Lord Byron as a satirist in verse

by Claude Moore Fuess

Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse.”

The sharpest satire in the poem was inserted merely to satisfy a personal grudge. Hewson Clarke (1787–1832), editor of The Satirist, a monthly magazine, had made sport of Hours of Idleness in an issue for October, 1807, and had harshly reviewed Poems Original and Translated in August, 1808. Byron replied in a passage full of violent invective, describing Clarke as

“A would-be satirist, a hired Buffoon,

A monthly scribbler of some low Lampoon.”[108]

These lines Byron never repudiated; he appended to them in 1816 the note: “Right enough: this was well deserved and well laid on.”[109]

English Bards closes with a defiance and a challenge. The poet, then only twenty-one, repeating that his only motive has been “to sternly speak the truth,” dares his opponents to meet him in the open and declares his willingness to engage them. There is something amusing in the pompous way in which Byron, throwing down the gauntlet, boasts of his own indifference and callousness to criticism. He had, however, achieved at least one of his two objects: he had answered hostile reviewers in a manner which made it plain that he would not submit unresistingly to supercilious comment on his work. Assuredly he had turned the weapons of his critics against themselves.

Nothing was more natural than that Byron, his wrath for the most part evaporated, should regret his bitterness in cases where his hasty judgment had carried him too far. On his way home from Greece he wrote Dallas: “At this period when I can think and act coolly, I regret that I have written it.”[110] The story of the events leading to the suppression of the fifth and last edition may be given in the words of Byron to Leigh Hunt, October 22, 1815: “I was correcting the fifth edition of E. B. for the press, when Rogers represented to me that he knew Lord and Lady Holland would not be sorry if I suppressed any further publication of that poem; and I immediately acquiesced, and with great pleasure, for I had attacked them upon a fancied and false provocation, with many others; and neither was, nor am, sorry to have done what I could to stifle that furious rhapsody.”[111] The result was that the whole impression of this edition was burned, only a few copies being rescued, and when, in 1816, Byron left England forever, he signed a Power of Attorney forbidding republication in any form.[112] His mature opinion of the work is expressed in a comment written at Diodati in 1816: “The greater part of this Satire I most sincerely wish had never been written—not only on account of the injustice of some of the critical and some of the personal part of it—but the tone and temper are such as I cannot approve.”

It now remains to compare English Bards with other examples of English classical satire, if one may apply that title to poems which use the heroic couplet and follow the methods employed by Pope. Byron’s versification in his early satires shows the effect of a careful study of Pope. It is singularly free from double rhymes, there being but five instances of them in English Bards.[113] Byron was somewhat more sparing than Pope in his use of the run-on line. Adopting as a basis of judgment the conclusion of Mr. Gosse that “with occasional exceptions, the presence or want of a mark of punctuation may be made the determining element,” we find that, of the 1070 lines in English Bards, approximately 101 are of the run-on variety, that is, about ten out of every hundred. In Mr. Gosse’s collation of typical passages from other poets, he estimates that Dryden has 11, Pope 4, and Keats 40 run-on lines out of every hundred. In the whole length of Byron’s poem there is but one run-on couplet; in a hundred consecutive lines selected by Mr. Gosse, Dryden has one such example and Pope none. Twice Byron employs the triplet,[114] and he has two alexandrines.[115] The medial cæsura after the 4th, 5th, or 6th foot of the line occurs with great regularity as it does in Pope’s work. There are a few minor peculiarities in rhyming,[116] but in general the rhymes are pure. In summarizing, it is safe to say that Byron adhered closely to the metrical principles established by Pope. Not until Hunt, Keats, and Shelley introduced the looser and less monotonous system of versification used in Rimini, Endymion, and Epipsychidion, was the heroic couplet freed from the shackles with which Pope had bound it.

Byron’s candid acknowledgment that, in English Bards, he was venturing “o’er the path which Pope and Gifford trod before” suggests at once a comparison of his work with that of the two earlier authors. Although the Dunciad and English Bards are alike in that they are in the same metre and actuated by much the same motive, there are many differences in execution between the poems. The Dunciad is, as the Preface of “Martinus Scriblerus” states, a true mock-heroic, with a fable “one and entire” dealing with the Empire and the Goddess of Dulness, with machinery setting forth a “continued chain of allegories,” and with a succession of incidents and episodes imitated from epic writers. English Bards, beginning as a paraphrase of Juvenal, has no real action and is composed of a series of descriptions and characterizations, joined by some necessary connective material. Pope’s method of satire is frequently indirect: he involves his victims in the plot, making them ridiculous through the situations in which he places them. Instead of inveighing against Blackmore, Pope pictures him as victor in a braying contest. Byron, on the other hand, uses this method only once in English Bards—in burlesquing the duel between Jeffrey and Moore. Instinctively he prefers taking up his adversaries one by one and covering each with abuse. The Dunciad, with rare exceptions, assails only personal enemies of the satirist, and these, for the most part, men already despised and defenceless; Byron attacks many prominent writers of whom he knows nothing except their work, and against whom he has no grievance of a private nature. Thus in plan and operation the two satires present some striking divergences.

So far as matters of detail are concerned, English Bards is not always in the manner of the Dunciad and the other satires of Pope. It has been observed of Dryden, and occasionally of Pope, that at its best their satire, however much it may be aimed at particular persons, tends to become universal in its application, just as had been the case with the finest work of the Latin satirists. Horace’s Bore, for instance, was doubtless once a definite Roman citizen; Dryden’s Buckingham has a place in history: but the satire on them is pointed and effective when applied to their counterparts in the twentieth century. The same is true of Pope’s Atticus, who is described in language which is both specific and general, fitted both to Addison and to a definite type of humanity. The faculty of thus creating types was not part of Byron’s art. For one thing, he seldom, except in some of his earliest satires, employs type names, and he carefully prints in full, without asterisks or blank spaces, the names of those whom he attacks. His accusations are too precise to admit of transference to others, and his epithets, even when they are unsatisfactory, cannot be dissevered from the one to whom they apply. The satire on Wordsworth, illustrated as it is by quotations and by references to that author’s poetry, is appropriate to him alone, and would have soon been forgotten had it not been for the eminence of the victim. It is otherwise with Pope’s description of Sporus, which is often applied to others, even when it is forgotten that the original Sporus was Lord Hervey.