Byron’s Vision of Judgment, printed in the first number of The Liberal, October 15, 1820, was the climax of his long quarrel with Southey, the complicated details of which have been related at length by Mr. Prothero in his edition of the Letters and Journals.357 Byron’s hostility to Southey was due apparently to several causes, some personal, some political, and some literary. He believed that Southey had spread malicious reports about the alleged immorality of his life in Switzerland with Jane Clermont, Mary Godwin, and Shelley; he considered the laureate to be an apostate from liberalism and a truckler to aristocracy; and he had no patience with his views on poetry and his lack of respect for Pope. The two men were, in fact, fundamentally incompatible in temperament and opinions, Southey being firmly convinced that Byron was a dissipated and dangerous debauchee, while Byron thought Southey a dull, servile, and somewhat hypocritical scribbler.

Since The Vision of Judgment was Byron’s only attempt at genuine travesty, it may be well to differentiate between the travesty and other kindred forms of satire, all of which are commonly grouped under the generic heading, burlesque. Broadly speaking, a burlesque is any literary production in which there is an absurd incongruity in the adjustment of style to subject matter or subject matter to style, humor being excited by a continual contrast between what is high and what is low, what is exalted and what is commonplace.358 The peculiar effect of burlesque is ordinarily dependent upon its comparison with some form of literature of a more serious nature. Of the subdivisions of burlesque, the parody aims particularly at the humorous imitation of the style and manner of another work, the original characters and incidents being displaced by incidents of a more trifling sort. The parody has been a popular variety of satire, and examples of it may be discovered in the productions of any sophisticated or critical age.359 The travesty, in the narrow sense of the term, is a humorous imitation of another work, the subject matter remaining substantially the same, being made ridiculous, however, by a grotesque treatment and a less imaginative style. A serious theme is thus deliberately degraded and debased. The commonest subjects of travesty have been derived, as one might expect, from mythology or from the great epic poems. Its popularity, except in certain limited periods, has never equalled that of the parody.360

Considered simply as a travesty, Byron’s Vision is remarkable in two respects: first, in that it burlesques a contemporary poem, while most other travesties ridicule works of antiquity, or at least of established repute; second, in that it has an intrinsic merit of its own far surpassing that of the poem which suggested it. Thus the general dictum that a travesty is valuable chiefly through the contrast which it presents to some nobler masterpiece is contradicted by Byron’s satire, which is in itself an artistic triumph.

Southey’s Vision of Judgment, of which Byron’s Vision is a travesty, was written in the author’s function as poet-laureate shortly after the death of George III. on January 29, 1820. Certainly in many ways it lent itself readily to burlesque.361 It was composed in the unrhymed dactyllic hexameter, a measure in which Southey was even less successful than Harvey and Sidney had been. It was full of adulation of a king, who, however much he may have been distinguished for domestic virtues, was surely, in his public activities, no suitable subject for encomium. It was dedicated, moreover, to George IV. in language which seems to us to-day the grossest flattery.362 The poem itself, divided into twelve sections, deals with the appearance of the old King at the gate of heaven, his judgment and beatification by the angels, and his meeting with the shades of illustrious dead—English worthies, mighty figures of the Georgian age, and members of his own family.

Many special features of Southey’s poem were disagreeable to Byron. It was a vindication and a eulogy of the existing system of government in England, George III, whom Byron despised, being described as an ideal sovereign. Southey had made a contemptuous reference to what he was pleased to call the watchwords of Faction, “Freedom, Invaded Rights, Corruption, and War, and Oppression,” a summary which must have been distasteful to a man who had been raising his voice in resistance to political tyranny. Southey had also carefully omitted Dryden and Pope from the list of great writers whom George III met in heaven. On the whole Southey’s poem was pervaded by a tone of arrogance and self-satisfaction which was exceedingly offensive to Byron.

