After these completed works Byron's fragment does not count for much
philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from
that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port, and
Byron's hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb:
he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the
fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova,
tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is
no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of
wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether
we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness
had saved you from the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a
philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and
useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without
the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant
unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than
Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but
as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent
Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did
it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then,
leave Byron's Don Juan out of account. Mozart's is the last of the true
Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the
hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his
reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics,
high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and
recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe. Goethe's
Faust and Mozart's Don Juan were the last words of the XVIII century
on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the XIX century,
ignoring William Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth
or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage