Claude Moore Fuess

“ The poet still prefers, in many cases, to make specific persons responsible for intolerable systems; but he is gradually forsaking petty aims and rising to a far nobler position as a critic of his age.
The satire in Don Juan is still more remarkable when we consider the field which it surveys. Byron is no longer dealing with local topics, but with subjects of momentous interest to all humanity. He is assailing, not a small coterie of editors or an immodest dance, but a bigoted and absolute government, a hypocritical society, and, a false idealism, wherever they exist. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When continental Europe of the middle nineteenth century thought of Byron, it pictured him as a nobleman who had assailed tyrannical monarchy, who had aided Italy and Greece in their struggles for independence, and who had been willing to fight for the sake of the principles in which he believed. The words of Byron’s political creed have a noble ring: “The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. ”

“ Deep emotion, tragedy, and pathos are all to be met with in the Morgante, but each is counter-balanced by mockery, comedy, or realism. It is this recurring antithesis, this continual introduction of the grotesque into the midst of what is, by itself, dignified and serious, that is the distinctive peculiarity of Pulci’s manner. The mere turn of a phrase makes a situation absurd. There is no intensity about this Florentine; he espouses no theories and advocates no creeds; he is content to have his laugh and to set others chuckling. ”

“ Doubtless there is something artificial and affected in much of Byron’s cynical comment on women and love; but if we are inclined to distrust this man of many amours who delights in flaunting his past before the eyes of his shocked compatriots, we must remember that there is probably no conscious insincerity in his words. Byron frequently deludes not only his readers but himself, and his satire on women, when it is not a kind of bravado, is merely part of his worldly philosophy. ”

“ Birrell, “is more to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind—a strong, gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage if you will—nay, as sour and savage as you like, but spiteful never.” Without subscribing unreservedly to Mr. Birrell’s preference of Johnson over Pope, we may still point out that the most conspicuous feature of Byron’s satire, as, indeed, of most of his other poetry, is the underlying personality of the author, too powerful and aggressive to be obscured or hidden. ”

“ If only the Novelle were considered, however, Byron’s obligation to Casti would be confined chiefly to Beppo, for in his tales the Italian seldom leaves his theme, as Byron does in Don Juan, to assail individuals or institutions. He touches lightly on the weaknesses of human nature, on the frailties and illicit indulgences of full-blooded men and women, but he is swayed by no impelling purpose, and he wants the fundamental seriousness of the genuine satirist. ”

“ The significant feature of The Devil’s Drive is the mocking spirit which animates the poem. Although the humor is sometimes clumsy and cheap, and the style formless and crude, the underlying tone is no longer ferocious, and the satire is no longer mere invective. The work is practically the only satire of Byron’s before Beppo in which are mingled the cool scorn, the bizarre wit, and the grotesque realism which were to be blended in Don Juan. ”

“ In thus defending the name and doctrines of Pope, Byron was consistent during his literary lifetime, although he himself wandered from the path which he persistently asserted to be the only right one. In inveighing against Southey, he was, of course, animated largely by personal spite. For minor poetasters, scribblers who might have been made the puppets of a modern Dunciad, Byron had little but silent contempt. In literary satire, then, he presents the strange spectacle of a radical striving desperately to support a losing cause, and that cause a conservative one. ”

“ Although an occasional touch of mockery reminds us of Don Juan, The Age of Bronze, in method, shows a reversion to the invective manner of English Bards. It can hardly be said, however, that this later satire is any advance over the earlier poem. Its allusions are now unfamiliar to the average reader, and the names once so pregnant with meaning have faded into dim memories. Although The Age of Bronze has sagacity and practicality, it lacks unity and concentration. Without the vehement sweep of English Bards, it is also too rhetorical and declamatory. ”

“ The Tristram and Gawain of The Monks, and the Giants are puppets and abstractions; Laura and the Count, on the other hand, are drawn from life and consequently seem to throb with warmth and passion. There are no women in Frere’s poem who receive more than cursory notice; in Beppo the central figure is a woman, and the atmosphere vibrates with love and intrigue. One result of these contrasts is that The Monks, and the Giants, unexceptionable in morality, lacks charm and is somewhat chastely cold; while Beppo, sensuous and frequently sensual, is never dull. ”

