provides the irony, and he feels that he need not comment much; when he can go slowly and delightedly from pageant to pageant, interspersing dialogue in verse, a form in which he can be a master, and showing, what in his dramas he does not show, his dramatic power. The familiar fifth canto of Don Juan is as good an instance as another. Juan is taken into the slave-market at Constantinople, has a tong talk with an older Englishman, who is also on sale; is carried in female dress to the sultana Gulbeyaz who has caught sight of him, and repels her advances; begins to relent, but is saved just in time by the appearance of the Sultan. The old attendant gives warning:
“Bride of the Sun! and Sister of the Moon!”
(’Twas thus he spake,) “and Empress of the Earth!
Whose frown would put the spheres all out of tune,
Whose smile makes all the planets dance with mirth,
Your slave brings tidings—he hopes not too soon—
Which your sublime attention may be worth:
The Sun himself has sent me like a ray,
To hint that he is coming up this way.”
“Is it,” exclaimed Gulbeyaz, “as you say?
I wish to heaven he would not shine till morning!
But bid my women form the Milky-way,
Hence, my old comet! give the stars due warning—
And, Christian! mingle with them as you may,
And as you’d have me pardon your past scorning”—
Here they were interrupted by a humming
Sound, and then by a cry, “The Sultan’s coming!”
Here are the qualities that Goethe liked so well, in Don Juan and in The Vision of Judgment—the nimbleness, the daring, the impudence, the lightsomeness; and that strain is kept up through 159 stanzas, of which I count about thirty, here and there, that are fairly to be called digressive; nor do these come too thick when once the story is set going. Byron is much better when he thus moves free of any documents, sailing buoyantly along. Even the digressions reveal him to us. Just at the start, he breaks off for seven verses to describe a sight he had seen while actually writing the canto—a man, the commandant, lying ferociously killed, shot dead, in the streets of Ravenna; this event he describes, in his terse prose, in a letter. The best parts of Don Juan run thus easily. Often enough the tale is of choicer fabric than the patched-in comment. In this sense, then, Byron takes his rank among the four or five best English story-tellers in rhyme, from Chaucer to Crabbe, and onwards.
