I Hail Thee Brother

 In any controversy between Byron and his critics, I will always incline to take Byron's side. And I've said before that one of his most admirable traits as a poet is his sympathy with animals—particularly his justified contempt for the overweening human pride that arrogates to our species "a sole exclusive heaven" and denies the existence of a soul in animal kind. 

He wrote about this most poignantly in his "Epitaph to a Dog." And in his "Cain: A Mystery," one of the reasons he gives for empathizing with humanity's first murderer is that—even if he ends with his brother's blood on his hands—at least his sacrifice to God was not bloody; at least he placed only plant life on the altar, rather than animals. Cain: the first vegetarian. 

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I find even Byron committing a vulgar error of human hubris against animals. I was reading his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" the other day, and found there a not-so-subtle dig at Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "The bard who soars to elegize an ass: / So well the subject suits his noble mind, / He brays, the Laureate of the long-eared kind." 

This turns out to be a reference to Coleridge's "To a Young Ass." Which, once you look it up, turns out to be one of the greatest and most poignant and most empathetic poems I've ever read. Coleridge stoops to sympathize with a humble donkey that is chained; he writes that he longs to free it and dwell with it in a condition of Pantisocratic equality (of which the young Coleridge once dreamed.)

Anyone proclaiming kinship and fellow-feeling with lowly animals has always invited the mockery of humankind—the very pride and hubris on the part of the species that Byron in his later works attacked. Coleridge knows he will provoke this derisive response—and he proclaims his comradeship with the donkey regardless. "I hail thee brother—spite of the fool's scorn," he writes. 

Coleridge, then, is the one who showed actual courage here—declaring his solidarity with animals even though he knows he will face satire for it. It seems, then, that Byron's attempt at a jape at his expense on the subject falls rather flat. It's hard to score points mocking someone for "elegizing an ass" and being a "Laureate of the long-eared kind" when they've already acknowledged they will face "scorn" for it. 

The only thing I can say in mitigation of Byron's arrogance here is that he was young. He was in his early twenties when he wrote "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"—and it predates by years his mature and better work. Byron, it must be said, improved with age (the reverse of Coleridge). His satire became more bitter and serious—and, instead of perpetuating human arrogance toward animals, he sought to humble it. 

Coleridge—alas—moved in the opposite direction. Where Byron ripened, Coleridge rotted. Where Byron strengthened in sympathy with age, Coleridge—like his friend Wordsworth—became a conservative crank. The youthful ideals of Pantisocracy and equality—so sweeping in their sympathy they extended even to the "long-eared kind"—vanished in a mist of metaphysical nebulosity. 

"Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" as Wordsworth would write. What became of the poet who once had the daring and humanity and sympathy to elegize an ass? 

O, that the youthful idealist who wrote "To a Young Ass" was capable of becoming a worshipper of "Legitimacy"—the walking self-contradiction of a "Dynastophylic Pantisocratist"—as Shelley once mockingly called him. Give me the Coleridge of "To a Young Ass"—and keep ye the Coleridge of the later religious turn; and give me the Byron of "Epitaph to a Dog;" and keep ye that of the "English Bards."