Lord Byron

The Critical Heritage

Andrew Rutherford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135035211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

Don Juan (1819–21)

39. Blackwood's Magazine, on Don Juan Cantos VI to VIII and IX to XI July, September 1823

DOI: 10.4324/9780203709184-54

Blackwood's comments on Don Juan alternate between moral outrage and robust appreciation—sometimes expressed by the same writers on different occasions. Cantos VI, VII and VIII were attacked by ‘Timothy Tickler’ in a letter to ‘Christopher North’ in the number for July 1823 (Blackwood's Magazine, XIV, 88 f.) This review was written by William Maginn (1793–1842) and revised by Lockhart. (‘I really have not read the poem,’ he wrote to Blackwood, ‘but dipping here and there it seems worthy of all that Maginn says.’) Cantos IX, X and XI were more sympathetically reviewed in the September number by Lockhart himself under the pseudonym of ‘Odoherty’ (Blackwood's Magazine, XIV, 282 f.) On these attributions see A. L. Strout, John Bull's Letter to Lord Byron, Norman (Oklahoma), 1947, pp. 127–8.

(a) Extract from ‘Tickler’ on Cantos VI–VIII:

‘…Well, I have read the three new Cantos.

Alas! Poor Byron!

Not ten times a-day, dear Christopher, but ten times a-page, as I wandered over the intense and incredible stupidities of this duodecimo, was the departed spirit of the genius of Childe Harold saluted with this exclamation. Alas! that one so gifted—one whose soul gave such appearance of being deeply imbued with the genuine spirit of poetry— one, to whom we all looked as an ornament of our literature, and who indeed has contributed in no small degree towards spreading a strain of higher mood over our poetry—should descend to the composition of heartless, heavy, dull, anti-British garbage, to be printed by the Cockneys, and puffed in the Examiner.—Alas! alas! that he should stoop to the miserable degradation of being extolled by Hunt!—that he who we hoped would be the Samson of our poetical day, should suffer himself to be so enervated by the unworthy Delilahs which have enslaved his imagination, as to be reduced to the foul office of displaying blind buffooneries before the Philistines of Cockaigne.

But so it is. Here we have three cantos of some hundred verses, from which it would be impossible to extract twenty, distinguished by any readable quality. Cant I never speak, and, with the blessing of God, never will speak—especially to you; and accordingly, though I was thoroughly disgusted with the scope and tendency of the former cantos of the Don—though there were passages in them which, in common with all other men of upright minds and true feelings, I looked on with indignation—yet I, for one, never permitted my moral or political antipathies so to master my critical judgment, as to make me whiningly decry the talent which they often wickedly, sometimes properly, exhibited. But here we are in a lower deep—we are wallowing in a sty of mere filth. Page after page presents us with a monotonous unmusical drawl, decrying chastity, sneering at matrimony, cursing wives, abusing monarchy, deprecating lawful government, lisping dull double-entendres, hymning Jacobinism, in a style and manner so little unrelieved by any indication of poetic power, that I feel a moral conviction that his lordship must have taken the Examiner, the Liberal, the Rimini, the Round Table, as his model, and endeavoured to write himself down to the level of the capacities and the swinish tastes of those with whom he has the misfortune, originally, I believe, from charitable motives, to associate. This is the most charitable hypothesis which I can frame. Indeed there are some verses which have all the appearance of having been interpolated by the King of the Cockneys. At least I hope so—I hope that there is but one set capable of writing anything so leering and impotent, as the loinless drivelling (if I may venture a translation of the strong expression of the Stoic satirist) which floats on the slaver of too many of these pages. I allude, for instance, to the attempt at wit, where the poet (the poet!) is facetious at the state of females during the sack of a town;¹ the greatest part of the seraglio scene; and other places to which I must decline making any farther reference….’

¹ [Quotes in a footnote Canto VIII, stanzas 128–34, with the comment, ‘It is a pity to reprint such things, but a single specimen here may do good, by the disgust for the whole which it must create.’]

(b) Extract from ‘Odoherty's’ reply, in his review of Cantos IX–XI:

‘Dear North,—I have a great respect both for Old Tickler and yourself, but now and then you both disquiet me with little occasional bits of lapses into the crying sin of the age—humbug! What could possess him to write, and you to publish, that absurd critique—if indeed it be worthy of any such name—upon the penult batch of Don Juan? The ancient scribe must have read those cantos when he was crop-sick, and had snapped his fiddle-string. You must never have read them at all.