Byron had begun his travesty on May 7, 1821, and had sent it to Murray from Ravenna on October 4th.363 Unconscious of the fact that this satire was in Murray’s hands, Southey meanwhile had published his Letter to the Courier, January 5, 1822, vindictively personal, and containing one unlucky paragraph: “One word of advice to Lord Byron before I conclude. When he attacks me again, let it be in rhyme. For one who has so little command of himself, it will be a great advantage that his temper should be obliged to keep tune.” When this Letter came to Byron’s notice, his anger boiled over; he sent Southey a challenge, which through the discretion of Kinnaird, was never delivered364; and he decided immediately to publish his Vision, which he had almost determined to suppress. Murray, however, delayed the proof, and on July 3, 1822, Byron, irritated by this tardiness and enthusiastic over his newly planned periodical, The Liberal, sent a letter by John Hunt,365 the proprietor of the magazine, requesting Murray to turn the satire over to Hunt. In the first number of The Liberal, then, the Vision was given the most conspicuous position, printed, however, without the preface, which Murray, either ignorantly or unfairly, had withheld from Hunt. A vigorous letter from Byron recovered the preface, which was inserted in a second edition of the periodical.366 The consequences of publication somewhat justified Murray’s apprehensions. John Hunt was prosecuted by the Constitutional Association, and on July 19, 1824, only three days after Byron’s body had been buried in the church of Hucknall Torkard, was convicted, fined one hundred pounds, and compelled to enter into securities for five years. In fairness to Byron, it must be added that he had offered to come to England in order to stand trial in Hunt’s stead, and had desisted only when he found that such procedure would not be allowed.367

In his Vision, Byron had at least four objects for his satire. He wished to ridicule Southey’s poem by burlesquing many of its absurd elements; he aimed to proceed more directly against Southey by exposing the weak points in his character and career; he desired to present a true picture of George III, in contrast to Southey’s idealized portrait; and he intended to make a general indictment of all illiberal government and particularly of the policy then being pursued by the English Tory party. He seized instinctively upon the weaknesses of the panegyric, and while preserving the general plan and retaining many of the characters, freely mocked at its cant and smug conceit. Through a style purposely grotesque and colloquial, he turned Southey’s pompous rhetoric into absurdity; by touches of realism and caricature he made the solemn angels and demons laughable; while, occasionally rising to a loftier tone suggestive of the spirit of Don Juan, he reasserted his love of liberty and hatred of despotism.

In executing his project, Byron deliberately neglected a large part of Southey’s Vision and confined himself almost exclusively to the scene at the trial of the King. He began actually with the situation represented in Section IV of Southey’s poem, omitting all the preliminary matter, and ended with Southey’s Section V, avoiding entirely the meeting of George with the English worthies. So far as subject matter is concerned, Byron travestied only two of the twelve divisions of the earlier work. He concentrated his attention on the judgment of the King, and then deserted formal travesty in order to introduce his attack on Southey.

It was part of Byron’s scheme that angels and demons, serious characters in Southey’s poem, should be made the objects of mirth. By a dexterous application of realism, he changed the New Jerusalem of Southey into a very earthly place, where angels now and then sing out of tune and hoarse, and where six angels and twelve saints act as a business-like Board of Clerks. These creatures of the spiritual realm are very substantial beings, not at all immune from mortal infirmities and passions. Saint Peter is a dull somnolent personage who grumbles over the leniency of heaven’s Master towards earth’s kings, and sweats through his apostolic skin at the appalling sight of Lucifer and demons pursuing the body of George to the very doors of heaven. Satan salutes Michael,

and the archangel, in turn, greets the fallen Lucifer superciliously as “my good old friend.” It is probable that in this practice of treating with ridicule those beings who are commonly spoken of with reverence, Byron is imitating Pulci, whose angels and devils are also, in their attributes, more human than divine.

Byron’s trial scene, in which Lucifer and Michael dispute for the possession of George III, is an admirable travesty of Southey’s representation of the same episode. The glorified monarch of Southey’s Vision meets in Byron’s satire with scant courtesy from Lucifer, who acts as attorney for the prosecution. Lucifer admits the king’s “tame virtues” and grants that he was a “tool from first to last”; but he charges him with having “ever warr’d with Freedom and the free,” with having stained his career with “national and individual woes,” with having resisted Catholic emancipation, and with having lost a continent to his country. Wilkes and Junius, the two shamefaced accusers of Southey’s Vision, now act in a different manner. Wilkes scornfully extends his forgiveness to the king, and Junius, while reiterating the truth of his original accusations, refuses to be enlisted as an incriminating witness. This section of the satire is splendidly managed. The whole assault on the king tends to show him as more misguided than criminal. The lines,

create a kind of sympathy for George in that they portray him as a man placed in a position for which he was manifestly unfitted.

