Lord Byron as a satirist in verse

by Claude Moore Fuess

Once he wrote a pretty Poem,”

unpublished during his lifetime, was nevertheless a malicious squib directed at a man who had been one of his closest companions. There can be no doubt, too, that Byron’s satiric ballad on Hobhouse, “My boy Hobbie, O,” sent secretly to England, was a true stab in the back, administered to the man who had been his loyal friend. Byron, moreover, was not always accurate in his charges. Like most satirists, he exaggerated to gain his point, and made claims which the evidence did not justify. Nor is it in his favor that he chose to attack his wife in public lampoons, and wrote scurrilous epigrams upon dead statesmen.

This lack of delicacy aside, however, it must be recognized that Byron’s satire was often exerted in condemning real evils, and that he performed a definite service to humanity. More than any other man of his time he insisted on liberty of speech and action in a period when reactionary politicians were in the ascendant. He combated the perennial forms of hypocrisy and cant which appear constantly in England. Neither Dryden nor Pope had been the consistent champion of great causes; but Byron so often employed his satire for beneficial purposes that, despite the vituperation with which it was greeted by conservatives, it became a powerful influence for good.

It may be said, in general, of the substance of Byron’s satires, that he devoted very little attention to the faults and foibles of mankind, taken as a whole. He was usually moved to satire by some contemporary person, event, or controversy, and his criticism was definite, levelled at some specific abuse or evil. In his youth he showed a disposition to take a lofty moral stand, and to preach against vice; but he was ill-suited to didacticism, and soon forsook it altogether. After 1812, his satire had a very intimate connection with the life around him in politics, society, and literature, and reflected the manners and moods of the age. It is to be noted, too, that Byron was, in theory at least, in opposition to the spirit of his time. His belief in liberal doctrines led him to resist much that seemed safe and solid to those in his own class of life. He was not, in his later days, in sympathy with the situation in Europe; and he died too soon to see his progressive ideas bear fruit in the revolutions of 1830 and the Reform Bill of 1832.

In literature Byron satirized, throughout his career, the representatives of the older romantic school: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He did this mainly on the ground that their principles of poetry were subversive of the rules handed down by his avowed masters, Pope and Gifford. In thus defending the name and doctrines of Pope, Byron was consistent during his literary lifetime, although he himself wandered from the path which he persistently asserted to be the only right one. In inveighing against Southey, he was, of course, animated largely by personal spite. For minor poetasters, scribblers who might have been made the puppets of a modern Dunciad, Byron had little but silent contempt. In literary satire, then, he presents the strange spectacle of a radical striving desperately to support a losing cause, and that cause a conservative one. Progressive in nearly every other respect, Byron persisted in opposing any attempt to deviate from the standard established by Pope.

Byron’s satire on society was partly the result of pique. He who had been for some time its idol, found himself expelled from English society, and, in retaliation, exposed its absurdities and follies. At the same time it is unquestionable that he furthered a reform in ridiculing the cant and sham of English high life. It was in his last saner days that he wrote the cantos of Don Juan which treat of the all-pervasive hypocrisy of fashionable circles, and the satire, even to-day, rings true. It is noticeable that he seldom satirizes fads or fashions, and that he rarely, after 1812, attacks private immorality. His zeal is devoted to unveiling pretence, and to describing this outwardly brilliant gathering as it really is.

Since Byron was a radical and a rebel, his satire was devoted, so far as it concerned itself with political questions, to the glorification of liberty in all its forms, and to the vigorous denunciation of everybody and everything that tended to block or discourage progressive movements. In defence of freedom and in resistance to oppression, his satire found its fullest mission and its amplest justification. When continental Europe of the middle nineteenth century thought of Byron, it pictured him as a nobleman who had assailed tyrannical monarchy, who had aided Italy and Greece in their struggles for independence, and who had been willing to fight for the sake of the principles in which he believed. The words of Byron’s political creed have a noble ring: “The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.”

The broader philosophical satire on humanity in which he was more and more inclined to indulge as he reached maturity is essentially shallow and cynical. As soon as Byron became indefinite, as soon as he undertook to preach, he grew unsatisfactory, for he had no lesson to teach beyond the pessimism of Ecclesiastes.

All these objects for satire afforded Byron an opportunity for expressing some much-needed criticism. The most unworthy sections of his satire are those devoted to mere revenge: the unchivalric lines on Lady Byron and Mrs. Clermont; the violent abuse of Southey and Jeffrey; and the treacherous thrusts at Rogers and Hobhouse. In these passages the satirist descends to the lower level of Churchill and Gifford.

It remains to say a word of Byron’s methods, a word merely of recapitulation. Preferring directness always, he was inclined by nature to go straight to his goal, to speak his mind out without pausing to devise subtle or devious plans of attack. Except in his Italian satires his procedure was simple enough: he hurled epithets, made scandalous and scurrilous charges, and thought out offensive comments, writing usually in the first person and meeting his enemies face to face in the good old way of his eighteenth century predecessors. It is, perhaps, unsafe, with Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment before us, to assert that he was incapable of finesse and cunning; but, for the most part, even in these poems, he was more fond of abuse than he was of innuendo and crafty insinuation. His impetuosity and irrepressible impulsiveness, to which we have had occasion so often to refer, did not allow him to dwell scrupulously on artistic effects.