Call things wicked, base, vile, obscene, blasphemous; run your tackle to its last inch upon these scores, but never say that they are stupid when they are not. I cannot suffer this sort of cant from you. Leave it to Wordsworth to call Voltaire “a dull scoffer.” Leave it to the British Review to talk of “the dotage” of Lord Byron. Depend upon it, your chief claim to merit as a critic has always been your justice to Intellect. I cannot bear to see you parting with a shred of this high reputation. It was you “that first praised Shelley as he deserved to be praised.” Mr. Tickler himself said so in his last admirable letter to you. It was in your pages that justice was first done to Lamb and to Coleridge —greatest of all, it was through and by you that the public opinion was first turned in regard to the poetry of Wordsworth himself.— These are things which never can be forgotten; these are your true and your most honourable triumphs. Do not, I beseech you, allow your claim to this noble distinction to be called in question. Do not let it be said, that even in one instance you have suffered any prejudices whatever, no matter on what proper feelings they may have been bottomed, to interfere with your candour as a judge of intellectual exertion.—Distinguish as you please: brand with the mark of your indignation whatever offends your feelings, moral, political, or religious—but “nothing extenuate.” If you mention a book at all, say what it really is. Blame Don Juan; blame Faublas; blame Candide; but blame them for what really is deserving of blame. Stick to your own good old rule—abuse Wickedness, but acknowledge Wit.

In regard to such a man as Byron, this, it must be evident, is absolutely necessary—that is, if you really wish, which you have always said you do, to be of any use to him. Good heavens! Do you imagine that people will believe three cantos of Don Juan to be unredeemedly and uniformly dull, merely upon your saying so, without proving what you say by quotation? No such things need be expected by you, North, far less by any of your coadjutors.

I maintain, and have always maintained, that Don Juan is, without exception, the first of Lord Byron's works. It is by far the most original in point of conception. It is decidedly original in point of tone, (for to talk of the tone of Berni, &c. being in the least like this, is pitiable stuff: Any old Italian of the 15th or 16th century write in the same tone with Lord Byron! Stuff! Stuff!)—It contains the finest specimens of serious poetry he has ever written; and it contains the finest specimens of ludicrous poetry that our age has witnessed. Frere may have written the stanza earlier; he may have written it more carefully, more musically if you will; but what is he to Byron? Where is the sweep, the pith, the soaring pinion, the lavish luxury, of genius revelling in strength? No, sir; Don Juan, say the canting world what it will, is destined to hold a permanent rank in the literature of our country. It will always be referred to as furnishing the most powerful picture of that vein of thought, (no matter how false and bad,) which distinguishes a great portion of the thinking people of our time. You and I disagree with them—we do not think so; we apprehend that to think so, is to think greenly, rashly, and wickedly; but who can deny, that many, many thousands, do think so? Who can deny, that that is valuable in a certain way which paints the prevailing sentiment of a large proportion of the people of any given age in the world? Or, who, that admits these things, can honestly hesitate to admit that Don Juan is a great work— a work that must last? I cannot.

And, after all, say the worst of Don Juan, that can with fairness be said of it, what does the thing amount to? Is it more obscene than Tom Jones?—Is it more blasphemous than Voltaire's novels? In point of fact, it is not within fifty miles of either of them: and as to obscenity, there is more of that in the pious Richardson's pious Pamela, than in all the novels and poems that have been written since.

The whole that can with justice be said of Byron, as to these two great charges, is, that he has practised in this age something of the licence of the age of our grandfathers. In doing so, he has acted egregiously amiss. The things were bad, nobody can doubt that, and we had got rid of them; and it did not become a man of Byron's genius to try to make his age retrograde in anything, least of all in such things as these. He also has acted most unwisely and imprudently in regard to himself. By offending the feelings of his age, in regard to points of this nature, he has undone himself as a popular writer.—I don't mean to say that he has done so for ever—Mercy and Repentance forbid! but he has done so most effectually for the present…. But,— and here I come back to my question—Is he no longer a great author?

Has his genius deserted him along with his prudence? Is his Hippocrene lazy as well as impure? Has he ceased, in other words, to be Byron, or is he only Byron playing mad tricks?

The latter is my opinion….’

40. Some minor reviewers on Don Juan 1819–23

DOI: 10.4324/9780203709184-55

(a) In an anonymous review of Mazeppa in the Eclectic Review for August 1819, the writer comments on ‘a subsequent publication of notorious character’—Don Juan, Cantos I and II: ‘Poetry which it is impossible not to read without admiration, yet, which it is equally impossible to admire without losing some degree of self-respect; such as no brother could read aloud to his sister, no husband to his wife;—poetry in which the deliberate purpose of the Author is to corrupt by inflaming the mind, to seduce to the love of evil which he has himself chosen as his good; can be safely dealt with only in one way, by passing it over in silence. There are cases in which it is equally impossible to relax into laughter or to soften into pity, without feeling that an immoral concession is made to vice….

He writes like a man who has that clear perception of the truth of things, which is the result of the guilty knowledge of good and evil, and who by the light of that knowledge, has deliberately preferred the evil, with a proud malignity of purpose which would seem to leave little for the last consummating change to accomplish. When he calculates that the reader is on the verge of pitying him, he takes care to throw him back the defiance of laughter, as if to let him know that all the Poet's pathos is but the sentimentalism of the drunkard between his cups, or the relenting softness of the courtesan, who the next moment resumes the bad boldness of her degraded character. With such a man who would wish either to laugh or to weep? And yet, who that reads him, can refrain alternately from either? …’ (Eclectic Review, N. S., XII, 149–50.)

