A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field.”
It was a nation exhausted by war, burdened with debt, and seething with discontent. The Luddite outbreaks, the “Manchester Massacre,” which so excited the wrath of Shelley, and the “Cato Street Conspiracy” showed the temper of the poor and disaffected classes. Unfortunately the cabinet saw the solution of these difficulties not in reform but in repression, and preferred to put down the uprisings by force rather than to remove their causes. For these conditions Byron blamed Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary.
Byron had never met Castlereagh and had never suffered a personal injury from him; his rage, therefore, was directed solely at the statesman, not at the man. The Secretary had long been detestable to Irish Whigs like Moore[294] and English radicals like Shelley[295]; it remained for Byron to track him through life with venomous hatred and to pursue him beyond the grave with scathing epigrams. For anything comparable aimed at a man in high position we must go back to Marvell’s satires on Charles II and the Duke of York or to the contemporary satire in 1762 on Lord Bute. Byron’s Castlereagh has no virtues; the portrait, like Gifford’s sketch of Peter Pindar, is all in dark colors. The satire is vehement and personal, without malice and without pity.
Byron also attacked Wellington, but in manner ironic and scornful, as a leader who had lost all claim to the gratitude of the people by allying himself with their oppressors. For George, who as Regent and King, had done nothing to redeem himself with his subjects, Byron had little but contempt. In satirizing these men, however, Byron was perhaps less effective than Moore, over whose imitations of Castlereagh’s orations and “best-wigged Prince in Christendom,” people smiled when Byron’s tirades seemed too vicious.
Through the method commonly called dramatic, or indirect, Byron assailed English politicians in his portrayal of Lord Henry Amundeville, the statesman who is “always a patriot—and sometimes a placeman,” and who is representative of the unemotional, just, yet altogether selfish British minister. The type is drawn with considerable skill and with much less rancor than would have been possible with Byron ten years before. Indeed the satire resembles Dryden’s in that it admits of a wide application and is not limited to the individual described.
Nothing in Byron’s political creed redounds more to his credit than his persistent opposition to all war except that carried on in the “defence of freedom, country, or of laws.” Neglecting the pride and pomp of war, he depicted the Siege of Ismail with ghastly realism, laying emphasis on the blood and carnage of the battle and condemning especially mercenary soldiers, “those butchers in large business.” Though this attitude towards warfare was not original with him,[296] Byron spoke out with a firmness and pertinacity that marked him as far ahead of his age.
Though Byron, in Don Juan, was almost entirely a destructive critic of the political situation in England and in Europe, his ideas were exceedingly influential. In spite of the fact that he had no definite remedy to offer for intolerable conditions, his daring championship of oppressed peoples affected European thought, not only during his lifetime, but also for years after his death. He was revered in Greece as more than mortal; he was an inspiration for Mazzini and Cavour; he seemed to Lamartine an apostle of liberty. It is probably to his insistence on the rights of the people and to his sweeping indictment of autocratic rule that he owes the greatest part of his international recognition.
Byron’s iconoclastic tendencies showed themselves also in his attack on English society, in which he aimed to expose the selfishness, stupidity, and affectation of the small class that represented the aristocratic circle of the nation. In dealing with this subject he knew of what he was speaking, for he had been a member and a close observer of “that Microcosm on stilts yclept the Great World.” His picture of this upper class is humorous and ironic, but seldom vehement. In a series of vivid and often brilliant character sketches he delineates the personages that Juan, Ambassador of Russia, meets in London, touching cleverly on their defects and vices, and unveiling the sensuality, jealousy, and deceit which their outward decorum covers. Though the figures are types rather than individuals, they were in many cases suggested by men and women whom Byron knew. Possibly the most effective satire occurs in the description of the gathering at Lady Adeline’s country-seat, Norman Abbey, where some thirty-three guests, “the Brahmins of the Ton,” meet at a fashionable house party.[297]
For these social parasites and office seekers Byron felt nothing but contempt. His advice to Juan moving among them is:
“Be hypocritical, be cautious, be