Many writers, from Tennant and Frere to Moultrie, have employed it in
burlesque or more society verse; but Byron alone has employed it
triumphantly, for he has made it the vehicle of thoughts grave as well as
gay, of "black spirits and white, red spirits and grey," of sparkling
fancy, bitter sarcasm, and tender memories. He has swept into the pages of
his poem the experience of thirty years of a life so crowded with vitality
that our sense of the plethora of power which it exhibits makes us ready
to condone its lapses. Byron, it has been said, balances himself on a
ladder like other acrobats; but alone, like the Japanese master of the
art, he all the while bears on his shoulders the weight of a man. Much of
_Don Juan_ is as obnoxious to criticism in detail as his earlier work; it
has every mark of being written in hot haste. In the midst of the most
serious passages (e.g. the "Ave Maria") we are checked in our course by
bathos or commonplace and thrown where the writer did not mean to throw
us: but the mocking spirit is so prevailingly present that we are often
left in doubt as to his design, and what is in _Harold_ an outrage is in
this case only a flaw.
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