COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH
AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

BYRON AS A SATIRIST IN VERSE

COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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LORD BYRON AS A SATIRIST IN
VERSE

BY
CLAUDE M. FUESS

Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the
Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University

NEW YORK
1912

Copyright, 1912
By Columbia University Press
Printed from type, July, 1912
All rights reserved

This Monograph has been approved by the Department of English and Comparative Literature in Columbia University as a contribution to knowledge worthy of publication.

A. H. THORNDIKE,
Secretary.

To
MY WIFE

PREFACE

This dissertation is an out-growth of some studies in English satire, particularly in the eighteenth century, and the book is to be regarded merely as a chapter in the history of English satiric poetry as a whole. The initial suggestion for this special phase of the broader subject came from Professor W. P. Trent, to whose wide scholarship and suggestive comment I have been throughout under great obligation. Professor A. H. Thorndike, who, with Professor Trent, read the work in manuscript, contributed valuable advice regarding its arrangement and contents; while Professor J. B. Fletcher was of much assistance in criticising the sections dealing with Byron’s indebtedness to the Italian poets. My colleague, Mr. A. W. Leonard, read the first two chapters, and offered much aid in connection with their style and structure. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the stimulus given by my studies under various members of the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, among them the late Professor G. R. Carpenter, Professor W. A. Neilson, now at Harvard, Mr. J. E. Spingarn, and Professors Krapp, Lawrence, and Matthews.

C. M. F.

Phillips Academy, Andover,
June 19, 1912.

CONTENTS

Lord Byron as a Satirist
in Verse

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

Byron’s puzzling character and fascinating career have been tempting themes for many biographers, little and great, from Sir Egerton Brydges and Tom Moore to Professor Emil Koeppel and Mr. Richard Edgcumbe. His literary product, too, has been, for the most part, so carefully and exhaustively treated by the critics of many nationalities that there is small excuse for adding one more volume to a bibliography already so comprehensive. It happens, however, that though his contribution to satiric poetry was extensive and important, his actual work in that field has been made the subject of no intensive study. It is the object of this essay to fill this gap by considering, so far as it is possible in a brief treatise, the special qualities which distinguish Byron’s satiric spirit, and by analyzing and classifying the modifications of that spirit as they are shown in his poetry. The wide range of material to be investigated naturally precludes any attention to the events of his life, except when these throw light on the inception or composition of particular satires. Nor is it practicable to devote any space, except by way of illustration or reference, to his poetry in general, or to his letters and prose pamphlets. The scope of the dissertation will be restricted to include a discussion only of his satire in verse.

The lamentable absence of any established body of criteria available as a basis for the study of satire is a difficulty which must be recognized and met at the very outset. First of all, therefore, it is necessary to make clear just what matter is to be included under the rather vague heading, satire. Broadly speaking, satire comprises any manifestation of the satiric spirit in literature; but this statement is really evasive, since the satiric spirit, like the romantic spirit, is intangible and not susceptible to precise definition. In general, as Professor Tucker has pointed out, the essential feature of the satiric spirit, wherever found, is its disposition to tear down and destroy. Variations in temper and aim may exist in different satirists; other subservient emotions may appear and other feelings may operate, in individual cases, to modify the underlying mood; but fundamentally the satiric spirit is negative and pessimistic.[1] It furthers disillusion by confronting romance with realism and fiction with fact. The satirist thus perceives and exposes incongruity, the discrepancy between profession and performance. He is actuated always by a destructive motive, and it is his function to condemn and to reprove.

Humor is, of course, usually a concomitant of satire, but authorities differ as to its value. Dryden, considering the question from the standpoint of the literary artist, says:—“The nicest and most delicate touches of satire consist in fine raillery.” Gifford, posing as a moralist, takes another position:—“To raise a laugh at vice is not the legitimate office of satire, which is to hold up the vicious, as objects of reprobation and scorn, for the example of others, who may be deterred by their sufferings.” When humor is wanting and the mood is entirely vituperative, the result is invective, which some critics are desirous of excluding arbitrarily from satire. But however advantageous it may be, for practical reasons, to limit the application of the word satire, it is difficult to neglect invective; and in this essay, since a considerable part of Byron’s so-called satire is sheer abuse, failure to treat that portion of his work would result in much confusion. An additional argument for including invective is furnished by the fact that to pass it over would mean relegating outside the domain of satire a large proportion of the work of other authors who have always been classed as satirists, among them Churchill and Gifford.

Nor is it possible to insist upon the reformatory purpose behind the satiric spirit. Dryden’s dictum that the satirist “is bound, and that is ex officio, to give his reader some one precept of moral virtue,” commendable as it may be, has been by no means a universal law for satire, and one is forced to admit that whatever emphasis particular satirists may have given to this rule in theory, the common practice has too often been at variance with it. Ultimately the single indispensable element of the satiric spirit is the wish to deny, rebuke, or destroy.

It is evident that the satiric spirit may show itself, to a certain extent, in nearly every known type of literature, even at times in the epic or the lyric, to say nothing of the prose essay or novel. The specific term satire ought, however, to be applied solely to a work in which the predominating motive is attack, whether on individuals, on institutions, or on mankind in general. Thus we say that Childe Harold has satiric features; but it is not, like The Age of Bronze, strictly a satire. For present purposes, too, it is desirable to narrow the field definitely by discussing the satiric spirit only so far as it has chosen verse for its medium, and by discarding the drama as belonging to another department of research. The subject may be further confined by neglecting poems which are obviously unliterary and make no pretensions to constructive or stylistic merit. The title verse-satire will be used loosely to fit any formal literary production in verse devoted ostensibly to negative criticism, whether direct or indirect, animated by sympathy or hatred; in short, to any non-dramatic poem, whatever its method, which has for its principal or avowed object the holding of vice, folly, or incapacity up to ridicule or reprobation. In Byron’s work there are many poems containing slight satiric elements, and others which are plainly satires in the narrower sense of the term; some are conveniently labelled, while others must be tested with regard to their intention and manner, and classified accordingly.

Our not altogether adequate definition has been intentionally made broad that it may comprise any formal expression of the satiric spirit in verse. The verse-satire as thus described may select its material from every province of human activity: literature, society, politics, and morals. It may range in tone from half-tolerant raillery, as in the Satires of Horace, to stern intolerant invective, as in the Satires of Juvenal. Its method may be either direct or indirect: direct, as in the formal classical satire, in which the purpose is distinctly stated; indirect, or dramatic, as in the fable, where the same end is sought through a more subtle or less obvious channel. Finally it may appear in one of several specialized types, each with peculiar characteristics of its own: the so-called formal or classical satire, based on Latin, French, or Italian models, represented in English literature in the poetry of Hall, Oldham, and Pope; the mock-heroic, sometimes directly satiric as in Pope’s Dunciad, sometimes indirectly so, as in his Rape of the Lock; the epigram and lampoon, used by Prior and Swift; the political ballad or song, illustrated in the verse of Marvell and Charles Hanbury Williams; the satiric fable, borrowed by Yalden, Gay, Whitehead, and others from Æsop and La Fontaine; and the burlesque, with its two subdivisions—parody, used in Philips’ Splendid Shilling, which intentionally degrades the blank verse of Milton, and travesty, illustrated in Byron’s Vision of Judgment, which gives an inferior treatment to lofty material. It is hardly necessary to add that these types, with others of less significance, continually encroach upon each other, so that two or more are frequently mingled in one poem. The single feature common to them all, however, is the tendency to deride or assail; therefore, in spite of their many superficial differences, they are classed together because of their general tone of negation.

A consideration of Byron’s satiric spirit as it is shown in his verse involves an investigation of the objects of his attack, whether individuals, classes, or institutions, and a discussion of the relation of his satire to contemporary life in literature, society, politics, and morals. It also necessitates a study of the forms which he adopted, the methods which he utilized, and the manner which he was inclined to assume. Something ought also to be said of his indebtedness to other satirists, Latin, English, and Italian, and of his place and influence in the evolution of English satire. Lastly, a summary is required of the peculiar characteristics which distinguish his satiric spirit and make his work distinctive or unique.

Sir Walter Scott’s generous assertion that his rival “embraced every topic in human life” is, of course, hyperbole; but one may be permitted to suspect that the variety and compass of Byron’s genius have not always been sufficiently dwelt upon. Even sympathetic critics have been in the habit of forgetting that in all three of what are ordinarily reckoned the chief divisions of poetry—the narrative, the lyrical, and the dramatic—Byron achieved distinct success. The same may be said of his attempts at poetry of a descriptive and meditative sort. That Manfred and Beppo, Childe Harold and “She walks in beauty like the night,” bear the same writer’s signature is convincing proof not only of the fecundity but also of the diverseness of his talent. What is true of his work as a whole is also true of his satire. It is to be found in several forms: the satiric tale, the formal or classical satire, the travesty, the epigram, and the mock-heroic. It is sometimes scurrilous, sometimes didactic, and sometimes playful. It carries its attack into many fields: into literature in English Bards; into society in The Waltz; into politics in The Age of Bronze; and into morals in Don Juan. Finally in Don Juan, his longest and most important poem, the satiric spirit blends with other elements, romantic, tragic, realistic, and colloquial, to produce what Paul Elmer More calls “to many critics the greatest Satire ever written.”

Professor Courthope traces throughout Byron’s poetry three main currents of feeling: the romance of the dilettante, the indignation of the satirist, and the lyrical utterance of the man himself. Of these three emotions, continues the critic, one comes in turn to predominate over the others at different periods, as external circumstances affect the poet. This analysis is, on the whole, discerning and uncontrovertible; but despite the fact that Byron so often ventured into romantic and lyric poetry, there is good cause for maintaining that his mind was primarily satiric in its observation of life. If we accept the testimony of his nurse, May Gray, as it was taken down by Moore, Byron’s first lisping in numbers was in the nature of satire, being a short lampoon on an old lady who had irritated him by her curious notions regarding the destination of the soul after death.[2] These verses, according to May Gray, date from 1798, when the boy was ten years old. During the ensuing years he engaged in writing satire, without many intermissions, until his career closed in 1824 with Don Juan still unfinished. In no other branch of literature was he led to undertake such a series of poems through so long a period. His narrative poetry cannot be said to have begun before Childe Harold (1812); as a dramatist he published nothing anterior to Manfred (1817); and even his lyrics appeared at infrequent intervals and in no great numbers. During most of his life, on the other hand, he engaged in satire of one kind or another. The Curse of Minerva was brought back from his early travels, along with the first two cantos of Childe Harold; The Waltz is almost synchronous with the Giaour; and The Vision of Judgment was being planned while he was composing Cain. Even in the period between the Waltz (1813) and Beppo (1818), during which no long verse-satire of his was published, he wrote The Devil’s Drive (1813), Windsor Poetics (1814), and A Sketch (1816), besides other shorter epigrams. Thus Byron’s satiric spirit was persistent and conspicuous from the date of Fugitive Pieces (1806) until his death eighteen years later.

The position which Byron occupies in the history of English satire is especially important because he is, in many respects, the last of the powerful satirists in verse. English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, published in March, 1809, is perhaps the last of the great English satires in the heroic couplet measure. It is a final vigorous outburst in the genre which, originating possibly with Wyatt, and improved by Donne and Hall, culminated in the satires of Dryden, and then passing successively through the hands of Pope, Churchill, and Gifford, underwent many modifications, and seemed, down to the end of the eighteenth century, to be losing gradually in universality and permanent value. The revival in which Byron took part, but which, as we shall see, was not altogether occasioned by him, was spasmodic and temporary; and in the hundred years since the appearance of English Bards, our literature has produced no single satire in the same manner worthy of being placed by the side of the Dunciad, the Rosciad, or even the Baviad. Byron himself, though he continued to write this sort of satire up to the time of The Age of Bronze, never equalled his early success. Eventually he turned from his standard models, Pope and Gifford, and under the inspiration of Italy and Italian authors, made his chief original contribution to satire in Beppo, Don Juan, and The Vision of Judgment. He thus, in a significant way, closes and sums up the work of an old and passing school, at the same time bringing into English satire the infusion of a new spirit and method.

With these facts in view, it is convenient and not illogical to arrange the major part of Byron’s satiric verse into two distinct groups. The one, deeply rooted in classical and English tradition, conforming to established conventions and obeying precedents well understood in our language, includes English Bards, Hints from Horace, The Curse of Minerva, The Waltz, and The Age of Bronze, besides other works shorter and less noteworthy. The other, retaining something of the “sæva indignatio” of Juvenal and Swift, but embodying it in what may be called, for want of a better term, the Italian burlesque spirit—that mood which, varying in individual authors, but essentially the same, prevails in the poetry of Pulci, Berni, and Casti—comprises Beppo, Don Juan, and The Vision of Judgment. Generally speaking, this division on the basis of sources corresponds to a difference in metre: the classical satires employ, almost from necessity, the iambic pentameter couplet, while those in the Italian manner adopt the exotic ottava rima. This classification is also partly chronological, for the English satires, with the exception of The Age of Bronze and some short epigrams, were written before 1817, and the Italian satires appeared during the eight years following that date, while Byron was in Italy and Greece.

The numerous ballads, political verses, and personal epigrams, some printed in the daily newspapers, others sent in letters to his friends, constitute another interesting group of satires, about which, however, no very satisfactory generalizations can be made. There are also lines and passages of a satiric nature in other poems, but these, casual as they are, need to be mentioned only because of their connection with ideas advanced in the genuine Verse-Satires, or because of some especial interest attaching to them.

In taking up the separate poems included in this mass of material it seems best to observe, as far as practicable, a chronological order, for by so doing, we may observe the steady growth and broadening of Byron’s ability as a satirist, and trace his connection with the events of his time. However, before proceeding directly to an analysis of the poet’s work and methods, it is necessary to say something of his predecessors in English satire, from many of whom he derived so much.

CHAPTER II
ENGLISH SATIRE FROM DRYDEN TO BYRON

Enough has been said to hint that Byron’s qualities as a satirist in verse are often best to be explained by a reference to the methods and influence of those who went before him. So far as his connection with English satire is concerned, Byron was indebted in part to a widespread and somewhat conventional satiric tradition established by Pope and in part also to the special characteristics of certain individual satirists like Gifford. Unfortunately the field of English satire has been investigated carefully only to the close of the Elizabethan era; it is, therefore, imperative to present, as a working basis, a brief outline of the course of satiric verse during the century or more prior to Byron’s own age. Such a summary being of value here chiefly as affording material for comparison, detailed treatment need be given only to the more conspicuous figures, particularly to those to whom it is possible Byron was under obligation.

