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In my turn: Byron's The Vision

of Judgment
Alastair W. Thomson

Chuo University , Tokyo

Published online: 13 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Alastair W. Thomson (1994) In my turn: Byron's The Vision of
Judgment , English Studies, 75:6, 523-535, DOI: 10.1080/00138389408598943
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/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 laureate
poem which inspired it. Southey's A Vision of Judgment is a panegyric on
George III at the gates of heaven, in which legitimacy is justified by God and
history. The title suggests something unexpectedly vouchsafed. Byron uses the
definite article, and (we learn at the end) a telescope. That is, something has
been seen. Whether it can be understood is another matter. The empiricism and
flux of Beppo suggested that there was much which could not be known. The
same is true of the Vision, with this distinction in particular, that Byron is dealing, among other things, with the enigma of the relationship between good and
evil. For this reason, and also because his terms have sometimes been misunderstood, it is worth spending some time on this comedy of heaven and hell and
judgment.
It is easy, as nearly everyone says, to be unfair to Southey. Like his Life of
Nelson, which Byron admired, the short poem The Battle of Blenheim is a classic of its kind. There may also be something to be said for Wilkes as Lord of
Misrule in his Vision. But reservations become an embarrassment beside the
poem, and its circumstances. Like others, he had been savagely parodied. In
particular, Sapphics: The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder ('Needy
Knife-Grinder!'), supposedly by Canning and Frere, had appeared in 1797 in
the Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner. This takes up Southey's The Widow: Sapphics (the inversion in the title suggests a peculiar readjustment), and all meetings 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 thee
damn'd first!'", with the radical 'thee' gummed over the upper-crust dismissal,
is unforgettable.) He had succeeded Pye as Poet Laureate in 1813. Byron had
commented on the laureateship, 'Consider, 100 marks a year! besides the wine
& the disgrace ..." Francis Jeffrey was to comment at greater length in the
Whig Edinburgh Review, after Southey had held the post for some years.
Southey aimed at Byron in the preface to his Vision, and Byron replied by
putting Southey in his poem. The terms Southey uses are those of the health of
mind, and state. (He had argued for strict censorship of journalists, in the Quarterly Review of October, 1816.) '...Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations ... the Satanic school ... This evil is political as well as moral ... "the
destruction of Governments" ... poisoning the waters of literature ... Let rulers
of the state look to this in time!' There was also Southey's arrogance, for which
he was well known. He is 'son of the Muses', and promises himself what had
been seen by a predecessor: 'secrets ../.. Such as of yore the Florentine saw'.

