The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Cannibalism, on the other hand, is a crime which is regarded with sacred horror. The survivors from the shipwreck in Canto II are not only starving but also have a craving for meat to which their upbringing has conditioned them. Unfortunately, the only kind of meat available is human. One can imagine a group of men in similar circumstances who would not have become cannibals because they had been brought up in a vegetarian culture and were unaware that human beings could eat meat. The men in Byron's poem pay with their lives for their act, not because it is a sacred crime but for the profane reason that their new diet proves indigestible.

By night chilled, by day scorched, there one by one

They perished until withered to a few, But chiefly by a species of self-slaughter In washing down Pedrillo with salt water.

It is the silly mistake of drinking salt water, not the sacred crime of consuming a clergyman, that brings retribution.

Most readers will probably agree that the least interesting figure in Don Juan

is its official hero, and his passivity is all the more surprising when one recalls the legendary monster of depravity after whom he is named. The Don Juan of the myth is not promiscuous by nature but by will; seduction is his vocation. Since the slightest trace of affection will turn a number on his list of victims into a name, his choice of vocation requires the absolute renunciation of love. It is an essential element in the legend, therefore, that Don Juan be, not a sinner out of weakness, but a defiant atheist, the demonic counter-image of the ascetic saint who renounces all personal preference for one neighbor to another in order that he may show Christian charity to all alike.

When he chose the name Don Juan for his hero, Byron was well aware of the associations it would carry for the public, and he was also aware that he himself was believed by many to be the heardess seducer and atheist of the legend. His poem is, among other things, a self-defense. He is saying to his accusers, as it were: "The Don Juan of the legend does not exist. I will show you what the sort of man who gets the reputation for being a Don Juan is really like."

Byron's hero is not even particularly promiscuous. In the course of two years he makes love with five women, a poor showing in comparison with the 1003 Spanish ladies of Leporello's Catalogue aria, or even with Byron's own "zoo odd Venetian pieces." Furthermore, he seduces none of them. In three cases he is seduced—by Julia, Catherine, the Duch­ess of Fitz-Fulk—and in the other two, circumstances outside his control bring him together with Haidee and Dudil, and no persuasion on his part is needed. Then, though he can­not quite play Tristan to her Isolde and commit suicide when he is parted from Haidee, he has been genuinely in love with her.

Far from being a defiant rebel against the laws of God and man, his most conspicuous trait is his gift for social conformity. I cannot understand those critics who have seen in him a kind of Rousseau child of Nature. Whenever chance takes him, to a pirate's lair, a harem in Mohammedan Con­stantinople, a court in Greek Orthodox Russia, a country house in Protestant England, he immediately adapts himself and is accepted as an agreeable fellow. Had Byron con­tinued the poem as he planned and taken Juan to Italy to be a cavaliere servente and to Germany to be a solemn Werther-faced man, one has no doubt that he would have continued to play the roles assigned to him with tact and aplomb. In some respects Juan resembles the Baudelairian dandy but he lacks the air of insolent superiority which Baudelaire considered essential to the true dandy; he would never, one feels, say anything outrageous or insulting. Aside from the stylistic impossibility of ending a comic poem on a serious note, it is impossible to imagine Juan, a man without enemies, ending on the guillotine, as apparently Byron was considering doing with him.

When one compares Don Juan with what we know of his creator, he seems to be a daydream of what Byron would have liked to be himself. Physically he is unblemished and one cannot imagine him having to diet to keep his figure; socially, he is always at his ease and his behavior in perfect taste. Had Juan set out for Greece, he would not have had made for him­self two Homeric helmets with overtowering plumes nor had engraved on his coat of arms the motto Crede Don Juan.

Byron, though very conscious of his rank, never felt fully at ease in the company of his social equals (Shelley was too odd to count). Even when he was the social lion of London, Lord Holland observed:

It was not from his birth that Lord Byron had taken the station he held in society for, till his talents were known, he was, in spite of his birth, in anything but good society and but for his talents would never, perhaps, have been in any better.

And Byron himself confessed to Lady Blessington: