But the fact is that I have nothing plann'd, Unless it were to be a moment merry-- A novel word in my vocabulary.
_Don Juan_ can only be credited with a text in the sense in which every large experience, of its own accord, conveys its lesson. It was to the author a picture of the world as he saw it; and it is to us a mirror in which every attribute of his genius, every peculiarity of his nature, is reflected without distortion. After the audacious though brilliant opening, and the unfortunately pungent reference to the poet's domestic affairs, we find in the famous storm (c. ii.) a bewildering epitome of his prevailing manner. Home-sickness, sea-sickness, the terror of the tempest, "wailing, blasphemy, devotion," the crash of the wreck, the wild farewell, "the bubbling cry of some strong swimmer in his agony," the horrors of famine, the tale of the two fathers, the beautiful apparitions of the rainbow and the bird, the feast on Juan's spaniel, his reluctance to dine on "his pastor and his master," the consequences of eating Pedrillo,--all follow each other like visions in the phantasmagoria of a nightmare, till at last the remnant of the crew are drowned by a ridiculous rhyme--
Finding no place for their landing better, They ran the boat ashore,--and overset her.
Then comes the episode of Haidee, "a long low island song of ancient days," the character of the girl herself being like a thread of pure gold running through the fabric of its surroundings, motley in every page; e.g., after the impassioned close of the "Isles of Greece," we have the stanza:--
Thus sang, or would, or could, or should, have sung, The modern Greek, in tolerable verse; If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young, Yet in those days he might have done much worse--
with which the author dashes away the romance of the song, and then launches into a tirade against Bob Southey's epic and Wordsworth's pedlar poems. This vein exhausted, we come to the "Ave Maria," one of the most musical, and seemingly heartfelt, hymns in the language. The close of the ocean pastoral (in c. iv.) is the last of pathetic narrative in the book; but the same feeling that "mourns o'er the beauty of the Cyclades," often re-emerges in shorter passages. The fifth and sixth cantos, in spite of the glittering sketch of Gulbeyaz, and tho fawn-like image of Dudù, are open to the charge of diffuseness, and the character of Johnson is a failure. From the seventh to the tenth, the poem decidedly dips, partly because the writer had never been in Russia; then it again rises, and shows no sign of falling off to the end.