The years between the accession of Charles II and the death of Pope saw a remarkable advance in the quantity and quality of published satiric work, in both prose and verse. For this development several causes may be assigned. As the romantic enthusiasm of the Renaissance died away or exhausted itself in fantastic extravagance and license, the new age, in reaction, became gradually more reasonable and practical. Its general tendencies were academic, introspective, and critical: literature began to analyze itself and to frame laws for its own guidance; society found amusement in laughing at its own follies and frivolities; moralists were occupied in censuring misbehaviour and in codifying maxims for the government of conduct. This critical spirit, whenever it became destructive, naturally sought expression in satire. Party feeling, too, grew violent in dealing with the complex problems raised by the bloodless revolution of 1689 and its aftermath; moreover, most of the prominent writers of the day, gathered as they were in London, allied themselves with either Whigs or Tories and engaged vigorously in the factional warfare. In the urban and gregarious life of the age of Anne, the thinkers who sharpened their wits against one another in clubs and coffee-houses esteemed logic and good sense higher than romantic fancy. Their talk and writing dealt mainly with practical affairs, with particular features of political and social life. It is not at all surprising that this critical and practical period should have found its most satisfactory expression in satire—a literary type which is well fitted to treat of definite and concrete questions.

Before 1700 interest in English satire centres inevitably around the name of Dryden. Among his contemporaries were, of course, other satirists, some of them distinguished by originality and genius. The true political satire, used so effectively against the Parliamentarians by Cleveland (1613–1658), had been revived in the work of Denham (1615–1669) and Marvell (1621–1678). Formal satire in the manner of Juvenal and Boileau had been attempted by Oldham (1653–1683) in his Satires against the Jesuits (1678–9). Moreover, several new forms had been introduced: Butler (1612–1680) in Hudibras (1663) had created an original variety of burlesque, with unusual rhymes, grotesque similes, and quaint ideas; Cotton (1630–1687) in his Scarronides (1664) had transplanted the travesty from the French of Scarron; and Garth (1661–1719) had composed in the Dispensary (1699) our earliest classical mock-heroic. Marvell, Rochester, Sedley, Dorset, and others had written songs and ballads of a satiric character, most of them coarse and scurrilous. But the work of these men, like that of their predecessors in satire, Lodge, Donne, Hall, Marston, Guilpin, Wither, and Brome, is, as a whole, crude and inartistic, rough in metre and commonplace in style. Dryden, who took up satire at the age of fifty, after a long and thorough discipline in literary craftsmanship, avoided these faults, and polished and improved the verse-satire, preserving its vigor while lending it refinement and dignity.

Dryden’s satire is distinguished by clearness, good taste, and self-control. The author was seldom in a rage, nor was he ever guilty of indiscriminate railing. Seeking to make his victims ridiculous and absurd rather than hateful, he drew them, not as monsters or unnatural villains, but as foolish or weak human beings.[3] It is significant, too, that he did not often mention his adversaries by their real names, but referred to them, for the most part, by pseudonyms, a device through which individual satire tends constantly to become typical and universal. Although he asserted that “the true end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction,” he rarely, except in poems which were designedly theological, permitted a moral purpose to become obtrusive.

Deliberately putting aside the octosyllabic metre of Butler as too undignified for satire, Dryden chose what he called the “English heroic,” or iambic pentameter couplet, as best suited to heroic poetry, of which he considered satire to be properly a species. This measure, already employed by Hall, Donne, and others as a medium for satire, is, as Dryden perceived, admirably suited for concise and pointed expression. Having used it successfully in his plays, he was already familiar with its possibilities and skilful in its management, and in his hands it became harmonious, varied, and incisive, a very different measure from the couplet as handled by even so near a contemporary as Oldham.

Excellent as Dryden’s satires are, they cannot be said to have had an influence proportionate to their merit. Defoe’s True-born Englishman (1701), probably the most popular satire between Absalom and Achitophel and the Dunciad, did undoubtedly owe much to Dryden’s work; and it is also true that MacFlecknoe suggested the plot of the Dunciad. During the eighteenth century, however, Dryden’s satires were not extensively imitated, chiefly because they were superseded as models by the work of Pope. Of the satirists after Pope, only Churchill seems to have preferred Dryden, and even he followed the principles of Pope in practice. Thus historically Dryden is of less importance in the history of satire than his successor and rival.

In the period between the death of Dryden and the death of Pope, satirists labored assiduously for correctness. The importance of this step can hardly be overestimated, for satire, more perhaps than any other literary type, is dependent on style for its permanency. Its subject matter is usually concerned with transitory events and specific individuals, and when the interest in these subsides, nothing but an excellent form can ensure the durability of the satire. Of this endeavor for artistic perfection in satire, Pope is the completest representative.

Pope boasted repeatedly that he had “moralized his song”; that is, that he had employed his satire for definite ethical purposes. In an invocation to Satire, he put into verse his theory of its proper use:—

“O sacred weapon! left for Truth’s defence,

Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence!

To all but Heav’n directed hands deny’d,

The Muse may give thee, but the Gods must guide;

Rev’rent I touch thee! but with honest zeal,

To rouse the Watchmen of the public Weal.”[4]

The lofty tone of this address ought not, however, to obscure the fact that Pope was primarily a personal satirist, actuated too often merely by the desire to satisfy his private quarrels. His claim to being an agent for the cause of public virtue is sometimes justified in his work, but not infrequently it is but a thin pretence for veiling his underlying malice and vindictiveness. What Pope really wanted, most of all, in his satires, was to damage the reputation of his foes; and, it must be added, he generally achieved his aim.

Pope was both less scrupulous and more personal than Dryden. He appropriated Dryden’s method of presenting portraits of well-known persons under type-names; but unlike Dryden, who had preserved a semblance of fairness, Pope was too often merely vituperative and savage. He seldom attained that high variety of satire which plans “to attack a man so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice.”[5] Unlike Dryden, too, he rarely mastered the difficult art of turning the individual objects of his scorn into representatives of a broader class. His personal sketches do not, except in a few instances like the celebrated Atticus, live as pictures of types.

Pope, moreover, was not always discreet enough to mask his opponents under pseudonyms. Sometimes, following a device introduced into English satire by Hall, he used an initial letter, with dashes or asterisks to fill out the name. More often he printed the name in full.[6] He had no scruples about making attacks on women, a practice not countenanced by Dryden.[7] In his satire on personal enemies he was insolent and offensive: however, he seldom gave vent to his rage, but kept cool, revised and polished every epithet, and retorted in a calm, searching dissection of character. In his methods he was unprincipled, never hesitating to make the vilest charges if they served his purposes.

In matters of form and technique Pope’s art is unquestioned. He refined and condensed the couplet until it cut like a rapier. The beauty of his satire thus lies rather in small details than in general effect, in clear-cut and penetrating phrasing rather than in breadth of conception. With all this his work is marked by an air of urbanity, ease, and grace, which connects him with Horace rather than with Juvenal. His wit is constant and his irony subtle. He understood perfectly the value of compression and of symmetry.

Finally he left behind him a heritage and a tradition. With all his malice, his occasional pettiness and habitual deceit, he so transformed the verse-satire that no imitator, following his design, has been able to surpass it. The methods and the forms which he used became, for good or for evil, those of most satire in the eighteenth century. From the Dunciad down to the days of Byron it was Pope’s influence chiefly that determined the course of English satire in verse.

Byron was fond of associating himself with Pope. He paid homage to him as a master, sustained, in theory at least, his principles of versification, defended his character, and offered him the tribute of quotation and imitation. Over and over again he repeated his belief in “the Christianity of English poetry, the poetry of Pope.”[8] Only in satire, however, did Pope’s influence become noticeable in Byron’s poetry; but in satire this influence was important.

Pope’s chief contemporary in formal satire in verse was Young, whose Love of Fame, The Universal Passion was finished in 1727, before the publication of the Dunciad. The seven satires which this work contains comprise portrayals of type characters under Latin names, diversified by allusions to living personages, the intention being to ridicule evils in contemporary social life. The Epistles to Pope (1730), by the same author, are more serious, especially in their arraignment of Grub Street. Young’s comparatively lifeless work made seemingly no strong appeal to Byron. The latter never mentions him as a satirist, although he does quote with approval some favorite passages from his work.

Lighter in tone and less rigidly formal in structure was the poetry of a group of writers headed by Prior and Gay, both of whom were at their best in a kind of familiar verse, lively, bantering, and worldly in spirit. Prior managed with some skill the octosyllabic couplet of Butler; Gay was successful in parody and the satiric fable.[9] The connection of Prior and Gay with Byron is not a close one, although the latter quoted from them both in his Letters, and composed some impromptu parodies of songs from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera.[10]

With Swift Byron had, perhaps, more affinity. Swift’s cleverness in discovering extraordinary rhymes undoubtedly influenced the versification of Don Juan,[11] and his morbid hatred of human nature and sordid views of life sometimes colored Byron’s satiric mood.[12]

Much lower in the literary scale are the countless ballads and lampoons of the period which maintain the rough and ready aggressiveness of Marvell, in a style slovenly, broken, and journalistic. Events like the trial of Sacheverell and the South Sea Bubble brought out scores of ephemeral satires which it would be idle to notice here. Of these scurvy pamphleteers, three gained considerable notoriety: Tom Brown (1663–1704), Thomas D’Urfey (1653–1723), and Ned Ward (1667–1731). Defoe, in several long satires, especially in the formidable folio Jure Divino, shows the results of a study of Dryden, although his lines are rugged and his style is colloquial. The work of no one of these men had any visible influence on Byron, but their production illustrates the wide-spread popularity at this time of satire, even in its transitory and unliterary phases.

The latter half of the eighteenth century, comparatively poor though it is in poetry of an imaginative sort, is rich in satiric literature of every variety. Nearly every able writer of verse—even including Gray—tried his hand at satire, and the resulting product is enormous. The heroic couplet as employed by Pope was recognized as the proper measure for formal satire, and the influence of Pope appeared in the diverse forms used: the mock-heroic, the personal epistle, the critical verse-essay, and the moral or preceptive poem. At the same time no small proportion of less formal satire took the manner of Gay and Swift, in the octosyllabic couplet. The ballad and other less dignified measures still continued popular for ephemeral satire. Finally there was a body of work, including Cowper’s Task, the satiric poems of Burns, and the early Tales of Crabbe, which must be regarded as, in some respects, exceptional.

Of the satirists of the school of Pope, the greater number seem to have had Dr. Johnson’s conception of Satire as the son of Wit and Malice, although, like Pope, they continued to pose as the upholders of morality even when indulging in the most indiscriminate abuse.[13] They borrowed the lesser excellencies of their master, but seldom attained to his brilliance, keeping, as far as they were able, to his form and method, but lacking the genius to reanimate his style.

The mock-heroic was exceedingly popular during the fifty years following the death of Pope. The satires of one group, following The Rape of the Lock, contain no personal invective, and are satiric only in the sense that any parody of a serious genre is satiric.[14] Another class of mock-heroics, modelled particularly on the Dunciad, make no pretence of refraining from personal satire, and are often violently scurrilous.[15] A large number of poems imitate the title of the Dunciad without necessarily having any mock-heroic characteristics.[16] In the field of personal, and especially of political, satire, are many poems not corresponding exactly to any of the above mentioned types.[17] The bitter party feeling aroused by the rise to power of Lord Bute and by the resulting protests of Wilkes in the North Briton was the occasion of many broadsides during the decade between 1760 and 1770.[18]

Several satires of the period, based particularly on Pope’s satiric epistles, seem to maintain a more elevated tone, although they also are frequently intemperate in their personalities.[19] An excellent example is the very severe Epistle to Curio by Akenside, praised for its literary merits by Macaulay.[20] A small, but rather important class of satires is made up of criticisms of literature or literary men in the manner of either the Essay on Criticism or the Dunciad.[21] Still another group deal, like Young’s Love of Fame, with the foibles and fads of society, using type figures and avoiding specific references.[22] It is necessary, finally, to include under satire many of the didactic and philosophic poems which seemed to infect the century.[23] These Ethic Epistles, as they are styled in Bell’s Fugitive Pieces, are often little more than verse sermons. Obviously many poems of this nature hardly come within the scope of true satire. Goldsmith’s Deserted Village (1770), for instance, has some satirical elements; yet it is, properly speaking, meditative and descriptive verse. The same may be said, perhaps, of the so-called satires of Cowper.

The body of work thus cursorily reviewed shows a wide diversity of subject-matter combined with a consistent and monotonous uniformity of style. In most of the material we find the same regular versification, the same stock epithets, and the same lack of distinctive qualities; indeed, were the respective writers unknown, it would be a difficult task to distinguish between the verse of two such satirists as James Scott and Soame Jenyns. During the fifty years between the death of Pope and the appearance of Gifford’s Baviad (1794) only four names stand out above the rest as important in the history of English satire in verse: Johnson, Churchill, Cowper, and Crabbe.

Of these writers, Johnson contributed but little to the mass of English satire. His London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) are imitations of Juvenal, characterized by stateliness, dignity, melancholy, and sonorous rhetoric, but with only a slight element of personal attack. The latter poem received high praise from Byron.[24]

Churchill and Byron, who have often been compared because of their quarrels with the reviewers and their denunciation of a conservative and reactionary government, were much alike in their arrogant independence, their fiery intensity, and their passionate liberalism. Churchill, however, unlike Byron, was always a satirist, and undertook no other species of poetry. In many respects he resembled Oldham, whose career, like his, was short and tumultuous, and whose wit, like his, usually shone “through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.”

All Churchill’s work is marked by vigor, effrontery, and earnestness, and the ferocity and vindictiveness of much of it give force to Gosse’s description of the author as “a very Caligula among men of letters.” However, although he was responsible for two of the most venomous literary assaults in English—that on Hogarth in the Epistle to William Hogarth (1763) and that on Lord Sandwich in The Candidate (1764)—he did not stab from behind or resort to underhand methods. Despite his obvious crudities, he is the most powerful figure in English satire between Pope and Byron.

Churchill employed two measures: the heroic couplet, in the Rosciad (1761) and several succeeding poems; and the octosyllabic couplet, in The Ghost (1763) and The Duellist (1764). His versification is seldom polished, but his lines have, at times, something of the robustness and impetuous disregard of regularity which lend strength to Dryden’s couplets. It was to Churchill that Byron attributed in part what he was pleased to term the “absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope,”[25] which, in his opinion, had been developing steadily towards the end of the eighteenth century. Churchill frankly acknowledged his preference of Dryden over Pope,[26] a partiality which he shared with Voltaire and Dr. Johnson. The fact is, however, that, despite his failure to attain smoothness and artistic finish, he owed more to Pope than he realized or cared to admit.[27]

With Cowper, Byron had temperamentally little in common; yet Cowper is interesting, if only for the reason that he proves, by contrast with Churchill, the range in manner of which the classical satire is capable. He was most successful in a kind of mildly moral reproof, which has often ease, humor, and apt sententiousness, although it rarely possesses energy enough to make it effective as satire. Cowper’s familiar verse, often satirical in tone, is almost wholly admirable, the best of its kind between Prior and Praed.

The satire of Crabbe is essentially realistic. It portrays things as they are, dwelling on each sordid detail and sweeping away all the illusions of romance. In The Village (1783), for instance, Crabbe describes life as he found it among the lower classes in a Suffolk coast town—a life barren, humdrum, and dismal: thus the poem is an antidote, possibly intentional, to the idyllic and sentimental picture drawn by Goldsmith in The Deserted Village. The ethical element is always present in Crabbe’s work, and thus he preserves the didacticism of Pope and Cawthorn; but his homely phraseology, his sombre portraiture, and his pitiless psychological analysis of character connect him with a novelist like Hardy. Possibly some of the realism of Don Juan may be traced to the example of Crabbe, for whom Byron had both respect and affection.[28]

Aside from that exercised by the work and heritage of Pope, the most definite influence upon Byron’s satiric verse came from the satires of William Gifford (1756–1826), which had appeared some years before Byron began to write. Gifford, who early became the young lord’s model and counsellor, and who later revised and corrected his poetry, continued to the end to be one of the few literary friends to whom Byron referred consistently with deference.[29]

Gifford’s reputation was established by the publication of two short satires, the Baviad (1794) and the Mæviad (1795), printed together in 1797. The Baviad is an imitation of the first satire of Persius, in the form of a dialogue between the poet and his friend; the Mæviad paraphrases Horace’s tenth satire of the first book. Both are devoted primarily to deserved, but often unnecessarily harsh, criticism of some contemporary fads in literature, particularly of the “effusions” of the so-called Della Cruscan School.[30] Gifford was a Tory in a period when the unexpected excesses of the French revolutionists were causing all Tories, and even the more conservative Whigs, to take a stand against innovation, eccentricity, and individualism in any form. Since the Della Cruscans were nearly all liberals,[31] it was natural that Gifford should be enthusiastic in his project of ridiculing the “metromania” for which they were responsible. Thus his satires are protests against license, defending the conventional canons of taste and reasserting the desirability of law and order in literature.

Undoubtedly Gifford performed a certain service to the cause of letters by condemning, in a common-sense fashion, the silly sentimentality of the Della Cruscans.[32] Unfortunately it was almost impossible for him to compose satire without being scurrilous. Although he may have possessed the virtue of sincerity with which Courthope credits him, he invariably picked for his victims men who were too feeble to reply effectually. Still the satires, appearing so opportunely, made Gifford both famous and feared. The Baviad and the Mæviad were placed, without pronounced dissent, beside the Dunciad. Mathias said of the author, in all seriousness: “He is the most correct poetical writer I have read since the days of Pope.” Even Byron, so immeasurably Gifford’s superior in most respects, was dominated so far as to term him “the last of the wholesome satirists”[33] and to refer to him as a “Bard in virtue strong.”[34]

The plain truth is that Gifford is not always correct, seldom wholesome, and never great. Something of his style at the worst may be obtained from a single line,

“Yet not content, like horse-leeches they come,”

of which even the careless Churchill would have been ashamed. Gifford wanted good-breeding, and he had no geniality; his irascible nature made him intolerant and unjust. Moreover he lacked a sense of discrimination and proportion; he used a sledge-hammer constantly, often when a lighter weapon would have served his purpose. In him the artistic satire of Pope seems to have degenerated into clumsy and crude abuse.

Carrying to excess a practice probably begun by Pope, with the advice of Swift, Gifford had accompanied his satires with copious and diffuse notes, sometimes affixing a page or more of prose comment to a single line of verse.[35] Mathias, whose Pursuits of Literature was, according to De Quincey, the most popular book of its day, so exaggerated this fashion that it is often a question in his work to decide which is meant for an adjunct to the other—verse or prose annotation.

Thomas James Mathias (1754–1835), like Gifford, a Tory, with a bigoted aversion to anything new or strange, and a firm belief in the infallibility of established institutions, published Dialogue I of the Pursuits of Literature in May, 1794, Dialogues II and III in June, 1796, and Dialogue IV in 1797. In his theory of satire he insisted on three essentials: notes, and full ones; anonymity in the satirist; and a personal application for the attack. His chosen field included “faults, vices, or follies, which are destructive of society, of government, of good manners, or of good literature.” Mathias is pedantic, ostentatious in airing his information, and indefatigable in tracking down revolutionary ideas. His chief work is a curiosity, discursive, disorderly, and incoherent, with a versification that is lifeless and unmelodious.[36]

With the work of Mathias, this cursory summary of the strictly formal satire in the eighteenth century comes to a natural resting-place. Only a year or two after the Pursuits of Literature, the Anti-Jacobin began, and in its pages we find a more modern spirit. It is now necessary, reverting to an earlier period, to trace the progress of satire along other less formal lines, and to deal with some anomalous poems, which, although satiric in tone, are difficult to classify according to any logical system.

The satiric fable had a considerable vogue throughout the century, and collections appeared at frequent intervals.[37] Nearly all have allegorical elements and contain little direct satire, their main object being to point out and ridicule the weaknesses and follies of human nature. The octosyllabic couplet, the favorite measure for fables, was also a popular verse form in familiar epistles and humorous tales, modelled on the work of Prior, Gay, and Swift.[38] Ephemeral political satire continued to flourish in rough and indecorous street-ballads, sometimes rising almost into literature in the productions of men like Charles Hanbury Williams (1708–1759) and Caleb Whitefoord (1734–1810). With the inception of the Criticisms on the Rolliad, political verse assumes a position of distinct importance in the history of satire.

The material represented under the title Criticisms on the Rolliad was published in the Whig Morning Herald, beginning June 28, 1784, shortly after the fall of the Fox-North coalition and the appointment of the younger Pitt to the office of Prime Minister. It presents extracts from a supposed epic, based on the deeds of the ancestors of John Rolle, M. P., who had become the pet aversion of the Whigs. The alleged verse excerpts, all of them short, are amalgamated by clever prose comment. The editors included a group of young and ambitious Whig statesmen: Dr. Lawrence, later Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, who furnished the prose sections; Joseph Richardson (1755–1803); Richard Tickell, already mentioned as the author of The Wreath of Fashion; and two former cabinet ministers, General Fitzpatrick, the friend of Fox, and Lord John Townshend. The object of these men was to belittle and deride the more prominent Tories in both Houses, particularly Rolle, Pitt, Dundas, and the Tory Bishops, by singling them out, one by one, for ridicule. Their verse was a flippant and free form of the heroic couplet. Although their main purpose was political, they dealt only slightly with party principles, preferring rather to excite laughter by their personal allusions.

The marked public approbation which attended their experiment led the editors to continue their project in a series of Probationary Odes for the Laureateship, comprising parodies of twenty-two living poets. The odes follow the plan of the Pipe of Tobacco (1734) of Isaac Hawkins Browne (1705–1760), which burlesques the poetry of Cibber, James Thomson, Swift, Young, and Ambrose Phillips.[39] The plan of the contributors was further amplified in Political Eclogues and Political Miscellanies, which keep to the original policy of vituperation, at the same time showing a striking deterioration in the quality of the verse. The first zest had grown languid, and in the last collection, Extracts from the Album at Streatham (1788), containing poems purporting to be by several ministers of state, the verse had no value as literature.

The complete product of these Whig allies is, as a rule, clever and pointed, but it is too often coarse and scandalous in content. Although it failed in reinstating the Whigs in office, it occupies an important position in English political satire. Despite its irregular versification and its frequently unedifying subject-matter, it contains some brilliant sketches and many witty lines.[40]

A droll and impudent, but not altogether pleasing figure of this same period was the Whig satirist, Rev. John Wolcot (1738–1819), better known by his nom-de-guerre of Peter Pindar, who, making it his especial function to caricature George III and his court, earned from Scott the title of “the most unsparing calumniator of his time.” George, with his bourgeois habits and petty economies, made a splendid subject, and Pindar drew him with the homely realism of Hogarth or Gilray, pouring forth a long series of impertinent squibs until the monarch’s dangerous illness in 1788 gained him the sympathy of the nation and roused popular feeling against his lampooner. Pindar also engaged in other quarrels, notably with the trio of Tory satirists, Gifford, Mathias, and Canning.[41] His genius was that of the caricaturist, and his vogue, like that of most caricaturists, was soon over. However, the peculiar flavor of his verses, full as they are sometimes of rich humor and grotesque descriptions, is still delightful, and partly explains the merriment which greeted his work at a time when his allusions were still fresh in people’s minds. It may be added that Pindar shows few traces of Pope’s influence; he makes no pretence of a moral purpose, and he seldom employs the heroic couplet.

Professor Courthope suggests that Don Juan owes much in style to the satires of Pindar. The question of a possible indebtedness will be taken up more in detail in another chapter; it is sufficient here to point out that Byron never refers to Wolcot by name, and makes only one reference to his poetry.[42]

Some of the most powerful social and political satire of the century was written, in defence of democracy and liberalism, by the vigorous pen of Robert Burns.[43] His work, however, despite the fact that it discussed many of the topics which were agitating the English satirists, was not particularly influential at the time in England.

One peculiar work, significant in the evolution of satire because of its undoubted influence on a succeeding generation, was the New Bath Guide; or Memoirs of the B—r—d Family (1766), written by Christopher Anstey (1724–1805).[44] It consists of a series of letters, most of them in an easy anapestic measure with curious rhymes, purporting to be from different members of one family, and satirising life at the fashionable watering-place made famous only a few years before by Beau Nash. Anstey’s method of using letters for the purpose of satire was followed by other authors,[45] but never, until Moore’s Two-penny Postbag and Fudge Family, with complete success. Other satires of the century also employed the anapestic metre in a clever way.[46]

The Tory Anti-Jacobin, a weekly periodical which began on November 20, 1797, and printed its last number on July 9, 1798, appropriately closes the satire of the century, for it includes examples of most of the types of satiric verse which had been popular since the death of Pope. Founded by government journalists, possibly at Pitt’s instigation, it planned to “oppose papers devoted to the cause of sedition and irreligion, to the pay and interests of France.” At a critical period in English affairs, when the long struggle with France and Napoleon was just beginning and many Whigs were still undecided as to their allegiance, it was the purpose of the Anti-Jacobin, as representative of militant nationalism, to oppose foreign innovations and to uphold time-honored institutions. Each number of the paper contained several sections: an editorial, or leader; departments assigned to Finances, Lies, Misrepresentations, and Mistakes; and some pages of verse, with a prose introduction. Gifford, who had been chosen to superintend the publication, devoted himself entirely to editorial management, so that the responsibility for the verse devolved upon George Canning (1770–1827) and several assistants, among whom were Ellis, now an adherent of the Tories, and John Hookham Frere (1769–1846).

The Anti-Jacobin, then, planned first to revive the traditions of English patriotism and to rally public opinion to the support of king and country. As a secondary but essential element of its design, it aimed, especially in its verse, to expose the falsity and fatuity of the doctrines of Holcroft, Paine, Godwin, and other radical philosophers and economists; to ridicule and parody the work of authors of the revolutionary school, particularly of the English Lake poets and the followers of the German romanticists; and incidentally to satirise some of the social and literary follies of the age.[47] Since the verse was submitted by many contributors, its tone was not always homogeneous, and it varied from playful jocularity to stern didacticism. On the whole, however, it had a definite ethical purpose, and avowedly championed sound morality and conservative principles.

The poetry of the Anti-Jacobin includes illustrations of many varied satiric forms. New Morality is a set, formal satire in conventional couplets and balanced lines, superior in technique to the best work of Gifford and Mathias, and not unworthy of comparison with many of the satires of Pope. Acme and Septimius, or the Happy Union is a short informal verse tale, reminiscent in manner of the unedifying personalities in the Rolliad. There are satiric imitations of Horace and Catullus. There are parodies of many sorts: the Needy Knife Grinder, an artistic parody of Southey’s sapphics; the Loves of the Triangles, a burlesque of Darwin’s Loves of the Plants; the Progress of Man, ridiculing the tedious didacticism of Payne Knight; and Chevy Chace, a parody of the romantic ballad. Hudibrastic couplets are used in A Consolatory Address to his Gunboats, by Citizen Muskein; anapests, in the Translation of a Letter, in the style of Anstey; and doggerel, in the Elegy on the Death of Jean Bon André. The material of the satire comprehends events in politics, in literature, in philosophy, and, to some extent, in society. Thus, in small compass, the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin offers a fruitful field for study.

In more than one respect, too, it furnished suggestions for the nineteenth century. Ballynahinch and the Translation of a Letter may have had some influence on the manner and versification of Moore and Byron. Certain of the Odes, notably the imitation of Horace, III, 25, have the delicate touch which was to mark the lighter satire of the Smiths and Praed, and, later, of Calverley, Barham, and Locker. In its rare combination of refined raillery with subtle irony and underlying seriousness, the satire of the Anti-Jacobin anticipates the brilliance of Punch in the days when Thackeray was a contributor to its pages. The dexterous and artistic humor of Canning and his confederates did not drive out the cut-and-slash method of Gifford, but it did succeed in teaching the lesson that mockery and wit are fully as effectual as vituperation in remedying a public evil.

