“Rail on, rail on, ye heartless crew!
My strains were never meant for you;
Remorseless rancour still reveal,
And damn the verse you cannot feel.”
Byron’s anger in these lines was directed apparently at certain ladies of Southwell, the little town where most of his Harrow vacations were spent; but though he mentioned one “portly female,” he had not yet reached the point where he ventured to call his enemies by name. This reserve, however, did not prevent him from breaking out in some caustic personal satire, in the course of which he did not spare the characters of the ladies in question. The same provocation led him to compose the Soliloquy of a Bard in the Country (1806), in heroic couplets, in which he seems to pick three persons—“physician, parson, dame”—as responsible for the adverse comment on Fugitive Pieces. In these satires the occasional sharpness of single phrases does not conceal a boyish timidity, which is evidence that Byron had not yet been stung enough to make him realize or display his full power. Neither of the poems was published during his lifetime, and they probably served only to gratify his revenge in private among his friends.
Possibly the last, and certainly the most cynical, of these early satires is the well-known Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog, dated by Byron from Newstead Abbey, October 30, 1808, though the animal did not die until November 18th. The twenty-six lines of the poem are now carved on a monument at Newstead, with an elaborate prose epitaph. Their misanthropy and savagery recall the contempt which Swift expressed for humanity in such poems as The Beasts’ Confession and the Lines on the Day of Judgment. An appropriate text for Byron’s verses might have been taken from Swift’s letter to Pope, September 29, 1725: “I heartily hate and detest that animal called man.” Doubtless Byron’s mood is due in part to an affectation of cynicism which reappeared frequently throughout his life; his hatred of mankind, if not actually assumed, was by no means the deep-seated emotion that agitated Swift.
A retrospective survey of the material so far considered again fastens our attention on the singular complexity of Byron’s satiric spirit. In a body of work comparatively meagre in content, he had used both invective and mockery, severity and humor. He had tried various metrical forms, some dignified and some colloquial. There is less to be said, however, for the intrinsic merit of the satires. No one of them is brilliant, nor does any one suggest marked intellectual power. The invective is too often mere indiscriminate ranting; the wit is, for the most part, sophomoric; and the assumption of superiority in one so young is, at times, exceedingly offensive. Here and there in single lines and passages, there are indications of latent genius; but many other young poets have shown as much.
These exercises, however, imitative and crude though they were, were training him in style and giving him confidence. When his anger was fully roused by the Edinburgh Review, he found himself prepared with an instrument for his purposes. English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, with all its faults, is not the product of an amateur in satire, but of a writer who, after much study of the methods of Pope and Gifford, has learned how to express his wrath in virulent couplets.
CHAPTER IV
“ENGLISH BARDS, AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS”
English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, Byron’s first long poem, is, like the Dunciad and the Baviad, a satire principally on literary people. It was not, however, in its inception, planned to be either so pretentious or so comprehensive as it afterwards came to be. In a letter to Elizabeth Pigot, October 26, 1807, when Byron was still an undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he referred casually to “one poem of 380 lines, to be published (without my name) in a few weeks, with notes,” and added, “The poem to be published is a satire.”[55] The manuscript draft of the work as thus conceived contained 360 lines.