At the time of the subsidence of the Anti-Jacobin in 1798,[48] the boy Byron, just made a lord by the death of his great-uncle on May 19, 1798, was in his eleventh year. From this date on, therefore, it is necessary to take account not only of the satiric literature which may have influenced his work, but also of the events in politics and society which were occurring around him and which determined in many ways the course of his career as a satirist. From his environment and his associations came often his provocation and his material.
No single verse-satire of note was produced during the ten years just preceding English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. It seemed, indeed, for a time, as if satire, fallen into feeble hands, would lose any claim to be considered as a branch of permanent literature. The increasing power of the daily newspapers and their abuse of the freedom of the press stimulated the composition of short satiric ballads and epigrams, designed to be effective for the moment, but most of them hastily conceived, carelessly executed, and speedily forgotten. The laws against libel, not consistently enforced until after the second conviction of Finnerty in 1811 and the imprisonment of the Hunt brothers in 1812, were habitually disregarded or evaded, and the utmost license of speech seems to have been tolerated, even when directed at the royal family. The ethical standard which Pope had set for satire and which had been kept in New Morality was now forgotten in the strife of faction and the play of personal spite. Pope had laid emphasis on style and technique, and even Mathias and Gifford had made some attempt to follow him; but the new school of satirists cared little for art. No doubt this degradation of satire may be partly attributed to the fact that the really capable writers of the time—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Southey—were engaged in poetry of another sort; but the result was that satire became the property of journalists and poetasters until Byron and Moore recovered for it some of its former dignity.
It must not be inferred that there was a dearth of material for destructive criticism. Few decades of English history have offered a more tempting opportunity to a satirist.[49] The Napoleonic Wars, renewed in May, 1803, after the brief Peace of Amiens (1802), were not, in spite of an occasional naval victory, resulting advantageously for England; the disgraceful Convention of Cintra (1808) and the Walcheren fiasco of 1809 had detracted from British prestige; and the Peninsular Campaign of 1808 seemed at the time to be a disastrous failure. The wearisome conflict had accentuated class differences, since, as Byron afterwards pointed out in The Age of Bronze, the landed interests only increased their wealth as the struggle continued. Many reforms were being agitated: Catholic Emancipation, opposed resolutely by George III and not made a reality until Canning became supreme; the abolition of negro slavery, championed persistently by Wilberforce; and many improvements in the suffrage laws, planned by Sir Francis Burdett and a small group of liberal statesmen. The older leaders, Pitt and Fox, died in the same year (1806), leaving weaker and less trusted men to fill their places; while political issues became confused until the establishment of the Regency in 1811 opened the way for the long Tory administration of Lord Liverpool. Some incidents of an unusually scandalous character aroused a general spirit of dissatisfaction. The impeachment of Melville in 1806 for alleged peculation of funds in the naval office; the investigation in 1806 into the character of the giddy Princess Caroline, instigated by the Prince of Wales, who had married her in 1795 and deserted her within a year; the resignation of the Duke of York from the command of the army, following a dramatic exposé of his relations with Mrs. Clarke and her disposal of commissions for bribes; the duel between Castlereagh and Canning (1809)—all these were unsavory topics of the hour. The open profligacy of the heir to the throne drew upon him ridicule and contempt, and the frequent recurrence of the King’s malady left Englishmen in doubt as to the duration of his reign. In such an age the ephemeral satires of the newspapers joined with the cartoons of Gilray and Cruikshank in assailing evils and expressing public indignation. It is, then, remarkable that no writer of real genius should have been led to commemorate these events in satire.
The formal satires of the decade are, for the most part, lifeless, lacking in wit and art. The most readable of them is, perhaps, Epics of the Ton (1807), by Lady Anne Hamilton (1766–1846), divided into a Male Book and a Female Book. It is a gallery of contemporary portraits, in which some twenty women and seventeen men, all prominent personages, are sketched by one familiar with most of the current scandal in court and private life. Although it is written in the heroic couplet, the versification is singularly crude and careless. Structurally the work has little discernible unity, being merely a series of satiric characterizations without connecting links, and each section might have been printed as a separate lampoon. The introductory passage, however, contains a running survey of contemporary poetry which was not without influence on Byron. Lady Hamilton, clever retailer of gossip though she was, belongs to the decadent school of Pope.
In 1808 Tom Moore published anonymously Corruption and Intolerance, following them in the next year with The Skeptic, a Philosophical Satire. All three are satires in the manner and form of Pope; but in spite of their fervid patriotism, they are dull and heavy, and Moore, quick to recognize his failure, discreetly turned to a lighter variety of satire for which his powers were better fitted. Of other political satires of the same period, the best were excited by the notorious ministry of “All the Talents,” formed by the Whigs after the death of their leader, Fox, in 1806. In All the Talents! (1807), Eaton Stannard Barrett (1786–1820), under the name of Polypus, undertook to undermine the ministry by assailing its members, following the methods of the Rolliad and using the diffuse notes which Mathias had popularized. A Whig reply appeared shortly after in All the Blocks! (1807) by the indefatigable W. H. Ireland (1777–1835), which attacked the newly formed Tory ministry of Portland.
Among the nondescript formal satires of the time should be mentioned Ireland’s Stultifera Navis (1807), a spiritless, impersonal, and general satire, which revives the form of Brandt’s Narrenschiff (1494), introduced into English in Barclay’s Ship of Fools (1508). A later satire of Ireland’s, Chalcographimania (1814), in feeble octosyllabics, satirises collectors and bibliophiles. The Children of Apollo (1794), an anonymous satire of an earlier period, seems to have afforded Byron more than a suggestion for his English Bards; but he was influenced still more by the Simpliciad (1808), published anonymously, but actually written by Richard Mant (1776–1848), which is dedicated to the three revolutionary poets, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, and contains some unmerciful ridicule of their more absurd poems. Mant’s work, the frank criticism of “a man of classical culture and of some poetic impulse,”[50] merits attention as being an almost contemporary outburst of the same general character as English Bards.
The ballad form reappeared in many satires arising from the troubled condition of politics[51]; but the usual tone of this work is scurrilous and commonplace, and dozens of such broadsides were composed and forgotten in a day. That any one of them had any definite influence on Byron, or on the course of satire in general, is highly improbable. What is important is that the literary atmosphere for a few years before 1809, although it produced no great satires, was surcharged with the satiric spirit, and that Byron, in his youth, must have been accustomed to the abusive personalities then common in the daily press. Conditions in his day encouraged rather than repressed destructive criticism.
This summary of English satiric verse between Dryden and Byron ends naturally with the year 1809, when the latter poet first revealed his true genius as a satirist. Something has been suggested of the wide scope and varied character of satire from the death of Pope until the end of the eighteenth century; the example of Pope has been traced through its influence on satire to the time when it degenerated in the work of Mathias and the minor rhymsters of the first decade of the new century; and the lighter classes of satire have been followed until the date when they became artistic in the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. With many of these English predecessors Byron had something in common; from a few he drew inspiration and material. Although it will be possible to point out only a few cases in which he was indebted to them directly for his manner and phraseology, it was their work which determined very largely the course which he pursued as a satirist in verse.
With the appearance of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, English satire regained something of the standing which it had once had in the days of Pope and Swift. Men of the highest genius were soon to employ satire as a weapon. Moore, the Smiths, Praed, Hood, and Hook were to carry raillery and mockery almost to the point of perfection; Shelley was to unite satire with idealism and a lofty philosophy; and Byron himself, the last master in the school of Pope, was to introduce a new variety of satire, borrowed from the Italians, and to gain for himself the distinction of being perhaps the greatest of our English verse-satirists.