A History of English Literature

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.

Byron’s Don Juan (pronounced in the English way), the legendary womanizer who
ends in hell, the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s 1787 opera, is, among other things, a
humorous self-portrait: a passive youngster who falls in with the amorous wishes of
a series of beautiful women in Seville, Greece, St Petersburg and England. But Don
Juan, like Tristram Shandy, is not read for the Life but for the Opinions, which
include: ‘What men call gallantry, and the gods adultery, / Is much more common
where the climate’s sultry’ and ‘Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; / Thou
shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; / Because the first is crazed
beyond all hope, / The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey ... .’
Although it rises to satire, most ofDon Juan is a long-running joke. Insofar as it is
self-display, the mature milord is more interesting than the self-regarding Childe. ‘It
may be pro fligate’, Byron wrote to a friend, ‘but is it not life, is it not the thing?’ He
exposes hypocrisy with a wonderfully varied use of anticlimax which disarms as it
unmasks.

Some have accused me of a strange design

Against the creed and morals of the land,

And trace it in this poem every line:

I don’t pretend that I quite understand

My own meaning when I would be very fine,

But the fact is that I have nothing plann’d,

Unless it were to be a moment merry,

A novel word in my vocabulary.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792–1822) was, like Byron, an aristocratic radical with the
money to flout convention. But Byron was a Regency buck and milord, fêted by soci-
ety before his exile, whereas Shelley was already an exile at Eton, a revolutionary
thinker, an intellectual for whom to think was normally to do. He believed in vege-
tarianism, pacifism, and free love – for marriage, he thought, enslaved women. The
philosophical anarchist William Godwin thought so too, but found himself Shelley’s
father-in-law. Both held that Man, as reasonable, was perfectible. Expelled from
Oxford for challenging the authorities to refute atheism, Shelley was soon known as
a revolutionary who had absconded with two 16-year-olds in two years. The second,
the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, was later to write: ‘That man
could be perfectionized as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the
greater part of the creation, was the cardinal point of his system.’ When his body was
washed up on the shore of Italy with a copy of Keats’s poems in his pocket, Shelley
displaced Chatterton as the Romantic poet-as-victim. Most of his work was
published posthumously.
Wordsworth said that ‘Shelley was one of the best artists of us all: I mean in work-
manship of style.’ He wrote in several styles – revolutionary satire, philosophical
vision and urbane verse letters – but posterity preferred his lyrics to his radical
philosophical and political poems – strong stuff in ‘Men of England’ and ‘England
in 1819’. Scholarly recovery of the historical context of these poems has not repaired

THE ROMANTIC POETS 239

Percy Bysshe Shelley

(1792–1822) Son of Sir T.

Shelley, MP. Hates Eton;

publishes two Gothic novels.

1811 sent down from Oxford

for distributing his The

Necessity of Atheism. Elopes

with Harriet Westwood (16).

1812 a radical activitist in

Dublin and Wales. 1813

Queen Mab. 1814 to Geneva,

with Mary Wollstonecraft

Godwin (16). Son is born to

Harriet. 1815 receives legacy.

Mary’s child dies. Alastor.

1816 with Byron on Lake

Geneva. Mary begins

Frankenstein. Hymn to

Intellectual Beauty; Mont

Blanc. Harriet drowns herself;

Shelley marries Mary. 1817

meets Keats. 1818 moves to

Italy. The Revolt of Islam;

translates Plato’s Symposium.

Julian and Maddalo. 1819

Prometheus Unbound; Ode to

the West Wind. 1820 at Pisa.

The Cenci (performed 1886).

1821 Defence of Poetry;

Adonais; Hellas. 1822 The

Triumph of Life; translations.

Drowns. 1824 Posthumous

Poems (ed. Mary Shelley).

1839 Poetical Works (ed.

Mary Shelley).