Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats Part 9

_Blackwood's_ of October, 1819, announced _Foliage_ to be a posthumous publication of Hunt's, presented to the public by his three friends, Keats, Haydon and Novello. An affecting picture is drawn of the now-departed Hunt in his once familiar costume of dressing-gown, yellow breeches and red slippers, sipping tea, playing whist and writing sonnets.

His statement in the preface that a "love of sociability, of the country, and the fine imagination of the Greeks" had prompted the poems is greatly ridiculed. The first is said to have caused his death by an over-indulgence in tea-drinking; his feeling for nature is said to be limited to the lawns, stiles and hedges of Hampstead and his knowledge of the imagination of the Greeks to quotations. The _Sonnet On Receiving a Crown of Ivy from Keats_ came in for especial derision--"a blister clapped on his head" would have been considered more appropriate.

Hunt's _Literary Pocket Books_ for 1819 and 1820 were reviewed in _Blackwood's_ in December, 1819, in a remarkably kind article. They are recommended as worth three times the price. The reviewer, who was no other than "Christopher North," stated that he had purchased six copies.

_Blackwood's_ of September, 1820, reviewed _The Indicator_; of December, 1821, the 1822 _Literary Pocket Book_; the last contained coa.r.s.e and unkind allusions to Hunt's health. It declared the production of sonnets in London and its suburbs about equal to the number of births and deaths.

In reply, _The Examiner_ of December 16, 1821, in an article ent.i.tled _Modern Criticism_, italicised extracts from _Blackwood's_ to bring out peculiarities of grammar and diction. _Blackwood's_ of January, 1822, contained a sonnet which it was pretended was Hunt's New Year's greeting, but which was instead a clever parody on his sonnet-style.

The issue of the next month announced the triumvirate of _The Liberal_ and, through Byron's "n.o.ble generosity," Hunt's departure with his wife and "little Johnnys" upon a "perilous voyage on the un-c.o.c.kney ocean....

He and his companions will now, like his own Nereids,

turn And toss upon the ocean's lifting billows, Making them _banks and_ pillows, Upon whose _springiness_ they lean and ride; Some with an _inward back_; some _upward-eyed_, Feeling the sky; and some with _sidelong hips_, O'er which the surface of the water slips."

The first number of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_ appeared in March. The following pa.s.sage refers to the launching of _The Liberal_ in a dialogue between the Editor and O'Doherty:

O. Hand me the lemons. This holy alliance of Pisa will be a queer affair. _The Examiner_ has let down its price from a tenpenny to a sevenpenny. They say the Editor here is to be one of that faction, for they must publish in London, of course.

Ed. Of course, but I doubt if they will be able to sell many. Byron is a prince, but these dabbling dogglerers destroy every dish they dip in.

O. Apt alliteration's artful aid.

Ed. Imagine Sh.e.l.ly [sic], with his spavin, and Hunt, with his staingalt, going in harness with such a caperer as Byron, three-a-breast. He'll knock the wind out of them both the first canter.

O. 'Tis pity Keats is dead.--I suppose you could not venture to publish a sonnet in which he is mentioned now? The _Quarterly_ (who killed him, as Sh.e.l.ly says) would blame you.

Ed. Let's hear it. Is it your own?

O. No; 'twas written many months ago by a certain great Italian genius, who cuts a figure about the London routs--one Fudgiolo.

Ed. Try to recollect it. (Here follows the sonnet.)

_Blackwood's_ of December, 1822, had pa.s.sages on the c.o.c.kney School in _Noctes Ambrosianae_. Number VII. of the series of articles on its members reviewed Hunt's _Florentine Lovers_, or, in their phrasing, his _Art of Love_, the story of which is wilfully misrepresented. Hunt is declared "the most irresistible knight-errant errotic extant ... the most contemptible little capon of the bantam breed that ever vainly dropped a wing, or sidled up to a partlet. He can no more crow than a hen. Byron makes love like Sir Peter, Moore like a tom-t.i.t and Hunt like a bantam."

