Byron meant what he said, but he kept back the larger truth. Great
works, in which the poet speaks _ex animo_, and the man lays bare the
very pulse of the machine, are not conceived or composed unconsciously
and at haphazard. Byron did not "whistle" _Don Juan_ "for want of
thought." He had found a thing to say, and he meant to make the world
listen. He had read with angry disapproval, but he had read, Coleridge's
_Critique on_ [Maturin's] _Bertram_ (_vide post_, p. 4, note 1), and,
it may be, had caught an inspiration from one brilliant sentence which
depicts the Don Juan of the legend somewhat after the likeness of Childe
Harold, if not of Lord Byron: "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." Here was
at once a suggestion and a challenge.

Would it not be possible to conceive and to depict an ideal character,
gifted, gracious, and delightful, who should "carry into all its
practical consequences" the doctrine of a mundane, if not godless
doctrine, and, at the same time, retain the charities and virtues of
uncelestial but not devilish manhood? In defiance of monition and in
spite of resolution, the primrose path is trodden by all sorts and
conditions of men, sinners no doubt, but not necessarily abstractions of