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

English Studies, 1994, 6, pp. 523-535

0013-838X/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 hexameter; the subject is also the glory of England, not in the seeds of time, but the
present; his Demon's 'after death there is judgment' is referred to Virgil, in a
note. There are also recollections and gatherings-up of Milton, and a faint
strain of Lucretius. As for the hexameters, those 'spavin'd dactyls', the preface's
references to 'the regular recurrence of emphasis in the last five syllables' are a
little ominous. ('Phylyda phyleridos, Pamphylyda florida flortos, / Dub dub a
dub, bounce quoth the guns, with a sulpherus huffe snuffe', as Peele said in The
Old Wives Tale, in the days of Stanyhurst.) The passage on the mob of hell has
its moments. But in general the blandness makes the essential vacuousness come
as a series of shocks: 'Not without ingenuous shame, and a sense of compunction / 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 'experiment' which may be 'of some importance in English Poetry'. '"I first venture; follow me who list!'" he says in his preface. The Vision, in its setting of
scholarly preface and historical 'Specimens, &c.,' will match a great moment of
triumph in the history of right-minded nations. Although 'Spenser, my master
dear' sounds like Occleve on Chaucer, the echoes of Milton and others seem
meant to suggest a consummation. Everything is accordingly of the very best,
and worst. 'Son of the Muses', he presents himself as 'Pensive though not in
thought', or as a vessel ready to be filled. What fills Southey is mainly the
strength 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 the
fierce spirit at work is understandable, at the time of the Cato Street conspiracy, on which there is another note. (Shakespeare seems to be brought in evidence here, since 'Some accursed conception of filth and of darkness / Ripe for
its monstrous birth' resembles Iago's boasting in Othello: 'I have't. It is engendred. Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light'.) It
is more difficult to understand his surprise that the multitude, in the post-Waterloo years of hunger, does not yet know its 'blessings', and is not 'contented
and thankful'. Among those bearing witness is Milton, cured like the King of
his blindness, and 'no longer here to Kings and to Hierarchies hostile': Byron's
rejoinder to this is in the (unpublished) dedication to Don Juan. This is presumption; Berkeley 'that kingdom enjoying where all things / Are what they
seem' is extraordinary bathos. The last of the appeals to Milton is the Princess
Amelia '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 final
vision of Southey himself held back from Heaven only by 'the weight of the
body' is perhaps unimportant.
There could hardly have been a larger invitation to parody, or satire, which
is probably one reason why Byron's response takes the form of comedy. 'The
gross 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 Orpheus and Amphion, incidentally ('stones in harmonious order / Mov'd, as their atoms
obey'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, 'are
something so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself. Some wondered
how a man of Southey's talents could have perpetrated it. 'We can with
difficulty be persuaded that it is not a hoax on the Poet Laureate', wrote one reviewer, who admired some of Southey's poetry.3 It is characterised by the highest of tones, and by an insistence on abstractions. (In a way, the same could be
said of the hexameters. The common ground, incidentally, between Southey's
laureate offering, and the reflections on revolutionary puration of Robespierre
is not surprising, since when the fiddle-faddle of high political moralising takes
over, the human is forgotten. '"Quoi de plus beau qu'une Assemble qui va se
purgeant, s'purant? ... Qui a donn ce spectacle? Vous, representante, vous
seuls!'") His poem begins and ends with himself. This is common form in a vision. But Southey's Vision has so little action that one suspects he is mainly concerned not even so much with a simple conviction as with himself and his bona
fides. Except for its brilliant introduction, Byron's Vision is all action. 'Es sind
keine Flickwrter im Gedichte', Goethe said of it: there is no padding in the
poem.4 It begins with Saint Peter nodding over his keys, and virtually ends with
the blow from the keys which confirms 'the weight of the body'. Like many another porter, Saint Peter has his little ways. For one thing, the people up at the
House are careless, and need keeping in line. He would not have let in Louis
XVI 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 recently, and this clamour at the gates is exceptional.) That is, to Southey's abstractions Byron opposes the essential humanity of Peter, capable in life of
violence and betrayal, and still testy and violent in heaven. The keys of the kingdom, which Southey had appropriated, have been restored to an authority
which (if one may say so) was never less than properly constituted.
The introduction, an ironic summary of recent great events, moves through
Waterloo and the King's funeral to a dismissal of the hell of tradition, before
the tale is taken up again at stanza xvi. By then several things have been
clarified. Waterloo is 'the crowning carnage', where England, Prussia, and
France threw their soldiers against each other, and when the recording angel's
board 'threw their pens down in divine disgust / The page was so besmear'd
with blood and dust'. This parody of incense offered to the gods reflects the reality of the long June day of slaughter: the only battle he was ever at, as one of
Wellington's officers said during it, where everyone was killed on both sides.
Five years later, there is the pomp of King George's funeral.

Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, 17 March 1821 (Lionel Madden, ed., Robert Southey: The
Critical 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 upon
the screen'" of the showman or lecturer'.
In a conversation with Henry Crabb Robinson, of 1829 (Andrew Rutherford, ed., Byron: The
Critical 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 fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.

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So mix his body with the dust! It might

Return to what it must far sooner, were
The natural compound left alone to fight
Its way back into earth, and fire, and air:
But the unnatural balsams merely blight
What 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 sang
anonyme', as Vigny called it in Servitude et Grandeur militaires), and obstinately preserving the dust of Kings. 'The mockery of hell', Byron calls this care. If
hell has any meaning in his vision, it is perhaps in such a denial of natural
process and natural energy over against the unnatural slaughter that has taken
place. For the rest, the damnation dealt out by state Church and moralising
State is dismissed in xv as 'that immortal fry / Of almost every body born to
die'. With this, the narrative action begins.
Southey's judicial process is complete, to the extent that (the witnesses for the
prosecution remaining speechless) a judgment is given. Byron's is incomplete,
and human, the proceedings being interrupted by what amounts to the arraignment of the living Southey, who like Dante is transported to other regions, and
unlike Dante remains unabashed and unenlightened. No judgment is passed on
King George, who manages to slip into heaven, perhaps with other souls who
see their opportunity. Southey's trial resembles a reversal of the trial of Louis
XVI in 1793 before the French Convention, for lese-nation and an appeal for
foreign intervention. (Two years earlier, after the return from Varennes, Danton had suggested that Louis should be declared imbecile, in the name of humanity, and left to himself; Byron's Satan at one point expresses a similar
opinion, in stanza xli.)5 This absence of judgment has something to do with the
idea that George was unwise, but also has to do with something central to
Byron'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 wanted 'to put ... George's apotheosis in a Whig point of view', can be misleading
if 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 franaise, ed. Gerard Walter, Bibliothque de la Pliade,

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'pamphltaire de gnie
la veille de la Revolution' had until then been 'poete aimable, sans plus', which is news indeed to admirers of Lycidas, Comus, and one or two other things.)
Letter to Moore, 1 October 1821 (L. & J., VIII, p. 229). (See also letter to Douglas Kinnaird
of 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 the
Satan 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 witnesses', incidentally, are not hellish, like Southey's, though some of them are
from hell, like many other people in the poem. (Michael protests that Satan has
produced '"half of earth and hell'"). They are swarming angry life, 'an universal shoal of shades': stout English, Irish, Scotch, French, and American citizens
in 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 at
lix will confirm this.) But, as most readers have understood, the discussion
which 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 produce
some such reaction.) A reference to Paradise Lost might have saved Kelsall from thinking
that Byron follows Southey in the matter of 'hell broke loose', and he should have understood that "'fie on't'" in Don Juan VIII. li is an echo of Hamlet's first soliloquy; the description of it as 'out of date' language suggesting (or confirming) that Byron was 'an
anachronism' (p. 166) is unfortunate. As for Byron being 'out of date', and not fully in touch
with 19th century revolutionary practice, it is one thing to refer stanza cv of The Vision of
Judgment to Pope and Augustan motifs (p. 145), and another to argue from this that for
Byron nothing had changed since Walpole's day. As typical is the willingness to see the meaning or meanings of the important stanza viii of the Vision in a single line (p. 133). A comparison of Byron in viii, and his Satan in xliv, puts at least one meaning of Satan's speech
beyond reasonable doubt, and removes the need for delicate cautions like 'the text creates the
suspicion that the issue is not proven' (p. 134). The statement that Byron 'dismisses' the 'extraordinary libertarian turmoil which had dominated Europe ever since he was born' (pp. 6869) 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 to
come. There is to be no wavering; poet or no poet, Byron cannot be allowed to express opinions 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 point
in removing the line 'I do not know; I wish men to be free' (Don Juan IX.xxv) from its
syntactic, as well as from any other effective context (p. 167), in order to describe it, in picturesque phrase, as 'a line which totters with insecurity'. Like much else in Byron, the passage expresses a human enough confusion of hope and hopelessness. He could be forgiven for
this 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 more
examples of the method may be of use. It makes good sense, up to a point, to say of Byron's
Vision (p. 130) that he follows Southey, in accepting that the parliamentary order in Britain
reflects the Providential order of the universe, though it leaves out of account the fuller implications of his comedy. But it makes very little sense to apply a recruitment of a Tory God
in the Vision, for purposes of comedy, to the hopeful and hopeless references to political and
social futures in Don Juan, or anywhere else. Nor is it true to say of the Vision that 'since the
situation is fully dramatised, one must read the poetry as expressive of the dilemmas and tensions of a political situation, and not as an essay in verse autobiography' (pp. 134-35). The
reference 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 clear
is that the poetry should be read as neither. Kelsall, incidentally, suggests that Byron suffered
from the 'pressure of typology' (p. 69).

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"Thing of Light', becomes a Minister of the Crown, whose weapons are sweet
reason and moderation. Satan becomes a leader of the Whig opposition, for
whom mistrust of the crown was a fact of political life. The case which he makes
is something of a caricature. For him, kings are a kind of quit-rent for this
unimportant planet, and so should be claimed; later he retreats a little from this
position, but his attitude leaves no room for doubt.
He merely bent his diabolic brow
An instant; and then raising it, he stood
In act to assert his right or wrong, and show
Cause why King George by no means could or should
Make out a case to be exempt from woe
Eternal, 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 be
significant. If so, the statement in the opening speech by Michael (as much president of the tribunal as defending counsel) of the need to prove guilt, not innocence, suggests that there is little common ground between them. The difficulty
of distinguishing between the guilt of the monarchy, and the guilt of a ruling
monarch, had already arisen in the case of Louis XVI of France; it was in any
case 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, / A
weaker king ne'er left a realm undone!' The paradox is human enough. The exclamation-mark, incidentally, is not declamatory, and the difference between
Byron and his Satan in what follows is not merely a matter of style.
'From out the past
Of ages, since mankind have known the rule
Of monarchs from the bloody rolls amass'd
Of sin and slaughter from the Caesar's school,
Take the worst pupil; and produce a reign
More drench'd with gore, more cumber'd with the slain!'

The oratorical shift in xliv from 'pupil' to 'reign' is skilfully made, but remains
a shift, in every sense of the term. In his preface, Byron remarks that the attempt 'to canonise a monarch, who, whatever were his household virtues, was
neither a successful nor a patriot king, inasmuch as several years of his reign
passed in war with America and Ireland, to say nothing of the aggression upon
France, like all other exaggeration, necessarily begets opposition'. This, with
its quiet 'exaggeration', is strictly factual. (The liberal 'aggression upon France'
can be accepted, in view of the British government's hostility to the progress of
the French revolution, and although [contrary to a sacramental tradition
among 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 because

of long absence from office. Much of his speech is high Whig oratory, properly larded with patriotism, invocations of liberty, and classical allusions and instances, in which the antitheses fall like blows. The rhetoric is impressive, with
its 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 Christian
nation'"). It has its weaknesses. 'He was a tool... / . . . but as a tool / So let him
be consumed!' (xliv). This has perhaps more gravity than logic, since useless
tools are left lying around or thrown away, not burned. (To argue that to be
forgotten by God means damnation might be to stretch the metaphor beyond
its real context, which at the moment is that of political condemnation. But if
we must understand 'burned', it exemplifies the political inhumanity inherent in
a process of abstraction and mere analogy, and is an appropriate introduction
to the shifty eloquence of the rest of xliv.) There is a touch of mere eloquence
in '"And this was well for him, but not for those / Millions who found him what
oppression chose'" (xlvi). One understands, in a general way (George either as
instrument, or protector of tyrants), but it is blurred by the sonorous economy
of '"chose"'. Since this is verse rendering some of the effects of parliamentary
prose, one might say that 'chose' seems to be there for the rhyme. (The same is
true of the tautology of the last line of xliv, '"More drench'd with gore, more
cumber'd with the slain!'", a line so complacently repetitive as to make it seem
like an intrusive alexandrine.) 'Mere eloquence' is probably misleading, since
the effect is to identify George and oppression. The climax is the indirect and
provocative appeal to Saint Peter in xlviii and xlix, which has a barrister's opportunism, since Saint Peter has no use for kings in any case. And to Peter's furious assent, Satan, at ease with all conditions above or below the sun, responds
with sonorousness ('"Saint! ... you do well to avenge ...'") and friendly humour: if Peter, a bit of a Cerberus, is willing to exchange, then we shall do what
we can.
Michael's conciliatory reason is as obviously that of a Tory minister of the
Crown secure in office. He seems willing to condemn George, if the evidence is
there. But the exchange with Wilkes in lxix is revealing. He has just informed
Wilkes of the '"august"' character of the proceedings: '"to judge of kings / Is
the tribunal met'". His orotund reassurance, that the tomb gives licence to the
beggar to accuse '"the loftiest", is met by Wilkes's remark, that some do not
wait for death '"for such a liberty'", where the play on 'liberty' (especially after
'licence') is very much to the point. Whatever his apparent impartiality, Michael
in debate is not quite the 'Michael, leader of God's host / When Heaven and
Hell are met' of Yeats's The Rose of Peace. "Thou wast / Too bitter is it not
so? in thy gloom / Of passion?'" he asks the shade of the anonymous Whig
libeller Junius, so giving it the opportunity for an eloquent and posturing antithesis: '"I loved my country, and I hated him"'. The two leaders play the party
game. 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 they
become 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 Thing

