Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes Part 34

THE c.o.c.kNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

No. III

[From _Blackwood's Magazine_, July, 1818]

Our hatred and contempt of Leigh Hunt as a writer, is not so much owing to his shameless irreverence to his aged and afflicted king--to his profligate attacks on the character of the king's sons--to his low-born insolence to that aristocracy with whom he would in vain claim the alliance of one ill.u.s.trious friendship--to his paid panderism to the vilest pa.s.sions of that mob of which he is himself a firebrand--to the leprous crust of self-conceit with which his whole moral being is indurated--to that loathsome vulgarity which constantly clings round him like a vermined garment from St. Giles'--to that irritable temper which keeps the unhappy man, in spite even of his vanity, in a perpetual fret with himself and all the world beside, and that shews itself equally in his deadly enmities and capricious friendships,--our hatred and contempt of Leigh Hunt, we say, is not so much owing to these and other causes, as to the odious and unnatural harlotry of his polluted muse. We were the first to brand with a burning iron the false face of this kept-mistress of a demoralizing incendiary. We tore off her gaudy veil and transparent drapery, and exhibited the painted cheeks and writhing limbs of the prost.i.tute. We denounced to the execration of the people of England, the man who had dared to write in the solitude of a cell, whose walls ought to have heard only the sighs of contrition and repentance, a lewd tale of incest, adultery, and murder, in which the violation of Nature herself was wept over, palliated, justified, and held up to imitation, and the violators themselves worshipped as holy martyrs. The story of Rimini had begun to have its admirers; but their deluded minds were startled at our charges,--and on reflecting upon the character of the poem, which they had read with a dangerous sympathy, not on account of its poetical merit, which is small indeed, but on account of those voluptuous scenes, so dangerous even to a pure imagination, when insidiously painted with the seeming colours of virtue,--they were astounded at their own folly and their own danger, and consigned the wretched volume to that ignominious oblivion, which, in a land of religion and morality, must soon be the doom of all obscene and licentious productions.

The story of Rimini is heard of no more. But Leigh Hunt will not be quiet. His hebdomadal hand [**Pointing hand symbol] is held up, even on the Sabbath, against every man of virtue and genius in the land; but the great defamer claims to himself an immunity from that disgrace which he knows his own wickedness has incurred,--the c.o.c.kney calumniator would fain hold his own disgraced head sacred from the iron fingers of retribution. But that head shall be brought low--aye--low "as heaped up justice" ever sunk that of an offending scribbler against the laws of Nature and of G.o.d.

Leigh Hunt dared not, Hazlitt dared not, to defend the character of the "Story of Rimini." A man may venture to say that in verse which it is perilous to utter in plain prose. Even they dared not to affirm to the people of England, that a wife who had committed incest with her husband's brother, ought on her death to be buried in the same tomb with her fraticidal [Transcriber's note: sic] paramour, and that tomb to be annually worshipped by the youths and virgins of their country. And therefore Leigh Hunt flew into a savage pa.s.sion against the critic who had chastised his crime, pretended that he himself was insidiously charged with the offences which he had applauded and celebrated in others, and tried to awaken the indignation of the public against his castigator, as if he had been the secret a.s.sa.s.sin of private character, who was but the open foe of public enormity. The attempt was hopeless,-- the public voice has lifted up against Hunt,--and sentence of excommunication from the poets of England has been p.r.o.nounced, enrolled, and ratified.

There can be no radical distinction allowed between the private and public character of a poet. If a poet sympathizes with and justifies wickedness in his poetry, he is a wicked man. It matters not that his private life may be free from wicked actions. Corrupt his moral principles must be,--and if his conduct has not been flagrantly immoral, the cause must be looked for in const.i.tution, &c., but not in conscience. It is therefore of little or no importance, whether Leigh Hunt be or be not a bad private character. He maintains, that he is a most excellent private character, and that he would blush to tell the world how highly he is thought of by an host of respectable friends. Be it so,--and that his vanity does not delude him. But this is most sure, that, in such a case, the world will never be brought to believe even the truth. The world is not fond of ingenious distinctions between the theory and the practice of morals. The public are justified in refusing to hear a man plead in favour of his character, when they hold in their hands a work of his in which all respect to character is forgotten. We must reap the fruit of what we sow; and if evil and unjust reports have arisen against Leigh Hunt as a man, and unluckily for him it is so, he ought not to attribute the rise of such reports to the political animosities which his virulence has excited, but to the real and obvious cause--his voluptuous defence of crimes revolting to Nature.

