Four Poetic Reactions to Don Juan

We are familiar with the critical reactions which Byron’s Don Juan met; less well-documented is the way poets, major and minor, named and anonymous, reacted to it creatively.  The four texts collected here are very different, written from different motives and using Don Juan in contrasting ways.  There is no consistency to them.  Hemans, writing in couplets as opposed to the ottava rima which is the choice of the others, is too polite even to mention Byron, still less to refer to Don Juan.

Sexual Politics

Byron, without ever having been a feminist, was a post-feminist before his time.  His portrayals, in Don Juan I and II, of Donna Inez, Donna Julia, and of Haidee and Zoe, combine empathy, drama and satire so as to make us sympathise with them even as we see how they are responsible, to an extent, for their own difficulties.  The examples of Fielding and Shakespeare, plus his own observation of the sex, doubtless helped him achieve this balance:

Even as we deplore (don’t we?) Julia’s barefaced mendacity, we laugh (don’t we?) at the energy and virtuosity with which she deploys it.  It’s this aspect of Don Juan which the four very different variations on Don Juan’s theme bring out first – by the contrast.  They contain nothing like it.  They are all two hundred years behind Byron in their portrayal of women.  For them, women are neither central to their concerns, nor amusing.  Women are at once apart from and beneath their focus of attention.

Whoever wrote the poem published by William Hone will have nothing to do with Byron’s serio-comic celebration of woman.  They meet the challenge of “What to do with Haidee?”, for example, by packing her off (lovingly, of course) into a household, with a farcical six sets of twins, and by denying us any sight of her in the action of the poem.  For this writer, women and politics do not mix.  The only woman in the action is the one who has come to New Palace Yard in the hope of seeing a riot being put down, and is disappointed when told that such a thing is unlikely to occur.  If it’s true, as Stuart Curran would have us believe, that “By the final third of the eighteenth century, at least … the culture of writing was becoming rapidly feminised”,2 the news hasn’t yet filtered down to whoever wrote A Third Canto.

For Felicia Hemans in The Sceptic, crafting her poem for a patriarchal market (for Murray, Gifford and Co. would also be surprised by Curran’s words), Woman is only there as a mother (of boys), and as a conduit for Christian instruction (to male children).  Her vital importance in this role is emphasised by placing her at the very end of the work.  The idea that women might themselves be sceptics is unentertainable.  Scepticism itself is an affront to womanhood, as defined by Hemans:

Compare Byron’s use of Christian ideas in his portrayal of Haidee:

It’s perhaps characteristic of Byron to be more preoccupied with the female capacity for damnation than with the female capacity for redemption.  He will have nothing to do with the tradition, sanctified by Shakespeare’s Cordelia and Hermione, of Woman as Redeemer.  For Hemans, again by contrast, women are not candidates for damnation.  Scepticism is a masculine problem.  Hemans carefully constructs her positives around the word “she”: the nouns which the pronoun “she” is used as a substitute for are Hope (line 53), Faith (line 123), Philosophy (line 387), and England (line 515).  The prime exemplar of all these abstractions is a famous, and lately deceased, woman – Princess Charlotte.

Caroline Lamb – if she is indeed the writer of A New Canto – may intend the following as a reference to the lot of women such as herself:

…but, to be fair, there is no feminine pronoun anywhere in the passage to prove it.  The words can refer without discrimination to male and female sufferers.

John Clare, incarcerated at High Beach Lunatic Asylum, is desperate for agreeable female company, even as he rails against the disagreeableness of female hypocrisy and lust; but his problem is that neither his Mary, his Martha, nor his “sweet Eliza Phillips” have any existence outside of his head:

It’s a thought from Shakespeare’s ninety-fourth sonnet (Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds) albeit phrased more explicitly.  But, even though he admires Byron’s drawing of Haidee, Clare’s women are one-dimensional fantasy images rather than well-imagined fictions, far from the reality of Inez, Julia, Haidee, or Zoe; they can neither lie, love, manipulate, deceive themselves, nor deceive others.

English Politics

Of the four writers, only Clare, writing in 1841, would have known about the Dedication to Don Juan, which was not published until 1832.  His is in fact a reaction to the entire poem (minus the fragmentary Canto XVII) in a way that the others cannot be.  Byron’s animus against “the intellectual eunuch” Castlereagh, against Southey as his dry-bobbing minstrel, and Byron’s admiration for the political integrity of Milton, would not have been known about in 1819, except to a privileged few, and the political aspect of Byron’s intention would have been cloudier than it became to later readers.

Clare harbours a detestation of the Whigs of 1841 similar to that which he would probably have held against the Tories in 1819.  It’s smudged somewhat by his equally unpleasant sneers against Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.  For him, life is a prison, from which Queen, Consort, and Ministers are enviably free: Victoria can marry Albert, Albert can go abroad, and “Noble Lord John” can marry “sweet Miss Fanny Fusty”, unfettered by the terrible problems which beset Clare.  The Painite politics of his poem are otherwise general: “Give toil more pay where rank starvation lurches” and “Asses like ministers are rather tricky” sum them up.

Felicia Hemans will have it that Scepticism is a threat to right Christian thinking and therefore to political and social order.  Her poem is so reactionary that even Prometheus is seen as misguided in his revolt against Zeus (lines 191-4), his gift of fire to man a regrettable lapse in discipline, an offence against “virtue and faith”, for which he is justly punished.  One is reminded of certain ultra-conservative modern Greeks, who regret Byron’s status as a freedom fighter.

The writer of A New Canto portrays society as being in a state of such disintegration that no political solutions are available.  If “The omnium falls, [and] the Bank of England stops”, and if the planet itself is in danger of splitting comically in two, making it impossible any more to import plays from Paris into London, then there is a crisis in train which neither reform nor revolution will cure.

Whoever wrote the heavily-political Third Canto, published by Hone, has the largest anti-Byron axe to grind.  “Bring your satire home to England, Byron!” is its none-too-profoundly-subtextual call.  “In the wake of the Manchester Massacre, to stay on the continent is a species of treason! Your outraged satirical voice is needed here!” It certainly is, and remains so despite the Third Canto, which does the protesters against Peterloo scant justice.  A comparison with what Sir Francis Burdett actually said in New Palace Yard on September 2nd 1819 (see here), with what the poem makes him say, is instructive, and sad.  In his speech as reported he makes it clear, not only that Peterloo was a violent, state-sponsored offence against the right to self-expression, but that, with the Horse Guards on Westminster Bridge and the local pubs full of specially-sworn constables, it is one which could easily be duplicated here in London, even as the Palace Yard meeting takes place.  His courage in speaking, that of Hobhouse, and the crowd’s courage in attending, is not at all obvious in the poem.  Prose – even prose as heavy as Burdett’s – may be preferable to Spenserian stanzas in such circumstances.  The following passage (the stenographer may have got slightly confused at the end) gets straight to the vital political point:

It is to be discussed by us here to-day, whether Englishmen are any longer to meet according to law—whether the law shall protect them in the exercise of this undoubted right, against the madness and violence of their enemies—whether we are to submit lightly or arbitrarily to a military system—or whether ours is in future a to be a Government of law, as it ought, or a Government of discretionary, and arbitrary, and military violence [cries of “never!”].7

But what Burdett says here is not well-rendered by the next passage, its poetic equivalent, which smothers the urgency of the situation with half-hearted sunrise metaphors and vague recollections of French revolutionary paintings:

The writer makes satirical play with the neutralising words Burdett uses to describe Peterloo – “occurrence” (line 355) and “transaction” (author’s note to line 780) – but he takes them out of context.  A reading of the whole speech leaves no doubt as to Burdett’s understanding of the physical horror of what took place in Manchester, and what could still take place here in Westminster:

The Riot Act says, after an hour’s notice has been given, and a tumultuous (not an orderly) meeting continues, then the Magistrate is to read the Act, to warn them of the penalties to which they render themselves liable by remaining together afterwards.  But even the new laws of England, not to speak of the old [laughter], do not travel quite so fast as the yeomen cavalry of Manchester! [cheering and laughter].  Even if the people do not disperse, they are not to have their throats cut immediately [cheering].  No, but if a meeting be riotous and tumultuous, it is directed that the ringleaders shall be—what? Not knocked on the head?—no such thing—they shall be apprehended and punished according to due course of law [loud plaudits].9

The poem refuses to duplicate either Burdett’s logical analysis of the Riot Act, or his jokes (it’s hard in any case to be amusing in Spenserian stanzas, as Byron showed in Childe Harold) or the crowd’s enthusiastic interjections.

Versification

The effect of a well-constructed ottava rima stanza is to create three increasingly desperate attempts at meaningful antithesis spiralling out of control, which are then in theory summed-up, but in reality undercut, by a couplet which purports to underline them but in fact undermines them.  All three imitators have moments which catch the effect well:

The six thousand special constables, so seemingly impressive up to line six, will do nothing but run round and round in ever-decreasing circles, until they finally disappear up their own … aptly-named alley.

The writer of A Third Canto also shows an intuitive understanding of, and capacity to imitate, the Byronic bathos:

Caroline Lamb – if ’tis she – places the Regent’s insanity (in theory it was his father, not he, who was mad, but the poem sees it differently) and the impotence of his ministers at the end of a catalogue of disasters starting with St Paul’s Cathedral’s golden ball falling off.  Moore’s amusement, placed parenthetically at the of line seven, forestalls the conclusion, only to allow it greater weight when it happens.

John Clare uses no punctuation, but manages a similar effect without it:

He contrasts a mighty creation from the mind of Man – Paradise Lost, at the stanza’s opening – with the monstrosity which God created from Man’s rib, at its end.  The implication about the superiority of Man’s creativity over God’s is quite Byronic, as is the not-wholly-ironic parallel implied between poetry and women as activities worthy of pursuit.  It goes with the pairing of poets and whores which informs the whole poem, and in so far as it implies that Clare would be happy, and sane, if neither poetry nor women had ever been invented, would elicit (I think) a Byronic nod.  Clare’s poem involves us at a deeper level than any of the others, as these disturbing ideas show.  He says “I will sing no more” in the sixth line, but it is predetermined that if he has come this far in the stanza, he must finish it, and so he does.  “Monarchs are less imperative than rhymes”.

It goes without saying that Felicia Hemans will have nothing to do with any of these horrid anti-climactical concepts.  Her couplets march on with confidence, supported by much subtextual Biblical quotation, though without a single touch of Popean wit to enliven their progress (humour is after all the Devil’s unhappy preogative):

The aim here would be to reassure the unhappy likes of John Clare that God’s gifts, so far from being unintentionally malign, so far from instigating a series of unhappy causes and effects which call His very wisdom into question, in fact answer man’s unworthy doubts, and give him the kind of reassurance which ottava rima would wear relentlessly away.