of 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, and
the idea of Creator and created). They are still in this state when they confront
each other, in xxxvii and xxxviii. Stanza xxxvii is neither direct nor reported
speech. It is how Satan must speak, and the word-play in 'In act to assert his
right or wrong' has more to do at this stage with Satan as Satan, than with
Satan as politician. Nor, unless eloquence itself is suspect, is there much room
for misunderstanding about Michael in xxxviii (the opening of the debate), with
his '"brought before the Lord'" and '"do thy will, / If it be just"'. That is, their
opposition 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 and
Michael begin by being Satan and Michael, it is inadvisable to swallow whole
Byron's remark to Moore, that he wanted 'to put ... George's apotheosis in a
Whig point of view', whether or not with a view to making poetry do the work
of politics.8 (In one sense this comment resembles his remark to Hobhouse, on
first seeing the Parthenon, that it looked very like the Mansion House.) The
question, of course, is not why Byron showed them at first as darkness and
light, 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 archangel
or Satan either. There is an angel who shouts 'Ho' and 'Lo' (Byron himself has
a 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 fortitude of mind, has not patience to think that evil is inseparable from the nature
of things'. So Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age, speaking of the effect of disap7

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 my
guess is that he intended a play on 'Machine' as a supernatural agency or personage introduced into a poem (as used by Dryden, Pope, and Addison: Byron himself speaks of 'mythological machinery' in Don Juan I.cci), and changed it because its other meanings would have
compromised the idea of agent, or viceroy: the last perhaps a discreetly loaded word in the
political contexts of the poem. It seems rather a pity that this appeal to fiction, and the reader, had to be cancelled.
Stuart Peterfreund (The Politics of "Neutral Space" in Byron's Vision of Judgment', Modern
Languages 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 (Saint
Peter as Lord Harrowby, Asmodeus as William Smith, who raised Wat Tyler and associated
matters in Parliament) is to the point, but some of it is a little circumstantial. (Michael's misquotation of Horace, which Peterfreund does not mention, may mean something here.) The
question of how he 'writes himself into history' is of some interest, though it could be argued
that he was already in it. But the statement that 'Byron, of course, writes himself into the
poem as Satan, in ironic rejoinder to Southey's remarks about the "Satanic School" of poetry', is too confident. Byron may have been tempted at some stage to do this; if so, he went
beyond it. (One comment by Peterfreund is particularly suggestive: 'the Byronic poet or visionary can know of hierarchies of order beyond his own, but he cannot decipher them, except 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 good

and evil, and the manner in which they are introduced, mean something radically different. Whatever the traditional figuring in which our understanding is
expressed, their relationship, and with that final knowledge of them, remains
hidden. Michael's '"Our difference is politicaF" is part of the party debate between gentlemen. But before the debate begins, there is a reference to destiny as
perhaps the cause of this war (xxxii). Unless we are determined to keep all of
Byron's meanings in the sphere of politics, this does not simply mean that no
parliamentary party can control the course of events. Veiled though the reference is, it has its significance, as has the mention of the Fates in lxxxix. Traditionally the gods themselves were subject to destiny, and the divine brawlings
and squabblings in Homer are not so far as all that from Byron. What he seems
to be concerned with, against dealings out of final judgment, is our human inability to understand not merely responsibility, but the continuing debate of
good and evil. It is not simply the Laureate's hell of Jacobins and radicals which
he dismisses, partly in so many words, partly by putting everyone or nearly
everyone in hell, Fox as well as Pitt, though hell, as we learn from liii, is hardly a strait prison. The Vision of Judgment is a comedy of vanity, and perhaps a
traditional hell and heaven are products of human vanity. ('It seem'd the mockery of hell', in that authentic vision of the exordium, seems to be as near as he
will approach it.) One would not want to insist too much on that. But when he
refers us to the Book of Job in xxxiii, it is likely that it is not merely to support
his parliamentary terms as such, against Southey's faith in a mob devil and a
Tory God.
But here they were in neutral space: we know
From 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 show
From the same book, in how polite a way
The dialogue is held between the powers
Of Good and Evil but 'twould take up hours.

Hazlitt's essay on Southey in The Spirit of the Age is not entirely unsympathetic. His review
of the recently published and republican Wat Tyler in the Examiner of 9 March 1817 is a remarkable contribution to the storm of abuse that broke on Southey. 'We wonder that in all
this 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 apologia
Byron puts into his mouth in the Vision. Southey's friend Charles Wynn defended him ably
against William Smith. Marilyn Butler has pointed out that we should not 'accept unexamined Byron's portrayals of Southey in Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment as merely a paid
government hack', and adds that he was 'a genuine populist' ("The Orientalism of Byron's
Giaour', 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 in
Don Juan. Admittedly in another way he is not, and Byron's 'when he has found it convenient to think otherwise' in the letter to Murray quoted on page 532 is unfair. But the provocation 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, in
particular about faith as distinct from man's knowledge and capacity for judgment. In the matter of knowledge, there is one line from Byron's neutral space
which 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 implications are plain.10 It is not that Byron is first using contemporary politics to subvert Southey's use of them, and then advancing an idea that we can know as
little of original good and evil as we do of God. The conviction of this lack of
knowledge, and a belief in the modest virtue of ordinary decency, is inherent in
him; the Regency ease of the ottava rima, against Southey's solemnities, is part
of this recognition. His Vision is not merely deflation and parody, but affirmation, and the humility, despite the mocking parade of it, is real enough. 'With
regard to the supernatural personages treated of, I can only say that I know as
much about them, and (as an honest man) have a better right to talk of them
than Robert Southey. I have also treated them more tolerantly' {Preface).
The climax of this most human vision of essential good and evil is the settling
of accounts over an offense about which there could be no mistake. Southey
had offended the code of honour which remains our substitute. 'It is no disgrace
to Mr Southey to have written Wat Tyler, & afterwards to have written his
birthday or Victory odes (I speak only of their politics), but it is something, for
which 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 because 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 him
at his Vision: '"a libel / No less on History than the Holy Bible'". (History
belongs to Satan, the Bible to Michael, so there is no time like the present.) This
is after the appearance of Wilkes and Junius for the prosecution. In Southey's
Vision both were damned, and dumb. Here both speak, but for Southey's blanket 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 his
servants, and in any case won his battle on earth. Junius characteristically exaggerates ('exegi monumentum aere perennius'), and arrogantly refers Michael
to what he has written. He is only 'old "Nominis Umbra'" after all, who took
shelter in anonymity. Satan's asking Michael to call Washington, Home Tooke,
and Franklin (we are to suppose) might have produced something. But it is time
for the complete outsider to appear. (As with a variation in rhythm, expectation
is 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 pre10

