CONCLUSION
Mr. Augustine Birrell, in an illuminating essay on the writings of Pope, brings forward, with reference to satire, a standard of judgment which merits a wider application. “Dr. Johnson,” says Mr. Birrell, “is more to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind—a strong, gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage if you will—nay, as sour and savage as you like, but spiteful never.” Without subscribing unreservedly to Mr. Birrell’s preference of Johnson over Pope, we may still point out that the most conspicuous feature of Byron’s satire, as, indeed, of most of his other poetry, is the underlying personality of the author, too powerful and aggressive to be obscured or hidden. There have been satirists who, in assuming to express public opinion, have succeeded in partly or entirely effacing themselves, and who have thus acted in the rôle of judicial censors, self-appointed to the task of voicing the sentiments of a party. In the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, it is by no means easy to detect where the work of one Tory satirist leaves off and that of another begins. So in Dryden’s work we are seldom confronted directly by the emotions or partialities of the writer himself; Absalom and Achitophel gives the impression of a cool impersonal commentary on certain episodes of history, prejudiced perhaps, but carried on with real or feigned calmness. Byron’s satire is of a different sort; we can read scarcely a page without recognizing the potency of the personality that produced it. Just as in Childe Harold the hero usually represents Byron himself in some of the phases of his complex individuality; just as the Lara and the Corsair of his verse romances and the Cain and Manfred of his dramas are reflections of the misanthropical, theatrical and skeptical poet; so, in the satires, no matter what method he uses, it is always Byron who criticises and assails.
Most of the characteristics which make up this personality accountable for Byron’s satiric spirit have been brought out and discussed in previous chapters. The most important of all, probably, is the haste and impetuosity with which he was accustomed to act. In this respect he may be again contrasted with Dryden, who proceeded to satirize an enemy after due preparation, without apparent agitation or excitement, much as a surgeon performs a necessary operation. Even Pope, sensitive and irritable though he was, did not usually strike when his temper was beyond his control. Byron, on the other hand, was, in most cases, feverish and impulsive; what he thought to be provocation was followed at once by a blow. He did not adopt a position of unmoved superiority, but, both too proud and too impatient to delay, sought instinctively to settle a dispute on the spot. Except in some instances notable because of their rarity, Byron seems to have had no understanding of the method of toying with a prospective victim; he planned to close with his opponent, to meet him in a grapple, and to overwhelm him by sheer energy and intrepidity.
This want of restraint had, of course, some favorable results on his satire; the work was indisputably vigorous, effective because of the ungoverned passion which sustained it. At the same time this hasty action was detrimental to Byron’s art, and accounts, in part, for the frequent lack of subtlety in his satire. We may be roused temporarily by the fury of the lines; but when, in less enthusiastic moods, we examine the details, we miss the technique and the transforming craftsmanship of the supreme artist. Only in The Vision of Judgment did he devote himself to devising means for gaining his end in the most dexterous fashion; and the consequence is that poem is the finest of his satires. In the earlier satires we have Byron, the man, talking out spontaneously, angrily, unguardedly, without second thought or reconsideration, like Churchill, a mighty wielder of the bludgeon but a poor master with the rapier.
Byron’s satiric spirit was always combative rather than argumentative or controversial. He preferred to assail men rather than principles. When he disliked an institution or a party, his invariable custom was to select some one as its representative and to proceed to call him to account. It is this desire to war with persons and not with theories that explains his attacks on Castlereagh, whom he never knew, but whom he singled out as the embodiment of England’s repressive policy. By nature Byron was much more ready to quarrel with the Foreign Minister as an individual than he was to discuss the prudence and expediency of that statesman’s measures.
The characteristics so far mentioned could belong only to a daring and fearless man. Byron never hesitated to avow his ideas, nor did he ever retract his invective except in cases in which he had been convinced that he was unjust. He published the Lines to a Lady Weeping under his own name at a time when no one suspected his authorship. For years he satirized European sovereigns without showing the slightest sign of trepidation. He espoused unpopular causes, and often, of his own choice, ran close to danger, when mere silence would have assured him security.
But despite the fact that Byron’s hatreds were seldom disguised and that he was, on the whole, open and manly in his satire, there is another side to his nature which cannot be left unnoticed. He was, unfortunately, implicated in certain incidents which leave him under the suspicion of a kind of treachery towards his friends. His lampoon on Samuel Rogers, beginning,
“Nose and chin would shame a knocker;
Wrinkles that would puzzle Cocker;”
and ending,
“For his merits, would you know ’em?
Once he wrote a pretty Poem,”
unpublished during his lifetime, was nevertheless a malicious squib directed at a man who had been one of his closest companions. There can be no doubt, too, that Byron’s satiric ballad on Hobhouse, “My boy Hobbie, O,” sent secretly to England, was a true stab in the back, administered to the man who had been his loyal friend. Byron, moreover, was not always accurate in his charges. Like most satirists, he exaggerated to gain his point, and made claims which the evidence did not justify. Nor is it in his favor that he chose to attack his wife in public lampoons, and wrote scurrilous epigrams upon dead statesmen.
This lack of delicacy aside, however, it must be recognized that Byron’s satire was often exerted in condemning real evils, and that he performed a definite service to humanity. More than any other man of his time he insisted on liberty of speech and action in a period when reactionary politicians were in the ascendant. He combated the perennial forms of hypocrisy and cant which appear constantly in England. Neither Dryden nor Pope had been the consistent champion of great causes; but Byron so often employed his satire for beneficial purposes that, despite the vituperation with which it was greeted by conservatives, it became a powerful influence for good.
It may be said, in general, of the substance of Byron’s satires, that he devoted very little attention to the faults and foibles of mankind, taken as a whole. He was usually moved to satire by some contemporary person, event, or controversy, and his criticism was definite, levelled at some specific abuse or evil. In his youth he showed a disposition to take a lofty moral stand, and to preach against vice; but he was ill-suited to didacticism, and soon forsook it altogether. After 1812, his satire had a very intimate connection with the life around him in politics, society, and literature, and reflected the manners and moods of the age. It is to be noted, too, that Byron was, in theory at least, in opposition to the spirit of his time. His belief in liberal doctrines led him to resist much that seemed safe and solid to those in his own class of life. He was not, in his later days, in sympathy with the situation in Europe; and he died too soon to see his progressive ideas bear fruit in the revolutions of 1830 and the Reform Bill of 1832.
In literature Byron satirized, throughout his career, the representatives of the older romantic school: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He did this mainly on the ground that their principles of poetry were subversive of the rules handed down by his avowed masters, Pope and Gifford. In thus defending the name and doctrines of Pope, Byron was consistent during his literary lifetime, although he himself wandered from the path which he persistently asserted to be the only right one. In inveighing against Southey, he was, of course, animated largely by personal spite. For minor poetasters, scribblers who might have been made the puppets of a modern Dunciad, Byron had little but silent contempt. In literary satire, then, he presents the strange spectacle of a radical striving desperately to support a losing cause, and that cause a conservative one. Progressive in nearly every other respect, Byron persisted in opposing any attempt to deviate from the standard established by Pope.
Byron’s satire on society was partly the result of pique. He who had been for some time its idol, found himself expelled from English society, and, in retaliation, exposed its absurdities and follies. At the same time it is unquestionable that he furthered a reform in ridiculing the cant and sham of English high life. It was in his last saner days that he wrote the cantos of Don Juan which treat of the all-pervasive hypocrisy of fashionable circles, and the satire, even to-day, rings true. It is noticeable that he seldom satirizes fads or fashions, and that he rarely, after 1812, attacks private immorality. His zeal is devoted to unveiling pretence, and to describing this outwardly brilliant gathering as it really is.
