Lord Byron
1788-1824
Don Juan
Preface and Dedication
Preface to Cantos I and II
In a note or preface (I forget which) by Mr W. Wordsworth to a poem, the subject of which, as far as it is intelligible, is the remorse of an unnatural mother for the destruction of a natural child, the courteous reader is desired to extend his usual courtesy so far as to suppose that the narrative is narrated by 'the captain of a merchantman or small trading vessel, lately retired upon a small annuity to some inland town, etc. etc.' I quote from memory but conceive the above to be the sense, as far [as] there is sense of the note or preface to the aforesaid poem, as far as it is a poem. The poem or production to which I allude is that which begins with 'There is a thorn - it is so old', and then the poet informs all who are willing to be informed that it[s] age was such as to leave great difficulty in the conception of its ever having been young at all, which is as much as to say either that it was coeval with the Creator of all things, or that it had been born old, and was thus appropriately by antithesis devoted to the commemoration of a child that died young.
The pond near it is described according to mensuration: 'I measured it from side to side, 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.' Let me be excused from being particular in the detail of such things, as this is the sort of writing which has super-seded and degraded Pope in the eyes of the discerning British public, and this man is the kind of poet who, in the same manner that Joanna Southcote found many thousand people to take her dropsy for God Almighty re-impreg-nated, has found some hundreds of persons to misbelieve in his insanities, and hold his art as a kind of poetical Emanuel Swedenborg or Richard Brothers or Parson Tozer, half enthusiast and half impostor. This rustic Gongora and vulgar Marini of his country's taste has long abandoned a mind capable of better things to the production of such trash as may support the reveries, which he would reduce into a system of prosaic raving, that is to supersede all that hitherto by the best and wisest of our fathers has been deemed poetry.
And for his success - and what mountebank will not find proselytes (from Count Cagliostro to Madame Krudner) - he may partly thank his absurdity, and partly his having lent his more downright and unmeasured prose to the aid of a political party, which acknowledges its real weakness, though fenced with the whole armour of artificial power and defended by all the ingenuity of purchased talent, in liberally rewarding with praise and pay even the meanest of its advocates. Amongst these last in self-degradation, this Thraso of poetry has long been a Gnatho in politics, and may be met in print at some booksellers and several trunk-makers, and in person at dinner at Lord Lonsdale's.
The reader, who has acquiesced in Mr W. Wordsworth's supposition that his 'Misery, oh misery' is related by the 'captain of a small etc.', is requested to suppose by a like exertion of imagination that the following epic narrative is told by a Spanish gentleman in a village in the Sierra Morena on the road between Monasterio and Seville, sitting at the door of a posada with the Curate of the hamlet on his right hand, a cigar in his mouth, a jug of Malaga or perhaps 'right sherris' before him on a small table, containing the relics of an olla-podrida. The time, sunset. At some distance a group of black-eyed peasantry are dancing to the sound of the flute of a Portuguese servant, belonging to two foreign travellers, who have an hour ago dismounted from their horses to spend the night on their way to the capital of Andalusia. Of these, one is attending to the story and the other, having sauntered further, is watching the beautiful movements of a tall peasant girl, whose whole soul is in her eyes and her heart in the dance, of which she is the magnet to ten thousand feelings that vibrate with her own. Not far off; a knot of French prisoners are contending with each other at the grated lattice of their temporary confinement for a view of the twilight festival. The two foremost are a couple of hussars, one of whom has a bandage on his forehead, yet stained with the blood of a sabre cut received in the recent skirmish, which deprived him of his lawless freedom. His eyes sparkle in unison and his fingers beat time against the bars of his prison to the sound of the fandango, which is fleeting before him.
Our friend the storyteller, at some distance with a small elderly audience, is supposed to tell his story without being much moved by the musical hilarity at the other end of the village green. The reader is further requested to suppose him (to account for his knowledge of English) either an Englishman settled in Spain, or a Spaniard who had travel-led in England, perhaps one of the Liberals who have subsequently been so liberally rewarded by Ferdinand, of grateful memory, for his restoration.
Having supposed as much of this as the utter impossibility of such a supposition will admit, the reader is requested to extend his supposed power of supposing so far as to con-ceive that the dedication to Mr Southey and several stanzas of the poem itself are interpolated by the English editor. He may also imagine various causes for the tenor of the dedication. It may be presumed to be the production of a present Whig, who after being bred a transubstantial Tory, aposta-tized in an unguarded moment, and incensed at having got nothing by the exchange, has, in utter envy of the better success of the author of Walter Tyler, vented his renegado rancour on that immaculate person, for whose future immortality and present purity we have the best authority in his own repeated assurances. Or it may be supposed the work of a rival poet, obscured, if not by the present ready popularity of Mr Southey, yet by the post~bits he has granted upon posterity and usurious self-applause, in which he has anticipated with some profusion perhaps the opinion of future ages, who are always more enlightened than contemporaries, more especially in the eyes of those whose figure in their own times has been disproportioned to their deserts. What Mr Southey's deserts are no one knows better than Mr Southey. All his latter writings have displayed the writhing of a weakly human creature conscious of owing its worldly elevation to its own debasement (like a man who has made a fortune by the slave-trade, or the retired keeper of a gaming house or brothel), and struggling convulsively to deceive others without the power of lying to himself.
