sin, and to assert the contrary makes for cant and not for
righteousness. The form and substance of the poem were due to the
compulsion of Genius and the determination of Art, but the argument is a
vindication of the natural man. It is Byron's "criticism of life." _Don
Juan_ was _taboo_ from the first. The earlier issues of the first five
cantos were doubly anonymous. Neither author nor publisher subscribed
their names on the title-page. The book was a monster, and, as its maker
had foreseen, "all the world" shuddered. Immoral, in the sense that it
advocates immoral tenets, or prefers evil to good, it is not, but it is
unquestionably a dangerous book, which (to quote Kingsley's words used
in another connection) "the young and innocent will do well to leave
altogether unread." It is dangerous because it ignores resistance and
presumes submission to passion; it is dangerous because, as Byron
admitted, it is "now and then voluptuous;" and it is dangerous, in a
lesser degree, because, here and there, the purport of the quips and
allusions is gross and offensive. No one can take up the book without
being struck and arrested by these violations of modesty and decorum;
but no one can master its contents and become possessed of it as a whole
without perceiving that the mirror is held up to nature, that it
reflects spots and blemishes which, on a survey of the vast and various
orb, dwindle into _natural_ and so comparative insignificance. Byron was
under no delusion as to the grossness of _Don Juan_. His plea or
pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and
La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding, is _nihil ad rem_, if it is not
insincere. When Murray (May 3, 1819) charges him with "approximations to
indelicacy," he laughs himself away at the euphemism, but when Hobhouse
and "the Zoili of Albemarle Street" talked to him "about morality," he
flames out, "I maintain that it is the most moral of poems." He 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,