Unquestionably the fact that Frere’s work was written in ottava rima[187] did affect Byron. It is true that the latter poet had selected the octave stanza for his Epistle to Augusta, composed near Geneva in 1816, before he had entered Italy and before Frere’s poem had come to his attention; but the Epistle had been serious and romantic, without a touch of humor or of satire. Byron had also been familiar with the use of the octave stanza in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and, as we shall see, in Casti’s Novelle. But of its employment in English for humorous purposes there had been few examples, and Byron made no reference to any such experiments by English poets.
In managing the octave, Frere had resorted to a somewhat free and loose versification, diversified by frequent run-on lines and many novel rhymes. Probably this unconstrained metrical structure appealed greatly to Byron; but it must be remembered that since 1811 he had been avoiding the heroic couplet and practising in some less restricted measures. In Childe Harold he had used a true stanzaic form, occasionally with humorous effect. He had also, even in his first published volume, shown facility in the rhyming of extraordinary words and combinations of syllables, an art in which he had as guides Butler, Swift, and Moore, all of whom were more skilful than Frere. Granting that Frere did suggest to Byron the possibility of making the octave a colloquial stanza, we cannot escape the conclusion that the latter went beyond his model. For one thing, he was less careful about accuracy in rhyming. Eichler, after a detailed examination of The Monks, and the Giants and Beppo, estimates that in the former poem only one rhyme out of thirty is humorously inexact, in the latter, one out of six. Frere’s entire work, more than double the length of Beppo, has only eleven examples of “two-word rhymes,” while Beppo has fifty-one. Eichler’s tables show conclusively that Byron employed for rhymes many more foreign words and proper names than Frere, and that he discovered more odd combinations of English words. In addition he utilized the enjambement in a more daring fashion. Certainly, in nearly every respect, Byron was more lax in his versification than Frere had been in his.[188]
Another uncommon feature of The Monks, and the Giants is its adoption of a vocabulary drawn from the language of every-day life. Whistlecraft, the imaginary author, is, we are led to understand, a rather talkative bourgeois. In fitting his diction to this middle-class artisan, Frere introduced many expressions which seem unpoetic, and consciously avoiding any effort at elevated speech, aimed at a kind of colloquial talk, illustrated in such contractions as, “I’ll” and “I’ve” and slang phrases like “play the deuce.” The vigor and picturesqueness of this conversational style impressed Byron and doubtless had some influence in leading him, in Beppo, to sink into street-jargon, well adapted to the tone of his poem. To some extent, as Eichler indicates, this informal diction coaxed him away from the correctness of Pope, and enabled him to give freer rein to his shifting moods.
The fictitious Whistlecraft has a habit, corresponding somewhat to a peculiarity of the Italian burlesque poets, of digressing from the main thread of the story in order to gossip about himself or his opinions. The first lines in the poem,
“I’ve often wished that I might write a book
Such as all English people might peruse,”[189]
set a conversational key. The introduction of eleven stanzas is devoted to a prefatory monologue, and in the body of the work there are digressions in the same vein, never long continued, and each in the nature of a brief aside to the reader. Sometimes they are merely interpolations having reference to the narrator’s method:
“We must take care in our poetic cruise,
And never hold a single tack too long.”[190]
In other cases, they are comments suggested by a turn in the plot. With this feature of The Monks, and the Giants Byron was, of course, familiar through his reading in one or more of the Italian writers from whom Frere had partly borrowed it, and when he adopted it in Beppo, he reverted to them rather than to the Englishman. The element of digression does not become conspicuous in Frere’s poem until the last two cantos, which could not have influenced Byron in Beppo.[191] Again Frere, who was deficient in aggressiveness, had not wished to employ the digression as a means of introducing personal satire. Since he himself remained anonymous and did not pretend to make his poem a polemic, he refused to utilize these opportunities for advancing his particular whims or prejudices. Byron, however, seeing the possibilities latent in the discursive method and recalling its importance in Italian satire, used it for the promulgation of his ideas, interesting himself more in his chat with the reader than he did in the story. In Beppo he constantly wanders from the tale to pursue varied lines of thought, returning to the plot more from a sense of duty than from desire.[192] In these talks with his audience, full of satiric references to English manners and morals, and tinctured with mocking observations on his contemporaries, Byron follows Casti rather than Frere.