Blasphemous wit and Satanic sentiment are the natural reactions of all healthy youthfulness in the presence of the sickening contrasts and diabolic ironies of life.
Such a mood is not by any means a sign of degeneracy. Byron was as far from being a degenerate as he was far from being a saint. It is a sign of sturdy sanity and vigorous strength.
Not to relish the gay brutality of Byron is an indication of something degenerate in ourselves. There is a certain type of person—perhaps the most prurient and disagreeable of all human animals—who is accustomed to indulge in a kind of holy leer of disgust when "brought up sharp" by the Aristophanic lapses of gay and graceless youth. Such a person's mind would be a fruitful study for Herr Freud; but the thought of its simmering cauldron of furtive naughtiness is not a pleasant thing to dwell on, for any but pathological philosophers.
After reading Don Juan one is compelled to recognise that Byron's mind must have been abnormally sane and sound. No one who jests quite at this rate could possibly be a bad man. The bad men—a word to the wise—are those from whose mouth the gay wantonness of the youth of the world is condemned as evil. Such persons ought to be sent for a rest-cure to Cairo or Morocco or Pekin.
The innocence of youth should be protected from a morality which is far more morbid than the maddest Dionysian revel.
It is, to confess it freely, not the satyrishness of Byron at all, but his hard brutality, which, for myself, I find difficult to enjoy.
I seem to require something more mellow, more ironical, more subtle, more humane, in my literature of irreverence. But no doubt this is a racial prejudice. Some obstinate drop of Latin—or, for all I know,—Carthaginian blood in me, makes me reluctant to give myself up to the tough, sane, sturdy brutality of your Anglo-Scot.
I can relish every word of Rabelais and I am not in the least dismayed by Heine's impishness, but I have always found Fielding's and Smollett's grosser scenes difficult mouthfuls to swallow.
They tell me there is a magnanimous generosity and a large earthy sanity about these humorists. But to me there is too much horse-play, too much ruffianism and "bully-ragging." And something of the same quality offends me in Byron. I lack the steadiness of nerves to deal with a coarseness which hits you across the head, much as the old English clowns hit one another with strings of sausages.
But because I suffer from this psychological limitation; because I prefer Sterne to Fielding, and Lamb to Dickens; I should condemn myself as an un-catholic fanatic if I presumed to turn my personal lack of youthful aplomb and gallant insouciance into a grave artistic principle.