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:—
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 politics51; 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.