Fugitive Pieces, Byron’s first volume of verse, actually printed in November, 1806, was almost immediately suppressed at the instance of his elder friend and self-appointed mentor, Rev. J. T. Becher, who somewhat prudishly expostulated with him on the sensuous tone of certain passages. Of the thirty-eight separate poems which the collection contains, eight, at least, may be classed as legitimate satires. The arrangement of the different items is, however, unsystematic and inconsistent. The lines On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School, comprising a prejudiced and impulsive diatribe, are followed by the Epitaph on a Beloved Friend, a sincere and heartfelt elegy; while the conventionally sentimental Lines to Mary, On Receiving Her Picture are preceded and followed by satiric poems. These unexpected juxtapositions, inexplicable even on the theory of an adherence to chronology, suggest at once the curious way in which Byron’s versatile and complex nature tended to show itself at various times in moods apparently antithetical, permitting them often to follow each other closely or even to exist at practically the same moment. In his early book two characteristic moods, if not more, may be recognized: the romantic, whether melancholy, sentimental, or mysterious; and the satiric, whether savage or mocking. It is, of course, only with the manifestations of the latter mood that we have here to do.
The motives which urged Byron, at this early age, towards satire arose chiefly from personal dislike, the wish to retaliate when some one, by word or deed, had offended his vanity or his partialities. His animosities, notoriously violent, were often, though not always, hasty, irrational, and unjustified. His satire was occasioned by his emotions, not by his reason, a fact which partly accounts for his fondness for exaggeration and his incapacity for weighing evidence. As to his choice of methods, it must be remembered that careful reading, of a scope and diverseness remarkable for one of his years, had given him a comprehensive acquaintance with the English poets, and notably with Pope, for whom his preference began early and continued long. From Pope, and from Pope’s literary descendant, Gifford, Byron derived the models for much of his preliminary work in satire. He also knew Canning and Mathias, Lady Hamilton, Mant, and E. S. Barrett, and, in a different field, he was familiar with the lighter verse of Swift, Prior, Anstey, the Rolliad, and the Anti-Jacobin. It was natural, indeed almost inevitable, that these first exercises in satire should reflect something of the style and manner of poems with which Byron had an acquaintance and of which he had made a study.
The first printed satire of his composition was the poem entitled On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School, dated from Harrow, July, 1805, when his period of residence there had almost closed. Dr. Drury, Headmaster of Harrow, having resigned, Dr. Butler had been chosen to fill the vacancy. Against Dr. Butler, Byron had no personal grievance; but resenting an appointment which, passing over Dr. Drury’s son, Mark Drury, had selected an utter stranger, the boy launched an invective at a teacher whom he scarcely knew, and predicted the downfall of the school under his administration. Characteristically enough he was soon ready to avow his regret for his rash outburst. Referring to Dr. Butler, he said in his Diary: “I treated him rebelliously, and have been sorry ever since.” In the details of Byron’s conduct at this time are exemplified several of his traits as a satirist: impetuous judgment, energetic attack, and eventual repentance.
The use of the Latin type names, Probus and Pomposus, applied to Dr. Drury and Dr. Butler, as well as a certain technical skill in the management of the heroic couplet, indicates that Byron had perused Pope to his own advantage. Already he had caught something of the tricks of antithesis and repetition of which the elder poet had been so fond, and he had derived from him the power of condensing acrimony into a single pointed couplet. Such lines as:
“Of narrow brain, yet of a narrower soul,
Pomposus holds you in his harsh control;
Pomposus, by no social virtue sway’d,
With florid jargon, and with vain parade,”[52]
have a hint of the vigor and vehemence of Pope himself, while they display, at the same time, the unfairness and exaggerated bitterness, so rarely mitigated by good humor, which were to distinguish the longer English Bards.
This poem, after all, was a mere scholastic experiment to be read only by those in close touch with events at Harrow. Fugitive Pieces contained also Byron’s earliest effort at political satire. An Impromptu, unsigned, and derogatory to Fox, had appeared in the Morning Post for September 26, 1806, only a few months after the death of the great Whig statesman, and the schoolboy, even then headed toward liberalism, came to the Minister’s defence in a reply published in the Morning Chronicle in October of the same year. The opening couplet: