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‘In my turn’: Byron's The Visionof JudgmentAlastair W. Thomson aa Chuo University , TokyoPublished online: 13 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Alastair W. Thomson (1994) ‘In my turn’: Byron's The Vision ofJudgment , English Studies, 75:6, 523-535, DOI: 10.1080/00138389408598943

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'IN MY TURN': BYRON'S THE VISION OF JUDGMENT

The best introduction to Byron's The Vision of Judgment of 1822 is the laureatepoem which inspired it. Southey's A Vision of Judgment is a panegyric onGeorge III at the gates of heaven, in which legitimacy is justified by God andhistory. The title suggests something unexpectedly vouchsafed. Byron uses thedefinite article, and (we learn at the end) a telescope. That is, something hasbeen seen. Whether it can be understood is another matter. The empiricism andflux of Beppo suggested that there was much which could not be known. Thesame is true of the Vision, with this distinction in particular, that Byron is deal-ing, among other things, with the enigma of the relationship between good andevil. For this reason, and also because his terms have sometimes been misun-derstood, it is worth spending some time on this comedy of heaven and hell andjudgment.

It is easy, as nearly everyone says, to be unfair to Southey. Like his Life ofNelson, which Byron admired, the short poem The Battle of Blenheim is a clas-sic of its kind. There may also be something to be said for Wilkes as Lord ofMisrule in his Vision. But reservations become an embarrassment beside thepoem, and its circumstances. Like others, he had been savagely parodied. Inparticular, Sapphics: The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder ('NeedyKnife-Grinder!'), supposedly by Canning and Frere, had appeared in 1797 inthe Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner. This takes up Southey's The Widow: Sap-phics (the inversion in the title suggests a peculiar readjustment), and all meet-ings with poor men with whom truth lay, and who had their tale to tell: '"Story!God bless you! I have none to tell, Sir ... '" ('"/give thee Sixpense! I will see theedamn'd first!'", with the radical 'thee' gummed over the upper-crust dismissal,is unforgettable.) He had succeeded Pye as Poet Laureate in 1813. Byron hadcommented on the laureateship, 'Consider, 100 marks a year! besides the wine& the disgrace . . ." Francis Jeffrey was to comment at greater length in theWhig Edinburgh Review, after Southey had held the post for some years.

Southey aimed at Byron in the preface to his Vision, and Byron replied byputting Southey in his poem. The terms Southey uses are those of the health ofmind, and state. (He had argued for strict censorship of journalists, in the Quar-terly Review of October, 1816.) '...Men of diseased hearts and depraved imag-inations ... the Satanic school ... This evil is political as well as moral ... "thedestruction of Governments" ... poisoning the waters of literature ... Let rulersof the state look to this in time!' There was also Southey's arrogance, for whichhe was well known. He is 'son of the Muses', and promises himself what hadbeen seen by a predecessor: 'secrets ../.. Such as of yore the Florentine saw'.

1 Letter to Lord Holland, 25 June 1812 (Letters & Journals, Marchand, II, p. 180).

English Studies, 1994, 6, pp. 523-535 5230013-838X/94/06-0523/$6.00©1994, Swets & Zeitlinger

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Probably he intended to rival Virgil as well as Dante.2 The verse is English hexa-meter; the subject is also the glory of England, not in the seeds of time, but thepresent; his Demon's 'after death there is judgment' is referred to Virgil, in anote. There are also recollections and gatherings-up of Milton, and a faintstrain of Lucretius. As for the hexameters, those 'spavin'd dactyls', the preface'sreferences to 'the regular recurrence of emphasis in the last five syllables' are alittle ominous. ('Phylyda phyleridos, Pamphylyda florida flortos, / Dub dub adub, bounce quoth the guns, with a sulpherus huffe snuffe', as Peele said in TheOld Wives Tale, in the days of Stanyhurst.) The passage on the mob of hell hasits moments. But in general the blandness makes the essential vacuousness comeas a series of shocks: 'Not without ingenuous shame, and a sense of compunc-tion / More or less, as each had more or less to atone for ... '.

In the dedicatory letter to George IV Southey speaks of the poem as an 'ex-periment' which may be 'of some importance in English Poetry'. '"I first ven-ture; follow me who list!'" he says in his preface. The Vision, in its setting ofscholarly preface and historical 'Specimens, &c.,' will match a great moment oftriumph in the history of right-minded nations. Although 'Spenser, my masterdear' sounds like Occleve on Chaucer, the echoes of Milton and others seemmeant to suggest a consummation. Everything is accordingly of the very best,and worst. 'Son of the Muses', he presents himself as 'Pensive though not inthought', or as a vessel ready to be filled. What fills Southey is mainly thestrength of holiness in the risen George III, of whom the Angel will declare that'Hell hath been dumb in his presence', which is not quite true. His fear of thefierce spirit at work is understandable, at the time of the Cato Street conspir-acy, on which there is another note. (Shakespeare seems to be brought in evi-dence here, since 'Some accursed conception of filth and of darkness / Ripe forits monstrous birth' resembles Iago's boasting in Othello: 'I have't. It is engen-dred. Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light'.) Itis more difficult to understand his surprise that the multitude, in the post-Wat-erloo years of hunger, does not yet know its 'blessings', and is not 'contentedand thankful'. Among those bearing witness is Milton, cured like the King ofhis blindness, and 'no longer here to Kings and to Hierarchies hostile': Byron'srejoinder to this is in the (unpublished) dedication to Don Juan. This is pre-sumption; Berkeley 'that kingdom enjoying where all things / Are what theyseem' is extraordinary bathos. The last of the appeals to Milton is the PrincessAmelia 'shedding / Tears, such as angels weep', from Paradise Lost (11.620).Whether this kind of presumption differs in kind or degree from that of the finalvision of Southey himself held back from Heaven only by 'the weight of thebody' is perhaps unimportant.

There could hardly have been a larger invitation to parody, or satire, whichis probably one reason why Byron's response takes the form of comedy. 'Thegross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance, and impious cant,

2 Suggested by Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, 1972, p. 84). The lines on Or-pheus and Amphion, incidentally ('stones in harmonious order / Mov'd, as their atomsobey'd the mysterious attraction of concord'), sound vaguely Lucretian.

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of the poem by the author of "Wat Tyler"', he remarks in his preface, 'aresomething so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself. Some wonderedhow a man of Southey's talents could have perpetrated it. 'We can withdifficulty be persuaded that it is not a hoax on the Poet Laureate', wrote one re-viewer, who admired some of Southey's poetry.3 It is characterised by the high-est of tones, and by an insistence on abstractions. (In a way, the same could besaid of the hexameters. The common ground, incidentally, between Southey'slaureate offering, and the reflections on revolutionary épuration of Robespierreis not surprising, since when the fiddle-faddle of high political moralising takesover, the human is forgotten. '"Quoi de plus beau qu'une Assemblée qui va sepurgeant, s'épurant? ... Qui a donné ce spectacle? Vous, representante, vousseuls!'") His poem begins and ends with himself. This is common form in a vi-sion. But Southey's Vision has so little action that one suspects he is mainly con-cerned not even so much with a simple conviction as with himself and his bonafides. Except for its brilliant introduction, Byron's Vision is all action. 'Es sindkeine Flickwörter im Gedichte', Goethe said of it: there is no padding in thepoem.4 It begins with Saint Peter nodding over his keys, and virtually ends withthe blow from the keys which confirms 'the weight of the body'. Like many an-other porter, Saint Peter has his little ways. For one thing, the people up at theHouse are careless, and need keeping in line. He would not have let in LouisXVI of France, with or without his head, and adds a grumble about Saint Paul,the '"parvenu"'. (Of course, they have not had much to do at the House re-cently, and this clamour at the gates is exceptional.) That is, to Southey's ab-stractions Byron opposes the essential humanity of Peter, capable in life ofviolence and betrayal, and still testy and violent in heaven. The keys of the king-dom, which Southey had appropriated, have been restored to an authoritywhich (if one may say so) was never less than properly constituted.

The introduction, an ironic summary of recent great events, moves throughWaterloo and the King's funeral to a dismissal of the hell of tradition, beforethe tale is taken up again at stanza xvi. By then several things have beenclarified. Waterloo is 'the crowning carnage', where England, Prussia, andFrance threw their soldiers against each other, and when the recording angel'sboard 'threw their pens down in divine disgust— / The page was so besmear'dwith blood and dust'. This parody of incense offered to the gods reflects the re-ality of the long June day of slaughter: the only battle he was ever at, as one ofWellington's officers said during it, where everyone was killed on both sides.Five years later, there is the pomp of King George's funeral.

3 Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, 17 March 1821 (Lionel Madden, ed., Robert Southey: TheCritical Heritage, London, 1972, p. 284). A comment by E.H. Coleridge (Poetical Works, IV,p. 476) is worth quoting: 'an undivine comedy', in which various matters are '"thrown uponthe screen'" of the showman or lecturer'.

4 In a conversation with Henry Crabb Robinson, of 1829 (Andrew Rutherford, ed., Byron: TheCritical Heritage, London, 1970, p. 251).

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... And when the gorgeous coffin was laid low,It seem'd the mockery of hell to foldThe rottenness of eighty years in gold.