The writer then charges Hunt with irreligion, indecency, sensuality and licentiousness. He is called "A Fool" and an "exquisite idiot." Such a burst of rage on the part of the anti-c.o.c.kneys, after their wrath had begun to cool as seen in the review of the _Literary Pocket Book_, was doubtless due to Hunt's a.s.sociation in _The Liberal_ with Byron: "What can Byron mean by patronizing a c.o.c.kney?... by far the most unaccountable of G.o.d's works ... a scavenger raking in the filth of the common sewers and stews, for a few gold pieces thrown down by a n.o.bleman.... But that Satan should stoop to a.s.sociate with an incubus, shows that there is degeneracy in h.e.l.l." The tirade closes with a poem of six stanzas of which this is a fair sample:

"The kind c.o.c.kney Monarch, he bids us farewell Taking his place in the Leghorn-bound smack-- In the smack, in the smack--Ah! will he ne'er come back?"

At the appearance of the last number of _The Liberal_, _Blackwood's_ rejoiced thus:

"Their hum, to be sure, is awfully subdued. They remind me of a mutchkin of wasps in a bottle, all sticking to each other--heads and tails--rumps glued with treacle and vinegar, wax and pus--helpless, hopeless, stingless, wingless, springless--utterly abandoned of air--choked and choking--mutually entangling and entangled--and mutually disgusting and disgusted--the last blistering ferment of incarnate filth working itself into one ma.s.s of oblivion in one bruised and battered sprawl of swipes and venom."[495]

_Blackwood's_ of October, 1823, declared Hazlitt to be the most loathsome and Hunt the most ludicrous of the group. Before the close of the year Hunt threatened the magazine with a suit for libel. This threat did not prevent in January a notice of Hunt's _Ultra-Crepidarius_, a satire on Gifford much in the vein and style of the _Feast of the Poets_. Mercury and Venus come to earth in search of the former's lost shoe. On their arrival they discover that it has been converted by command of the G.o.ds into a man named Gifford. The satire is facetiously attributed by _Blackwood's_ to Master Hunt, aged ten; a "small, smart, smattering satirist of an air-haparent ... c.o.c.kney chick." The parent is reproached for putting a child in such a position.

"Had Leigh Hunt, the papa, boldly advanced on any great emergency, at the peril of his life and crown, to s.n.a.t.c.h the legitimate issue of his own loins from the shrivelled hands of some blear-eyed old beldam, into whose small cabbage-garden Maximilian had headed a forlorn hope, good and well, and beautiful; but not so, when a stalwart and cankered carl like Mr. Gifford, with his quarter-staff, belabours the shoulders of his Majesty, and sire shoves son between himself and the Pounder ... such pusillanimity involves forfeiture of the Crown, and from this hour we declare Leigh dethroned, and the boy-bard of _Ultra-Crepidarius_ King of c.o.c.kaigne."

Wearying of this make-believe, the reviewer discards such a possibility of authorship and considers Hunt's grandfather, a legendary personage whose age is put at ninety-six and who is given the name of Zachariah Hunt: "What a gross, vulgar, leering old dog it is! Was ever the couch of the celestials so profaned before! One thinks of some aged cur, with mangy back, glazed eye-b.a.l.l.s dropping rheum, and with most disconsolate muzzard muzzling among the fleas of his abominable loins, by some accident lying upon the bed where Love and Beauty are embracing and embraced." As a final potentiality the reviewer deliberates whether Hunt by any possibility could have been the author and closes with this peroration: "There he goes soaking, and swaling, and straddling up the sky, like Daniel O'Rouke on goose back!... Toes in if you please. The goose is galloping--why don't you stand in the stirrups?... Alas Pegasus smells his native marshes; instead of making for Olympus, he is off in a wallop to the fens of Lincolnshire! Bellerophon has lost his seat--now he clings desperately by the tail--a single feather holds him from eternity."

Article VIII of the regular series, reviewing Hunt's _Bacchus in Tuscany_, appeared in _Blackwood's_ of August, 1825. His allegiance to Apollo in c.o.c.kaigne is declared to have been changed to Bacchus in Tuscany, and his usual beverage of weak tea to a diet of wine on which he swills like a hippopotamus. He is depicted as Jupiter Tonans and his manner to Hebe is compared with a "natty Bagman to the barmaid of the Hen and Chickens." The same number noticed Sotheby's translation of Homer. The opportunity was not lost to refer unfavorably to Hunt's translations of the same in _Foliage_.

_The Rebellion of the Beasts_; or _The a.s.s is Dead! Long Live the a.s.s!!!