Southey’s name is mentioned only once before the 35th stanza of Byron’s poem, but from that point until the conclusion the work deals entirely with him. These stanzas constitute what is probably Byron’s happiest effort at personal satire. For once he did not act in haste, but carefully matured his project, studied its execution, and permitted his first impulsive anger to moderate into scorn. With due attention to craftsmanship, he surveyed and annihilated his enemy, laughing at him contemptuously and making every stroke tell. It should be observed too that he chose a method largely indirect and dramatic. He did not, as in English Bards, merely apply offensive epithets; rather he placed Southey in a ridiculous situation and made him the sport of other characters. The satire, is, therefore, exceedingly effective since it allows the victim no chance for a reply.368 By turning the laugh on Southey, Byron closed the controversy by attaining what is probably the most desirable result of purely personal satire—the making an opponent seem not hateful but absurd.

Byron’s poem, however, was something more than a chapter in the satisfaction of a private quarrel. It is also a liberal polemic, assailing not only the whole system of constituted authority in England, but also tyranny and repression wherever they operate. 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:

With all its broad humor, the satire is aflame with indignation. In this respect the poem performed an important public service. In place of stupid content with things as they were, it offered critical comment on existing conditions, comment somewhat biassed, it is true, but nevertheless in refreshing contrast to the conventional submission of the great majority of the British public.

Much of what has already been pointed out with regard to the sources and inspiration of Don Juan may be applied without alteration to The Vision of Judgment, which is, as Byron told Moore, written “in the Pulci style, which the fools in England think was invented by Whistlecraft—it is as old as the hills in Italy.”369 The Vision, being shorter and more unified, contains few digressions which do not bear directly upon the plot; but it has the same colloquial and conversational style, the same occasional rise into true imaginative poetry with the inevitable following drop into the commonplace, the same fondness for realism, and the same broad burlesque.370 Hampered as it is by the necessity of keeping the story well-knit, Byron’s personality has ample opportunity for expression.

It is probable that Byron’s description of Saint Peter and the angels owes much to his reading of Pulci.371 In at least one instance there is a palpable imitation. Saint Peter in the Vision, who was so terrified by the approach of Lucifer that,

suffered as did the same saint in the Morgante Maggiore who was weary with the duty of opening the celestial gate for slaughtered Christians:

In employing the realistic method in depicting the angels, Byron seems to have caught something of Pulci’s grotesque spirit.

One line of the Vision,

“When this old, blind, mad, helpless, weak, poor worm,”

seems to imitate the opening of Shelley’s powerful Sonnet; England in 1819, already quoted,

“An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king.”

Professor Courthope has suggested that Byron’s Don Juan owes something to the work of Peter Pindar.374 The evidence for the relationship seems, however, to be very scanty. Wolcot never employed the octave stanza, nor, indeed, did he ever show evidences of true poetic power. The two men were, of course, alike in that they were both liberals, both avowedly enemies of George III, and both outspoken in their dislikes. But Byron seldom except in parts of the Vision used the method of broad caricature so characteristic of Pindar. In the Vision, too, occurs the only obvious reference on Byron’s part to Pindar’s satire. He describes the effect of Southey’s dactyls on George III, in the lines:

The couplet recalls Pindar’s delightful imitations of that king’s eccentric habit of repeating words and phrases. However, Byron’s style in both Don Juan and the Vision is drawn more from Italian than from English models.

The Vision of Judgment is, if we exclude Don Juan as being more than satire, the greatest verse-satire that Byron ever wrote. It is only natural then to compare the poem with other English satires which have high rank in our literature. A practically unanimous critical decision has established Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel as occupying the foremost position in English satire before the time of Byron. Unquestionably this work of Dryden’s is admirable; it is witty, pointed, and direct, embellished with masterly character sketches and almost faultless in style. It does, however, suffer somewhat from a lack of unity, due primarily to the fact that the narrative element in the poem is subordinate to the description. Byron’s Vision, on the other hand, has a single plot, which is carefully carried out to a climax and a conclusion. Action joins with invective and description in forming the satire. Thus the two poems, approximately the same length if we consider only Part I of Absalom and Achitophel, give a decidedly different impression. Dryden’s satire seems a panorama of figures, while Byron’s has the coherence and clash of a drama.