At the time of the subsidence of the Anti-Jacobin in 1798,[48] the boy Byron, just made a lord by the death of his great-uncle on May 19, 1798, was in his eleventh year. From this date on, therefore, it is necessary to take account not only of the satiric literature which may have influenced his work, but also of the events in politics and society which were occurring around him and which determined in many ways the course of his career as a satirist. From his environment and his associations came often his provocation and his material.

No single verse-satire of note was produced during the ten years just preceding English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. It seemed, indeed, for a time, as if satire, fallen into feeble hands, would lose any claim to be considered as a branch of permanent literature. The increasing power of the daily newspapers and their abuse of the freedom of the press stimulated the composition of short satiric ballads and epigrams, designed to be effective for the moment, but most of them hastily conceived, carelessly executed, and speedily forgotten. The laws against libel, not consistently enforced until after the second conviction of Finnerty in 1811 and the imprisonment of the Hunt brothers in 1812, were habitually disregarded or evaded, and the utmost license of speech seems to have been tolerated, even when directed at the royal family. The ethical standard which Pope had set for satire and which had been kept in New Morality was now forgotten in the strife of faction and the play of personal spite. Pope had laid emphasis on style and technique, and even Mathias and Gifford had made some attempt to follow him; but the new school of satirists cared little for art. No doubt this degradation of satire may be partly attributed to the fact that the really capable writers of the time—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Southey—were engaged in poetry of another sort; but the result was that satire became the property of journalists and poetasters until Byron and Moore recovered for it some of its former dignity.

It must not be inferred that there was a dearth of material for destructive criticism. Few decades of English history have offered a more tempting opportunity to a satirist.[49] The Napoleonic Wars, renewed in May, 1803, after the brief Peace of Amiens (1802), were not, in spite of an occasional naval victory, resulting advantageously for England; the disgraceful Convention of Cintra (1808) and the Walcheren fiasco of 1809 had detracted from British prestige; and the Peninsular Campaign of 1808 seemed at the time to be a disastrous failure. The wearisome conflict had accentuated class differences, since, as Byron afterwards pointed out in The Age of Bronze, the landed interests only increased their wealth as the struggle continued. Many reforms were being agitated: Catholic Emancipation, opposed resolutely by George III and not made a reality until Canning became supreme; the abolition of negro slavery, championed persistently by Wilberforce; and many improvements in the suffrage laws, planned by Sir Francis Burdett and a small group of liberal statesmen. The older leaders, Pitt and Fox, died in the same year (1806), leaving weaker and less trusted men to fill their places; while political issues became confused until the establishment of the Regency in 1811 opened the way for the long Tory administration of Lord Liverpool. Some incidents of an unusually scandalous character aroused a general spirit of dissatisfaction. The impeachment of Melville in 1806 for alleged peculation of funds in the naval office; the investigation in 1806 into the character of the giddy Princess Caroline, instigated by the Prince of Wales, who had married her in 1795 and deserted her within a year; the resignation of the Duke of York from the command of the army, following a dramatic exposé of his relations with Mrs. Clarke and her disposal of commissions for bribes; the duel between Castlereagh and Canning (1809)—all these were unsavory topics of the hour. The open profligacy of the heir to the throne drew upon him ridicule and contempt, and the frequent recurrence of the King’s malady left Englishmen in doubt as to the duration of his reign. In such an age the ephemeral satires of the newspapers joined with the cartoons of Gilray and Cruikshank in assailing evils and expressing public indignation. It is, then, remarkable that no writer of real genius should have been led to commemorate these events in satire.

The formal satires of the decade are, for the most part, lifeless, lacking in wit and art. The most readable of them is, perhaps, Epics of the Ton (1807), by Lady Anne Hamilton (1766–1846), divided into a Male Book and a Female Book. It is a gallery of contemporary portraits, in which some twenty women and seventeen men, all prominent personages, are sketched by one familiar with most of the current scandal in court and private life. Although it is written in the heroic couplet, the versification is singularly crude and careless. Structurally the work has little discernible unity, being merely a series of satiric characterizations without connecting links, and each section might have been printed as a separate lampoon. The introductory passage, however, contains a running survey of contemporary poetry which was not without influence on Byron. Lady Hamilton, clever retailer of gossip though she was, belongs to the decadent school of Pope.

In 1808 Tom Moore published anonymously Corruption and Intolerance, following them in the next year with The Skeptic, a Philosophical Satire. All three are satires in the manner and form of Pope; but in spite of their fervid patriotism, they are dull and heavy, and Moore, quick to recognize his failure, discreetly turned to a lighter variety of satire for which his powers were better fitted. Of other political satires of the same period, the best were excited by the notorious ministry of “All the Talents,” formed by the Whigs after the death of their leader, Fox, in 1806. In All the Talents! (1807), Eaton Stannard Barrett (1786–1820), under the name of Polypus, undertook to undermine the ministry by assailing its members, following the methods of the Rolliad and using the diffuse notes which Mathias had popularized. A Whig reply appeared shortly after in All the Blocks! (1807) by the indefatigable W. H. Ireland (1777–1835), which attacked the newly formed Tory ministry of Portland.

Among the nondescript formal satires of the time should be mentioned Ireland’s Stultifera Navis (1807), a spiritless, impersonal, and general satire, which revives the form of Brandt’s Narrenschiff (1494), introduced into English in Barclay’s Ship of Fools (1508). A later satire of Ireland’s, Chalcographimania (1814), in feeble octosyllabics, satirises collectors and bibliophiles. The Children of Apollo (1794), an anonymous satire of an earlier period, seems to have afforded Byron more than a suggestion for his English Bards; but he was influenced still more by the Simpliciad (1808), published anonymously, but actually written by Richard Mant (1776–1848), which is dedicated to the three revolutionary poets, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, and contains some unmerciful ridicule of their more absurd poems. Mant’s work, the frank criticism of “a man of classical culture and of some poetic impulse,”[50] merits attention as being an almost contemporary outburst of the same general character as English Bards.

The ballad form reappeared in many satires arising from the troubled condition of politics[51]; but the usual tone of this work is scurrilous and commonplace, and dozens of such broadsides were composed and forgotten in a day. That any one of them had any definite influence on Byron, or on the course of satire in general, is highly improbable. What is important is that the literary atmosphere for a few years before 1809, although it produced no great satires, was surcharged with the satiric spirit, and that Byron, in his youth, must have been accustomed to the abusive personalities then common in the daily press. Conditions in his day encouraged rather than repressed destructive criticism.

This summary of English satiric verse between Dryden and Byron ends naturally with the year 1809, when the latter poet first revealed his true genius as a satirist. Something has been suggested of the wide scope and varied character of satire from the death of Pope until the end of the eighteenth century; the example of Pope has been traced through its influence on satire to the time when it degenerated in the work of Mathias and the minor rhymsters of the first decade of the new century; and the lighter classes of satire have been followed until the date when they became artistic in the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. With many of these English predecessors Byron had something in common; from a few he drew inspiration and material. Although it will be possible to point out only a few cases in which he was indebted to them directly for his manner and phraseology, it was their work which determined very largely the course which he pursued as a satirist in verse.

With the appearance of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, English satire regained something of the standing which it had once had in the days of Pope and Swift. Men of the highest genius were soon to employ satire as a weapon. Moore, the Smiths, Praed, Hood, and Hook were to carry raillery and mockery almost to the point of perfection; Shelley was to unite satire with idealism and a lofty philosophy; and Byron himself, the last master in the school of Pope, was to introduce a new variety of satire, borrowed from the Italians, and to gain for himself the distinction of being perhaps the greatest of our English verse-satirists.

CHAPTER III
BYRON’S EARLY SATIRIC VERSE

Fugitive Pieces, Byron’s first volume of verse, actually printed in November, 1806, was almost immediately suppressed at the instance of his elder friend and self-appointed mentor, Rev. J. T. Becher, who somewhat prudishly expostulated with him on the sensuous tone of certain passages. Of the thirty-eight separate poems which the collection contains, eight, at least, may be classed as legitimate satires. The arrangement of the different items is, however, unsystematic and inconsistent. The lines On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School, comprising a prejudiced and impulsive diatribe, are followed by the Epitaph on a Beloved Friend, a sincere and heartfelt elegy; while the conventionally sentimental Lines to Mary, On Receiving Her Picture are preceded and followed by satiric poems. These unexpected juxtapositions, inexplicable even on the theory of an adherence to chronology, suggest at once the curious way in which Byron’s versatile and complex nature tended to show itself at various times in moods apparently antithetical, permitting them often to follow each other closely or even to exist at practically the same moment. In his early book two characteristic moods, if not more, may be recognized: the romantic, whether melancholy, sentimental, or mysterious; and the satiric, whether savage or mocking. It is, of course, only with the manifestations of the latter mood that we have here to do.

The motives which urged Byron, at this early age, towards satire arose chiefly from personal dislike, the wish to retaliate when some one, by word or deed, had offended his vanity or his partialities. His animosities, notoriously violent, were often, though not always, hasty, irrational, and unjustified. His satire was occasioned by his emotions, not by his reason, a fact which partly accounts for his fondness for exaggeration and his incapacity for weighing evidence. As to his choice of methods, it must be remembered that careful reading, of a scope and diverseness remarkable for one of his years, had given him a comprehensive acquaintance with the English poets, and notably with Pope, for whom his preference began early and continued long. From Pope, and from Pope’s literary descendant, Gifford, Byron derived the models for much of his preliminary work in satire. He also knew Canning and Mathias, Lady Hamilton, Mant, and E. S. Barrett, and, in a different field, he was familiar with the lighter verse of Swift, Prior, Anstey, the Rolliad, and the Anti-Jacobin. It was natural, indeed almost inevitable, that these first exercises in satire should reflect something of the style and manner of poems with which Byron had an acquaintance and of which he had made a study.

The first printed satire of his composition was the poem entitled On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School, dated from Harrow, July, 1805, when his period of residence there had almost closed. Dr. Drury, Headmaster of Harrow, having resigned, Dr. Butler had been chosen to fill the vacancy. Against Dr. Butler, Byron had no personal grievance; but resenting an appointment which, passing over Dr. Drury’s son, Mark Drury, had selected an utter stranger, the boy launched an invective at a teacher whom he scarcely knew, and predicted the downfall of the school under his administration. Characteristically enough he was soon ready to avow his regret for his rash outburst. Referring to Dr. Butler, he said in his Diary: “I treated him rebelliously, and have been sorry ever since.” In the details of Byron’s conduct at this time are exemplified several of his traits as a satirist: impetuous judgment, energetic attack, and eventual repentance.

The use of the Latin type names, Probus and Pomposus, applied to Dr. Drury and Dr. Butler, as well as a certain technical skill in the management of the heroic couplet, indicates that Byron had perused Pope to his own advantage. Already he had caught something of the tricks of antithesis and repetition of which the elder poet had been so fond, and he had derived from him the power of condensing acrimony into a single pointed couplet. Such lines as:

“Of narrow brain, yet of a narrower soul,

Pomposus holds you in his harsh control;

Pomposus, by no social virtue sway’d,

With florid jargon, and with vain parade,”[52]

have a hint of the vigor and vehemence of Pope himself, while they display, at the same time, the unfairness and exaggerated bitterness, so rarely mitigated by good humor, which were to distinguish the longer English Bards.

This poem, after all, was a mere scholastic experiment to be read only by those in close touch with events at Harrow. Fugitive Pieces contained also Byron’s earliest effort at political satire. An Impromptu, unsigned, and derogatory to Fox, had appeared in the Morning Post for September 26, 1806, only a few months after the death of the great Whig statesman, and the schoolboy, even then headed toward liberalism, came to the Minister’s defence in a reply published in the Morning Chronicle in October of the same year. The opening couplet:

“Oh, factious viper! whose envenomed tooth,

Would mangle still the dead, perverting truth,”

proved that he possessed, with Gifford, the singular faculty of working himself, with very little cause, into a furious rage. When once he had let his wrath master him, he was uncontrollable, and he found satisfaction in nothing so much as in affixing scurrilous epithets to those who had aroused him. Until he had studied the Italian satirists, he was almost incapable of cool dissection of an enemy’s faults or shortcomings, and even then he never acquired the virtue of self-control.

This essay at political satire was not followed by other excursions into politics, probably because of the poet’s temporary indifference to the situation in England at the time. On January 15, 1809, in writing his solicitor, Hanson, concerning his entrance into the House of Lords, he said: “I cannot say that my opinion is strongly in favor of either party.”[53] Not until after his return to England from his travels in 1811 and the beginning of his friendship with Moore, Hunt, and other active Whigs, did his interest in politics revive and his pen become a party weapon.

The last of the three classical satires in couplets to be found in Fugitive Pieces is Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination (1806), composed at Cambridge. It opens with a burlesque sketch of Magnus, a college tutor, but soon broadens into a general indictment of pedantry and scholastic sycophancy. Byron himself had desired to go to Oxford, and he never felt himself in sympathy with either the instructors or the educational system of his Alma Mater. This particular poem, however, is merely an outburst of boyish spleen, remarkable for nothing except a kind of sauciness not unknown in the university freshman.

Fugitive Pieces had been privately printed, with the addition of twelve poems, and with two poems omitted, as Poems on Various Occasions in January, 1807, and in the summer of the same year a new collection, consisting partly of selections from the two previous volumes and partly of hitherto unprinted work, was published under the title Hours of Idleness. A final edition, called Poems Original and Translated, appeared in 1808, comprising thirty-eight separate poems, five of them new. Among the poems in these volumes, and other verses of the same period, drawn from various sources and since gathered together in Mr. Coleridge’s authoritative edition of Byron’s poetry, there are several satires, many of them interesting in themselves and nearly all illuminating in their relation to the author’s later production.

Childish Recollections (1806),[54] a sentimental reverie, is satiric in part, though it is devoted mostly to eulogies of Byron’s companions at Harrow. In the couplet,

“Let keener bards delight in Satire’s sting,

My fancy soars not on Detraction’s wing,”

he disavows any satiric intent, but this does not prevent him from indulging in some additional criticism of Dr. Butler. Regret for this passage induced Byron to omit the entire poem from Poems Original and Translated, and in ordering the excision he wrote Ridge: “As I am now reconciled to Dr. Butler I cannot allow my satire to appear against him.”

