CHAPTER VIII
“DON JUAN”
With the exception of The Ring and the Book, Don Juan, containing approximately 16,000 lines, is probably the longest original poem in English since the Faerie Queene; moreover, if we exclude the Canterbury Tales, no other work in verse in our literature attempts an actual “criticism of life” on so broad a scale. It is Byron’s deliberate and exhaustive characterization of his age, the book in which he divulges his opinions with the least reticence and the most finality. With all their occasional brilliance and power, his earlier satires had been essentially imitative and could be judged by pre-existing standards. Later, in composing Beppo, Byron discovered that he had found a kind of verse capable of free and varied treatment and therefore especially suited to his improvising and discursive genius; accordingly, in Don Juan, which is a longer and more elaborate Beppo, he produced a masterpiece which, besides being an adequate revelation of his complex personality, is unique in English, anomalous in its manner and method.276
Because it reflects nearly every side of Byron’s variable individuality, Don Juan, though satirical in main intent, combines satire with many other elements. It is tragic, sensuous, humorous, melancholy, cynical, realistic, and exalted, with words for nearly every emotion and temper. It contains a romantic story, full of sentiment and tenderness; it rises into passages of lyric and descriptive beauty, evidently heart-felt; yet these serious and imaginative details are imbedded in a sub-stratum of satire. Furthermore, its range in substance and style is very great; it discusses matters in politics, in society, in literature, and in religion; it shifts in a stanza from grave to gay, from the commonplace to the sublime. It is a poem of freedom; free in thought and free in speech, unrestricted by the ordinary laws of metre. “The soul of such writing is its license,” wrote Byron to Murray in 1819.
The plot of Don Juan, dealing, like the picaresque romances of Le Sage and Smollett, with a series of adventures in the life of a wandering hero, and interrupted constantly by the comments of the author, has little real unity. Considered as a satire, however, the poem becomes unified through the personality behind the stanzas. It is a colossal monument of egotism; wherever we read, we meet the inevitable “I.” The poet’s interest in the progress of his characters is so obviously subordinated to his desire for gossiping with his readers that the plot seems, at times, to be almost forgotten. Thus Don Juan is as subjective as Byron’s correspondence; indeed ideas were often transferred directly from his letters to his verses. There are lines in the poem which restate, sometimes in the same phraseology, the confessions and the criticisms recorded by Lady Blessington in her Conversations with Lord Byron. Autobiographical references are very common, sometimes merely casual,277 sometimes used as a text for satire.278 The powerful personality of the writer, expressed thus in his work, furnishes it with a unity which is lacking in the plot.
It is probable that Byron himself had only a vague conception of the structure and limits of his poem. His conflicting assertions, usually half-jocular, concerning his plan or scheme are proof that he cared little about adhering to a closely knit form. He is most to be trusted when he says:
or when he confesses to Murray: “You ask me for the plan of Donny Juan: I have no plan—I had no plan; but I had or have materials.”280 The inconsistent statements in the body of the poem are, of course, merely quizzical: thus in the first canto Byron says decidedly,
when the twelfth canto is reached, he has an apology ready:
As it lengthened Don Juan developed more and more into a verse diary, bound, from the looseness of its design, to remain uncompleted at Byron’s death.
But whatever may have actuated Byron in beginning Don Juan and however uncertain he may have been at first about its ultimate purpose, it soon grew to be primarily satirical. He himself perceived this in describing it to Murray in 1818 as “meant to be a little quietly facetious upon everything”283 and in characterizing it in 1822 as “a Satire on abuses of the present states of society.”284 Despite the intermingling of other elements, the poem is exactly what Byron called it—an “Epic Satire.”285 His remark “I was born for opposition” indicates how much at variance with his age he felt himself to be; and his inclination to pick flaws in existing institutions and to indulge in destructive criticism of his time had become so strong that any poem which expressed fully his attitude towards life was bound to be satirical. Just as the cosmopolitan outlook of the poem is due partly to Byron’s long-continued residence in a foreign country, so its varied moods, its diverse methods, and its wide range of subject matter are to be attributed, to a large extent, to the fact that the composition of Don Juan extended over several years during a period when he was growing intellectually and responding eagerly to new ideas.286 The work is a fair representation of Byron’s theories and beliefs during the period of his maturity, when he was developing into an enlightened advocate of progressive and liberal doctrines. It is an attack on political inertia and retrogression, on social conventionality, on cant and sham and intolerance. The intermittent, erratic, and somewhat imitative radicalism of a few of his earlier poems has changed into a persistent hostility to all the reactionary conservation of the time. Don Juan is satiric, then, in that it is a protest against all that hampers individual freedom and retards national independence.