Since Byron was a radical and a rebel, his satire was devoted, so far as it concerned itself with political questions, to the glorification of liberty in all its forms, and to the vigorous denunciation of everybody and everything that tended to block or discourage progressive movements. In defence of freedom and in resistance to oppression, his satire found its fullest mission and its amplest justification. When continental Europe of the middle nineteenth century thought of Byron, it pictured him as a nobleman who had assailed tyrannical monarchy, who had aided Italy and Greece in their struggles for independence, and who had been willing to fight for the sake of the principles in which he believed. The words of Byron’s political creed have a noble ring: “The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.”
The broader philosophical satire on humanity in which he was more and more inclined to indulge as he reached maturity is essentially shallow and cynical. As soon as Byron became indefinite, as soon as he undertook to preach, he grew unsatisfactory, for he had no lesson to teach beyond the pessimism of Ecclesiastes.
All these objects for satire afforded Byron an opportunity for expressing some much-needed criticism. The most unworthy sections of his satire are those devoted to mere revenge: the unchivalric lines on Lady Byron and Mrs. Clermont; the violent abuse of Southey and Jeffrey; and the treacherous thrusts at Rogers and Hobhouse. In these passages the satirist descends to the lower level of Churchill and Gifford.
It remains to say a word of Byron’s methods, a word merely of recapitulation. Preferring directness always, he was inclined by nature to go straight to his goal, to speak his mind out without pausing to devise subtle or devious plans of attack. Except in his Italian satires his procedure was simple enough: he hurled epithets, made scandalous and scurrilous charges, and thought out offensive comments, writing usually in the first person and meeting his enemies face to face in the good old way of his eighteenth century predecessors. It is, perhaps, unsafe, with Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment before us, to assert that he was incapable of finesse and cunning; but, for the most part, even in these poems, he was more fond of abuse than he was of innuendo and crafty insinuation. His impetuosity and irrepressible impulsiveness, to which we have had occasion so often to refer, did not allow him to dwell scrupulously on artistic effects.
He had, however, two distinct satiric moods: the one, savage, stern, and merciless; the other, mocking, scornful, and humorous. The one resulted in invective, the other, in ridicule and burlesque. One came to him from Juvenal, Pope, and Gifford; the other he learned from Moore, Frere, and the Italians. Thanks to his versatility, he was successful in using both; but his real genius was shown more in the contemptuous mirth of The Vision of Judgment than in the fury of English Bards.
Unlike Pope, Byron was no adept at framing pointed phrases. The beauty of Pope’s satire lies in the single lines, in the details and the finish of an epithet. Byron’s work, on the other hand, should be estimated with regard to the general effect. Few recall particular lines from the passage on Southey in The Vision of Judgment; yet every one remembers the complete caricature of the laureate. Pope manipulated a delicate and fine stencil; Byron painted on the canvas with broad sweeping strokes.
Byron was the last of the great English satirists in verse, and he has had no imitators who have been able to approach his unique style and manner. It is a curious fact that his influence after his death on nineteenth-century English satire has been almost negligible. The causes of this decline in satire since Byron’s day are not altogether easy to explain. Perhaps it may be accounted for as accompanying the general lack of interest in poetry of any sort so common to-day. Possibly it may be due to the stringency of the laws against libel, which has resulted in the situation described by Sir George Trevelyan in his Ladies in Parliament:
“But now the press has squeamish grown, and thinks invective rash:
And telling hits no longer lurk ’neath asterisk and dash;
And poets deal in epithets as soft as skeins of silk,
Nor dream of calling silly lords a curd of ass’s milk.”
In the twentieth century great political problems are usually fought out in the newspapers or in prose pamphlets; the editorials of our daily journals take the place of satires like The Age of Bronze. Doubtless, too, we have grown somewhat refined in our sensibilities and fastidious in our speech, so that we shrink from the cut-and-slash method in poetry. At any rate our English satire since 1830 has inclined toward raillery and humor, wholly unlike the ardent vindictiveness of the men under the Georges. The old régime died away with Byron; and in its stead we have had the polished cleverness of Praed, the gentle cynicism of Thackeray, the mild sentimentality of Looker and Dobson. Not until very recently have flashes of the invective spirit appeared in the work of William Watson and Rudyard Kipling. The great issues of the twentieth century have stimulated no powerful English satirist in verse.