Don Juan, the world’s greatest
heartbreaker. Surely he must be a bad guy. Le beau cavalier
sans pitié. Archetype of the sexual predator. How can you make
him a good guy? Yet Lord Byron tried it in
a celebrated epic.
Byron created a Don Juan who never meant to hurt anybody. Nor did
Byron’s hero set out to conquer. It just happened,
as Elvis the King still conquers some hearts from the grave. Women
found that this young and innocent Don Juan
was just what they wanted, and the rest followed. Of course, there were
consequences. His first lover, an experienced
wife, was packed off to a convent; his second, even more innocent than
himself, burst a blood vessel at being bound
away from him by her father. A broken heart if there ever was one. Don
Juan should learn by this time that social
beings can’t just do what comes naturally. Byron is even more
censorious:
And secondly, I pity not, because
He had no business to commit a sin,
Forbid by heavenly, fined by human laws;-
At least, ‘twas rather early to begin,
But at sixteen the conscience rarely gnaws
So much as when we call our old debts in
At sixty years, and draw the accompts of evil,
And find a deuced balance with the devil.
The problem is that Byron’s Don Juan does learn, and being a good
guy, gives over being un homme fatal. I say the
problem, for what’s left for Byron to write about? He sends Juan
off to war, brings him through a bloody battle
and a shipwreck, and then…falls to versifying Byron’s
opinions about philosophy, the position of women, that fool
Wordsworth, the upper classes, and everything else. There is a thin
thread of intrigue tying Don Juan to a few
experienced ladies who know all the ropes, but it just draws us on
without satisfying our curiosity. Either Byron
knew that his public wouldn’t stand for amours between old
swingers, or…such things don’t make good poetry.
Artistically, Byron got himself into something he couldn’t
finish. Why did he do it? Because he was an old swinger
himself, and he liked it. He wants, it’s clear, to stand up for
that grand passion:
Alas! They were so young, so beautiful,
So lonely, loving, helpless, and the hour
Was that in which the heart is always full,
And having o’er itself no further power,
Prompts deeds eternity cannot annul,
But pays off moments in an endless shower
Of hell-fire—all prepared for people giving
Pleasure or pain to one another living.
Yet when he looked it over, exiled, abandoned by his wife, his children
beyond his reach, and ruing the misery
and death caused probably by his faithlessness, he had to admit that
any excess of this passion is punished here
on earth.
Byron had a daughter, Allegra, by one of his mistresses. As he thought
the mother an unsuitable parent, he placed
the tiny girl in a convent. But he had no time for her. Deprived of
both parents, Allegra quickly died.