The pervasive satiric spirit of Don Juan has varied manifestations. In a few passages there are examples of rancor and spite, of direct personal denunciation and furious invective, that recall the satire of English Bards. The attacks on Castlereagh and Southey, on Brougham and Lady Byron are in deadly earnest, with hardly a touch of mockery. At the same time Byron relies mainly on the more playful and less savage method which he had learned from the Italians and used in Beppo. He himself expressed this alteration in mood by saying,
It is noticeable, too, that in Don Juan petulant fury is much less conspicuous than philosophic satire. Byron is assailing institutions and theories as well as men and women. To some extent the poem is a medium for satisfying a quarrel or a prejudice; but to a far greater degree it is a summary of testimony hostile to the reactionary early nineteenth century. The poet still prefers, in many cases, to make specific persons responsible for intolerable systems; but he is gradually forsaking petty aims and rising to a far nobler position as a critic of his age.
The satire in Don Juan is still more remarkable when we consider the field which it surveys. Byron is no longer dealing with local topics, but with subjects of momentous interest to all humanity. He is assailing, not a small coterie of editors or an immodest dance, but a bigoted and absolute government, a hypocritical society, and, a false idealism, wherever they exist. More than this, he so succeeds in uniting his satire, through the force of his personality, with the eternal elements of realism and romance, that the combination, complex and intricate though it is, seems to represent an undivided purpose.
Perhaps the loftiest note in Byron’s protest is struck in dealing with the political situation of his day. Despite his noble birth and his aristocratic tastes, he had become, partly through temperamental inclination, partly through association with Moore and Hunt, a fairly consistent republican, though he took care to make it clear, as Nichol points out, that he was “for the people, not of them.” Impatient of restraint on his own actions, he extended his belief in personal liberty until it included the advocacy of any democratic movement. It is to his credit, moreover, that he was no mere closet theorist; in Italy he espoused the cause of freedom in a practical way by abetting and joining the revolutionary Carbonari; and he died enrolled in the ranks of the liberators of Greece. In Don Juan he declares himself resolutely opposed to tyranny in any form, asserting his hatred of despotism in memorable lines:
Such doctrine was, of course, not new in Byron’s poetry. He had already spoken eloquently and mournfully of the loss of Greek independence289; he had prophesied the downfall of monarchs and the triumph of democracy290; and he had inserted in Childe Harold that vigorous apostrophe to liberty:
In Don Juan, however, Byron is less rhetorical and more direct. In expressing his
he does not hesitate to condemn all absolute monarchs; moreover he displays a sincere faith in the ultimate success of popular government:
Such lines as these show a maturity and an earnestness that mark the evolution of Byron’s satiric spirit from the hasty petulance of English Bards to the humanitarian breadth of his thoughtful manhood. Like “Young Azim” in Moore’s Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, he is eager to march and command under the banner on which is emblazoned “Freedom to the World.”
It is characteristic of Byron’s later satire that he applied his theory of liberty to the current problems of British politics by assailing the obnoxious domestic measures instituted by the Tory ministry of Lord Liverpool, by condemning the English foreign policy of acquiescence in the legitimist doctrines of Metternich and the continental powers, and by attacking the characters of the ministers whom he considered responsible for England’s position at home and abroad. The England of the time of Don Juan was the country which Shelley so graphically pictured in his Sonnet: England in 1819:—
It was a nation exhausted by war, burdened with debt, and seething with discontent. The Luddite outbreaks, the “Manchester Massacre,” which so excited the wrath of Shelley, and the “Cato Street Conspiracy” showed the temper of the poor and disaffected classes. Unfortunately the cabinet saw the solution of these difficulties not in reform but in repression, and preferred to put down the uprisings by force rather than to remove their causes. For these conditions Byron blamed Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary.