Damoetas, a short fragment of truculent characterization, may be a morbid bit of self-portraiture, but is more probably a cynical sketch of some acquaintance. The description is excessively bitter:—

“From every sense of shame and virtue wean’d,

In lies an adept, in deceit a fiend;—

Damoetas ran through all the maze of sin,

And found the goal, when others just begin.”

The poems so far mentioned as composed by Byron before 1809 have been formal exercises in the manner of Pope, tentative efforts in the genre of which English Bards was to be Byron’s best example. Even in this early period, however, another phase of his satiric spirit appears, which hints of the future Don Juan; it trifles in a lighter vein, with less of invective and more of banter, and the style is lent a humorous touch by the use of odd and uncommon rhymes. The half-genial playfulness of these poems is decidedly different from the earnestness and intensity of Damoetas, and makes them akin to the familiar verse of Prior, Cowper, and Praed. One of the cleverer specimens is the poem with the elaborate title Lines to a Lady Who Presented to the Author a Lock of Her Hair Braided with His Own, and Appointed a Night in December to Meet Him in the Garden, in which thirteen rhymes out of twenty-two are double. These verses, printed first in Fugitive Pieces, are possibly the earliest in which evidence may be found of a sportive mood in Byron’s work. Their tone is both ironic and comic, and possible romance is turned into something ridiculous by a satiric use of realism. The poem is also one of the few examples of Byron’s employment of octosyllabic couplets for satiric purposes.

To Eliza (October 9, 1806), written to Elizabeth Pigot, Byron’s early correspondent and confidante, contains some cynical observations on marriage, with at least one line that might have fitted into Don Juan:

“Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.”

It is composed in stanzas made up of four anapestic lines. Granta, a Medley, written October 28, 1806, in one of the bursts of rhyming not uncommon with him at that period, treats, in a jocular fashion, of college life at Cambridge. Its chief interest lies in some of its peculiar rhymes, such as triangle-wrangle, historic use-hypothenuse, before him-tore ’em, crude enough in themselves, but prophetic of better skill to come, and in the fact that it uses the common quatrain of four-stressed lines, with alternate rhymes, a measure seldom found in Byron’s satire. To the Sighing Strephon, in a six-line stanza, while occasionally serious, is actually the reflection of a frivolous mood, and contains light satire. The trivial nature of these poems as contrasted with the vehemence of some other of his early satires, indicates that Byron’s satiric spirit even at that time was fickle and changeable, dependent often on his environment and varying constantly in response to alterations in his own temper. It is noticeable too that he was experimenting with several metrical forms, and trying his hand at extraordinary rhymes.

Byron’s path as an aspiring author was not always a smooth one, even before his name became generally known. Fugitive Pieces had been harshly criticised by several of his acquaintances, and, as we have seen, the objections of the hypercritical Becher had led to the destruction of the entire edition. But the proud young lord was not always tamely submissive to correction. In December, 1806, he wrote in Hudibrastic couplets the verses To a Knot of Ungenerous Critics, which express the same sort of injured pride and resentment that he afterwards showed toward Jeffrey and the Edinburgh reviewers:

“Rail on, rail on, ye heartless crew!

My strains were never meant for you;

Remorseless rancour still reveal,

And damn the verse you cannot feel.”

Byron’s anger in these lines was directed apparently at certain ladies of Southwell, the little town where most of his Harrow vacations were spent; but though he mentioned one “portly female,” he had not yet reached the point where he ventured to call his enemies by name. This reserve, however, did not prevent him from breaking out in some caustic personal satire, in the course of which he did not spare the characters of the ladies in question. The same provocation led him to compose the Soliloquy of a Bard in the Country (1806), in heroic couplets, in which he seems to pick three persons—“physician, parson, dame”—as responsible for the adverse comment on Fugitive Pieces. In these satires the occasional sharpness of single phrases does not conceal a boyish timidity, which is evidence that Byron had not yet been stung enough to make him realize or display his full power. Neither of the poems was published during his lifetime, and they probably served only to gratify his revenge in private among his friends.

Possibly the last, and certainly the most cynical, of these early satires is the well-known Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog, dated by Byron from Newstead Abbey, October 30, 1808, though the animal did not die until November 18th. The twenty-six lines of the poem are now carved on a monument at Newstead, with an elaborate prose epitaph. Their misanthropy and savagery recall the contempt which Swift expressed for humanity in such poems as The Beasts’ Confession and the Lines on the Day of Judgment. An appropriate text for Byron’s verses might have been taken from Swift’s letter to Pope, September 29, 1725: “I heartily hate and detest that animal called man.” Doubtless Byron’s mood is due in part to an affectation of cynicism which reappeared frequently throughout his life; his hatred of mankind, if not actually assumed, was by no means the deep-seated emotion that agitated Swift.

A retrospective survey of the material so far considered again fastens our attention on the singular complexity of Byron’s satiric spirit. In a body of work comparatively meagre in content, he had used both invective and mockery, severity and humor. He had tried various metrical forms, some dignified and some colloquial. There is less to be said, however, for the intrinsic merit of the satires. No one of them is brilliant, nor does any one suggest marked intellectual power. The invective is too often mere indiscriminate ranting; the wit is, for the most part, sophomoric; and the assumption of superiority in one so young is, at times, exceedingly offensive. Here and there in single lines and passages, there are indications of latent genius; but many other young poets have shown as much.

These exercises, however, imitative and crude though they were, were training him in style and giving him confidence. When his anger was fully roused by the Edinburgh Review, he found himself prepared with an instrument for his purposes. English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, with all its faults, is not the product of an amateur in satire, but of a writer who, after much study of the methods of Pope and Gifford, has learned how to express his wrath in virulent couplets.

CHAPTER IV
“ENGLISH BARDS, AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS”

English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, Byron’s first long poem, is, like the Dunciad and the Baviad, a satire principally on literary people. It was not, however, in its inception, planned to be either so pretentious or so comprehensive as it afterwards came to be. In a letter to Elizabeth Pigot, October 26, 1807, when Byron was still an undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he referred casually to “one poem of 380 lines, to be published (without my name) in a few weeks, with notes,” and added, “The poem to be published is a satire.”[55] The manuscript draft of the work as thus conceived contained 360 lines.

The actual stimulus for the enlargement of the poem came, however, from an external source. Injured vanity, the occasion of the earlier Soliloquy of a Bard in the Country, was also responsible for the completion of the half-formed satire of which Byron had written to Miss Pigot. On February 26, 1808, he wrote Becher: “A most violent attack is preparing for me in the next number of the Edinburgh Review.”[56] The attack alluded to, a criticism of Hours of Idleness, unsigned but probably contributed by Brougham, appeared in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1807; but that number, in accordance with a practice not then uncommon, was delayed for over a month in going through the press, and was not actually on sale until March. The article itself, which has since become notorious for its bad taste, began with the scathing sentence: “The poetry of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit.” Its attitude was certainly not calculated to encourage or soothe the youthful poet, and with his usual impetuosity, he at once sought a means of redress. Adding an introduction and a conclusion to his embryonic poem, and inserting an attack on Jeffrey, whom he supposed to be his critic, he had the whole privately printed, as British Bards, in the autumn of 1808. This work, revised and enlarged, but with some excisions,[57] making a poem of 696 lines, was published anonymously in March, 1809, under the title English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. A letter of January 25, 1809, to Dallas proves that the poet had intended to conceal his authorship by inserting a slighting reference to “minor Byron,”[58] but this ruse was not retained in the published volume.

The satire, as Byron told Medwin, made a prodigious impression. A second edition in October, 1809, was amplified by several interpolated passages so that it comprised 1050 lines. A third and a fourth edition were demanded while Byron was on his travels, and the fifth, including the 1070 lines of the poem as it is ordinarily printed to-day, was suppressed by him in 1811. In the second and succeeding editions his name was on the title-page.

His friend, Dallas, who had been favored with the perusal of the poem in manuscript, had suggested as a title, The Parish Poor of Parnassus, but Byron, with some wisdom, rejected this as too humorous,[59] and chose English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. The present title indicates clearly the double object of the satire; for though it is, in one sense, an attempt at retaliation upon the editors of the Edinburgh Review, it is, in another, an eager and deliberate defence of the Popean tradition in poetry. It combines the motives of Churchill’s Apology and Gifford’s Baviad in that it aims, like the first, to castigate hostile critics, and like the second, to ridicule contemporary poets. Personal spite urged him to assail the “Scotch marauders,” Jeffrey, Horner, and their coterie; but he had no individual grudge to pay in satirising the “Southern dunces,” Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, and others. His attack upon them was actuated by the same sort of narrow spirit which he had condemned in his critics. The spectacle of Byron posing as an overthrower of intolerant reviewers, and in the same poem outdoing them in unjust and prejudiced criticism is not likely to leave the reader with an exalted opinion of the author’s consistency.

Presumably influenced by the example of Gifford, Byron deluded himself into believing that it was his mission to protest against the excesses of romanticism in poetry, and to engage “the swarm of idiots” who were infecting literature. He was to be “self-constituted judge of poesy”; and in pursuance of his design, the satire became a gallery of many figures, some sketched graphically, others merely limned in a line or a phrase. It is to Byron’s credit that his chosen victims were not, like those of Pope and Gifford, all poetasters. Doubtless there was a certain amount of chance in the causes that led him to be the opponent of men who have since been recognized as representative poets of their age; but in spite of the fact that Wordsworth and Coleridge, Southey and Moore, may not have been fully appreciated in 1809, they were, nevertheless, authors of reputation whom it was not altogether discreet to attack. As for Scott, he was the favorite writer of the period and no mean antagonist. Herford points out the daring character of the satire in saying: “It is a kind of inverted Dunciad; the novice falls upon the masters of his day, as the Augustan Master upon the nonentities of his.”

The originality of the satire was questioned as far back as 1822 in Blakwood’s Magazine, which, in a Letter to Paddy, said: “English Bards is, even to the most wretched point of its rhyme, most grossly and manifestly borrowed.”[60] That this is inexcusable exaggeration hardly needs asserting; yet it is not detrimental to Byron to state that he had been anticipated in many of his criticisms to such an extent that his views could have offered little of novelty to his readers, and that some of his lines are reminiscent of the work of previous English satirists. He was no direct plagiarist, but he had a tenacious memory, and he had read omnivorously in Pope, Churchill, Gifford, and the minor satirists of his own time. It is not strange that he occasionally repeats phrases which had become, by inheritance, the common property of all English satirists.

Continuing a practice which, as we have seen, was instituted by Oldham and adopted by Pope and Gifford, Byron evidently intended to follow the general plan of the first satire of Juvenal. Pope, in the Satires and Epistles Imitated, had printed the Latin poems of Horace in parallel columns with his own verses.[61] Gifford, in the Baviad, had placed sections of the text of Persius in notes at the bottom of the page, and had adhered rather closely to the structure of his Latin model. Byron, however, soon perceived the restrictions which such procedure would entail, and after indicating three examples of imitation in the first hundred lines, neglected Juvenal in order to pursue an independent course.[62] Aside from these acknowledged imitations, it is interesting to notice that one couplet from English Bards,

“I, too, can scrawl, and once upon a time

I poured along the town a flood of rhyme,”[63]

have some resemblance to two lines of Gifford’s translation of Juvenal’s first satire,

“I, too, can write—and at a pedant’s frown,

Once poured my fustian rhetoric on the town.”

These few instances excepted, there is no evidence in the poem of borrowing from the Latin satirists, nor is any one of them mentioned or quoted in English Bards.

It is curious that Byron, instead of striking out for himself in an original way, should have repeated complacently many of the time-honored ideas which had become almost fixed conventions in satire. It is customary, of course, for the satirist to complain of contemporary conditions and to sigh for the good old days; indeed, it would be possible to collate passages from satirists in an unbroken line from Juvenal to William Watson, each making it clear that the age in which the writer lives is decadent. As far back as 1523 we find in the verse preface to Rede Me and be nott wrothe, a couplet full of this lament:

“This worlde is worsse than evyr it was,

Never so depe in miserable decaye.”

Marvell, in An Historical Poem, wishes for the glorious period of the Tudors; Dryden, in the Epistle to Henry Higden, Esq., cries out against “our degenerate times”; and Pope, in the Dunciad, has a familiar reference to “these degen’rate days.” The same strain is repeated in Young,[64] in Johnson,[65] in Cowper,[66] in Gifford,[67] and even in Barrett.[68] The tone of Byron’s jeremiad differs very little from that of those which have been cited:

“Time was, ere yet in these degenerate days

Ignoble themes obtained mistaken praise,

When Sense and Wit with Poesy allied,

No fabled Graces, flourished side by side.”[69]

It is not inappropriate to point out that this ideal era to which Byron refers had been termed by Pope, who lived in it, “a Saturnian Age of lead.”[70] It required a maturer Byron to satirise this very satiric convention as he did in the first line of The Age of Bronze:

“The ‘good old times’—all times when old are good.”

Another generally accepted custom for the satirist was the apologetic formality of calling upon some supposedly more powerful censor to revive and scourge folly. Thus Young had asked,

“Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train,

Nor hears the virtue which he loves complain.”[71]

Whitehead’s State Dunces had opened with a similar invocation to Pope. At the end of the eighteenth century it was Gifford who seemed to have sunk into a torpor. Thus we find Canning in New Morality attempting to rouse him:

“Oh, where is now that promise? why so long

Sleep the keen shafts of satire and of song?”

Hodgson, Byron’s friend, in his Gentle Alterative had also appealed to Gifford. In the preface to the second edition of English Bards, Byron had, in his turn, regretted the listlessness of Gifford, and had modestly professed himself a mere country practitioner officiating in default of the regular physician; while in the satire itself he again sounded the familiar note, repeating the interrogation of Canning:

“‘Why slumbers Gifford?’ once was asked in vain;

Why slumbers Gifford? let us ask again.”[72]

The emphatic language which he used elsewhere in admitting his indebtedness and even his inferiority to Gifford is, however, proof of the sincerity of this outburst.

