In the Noctes Ambrosianæ, Coleridge gets a contemporary thrust for his conceit and dogmatism, with the conclusion,—
“The author o’ Christabel, and The Auncient Mariner, had better just continue to see visions, and to dream dreams—for he’s no fit for the wakin’ world.”
The most direct attack on Southey is in the comment on Mr. Feathernest:[256]
“* * * to whom the Marquis had recently given a place in exchange for his conscience. The poet had, in consequence, burned his old ‘Odes to Truth and Liberty,’ and published a volume of Panegyrical Addresses ‘to all the crowned heads in Europe,’ with the motto, ‘Whatever is at court, is right.’”
In Disraeli’s Ixion, Enceladus has been identified as Wellington, Hyperion as Sir Robert Peel, Jupiter as George the Third, and Apollo as Byron. Byronism indeed is one of the shining marks loved by the nineteenth century, a fact that not only labels the British temper, but illustrates the irony of time’s revenges. The last great satirist of the old school himself becomes the prime object of satire for the new, partly through mutual lack of understanding, and partly because Byron, like some other brilliant wits, lacked a real sense of humor. Both these reasons enabled Lytton to flatter himself that his Pelham had “contributed to put an end to the Satanic Mania—to turn the thoughts and ambitions of young gentlemen without neckcloths, and young clerks who were sallow, from playing the Corsair and boasting that they were villains.”[257]
Nearly a half century after Pelham, we have a reference which strikes indirectly the keynote of satire, made by a genius great enough to admire judiciously (as he elsewhere testifies) another genius.[258]
“Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to stand for nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism, and rarely woos your sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing.”
It was Lytton, in turn, who was attacked by Thackeray. He heads the list of Novels by Eminent Hands, and is brought up again in the Yellowplush Papers and Epistles to the Literati.
But here, as everywhere, the complexity of this type obtrudes itself. Most of the preceding illustrations have been concerned with men as authors, that is to say, with certain products of literature; and this puts them out of the personal class. The same thing is true of Trollope’s sarcastic allusions to the novels of Disraeli and Dickens, and Kingsley’s little flings at Coningsby and Young England generally.
No comment on the whole matter of personal satire could be more to the point or more conclusive than that given informally by Thackeray in a couple of letters concerning his own attack on Lytton,—which he calls by the right name. The first is addressed to Lady Blessington, and accounts for his objection to E. L. B.[259]