His command over the verse itself is almost
miraculous: he glides from extreme to extreme, from punning to pathos,
from melancholy to mad merriment, sighing or laughing by the way at his
readers or at himself or at the stanzas. Into them he can fling anything
under the sun, from a doctor's prescription to a metaphysical theory.
When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said,
is as cogent a refutation of idealism as the cumbrous wit of Scotch
logicians.
The popularity of the work is due not mainly to the verbal skill which
makes it rank as the _cleverest_ of English verse compositions, to its
shoals of witticisms, its winged words, telling phrases, and incomparable
transitions; but to the fact that it continues to address a large class
who are not in the ordinary sense of the word lovers of poetry. _Don Juan_
is emphatically the poem of intelligent men of middle age, who have grown
weary of mere sentiment, and yet retain enough of sympathetic feeling to
desire at times to recall it. Such minds, crusted like Plato's Glaucus
with the world, are yet pervious to appeals to the spirit that survives
beneath the dry dust amid which they move; but only at rare intervals can
they accompany the pure lyrist "singing as if he would never be old," and
they are apt to turn with some impatience even from _Romeo and Juliet_ to
_Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_.
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