“ The plot of Don Juan, dealing, like the picaresque romances of Le Sage and Smollett, with a series of adventures in the life of a wandering hero, and interrupted constantly by the comments of the author, has little real unity. Considered as a satire, however, the poem becomes unified through the personality behind the stanzas. It is a colossal monument of egotism; wherever we read, we meet the inevitable “I.” The poet’s interest in the progress of his characters is so obviously subordinated to his desire for gossiping with his readers that the plot seems, at times, to be almost forgotten. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The indictment of George III, which at times approaches sublimity, is in reality directed against the entire reactionary policy of contemporary European statesmen and rulers. The doctrines of the revolutionary Byron, already familiar to us in Don Juan, are to be found in the ironic stanzas upon the sumptuous funeral of the king, a passage admired by Goethe; respect for monarchy itself had died out in a nobleman who could say of George’s entombment:
“It seemed the mockery of hell to fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.” With all its broad humor, the satire is aflame with indignation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At any rate our English satire since 1830 has inclined toward raillery and humor, wholly unlike the ardent vindictiveness of the men under the Georges. The old régime died away218 with Byron; and in its stead we have had the polished cleverness of Praed, the gentle cynicism of Thackeray, the mild sentimentality of Looker and Dobson. Not until very recently have flashes of the invective spirit appeared in the work of William Watson and Rudyard Kipling. The great issues of the twentieth century have stimulated no powerful English satirist in verse. ”

“ What this spirit is we may well leave for future discussion. It is enough here to point out that it is characterized by a kind of playfulness, half gayety and half mockery, often tinged with irony and reflecting a cynical tolerance, and that it adopts a style informal and colloquial, in which the satirist unbends to his readers and feigns to let them into his confidence. The bare outlining of these features alone proves how far Byron departed from the usually serious, dignified, and formal satire of Pope and Gifford. ”

“ For anything comparable aimed at a man in high position we must go back to Marvell’s satires on Charles II and the Duke of York or to the contemporary satire in 1762 on Lord Bute. Byron’s Castlereagh has no virtues; the portrait, like Gifford’s sketch of Peter Pindar, is all in dark colors. The satire is vehement and personal, without malice and without pity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not at all surprising that a large portion of Don Juan should be devoted to two subjects in which Byron had always been deeply interested—woman and love. Nor is it at all remarkable, in view of his singularly complex and variable nature, that the poem should contain not only the exquisite idyll of Haidée but also line after line of cynical satire on her sex. Though Byron’s opinion of women was usually not complimentary, sentiment, and even sentimentality of a certain sort, had a powerful attraction for him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Byron’s satire, in assuming a wider scope and a greater breadth of view, in growing out of the insular into the cosmopolitan, has also blended itself with romance and realism, with the lyric, the descriptive, and the epic types of poetry until it has created a new literary form and method suitable only to a great genius. ”

“ Byron is here surely not at his best, and his coarseness is not extenuated by his alleged moral purpose. Weiser’s judgment that The Waltz is the ripest of Byron’s youthful poems will, to most critics, seem unwarranted. There is barely a line of the satire which is either witty or epigrammatic; the style is low and the language is cheap in tone; the versification is lifeless and dull. The one thing for which it is to be noted is the spirit of mockery sometimes displayed, and the tendency to jest rather than to inveigh. ”

“ In spite of its apparent irreverence, the Morgante was probably not planned as a satire on chivalry or on the church, Pulci—“the lively, affecting, hopeful, charitable, large-hearted Luigi Pulci,” as Hunt called him—was at bottom kindly and sympathetic, and his work displays a robust geniality and good-humor which had undoubtedly some influence on Don Juan. We rarely find Pulci in a fury; at times his merriment is not far from Rabelaisian, however always without a trace of indignation, for his levity and playfulness seem genuine. ”

“ As loathsome to thyself as to mankind!” Perhaps no more savage satire was ever levelled at a woman; it is even more venomous than Pope’s assault on Lady Montagu in what Mr. Birrell calls “the most brutal lines ever written by man of woman.” Murray wrote Byron, after showing the satire to Rogers, Canning, and Frere:—“They have all seen and admired the lines; they agree that you have produced nothing better; that satire is your forte; and so in each class as you choose to adopt it.”171 These men, however, were active supporters of Byron, and their praise seems extravagant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The realism of this sort closely resembles the more modern work of Zola, attributing as it does even good actions to low motives and degrading deliberately the better impulses of mankind. In Byron’s case it seems to be the result partly of a wish to avoid carrying sentiment and romance to excess, partly of a distorted or partial view of life. Whatever romance there is in Don Juan—and the amount is not inconsiderable—is invariably followed by a drop into bathos or absurdity. ”

“ The most unworthy sections of his satire are those devoted to mere revenge: the unchivalric lines on Lady Byron and Mrs. Clermont; the violent abuse of Southey and Jeffrey; and the treacherous thrusts at Rogers and Hobhouse. In these passages the satirist descends to the lower level of Churchill and Gifford.
It remains to say a word of Byron’s methods, a word merely of recapitulation. Preferring directness always, he was inclined by nature to go straight to his goal, to speak his mind out without pausing to devise subtle or devious plans of attack. ”

“ 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. ”