the pleasure we get from the
spectacle of mere splendid energy and devil-may-care animal spirits
let loose to run amuck as they please; while genius, like a lovely
camp-follower tossed to and fro from hand to hand, throws a
redeeming enchantment over the most ribald proceedings.

The people--I speak now of intelligent people--who love Don Juan,
are those who, while timid and shrinking themselves, love to
contemplate emphatic gestures, scandalous advances, Rabelaisian
foolings, clownish tricks; those who love to watch the mad
hurly-burly of life and see the resplendent fire-works go bang; those who
love all huge jests, vituperative cursings, moonlit philanderings,
scoffing mockeries, honest scurrilities, great rolling barrels of
vulgarity, tuns and vats of ribaldry, and lovely, tender,
gondola-songs upon sleeping waters.

The pleasure which such persons derive from Byron is the pleasure
which the civilised Greeks derived from Aristophanes, the pleasure
of seeing everything which we are wont to treat reverently treated
irreverently, the pleasure, most especially, of seeing the pompous
great ones of the world made to dance and skip like drunk puppets.
The literary temperament is so fatally inclined to fall into a sort of
aesthetic gravity, taking its "philosophy" and its "art" with such
portentous self-respect, that it is extremely pleasant when a reckless
young Alcibiades of a Byron breaks into the enchanted circle and
clears the air with a few resounding blasts from his profane bassoon.

What happens really in this pantomimic history of Don Juan, with
its huge nonchalance and audacious cynicism, is the invasion of the
literary field by the godless rabble, the rabble who take no stock of
the preserves of art, and go picnicking and rollicking and scattering
their beer-bottles and their orange-peel in the very glades of the
immortals. It is in fact the invasion of Parnassus by a horde of most
unmitigated proletarians. But these sweet scamps are led by a real
lord, a lord who, like most lords, is ready to out-philistine the
philistines and out-blaspheme the blasphemers.

Don Juan would be a hotch-potch of indecency and sentimentality, if
it were not for the presence of genius there, of genius which, like a
lovely flood of shining sunlight, irradiates the whole thing.

It is nonsense to talk of the "Byronic pose" either with regard to the
outrageousness of his cynical wit or with regard to his sentimental
Satanism.