But to resume. The dedication may be further supposed to be produced by someone who may have a cause of aversion from the said Southey, for some personal reason, perhaps a gross calumny invented or circulated by this Pantisocratic apostle of apostasy, who is sometimes as unguarded in his assertions as atrocious in his conjectures) and feeds the cravings of his wretched vanity; disappointed in its nobler hopes and reduced to prey upon such snatches of fame as his contributions to the Quarterly Review, and the consequent praise, with which a powerful journal repays its assistants, can afford him - by the abuse of whosoever may be more consistent or more successful than himself; and the provincial gang of scribblers gathered round him.
Dedication
Bob Southey! You're a poet, poet laureate,
And representative of all the race.
Although 'tis true that you turned out a Tory at
Last, yours has lately been a common case.
And now my epic renegade, what are ye at
With all the lakers, in and out of place?
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye
Like four and twenty blackbirds in a pye,
Which pye being opened they began to sing'
(This old song and new simile holds good),
'A dainty dish to set before the King'
Or Regent, who admires such kind of food.
And Coleridge too has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumbered with his hood,
Explaining metaphysics to the nation.
I wish he would explain his explanation.
You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only blackbird in the dish.
And then you overstrain yourself, or so,
And tumble downward like the flying fish
Gasping on deck, because you soar too high,
Bob, And fall for lack of moisture quite a dry Bob.
And Wordsworth in a rather long Excursion
(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages)
Has given a sample from the vasty version
Of his new system to perplex the sages.
'Tis poetry, at least by his assertion,
And may appear so when the Dog Star rages,
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the tower of Babel.
You gentlemen, by dint of long seclusion
From better company, have kept your own
At Keswick, and through still continued fusion
Of one another's minds at last have grown
To deem, as a most logical conclusion,
That poesy has wreaths for you alone.
There is a narrowness in such a notion,
Which makes me wish you'd change your lakes for ocean.
I would not imitate the petty thought,
Nor coin my self-love to so base a vice,
For all the glory your conversion brought,
Since gold alone should not have been its price.
You have your salary; was't for that you wrought?
And Wordsworth has his place in the Excise.
You're shabby fellows - true - but poets still
And duly seated on the immortal hill.
Your bays may hide the baldness of your brows,
Perhaps some virtuous blushes; let them go.
To you I envy neither fruit nor boughs,
And for the fame you would engross below,
The field is universal and allows
Scope to all such as feel the inherent glow.
Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe will try
'Gainst you the question with posterity.
For me, who, wandering with pedestrian Muses,
Contend not with you on the winged' steed,
I wish your fate may yield ye, when she chooses,
The fame you envy and the skill you need.
And recollect a poet nothing loses
In giving to his brethren their full meed
Of merit, and complaint of present days
Is not the certain path to future praise.
He that reserves his laurels for posterity
(Who does not often claim the bright reversion)
Has generally no great crop to spare it, he
Being only injured by his own assertion.
And although here and there some glorious rarity
Arise like Titan from the sea's immersion,
The major part of such appellants go
To - God knows where - for no one else can know.
If fallen in evil days on evil tongues,
Milton appealed to the avenger, Time,
If Time, the avenger, execrates his wrongs
And makes the word Miltonic mean sublime,
He deigned not to belie his soul in songs,
Nor turn his very talent to a crime.
He did not loathe the sire to laud the son,
But closed the tyrant-hater he begun.
Think'st thou, could he, the blind old man, arise
Like Samuel from the grave to freeze once more
The blood of monarchs with his prophecies,
Or be alive again - again all hoar
With time and trials, and those helpless eyes
And heartless daughters - worn and pale and poor,
Would he adore a sultan? He obey
The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh?
Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant!
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferred to gorge upon a sister shore,
The vulgarest tool that tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fixed
And offer poison long already mixed.
An orator of such set trash of phrase,
Ineffably, legitimately vile,
That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise,
Nor foes - all nations - condescend to smile.
Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze
From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil,
That turns and turns to give the world a notion
Of endless torments and perpetual motion.
A bungler even in its disgusting trade,
And botching, patching, leaving still behind
Something of which its masters are afraid,
States to be curbed and thoughts to be confined,
Conspiracy or congress to be made,
Cobbling at manacles for all mankind,
A tinkering slave-maker, who mends old chains,
With God and man's abhorrence for its gains.
If we may judge of matter by the mind,
Emasculated to the marrow, it
Hath but two objects, how to serve and bind,
Deeming the chain it wears even men may fit,
Eutropius of its many masters, blind
To worth as freedom, wisdom as to wit,
Fearless, because no feeling dwells in ice;
Its very courage stagnates to a vice.
Where shall I turn me not to view its bonds,
For I will never feel them. Italy,
Thy late reviving Roman soul desponds
Beneath the lie this state-thing breathed o'er thee.
Thy clanking chain and Erin's yet green wounds
Have voices, tongues to cry aloud for me.
Europe has slaves, allies, kings, armies still,
And Southey lives to sing them very ill.
Meantime, Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate
In honest simple verse this song to you.
And if in flattering strains I do not predicate,
'Tis that I still retain my buff and blue;
My politics as yet are all to educate.
Apostasy's so fashionable too,
To keep one creed's a task grown quite
Herculean Is it not so, my Tory, ultra-Julian?