Byron had never met Castlereagh and had never suffered a personal injury from him; his rage, therefore, was directed solely at the statesman, not at the man. The Secretary had long been detestable to Irish Whigs like Moore294 and English radicals like Shelley295; it remained for Byron to track him through life with venomous hatred and to pursue him beyond the grave with scathing epigrams. For anything comparable aimed at a man in high position we must go back to Marvell’s satires on Charles II and the Duke of York or to the contemporary satire in 1762 on Lord Bute. Byron’s Castlereagh has no virtues; the portrait, like Gifford’s sketch of Peter Pindar, is all in dark colors. The satire is vehement and personal, without malice and without pity.
Byron also attacked Wellington, but in manner ironic and scornful, as a leader who had lost all claim to the gratitude of the people by allying himself with their oppressors. For George, who as Regent and King, had done nothing to redeem himself with his subjects, Byron had little but contempt. In satirizing these men, however, Byron was perhaps less effective than Moore, over whose imitations of Castlereagh’s orations and “best-wigged Prince in Christendom,” people smiled when Byron’s tirades seemed too vicious.
Through the method commonly called dramatic, or indirect, Byron assailed English politicians in his portrayal of Lord Henry Amundeville, the statesman who is “always a patriot—and sometimes a placeman,” and who is representative of the unemotional, just, yet altogether selfish British minister. The type is drawn with considerable skill and with much less rancor than would have been possible with Byron ten years before. Indeed the satire resembles Dryden’s in that it admits of a wide application and is not limited to the individual described.
Nothing in Byron’s political creed redounds more to his credit than his persistent opposition to all war except that carried on in the “defence of freedom, country, or of laws.” Neglecting the pride and pomp of war, he depicted the Siege of Ismail with ghastly realism, laying emphasis on the blood and carnage of the battle and condemning especially mercenary soldiers, “those butchers in large business.” Though this attitude towards warfare was not original with him,296 Byron spoke out with a firmness and pertinacity that marked him as far ahead of his age.
Though Byron, in Don Juan, was almost entirely a destructive critic of the political situation in England and in Europe, his ideas were exceedingly influential. In spite of the fact that he had no definite remedy to offer for intolerable conditions, his daring championship of oppressed peoples affected European thought, not only during his lifetime, but also for years after his death. He was revered in Greece as more than mortal; he was an inspiration for Mazzini and Cavour; he seemed to Lamartine an apostle of liberty. It is probably to his insistence on the rights of the people and to his sweeping indictment of autocratic rule that he owes the greatest part of his international recognition.
Byron’s iconoclastic tendencies showed themselves also in his attack on English society, in which he aimed to expose the selfishness, stupidity, and affectation of the small class that represented the aristocratic circle of the nation. In dealing with this subject he knew of what he was speaking, for he had been a member and a close observer of “that Microcosm on stilts yclept the Great World.” His picture of this upper class is humorous and ironic, but seldom vehement. In a series of vivid and often brilliant character sketches he delineates the personages that Juan, Ambassador of Russia, meets in London, touching cleverly on their defects and vices, and unveiling the sensuality, jealousy, and deceit which their outward decorum covers. Though the figures are types rather than individuals, they were in many cases suggested by men and women whom Byron knew. Possibly the most effective satire occurs in the description of the gathering at Lady Adeline’s country-seat, Norman Abbey, where some thirty-three guests, “the Brahmins of the Ton,” meet at a fashionable house party.297
For these social parasites and office seekers Byron felt nothing but contempt. His advice to Juan moving among them is:
He describes their life as dull and uninteresting, a gay masquerade which palls when all its delights have been tried. Its prudery conceals scandal, treachery, and lust; its great vices are hypocrisy and cant—“cant political, cant religious, cant moral.”299 Indeed the satire of Don Juan, from Canto XI to the point where the poem is broken off, is an attack on pretence and sham, and a vindication of the free and natural man. Byron’s motive may have been, in part, the desire for revenge on the circle which had cast him out; but certainly he was disgusted with the narrowness and conventionality of his London life, and his newly acquired jesting manner found in it a suitable object for satire.