So mix his body with the dust! It mightReturn to what it must far sooner, were

The natural compound left alone to fightIts way back into earth, and fire, and air:

But the unnatural balsams merely blightWhat nature made him at his birth, as bare

As the mere million's base unmummied clay —Yet all his spices but prolong decay, (x, xi)

What we are given, so quietly that it can easily be missed, is an authentic vision,that of an authoritarian world, careless of nameless living flesh fun sanganonyme', as Vigny called it in Servitude et Grandeur militaires), and obstinate-ly preserving the dust of Kings. 'The mockery of hell', Byron calls this care. Ifhell has any meaning in his vision, it is perhaps in such a denial of naturalprocess and natural energy over against the unnatural slaughter that has takenplace. For the rest, the damnation dealt out by state Church and moralisingState is dismissed in xv as 'that immortal fry / Of almost every body born todie'. With this, the narrative action begins.

Southey's judicial process is complete, to the extent that (the witnesses for theprosecution remaining speechless) a judgment is given. Byron's is incomplete,and human, the proceedings being interrupted by what amounts to the arraign-ment of the living Southey, who like Dante is transported to other regions, andunlike Dante remains unabashed and unenlightened. No judgment is passed onKing George, who manages to slip into heaven, perhaps with other souls whosee their opportunity. Southey's trial resembles a reversal of the trial of LouisXVI in 1793 before the French Convention, for lese-nation and an appeal forforeign intervention. (Two years earlier, after the return from Varennes, Dan-ton had suggested that Louis should be declared imbecile, in the name of hu-manity, and left to himself; Byron's Satan at one point expresses a similaropinion, in stanza xli.)5 This absence of judgment has something to do with theidea that George was unwise, but also has to do with something central toByron's poetry, and not merely to the later comedy: that is, that we know little,or nothing. (In this connection, it should be said that his remark, that he want-ed 'to put ... George's apotheosis in a Whig point of view', can be misleadingif taken for most of the truth about the poem, as one critic, Malcolm Kelsall,has done.)6 Satan, who prosecutes the king at the gates of heaven, is presented

5 Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution française, ed. Gerard Walter, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,Gallimard, Paris, 1952, I, p. 614. (From Walter's commentary, under 'Personnages' (II,1191), incidentally, we learn that the Milton who was to reveal himself'pamphlétaire de génieå la veille de la Revolution' had until then been 'poete aimable, sans plus', which is news in-deed to admirers of Lycidas, Comus, and one or two other things.)

6 Letter to Moore, 1 October 1821 (L. & J., VIII, p. 229). (See also letter to Douglas Kinnairdof 4 October 1821, op., cit., p. 230.) Malcolm Kelsall, Byron's Politics, Sussex, 1987, p. 126.Kelsall's study is often informative, but suffers from what seems to be a partisan desire to cut

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at first in terms of thunder-clouds, the ocean, and a towering falcon. This is theSatan of one tradition, who resembles one or two of Byron's haunted outcasts.To take it here as merely Byronic is again to risk confusion. (His 'cloud of wit-nesses', incidentally, are not hellish, like Southey's, though some of them arefrom hell, like many other people in the poem. (Michael protests that Satan hasproduced '"half of earth and hell'"). They are swarming angry life, 'an univer-sal shoal of shades': stout English, Irish, Scotch, French, and American citizensin terms of locusts, wild geese, and fish, all jargoning in their various idioms.The '"hell broke loose'" of lviii from Paradise Lost (IV. 928), but by then a tag,as now, so far from meaning that Byron follows Southey (Kelsall again, p. 126),is an ironic comment on Southey's equation of 'mob' and 'hell', and a glance atlix will confirm this.) But, as most readers have understood, the discussionwhich follows with Michael is a debate between politicians. Michael, at first a

Byron down to size. (Perhaps the modern tendency to canonize him was bound to producesome such reaction.) A reference to Paradise Lost might have saved Kelsall from thinkingthat Byron follows Southey in the matter of 'hell broke loose', and he should have under-stood that "'fie on't'" in Don Juan VIII. li is an echo of Hamlet's first soliloquy; the descrip-tion of it as 'out of date' language suggesting (or confirming) that Byron was 'ananachronism' (p. 166) is unfortunate. As for Byron being 'out of date', and not fully in touchwith 19th century revolutionary practice, it is one thing to refer stanza cv of The Vision ofJudgment to Pope and Augustan motifs (p. 145), and another to argue from this that forByron nothing had changed since Walpole's day. As typical is the willingness to see the mean-ing or meanings of the important stanza viii of the Vision in a single line (p. 133). A com-parison of Byron in viii, and his Satan in xliv, puts at least one meaning of Satan's speechbeyond reasonable doubt, and removes the need for delicate cautions like 'the text creates thesuspicion that the issue is not proven' (p. 134). The statement that Byron 'dismisses' the 'ex-traordinary libertarian turmoil which had dominated Europe ever since he was born' (pp. 68-69) makes one ask what 'dismiss' could mean with reference to Childe Harold IV, or to III,which is not brought in evidence. Until one remembers, that is, that Byron's 'History . . . /Hath but one page' (IV.cviii) is unacceptable, doubtless since there is a kingdom which is tocome. There is to be no wavering; poet or no poet, Byron cannot be allowed to express opin-ions which do not co-ordinate like machinery. When this principle is applied to the poetry,the result can be disconcerting. Whatever he failed to achieve in Greece, there is little pointin removing the line 'I do not know; — I wish men to be free' (Don Juan IX.xxv) from itssyntactic, as well as from any other effective context (p. 167), in order to describe it, in pic-turesque phrase, as 'a line which totters with insecurity'. Like much else in Byron, the pas-sage expresses a human enough confusion of hope and hopelessness. He could be forgiven forthis in the 1820s. Nor is it difficult to forgive him for disliking demagogues like Henry Hunt,or for writing Don Juan instead of What Is To Be Done. This is a long note, but two moreexamples of the method may be of use. It makes good sense, up to a point, to say of Byron'sVision (p. 130) that he follows Southey, in accepting that the parliamentary order in Britainreflects the Providential order of the universe, though it leaves out of account the fuller im-plications of his comedy. But it makes very little sense to apply a recruitment of a Tory Godin the Vision, for purposes of comedy, to the hopeful and hopeless references to political andsocial futures in Don Juan, or anywhere else. Nor is it true to say of the Vision that 'since thesituation is fully dramatised, one must read the poetry as expressive of the dilemmas and ten-sions of a political situation, and not as an essay in verse autobiography' (pp. 134-35). Thereference to 'verse autobiography' is a straw argument of a familiar kind, and phrases like'fully dramatised' and 'expressive of raise more questions than they answer, but what is clearis that the poetry should be read as neither. Kelsall, incidentally, suggests that Byron sufferedfrom the 'pressure of typology' (p. 69).

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"Thing of Light', becomes a Minister of the Crown, whose weapons are sweetreason and moderation. Satan becomes a leader of the Whig opposition, forwhom mistrust of the crown was a fact of political life. The case which he makesis something of a caricature. For him, kings are a kind of quit-rent for thisunimportant planet, and so should be claimed; later he retreats a little from thisposition, but his attitude leaves no room for doubt.

He merely bent his diabolic browAn instant; and then raising it, he stood

In act to assert his right or wrong, and showCause why King George by no means could or should

Make out a case to be exempt from woeEternal, more than other kings, endued

With better sense and hearts, whom history mentions,Who long have 'paved hell with their good intentions', (xxxvii)

One suspects George is to be considered guilty in great part ('could or should')because he was a king, and the fact that Satan has not yet spoken may besignificant. If so, the statement in the opening speech by Michael (as much pres-ident of the tribunal as defending counsel) of the need to prove guilt, not inno-cence, suggests that there is little common ground between them. The difficultyof distinguishing between the guilt of the monarchy, and the guilt of a rulingmonarch, had already arisen in the case of Louis XVI of France; it was in anycase a question with which the English were familiar.

Byron's opinion of George is given in stanza viii: 'although no tyrant, one /Who shielded tyrants ... A better farmer ne'er brushed dew from lawn, / Aweaker king ne'er left a realm undone!' The paradox is human enough. The ex-clamation-mark, incidentally, is not declamatory, and the difference betweenByron and his Satan in what follows is not merely a matter of style.

'From out the pastOf ages, since mankind have known the rule

Of monarchs — from the bloody rolls amass'dOf sin and slaughter — from the Caesar's school,

Take the worst pupil; and produce a reignMore drench'd with gore, more cumber'd with the slain!'

The oratorical shift in xliv from 'pupil' to 'reign' is skilfully made, but remainsa shift, in every sense of the term. In his preface, Byron remarks that the at-tempt 'to canonise a monarch, who, whatever were his household virtues, wasneither a successful nor a patriot king, — inasmuch as several years of his reignpassed in war with America and Ireland, to say nothing of the aggression uponFrance, — like all other exaggeration, necessarily begets opposition'. This, withits quiet 'exaggeration', is strictly factual. (The liberal 'aggression upon France'can be accepted, in view of the British government's hostility to the progress ofthe French revolution, and although [contrary to a sacramental traditionamong the French] it was the Convention which had declared war upon Britain,in the name of universal brotherhood.) Satan's opposition, within that of

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Byron's Vision, is dramatised as sonorous hyperbole, the more furious becauseof long absence from office. Much of his speech is high Whig oratory, proper-ly larded with patriotism, invocations of liberty, and classical allusions and in-stances, in which the antitheses fall like blows. The rhetoric is impressive, withits sweep over history, its rises and falls, its easy command of bitter irony(George as "The foe to Catholic participation / In all the licence of a Christiannation'"). It has its weaknesses. 'He was a tool.. . / . . . but as a tool / So let himbe consumed!' (xliv). This has perhaps more gravity than logic, since uselesstools are left lying around or thrown away, not burned. (To argue that to beforgotten by God means damnation might be to stretch the metaphor beyondits real context, which at the moment is that of political condemnation. But ifwe must understand 'burned', it exemplifies the political inhumanity inherent ina process of abstraction and mere analogy, and is an appropriate introductionto the shifty eloquence of the rest of xliv.) There is a touch of mere eloquencein '"And this was well for him, but not for those / Millions who found him whatoppression chose'" (xlvi). One understands, in a general way (George either asinstrument, or protector of tyrants), but it is blurred by the sonorous economyof '"chose"'. Since this is verse rendering some of the effects of parliamentaryprose, one might say that 'chose' seems to be there for the rhyme. (The same istrue of the tautology of the last line of xliv, '"More drench'd with gore, morecumber'd with the slain!'", a line so complacently repetitive as to make it seemlike an intrusive alexandrine.) 'Mere eloquence' is probably misleading, sincethe effect is to identify George and oppression. The climax is the indirect andprovocative appeal to Saint Peter in xlviii and xlix, which has a barrister's op-portunism, since Saint Peter has no use for kings in any case. And to Peter's fu-rious assent, Satan, at ease with all conditions above or below the sun, respondswith sonorousness ('"Saint! ... you do well to avenge ...'") and friendly hu-mour: if Peter, a bit of a Cerberus, is willing to exchange, then we shall do whatwe can.

Michael's conciliatory reason is as obviously that of a Tory minister of theCrown secure in office. He seems willing to condemn George, if the evidence isthere. But the exchange with Wilkes in lxix is revealing. He has just informedWilkes of the '"august"' character of the proceedings: '"to judge of kings / Isthe tribunal met'". His orotund reassurance, that the tomb gives licence to thebeggar to accuse '"the loftiest", is met by Wilkes's remark, that some do notwait for death '"for such a liberty'", where the play on 'liberty' (especially after'licence') is very much to the point. Whatever his apparent impartiality, Michaelin debate is not quite the 'Michael, leader of God's host / When Heaven andHell are met' of Yeats's The Rose of Peace. "Thou wast / Too bitter — is it notso? — in thy gloom / Of passion?'" he asks the shade of the anonymous Whiglibeller Junius, so giving it the opportunity for an eloquent and posturing an-tithesis: '"I loved my country, and I hated him"'. The two leaders play the partygame. But it has to be remembered that their first appearances 'in neutral space'are, so to speak, ideal, and that it is only when the debate is under way that theybecome politicians. Satan's attributes are those of hell as furious energy, and in'the gate / Ne'er to be enter'd more by him or sin' there is more than a nod to

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traditional interpretations of energy. Michael is 'A beautiful and mighty Thingof Light', and 'A goodly work of him from whom all glory / And good arise'.('Thing' or 'goodly work' are suspect only if we overlook the upper case, andthe idea of Creator and created). They are still in this state when they confronteach other, in xxxvii and xxxviii. Stanza xxxvii is neither direct nor reportedspeech. It is how Satan must speak, and the word-play in 'In act to assert hisright or wrong' has more to do at this stage with Satan as Satan, than withSatan as politician. Nor, unless eloquence itself is suspect, is there much roomfor misunderstanding about Michael in xxxviii (the opening of the debate), withhis '"brought before the Lord'" and '"do thy will, / If it be just"'. That is, theiropposition here, despite the tone of 'his Darkness and his Brightness' in xxxv,and all that has gone before, is still primary.7

On the whole, and also for other reasons besides the fact that Satan andMichael begin by being Satan and Michael, it is inadvisable to swallow wholeByron's remark to Moore, that he wanted 'to put ... George's apotheosis in aWhig point of view', whether or not with a view to making poetry do the workof politics.8 (In one sense this comment resembles his remark to Hobhouse, onfirst seeing the Parthenon, that it looked very like the Mansion House.) Thequestion, of course, is not why Byron showed them at first as darkness andlight, but why they change, and the most obvious answer is that this is comedy.Southey has no such anomalies, because he has no doubts. He has no archangelor Satan either. There is an angel who shouts 'Ho' and 'Lo' (Byron himself hasa cry of 'Lo' at a supreme moment), there is the many-headed devil of the mob,and there is 'the Presence / Veil'd with excess of light'. ('Mr Southey has not for-titude of mind, has not patience to think that evil is inseparable from the natureof things'. So Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age, speaking of the effect of disap-

7 In xxxi.7-8 Byron at first described Michael as 'the loveliest Machine / however fair and high'.But in spite of 'however' it would be a mistake to take this for an essential depreciation,which he preferred to veil. Speculation on one side or the other is only speculation, but myguess is that he intended a play on 'Machine' as a supernatural agency or personage intro-duced into a poem (as used by Dryden, Pope, and Addison: Byron himself speaks of 'mytho-logical machinery' in Don Juan I.cci), and changed it because its other meanings would havecompromised the idea of agent, or viceroy: the last perhaps a discreetly loaded word in thepolitical contexts of the poem. It seems rather a pity that this appeal to fiction, and the read-er, had to be cancelled.

8 Stuart Peterfreund (The Politics of "Neutral Space" in Byron's Vision of Judgment', ModernLanguages Quarterly, Vol. XL, 1979, pp. 275-91) argues that Michael stands for Lord Eldon,the Tory Chancellor. Some of Peterfreund's evidence for this and other identifications (SaintPeter as Lord Harrowby, Asmodeus as William Smith, who raised Wat Tyler and associatedmatters in Parliament) is to the point, but some of it is a little circumstantial. (Michael's mis-quotation of Horace, which Peterfreund does not mention, may mean something here.) Thequestion of how he 'writes himself into history' is of some interest, though it could be arguedthat he was already in it. But the statement that 'Byron, of course, writes himself into thepoem as Satan, in ironic rejoinder to Southey's remarks about the "Satanic School" of poet-ry', is too confident. Byron may have been tempted at some stage to do this; if so, he wentbeyond it. (One comment by Peterfreund is particularly suggestive: 'the Byronic poet or vis-ionary can know of hierarchies of order beyond his own, but he cannot decipher them, ex-cept comically, as in the case of The Vision' (p. 290.)

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pointment on a too sanguine mind.)9 Byron's parliamentary politics of goodand evil, and the manner in which they are introduced, mean something radi-cally different. Whatever the traditional figuring in which our understanding isexpressed, their relationship, and with that final knowledge of them, remainshidden. Michael's '"Our difference is politicaF" is part of the party debate be-tween gentlemen. But before the debate begins, there is a reference to destiny asperhaps the cause of this war (xxxii). Unless we are determined to keep all ofByron's meanings in the sphere of politics, this does not simply mean that noparliamentary party can control the course of events. Veiled though the refer-ence is, it has its significance, as has the mention of the Fates in lxxxix. Tradi-tionally the gods themselves were subject to destiny, and the divine brawlingsand squabblings in Homer are not so far as all that from Byron. What he seemsto be concerned with, against dealings out of final judgment, is our human in-ability to understand not merely responsibility, but the continuing debate ofgood and evil. It is not simply the Laureate's hell of Jacobins and radicals whichhe dismisses, partly in so many words, partly by putting everyone or nearlyeveryone in hell, Fox as well as Pitt, though hell, as we learn from liii, is hard-ly a strait prison. The Vision of Judgment is a comedy of vanity, and perhaps atraditional hell and heaven are products of human vanity. ('It seem'd the mock-ery of hell', in that authentic vision of the exordium, seems to be as near as hewill approach it.) One would not want to insist too much on that. But when herefers us to the Book of Job in xxxiii, it is likely that it is not merely to supporthis parliamentary terms as such, against Southey's faith in a mob devil and aTory God.

But here they were in neutral space: we knowFrom Job, that Satan hath the power to pay

A heavenly visit thrice a year or so;And that the 'Sons of God', like those of clay,

Must keep him company; and we might showFrom the same book, in how polite a way

The dialogue is held between the powersOf Good and Evil — but 'twould take up hours.

9 Hazlitt's essay on Southey in The Spirit of the Age is not entirely unsympathetic. His reviewof the recently published and republican Wat Tyler in the Examiner of 9 March 1817 is a re-markable contribution to the storm of abuse that broke on Southey. 'We wonder that in allthis contempt which our prose-poet has felt at different times for different persons and things,he has never felt any dissatisfaction with himself or distrust of his own infallibility' (Madden,op. cit., p. 234-45). The long sentence just before this is worth comparing with the apologiaByron puts into his mouth in the Vision. Southey's friend Charles Wynn defended him ablyagainst William Smith. Marilyn Butler has pointed out that we should not 'accept unexam-ined Byron's portrayals of Southey in Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment as merely a paidgovernment hack', and adds that he was 'a genuine populist' ("The Orientalism of Byron'sGiaour', in Bernard Beatty & Vincent Newey, eds., Byron and the Limits of Fiction, Liverpool,1988, p. 85). In one way Byron's Southey is a symbolic figure, like his Catherine the Great inDon Juan. Admittedly in another way he is not, and Byron's 'when he has found it conve-nient to think otherwise' in the letter to Murray quoted on page 532 is unfair. But the provo-cation was extreme. Southey's arrogance seems to have been common knowledge.

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The material reference is probably to what the Book of Job says about faith, inparticular about faith as distinct from man's knowledge and capacity for judg-ment. In the matter of knowledge, there is one line from Byron's neutral spacewhich has a particular resonance. 'They knew each other both for good and ill'(xxxii). The irony in this becomes more complex the longer one looks at it. But'knew' (one must suppose) means exactly that, and at least some of its implica-tions are plain.10 It is not that Byron is first using contemporary politics to sub-vert Southey's use of them, and then advancing an idea that we can know aslittle of original good and evil as we do of God. The conviction of this lack ofknowledge, and a belief in the modest virtue of ordinary decency, is inherent inhim; the Regency ease of the ottava rima, against Southey's solemnities, is partof this recognition. His Vision is not merely deflation and parody, but affirma-tion, and the humility, despite the mocking parade of it, is real enough. 'Withregard to the supernatural personages treated of, I can only say that I know asmuch about them, and (as an honest man) have a better right to talk of themthan Robert Southey. I have also treated them more tolerantly' {Preface).

The climax of this most human vision of essential good and evil is the settlingof accounts over an offense about which there could be no mistake. Southeyhad offended the code of honour which remains our substitute. 'It is no disgraceto Mr Southey to have written Wat Tyler, & afterwards to have written hisbirthday or Victory odes (I speak only of their politics), but it is something, forwhich I have no words, for this man to have endeavoured to bring to the stake(for such would he do) men who think as he thought, & for no reason but be-cause they think so still, when he has found it convenient to think otherwise'.11

He is brought in, alive, by the demon of vanity Asmodeus, who has caught himat his Vision: '"a libel — / No less on History than the Holy Bible'". (Historybelongs to Satan, the Bible to Michael, so there is no time like the present.) Thisis after the appearance of Wilkes and Junius for the prosecution. In Southey'sVision both were damned, and dumb. Here both speak, but for Southey's blan-ket political damnation Byron substitutes a recognition of human extremes.Wilkes, a merry soul still calling for votes ('how was that countenance alter'd...!', Southey had said), refuses to testify, since he blames George less than hisservants, and in any case won his battle on earth. Junius characteristically ex-aggerates ('exegi monumentum aere perennius'), and arrogantly refers Michaelto what he has written. He is only 'old "Nominis Umbra'" after all, who tookshelter in anonymity. Satan's asking Michael to call Washington, Home Tooke,and Franklin (we are to suppose) might have produced something. But it is timefor the complete outsider to appear. (As with a variation in rhythm, expectationis first disappointed, then doubly satisfied.) Southey's appearance, incidentally,is marked by a final puncturing of the Southey-Virgil-Dante-Milton hyperbole,or gorbelly, of learned allusion and commentary. Against this Byron has pre-

10 The obvious comparison is with stanzas xiii, xiv, and xv, where 'I hardly know' (xiii) turnsinto the ironic 'I know . . . I know . . . I know . . . I know . . . I know . . . I know' of xiv, andends up in the despairing 'God knows' of xv.

11 Letter to John Murray, 9 May 1817 (L. & J., V, pp. 220-21).

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sented himself as the Spanish satirist Quevedo, or Quevedo redivivus, an addi-tion which may have a wider reference.12 But Asmodeus's remark, that he hasbrought the libeller up to heaven's gate so quickly that '"I dare say that his wifeis still at tea'", seems to be an echo of Juvenal's Third Satire, where the mankilled in a Roman traffic accident sits glumly by the river of death, without acoin for the ferryman, while his family and servants bustle about preparing hisbath and dinner.

Southey will have better fortune, not being dead. His Vision has brought himup to heaven's gate for libel, and will bring him down again, for his insistenceon it. He is presented as a sharp fellow, with the sort of bearing and appearancewhich could pass (he is apparently unaffected by his dreadful journey), and asa vulgar publicist and opportunist. His first attempt at recitation makes evenMichael swear. His apologia follows, at some length. 'I only give the heads' isa wickedly appropriate meiosis. A third-person apologia, with its slight distance('he was pleased to dread'), is a formidable instrument. Byron was to use itagain in the political apologia of Lord Henry Amundeville in Don Juan, whichsometimes resembles an extract from Hansard. Wilkes had impudently askedfor Saint Peter's vote, being dead. Southey, all alive, goes one better, and offersto write the lives first of Satan, then of Michael ('"what says Michael?'"), be-fore turning from this to his most recent project.

'But talking about trumpets, here's my Vision!Now you shall judge, all people; yes, you shall

Judge with my judgment! and by my decisionBe guided who shall enter heaven or fall!

I settle all these things by intuition ..."

Everyone else having fled at the sound of his verses, Saint Peter knocks himdown at the fifth line. (This is 'Mountain and lake and vale; the valley disrobedof its verdure'. Perhaps it is 'lake' which does it, or perhaps the alliteration (v dr, v dr).) Southey drops back into Derwentwater, aided of course by that weightof the body which now comes fully into its own, but is saved from drowning bythe buoyancy of his corruption.

The judgment is Southey's, though not in his sense. ('Judge not, that ye benot judged'.) King George, the cherubs' 'poor old charge', is adroit enough toslip 'into heaven for one'. ('I see the good old King is gone to his place', Byronobserved on George's death;'— one can't help being sorry — though blindness— and age and insanity are supposed to be drawbacks — on human felicity —but I am not at all sure that the latter at least — might not render him happier

12 Callimachus, when publishing his satires or Iambics, gave part of them to Hipponax redivivus,and perhaps Byron's 'Quevedo Redivivus' has an oblique reference to this, as a farther re-buke to Southey's allusions and commentary. (It is also possible that the rudeness of liv (theoriginal MS reading is 'buttocks', which was replaced by 'loins'), after the parody ofSouthey's Marlovian and Miltonic comments on hell in liii, contains a suggestion that Byronis closer to Dante, and (say) the line about the devil who 'avea del cul fatto trombetta' (In-ferno XXI. 139). But this is only speculation.

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than any of his subjects'.13 'The good old King' is sarcasm, since the phrase wascommon form, but the qualified regret is real enough.) His parody of Southeyis close enough to remind one of the 'diabolical procedure' in Middlemarch bywhich the Tory opponents of Mr Brooke raise up an effigy before the electors,to squeak his maundering phrases after him ('"the Baltic, now'"). But thoughByron's Vision is founded on parody, its action goes beyond it, passing into themystery of primary good and evil confirmed as mystery by the human antics ofthe patriots and placemen of another world. The Judgment, by way of Southey,is essentially that passed on the opportunists of Church and State who say theyknow, and who to that extent claim something of the divine knowledge of goodand evil promised in the first temptation. ('Is there anything beyond? — whoknows? He that can't tell. Who tells that there is? He who don't know ...')

... the telescope is goneWhich kept my optics free from all delusion,

And show'd me what I in my turn have shown ...

'And shów'd me what II Í in my turn have shown'; the trochaic substitution inthe third foot imposes a pause before it, enhancing the deprecating T , the iron-ic and valedictory 'in my turn'.14 This is Byron as instrument, as Southey hadpretended to be a kind of vessel.

... All I saw farther, in the last confusion,Was, that King George slipp'd into heaven for one;

And when the tumult dwindled to a calm,I left him practising the hundredth psalm.

That is, the one thing to be known: 'For the Lord is gracious, his mercy is ever-lasting; and his truth endureth . . . ' I n stanza xxxiv Byron had called the poem'a true narrative'. Here in cvi it is 'a true dream', or all that our imperfection iscapable of. Perhaps the conjunction in the last stanza of human and divine isnot fortuitous. The postcript to the Preface puts The Vision of Judgment with'other works not intended to be serious'. These are by Fielding, Quevedo,

13 Letter to John Murray, 21 February 1820 (L. & J.. VII, p. 41). There are relatively few ref-erences to George III in the letters and journals. ('Of Kings the best', he calls him, sarcasti-cally in The Waltz). The Vision has one or two references to George IV, in particular in stanzaxii. In a way Southey's Vision makes Byron's 'In whom his qualities are reigning still', &c.,almost unnecessary; many people, on reading Spencer Perceval's reassuring 'Right in hisfather's steps hath the Regent trod', must have remembered Pope's 'Still Dunce the secondrules like Dunce the first'.

14 Journal for 18 February 1814 (L. & J., III, p. 244); it is one of Byron's frequent references toFalstaffs speech on honour. The line could of course be scanned 'Ănd shów'd mé whăt Í inmy turn have shown'. I prefer the pause before T. The effect is rather different, incidentally,from that in the middle of Southey's hexameters, which one reviewer described as 'a deadstop . . . producing the effect of a horse first refusing a leap, and then taking it by a violenteffort from the place where he stands' (unsigned review, Monthly Review, June 1821, in Mad-den, op. cit., p. 288).

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Chaucer, Pulci, and Swift, so perhaps it is not necessary to suggest that we areto trust not the teller, but the tale.

Chuo University, Tokyo ALASTAIR W. THOMSON

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