create a kind of sympathy for George in that they portray him as a man placed in a position for which he was manifestly unfitted.
Southey’s name is mentioned only once before the 35th stanza of Byron’s poem, but from that point until the conclusion the work deals entirely with him. These stanzas constitute what is probably Byron’s happiest effort at personal satire. For once he did not act in haste, but carefully matured his project, studied its execution, and permitted his first impulsive anger to moderate into scorn. With due attention to craftsmanship, he surveyed and annihilated his enemy, laughing at him contemptuously and making every stroke tell. It should be observed too that he chose a method largely indirect and dramatic. He did not, as in English Bards, merely apply offensive epithets; rather he placed Southey in a ridiculous situation and made him the sport of other characters. The satire, is, therefore, exceedingly effective since it allows the victim no chance for a reply.[368] By turning the laugh on Southey, Byron closed the controversy by attaining what is probably the most desirable result of purely personal satire—the making an opponent seem not hateful but absurd.
Byron’s poem, however, was something more than a chapter in the satisfaction of a private quarrel. It is also a liberal polemic, assailing not only the whole system of constituted authority in England, but also tyranny and repression wherever they operate. The indictment of George III, which at times approaches sublimity, is in reality directed against the entire reactionary policy of contemporary European statesmen and rulers. The doctrines of the revolutionary Byron, already familiar to us in Don Juan, are to be found in the ironic stanzas upon the sumptuous funeral of the king, a passage admired by Goethe; respect for monarchy itself had died out in a nobleman who could say of George’s entombment:
“It seemed the mockery of hell to fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.”
With all its broad humor, the satire is aflame with indignation. In this respect the poem performed an important public service. In place of stupid content with things as they were, it offered critical comment on existing conditions, comment somewhat biassed, it is true, but nevertheless in refreshing contrast to the conventional submission of the great majority of the British public.
Much of what has already been pointed out with regard to the sources and inspiration of Don Juan may be applied without alteration to The Vision of Judgment, which is, as Byron told Moore, written “in the Pulci style, which the fools in England think was invented by Whistlecraft—it is as old as the hills in Italy.”[369] The Vision, being shorter and more unified, contains few digressions which do not bear directly upon the plot; but it has the same colloquial and conversational style, the same occasional rise into true imaginative poetry with the inevitable following drop into the commonplace, the same fondness for realism, and the same broad burlesque.[370] Hampered as it is by the necessity of keeping the story well-knit, Byron’s personality has ample opportunity for expression.
It is probable that Byron’s description of Saint Peter and the angels owes much to his reading of Pulci.[371] In at least one instance there is a palpable imitation. Saint Peter in the Vision, who was so terrified by the approach of Lucifer that,
“He patter’d with his keys at a great rate,
And sweated through his apostolic skin,”[372]