11

The obvious comparison is with stanzas xiii, xiv, and xv, where 'I hardly know' (xiii) turns
into the ironic 'I know . . . I know . . . I know . . . I know . . . I know . . . I know' of xiv, and
ends up in the despairing 'God knows' of xv.
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 addition which may have a wider reference.12 But Asmodeus's remark, that he has
brought the libeller up to heaven's gate so quickly that '"I dare say that his wife
is still at tea'", seems to be an echo of Juvenal's Third Satire, where the man
killed in a Roman traffic accident sits glumly by the river of death, without a
coin for the ferryman, while his family and servants bustle about preparing his
bath and dinner.
Southey will have better fortune, not being dead. His Vision has brought him
up to heaven's gate for libel, and will bring him down again, for his insistence
on it. He is presented as a sharp fellow, with the sort of bearing and appearance
which could pass (he is apparently unaffected by his dreadful journey), and as
a vulgar publicist and opportunist. His first attempt at recitation makes even
Michael swear. His apologia follows, at some length. 'I only give the heads' is
a wickedly appropriate meiosis. A third-person apologia, with its slight distance
('he was pleased to dread'), is a formidable instrument. Byron was to use it
again in the political apologia of Lord Henry Amundeville in Don Juan, which
sometimes resembles an extract from Hansard. Wilkes had impudently asked
for Saint Peter's vote, being dead. Southey, all alive, goes one better, and offers
to write the lives first of Satan, then of Michael ('"what says Michael?'"), before 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 decision
Be 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 him
down at the fifth line. (This is 'Mountain and lake and vale; the valley disrobed
of its verdure'. Perhaps it is 'lake' which does it, or perhaps the alliteration (v d
r, v dr).) Southey drops back into Derwentwater, aided of course by that weight
of the body which now comes fully into its own, but is saved from drowning by
the buoyancy of his corruption.
The judgment is Southey's, though not in his sense. ('Judge not, that ye be
not judged'.) King George, the cherubs' 'poor old charge', is adroit enough to
slip 'into heaven for one'. ('I see the good old King is gone to his place', Byron
observed 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 rebuke to Southey's allusions and commentary. (It is also possible that the rudeness of liv (the
original MS reading is 'buttocks', which was replaced by 'loins'), after the parody of
Southey's Marlovian and Miltonic comments on hell in liii, contains a suggestion that Byron
is closer to Dante, and (say) the line about the devil who 'avea del cul fatto trombetta' (Inferno 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 was
common form, but the qualified regret is real enough.) His parody of Southey
is close enough to remind one of the 'diabolical procedure' in Middlemarch by
which the Tory opponents of Mr Brooke raise up an effigy before the electors,
to squeak his maundering phrases after him ('"the Baltic, now'"). But though
Byron's Vision is founded on parody, its action goes beyond it, passing into the
mystery of primary good and evil confirmed as mystery by the human antics of
the 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 they
know, and who to that extent claim something of the divine knowledge of good
and evil promised in the first temptation. ('Is there anything beyond? who
knows? He that can't tell. Who tells that there is? He who don't know ...')
... the telescope is gone
Which kept my optics free from all delusion,
And show'd me what I in my turn have shown ...
'And shw'd me what II in my turn have shown'; the trochaic substitution in
the third foot imposes a pause before it, enhancing the deprecating T , the ironic and valedictory 'in my turn'. 14 This is Byron as instrument, as Southey had
pretended 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 everlasting; 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 is
capable of. Perhaps the conjunction in the last stanza of human and divine is
not 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

14

Letter to John Murray, 21 February 1820 (L. & J.. VII, p. 41). There are relatively few references to George III in the letters and journals. ('Of Kings the best', he calls him, sarcastically in The Waltz). The Vision has one or two references to George IV, in particular in stanza
xii. 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 his
father's steps hath the Regent trod', must have remembered Pope's 'Still Dunce the second
rules like Dunce the first'.
Journal for 18 February 1814 (L. & J., III, p. 244); it is one of Byron's frequent references to
Falstaffs speech on honour. The line could of course be scanned 'nd shw'd m wht in
my 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 dead
stop . . . producing the effect of a horse first refusing a leap, and then taking it by a violent
effort from the place where he stands' (unsigned review, Monthly Review, June 1821, in Madden, op. cit., p. 288).

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

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Chuo University, Tokyo

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