A third convention, established if not originated in English by Pope, is the obligation felt by the satirist to pose as a defender of public morals and to insist upon his ethical purpose. Byron, partly affected by this tradition, partly believing himself to be, like Gifford, a champion of law and order in literature, tries to persuade his public that he is instigated entirely by lofty motives in giving vent to his anger:

“For me, who, thus unasked, have dared to tell

My country, what her sons should know too well,

Zeal for her honor bade me here engage

The host of idiots that infest her age.”[73]

It will not do, however, to take this assertion too seriously, especially since incitements of a far different sort seem to have occasioned several sections of the poem.

Besides conforming to the conventional practice of his predecessors in these three important respects, Byron linked himself with them by so many other ties that even in matters of minor detail English Bards resembles the classical satires of Pope and Gifford. As a satire it may justly be compared with the Dunciad and the Baviad, and may be judged by the standards which are applied to them.

An analysis of English Bards is rendered difficult by the lack of any coherent plan in the poem, and its consequent failure to follow any logical order in treating its material. The author wanders from his avowed theme to satirise the depravity of the Argyle Institution and to ridicule the antiquarian folly of Aberdeen and Elgin, slipping, moreover, easily from critics to bards and from bards to critics, as a train of observations occurs to him. The same excuse may be pleaded for him that Mathias advanced in his own behalf: that an informing personality lends a kind of unity to the poem. It may be said, too, that the classical satire, not aiming as a rule to be compact and close in structure, is very likely to become a panorama in which figures pass in long review. This impression is conveyed in English Bards by the use of stock phrases which serve to introduce each new character as if he were appearing in a parade of celebrities.[74]

Under the false impression that Jeffrey was responsible for the scornful review of Hours of Idleness, Byron singled him out for violent abuse, though he did not neglect his colleagues, “the allied usurpers on the throne of taste.” For his attack on critics as a class Byron could have found much encouragement in previous English satire. Dryden had expressed a common enough feeling of authors, in the lines:

“They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst write,

Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.”[75]

Pope had condemned the “bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,” who knows no method in his calling but censure.[76] Young had carried out rather tamely in his third satire his boastful intention of falling upon critics:

“Like the bold bird upon the banks of Nile,

That picks the teeth of the vile crocodile.”

Aside from these more or less incidental aspersions, at least two entire satires had been written upon critics. Cuthbert Shaw, enraged by what he thought an unfair account of his Race (1762) in the Critical Review, prefixed to the second edition of that poem an Address to the Critics, in which he heaped vituperation on all the reviewers of his time. Only a few months before this, Churchill in his Apology Addressed to the Critical Reviewers (1761) had constructed a satire very similar in motive and plan to Byron’s English Bards. A fairly close parallel may, in fact, be evolved between the two poems. Both are replies to the severe comments of critics on an earlier work[77]; both assail Scotch editors, the victim being, in the one case, Smollett, in the other, Jeffrey; both digress from the main theme, the one to renew the controversy with actors begun in the Rosciad, the other to satirise a new movement in poetry.

It is characteristic of both Churchill and Byron that, instead of attempting to defend their verses, they devote all their attention to reviling their reviewers. Byron’s retaliation is less vigorous than Churchill’s; indeed it may be said that English Bards is weakest in the place where it should have been most effective—in the passage directed at Jeffrey. Byron compares his antagonist to the hangman Jeffries, and describes in burlesque fashion the duel between him and Moore; but he fastens on him no epithet worth remembering and abuses him in lines which are neither incisive nor witty.

Churchill had made an especial point of the anonymous character of the articles in the Critical Review, and had said of the editors:

“Wrapt in mysterious secrecy they rise,

And, as they are unknown, are safe and wise.”[78]

Hodgson, in his Gentle Alterative (1809), had referred to a similar custom of the Edinburgh Review, by attacking,

“Chiefly those anonymously wise,

Who skulk in darkness from Detection’s eyes.”

The allusion in English Bards to “Northern Wolves, that still in darkness prowl”[79] may be explained by Byron’s objection to this practice, though he chooses to dwell on it very little.

The Apology had accused the critics of dissimulation and had alleged that their pages were full of misstatements—

“Ne’er was lie made that was not welcome there.”[80]

Byron made the same charge in advising contributors to the Edinburgh Review not to stick to the truth,

“Fear not to lie, ’twill seem a sharper hit.”[81]

It is quite apparent that the “self-elected monarchs” whom Churchill treated so cavalierly in 1761 had no more popularity among sensitive authors than did the body of critics whom Hodgson styled “self-raised arbiters of sense and wit”[82] whom Gifford spoke of as “mope-eyed dolts placed by thoughtless fashion on the throne of taste”[83] and whom Byron, in much the same phraseology, scorned as,

“Young tyrants, by themselves misplaced,

Combined usurpers on the Throne of Taste.”

Churchill, rash though he was, was cautious enough not to print his opponents’ names, and they are to be discovered only through definite allusions. Byron, on the other hand, brought his satire into the open, and ridiculed “smug Sydney,” “classic Hallam,” “paltry Pillans,” “blundering Brougham,” and other contributors to the Edinburgh, never hesitating to give a name in full. Even Lord and Lady Holland, later Byron’s close friends, were included among the victims, as patrons of the Whig Review.

These resemblances between English Bards and some earlier satires of a like nature do not prove Byron a mere imitator. Enough has been shown, perhaps, to make it clear that his work belongs to a definite school of poetry, and that his verses show no marked originality. At the same time he never stoops to direct plagiarism, and whatever similarities exist with other poems are largely those of style and spirit, not of phraseology.

But there is much more in English Bards than the outburst against critics; dexterously Byron proceeded himself to don the garb of judge and to pass sentence on men older and better known than he. He had early adopted a conservative attitude towards the versification and subject-matter of poetry, a position which he preserved in theory throughout his life.[84] Having learned to use glibly the catchwords of the Augustans, he ventured to praise Crabbe, Campbell, Rogers, and Gifford for adhering tenaciously to the principles of Sense, Wit, Taste, and Correctness established by Pope. Acting on this basis, he was justified in condemning his own age for its disregard of what he considered to be the standard models of poetic expression.[85] Under the tutelage of Gifford, he had acquired a distaste for novelty which led him to look upon the romanticists as Gifford looked upon the Della Cruscans, and which induced him to carry his defence of custom and tradition almost to the verge of bigotry.

Something must be allowed, too, for the operation of contemporary ideas upon Byron. The leaders of the so-called Romantic Movement, partly because many of them had associated themselves with the Jacobin party in England, partly because their poetry seemed strange, were met from the first with opposition in many quarters.[86] Language of a tenor hostile to their work may be met with in Mathias, the Anti-Jacobin, Epics of the Ton, the Simpliciad, and Hodgson’s Gentle Alterative. The suggestions for many of the anti-romantic views since attributed to Byron alone came doubtless from other satirists, whose accusations Byron fitted into telling phrases.

An excellent illustration of this is to be found in Byron’s unprovoked attack upon Scott, in which the younger poet, seizing upon the well-known fact that Scott had received money for his verses, terms him “hireling bard” and “Apollo’s venal son.” Perhaps Byron may have shared with Young the snobbish notions about money expressed in the latter’s couplet:

“His [Apollo’s] sacred influence never should be sold;

’Tis arrant simony to sing for gold.”[87]

It is more probable, however, that he had in mind a passage from Epics of the Ton, in which Scott’s “well-paid lays” had been mentioned in a contemptuous manner.[88] Even in his charge that the plot of the Lay of the Last Minstrel was “incongruous and absurd,” Byron had been anticipated in a note to All the Talents.[89] The whole tirade against Scott in English Bards was particularly unfortunate because, as was revealed later, that author had remonstrated with Jeffrey on the “offensive criticism” of Hours of Idleness.

Byron’s antagonism to the so-called Lake School of poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, began early and continued long. In 1809 it is improbable that he had any acquaintance with any one of the three; yet he placed them in a conspicuous and unenviable position in English Bards. His primary motives in attacking them have already been indicated. Considering them as faddists who were lowering the dignity of the author’s calling and degrading poetic style, he followed the Simpliciad in condemning them for the contemptible nature of their subject-matter, for their simple diction, for their fondness for the wild and unnatural, and for their studied avoidance of conventionality.

Southey’s first verse had appeared in 1794; while Wordsworth and Coleridge had been really introduced to the public through Lyrical Ballads. Opposition to them and their theories had begun to be shown almost immediately, allusions to Southey, in particular, being fairly common in satiric literature before 1809. Mathias had said ironically with reference to Southey’s first poem:

“I cannot ...

Quit the dull Cam, and ponder in the Park

A six-weeks Epick, or a Joan of Arc.”[90]

In the Anti-Jacobin Southey’s poetry had been ludicrously parodied, and the members of the Lake School had been branded as revolutionists. Epics of the Ton had ridiculed Southey and Wordsworth,[91] and the Simpliciad had accused all three of “childish prattle.”[92] Byron, then, was no pioneer in his satire on the romanticists, nor did he contribute anything original to the controversy. The frequency and rapidity with which Southey had published long epics had impressed others before Byron cried in English Bards:

“Oh, Southey! Southey! cease thy varied song!

A bard may chaunt too often and too long.”[93]

In this early satire Byron showed no personal animosity towards Southey; he introduced him merely as a too prolific and too eccentric scribbler, to be jeered at rather than hated. The fierce feud between the two men was of a later growth.

Picking Southey as the leader of the romanticists, Byron treats Wordsworth as merely a “dull disciple,” silly in his choice of subjects and prosaic in his poetry, “the meanest object of the lowly group.” Perhaps the most striking defect in the satire levelled at this poet is the lack of any recognition of his ability, an omission all the more noticeable because Byron, in the last two cantos of Childe Harold, was influenced so strongly by Wordsworth’s conception of the relation between man and nature. Coleridge receives even less consideration. He is “the gentle Coleridge—to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear,” and is ridiculed mainly because of his Lines to a Young Ass, a poem which had previously excited the mirth of the Simpliciad.[94] The slashing manner in which the boy satirist disposes of his great contemporaries is almost unparalleled.[95]

Byron’s satire on the Rev. Samuel Bowles (1762–1850) illustrates one phase of his veneration for Pope, and connects him with another Pope enthusiast, Gifford. In the Baviad Gifford had gone out of his way to confront and refute Weston, who, in an article in the Gentleman’s Magazine, had adduced evidence to prove that Pope’s moral character was not above reproach. Gifford, unable to dispute the validity of the facts, had contented himself with describing the critic as “canker’d Weston,” and terming him in a note “this nightman of literature.”[96] Bowles, whose early sonnets (1789) had attracted the admiration of Coleridge, published in 1807 an edition of Pope’s Works in ten volumes, in which he followed Weston in not sparing the infirmities and mendacities of the great Augustan. The effect of this work on Byron was like that of Weston’s on Gifford, and the result was that Bowles was pilloried in English Bards as “the wretch who did for hate what Mallet did for hire.” Nor did the quarrel end here. It grew eventually into a heated controversy between Bowles and Byron, carried on while the latter was in Italy, in the course of which Byron was provoked into calling Pope “the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence.”[97] So strongly did he feel on the matter that he wrote, even as late as 1821, concerning English Bards: “The part which I regret the least is that which regards Mr. Bowles, with reference to Pope.”[98] Byron’s exaltation of Pope was made a positive issue in the unreserved commendation which he gave to Campbell, Rogers, and Crabbe, all three of whom were, in most respects, firm in their allegiance to that master’s principles of poetry.

An odd freak of fancy led Byron to pose in English Bards as a watchful guardian of morality in literature, though even at that date he was the author of verses which are not altogether blameless. That he should upbraid Monk Lewis, Moore, and Strangford as “melodious advocates of lust” may well seem extraordinary to the reader who recalls the poem which Byron sent to Pigot, August 10, 1806, asking that it be printed separately as “improper for the perusal of ladies.”[99] The truth is that Byron was again treading in the steps of others. The virtuous but somewhat prurient Mathias, excited by Lewis’s novel Ambrosio, or the Monk (1795), which has given the writer notoriety and a nickname, had assailed the author in Pursuits of Literature,[100] and the supposed voluptuousness of the story had not escaped the notice of the Anti-Jacobin and Epics of the Ton. Byron had thus more than one precedent for his ironic reference to Lewis’s “chaste descriptions.” Moore’s Epistles, Odes, and other Poems (1806) had been censured by the Edinburgh Review in an article which described Moore as “the most licentious of modern versifiers.” All the Talents had questioned Moore’s morality, and Epics of the Ton had mentioned a writer who,

“Like Tommy Moore has scratch’d the itching throng,

And tickled matrons with a spicy song.”

Byron had been a delighted reader of the Irish poet and had been influenced by him in the more sentimental verses of Hours of Idleness; nevertheless he repeated the imputations of the other satirists in referring to him as

“Little! young Catullus of his day,

As sweet, but as immoral, as his lay.”

To Viscount Strangford (1780–1855), of whose translation of Camoëns he had formerly been very fond, Byron offered advice:

“Be warm, but pure; be amorous, but be chaste.”

In the same vein as this grave admonition are the remarks which the poet makes upon the Argyle Institution, founded by Colonel Greville as a resort for gambling and dancing. Digressing for a while without any logical reason, Byron proceeds to condemn social follies, especially those fostered by “blest retreats of infamy and ease.” The passage includes some lines on round dancing, which anticipate Byron’s attack on that amusement in his later satire, The Waltz.

