Byron’s Social Doctrine 19
There can be no doubt that Byron exhibited maturity and
found his poetic medium in the satire of Don Juan, The Irish
Avatar, and other of these later poems. In them he could
attack cant, religious, political, and moral, as he had never
been able to attack it in verses of the Childe Harold type.
His nature was basically satirical, and he returned to that
form of verse as a natural consequence of this nature.
If, however, he turned away from satire in the poems of
the middle period, he did not turn away from the principles
of his satiric verse, or from the abuses at which he directed
it. He did not wield the cudgel so effectively in sentimental
verse as in satire, but he wielded it, nevertheless, against the
same enemy which he attacked in the later cantos of Don
Juan.
This consistency in Byron’s social doctrine is indicated
best, I think, by an entry in his journal on January 16, 1814:
As for me, by the blessing of indifference, I have simpli-
fied my politics into an utter detestation of all existing gov-
ernments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and
summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal
republic would convert me into an advocate for single and
Uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power,
and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of
establishment is no better nor worse for a people than an-
other. . . . I have no consistency, except in politics; and that
probably arises from my indifference on the subject alto-
gether.2
After we have loosed this statement from its tangle of
Byronic facetiousness, one fact is clear: Byron’s consistency
was not in his politics, as he maintained. His interest in gov-
ernment was in what it would do for a people, and his con-
sistent theme in his poetry, as in his life, was a relentless
fight against oppression and for freedom. He was no more
serious in thought and purpose in this respect in 1823 than
he was in 1812.