By a Late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge_, with the motto "A man hath pre-eminence above a beast," was published anonymously by J. & H. L.

Hunt in London in 1825. There is every reason to believe that it was by Hunt, although he does not mention it elsewhere. It is an exceedingly clever satire on monarchy and far surpa.s.ses anything else of the kind that he ever did. Had the Tories of Edinburgh suspected the author it would probably have made them apoplectic with rage.

With _Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries_ the rage of the two periodicals reached a grand climax and seemingly exhausted itself. The _Quarterly_ in March of the same year in which it appeared said: "The last wiggle of expiring imbecility appears in these days to be a volume of personal Reminiscences." It characterized the book as a melancholy product of c.o.xcombry and c.o.c.kneyism: as "dirty gabble about men's wives and men's mistresses--and men's lackeys, and even the mistresses of the lackeys:" as "the miserable book of a miserable man; the little airy fopperies of its manner are like the fantastic trip and convulsive simpers of some poor worn-out wanton, struggling between famine and remorse, leering through her tears." _Blackwood's_ of the same month pictured Hunt riding in the tourney lists of c.o.c.kaigne to the tune of c.o.c.k-a-doodle-doo. It accused him, besides those misdemeanors many times previously exploited, of clumsy casuistry, of falsehood regarding his transaction with Colburn, of ill-breeding in dragging his wife into such a book. The following is the culmination of the author's anger:

"Mr. Hunt, who to the prating pertness of the parrot, the chattering impudence of the magpie--to say nothing of the mowling malice of the monkey--adds the hissiness of the bill-pouting gander, and the gobble-bl.u.s.ter of the bubbly-jock--to say nothing of the forward valour of the brock or badger--threatens death and destruction to all writers of prose or verse, who shall dare to say white is the black of his eye, or that his book is not like a vase lighted up from within with the torch of truth ... Frezeland Bantam is the vainest bird that attempts to crow; and by and by our feverish friend comes out into the light, and begins to trim his plumage! His toilet over he basks on the ditch side, and has not the smallest doubt in the world that he is a Bird of Paradise."

The _Literary Gazette_ joined in the hue-and-cry against "the pert vulgarity and miserable low-mindedness of c.o.c.kney-land," against "the disagreeable, envious, bickering, hating, slandering, contemptible, drivelling and be-devilling wretches."[496] _Blackwood's_ of February, 1830, in a review of Moore's _Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron_, satirizes the conversational habits of the c.o.c.kneys "who all keep chattering during meals and after them, like so many monkeys, emulous and envious of each other's eloquence, and pulling out with their paws fetid observations from their cheek-pouches, which are nuts to them, though instead of kernel, nothing but snuff."

Not only did the articles in _Blackwood's_ cease after this last, but in 1834 a full and complete apology was tendered Hunt by Christopher North:

"And Sh.e.l.ley truly loved Leigh Hunt. Their friendship was honorable to both, for it was as disinterested as sincere; and I hope Gurney will let a certain person in the City understand that I treat his offer of a reviewal of Mr. Hunt's _London Journal_ with disdain. If he has anything to say against us or that gentleman, either conjunctly or severally, let him out with it in some other channel; and I promise him a touch and taste of the crutch. He talks to me of _Maga's_ desertion of principle; but if he were a Christian--nay, a man--his heart and his head would tell him that the Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live for ever--and that Leigh Hunt has more talent in his little finger than the puling prig, who has taken upon himself to lecture Christopher North in a scrawl crawling with forgotten falsehoods."[497]

Professor Wilson's invitation to Hunt to contribute to his magazine was declined politely but firmly. Leigh Hunt wrote to Charles Cowden Clarke: "_Blackwood's_ and I, poetically, are becoming the best friends in the world. The other day there was an Ode in _Blackwood_ in honour of the memory of Sh.e.l.ley; and I look for one of Keats. I hope this will give you faith in glimpses of the Golden Age."[498] Nowhere does Hunt show resentment or malice for the sufferings of years. Yet Mrs. Oliphant, in her advocacy of the Blackwood group, goes the length of saying that he displayed "feebleness of mind and body," "petty meannesses,"

