Don Juan (Byron) - The Name and Motive

The Name and Motive

Many of Byron's remarks and reflections on the motive behind his poem are humorous paradoxes, provoked by advice and opposition. For instance, writing to Thomas Moore, he says, "I have finished the first canto ... of a poem in the style and manner of Beppo, encouraged by the good success of the same. It is ... meant to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing. But I doubt whether it is not—at least as far as it has gone—too free for these very modest days." Critical opinion aligned itself with the opinion that the poem was "too free," however, a month after the two first cantos had been issued, Byron wrote to Murray, "You ask me for the plan of Donny Johnny; I have no plan—I had no plan; but I had or have materials.... You are too earnest and eager about a work never intended to be serious. Do you suppose that I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle?—a playful satire, with as little poetry as could be helped, was what I meant." After the completion but before the publication of Cantos III., IV., V., in a further letter to Murray, he writes, "The Fifth is so far from being the last of Don Juan, that it is hardly the beginning. I meant to take him the tour of Europe, with a proper mixture of siege, battle, and adventure, and to make him finish as Anacharsis Cloots in the French Revolution.... I meant to have made him a Cavalier Servente in Italy, and a cause for a divorce in England, and a Sentimental 'Werther-faced' man in Germany, so as to show the different ridicules of the society in each of these countries, and to have displayed him gradually gâté and blasé, as he grew older, as is natural. But I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest."

Conversely, it has been argued that Byron did not "whistle" Don Juan "for want of thought" – but instead he had found a thing to say, and he meant to make the world listen. He had read, albeit with angry disapproval, Coleridge's Critique on (Charles Maturin's) Bertram, where Coleridge describes the legendary Don Juan as a figure not unlike Childe Harold, or for that matter, Byron himself: "Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health...all these advantages, elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and natural character, are...combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature... Obedience to nature is the only virtue." Again, "It is not the wickedness of Don Juan...which constitutes the character an abstraction, ...but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities as coexistent with entire wickedness in one and the same person." It is therefore conceivable that Byron read these passages as either a suggestion or a challenge, or both.

Byron was under no delusion as to the grossness of Don Juan, though he protested that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding. When Murray charges him with "approximations to indelicacy," he laughs at the euphemism, but when Hobhouse talked to him "about morality," he flames out, "I maintain that it is the most moral of poems." Ernest Hartley Coleridge concludes that Byron looked upon his great work as a whole, and he knew that the "raison d'être of his song" was not only to celebrate, but, by the white light of truth, to represent and exhibit the great things of the world—Love and War, and Death by sea and land, and Man, half-angel, half-demon—the comedy of his fortunes, and the tragedy of his passions and his fate.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Spain experienced a quick decline from power in Europe. This fall was accompanied by what many saw as relative cultural poverty when compared to France. By Byron's time, Spanish culture was often considered both archaic and exotic. This led to a Romantic valorization of Spanish culture. Many scholars note this work as a prime example of Spanish exoticism.