Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/49

Rh with the Countess Guiccioli. There is very little romance or sentiment in the matter; much more of a cool, careless intelligence and reckless humour. He becomes a positive, anti-sentimental Italian. Stendhal, an excellent witness, who met Byron, remarked on his freedom from the childish vanity of “turning a phrase.” “He was exactly the reverse,” says Stendhal, “of an academician; his thoughts flowed with greater rapidity than his words, and were free from all affectation or studied grace.” And this, too, is the charm of his satires; you do not know, nor does he, what will come next; except that the jest will never be far off. It is very odd that amidst these brilliant achievements, he went on writing his duller dramas, the Sardanapaluses and Werners, of which I need only say that he meant them as a tribute to the classic proprieties and unities, which in his naïf way he thought were still respectable. He sacrificed to the goddess of beauty, the goddess of dullness, and the muse of comedy, all at once.

All three, no doubt, received their offering in Don Juan; dullness is not absent, especially in the more roughly jeering portions; much of it now reads cheap enough. But beauty, as I have said, is there; and comedy, or satire, prevails. Lord Beaconsfield, in 1875, pitching his words, as his fashion was, rather high, remarked that “Don Juan will remain, as it is now recognised, an unexampled picture of human nature, and the triumph of the English language.” Lord Beaconsfield, with his un-English mind, his vein of not wholly false romance, and his genius as a fellow-satirist, is another good witness. True, he could hardly have said more of Shakespeare’s best comedies. But an unexampled picture, speaking literally, Don Juan is. Allow for all the blemishes, and there remains a surprising overplus of wit, observation, and also of a certain not contemptible kind of pathos. His hero is a peg for the adventures, which are mostly amorous; as for the impropriety, I will for the last time quote Goethe, who said that “poets and romancers, bad as they may be, have not yet learned to be more pernicious than the daily newspapers which lie on every table.” It may be added that the amorous scenes, though they do not satisfy and clear the imagination like Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, do not, for adult readers, either baulk and chill the imagination, or merely heat it. Juan, moreover, apart from these affairs, and even whilst he is in the thick of them, is made, very skilfully, to retain our regard. He is brave and humane, and there is no cruelty or “bilking” in his composition; and, except in the bad