"unwillingness or incapacity to take a high view even of friends or benefactors," a lightheartedness and frivolity, and "enduring spite." She grudgingly admits his "almost feminine grace and charm." She says that he thought his friends deserved only "casual thanks when they did what was but their manifest duty ... bitter and spiteful satire when they attended to their own affairs instead." She makes a radically false statement when she says that he defended Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Moore, and many others in _The Examiner_, but found an opportunity to say an evil word of most of them afterwards; and that when _Blackwood's_ or the _Quarterly_ attacked him, he was convinced that "it must be really one of his friends who was being struck at through him."[499]

The _Quarterly_ delayed longer in a.s.suming a friendly att.i.tude. It remained silent until 1867, when Bulwer, in a comparison of Hunt and Hazlitt, conceded to the former a gracefulness and kindliness of disposition, a smoothness of tone and delicacy of finish in his writing.

There was no formal apology as in the case of _Blackwood's_.

Carlyle says that Hunt suffered an "obloquy and calumny through the Tory press--perhaps a greater quant.i.ty of baseness, persevering, implacable calumny, than any other living writer has undergone; which long course of hostility ... may be regarded as the beginning of his worst distresses, and a main cause of them down to this day."[500] Macaulay said: "There is hardly a man living whose merits have been so grudgingly allowed, and whose faults have been so cruelly expiated."[501] For a period of more than a quarter of a century, from the beginning of the crusade against him until about 1845, partly as the result of the misrepresentation of the press, and partly as a natural consequence of his own foibles and early blunders, a pretty general antagonism existed against him. At the end of that time his honesty and talents were recognized and rewarded publicly by the government. And the public has come more and more to esteem his personal character.

The _Quarterly_ of April, 1818, contained the stupid and savage review of _Endymion_, provoked almost solely by the Keats's offence in being the friend and public protege of Leigh Hunt. The simple and manly preface[502]

was misconstrued into a formula for Huntian poetry, and its allusion to a "London drizzle or a Scotch mist" into a "deprecation of criticism in a feverish manner." Leigh Hunt asked years afterwards how "anybody could answer such an appeal to the mercy of strength with the cruelty of weakness. All the good for which Mr. Gifford pretended to be zealous, he might have effected with pain to no one, and glory to himself; and therefore all the evil he mixed with it was of his own making."[503] The general trend of the article and the reviewer's acknowledgment that he had read only the first book of the poem are well known. The following pa.s.sage refers directly to Keats's connection with Hunt:

"The author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype; who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr. Keats advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense is therefore quite gratuitous; he writes it for his own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry."[504]

_Blackwood's_ followed the _Quarterly's_ lead in August, reviewing Keats's first volume at the same time with _Endymion_. He is reproached with madness, with metromania, with low origin, with perversion of talents suited only to an apprenticeship, all because he admired Hunt sufficiently to adopt some of his theories and because he had been called in _The Examiner_ one of "two stars of glorious magnitude." The sonnet _Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison_, the _Sonnet to Haydon_, and _Sleep and Poetry_, are anathematized. In the last Keats is said to speak with

"contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits that 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, etc., Mr. Keats comforts himself and his readers with a view of the present more promising state of affairs; above all, with the ripened glories of the poet of _Rimini_."

The denunciation of the "calm, settled, drivelling idiocy" of _Endymion_ in the same article is famous, but in a discussion of the c.o.c.kney School it is well to recall the following:

"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 adopted for the purpose of poetry as theirs. It is amusing to see what a hand the 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."

The versification is said to expose the defects of Hunt's system ten times more than Hunt's own poetry. The mocking close is as follows: "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,' etc. But, for Heaven's sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry."

The delusion that these articles were the direct cause of Keats's death, an impression given wide currency by the pa.s.sages in _Adonais_[505] and _Don Juan_,[506] has long since been dispelled by the evidence of Hunt,[507] f.a.n.n.y Brawne, C. C. Clarke and, most important of all, Keats's own letters.[508] It is not likely that he was affected by them as much as either Hunt or Hazlitt, for he showed more indifference and greater dignity under fire than either. His courage and his craving for future fame do not seem to have wavered during the year in which they appeared.

