Shortly after the momentous year 1816, an extraordinary development took place in the form and spirit of Byron’s satiric work in verse. Up to this date, as we have seen, his satires of any literary value had followed, as a rule, the general plan and manner used by the authors of such typical productions as the Dunciad, the Rosciad, and the Baviad. In some ephemeral verses, it is true, he had shown signs of breaking away from the English classical tradition; but few, if any, of these unimportant occasional poems had been printed in book form. They had appeared in newspapers or in letters to correspondents, and Byron himself would have made no claim for their permanence. His published satires, then, had deviated little from the standard set by Pope and Gifford, a fact all the more remarkable because his work in the other branches of literature in which he had distinguished himself had revealed a wide discrepancy between his utterances as a critic and his practice as a poet. The enthusiastic and often extravagant eulogist of Pope had been the author of the romantic Childe Harold and The Giaour. In one field of letters, however, Byron had preserved some consistency; before 1818, considered as a satirist, he must be classed as one of the numerous disciples of the great Augustan.
The publication of Beppo, February 28, 1818, may serve roughly to denote the visible turning-point between the old era and the new one to come. It is significant that this poem is written, not in the characteristically English heroic couplet, but in the thoroughly foreign ottava rima. Responsive to an altered and agreeable environment, Byron found in Italy and its literature an inspiration which affected him even more profoundly than it had Goethe only a few decades before. The results of this influence, shown to some extent in his dramas though more decidedly in his satires, justify terming the years from 1817 until his death his Italian period. A mere mention of its contribution to satire indicates its importance: it produced Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, and Don Juan. Of these poems, Beppo is, strictly speaking, a satiric novella; The Vision of Judgment is a travesty; and Don Juan is an “epic satire.” They are, however, all three closely related: first, in that, unlike most of the earlier satires, they are narrative in method; second, in that they are infused with what we may call, for want of a better phrase, the Italian spirit. What this spirit is we may well leave for future discussion. It is enough here to point out that it is characterized by a kind of playfulness, half gayety and half mockery, often tinged with irony and reflecting a cynical tolerance, and that it adopts a style informal and colloquial, in which the satirist unbends to his readers and feigns to let them into his confidence. The bare outlining of these features alone proves how far Byron departed from the usually serious, dignified, and formal satire of Pope and Gifford.
It would, of course, be erroneous to assume that Byron, before he first touched Italian soil in 1816, was unfamiliar with the language. If, as Moore says, he had read little of it up to 1807, he still must have gained some acquaintance with it on his early travels, for on January 14, 1811, he wrote his mother from Athens:—“Being tolerably master of the Italian and Modern Greek languages—I can order and discourse more than enough for a reasonable man.”[175] In a letter of August 24, 1811, he used Italian words,[176] and in 1812 he criticized with much intelligence the “Italian rhymes” of W. R. Spencer.[177] There are several references in his Diary to his study of Italian writers.[178] In his library, sold in 1816 to satisfy his creditors, were many Italian books; indeed Fuhrman computes that by that date he had gone through Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Bandello, Ariosto, Alfieri, Monti, and Goldoni, besides many minor historians, essayists, and poets.[179] Finally when he actually set foot in Italy, he was able to assure Murray:—“As for Italian, I am fluent enough.”[180] Nothing up to this time, however, had induced him to become an imitator of the Italians. Although he had commended Hunt’s Rimini for having two excellent features, “originality and Italianism,” he had, apparently, no idea of emulating Hunt in seeking for a stimulus from Italian sources.
In mid-October, 1816, Byron arrived in Italy from Switzerland, making his first halt at Milan. From then on until he set out for Greece on July 23, 1823, he was a continuous dweller in the peninsula, settling for a time at and near Venice, in the meanwhile making an excursion to Florence and Rome, going later to Ravenna, and at last residing at Pisa and Genoa. The interesting details of his life in these places are sufficiently well known through his own letters and the records given to the world by Hunt, Medwin, the Countess of Blessington, Trelawney, Moore, and others. His reputation as the author of Childe Harold served as a means of introduction to men of letters; his noble birth procured him admission into social circles; and naturally he acquired an intimate knowledge of Italian customs, as well as a wide acquaintance with the literature of the country, both mediæval and modern. He engaged in several liaisons in Venice, and in 1819 became the accepted cicisbeo of the Countess Guiccioli. By aiding the secret organization of the Carbonari, he enrolled himself in the struggle for Italian independence and made himself an object of suspicion to the police. It is no wonder that he wrote to Moore in 1820:—“I suspect I know a thing or two of Italy—I have lived in the heart of their houses, in parts of Italy freshest and least influenced by strangers—have seen and become (pars magna fui) a portion of their hopes, and fears, and passions.”[181] The immediate consequences of this assimilation may be recognized in Beppo, composed in 1817, which, slight and inconsiderable though it seems, is nevertheless the prelude to the fuller voice of Don Juan, the product of Byron’s ripest genius.
The problem is to determine, as far as it is possible, in what way and to what extent Byron is indebted to Italy and Italian writers in Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, and Don Juan. The process of arriving at a satisfactory answer to these queries cannot be an easy one, because it so often necessitates dealing with qualities of style which are somewhat intangible. We may set aside at once any supposition that Byron stole habitually from the Italian satirists by translating their phrases or transferring their ideas, unacknowledged, to his own pages. He was rarely a plagiarist in the sense that he conveyed the words of others bodily into his own stanzas, and when, as in sections of Don Juan, he paraphrased the prose of historians, he frankly admitted his obligation. But his creative impulse was likely to be affected by any book which had recently aroused his admiration. Moore, who knew the operations of Byron’s mind as no one else did, said:—“There are few of his poems that might not ... be traced to the strong impulse given to his imagination by the perusal of some work that had just before interested him.”[182] Obviously, when a particular poem was composed under such inspiration, we shall find it difficult to measure the extent of Byron’s dependence upon the book which offered him a stimulus. Now and then, it is true, there are passages in his satires which recall at once similar lines in Italian writers, and occasionally we find him using a trick of theirs which it seems improbable he could have learned elsewhere: in such cases the relationship is clear enough. On the other hand, we may feel convinced that Byron drew from the Italian satirists something of their general tone, and yet be unable to clarify our reasons for this belief or to frame them into an effective argument. Of such a sort, indeed, is much of the influence which Pulci, Berni, and Casti had on Byron. It is vague and evasive, but it undoubtedly exists. Perhaps at bottom it is little more than the habit of thinking in a peculiar way or of surveying objects from an unusual point of view. But whatever is the basis of this satiric manner, it influenced Byron’s work, and made his later satires almost unique in English.
It is in Beppo, as has been said, that this new mood first has full expression. Yet, curiously enough, we are at once forced into the paradox that Byron may have been taught something of the Italian spirit in Beppo through the medium of an English poem, to which he explicitly turns our attention. In 1817 a book was published by Murray with the odd title, Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft, of Slowmarket, in Suffolk, Harness and Collar Makers, Intended to Comprise the Most Interesting Particulars Relating to King Arthur and his Round Table. The volume contained only two short cantos in ottava rima, the whole making up, with the eleven stanzas of introduction, 99 stanzas, exactly the length of Beppo. Early in 1818 two more cantos were added, and in the same year the entire poem was printed as The Monks, and the Giants. Although no author’s signature was attached, credit was rightfully bestowed upon John Hookham Frere (1769–1846), already mentioned as a brilliant contributor to the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin.[183] Like Mathias, Roscoe, Rose, and others among his contemporaries, Frere had been an assiduous student of Italian, and had read extensively in the Italian romantic and burlesque poets from Pulci to Casti. It was doubtless interest in this literature that led him to the composition of The Monks, and the Giants, for which work he borrowed from the Italians their octave stanza, an occasional episode, and as much of their manner as his nature could absorb.[184]
Byron’s first mention of Beppo occurs in a letter of October 12, 1817, to Murray:—“I have written a poem (of 84 octave stanzas), humourous, in or after the excellent manner of Mr. Whistlecraft (whom I take to be Frere), on a Venetian anecdote which amused me.”[185] On October 23d he repeats this assertion:—“Mr. Whistlecraft has no greater admirer than myself. I have written a story in 89 stanzas, in imitation of him, called Beppo.”[186] Although the definiteness of these statements is unquestionable, it is, nevertheless, essential to ascertain just how literally we are to accept Byron’s confession that Beppo is “in the excellent manner of Mr. Whistlecraft.”
The problem has been discussed in detail by Albert Eichler in his treatise, John Hookham Frere, Sein Leben und seine Werke, Sein Einfluss auf Lord Byron (1905), and his conclusions are, in many respects, trustworthy. After comparing Beppo with Frere’s poem, Dr. Eichler maintains that Byron’s inspiration may be traced to The Monks, and the Giants, and makes the following assertion regarding the sources of Byron’s work:—“Die Italien duerfen wir als Quellen hiebei mit Recht nach des Dichters eigenen Auesserungen und auch aus zeitlichen Gruenden ausschliessen.” This statement, which is certainly stronger than the evidence warrants, may be controverted on two grounds: first, that, in spite of some superficial resemblances between the two poems, there is much in Beppo that Byron could not have gained from Frere, indeed which he could have learned only from a close study of the Italian poets; secondly, that Byron actually knew the work of Casti well at the time when he composed Beppo.
The likeness in stanza form and Byron’s own acknowledgment of his model have, in all probability, been somewhat over-emphasized. So much do the two works differ in plot that there is no single case in which Byron could have adopted a situation or an incident from Frere. The story of The Monks, and the Giants is told by an imaginary personage, Robert Whistlecraft, just as The Waltz is supposed to have been composed by the fictitious “Horace Hornem, Esq.,” and the language of the poem is fitted to the station and education of this figure, who is thoroughly British and entirely Frere’s creation. The poem itself, fragmentary and amorphous even in its final state, is a jumble of poorly organized themes. Beginning in Canto I with a description of Arthur’s court and of his three valorous knights, Lancelot, Tristram, and Gawain, it proceeds to treat in Canto II of an attack of the banded Arthurian chivalry on the castle of the Giants, a race who resemble, in some respects, the giants in Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore. At this point the knights disappear from the story, Arthur being mentioned only once during the rest of the tale, and Frere, imitating in part the first canto of the Morgante Maggiore, takes a monastery for his scene and a siege of the religious brethren by the Giants for his main action. Friar John’s quarrel with the Tintinabularians, his enforced leadership after the death of the venerable abbot, the assault of the Giants, the successful defence of the Monks, and the eventual retreat of the assailing party:—these are the significant incidents in the second half of a work which obviously depends little on the unity of its plot.
Beppo is also a narrative, founded on a rather unimpressive anecdote. The merchant, Beppo, departed on a trading trip, fails to return to his wife, Laura, and she, thinking him dead, consoles herself with a Count for her lover. After some years, Beppo comes back, to meet his wife and her cavalier at a ball. She is reconciled to her husband, the Count becomes Beppo’s friend, and the story ends. Since these main features of the plot differ so widely from the incidents in The Monks, and the Giants, we are forced to seek, therefore, for similarities in manner and style between the two poems.