Dryden kept his personality always in the background, while the egotistical Byron could not refrain from letting his individuality lend fire and passion to whatever he wrote. Thus the Vision, despite the fact that it is the most cool of Byron’s satires, cannot be called calm and restrained. Self-control, the will to subdue and govern his impulses and prejudices, was beyond his reach. Fortunately in the Vision he did take time to exercise craftsmanship, but he never attained the polished artistry and firm reserve of his predecessor. Certainly in urbanity, in dignity, and in justice Dryden is the superior, just as he is undoubtedly less imaginative, less varied, and less spirited than Byron.
The two satires are, then, radically different in their methods. One is a masterpiece of the Latin classical satire in English, formal and regular, and using the standard English couplet; the other is our finest example of the Italian style in satire—the mocking, grotesque, colloquial, and humorous manner of Pulci and Casti. Both are effective; but one is inclined to surmise that the purple patches in Absalom and Achitophel will outlast the more perfect whole of The Vision of Judgment.
The probable results of the publication of a work of such a sensational character had been foreseen by both Murray and Longman. When the first number of The Liberal appeared containing not only The Vision of Judgment but also three epigrams of Byron’s on the death of Castlereagh, it was received by a torrent of hostile criticism from the Tory press. The Literary Gazette for October 19, 1822, called Byron’s work “heartless and beastly ribaldry,” and added on November 2, that Byron had contributed to the Liberal “impiety, vulgarity, inhumanity, and heartlessness.” The Courier for October 26 termed him “an unsexed Circe, who gems the poisoned cup he offers us.” On the Whig side, in contrast, Hunt’s Examiner for September 29 spoke of it as “a Satire upon the Laureate, which contains also a true and fearless character of a grossly adulated monarch.”
Byron himself described it to Murray as “one of my best things.”[376] Later critical opinion has also tended to rank it very high. Goethe called the verses on George III “the sublime of hatred.” Swinburne, himself a revolutionist but no partisan of Byron’s, exhausts superlatives in commenting on it: “This poem—stands alone, not in Byron’s work only, but in the work of the world. Satire in earlier times had changed her rags for robes; Juvenal had clothed with fire, and Dryden with majesty, that wandering and bastard muse. Byron gave her wings to fly with, above the reach even of these. Others have had as much of passion and as much of humor; Dryden had perhaps as much of both combined. But here, and not elsewhere, a third quality is apparent—the sense of a high and clear imagination.—Above all, the balance of thought and passion is admirable; human indignation and divine irony are alike understood and expressed; the pure and fiery anger of men at the sight of wrong-doing, the tacit inscrutable derision of heaven.” Nichol, in his life of Byron, says:—“Nowhere in so much space, save in some of the prose of Swift, is there in English so much scathing satire.”
Two figures in Byron’s poem have been made the basis of a shrewd comparison by Henley. He says: “Byron and Wordsworth are like the Lucifer and Michael of The Vision of Judgment. Byron’s was the genius of revolt, as Wordsworth’s was the genius of dignified and useful submission; Byron preached the doctrine of private revolution, Wordsworth the dogma of private apotheosis—Byron was the passionate and dauntless ‘soldier of a forlorn hope,’ Wordsworth a kind of inspired clergyman.” Byron’s sympathies in the Vision, as in Cain, were undoubtedly with Lucifer, the rebel and exile, and his poem will live as a satiric declaration of the duty of active resistance to despotism and oppression.
CHAPTER X
“THE AGE OF BRONZE” AND “THE BLUES”
Byron’s Monody on the Death of Sheridan, written at Diodati on July 17, 1816, and recited in Drury Lane Theatre on September 7, was followed by a period of several years in which he ceased to employ the heroic couplet in poetry of any sort. The reasons for this temporary abandonment of what had been, hitherto, a favorite measure, are not altogether clear, although his action may be ascribed, in part, to his renunciation of things English and to the influence upon him of his study of the Italians. During his residence in Italy, Byron used many metrical forms: the Spenserian stanza, ottava rima, terza rima, blank verse, and other measures in some shorter lyrics and ephemeral verses. Not until The Age of Bronze, which he began in December, 1822, did he return to the heroic couplet of English Bards.
On January 10, 1823, Byron, then living in Genoa, wrote a letter to Leigh Hunt, in which, among other things, he said: “I have sent to Mrs. S[helley], for the benefit of being copied, a poem of about seven hundred and fifty lines length—The Age of Bronze—or Carmen Seculare et Annus haud Mirabilis, with this Epigraph—‘Impar Congressus Achilli’.” By way of description, he added: “It is calculated for the reading part of the million, being all on politics, etc., etc., etc., and a review of the day in general,—in my early English Bards style, but a little more stilted, and somewhat too full of ‘epithets of war’ and classical and historical allusions.”[377] The work as revised and completed contains 18 sections and 778 lines. Originally destined for The Liberal, it was eventually published anonymously by John Hunt, on April 1, 1823.
The Age of Bronze is, then, entirely a political satire, intended chiefly as a counterblast to the recent stringent regulations of the reactionary Congress of Verona (1822). It comprises, however, other material: an introductory passage on the great departed leaders, Pitt, Fox, and Bonaparte; frequent digressions treating of the struggles for constitutional government then taking place in Europe; and some lines attacking the landed proprietors in England for their luke-warm opposition to foreign war. It is, in nearly every sense, a timely poem, although the note of “Vanitas Vanitatum” sounded in the early sections gives the satire a universal application.
For a comprehension of Byron’s motives in writing The Age of Bronze, it is necessary to understand something of the situation in Europe at the time. Following the numerous insurrections of 1820–22 in Spain, Portugal, Naples, Greece, and the South American States, the European powers, guided by the three members of the Holy Alliance, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, sent delegates to meet at Verona on October 20, 1822, for a consideration of recent developments in politics. The leading figure at the conference was Metternich, the Austrian statesman, although Francis of Austria, Alexander of Russia, and Frederick William of Prussia were among the monarchs present. Montmorenci, representing an ultra-royalist ministry under Villiele, was there to look after the interests of France; while England, deprived at the last moment of Castlereagh’s services by his suicide, sent Wellington. The gathering finally resolved itself into a conclave for the purpose of discussing the right of France to interfere in the affairs of Spain, by restoring Ferdinand VII, a member of the House of Bourbon, to the throne of which he had been deprived by the Constitutionalists. Wellington, after protesting against the agreement reached by the other envoys to permit the interference of France, left the Congress,[378] by Canning’s instructions, in December. His withdrawal, however, did not affect the ultimate decision of the Congress to stamp out revolt whenever it assailed the precious principle of Legitimacy. War between France and Spain broke out in 1823; Ferdinand VII was replaced upon his tottering throne; and the despotic policy of Metternich triumphed, for a time, over democracy. Canning’s only reply was to recognize the independence of the rebellious colonies of Spain, and to assert the belligerency of the Greeks, then fighting for their liberty against the Turks.