While Byron’s liberalism and democracy were doing effective service in pointing out flaws in existing political and social systems, he was still maintaining, not without many inconsistencies, his old conservative doctrines in literature, and doggedly insisting on the virtue of his literary commandments:
While he was being hailed as a leader of the romantic school of poetry, he was still defending the principles of Pope, praising the work of Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, and disapproving of the verses of the members of the Lake School. He dedicated Don Juan, in a mocking and condescending fashion, to Southey, and described him in the sketch of the bard “paid to satirise or flatter” who sang to Haidée and Juan the beautiful lyric, The Isles of Greece.301 He ridiculed The Waggoner and Peter Bell, treating Wordsworth with an hostility which is almost inexplicable in view of Byron’s indebtedness in Childe Harold, III and IV to the older poet’s feeling for nature. Only in minor respects had Byron’s position changed; he was more appreciative of Scott and less vindictive towards Jeffrey; and he had found at least one new literary enemy in the poetaster, William Sotheby. In general there was little for him to add to what he had already said in English Bards. His otherwise progressive spirit had not extended into the field of literary criticism.
It is not at all surprising that a large portion of Don Juan should be devoted to two subjects in which Byron had always been deeply interested—woman and love. Nor is it at all remarkable, in view of his singularly complex and variable nature, that the poem should contain not only the exquisite idyll of Haidée but also line after line of cynical satire on her sex. Though Byron’s opinion of women was usually not complimentary, sentiment, and even sentimentality of a certain sort, had a powerful attraction for him. If many of his love affairs were followed and even accompanied by cynicism, it was because the passion in such cases was sensual, and in reaction, he went to the other extreme. The influence of the Guiccioli, however, manifest in his descriptions of Haidée and Aurora Raby, was beneficial to Byron’s character, and his ideas of love were somewhat altered through his relations with her. At the same time the conventional assertions of woman’s inconstancy and treachery so common in his earlier work recur frequently in Don Juan.
Love, according to Byron’s philosophy, can exist only when it is free and untrammelled. The poet’s too numerous amours and the general laxity of Italian morals had joined in exciting in him a prejudice against English puritanism; while his own unfortunate marital experience had convinced him that “Love and Marriage rarely can combine.”302 The remembrance of his married life and his observation in the land of his adoption were both instrumental in forming his conclusion:
When marriage, then, is so unalluring, the logical refuge is an honest friendship with a married lady, “of all connections the most steady.”304 When Byron does speak of women with apparent respect, it is always well to search for irony behind. If he says, evidently with emotion:
he qualifies his ecstacy elsewhere by asserting that Love is “the very God of evil.”306 Although he protests that he loves the sex,307 he must add that they are deceitful,308 hypocritical,309 and fickle.310
Nothing in the first two cantos of Don Juan was more offensive to Hobhouse and the “Utican Senate” to which Murray submitted them than the poorly disguised portrayal of Lady Byron in the character of Donna Inez. Though Byron explicitly disavowed all intention of satirising his wife directly, no one familiar with the facts could possibly have doubted that this lady “whose favorite science was the mathematical,” who opened her husband’s trunks and letters, and tried to prove her loving lord mad, and who acted under all circumstances like “Morality’s prim personification” was intended to represent the former Miss Milbanke and present Lady Byron.
Doubtless there is something artificial and affected in much of Byron’s cynical comment on women and love; but if we are inclined to distrust this man of many amours who delights in flaunting his past before the eyes of his shocked compatriots, we must remember that there is probably no conscious insincerity in his words. Byron frequently deludes not only his readers but himself, and his satire on women, when it is not a kind of bravado, is merely part of his worldly philosophy.