Gifford’s Mæviad, after making some final thrusts at the Della Cruscans, had shifted its attack to contemporary actors and dramatists. That satire upon them was justified may be gathered from Gifford’s remark in his Preface: “I know not if the stage has been so low since the days of Gammer Gurton as at this hour.”[101] During the fifteen years following the date of this statement it cannot be averred that circumstances made it any the less applicable to the theatrical situation in England, and Byron, in 1809, in ridiculing the “motley sight” which met his eyes on the stage of his time, had perhaps even more justification than Gifford had had in 1794.[102]

Of the dramatists whom Gifford had mentioned with disfavor, only two, Frederick Reynolds (1784–1841) and Miles Andrews (died 1814), were selected for notice by Byron. What the Mæviad had called “Reynolds’ flippant trash” was still enjoying some vogue, and English Bards took occasion to speak of the author as “venting his ‘dammes!’ ‘poohs!’ and ‘zounds!’”[103] Miles Andrews, whose “Wonder-working poetry” had been laughed at in the Baviad, was barely mentioned by Byron as a writer who “may live in prologues, though his dramas die.” In general the satire on the stage in English Bards consists of uninteresting remarks on some mediocre dramatists, among them Theodore Hook (1788–1841), Andrew Cherry (1762–1812), James Kenney (1780–1849), Thomas Sheridan (1775–1817), Lumley Skeffington (1762–1850), and T. J. Dibdin (1771–1841). It is a fair contention that this digression is the dreariest portion of the poem. The interpolated lines on the Italian Opera, sent to Dallas, February 22, 1809, after an evening spent at a performance, attack that amusement on the ground of its indecency. They are akin in spirit to similar passages in Young,[104] Pope,[105] Churchill,[106] and Bramston.[107]

The satire on less-known poets is indiscriminate and not always discerning. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), who, in his Botanic Garden (1789–92), was a decadent imitator of Pope, is contemptuously dismissed as “a mighty master of unmeaning rhyme.” Another once popular bard, William Hayley (1745–1820), still remembered as the friend and biographer of Cowper, is branded with a stinging couplet:

“His style in youth or age is still the same,

Forever feeble and forever tame.”

The Delia Cruscans are passed over as already crushed by Gifford, and “sepulchral Grahame,” “hoarse Fitzgerald,” the Cottles from Bristol, Maurice, and the cobbler poets, Blackett and Bloomfield, get only a fleeting sneer. H. J. Pye, the laureate, once a butt of Mathias, is mentioned only once.

Two characterizations, however, are distinguished above the others by their singular virulence. The first was a vicious onslaught on Lord Carlisle, the friend of Fox, Byron’s relative and guardian, who had been included among the sentimental rhymsters in Tickell’s Wreath of Fashion. To him his ward had dedicated Poems Original and Translated; but the peer’s carelessness about introducing Byron into the House of Lords had irritated the young poet, and he changed what had previously been a flattering notice in English Bards into a ferocious assault:

“The puny schoolboy and his early lay

Men pardon, if his follies pass away;

But who forgives the Senior’s ceaseless verse,

Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse.”

The sharpest satire in the poem was inserted merely to satisfy a personal grudge. Hewson Clarke (1787–1832), editor of The Satirist, a monthly magazine, had made sport of Hours of Idleness in an issue for October, 1807, and had harshly reviewed Poems Original and Translated in August, 1808. Byron replied in a passage full of violent invective, describing Clarke as

“A would-be satirist, a hired Buffoon,

A monthly scribbler of some low Lampoon.”[108]

These lines Byron never repudiated; he appended to them in 1816 the note: “Right enough: this was well deserved and well laid on.”[109]

English Bards closes with a defiance and a challenge. The poet, then only twenty-one, repeating that his only motive has been “to sternly speak the truth,” dares his opponents to meet him in the open and declares his willingness to engage them. There is something amusing in the pompous way in which Byron, throwing down the gauntlet, boasts of his own indifference and callousness to criticism. He had, however, achieved at least one of his two objects: he had answered hostile reviewers in a manner which made it plain that he would not submit unresistingly to supercilious comment on his work. Assuredly he had turned the weapons of his critics against themselves.

Nothing was more natural than that Byron, his wrath for the most part evaporated, should regret his bitterness in cases where his hasty judgment had carried him too far. On his way home from Greece he wrote Dallas: “At this period when I can think and act coolly, I regret that I have written it.”[110] The story of the events leading to the suppression of the fifth and last edition may be given in the words of Byron to Leigh Hunt, October 22, 1815: “I was correcting the fifth edition of E. B. for the press, when Rogers represented to me that he knew Lord and Lady Holland would not be sorry if I suppressed any further publication of that poem; and I immediately acquiesced, and with great pleasure, for I had attacked them upon a fancied and false provocation, with many others; and neither was, nor am, sorry to have done what I could to stifle that furious rhapsody.”[111] The result was that the whole impression of this edition was burned, only a few copies being rescued, and when, in 1816, Byron left England forever, he signed a Power of Attorney forbidding republication in any form.[112] His mature opinion of the work is expressed in a comment written at Diodati in 1816: “The greater part of this Satire I most sincerely wish had never been written—not only on account of the injustice of some of the critical and some of the personal part of it—but the tone and temper are such as I cannot approve.”

It now remains to compare English Bards with other examples of English classical satire, if one may apply that title to poems which use the heroic couplet and follow the methods employed by Pope. Byron’s versification in his early satires shows the effect of a careful study of Pope. It is singularly free from double rhymes, there being but five instances of them in English Bards.[113] Byron was somewhat more sparing than Pope in his use of the run-on line. Adopting as a basis of judgment the conclusion of Mr. Gosse that “with occasional exceptions, the presence or want of a mark of punctuation may be made the determining element,” we find that, of the 1070 lines in English Bards, approximately 101 are of the run-on variety, that is, about ten out of every hundred. In Mr. Gosse’s collation of typical passages from other poets, he estimates that Dryden has 11, Pope 4, and Keats 40 run-on lines out of every hundred. In the whole length of Byron’s poem there is but one run-on couplet; in a hundred consecutive lines selected by Mr. Gosse, Dryden has one such example and Pope none. Twice Byron employs the triplet,[114] and he has two alexandrines.[115] The medial cæsura after the 4th, 5th, or 6th foot of the line occurs with great regularity as it does in Pope’s work. There are a few minor peculiarities in rhyming,[116] but in general the rhymes are pure. In summarizing, it is safe to say that Byron adhered closely to the metrical principles established by Pope. Not until Hunt, Keats, and Shelley introduced the looser and less monotonous system of versification used in Rimini, Endymion, and Epipsychidion, was the heroic couplet freed from the shackles with which Pope had bound it.

Byron’s candid acknowledgment that, in English Bards, he was venturing “o’er the path which Pope and Gifford trod before” suggests at once a comparison of his work with that of the two earlier authors. Although the Dunciad and English Bards are alike in that they are in the same metre and actuated by much the same motive, there are many differences in execution between the poems. The Dunciad is, as the Preface of “Martinus Scriblerus” states, a true mock-heroic, with a fable “one and entire” dealing with the Empire and the Goddess of Dulness, with machinery setting forth a “continued chain of allegories,” and with a succession of incidents and episodes imitated from epic writers. English Bards, beginning as a paraphrase of Juvenal, has no real action and is composed of a series of descriptions and characterizations, joined by some necessary connective material. Pope’s method of satire is frequently indirect: he involves his victims in the plot, making them ridiculous through the situations in which he places them. Instead of inveighing against Blackmore, Pope pictures him as victor in a braying contest. Byron, on the other hand, uses this method only once in English Bards—in burlesquing the duel between Jeffrey and Moore. Instinctively he prefers taking up his adversaries one by one and covering each with abuse. The Dunciad, with rare exceptions, assails only personal enemies of the satirist, and these, for the most part, men already despised and defenceless; Byron attacks many prominent writers of whom he knows nothing except their work, and against whom he has no grievance of a private nature. Thus in plan and operation the two satires present some striking divergences.

So far as matters of detail are concerned, English Bards is not always in the manner of the Dunciad and the other satires of Pope. It has been observed of Dryden, and occasionally of Pope, that at its best their satire, however much it may be aimed at particular persons, tends to become universal in its application, just as had been the case with the finest work of the Latin satirists. Horace’s Bore, for instance, was doubtless once a definite Roman citizen; Dryden’s Buckingham has a place in history: but the satire on them is pointed and effective when applied to their counterparts in the twentieth century. The same is true of Pope’s Atticus, who is described in language which is both specific and general, fitted both to Addison and to a definite type of humanity. The faculty of thus creating types was not part of Byron’s art. For one thing, he seldom, except in some of his earliest satires, employs type names, and he carefully prints in full, without asterisks or blank spaces, the names of those whom he attacks. His accusations are too precise to admit of transference to others, and his epithets, even when they are unsatisfactory, cannot be dissevered from the one to whom they apply. The satire on Wordsworth, illustrated as it is by quotations and by references to that author’s poetry, is appropriate to him alone, and would have soon been forgotten had it not been for the eminence of the victim. It is otherwise with Pope’s description of Sporus, which is often applied to others, even when it is forgotten that the original Sporus was Lord Hervey.

In many respects Byron had more in common with Gifford than with Pope. It is Gifford to whom, in English Bards, he refers so often as a master; it is he whom he mentions in 1811 as his “Magnus Apollo”[117]; and it was of the Baviad and the Mæviad that he was thinking when he conceived his plan of hunting down the “clamorous brood of Folly.”

Pope, preserving in his satire a calm deliberation which enabled him both to conceal and to concentrate his inward wrath, was capable, even when most in a rage, of a sustained analysis of those whom he hated, and seldom let his temper sweep him off his feet. Gifford and Byron prefer a more slashing and a less reserved method. Dallas once said of Byron: “His feelings rather than his judgment guided his pen.”[118] The same idea was also expressed by the poet himself:—“Almost all I have written has been mere passion.”[119] These two statements, confirming each other, explain the lack of poise and the want of a sense of proportion which are apparent in English Bards, as they were apparent in the Baviad. Unlike Dryden, neither Gifford nor Pope allows his victims any merit; each paints entirely in sombre colors, without ever perfecting a finished sketch or alleviating the black picture with the admission of a single virtue. Their conclusions, naturally, are unpleasantly dogmatic, founded as they are on prejudice and seldom subjected to reason. Most satire is, of course, biassed and unjust, but the careful craftsman takes good care that his charges shall have a semblance of plausibility and shall not defeat their purpose by arousing in reaction a sympathy for the defendant.[120] Satire written in a rage is likely to be mere invective, and invective, even when embodied in artistic form, is usually less effective than deliberate irony. Byron in his later satire learned better than to portray an enemy as all fool or all knave.

Gifford was, as he sedulously protested, fighting for a principle, aiming at the extermination of certain forms of affectation and false taste in poetry. There is no ground for suspecting his sincerity, any more than there is for questioning Byron’s motive in his effort to defend the classical standards against the encroachments of romanticism. It so happened that Gifford was performing a genuine service to letters, while Byron engaged himself in a struggle at once unnecessary and hopeless. In their zeal and enthusiasm, however, both satirists lost a feeling for values. Gifford delivered sledge-hammer blows at butterflies; Byron classed together, without discernment, the work of mediocrity and genius, and heaped abuse indiscriminately upon poetaster and poet.

Gifford’s method, like Byron’s, was descriptive and direct, and his satires have little action. The Baviad, with its dialogue framework, is not unlike some of Pope’s Epistles, while the Mæviad is more akin to English Bards. Byron, following Mathias and Gifford, employed prose notes to reinforce his verse, but he never, like Gifford, padded them with quotations from the men whom he was attacking. In both the Mæviad and English Bards names are printed in full. Gifford used no type names, nor did he succeed in creating a type. In style and diction Byron is Gifford’s superior. The latter was often vulgar and inelegant, and his ear for rhythm and melody was poor. Byron’s instinctive good taste kept him from blotting his pages with the language of the streets. His study of Pope, moreover, had enabled him to acquire something of the smoothness as well as of the vigor of that master.

It may be said in general of English Bards that it owes most in versification to Pope, and most in manner and structure to Gifford. There are, however, other satirists to whom Byron may have been slightly indebted. At the time when he was preparing British Bards, Francis Hodgson (1781–1852), his close friend, irritated by some severe criticism in the Edinburgh Review on his translation of Juvenal (1807), was planning his Gentle Alterative prepared for the Reviewers, which appeared in Lady Jane Grey; and other Poems (1809). The fact that the provocation was the same as for English Bards and that the two authors were acquaintances offers a curious case of parallelism in literature. It is certain, however, that Byron’s satire, which is much longer than the Gentle Alterative, is indebted to it only in minor respects, if at all. Both satires mention the ludicrous mistake of an Edinburgh Review article in attributing to Payne Knight some Greek passages really quoted from Pindar; but this error had been discussed in a long note to All the Talents, and was a favorite literary joke of the period. Both poets, too, call upon the master, Gifford, to do his part in castigating the age. Beyond these superficial similarities, it may safely be asserted that Byron borrowed nothing from Hodgson.

It is curious that the striking simile of the eagle shot by an arrow winged with a feather from his own plume used by Moore in Corruption[121] should have been employed by Byron[122] in speaking of the tragic death of Henry Kirke White (1785–1805), the religious poet and protégé of Southey. The simile, which has been traced to Fragment 123 of Æschylus, occurs also in Waller’s To a Lady Singing a Song of His Own Composing. It is somewhat remarkable that two poets in two successive years should have happened upon the same figure, each working it out so elaborately. Aside from this one parallelism, Moore’s early satires, almost entirely political, would seem to have had no definite influence upon English Bards.

It has been shown, then, that Byron’s ideas in his satire were not always entirely his own, and that he reflected, in many cases, the views and sometimes the phraseology of other satirists, notably Pope, Churchill, and Gifford. English Bards belongs to the school of English classical satire, and, as such, has the peculiarities and the established features common to the different types of that genre. In the preface to the second edition of his poem, Byron said: “I can safely say that I have attacked none personally, who did not commence on the offensive.”[123] To accept this literally would be to misinterpret Byron’s whole theory of satire. Whether he admitted it or not he was a great personal satirist—in English Bards, primarily a personal satirist. Looking back at the time when his wrath was fiercest, he said: “Like Ishmael, my hand was against all men, and all men’s against me.”[124] Even when satirising a principle or a movement, he was invariably led to attack the individuals who represented it. Swift’s satiric code:

“Malice never was his aim;

He lash’d the vice, but spar’d the name;

No individual could resent,

Where thousands equally were meant,”

was exactly contrary to Byron’s practice. He sought always to contend with persons, to decide questions, not by argument, but by a hand-to-hand grapple.

The peculiar features of English Bards are to be explained by the author’s character. He did not let his reason rule. From notes and letters we learn that he was often in doubt whether to praise or censure certain minor figures: it was on the spur of the moment that he changed “coxcomb Gell” to “classic Gell.” He was courageous and aggressive, but he was also unfair and illogical. There is little real humor in English Bards, so little that one is inclined to wonder where Jeaffreson discovered the “irresistibly comic verse” of which he speaks. When the satirist tries to be playful, the result is usually brutality. He has not yet acquired the conversational railling mood which he utilized so admirably in Beppo.