The publication of the voluptuous story of Rimini was followed, it would appear, by mysterious charges against Leigh Hunt in his domestic relations. The world could not understand the nature of his poetical love of incest; and instead of at once forgetting both the poem and the poet, many people set themselves to speculate, and talk, and ask questions, and pry into secrets with which they had nothing to do, till at last there was something like an identification of Leigh Hunt himself with Paolo, the incestuous hero of Leigh Hunt's chief c.o.c.kney poem. This was wrong, and, we believe, wholly unjust; but it was by no means unnatural; and precisely what Leigh Hunt is himself in the weekly practice of doing to other people without the same excuse. Leigh Hunt has now spoken out so freely to the public on the subject, that there can be no indelicacy in talking of it, in as far as it respects him, at least....

There is no need for us to sink down this unhappy man into deeper humiliation. Never before did the abuse and prost.i.tution of talents bring with them such prompt and memorable punishment. The pestilential air which Leigh Hunt breathed forth into the world to poison and corrupt, has been driven stiflingly back upon himself, and he who strove to spread the infection of loathsome licentiousness among the tender moral const.i.tutions of the young, has been at length rewarded, as it was fitting he should be, by the accusation of being himself guilty of those crimes which it was the object of "The Story of Rimini" to encourage and justify in others. The world knew nothing of him but from his works; and were they blameable (even though they erred) in believing him capable of any enormities in his own person, whose imagination feasted and gloated on the disgusting details of adultery and incest? They were repelled and sickened by such odious and unnatural wickedness--he was attracted and delighted. What to them was the foulness of pollution, seemed to him the beauty of innocence. What to them was the blast from h.e.l.l, to him was the air from heaven. They read and they condemned. They asked each other "What manner of man is this?" The charitable were silent. It would perhaps be hard to call them uncharitable who spoke aloud. Thoughts were a.s.sociated with his name which shall be nameless by us; and at last the wretched scribbler himself has had the gross and unfeeling folly to punish them all to the world, and that too in a tone of levity that could have been becoming only on our former comparatively trivial charges against him of wearing yellow breeches, and dispensing with the luxury of a neckcloth. He shakes his shoulders, according to his rather iniquitous custom, at being told that he is suspected of adultery and incest! A pleasant subject of merriment, no doubt, it is--though somewhat embittered by the intrusive remembrance of that unsparing castigator of vice, Mr. Gifford, and clouded over by the melancholy breathed from the shin-bone of his own poor old deceased grandmother.

What a mixture of the horrible and absurd! And the man who thus writes is--not a Christian, for that he denies--but, forsooth, a poet! one of the

Great spirits who on earth are sojourning!

But Leigh Hunt is not guilty, in the above paragraph, of shocking levity alone,--he is guilty of falsehood. It is not true, that he learns for the first time, from that anonymous letter (so vulgar, that we could almost suspect him of having written it himself) what charges were in circulation against him. He knew it all before. Has he forgotten to whom he applied for explanation when Z.'s sharp essay on the c.o.c.kney Poetry cut him to the heart? He knows what he said upon those occasions, and let him ponder upon it. But what could induce him to suspect the amiable Bill Hazlitt, "him, the immaculate," of being Z.? It was this,--he imagined that none but that foundered artist could know the fact of his feverish importunities to be reviewed by him in the Edinburgh Review.

And therefore, having almost "as fine an intellectual touch" as "Bill the painter" himself, he thought he saw Z. lurking beneath the elegant exterior of that highly accomplished man.

Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is such, That it seems to feel truth as one's fingers do touch.

But, for the present, we have nothing more to add. Leigh Hunt is delivered into our hands to do with him as we will. Our eyes shall be upon him, and unless he amend his ways, to wither and to blast him. The pages of the Edinburgh Review, we are confident, are henceforth shut against him. One wicked c.o.c.kney will not again be permitted to praise another in that journal, which, up to the moment when incest and adultery were defended in its pages, had, however openly at war with religion, kept at least upon decent terms with the cause of morality. It was indeed a fatal day for Mr. Jeffrey, when he degraded both himself and his original coadjutors, by taking into pay such an unprincipled blunderer as Hazlitt. He is not a coadjutor, he is an accomplice. The day is perhaps not far distant, when the Charlatan shall be stripped to the naked skin, and made to swallow his own vile prescriptions. He and Leigh Hunt are

Arcades ambo Et cantare pares--

Shall we add,

et respondere parati?

Z. ON KEATS

[From _Blackwood's Magazine_, August, 1818]

c.o.c.kNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

No. IV

---- OF KEATS, THE MUSES' SON OF PROMISE, AND WHAT FEATS HE YET MAY DO, &C.

CORNELIUS WEBB.

Of all the manias of this mad age, the most incurable, as well as the most common, seems to be no other than the _Metromanie_. The just celebrity of Robert Burns and Miss Baillie has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we know not how many farm-servants and unmarried ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind her in her band-box. To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John Keats. This young man appears to have received from nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior order-- talents which, devoted to the purposes of any useful profession, must have rendered him a respectable, if not an eminent citizen. His friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we have alluded.