(b) [i] Extract from anonymous review of Don Juan, Cantos I and II, in the British Critic for August 1819. The reviewer denounces the ‘shameless indecency’ of Canto I, expresses disgust at ‘so flippant, dull and disgraceful a publication’, and denies its claim to rank as satire: ‘ … If Don Juan then be not a satire—what is it? A more perplexing question could not be put to the critical squad. Of the four hundred and odd stanzas which the two Cantos contain, not a tittle could, even in the utmost latitude of interpretation, be dignified by the name of poetry. It has not wit enough to be comic; it has not spirit enough to make it lyric; nor is it didactic of any thing but mischief. The versification and morality are about upon a par; as far therefore as we are enabled to give it any character at all, we should pronounce it a narrative of degrading debauchery in doggerel rhyme….’ (British Critic, 2nd series, XII, 197.)

[ii] The anonymous reviewer of Cantos III, IV and V in the British Critic for September 1821 comments on the anonymity of author and publisher: ‘ … The Poem before us is…not only begotten but spawned in filth and darkness. Every accoucheur of literature has refused his obstetric aid to the obscure and ditch-delivered foundling; and even its father, though he unblushingly has stamped upon it an image of himself which cannot be mistaken, forbears to give it the full title of avowed legitimacy….’ (Op. cit., XVI, 252.)

[iii] Extract from review of Cantos IX, X and XI in the British Critic for November 1823. The reviewer describes the muse (‘that nondescript goddess’) who seems to have presided over the composition of Don Juan: ‘…In the first canto we saw her elegant, highly talented, and graceful, and lamented her deflection from virtue. We can trace her subsequently through each stage of deterioration, till we find her a camp-follower at Ismail, still possessing allurements of a coarse and sensual sort, and though thoroughly depraved, full of anecdote and adventurous spirit. In the present three cantos we behold her a reckless and desperate outcast from society, smarting under the sense of universal neglect, and venting it in the roar of scurrilous defiance against every one who comes in her way: her conversation a mixture of metaphysical scraps picked up in the course of her former education, with broader slang, and more unblushing indecency, than she had as yet ventured upon. Such is the history of the rise and progress, the decline and fall, of the tenth, or Juanic muse….’ (Op. cit., XX, 529–30.)

(c) Extract from anonymous review of Don Juan, Cantos IX, X and XI, in the Literary Gazette for 6 September 1823. Lord Byron, argues the reviewer, must have been insane when he composed these cantos: ‘… The whole composition is so utterly contemptible and incoherent, so disgustingly vulgar and obscene, so wandering in a metaphysical cloud of scepticism, and so destitute of any thing like a comprehensive or correct idea, so pointless and unpoetical, that it seems impossible that Lord Byron, fallen as we have seen him, can be at the same time in his senses and the author….’ (Literary Gazette, 1823, p. 652.)

On 6 December, however, the reviewer of Cantos XII, XIII and XIV for the Literary Gazette found more to be said in their favour: these cantos, he admitted, ‘certainly exhibit a knowledge of life and nature, and are written in a sportive satirical vain which renders them very entertaining. Without comparing this sort of trifling badinage with the higher efforts of Lord Byron, we are free to say that it is long since we have read any production of his with more amusement and less regret….’ (Op. cit., 1823, p. 771.)

(d) [i] Extract from anonymous review of Don Juan, Cantos III, IV and V, in the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany; a New Series of the Scots Magazine, for August 1821: ‘…Here is my Lord Byron, doubtless one of the most extraordinarily gifted intellectual men of the day, again enacting the part of Don Juan again, and with impunity, poisoning the current of fine poetry, by the intermixture of ribaldry and blasphemy such as no man of pure taste can read a second time, and such as no woman of correct principles can read the first. Why is this ridiculous and disgusting farce to go on, unnoticed by the more powerful critical journals of the day?…’ (Op. cit., IX,^* 105–6.)

[ii] Extract from anonymous review of Cantos VI, VII and VIII, in the Edinburgh Magazine for August 1823: ‘…The first of these three additional Cantos is a piece of unredeemed and unrelieved sensuality and indecency; the second and third, which are filled with the details of the siege, contain some very powerful description, and occasional passages of great beauty and strength, followed close at the hee...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• General Editor's Preface
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• Hours of Idleness (1807)
• English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II (1812)
• The Turkish Tales (1813–16)
• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III (1816)
• Manfred (1817)
• Beppo (1818)
• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto IV (1818)
• Don Juan (1819–24)
• The Dramas (1821)
• The Vision of Judgment (1822)
• Don Juan (1819–24)
• Bibliography
• Select Index