The first part of Faust is one of the most beautiful poems in the world. Unfortunately, there is no really fine translation into English. Perhaps the best way to appreciate it is to see Gounod’s opera Faust. You will leave the theater shaken, your heart broken.
Part Two of Goethe’s Faust is, for many people, an enigma. Faust, having survived the tragedy of Margaret’s death—and become a better man because of it—now uses the Devil, instead of the other way around. The bargain has taken a subtly different form: if Faust will ever say “Enough!” to life, then his soul will belong to Mephistopheles. Faust never does. His spirit, always seeking, always questing, never rests. The Devil never manages to capture him.
It is hard to describe or summarize this second part, with its journeys through space and time—Faust meets Helen of Troy and woos her, as the supreme example of womanhood in history. He flies to Egypt and America in the arms of Mephistopheles. Better not to try and describe it. Faust is better than anything that one can say about it.
LORD BYRON
1788–1824
Don Juan
Selected Poems
George Gordon, Lord Byron, lived a life so completely Byronic that if it had not actually occurred he would have had to invent it. Which, of course, he almost did. Born in London in 1788, he inherited his title when he was ten, attended Harrow and Cambridge, took his seat in the House of Lords on his twenty-first birthday, and immediately set out for a grand tour. He began Childe Harold while in Albania and completed it in Greece six months later. To celebrate, on May 3, 1810, he swam the Hellespont (the narrow waterway between Europe and Asia now known as the Dardanelles). In the Greek myth of Hero and Leander, Leander swims the Hellespont to rescue his beloved, and Byron was not to be outdone by a mythical hero. Crippled since birth, he had suffered from the ridicule of schoolmates; it was like him to show in this way that he was a young man to be reckoned with on a grand scale.
Byron returned to England with the first two cantos of Childe Harold. The day after they were published, in 1812, he “awoke to find himself famous.” He was lionized by the best society and involved himself in a number of liaisons, all illicit, including one with the wife of the prime minister and another with his half-sister. He married a year later and left England after his wife left him; he claimed that she blackened his reputation, and he never returned to his homeland. He spent most of the rest of his life in Italy, falling in love often (last but not least with the Countess Guiccioli, a woman fully his equal).
In 1823, the Greek War of Independence was just beginning to stir. Byron supported the rebels against their Turkish masters, lent them money, financed a corps of soldiers, and “invaded” Greece himself, dressed as a Homeric warrior. His attempts to bring together all the bickering Greek factions failed; he contracted a fever and died at Missolonghi in 1824, at the age of thirty-six.
“Byronism” is a complex combination of idealism and mockery, stirred together to conceal one’s disappointment with the world. The character of Don Juan, with his melancholy view of things, was not Byron, Byron always insisted—but he was. Melancholy was the only possible mood of a man who wanted the world to be better than it is, and who saw how abysmally bad it is, at that. The most honest response was that of Byron’s Don Juan—to laugh, bitterly sometimes and other times heartily, but never again to cry.
Byron tried everything, experienced everything, went everywhere, met everyone, enjoyed every kind of success, even suffered several kinds of failure. No fewer than ten thousand copies of one of his books were sold on the day after publication—in an age when there were probably fewer than fifty thousand book readers in England. At the same time, he was exiled from his home, mercilessly harassed by lawyers and moralists, and attacked in the public press and in the private homes of England. The wonder is that he wrote so much magnificent poetry; it might have been enough just to be Byron.
He wrote lyrics, songs, stories, and satires—the last are some of his very best things—as well as dramas and epistles. He could write superbly in any poetic form or manner. But his greatest work was Don Juan. It is partly a mock epic, but mainly a vehicle for the expression of opinions, views, and feelings. “I want a hero,” the poem begins:
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—We all have seen him, in the pantomime, Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.
That is perfect Byron, perfect Don Juan (and, besides, the stanza teaches the reader how to pronounce the name of his hero—it rhymes with “new one” and “true one”). The author cannot be serious, Byron wants you to believe; there is nothing in this old world worth being serious about. It is all no more than “giggling and making giggle,” as he wrote to a friend—except he did not mean it.
Nor should we believe it. Don Juan, all four hundred and fifty wonderful pages of it, is serious stuff. But no long poem was ever easier to read, or more fun.
Don Juan is Byron’s final achievement; he was working on it when he died. Many fine and readable poems preceded it in his canon. One in particular is worth mentioning here. Among Byron’s closest friends was the sentimental Irish poet Thomas Moore. He and Byron continued a lively correspondence for years. Many of Byron’s letters contained short poems, dashed off on the spur of the moment. He wrote Moore on February 28, 1817, to say that he had been up late too many nights at the Carnival in Venice, and he added these few perfect verses:
So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
When you passionately desire the world to be what it ought to be, to live up to your dreams, and it never does, finally “the soul wears out the breast.” Byron died at thirty-six of a fever, but he also died because he was worn out. He had been disappointed too often.
In reading Byron, be selective. Not all of his large poetical oeuvre retains the freshness that readers once saw in it. Read all of the lyrics that you can find in anthologies; they are likely to be good. Try a canto of Childe Harold; it may, however, seem antique and overwrought. But do not fail to read deep into Don Juan, especially the first few cantos. What Byron does there no one else has ever done so well.