Joseph Severn has testified that he never heard Keats mention _Blackwood's_ and that he considered what his friend endured from the press as "one of the least of his miseries"; that he knew so little about the whole matter that when he met Sir Walter Scott in Rome many years after he was at a loss to understand Scott's embarra.s.sment when Keats's name was mentioned; and it was not until a friend afterwards explained that Scott was connected with one of the magazines which was popularly supposed to have caused Keats's death that he could fathom it.[509]

It would have been impossible for a more obtuse man than Leigh Hunt not to have realized from the import of these two articles that Keats was abused largely because of the a.s.sociation with himself and, but for that, might have remained in peaceful obscurity. Hunt therefore wisely refrained from further defense as it would only have made matters worse. During the year 1818 only one notice of Keats appeared in _The Examiner_.[510] During the same year three sonnets to Keats appeared in _Foliage_. Yet it has been several times stated that Hunt forsook Keats at this time. Keats, under the hallucination of disease himself, accused Hunt of neglect, yet there were three reasons which made a persistent defense on the part of Hunt not to be expected. First, he was unaware, according to his own statement, of the extent of the defamation; second, he realized that his championship and friendship had been the original cause of wrath in the enemies' camp against Keats and that any activity on his part would only incense them further,[511] and third, he did not approve of Keats's only publication of that year and could not give it his support, as he frankly told Keats himself. Mr. Forman and Mr. Rossetti both scout the idea of disertion and disloyalty. Yet Mr. Hall Caine has made much[512] of a charge which has been denied by Hunt and ultimately repudiated by Keats. He has, moreover, overlooked the fact that Hunt's bitter satire, _Ultra-Crepidarius_, was written in _1818_ as a reply to Keats's critics but was withheld from publication, presumably only for reasons of prudence, until 1823. When Keats's feeling on the subject was brought to his knowledge years later, Hunt wrote:

"Keats appears to have been of opinion that I ought to have taken more notice of what the critics said against him. And perhaps I ought. My notices of them may not have been sufficient. I may have too much contented myself with panegyrizing his genius, and thinking the objections to it of no ultimate importance. Had he given me a hint to another effect, I should have acted upon it. But in truth, as I have before intimated, I did not see a twentieth part of what was said against us; nor had I the slightest notion, at that period, that he took criticism so much to heart. I was in the habit, though a public man, of living in a world of abstractions of my own; and I regarded him as of a nature still more abstracted, and sure of renown. Though I was a politician (so to speak), I had scarcely a political work in my library. Spensers and Arabian Tales filled up the shelves; and Spenser himself was not remoter, in my eyes, from all the common-places of life, than my new friend. Our whole talk was made up of idealisms. In the streets we were in the thick of the old woods. I little suspected, as I did afterwards, that the hunters had struck him; and never at any time did I suspect that he could have imagined it desired by his friends. Let me quit the subject of so afflicting a delusion."[513]

The _Edinburgh Review_ of August, 1820, discussed _Endymion_ and the 1820 volume. While it lamented the extravagances and obscurities, the "intoxication of sweetness" and the perversion of rhyme, it gave Keats due credit for his genius and his appreciation of the spirit of poetry. Hunt's review of _Lamia_[514] and the other poems of the 1820 volume appeared in _The Indicator_ of the same month. _Blackwood's_ answered the next month, abusing Hunt roundly and faintly praising the poems. The following proves that their chief object was to strike Hunt through Keats:

"It is a pity that this young man, John Keats, author of _Endymion_, and some other poems, should have belonged to the c.o.c.kney School--for he is evidently possessed of talents that, under better direction, might have done very considerable things. As it is, he bids fair to sink himself beneath such a ma.s.s of affectation, conceit, and c.o.c.kney pedantry, as I never expected to see heaped together by anybody, except the first founder of the School.... There is much merit in some of the stanzas of Mr. Keats's last volume, which I have just seen; no doubt he is a fine feeling lad--and I hope he will live to despise Leigh Hunt and be a poet."

Hazlitt, in May of the next year wrote of the persecution of Keats in the _Edinburgh Review_:

"Nor is it only obnoxious writers on politics themselves, but all their friends and acquaintances, and those whom they casually notice, that come under their sweeping anathema. It is proper to make a clear stage. The friends of Caesar must not be suspected of an amicable intercourse with patriotic and incendiary writers. A young poet comes forward; an early and favourable notice appears of some boyish verses of his in the _Examiner_, independently of all political opinion.