Absalom and Achitophel is witty but seldom humorous; while Byron joins caricature and burlesque to wit. The best lines in Dryden’s poem, such as:

excite admiration for the author’s cleverness, but rarely arouse a smile; the Vision, the contrary, is full of buffoonery. Dryden’s sense of the dignity of the satirist’s office did not permit him to lower his style, and he never became familiar with his readers; the very essence of Byron’s satire is its colloquial character.

Dryden kept his personality always in the background, while the egotistical Byron could not refrain from letting his individuality lend fire and passion to whatever he wrote. Thus the Vision, despite the fact that it is the most cool of Byron’s satires, cannot be called calm and restrained. Self-control, the will to subdue and govern his impulses and prejudices, was beyond his reach. Fortunately in the Vision he did take time to exercise craftsmanship, but he never attained the polished artistry and firm reserve of his predecessor. Certainly in urbanity, in dignity, and in justice Dryden is the superior, just as he is undoubtedly less imaginative, less varied, and less spirited than Byron.

The two satires are, then, radically different in their methods. One is a masterpiece of the Latin classical satire in English, formal and regular, and using the standard English couplet; the other is our finest example of the Italian style in satire—the mocking, grotesque, colloquial, and humorous manner of Pulci and Casti. Both are effective; but one is inclined to surmise that the purple patches in Absalom and Achitophel will outlast the more perfect whole of The Vision of Judgment.

The probable results of the publication of a work of such a sensational character had been foreseen by both Murray and Longman. When the first number of The Liberal appeared containing not only The Vision of Judgment but also three epigrams of Byron’s on the death of Castlereagh, it was received by a torrent of hostile criticism from the Tory press. The Literary Gazette for October 19, 1822, called Byron’s work “heartless and beastly ribaldry,” and added on November 2, that Byron had contributed to the Liberal “impiety, vulgarity, inhumanity, and heartlessness.” The Courier for October 26 termed him “an unsexed Circe, who gems the poisoned cup he offers us.” On the Whig side, in contrast, Hunt’s Examiner for September 29 spoke of it as “a Satire upon the Laureate, which contains also a true and fearless character of a grossly adulated monarch.”

Byron himself described it to Murray as “one of my best things.”376 Later critical opinion has also tended to rank it very high. Goethe called the verses on George III “the sublime of hatred.” Swinburne, himself a revolutionist but no partisan of Byron’s, exhausts superlatives in commenting on it: “This poem—stands alone, not in Byron’s work only, but in the work of the world. Satire in earlier times had changed her rags for robes; Juvenal had clothed with fire, and Dryden with majesty, that wandering and bastard muse. Byron gave her wings to fly with, above the reach even of these. Others have had as much of passion and as much of humor; Dryden had perhaps as much of both combined. But here, and not elsewhere, a third quality is apparent—the sense of a high and clear imagination.—Above all, the balance of thought and passion is admirable; human indignation and divine irony are alike understood and expressed; the pure and fiery anger of men at the sight of wrong-doing, the tacit inscrutable derision of heaven.” Nichol, in his life of Byron, says:—“Nowhere in so much space, save in some of the prose of Swift, is there in English so much scathing satire.”

Two figures in Byron’s poem have been made the basis of a shrewd comparison by Henley. He says: “Byron and Wordsworth are like the Lucifer and Michael of The Vision of Judgment. Byron’s was the genius of revolt, as Wordsworth’s was the genius of dignified and useful submission; Byron preached the doctrine of private revolution, Wordsworth the dogma of private apotheosis—Byron was the passionate and dauntless ‘soldier of a forlorn hope,’ Wordsworth a kind of inspired clergyman.” Byron’s sympathies in the Vision, as in Cain, were undoubtedly with Lucifer, the rebel and exile, and his poem will live as a satiric declaration of the duty of active resistance to despotism and oppression.