Byron had begun his travesty on May 7, 1821, and had sent it to Murray from Ravenna on October 4th.[363] Unconscious of the fact that this satire was in Murray’s hands, Southey meanwhile had published his Letter to the Courier, January 5, 1822, vindictively personal, and containing one unlucky paragraph: “One word of advice to Lord Byron before I conclude. When he attacks me again, let it be in rhyme. For one who has so little command of himself, it will be a great advantage that his temper should be obliged to keep tune.” When this Letter came to Byron’s notice, his anger boiled over; he sent Southey a challenge, which through the discretion of Kinnaird, was never delivered[364]; and he decided immediately to publish his Vision, which he had almost determined to suppress. Murray, however, delayed the proof, and on July 3, 1822, Byron, irritated by this tardiness and enthusiastic over his newly planned periodical, The Liberal, sent a letter by John Hunt,[365] the proprietor of the magazine, requesting Murray to turn the satire over to Hunt. In the first number of The Liberal, then, the Vision was given the most conspicuous position, printed, however, without the preface, which Murray, either ignorantly or unfairly, had withheld from Hunt. A vigorous letter from Byron recovered the preface, which was inserted in a second edition of the periodical.[366] The consequences of publication somewhat justified Murray’s apprehensions. John Hunt was prosecuted by the Constitutional Association, and on July 19, 1824, only three days after Byron’s body had been buried in the church of Hucknall Torkard, was convicted, fined one hundred pounds, and compelled to enter into securities for five years. In fairness to Byron, it must be added that he had offered to come to England in order to stand trial in Hunt’s stead, and had desisted only when he found that such procedure would not be allowed.[367]
In his Vision, Byron had at least four objects for his satire. He wished to ridicule Southey’s poem by burlesquing many of its absurd elements; he aimed to proceed more directly against Southey by exposing the weak points in his character and career; he desired to present a true picture of George III, in contrast to Southey’s idealized portrait; and he intended to make a general indictment of all illiberal government and particularly of the policy then being pursued by the English Tory party. He seized instinctively upon the weaknesses of the panegyric, and while preserving the general plan and retaining many of the characters, freely mocked at its cant and smug conceit. Through a style purposely grotesque and colloquial, he turned Southey’s pompous rhetoric into absurdity; by touches of realism and caricature he made the solemn angels and demons laughable; while, occasionally rising to a loftier tone suggestive of the spirit of Don Juan, he reasserted his love of liberty and hatred of despotism.
In executing his project, Byron deliberately neglected a large part of Southey’s Vision and confined himself almost exclusively to the scene at the trial of the King. He began actually with the situation represented in Section IV of Southey’s poem, omitting all the preliminary matter, and ended with Southey’s Section V, avoiding entirely the meeting of George with the English worthies. So far as subject matter is concerned, Byron travestied only two of the twelve divisions of the earlier work. He concentrated his attention on the judgment of the King, and then deserted formal travesty in order to introduce his attack on Southey.
It was part of Byron’s scheme that angels and demons, serious characters in Southey’s poem, should be made the objects of mirth. By a dexterous application of realism, he changed the New Jerusalem of Southey into a very earthly place, where angels now and then sing out of tune and hoarse, and where six angels and twelve saints act as a business-like Board of Clerks. These creatures of the spiritual realm are very substantial beings, not at all immune from mortal infirmities and passions. Saint Peter is a dull somnolent personage who grumbles over the leniency of heaven’s Master towards earth’s kings, and sweats through his apostolic skin at the appalling sight of Lucifer and demons pursuing the body of George to the very doors of heaven. Satan salutes Michael,
“as might an old Castilian
Poor noble meet a mushroom rich civilian,”
and the archangel, in turn, greets the fallen Lucifer superciliously as “my good old friend.” It is probable that in this practice of treating with ridicule those beings who are commonly spoken of with reverence, Byron is imitating Pulci, whose angels and devils are also, in their attributes, more human than divine.
Byron’s trial scene, in which Lucifer and Michael dispute for the possession of George III, is an admirable travesty of Southey’s representation of the same episode. The glorified monarch of Southey’s Vision meets in Byron’s satire with scant courtesy from Lucifer, who acts as attorney for the prosecution. Lucifer admits the king’s “tame virtues” and grants that he was a “tool from first to last”; but he charges him with having “ever warr’d with Freedom and the free,” with having stained his career with “national and individual woes,” with having resisted Catholic emancipation, and with having lost a continent to his country. Wilkes and Junius, the two shamefaced accusers of Southey’s Vision, now act in a different manner. Wilkes scornfully extends his forgiveness to the king, and Junius, while reiterating the truth of his original accusations, refuses to be enlisted as an incriminating witness. This section of the satire is splendidly managed. The whole assault on the king tends to show him as more misguided than criminal. The lines,
“A better farmer ne’er brush’d dew from lawn,
A worse king never left a realm undone!”