The philosophical conceptions on which Don Juan rests are, in their general trend, not uncommonly satirical; that is, they are destructive rather than constructive, skeptical rather than idealistic, founded on doubt rather than on faith. It is the object of the poem to overturn tottering institutions, to upset traditions, and to unveil illusions. Byron’s attitude is that so often taken by a thorough man of the world who has tasted pleasure to the point of satiety, and who has arrived at early middle age with his enthusiasms weakened and his faith sunk in pessimism. This accounts for much of the realism in the poem. Sometimes the poet, in the effort to portray things as they are, merely transcribes the prose narratives of others into verse,311 just as Shakspere borrowed passages from North’s Plutarch for Julius Cæsar. More often he undertakes to detect and reveal the incongruity between actuality and pretence, and to expose weakness and folly under its mask of sham. The realism of this sort closely resembles the more modern work of Zola, attributing as it does even good actions to low motives and degrading deliberately the better impulses of mankind. In Byron’s case it seems to be the result partly of a wish to avoid carrying sentiment and romance to excess, partly of a distorted or partial view of life. Whatever romance there is in Don Juan—and the amount is not inconsiderable—is invariably followed by a drop into bathos or absurdity. The deservedly famous “Ave Maria,”312 with its exquisite sentiment and melody, is closed by a stanza harsh and grating, which calls the reader with a shock back to a lower level. This juxtaposition of tenderness and mockery, tending by contrast to accentuate both moods, is highly characteristic of the spirit of the poem. Juan’s lament for Donna Julia is interrupted by sea-sickness,313 and his rhetorical address on London, “Freedom’s chosen station,” is broken off by “Damn your eyes! your money or your life.”314 Byron never overdoes the emotional element in Don Juan; he draws us back continually to the commonplace, and sometimes to the mean and vulgar.315
Byron’s materialistic and skeptical habit of mind is often put into phraseology that recalls the “Que sais-je?” of Montaigne. Rhetorical disquisitions on the vanity of human knowledge and of worldly achievement had appeared in Childe Harold316; in Don Juan the poet dismisses the great problems of existence with a jest:
In the words of the British soldier, Johnson, to Juan, we have, perhaps, a summary of the position which Byron himself had reached:
As a corollary to this recognition of the futility of human endeavor, the doctrine of mutability, so common in Shelley’s poetry, appears frequently in Don Juan,319 ringing in the note of sadness which Byron would have us believe was his underlying mood. Curiously enough, though he cynically classed together “rum and true religion” as calming to the spirit,320 he was chary of assailing Christian theology or orthodox creeds. He preserved a kind of respect for the Church; and even Dr. Kennedy was obliged to admit that on religious questions Byron was a courteous and fair, as well as an acute, antagonist. Perhaps the half-faith which led him to say once “The trouble is I do believe” may account for the fact that, at a time when William Hone and other satirists were making the Church of England a target for their wit, Don Juan contained no reference to that institution.
Byron, then, refused to accept any of the creeds and idealisms of his day. His own position, however, was marked by doubt and vacillation, and he took no positive attitude towards any of the great problems of existence. Experience led him to nothing but uncertainty and indecision, with the result that he became content to destroy, since he was unable to construct.
This is no place for discussing the fundamental morality or immorality of Don Juan. The British public of Byron’s day, basing their judgment largely upon the voluptuousness of certain love scenes and upon some coarse phrases scattered here and there through the poem, charged him with “brutally outraging all the best feeling of humanity.” There can be no doubt that Byron did ignore the ordinary standards of conduct among average people; though he asserted “My object is Morality,”321 no one knew better than he that he was constantly running counter to the conventional code of behavior. Nor can any one doubt, after a study of his letters to Murray and Moore, that he felt a sardonic glee in acting as an agent of disillusion and pretending to be a very dangerous fellow. This spirit led him to employ profanity in Don Juan until his friend Hobhouse protested: “Don’t swear again—the third ‘damn.’”322 By assailing many things that his time held sacred, by calling love “selfish in its beginning as its end,”323 and maintaining that the desire for money is “the only sort of pleasure that requites,”324 Byron drew upon himself the charge of immorality. The poem, however, does not attempt to justify debauchery or to defend vicious practices; Byron is attacking not virtue, but false sentiment, false idealism, and false faith. His satiric spirit is engaged in analyzing and exposing the strange contradictions and contrasts in human life, in tearing down what is sham and pretence and fraud. Judged from this standpoint, Don Juan is profoundly moral.
Fortunately, in this poem the design of which was to exploit the doctrine of personal freedom, Byron had discovered a medium through which he could make his individuality effective, in which he could speak in the first person, leave off his story when he chose, digress and comment on current events, and voice his every mood and whim. The colloquial tone of the poem strikes the reader at once. He censures himself in a jocular way for letting the tale slip forever through his fingers, and confesses with mock humility,
“If I have any fault, it is digression.”325
The habit of calling himself back to the narrative becomes almost as much of an idiosyncrasy as Mr. Kipling’s “But that is another story.”326 Obviously Byron’s words are really no more than half-apologetic; he knew perfectly well what he was doing and why he was doing it. Without insisting too much on the value of a mathematical estimate it is still safe to say that Don Juan is fully half-concerned with that sort of gossipy chat with which Byron’s visitors at Venice or Pisa were entertained,327 and as the poem lengthened, his tendency was to neglect the plot more and more. Indeed the justification for treating Don Juan as a satire lies mainly in these side-remarks in which Byron discloses his thoughts and opinions with so little reserve. The digressions in the poem are used principally for two purposes: to satirize directly people, institutions, or theories; to gossip about the writer himself. In either case we may imagine Byron as a monologist, telling us what he has done and what he is going to do, what he has seen and heard, what he thinks on current topics, and illustrating points here and there by a short anecdote or a compact maxim. In such a series of observations, extending as they do over a number of years and written as they were under rapidly shifting conditions, it is uncritical to demand unity. We might as well expect to find a model drama in a diary. The important fact is that we have in these digressions a continuous exposition of Byron’s satire during the most important years of his life.
