Rice University

Pope, Byron, and the Satiric Persona

Author(s): Martin Maner
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 20, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn,
1980), pp. 557-573
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/450370
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 SEL, 20 (1980)
ISSN 0039 3657

Pope, Byron, and the Satiric Persona

MAR TIN MANER

Ever since Odysseus beat Thersites for abusing Agamemnon, satirists

have had to win acceptance from their audiences or face the conse-
quences. This has made the apologia one of the satirist's standard topics;
and more importantly, it has led to a strong emphasis, in satiric works,
upon what Aristotelians call the persuasive appeal based on ethos, or the
speaker's character. As Maynard Mack reminds us, the satirist "must be
accepted by his audience as a fundamentally virtuous and tolerant man,
who challenges the doings of other men not whenever he happens to feel
vindictive, but whenever they deserve it." Mack emphasizes that "the
audience must be assured that its censor is a man of good will, who has
been, as it were, forced into action."'
But in extending this argument to rescue Pope's Horatian satires from
the frequent charge that in them Pope sounds vain and self-righteous,
Mack goes astray. Readers who accuse Pope of vanity, he argues, ignore
"the real point . . . which is simply that in passages of this sort [i.e.,
passages of vigorous self-defense] . . . Pope felt the necessity of support-
ing the ethos a satirical poet must have" (Mack, "Muse," pp. 87-88; my
interpolation). Of course this is true; but when we read lines such as
these,

With Eyes that pry not, Tongue that ne'er repeats,

Fond to spread Friendships, but to cover Heats,
To help who want, to forward who excel;
This, all who know me, know; who love me, tell;2

we do not judiciously pause to remark that Pope is defending the

satirist's ethos rather than himself.
Perhaps to counter this sort of objection, Mack emphasizes the fictive
situation in satire. The speaker of the poem is not Pope, but a
many-voiced persona - an embodiment of the satirist's ethos. But this is

Martin Maner is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Wright State University

at Dayton, Ohio.
'Maynard Mack, "The Muse of Satire," YR, 41 (Autumn 1951):86.
'Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1961), p.
19. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text, giving page and line
numbers.
558 SATIRIC PERSONA

an overextension of the term "persona"; after all, the speaker in Pope's

Horatian poems lives (not coincidentally) at Twickenham and attacks
(not coincidentally) Pope's enemies. To say, as Mack does, that a per-
sona with three distinguishable voices defends an abstract ethos in the
Horatian poems, is merely to describe a complex rhetorical situation,
not to disguise the simple fact that Pope defends himself.
Mack overextends the concept of persona in two directions: he uses it
evaluatively, to suggest that Pope's Horatian satires are somehow better
poems if we read them with an awareness of persona as distancing
device; and he uses it too broadly, to designate the poet's entire pro-
jected self-image. In his later writing, Mack uses the more accurate
term, "personality," to designate the writer's projected image of himself;
in particular, he writes of "the dramatic personality . . . who is at once
the historical Alexander Pope and the fictive hero" of a rhetorical tradi-
tion.3
Mack's earlier argument in "The Muse of Satire" may be seen as part
of what Irvin Ehrenpreis calls "an honest effort to rescue the Augustans
from imprisonment in old Romantic commonplaces" by setting up
"an ideal of an impersonal art as the distinguishing property of these
writers."4 In place of the old image of Pope as a vain, hypersensitive
railer at war with the dunces, we have Pope the consummate rhetorician
defending an abstract ethos via a multiple-voiced persona. By overex-
tending the concept, we can assign "inept or distasteful aspects of [a
writer's] work" to the persona who speaks the poem, "while the author
remains deft and refined"; thus "we can also dissipate the aura of
vain-glory that floats about any defense of one's own career" (Ehren-
preis, p. 53; my interpolation).
Once the rescue operation was mounted for the Augustans, it was
inevitable that the same sort of analysis should be employed on the
Romantics-so that the "impersonal" persona should next be discovered
in the works of poets traditionally regarded as highly personal. The kind
of confusion this persona- analysis can lead to is exemplified by a critical
exchange between William Marshall and George Ridenour. In Byron's
Don Juan, Marshall discovers not a unified consciousness, but a series of
narrating voices who quarrel among themselves. Yet in this disunity
Marshall finds reason to praise Don Juan, perhaps because the
multiple-voiced persona has become praiseworthy for its own sake:

One after another, in sequence or in conflict, the various

speakers emerge. Some readers have complained that the prin-

3Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969),
p. 8.
4Irvin Ehrenpreis, Literary Meaning and Augustan Values (Charlottesville: Univ. of
Virginia Press, 1974), pp. 49-50.
 MARTIN MAN ER 559

cipal fault of DonJuan is its lack of consistency. This is, instead,

its dominant virtue in terms of what it is supposed to do and
what it does. At one moment the speaker emerging is naive,
prudish, perhaps stupid; he may be prudent to the point of
absurdity, sometimes concerned with exasperating details, else-
where frightened at the implications of what he recounts. At
other times, however, the speaker is worldly, indiscreet, perhaps
cynical.5

Ridenour refutes Marshall's argument by pointing out that readers of

DonJuan have generally felt the narrator of the poem to be a "recogniz-
able companion," not a series of speakers.6 Next Ridenour argues that
since Byron was such a notorious public figure, he could assume that the
reader would know at least the basic facts of his life and character;
certainly no moderately literate reader has been taken in by the "prud-
ish" disguise. After analyzing the nature of Byron's irony, Ridenour caps
his treatment of Don Juan thus:

But the quality of the poem, it seems to me, its special flavor or
tonality, comes from this particular blend of the predictable
and unpredictable, mysterious and prosaic, frightening and
reassuring. . . . And one of the ways of expressing this state of
affairs is through a multitude of voices which we always recog-
nize as manifestations of one voice, and through a great variety
of attitudes that shape themselves into a limited number of re-
lated, recurrent ones, which we attach to the one speaker.
(Ridenour, "Mode," p. 443)

This "one speaker" Ridenour elsewhere refers to as the "persona" of Don

Juan.7 Again the concept has been overextended to refer to the personal-
ity of the poem's speaker -a personality which is as carefully constructed
as Pope's in the Horatian satires, but which is not so much a rhetorical
disguise as a selective form of self-presentation.
Ehrenpreis is surely correct in stating that when one employs the con-
cept of persona, "the most illuminating applications are made to works
whose structure depends on the speaker's having an ambiguous charac-
ter" (Ehrenpreis, p. 57). If we confine our use of the term so that it
invariably means "the kind of literary disguise that is deliberately in-
tended to be penetrated" (Ehrenpreis, p. 59), we shall avoid the kind of

5William H. Marshall, The Structure of Byron's Major Poems (Philadelphia: Univ. of

Pennsylvania Press, 1962), p. 176.
6George M. Ridenour, "The Mode of Byron's Don Juan," PMLA, 79 (September
1964):442.
7George M. Ridenour, The Style of Don Juan, Yale Studies in English, vol. 144 (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 93 et passim.
560 SATIRIC PERSONA

confusion that results from overextending it. In discussing satiric perso-

nae one must often distinguish straightforward self-presentations from
ironic ones-a difficult task for some readers, even without the added
confusion of an ambiguous critical terminology!
In analyzing Pope's and Byron's use of satiric personae, I shall set
aside the whole question of personality (real or fictive) as revealed in
their works, in order to focus instead on the rhetorical use of ironic
disguise in their respective manners of self-presentation. Both poets
were public men with recognizable personalities - an important similar-
ity, since it gave them similar opportunities for employing ironic dis-
guises that would readily be penetrated. Both evolved satiric verse styles
that are colloquial, flexible in tone, and rich in irony. Nowhere is the
concept of satiric persona more relevant than in the analysis of poetry
rich in such ironies, tonal shifts, and undercuttings-poetry marked by
frequent games with ironic disguises which the reader is expected to see
through.
Pope's manner of self-presentation can best be seen in his Horatian
imitations, because in them we can examine his alterations of
pre-existing rhetorical patterns. It is commonplace to point out the
depersonalization implicit in Pope's use of imitation as a literary form; it
is less often pointed out that he frequently and obtrusively personalizes
these poems, and that he tends to be least ironic when presenting his own
character as a satirist. In choosing to compare the rhetoric of Pope's
self-presentation in the Horatian poems to Byron's in Don Juan, I may
seem to be comparing apples and oranges; Don Juan is admittedly
neither an imitation nor a formal verse satire, but rather an extended
satiric verse narrative. However, the differences of literary mode are
outweighed by the similarities of method: the character of the speaker is
essential to the structure and meaning of both satirists' works. Further-
more, in the works chosen for analysis, both writers exhibit a similar
concern with the satirist's apologia. Pope, who is usually regarded as the
prime example of an Augustan master of rhetorical impersonality, con-
stantly puts himself forward, without disguise and without ironic intent,
as a reliable and admirable man. Byron, on the other hand, whose Don
Juan is in many other ways a highly personal poem, handles his apologia
by consistently employing ironic disguise.
The earliest of Pope's Horatian imitations is the First Satire of the
Second Book-the one satire by Horace that deals most explicitly with
the character or ethos of the satirist. In choosing this poem to imitate,
Pope is of course generalizing his own apologia; he is implying that his
situation is like Horace's, and that both of them have faced the kinds of
attacks that all satirists must endure. Pope says as much when he points
out that after the uproar surrounding the third and fourth Moral Essays,
"An Answer from Horace was both more full, and of more Dignity, than
 MARTIN MANER 561

any I cou'd have made in my own person" (Butt, p. 3).

Yet despite the relative impersonality of imitation as a mode, Pope
consistently personalizes this satire, putting himself in the poem much
more obtrusively and much less ironically than Horace did in the orig-
inal. Horace's apologia is ironically self-deprecatory: he writes satire
rather than epic or complimentary verse, he tells us, because it is his
nature to do so. There is an element of self-mockery in Horace's insis-
tence that he could not stop writing satire if he wished to. Pope, how-
ever, somewhat stridently insists that his writing satire is a virtuous re-
sponse to provocation. He writes because external circumstances force
him to; the vice he encounters is so outrageous that he cannot remain
silent:

Satire's my Weapon, but I'm too discreet

To run a Muck, and tilt at all I meet;
I only wear it in a Land of Hectors,
Thieves, Supercargoes, Sharpers, and Directors.
(Butt, p. 11, lines 69-72)

There is only a slight hint of this in Horace, and no parallel at all for the
six lines immediately preceding-lines in which Pope portrays himself as
frank, sincere, and moderate. One can see ironic self-disguise in these
lines only if one violently misreads the poem's entire argument.
The single most drastic alteration of the Horatian original involves a
similar displacement of emphasis toward Pope himself as the satire's
prime example of virtue. Horace shows us the virtue he recommends by
portraying Lucilius as a model of the frank and open writer; but Pope
transfers this praise to himself. Horace's humorous digression on his
Venusian background, a tongue-in-cheek explanation of his own
pugnaciousness, becomes in Pope's version an unironic description of
Pope's own frankness and political impartiality.
Indeed, Pope's anxiety to put himself forward as exemplary leads him
to misjudge badly the rhetorical effect of this apologia. Whereas the
climax of Horace's poem is the author's insistence that he must live up to
the examples set by men like Lucilius, Pope goes on to supply line after
line unparalleled in the original, carrying the tone of the imitation to a
pitch of heroic virtue. The implicit emphasis on Pope's courage is now
made devastatingly explicit:

Hear this, and tremble! you, who 'scape the Laws.

Yes, while I live, no rich or noble knave
Shall walk the World, in credit, to his grave.
To VIRTUE ONLY and HER FRIENDS, A FRIEND,
The World beside may murmur, or commend.
Know, all the distant Din that World can keep
562 SATIRIC PERSONA

Rolls o'er my Grotto, and but sooths my Sleep.

(Butt, p. 17, lines 118-24)

These lines are disturbing, not because they are vain or biographically
inaccurate, but because they violate decorum. The Horatian equipoise
is destroyed by the elevated tone of this passage; it is as though Pope were
shouting in Fortescue's ear. Thus it is with immoderate relief that we
welcome the casual, idiomatic conclusion of this imitation.
Again in the Second Satire of the Second Book, Pope drastically alters
the Horatian original in order to make his own personal presence more
clearly felt. In the First Satire of the Second Book, Horace holds up
Lucilius for us to admire; now in the Second Satire of the Second Book
he gives us Ofellus as an example of the right way to live. Again Pope
appropriates this praise and directs it toward himself-giving us a
description of his own life at Twickenham, rather than creating some
counterpart to Horace's Ofellus.
In the first example we feel that the intensity of the poet's self-defense
stems from a source lying outside the poem - that Pope is speaking, not
to Fortescue, but to a public adversary. The result is a mishandling of
poetic decorum. In the second example, however, Pope finds ways to
put himself forward by indirection and implication; for one thing, he
describes not himself, but his life at Twickenham, which is made to
stand for important political and social virtues. Also, Pope's tone modu-
lates as far toward self-deprecation as was possible for a poet who lacks
Horace's "happy faculty of including himself among his 'victims' and of
regarding his most serious poses with amusement":8 "Content with little,
I can piddle here / On Broccoli and mutton, round the year" (Butt,
p. 65, lines 137-38). This gives the apologia a human cast; the implica-
tion is that the good man can be allowed his trifles, his little vanities. He
may be no real gentleman-farmer, but he can at least play at rustic
self-sufficiency. The political asides are delivered with the same quiet
understatement: "My Life's amusements have been just the same, /
Before, and after Standing Armies came" (Butt, p. 67, lines 153-54).
Most importantly, despite his self-praise Pope wisely follows Horace in
putting someone else forward as the poem's prime satiric norm: Bethel,
whose "equal [i.e., calm and stoic] mind" Pope imitates (Butt, p. 65,
lines 131-32; my interpolation).
Pope's real triumph, among those imitations that comprise his apolo-
gia, is the Second Epistle of the Second Book. Here Pope brings to the
apologia a true Horatian balance of attitudes; consistently expanding

8Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (London: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1959), p. 186.
 MARTIN MANE E R 563

the original without radically altering its structure, he avoids strident

self-justification. Lines fifty-two to seventy-nine, the key lines in Pope's
self-presentation, culminate in a series of couplets that are among his
finest:

Years foll'wing Years, steal something ev'ry day,

At last they steal us from our selves away;
In one our Frolicks, one Amusements end,
In one a Mistress drops, in one a Friend:
This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time,
What will it leave me, if it snatch my Rhime?
If ev'ry Wheel of that unweary'd Mill
That turn'd ten thousand Verses, now stands still.
(Butt, p. 171, lines 72-79)

What Horace says in three lines, Pope expands to eight-but with a gain
in density of meaning, rather than a loss. Pope's manner is at once more
frivolous and more serious than Horace's. Pope takes Horace's line be-
ginning "Singula de nobis" and translates it relatively straightforwardly;
but then he extends the figure of speech and surpasses it in line
seventy-three, blending wit and pathos. He continues the figure and
develops it allusively, with a reference to early Milton; he works in an
autobiographical reference to his Homeric translations; he subtly links
the "mill" of his own versification to the mill of time; and through all this
deepening and broadening of the original, he manages to make the
passage truly his own, adding personal overtones while remaining true
to the essential Horatian spirit of the text he imitates.
In this poem, more effectively than in any of the other imitations,
Pope bases his apologia on the reader's willingness to compare the imita-
tion with the original. The comparison works to Pope's advantage in
various subtle ways. In the passage just mentioned (lines 52-79), for
example, the speaker presents himself as a victim of circumstances. But
whereas Horace suffered because of a mere turn of fortune's wheel (the
defeat at Philippi), Pope has been the victim of discrimination and
oppression. When Horace turns to lament the transience of worldly
pleasure, he is speaking merely of good and ill fortune; but Pope explic-
itly points toward the more pathetic theme of mortality, and allows that
theme to subsume his own particular sufferings.
Even when he closely follows the original text, Pope implicitly com-
pares himself favorably with Horace. In these lines, for example, he
translates Horace rather closely:

What is't to me (a Passenger God wot)

Whether my Vessel be first-rate or not?
The Ship it self may make a better figure,
564 SATIRIC PERSONA

But I that sail, am neither less nor bigger.

I neither strut with ev'ry fav'ring breath,
Nor strive with all the Tempest in my teeth.
In Pow'r, Wit, Figure, Virtue, Fortune, plac'd
Behind the foremost, and before the last.
(Butt, pp. 185-87, lines 296-303)

Here there is alteration of the original's literal meaning; but the reader's
knowledge of Pope's physical deformity entirely alters the significance of
the lines. As Pope's "ship" is inferior to Horace's, so his moral equipoise
must be even more strenuously maintained. Pope further invites favor-
able comparison with Horace by printing in boldface the words,
"magna," "parva," and "unus & idem," in the parallel text. Translation
itself becomes a highly personal apologia: the "Answer from Horace."
The chief counterinstance to my argument - that Pope usually per-
sonalizes the Horatian imitations without employing ironic disguises - is
the First Epistle of the Second Book. The speaker of this poem is, as
Robert Rogers puts it, "a rhetorical contrivance, an ingenu approach-
ing his king with humility and esteem."9 Precisely- and in analyzing this
poem, in which the irony depends upon our penetrating Pope's disguise,
the concept of persona may properly be invoked.
Unlike Pope's Horatian imitations, Byron's DonJuan is a work "whose
structure depends on the speaker's having an ambiguous character"
(Ehrenpreis, p. 57)-though not in the narrow sense suggested by
Ehrenpreis. That is, the narrator is not a mere "rhetorical contrivance"
set up for consistent ironic effect. But the narrator employs two ironic
disguises so frequently, and these disguises are so essential to the poem's
structure and meaning, that I believe they may be accurately described
as masks or personae.
Byron's disguises are variants of the traditional, naive satiric persona;
I shall refer to them as the literary naif and the naive moralist. Both
masks derive from Byron's central themes. The moralist-mask arises
from Byron's concern with the issue of morality in literature; his au-
dience, even his close friends, demanded "a moral to each error
tacked,"'0 yet Byron rejected the prudishness of his contemporaries,
even while he took the problem of authorial moral responsibility quite
seriously. His solution was to pose as a naive moralist, and thereby to
mock the conventional moral critics while seeming to give them the
moral they demanded: "So children cutting teeth receive a coral" (I,

9Robert W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope, Illinois Studies in Lan-
guage and Literature, vol. 40 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955), p. 89.
'?Truman Guy Steffan and Willis W. Pratt, eds., Byron's DonJuan, 2nd edn., 4 vols.
(Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1971), 2:412, canto V, stanza 2. Subsequent references to
this edition will be made by canto and stanza number.
 MARTIN MANE E R 565

209). Just as he mocked reductive moralism, he mocked prescriptive

literary criticism by posing as a literary naif who fusses over correct
diction, literary rules, and factual accuracy.
Both masks serve multiple functions, but both relate to Byron's need
to incorporate an apologia in his satire. He needed to assure his audience
that he was a satirist "who challenges the doings of other men not
whenever he happens to feel vindictive, but whenever they deserve it"
(Mack, "Muse," p. 86), and to do this he had to present himself as a
responsible literary craftsman with a definite moral stance. For an
author whose satiric manner was improvisatory and whose personal im-
morality was prejudged by his audience, this posed a problem.
Byron's wrestling with the problem of moral stance is evident in the
many defensive remarks he made about the poem's morality. To Murray
he wrote: "If they had told me the poetry was bad, I would have ac-
quiesced; but they say the contrary, and then talk to me about morality.
.. I maintain that it is the most moral of poems; but if people won't
discover the moral, that is their fault, not mine."'1 The author's moral
responsibility, Byron implies, is to tell his story as truthfully and as
amusingly as possible; it is the reader's responsibility to draw moral
conclusions. But despite this disclaimer, in the work itself Byron does
provide moral commentary-by posing as a naif, while allowing his real
attitudes to emerge by implication.
Many readers have argued that such attitudes do not in fact emerge-
that Don Juan is devoid of normative values, particularly values arising
from the character of the poem's speaker. Such readers see Don Juan as
essentially nihilistic. They discern what Mack calls "a thesis layer attack-
ing vice and folly," but no "antithesis layer illustrating or implying a
philosophy of rational control, usually embodied in some more or less
ideal norm like the Stoic vzrbonus, the good plain man" (Mack, "Muse,"
pp. 84-85). But such readers overlook one of the satirist's favorite
devices, which might be called (to borrow and expand Mack's terminol-
ogy) an "ironic antithesis layer." The satirist employing this device holds
up a model of virtue for us to admire, but we are expected to see through
it. Thus Horace poses as an ethical guide and warns us against seeking
to seduce high-born ladies-then recommends fornication with
servant-girls instead. In other words, Horace employs a relatively lax
standard to show how utterly foolish it is to chase the wives of powerful
men.
Byron exploits this kind of irony most impressively. He gives us models
of virtue to admire and poses as a moralist himself, but the disguise is

"'Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1957), 2:766.
566 SATIRIC PERSONA

usually transparent. His ironic treatment of moral questions hardly im-

plies that DonJuan is nihilistic, however, since the absence of absolute
moral guidelines does not rule out the existence of relative ones. I believe
that Byron gives us something like contemporary "situation ethics," in
which proper action or response depends upon complex variables. The
underlying conception of morality is relativistic, but not unpatterned;
and the pattern emerges, in part, through Byron's use of masks.
When counterpointing relative standards of moral and literary judg-
ment, Byron dons and sheds satiric disguises with a rapidity that is dis-
concerting to the unwary. In the following stanza, he describes his po-
etry as fanciful, evanescent, and playful:

You know, or don't know, that great Bacon saith,

"Fling up a straw, 'twill show the way the wind blows";
And such a straw, borne on by human breath,
Is Poesy, according as the mind glows;
A paper kite, which flies 'twixt life and death,
A shadow which the onward Soul behind throws:
And mine's a bubble not blown up for praise,
But just to play with, as an infant plays.
(XIV, 8)

A few stanzas later, he shifts the basis of his apologia, describing himself
as a realist:

Besides, my Muse by no means deals in fiction:

She gathers a repertory of facts,
Of course with some reserve and slight restriction;
But mostly sings of human things and acts-
And that's one cause she meets with contradiction;
For too much truth, at first sight, ne'er attracts;
And were her object only what's call'd glory,
With more ease too she'd tell a different story.
(XIV, 13)

Which stanza is the "real" Byron? Is Don Juan "a paper kite" or "a
repertory of facts"? It is precisely the kind of either-or oversimplification
implicit in these questions that Byron seeks to prevent by shifting atti-
tudes and disguises. Byron is asking us to discriminate: In what sense is
Don Juan fanciful? In what sense is it factual?
The literary naif is a source of normative values in that he may be
counted on to give the wrong answers to these questions; and his voice,
present from the opening stanza of Don Juan, is one of the poem's great
unifying forces:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,

 MARTIN MANER 567

When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,
We have all seen him in the Pantomime
Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.
(I, 1)

The word "hero" carries at least three meanings here: the hero as exem-
plar; the hero merely as protagonist, whether exemplary or not; and the
hero as popular idol (particularly the military hero and the politician).
Byron pretends to confuse these various meanings of the word. To
paraphrase: "It is odd that I should have to look for a hero (exemplar)
when we have so many of them (popular idols); but our age's heroes
inevitably disappoint us, so I will choose a fictional hero (protagonist)
instead." And then, with a show of being offhand about it, he chooses
one of literature's most famous rakes.
Byron achieves this ironic effect by pretending to be a literary naif
who mixes up his terms without being aware that he is doing so. The
shifting connotations of "hero" carry us from fact (the gazettes) to fiction
(pantomime), while the word "hero" finally collides with its opposite,
"devil," in the stanza's closing comic deflation. As the comic incongruity
strikes home, the ironic mask slips, and we see how bitter the satirist's
real attitude is: even the most profligate of literary heroes is a more
satisfactory protagonist than any of Byron's contemporaries. At the
same time, Byron's game with the mask of literary naif highlights one of
his central themes: the potential incongruity between fact and fiction.
The narratorial "digressions" on literature and morality do not func-
tion merely as an apologia in which Byron discusses his artistic and
moral intentions; they also interact with and comment upon the narra-
tive itself, and so guide us in our responses to the poem's actions. This
interrelationship between the action and the narratorial frame can be
seen, for example, in the concluding stanzas of Canto I. In a late inser-
tion (sent to Murray about two weeks after the fair copy of the canto as a
whole), Byron gives usJulia's self-consciously pathetic letter, its message
delicately undercut by a detailed description of the letter's appearance.
Like one of Richardson's heroines, Julia claims to be pouring out her
feelings because she cannot rest, but the letter's gilt edges, seal, and
motto reveal the premeditation and preciosity of its sentiments. We
need not feel too much pity for a sentimental heroine so aware of her
role.
Appropriately, this passage is framed by stanzas which Byron writes in
the guise of the literary naif. Stanza 189 ironically insists upon the literal
truth of the narrative; and behind the mask, Byron is reminding us of
568g SATIRIC PERSONA

the narrative's resemblance to his own life history. Then comes Julia's
letter and its subsequent "distancing." Then the theme of art versus life
is immediately picked up in the narratorial frame (I, 200).
Again we have Byron using the mask of the naif who claims to be a
correct epic poet: "All these things will be specified in time, / With strict
regard to Aristotle's rules, / The vade mecum of the true sublime" (I,
201). But the next line lets the mask drop: "Which makes so many poets,
and some fools." Stanzas 202-203 cap this literary joke by reiterating the
claim to factual accuracy; the final absurdity is the persona's claim ac-
tually to have seen Juan elope with the devil-in a play.
Byron's use of a naive persona who confuses art and life is reminiscent
of Partridge's reaction to a performance of Hamlet: "Nay, perhaps it is
the Devil - for they say he can put on what Likeness he pleases."'2 Like
Fielding, Byron uses the contrast between art and life to make us face
reality. The difference is that in Fielding's world we are primarily con-
cerned with characters who consciously imitate art through dissimula-
tion and role-playing; Fielding repeatedly warns us that people are not
what they seem, and that they are concealing their true identities in
order to deceive others. In Don Juan, however, we are mainly concerned
with self-deception. Juan fancies himself a romantic hero, andJulia sees
herself as the heroine of a sentimental novel. Byron comments upon this
self-deception partly by ironically pretending to be something he is not:
the epic poet and the follower of rules.
The effect is largely cumulative; the reader learns to anticipate
Byron's ironies and to participate in the process of seeing through vari-
ous kinds of illusion. When we turn to examine Byron's use of the
moralist-mask, we find the same pattern at work. A racy scene, for
example, almost invariably leads to a digression on morality in litera-
ture; Byron assumes the mask of the naive moralist, and his ironic but
increasingly emphatic apologia is punctuated by a final deflation. For
example:

If any person should presume to assert

This story is not moral, first, I pray,
That they will not cry out before they're hurt,
Then that they'll read it o'er again, and say,
(But, doubtless, nobody will be so pert)
That this is not a moral tale, though gay;
Besides, in canto twelfth, I mean to show
The very place where wicked people go.
(I, 207)

'Henry Fielding, The History of TomJones, a Foundling, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols.
(Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 2:854.
 MARTIN MAN ERR 569

The public approbation I expect,

And beg they'll take my word about the moral,
Which I with their amusement will connect,
(So children cutting teeth receive a coral);
Meantime, they'll doubtless please to recollect
My epical pretensions to the laurel:
For fear some prudish readers should grow skittish,
I've bribed my grandmother's review-the British.
(I, 209)

First Byron poses as the moralist to ridicule his audience; then he

poses as a rogue to mock his own moralistic stance and "epical preten-
sions." Since Byron seems to be playing a game of hide-and-seek with
his reader, it is easy to see why a critic like Marshall calls this "terminal
irony." One pose mocks the other, and Byron seems to elude us. But
despite this seeming elusiveness, relatively unambiguous attitudes do
emerge. Certainly hypocritical moralism is under attack, and sincerity is
the implied norm. Analogously, Julia's harmless but self-deluding pre-
tensions are attacked, and her underlying emotion-whatever its ex-
tent - is the implied norm. "Epical pretensions" to self-conscious artful-
ness are attacked, and the fluid, digressive style of Don Juan itself is the
implied norm. If we point to sincerity and artlessness as recurrent
norms, however, what are we to make of a narrator who plays artful
games with disguises? But this is a pseudo-question-for as comic
devices, Byron's masks exist in order to be seen through.
Like any careful ironist, Byron takes pains to ensure that his ironies
will be perceived. In the case of Julia's letter, we are alerted by the
incongruity between her suggestion that she has cried until she can cry
no more ("My eyeballs burn and throb, but have no tears," she writes)
and the narrator's observation that "she did not let one tear escape her"
(I, 192, 198; my italics). In the case of Byron's moralistic pose, we find
that the masks are temporarily set aside, and Byron seems to speak in his
own voice:

No more-no more-Oh! never more, my heart,

Canst thou be my sole world, my universe!
Once all in all, but now a thing apart,
Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse:
The illusion's gone for ever, and thou art
Insensible, I trust, but none the worse,
And in thy stead I've got a deal of judgment,
Though heaven knows how it ever found a lodgement.
(I, 215)
Once the masks are stripped away, Byron must confront this problem: as
a disillusioned Romantic, what can he offer in illusion's stead? In partic-
570 SATIRIC PERSONA

ular, what moral guidelines can he draw? The sole answer in this passage
lies in that equivocal, Augustan word, "judgment." In the very next
stanza, Byron offers a "judgment" of four alternative "vices": physical
love, credulity, intemperance, and avarice. He seems to conceal himself
by resuming his ironic manner; but his tongue-in-cheek recommenda-
tion of avarice as an "old-gentlemanly vice" is easily perceived as ironic.
Again Byron is using the Horatian device of a relatively corrupt satiric
norm. The irony can be interpreted as implying that every pleasure is, in
some context, a vice. Even if judgment does not free you from vice or
folly, at least it can help you select one that is relatively less
self-destructive than the others. Furthermore, to avoid naivete, to be a
realist, one must recognize that any absolute standard of judgment may
be destructive in some situations.
The point is that as Byron shifts stances, each attitude deflates the
preceding one. Like his characters, the author feels the attraction both
of "realistic" and "idealistic" views of experience. As an idealist he plays
with models of human behavior, but as a realist he must demonstrate the
inadequacy of such models. In this way he subtly puts himself forward as
a moral teacher, but without seeming to do so. Thus the purpose of the
naive moralist's commentary is not to laugh away the whole question of
morality, but rather to force the reader to make realistic judgments.
Just as Juan meets Haidee, for example, Byron turns aside to ask
whether Juan's inconstancy to Julia is moral or not. He poses as the
moralist, but this stance is immediately undercut by a reference to the
physical reality of desire:

I hate inconstancy-I loathe, detest,

Abhor, condemn, abjure the mortal made
Of such quicksilver clay that in his breast
No permanent foundation can be laid;
Love, constant love, has been my constant guest,
And yet last night, being at a masquerade,
I saw the prettiest creature, fresh from Milan,
Which gave me some sensations like a villain.
(II, 209)

There follows an argument in which "Philosophy" restrains desire, only

to be turned into desire's handmaiden; for to be inconstant is merely to
admire the beautiful. This argument, in turn, is exaggerated into a
praise of desire as a "fine extension of the faculties," and is finally de-
flated by a complete return to physical reality. Where on this
roller-coaster of argument and counter-argument do we place Byron's
satiric norm? Perhaps it is fairest to say that the norm is the acceptance
of this up-and-down alternation of attitudes. We are not supposed to
 MARTIN MANER 571

choose between the idealistic and the realistic descriptions of inconstant

passion; rather, we are supposed to realize that moralistic speculations
are beside the point. The narrator begins by questioningJuan's behavior
and ends in amazement at his own passion. Implied is a comment
directed at us: do not deny your own nature by indulging in simplistic
moralism.
A related speculation upon the incompatibility of love and mar-
riage-in effect, upon the impossibility of creating "constancy" through
social institutions-opens Canto III:

'Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign

Of human frailty, folly, also crime,
That love and marriage rarely can combine,
Although they both are born in the same clime.
(III, 5)

The underlying source of humor is again Byron's pretended mystifica-

tion. All of the elaborate arguments about love and marriage are sup-
posed to answer a single question: Why don't poets write about married
lovers? While he pretends to be mystified, Byron surreptitiously offers us
the ironic answer: "There's nothing wrong in a connubial kiss" (III, 8;
italics mine). In other words, readers demand the thrill of vicarious
immorality; authors merely satisfy that desire. Thus Byron deflects the
charge of cynicism back at the reader, and at just this point he assumes
the guise of the naive moralist:

Haidee and Juan were not married, but

The fault was theirs, not mine: it is not fair,
Chaste reader, then, in any way to put
The blame on me, unless you wish they were;
Then if you'd have them wedded, please to shut
The book which treats of this erroneous pair,
Before the consequences grow too awful;
'Tis dangerous to read of loves unlawful.
(III, 12)
By posing as the moralist, Byron scores several points at once. For one
thing, ironically fixing the blame upon Juan and Haidee demonstrates
the absurdity of confusing art and life. Also, there is the implication that
most readers complain about immorality when the author is being
truthful, showing things as they really are. But the most damaging point
is still more fundamental: Byron denies literature's power to corrupt.
The moralist suggests that the reader who finds this story lascivious had
better not read any further; but Byron is saying that he will read
further-for just that reason-and that the only corruption in this love
story is the corruption the reader brings to it.
572 SATIRIC PERSONA

The moralist-mask, then, may be described as a persona whose mis-

statements help guide us toward the poem's norms. Preoccupied with
forms, judging characters by unrealistic moral standards, and equating
frankness with immorality, this persona voices the kind of intolerance
Byron detested. The implied norms are tolerance and a full awareness of
human passions and limitations- essentially, attitudes precisely op-
posed to those expressed by the persona.
Thus the argument that Byron's poses and disguises prevent the emer-
gence of a unified narrating consciousness is untrue, for Byron consis-
tently makes himself heard through his masks and is in full control of the
ironic implications of the comments he makes through them. Those who
demand more, those who ask that Byron deliver in his own voice a state-
ment of some absolute criterion by which all values can be judged - such
readers may consider Byron's pessimistic touchstone: all is vanity, all is
illusion. Although this is a negative concept, it translates into a positive
statement for Byron, whose task is to demonstrate the value of disillu-
sionment. Admittedly, the belief that disillusionment does not cause the
loss of anything valuable can be a cause either for laughter or for de-
spair: "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / 'Tis that I may not weep"
(IV, 4). But the important thing is that Byron chooses to laugh.
This choice is made from a position of detachment-not detachment
from human suffering, but from the systematic self-delusion which ag-
gravates that suffering. This compassionate detachment is what gives
Don Juan its special tonality, and it is the ultimate source of the poem's
normative values as well. To mock man's attempts to construct a world
of literary or moral ideals yet to sympathize with the human uncertainty
that makes such attempts necessary- that is the nature of Byron's tenu-
ous position, and is the nature of the "proper response" which lies be-
hind the posturings of the literary naif and the naive moralist. The witty,
skeptical narrator of Don Juan, who plays with various illusions and
misconceptions but who ultimately speaks with the authority of a moral
realist-this is Byron's greatest self-portrait and consequently the finest
expression of his satiric apologia.
By contrasting Pope and Byron I have tried to show that the concept
of persona is most useful in analyzing the rhetorical effect of disguises
that are meant to be seen through. I have also argued that Pope's and
Byron's ways of presenting themselves in their satiric verse are quite
dissimilar: Pope goes out of his way to keep himself visible in his Hora-
tian poems, while Byron consistently plays games with disguises. The
seeming paradox- that the "impersonal" Augustan keeps his personal-
ity on display, while the Romantic more frequently speaks through
masks-is really no paradox. Both writers faced the problem of present-
ing themselves as responsible satirists; but while the Augustan could
appeal to stable, traditional values and present himself both by "speak-
 MARTIN MANER 573

ing for" and "standing for" those values, the Romantic satirist had to
create a speaking voice as unstably ironic as the reality he sought to
convey.

Wright State University