Whether Mr. John had been sent home with a diuretic or composing draught to some patient far gone in the poetical mania, we have not heard. This much is certain, that he has caught the infection, and that thoroughly.

For some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of "Endymion." We hope, however, that in so young a person, and with a const.i.tution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable. Time, firm treatment, and rational restraint, do much for many apparently hopeless invalids; and if Mr. Keats should happen, at some interval of reason, to cast his eye upon our pages, he may perhaps be convinced of the existence of his malady, which, in such cases, is often all that is necessary to put the patient in a fair way of being cured.

The readers of the Examiner newspaper were informed, some time ago, by a solemn paragraph, in Mr. Hunt's best style, of the appearance of two new stars of glorious magnitude and splendour in the poetical horizon of the land of c.o.c.kaigne. One of these turned out, by and by, to be no other than Mr. John Keats. This precocious adulation confirmed the wavering apprentice in his desire to quit the gallipots, and at the same time excited in his too susceptible mind a fatal admiration for the character and talents of the most worthless and affected of all the versifiers of our time. One of his first productions was the following sonnet, "_written on the day when Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison._" It will be recollected, that the cause of Hunt's confinement was a series of libels against his sovereign, and that its fruit was the odious and incestuous "Story of Rimini."

What though, for shewing truth to flattered state, _Kind Hunt_ was shut in prison, yet has he, In his immortal spirit been as free As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.

Minion of grandeur! think you he did wait?

Think you he nought but prison walls did see, Till, so unwilling, thou unturn'dst the key?

Ah, no! far happier, n.o.bler was his fate!

_In Spenser's halls_! he strayed, and bowers fair, Culling enchanted flowers; and he flew _With daring Milton_! through the fields of air; To regions of his own his genius true Took happy flights. Who shall his fame impair When thou art dead, and all thy wretched crew?

The absurdity of the thought in this sonnet is, however, if possible, surpa.s.sed in another, "_addressed to Haydon_" the painter, that clever, but most affected artist, who as little resembles Raphael in genius as he does in person, notwithstanding the foppery of having his hair curled over his shoulders in the old Italian fashion. In this exquisite piece it will be observed, that Mr. Keats cla.s.ses together WORDSWORTH, HUNT, and HAYDON, as the three greatest spirits of the age, and that he alludes to himself, and some others of the rising brood of c.o.c.kneys, as likely to attain hereafter an equally honourable elevation. Wordsworth and Hunt! what a juxta-position! The purest, the loftiest, and, we do not fear to say it, the most cla.s.sical of living English poets, joined together in the same compliment with the meanest, the filthiest, and the most vulgar of c.o.c.kney poetasters. No wonder that he who could be guilty of this should cla.s.s Haydon with Raphael, and himself with Spenser.

Great spirits now on earth are sojourning; He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake, Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing: _He of the rose, the violet, the spring, The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake_: And lo!--whose steadfastness would never take A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering.

And other spirits there are standing apart Upon the forehead of the age to come; These, these will give the world another heart, And other pulses. _Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings_?-- _Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb_.

The nations are to listen and be dumb! and why, good Johnny Keats?

because Leigh Hunt is editor of the Examiner, and Haydon has painted the judgment of Solomon, and you and Cornelius Webb, and a few more city sparks, are pleased to look upon yourselves as so many future Shakespeares and Miltons! The world has really some reason to look to its foundations! Here is a _tempestas in matula_ with a vengeance. At the period when these sonnets were published, Mr. Keats had no hesitation in saying, that he looked on himself as "_not yet_ a glorious denizen of the wide heaven of poetry," but he had many fine soothing visions of coming greatness, and many rare plans of study to prepare him for it....

Having cooled a little from this "fine pa.s.sion," our youthful poet pa.s.ses very naturally into a long strain of foaming abuse against a certain cla.s.s of English Poets, whom, with Pope at their head, it is much the fashion with the ignorant unsettled pretenders of the present time to undervalue. Begging these gentlemen's pardon, although Pope was not a poet of the same high order with some who are now living, yet, to deny his genius, it is just about as absurd as to dispute that of Wordsworth, or to believe in that of Hunt. Above all things, it is most pitiably ridiculous to hear men, of whom their country will always have reason to be proud, reviled by uneducated and flimsy striplings, who are not capable of understanding either their merits, or those of any other _men of power_--fanciful dreaming tea-drinkers, who, without logic enough to a.n.a.lyse a single idea, or imagination enough to form one original image, or learning enough to distinguish between the written language of Englishmen and the spoken jargon of c.o.c.kneys, presume to talk with contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits the world ever produced, merely because they did not happen to exert their faculties in laborious affected descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots, or cascades heard at Vauxhall; in short, because they chose to be wits, philosophers, patriots, and poets, rather than to found the c.o.c.kney school of versification, morality, and politics, a century before its time. After blaspheming himself into a fury against Boileau, &c., Mr.