The peculiar features of the octave stanza, with its opportunity for double and triple rhymes and the loose structure of its sestette, made it more suited to Byron’s genius than the more compact and less flexible heroic couplet. At the same time the concluding couplet of the octave offered him a chance for brief and epigrammatic expression. In general it may be said that no metrical form lends itself more readily to the colloquial style which Byron preferred than does the octave.
In utilizing this stanza, Byron, accepting the methods of Pulci and Casti, allowed himself the utmost liberties in rhyming and verse-structure. We have already seen that in several youthful poems, and, indeed, in some later ephemeral verses, he had shown a fondness for remarkable rhymes. By the date of Beppo he had broken away entirely from the rigidity of the Popean theory of poetry, and had confessed that he enjoyed a freer style of writing:
In Don Juan this employment of uncommon rhymes had become a genuine art. Byron once declared to Trelawney that Swift was the greatest master of rhyming in English; but Byron is as superior to Swift as the latter is to Barham and Browning in this respect. Indeed Byron’s only rival is Butler, and there are many who would maintain, on good grounds, that Byron as a master of rhyming is greater than the author of Hudibras. When we consider the length of Don Juan, the constant demand for double and triple rhymes, and the fact that Byron seldom repeated himself, we cannot help marvelling at the linguistic cleverness which enabled him to discover such unheard-of combinations of syllables and words. Some of the most extraordinary have become almost classic,329 e.g.:—
Naturally in securing such a variety of rhymes he was forced to draw from many sources. Foreign languages proved a rich field, and he obtained from them some striking examples of words similar in sound, sometimes rhyming them with words from the same language, sometimes fitting them to English words and phrases. Some typical specimens are worthy of quotation:
Latin—in medias res, please, ease.332
Greek—critic is, poietikes.333
French—seat, tête-à-tête, bete.334
Italian—plenty, twenty, “mi vien in mente.”335
Spanish—Lopé, copy.336
Russian—Strokenoff, Chokenoff, poke enough.337
Byron also resorts to the uses of proper names, borrowed from many tongues:
Dante’s—Cervantes.338
Hovel is—Mephistophelis.339
Tyrian—Presbyterian.340
Avail us—Sardanapalus.341
Pukes in—Euxine.342
It may be added, too, that he was seldom over-accurate or careful in making his rhymes exact. In one instance he rhymes certainty—philosophy—progeny.343 Most stanzas have either double or triple rhymes, but there are occasional stanzas in which all the rhymes are single.344
In Don Juan run-on lines are the rule rather than the exception. Certain stanzas are really sentences in which the thought moves straight on, disregarding entirely the ordinary restrictions of versification.345 In more than one case the idea is even carried from one stanza to another without a pause.346 In one extraordinary instance a word is broken at the end of a line and finished at the beginning of the next,347 following the example set by the Anti-Jacobin in Rogero’s song in The Rovers. Like a public speaker, Byron at times neglects coherence in order to keep the thread of his discourse or to digress momentarily without losing grip on his audience.
Much of the humor of Don Juan is due to the varied employment of many forms of verbal wit: puns, plays upon words, and odd repetitions and turns of expression. The puns are not always commendable for their brilliance, though they serve often to burlesque a serious subject. In at least one stanza Byron uses a foreign language in punning.348 In general it is noticeable that puns become more common in the later cantos of the poem.349 There are also many curious turns of expression, comparable only to some of the quips of Hood and Praed.350 Frequently, they are exceedingly clever in the suddenness with which they shift the thought and give the reader an unexpected surprise, e.g.: