In the Island—a tale of the mutiny of the "Bounty"—he reverts to the manner and theme of his old romances, finding a new scene in the Pacific for the exercise of his fancy. In this piece his love of nautical adventure reappears, and his idealization of primitive life, caught from Rousseau and Chateaubriand. There is more repose about this poem than in any of the author's other compositions. In its pages the sea seems to plash about rocks and caves that bask under a southern sun. "'Byron, the sorcerer,' he can do with me what he will," said old Dr. Parr, on reading it. As the swan-song of the poet's sentimental verse, it has a pleasing if not pathetic calm. During the last years in Italy he planned an epic on the Conquest, and a play on the subject of Hannibal, neither of which was executed.
In the criticism of a famous work there is often little left to do but to criticise the critics—to bring to a focus the most salient things that have been said about it, to eliminate the absurd from the sensible, the discriminating from the commonplace. Don Juan, more than any of its precursors, is Byron, and it has been similarly handled. The early cantos were ushered into the world amid a chorus of mingled applause and execration. The minor Reviews, representing middle-class respectability, were generally vituperative, and the higher authorities divided in their judgments. The British Magazine said that "his lordship had degraded his personal character by the composition;" the London, that the poem was "a satire on decency;" the Edinburgh Monthly, that it was "a melancholy spectacle;" the Eclectic, that it was "an outrage worthy of detestation." Blackwood declared that the author was "brutally outraging all the best feelings of humanity." Moore characterizes it as "the most painful display of the versatility of genius that has ever been left for succeeding ages to wonder at or deplore." Jeffrey found in the whole composition "a tendency to destroy all belief in the reality of virtue;" and Dr. John Watkins classically named it "the Odyssey of Immorality." "Don Juan will be read," wrote one critic, "as long as satire, wit, mirth, and supreme excellence shall be esteemed among men." "Stick to Don Juan," exhorted another; "it is the only sincere thing you have written, and it will live after all your Harolds have ceased to be 'a schoolgirl's tale, the wonder of an hour.' It is the best of all your works—the most spirited, the most straightforward, the most interesting, the most poetical." "It is a work," said Goethe, "full of soul, bitterly savage in its misanthropy, exquisitely delicate in its tenderness." Shelley confessed, "It fulfils in a certain degree what I have long preached, the task of producing something wholly new and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful." And Sir Walter Scott, in the midst of a hearty panegyric: "It has the variety of Shakespeare himself. Neither Childe Harold, nor the most beautiful of Byron's earlier tales, contain more exquisite poetry than is to be found scattered through the cantos of Don Juan, amidst verses which the author seems to have thrown from him with an effort as spontaneous as that of a tree resigning its leaves."
One noticeable feature about these comments is their sincerity: reviewing, however occasionally one-sided, had not then sunk to be the mere register of adverse or friendly cliques; and, with all his anxiety for its verdict, Byron never solicited the favour of any portion of the press. Another is, the fact that the adverse critics missed their mark. They had not learnt to say of a book of which they disapproved, that it was weak or dull: in pronouncing it to be vicious, they helped to promote its sale; and the most decried has been the most widely read of the author's works. Many of the readers of Don Juan have, it must be confessed, been found among those least likely to admire in it what is most admirable—who have been attracted by the very excesses of buffoonery, violations of good taste, and occasionally almost vulgar slang, which disfigure its pages. Their patronage is, at the best, of no more value than that of a mob gathered by a showy Shakespearian revival, and it has laid the volume open to the charge of being adapted "laudari ab illaudatis." But the welcome of the work in other quarters is as indubitably duo to higher qualities. In writing Don Juan, Byron attempted something that had never been done before, and his genius so chimed with his enterprise that it need never be done again. "Down," cries M. Chasles, "with the imitators who did their host to make his name ridiculous." In commenting on their failure, an Athenaeum critic has explained the pre-established fitness of the ottava rima—the first six lines of which are a dance, and the concluding couplet a "breakdown"—for the mock-heroic. Byron's choice of this measure may have been suggested by Whistlecraft; but, he had studied its cadence in Pulci, and the Novelle Galanti of Casti, to whom he is indebted for other features of his satire; and he added to what has been well termed its characteristic jauntiness, by his almost constant use of the double rhyme. That the ottava rima is out of place in consistently pathetic poetry, may be seen from its obvious misuse in Keats's Pot of Basil. Many writers, from Tennant and Frere to Moultrie, have employed it in burlesque or more society verse; but Byron alone has employed it triumphantly, for he has made it the vehicle of thoughts grave as well as gay, of "black spirits and white, red spirits and grey," of sparkling fancy, bitter sarcasm, and tender memories. He has swept into the pages of his poem the experience of thirty years of a life so crowded with vitality that our sense of the plethora of power which it exhibits makes us ready to condone its lapses. Byron, it has been said, balances himself on a ladder like other acrobats; but alone, like the Japanese master of the art, he all the while bears on his shoulders the weight of a man. Much of Don Juan is as obnoxious to criticism in detail as his earlier work; it has every mark of being written in hot haste. In the midst of the most serious passages (e.g. the "Ave Maria") we are checked in our course by bathos or commonplace and thrown where the writer did not mean to throw us: but the mocking spirit is so prevailingly present that we are often left in doubt as to his design, and what is in Harold an outrage is in this case only a flaw. His command over the verse itself is almost miraculous: he glides from extreme to extreme, from punning to pathos, from melancholy to mad merriment, sighing or laughing by the way at his readers or at himself or at the stanzas. Into them he can fling anything under the sun, from a doctor's prescription to a metaphysical theory.