Keats comforts himself and his readers with a view of the present more promising aspect of affairs; above all, with the ripened glories of the poet of Rimini. Addressing the names of the departed chiefs of English poetry, he informs them, in the following clear and touching manner, of the existence of "him of the Rose," &c.

From a thick brake, Nested and quiet in a valley mild, Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild About the earth. Happy are ye and glad....

From some verses addressed to various individuals of the other s.e.x, it appears, notwithstanding all this gossamer-work, that Johnny's affectations are not entirely confined to objects purely etherial. Take, by way of specimen, the following prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady east of Temple-bar.

Add too, the sweetness Of thy honied voice; the neatness Of thine ankle lightly turn'd: With those beauties, scarce discerned, Kept with such sweet privacy, That they seldom meet the eye Of the little loves that fly Round about with eager pry.

Saving when, with freshening lave, Thou dipp'st them in the taintless wave; Like twin water lilies, born In the coolness of the morn.

O, if thou hadst breathed then, Now the Muses had been ten.

Couldst thou wish for lineage _higher_ Than twin sister of _Thalia_?

At last for ever, evermore, Will I call the Graces four.

Who will dispute that our poet, to use his own phrase (and rhyme),

Can mingle music fit for the soft _ear_ Of Lady _Cytherea_.

So much for the opening bud; now for the expanded flower. It is time to pa.s.s from the juvenile "Poems," to the mature and elaborate "Endymion, a Poetic Romance." The old story of the moon falling in love with a shepherd, so prettily told by a Roman Cla.s.sic, and so exquisitely enlarged and adorned by one of the most elegant of German poets, has been seized upon by Mr. John Keats, to be done with as might seem good unto the sickly fancy of one who never read a single line either of Ovid or of Wieland. If the quant.i.ty, not the quality, of the verses dedicated to the story is to be taken into account, there can be no doubt that Mr.

Keats may now claim Endymion entirely to himself. To say the truth, we do not suppose either the Latin or the German poet would be very anxious to dispute about the property of the hero of the "Poetic Romance." Mr.

Keats has thoroughly appropriated the character, if not the name. His Endymion is not a Greek shepherd, love of a Grecian G.o.ddess; he is merely a young c.o.c.kney rhymster, dreaming a phantastic dream at the full of the moon. Costume, were it worth while to notice such a trifle, is violated in every page of this goodly octavo. From his prototype Hunt, John Keats has acquired a sort of vague idea, that the Greeks were a most tasteful people, and that no mythology can be so finely adapted for the purposes of poetry as theirs. It is amusing to see what a hand the two c.o.c.kneys make of this mythology; the one confesses that he never read the Greek Tragedians, and the other knows Homer only from Chapman, and both of them write about Apollo, Pan, Nymphs, Muses, and Mysteries, as might be expected from persons of their education. We shall not, however, enlarge at present upon this subject, as we mean to dedicate an entire paper to the cla.s.sical attainments and attempts of the c.o.c.kney poets. As for Mr. Keats's "Endymion," it has just as much to do with Greece as it has with "old Tartary the fierce"; no man, whose mind has ever been imbued with the smallest knowledge or feeling of cla.s.sical poetry or cla.s.sical history, could have stooped to profane and vulgarise every a.s.sociation in the manner which has been adopted by this "son of promise." Before giving any extracts, we must inform our readers, that this romance is meant to be written in English heroic rhyme. To those who have read any of Hunt's poems, this hint might indeed be needless.

Mr. Keats has adopted the loose, nerveless versification, and c.o.c.kney rhymes of the poet of Rimini; but in fairness to that gentleman, we must add, that the defects of the system are tenfold more conspicuous in his disciples' work than in his own. Mr. Hunt is a small poet, but he is a clever man. Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities, which he has done every thing in his power to spoil....

After all this, however, the "modesty," as Mr. Keats expresses it, of the Lady Diana prevented her from owning in Olympus her pa.s.sion for Endymion. Venus, as the most knowing in such matters, is the first to discover the change that has taken place in the temperament of the G.o.ddess. "An idle tale," says the laughter-loving dame,

A humid eye, and steps luxurious, When these are new and strange, are ominous.

The inamorata, to vary the intrigue, carries on a romantic intercourse with Endymion, under the disguise of an Indian damsel. At last, however, her scruples, for some reason or other, are all overcome, and the Queen of Heaven owns her attachment.