In spite of its crudities, its lack of restraint, and its manifest prejudices, English Bards shows many signs of power. In the light of the greater satire of Don Juan, it seems immature and inartistic, but it surpasses any work of a similar kind since the death of Pope. It is Byron’s masterpiece in classical satire. To excel it he had to turn for inspiration to another quarter, and to change both his method and his style.

CHAPTER V
“HINTS FROM HORACE” AND “THE CURSE OF MINERVA”

On July 2, 1809, Byron, accompanied by his friend, John Cam Hobhouse, sailed from Falmouth for Lisbon on a trip that was to take him to Spain, Malta, Greece, and Turkey. When he returned to England in July, 1811, after two years of travel and adventure, he brought with him “4000 lines of one kind or another,” including the first two cantos of Childe Harold and two satires, Hints from Horace and The Curse of Minerva. Hints from Horace, written in March, 1811, during the poet’s second visit to Athens, is dated March 14, 1811, on the last page of the most authentic manuscript. It was composed at the Capuchin Convent in Athens, where he had met accidentally with a copy of Horace’s epistle Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica, commonly known as the Ars Poetica.

The history of the fortunes of this work is perhaps worth relating. Byron, on his arrival, handed it over at once to Dallas, without giving him a hint of Childe Harold; indeed, only the latter’s obvious disappointment induced the poet to show him the Pilgrimage, which then seemed of little importance to its author. On September 4, 1811, Byron requested Dallas to aid him in correcting the proofs of Hints from Horace, and “in adapting the parallel passages of the imitation in such places to the original as may enable the reader not to lose sight of the allusion.”[125] There is, however, no reason for thinking that Dallas actually undertook the task, for on October 13th Byron complained to Hodgson that the labor of editing was still hanging fire, and begged the latter to assist him. Shortly after, owing partly to the adverse criticism of Dallas, and partly to Murray’s wish not to endanger the success of Childe Harold, the idea of immediate publication was put aside for some years. In 1820, Byron, then resident in Italy, was reminded of his unprinted satire, and wrote Murray to inform him that the manuscript had been left, among various papers, with Hobhouse’s father in England.[126] At intervals he expressed anxiety about the proofs, which Murray, exercising his discretion, delayed sending. From this revived project Byron was, for a time, dissuaded by the wise counsel of Hobhouse, who suggested that the poem would require much revision. Nevertheless on January 11, 1821, he informed Murray that he saw little to alter,[127] and accused him of having neglected to comply with his orders. A postscript to a letter of February 16, 1821, indicates that he was contemplating printing the Hints with its Latin original.[128] After March 4, 1822, there is no further allusion to the satire in his correspondence, and the question of printing it seems to have been forgotten. Although a few selections, amounting to 156 lines, were inserted in Dallas’s Recollections (1824), the poem did not appear complete until the Works were published by Murray in 1831.

Hints from Horace, through a curious perversity of judgment, was always a great favorite with Byron, and was estimated by him as one of his finest performances. His mature opinion of it and a possible cause for his preference are given in a letter to Murray, March 1, 1821: “Pray request Mr. Hobhouse to adjust the Latin to the English: the imitation is so close that I am unwilling to deprive it of its principal merit—its closeness. I look upon it and my Pulci as by far the best things of my doing.”[129] On September 23, 1820, when he had published portions of his masterpiece, Don Juan, he said, referring to the period of Hints from Horace: “I wrote better then than now.”[130] No intelligent reader will be likely to agree with Byron’s preposterous verdict on his own work, for Hints from Horace, although designed as a sequel to English Bards, is so much less vigorous and brilliant that it suffers decidedly by a comparison with the earlier satire. The poet, far from the scenes and associations where his rage had been aroused, has lost the angry inspiration which raised English Bards above mere ranting, and the white heat of his passion has cooled with the flight of time. The praise which Byron bestowed upon his poem is additional testimony to the often repeated assertion that authors are incompetent critics of their own productions.

Byron’s boastful claim for the accuracy of Hints from Horace as a version of the Ars Poetica may possibly lead to some misconceptions. Professor A. S. Cook, in his Art of Poetry, has pointed out some particular passages in which the English poet imitated his model, and has proved that he followed Horace, in places, with reasonable closeness. But Hints from Horace is far from being, like Byron’s version of the first canto of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, a mere translation. It must be remembered that Byron, in his secondary title, defined the Hints in three different ways in as many manuscripts, as “an Allusion,” as an “Imitation,” and as a “Partial Imitation.” The fact seems to be that the work conforms, in general, to the structure and argument of the Ars Poetica, in many cases translating literally the phrasing of the original, but altering and reorganizing the satire to fit current conditions.

The idea of thus preserving the continuity of Horace’s poem, while revising and readapting its text, was probably first conceived by Oldham in his English version of the Ars Poetica. In his preface Oldham stated his design as follows: “I resolved to alter the scene from Rome to London, and to make Use of English Names of Men, Places, and Customs, where the Parallel would decently permit, which I conceived would give a kind of New Air to the Poem, and render it more agreeable to the Relish of the Present Age.” Accordingly, while keeping roughly to the text of Horace, he introduced plentiful references to English poets. Byron also gives his satire a modern setting, but in so doing, takes more liberties than Oldham. He substitutes Milton for Homer as the classic example of the epic poet; he makes Shakspere instead of Æschylus the standard writer of drama. He inserts many passages, such as the remarks on the Italian Opera, on Methodism, and on the versification of Hudibras, which have no counterparts in the Ars Poetica. Oldham had refrained from satirising his contemporaries; Byron improves every opportunity for assailing his old antagonists. Allusions to “Granta” and her Gothic Halls, to “Cam’s stream,” to Grub-street, and to Parliament make Hints from Horace a thoroughly modern poem. We may apply to it Warburton’s comment on Pope’s Imitations: “Whoever expects a paraphrase of Horace, or a faithful copy of his genius, or manner of writing ... will be much disappointed.” Byron restates, without much alteration, the critical dicta which Horace had established as applicable to poetry in all times and countries; he takes the plan of the Ars Poetica as a rough guide for his English adaptation; but he introduces so many digressions and changes so many names that his satire is firmly stamped with his own individuality.

There is no ground for supposing that any one of the scores of translations and imitations of the Ars Poetica had ever met Byron’s eye[131]; the nearest prototypes in English poetry of Hints from Horace are probably Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Epistle to Augustus. Certain superficial resemblances have led critics to the inference that Pope’s Essay is accountable for much of Byron’s Hints. It is remarkable that the two authors, born just a century apart, should have attempted satires so similar in tone at ages approximately the same. Pope’s Essay on Criticism, composed probably in 1709, was printed in 1711, a hundred years before Byron wrote Hints from Horace. In this work Pope tried to do for criticism what Horace had done for poetry: that is, to codify and express in compact form some generally accepted principles of the art. Pope, however, saw fit to introduce incidentally some conventional precepts concerning the subject-matter of literary criticism, borrowing them from Horace, and Horace’s French imitator, Boileau. Thus in Pope’s Essay are to be found many of the maxims which Byron transferred into Hints from Horace from the Latin source. The correspondence between such passages in the Essay and their counterparts in Hints from Horace has led Weiser to conclude, from a study of parallel ideas, that Byron’s poem is based, to a large extent, on Pope’s work.[132] His thesis, however, has been all but conclusively refuted by Levy, who shows that in the nine instances of parallelism adduced by Weiser as evidence, the lines quoted from Hints from Horace are really much closer to lines from the Ars Poetica than they are to the citations from the Essay on Criticism.[133] Undoubtedly there are couplets in the Hints that recall the Essay; but in view of Byron’s specific statement of his obligation to Horace, it would be rash to assume that Pope’s influence was more than a general one, the natural result of Byron’s careful study of his style and manner. Pope’s Epistle to Augustus, a paraphrase of Horace’s Book II, Epistle 1, is, in several respects, not unlike Hints from Horace. It pursues the same method in substituting English names for Greek and Roman ones, and in replacing classical references by allusions to contemporary life. Moreover the Epistle, with its judgment on English writers, its criticism of the drama, and its estimate of the age, is structurally more akin to Hints from Horace than is ordinarily supposed.

It would be superfluous to attempt to add anything to Professor Cook’s work in outlining the instances in which Byron merely translated Horace. A single illustration will suffice to show how the same Latin lines were treated by Pope, and, later, by Byron. Horace’s counsel:—

“Vos exemplaria Græca

Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna”[134]

is paraphrased roughly in the Essay on Criticism as,

“Be Homer’s works your study and delight,

Read them by day and meditate by night.”[135]

In this case Byron’s version,

“Ye who seek finished models, never cease

By day and night to read the works of Greece,”[136]

is slightly more literal.

Horace’s treatise, technically an epistle, suffers from a want of coherence. In plan it is merely a group of maxims, with illustrations and amplifications. Hints from Horace is even more muddled and formless. It is like a collection of detached thoughts in verse, with each single observation jotted down almost at haphazard without regard to what comes before or after. It is no exaggeration to say that whole sections of the satire might be lifted bodily from one page to another without perceptibly affecting the continuity of thought. This defect, obscured in Horace and Pope by the epigrammatic brilliancy of separate phrases and the lift of “winged words,” has, in Byron’s poem, few counterbalancing virtues. Hints from Horace lacks the finished perfection of style which distinguishes the Ars Poetica and the Epistle to Augustus. Its versification is, except in isolated lines, feeble and careless, far inferior to that of English Bards, and even sinking at times, as in the passage on Hudibras,[137] into bare prosing. One finds in the poem confirmation of Byron’s confession to Lord Holland in 1812:—“Latterly, I can weave a nine-line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning.”[138] If the dates furnished by the poet are correct, 722 lines, at least, of the satire must have been composed in two weeks, a speed which may explain some of the defects in execution. Certainly, even with due allowance for Byron’s strange fondness, it must be considered one of his poorest works in structure, diction, and versification.

Nor can it, viewed merely as a medium for satire, claim a high rank. It is too obviously didactic in its purpose and too general in its attacks. It does not even possess the special interest which attaches to English Bards because of the references to contemporary and famous writers in the latter work. Only a few lines are devoted to personal satire, and these seldom do more than repeat or amplify the criticism embodied in the earlier poem. The result is that Hints from Horace, taken as a satire only, is open to a charge of futility, in that its motive is not definite and its satire is too scattered. It cannot go straight to the mark, because it is aiming at no particular target.

As in English Bards, a large proportion of the satire is placed in prose notes. The longest passage of satire in verse is that directed at Jeffrey. The lines:—

“On shores of Euxine or Ægean sea,

My hate, untraveiled, fondly turned to thee,”

show that Byron’s rage at that critic was still smouldering. Repeating the bombastic challenge uttered in the postscript to the second edition of English Bards, the satirist taunts Jeffrey with disinclination or inability to reply to the assault made upon him. It is probable that the Scotchman never saw this passage in Hints from Horace; at any rate he did not deign to answer Byron’s abuse, and maintained a discreet silence during the period of the latter’s anger.

The lines on Southey reiterate in a commonplace fashion what Byron had said before on the same subject, a long prose note dwelling on the heaviness of Southey’s epics, particularly of The Curse of Kehama (1810), which had recently appeared. Another elaborate note is aimed at the “cobbler-laureates,” Bloomfield and Blackett, whom Byron still mentions with contempt. Scott and Bowles receive some passing uncomplimentary remarks; Fitzgerald is referred to once as “Fitz-scribble”; Wordsworth is barely alluded to, and Coleridge is not spoken of at all. The review of the drama is uninteresting and dull. Byron persists in his condemnation of the Opera on the ground of its immorality, although, somewhat inconsistently, he defends plays against the prudish censure of “Methodistic men.”

An occasional line suggests a similar passage from other English satirists. Thus Byron’s couplet,

“Satiric rhyme first sprang from selfish spleen.

You doubt—see Dryden, Pope, St. Patrick’s Dean,”

recalls the words of Cowper,

“But (I might instance in St. Patrick’s Dean)

Too often rails to gratify his spleen.”[139]

The reference to Pitt’s skill in coining words may have been remembered from many jests on the subject in the Rolliad and the Works of Peter Pindar. The scorn of “French flippancy and German sentiment” re-echoes the violent opposition of the Anti-Jacobin to the spread of foreign ideas. A note on “the millennium of the black letter”[140] calls to mind the hatred of Mathias for antiquaries and searchers for old manuscripts[141] and another note[142] reinforces Gifford in abusing T. Vaughan, Esq., the “last of the Cruscanti.”

The single striking feature of Hints from Horace is its summary of “Life’s little tale,” based upon a corresponding passage in the Ars Poetica, in which Byron describes graphically the career of a young nobleman under the Georges, from his “simple childhood’s dawning days” to the time when “Age palsies every limb,” and he sinks into his grave “crazed, querulous, forsaken, half-forgot.” Despite some obvious exaggerations and some traces of affected pessimism, the poet was undoubtedly drawing largely upon his own experience. The tone of the lines is bitter, unrelieved by sympathy or humor, paralleled in Byron’s work only in the Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog.

The Curse of Minerva, composed at approximately the same time as Hints from Horace,—it is dated from the Capuchin Convent at Athens, March 17, 1811—was actually printed in 1812, but not for public circulation. The first edition, probably unauthorized, was brought out in Philadelphia in 1815. Meanwhile the 54 introductory lines, beginning:—

“Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,

Along Morea’s hills the setting sun,”

had appeared in Canto III of the Corsair (1814). A fragmentary version of 111 lines, entitled The Malediction of Minerva, or the Athenian Marble-Market, signed “Steropes” and published in the New Monthly Magazine for April, 1815, was disowned by Byron as a “miserable and villanous copy.”[143] The stanzas on Lord Elgin in Childe Harold[144] had already expressed Byron’s condemnation of the conduct of that nobleman, and the poet doubtless believed that nothing was to be gained by again airing his indignation. Possibly, too, as Moore suggests,[145] a remonstrance from Lord Elgin or some of his relatives may have been an inducement to sacrifice a work which could add little to his reputation.