When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said,
is as cogent a refutation of idealism as the cumbrous wit of Scotch logicians.
The popularity of the work is due not mainly to the verbal skill which makes it rank as the cleverest of English verse compositions, to its shoals of witticisms, its winged words, telling phrases, and incomparable transitions; but to the fact that it continues to address a large class who are not in the ordinary sense of the word lovers of poetry. Don Juan is emphatically the poem of intelligent men of middle age, who have grown weary of mere sentiment, and yet retain enough of sympathetic feeling to desire at times to recall it. Such minds, crusted like Plato's Glaucus with the world, are yet pervious to appeals to the spirit that survives beneath the dry dust amid which they move; but only at rare intervals can they accompany the pure lyrist "singing as if he would never be old," and they are apt to turn with some impatience even from Romeo and Juliet to Hamlet and Macbeth. To them, on the other hand, the hard wit of Hudibras is equally tiresome, and more distasteful; their chosen friend is the humourist who, inspired by a subtle perception of the contradictions of life, sees matter for smiles in sorrow, and tears in laughter. Byron was not, in the highest sense, a great humourist; he does not blend together the two phases, as they are blended in single sentences or whole chapters of Sterne, in the April-sunshine of Richter, or in Sartor Resartus; but he comes near to produce the same effect by his unequalled power of alternating them. His wit is seldom hard, never dry, for it is moistened by the constant juxtaposition of sentiment. His tenderness is none the less genuine that he is perpetually jerking it away—an equally favourite fashion with Carlyle,—as if he could not trust himself to be serious for fear of becoming sentimental; and, in recollection of his frequent exhibitions of unaffected hysteria, we accept his own confession—
If I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep,
as a perfectly sincere comment on the most sincere, and therefore in many respects the most effective, of his works. He has, after his way, endeavoured in grave prose and light verse to defend it against its assailants; saying, "In Don Juan I take a vicious and unprincipled character, and lead him through those ranks of society whose accomplishments cover and cloak their vices, and paint the natural effects;" and elsewhere, that he means to make his scamp "end as a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or by the guillotine, or in an unhappy marriage." It were easy to dilate on the fact that in interpreting the phrases of the satirist into the language of the moralist we often require to read them backwards: Byron's own statement, "I hate a motive," is, however, more to the point:
But the fact is that I have nothing plann'd,
Unless it were to be a moment merry—
A novel word in my vocabulary.
Don Juan can only be credited with a text in the sense in which every large experience, of its own accord, conveys its lesson. It was to the author a picture of the world as he saw it; and it is to us a mirror in which every attribute of his genius, every peculiarity of his nature, is reflected without distortion. After the audacious though brilliant opening, and the unfortunately pungent reference to the poet's domestic affairs, we find in the famous storm (c. ii.) a bewildering epitome of his prevailing manner. Home-sickness, sea-sickness, the terror of the tempest, "wailing, blasphemy, devotion," the crash of the wreck, the wild farewell, "the bubbling cry of some strong swimmer in his agony," the horrors of famine, the tale of the two fathers, the beautiful apparitions of the rainbow and the bird, the feast on Juan's spaniel, his reluctance to dine on "his pastor and his master," the consequences of eating Pedrillo,—all follow each other like visions in the phantasmagoria of a nightmare, till at last the remnant of the crew are drowned by a ridiculous rhyme—