“to the holy contemplation of your own divine perfections, and there ‘perk up with timid mouth’ ‘and lamping eyes’ (as you have it) upon what to you is dearer and more glorious than all created things besides, till you become absorbed in your own identity—motionless, mighty, and magnificent, in the pure calm of Cockneyism ... instead of rousing yourself from your lair, like some noble beast when attacked by the hunter, you roll yourself round like a sick hedgehog, that has crawled out into the ‘crisp’ gravel walk round your box at Hampstead, and oppose only the feeble pricks of your hunch’d-up back to the kicks of any one who wishes less to hurt you, than to drive you into your den.”
“to the holy contemplation of your own divine perfections, and there ‘perk up with timid mouth’ ‘and lamping eyes’ (as you have it) upon what to you is dearer and more glorious than all created things besides, till you become absorbed in your own identity—motionless, mighty, and magnificent, in the pure calm of Cockneyism ... instead of rousing yourself from your lair, like some noble beast when attacked by the hunter, you roll yourself round like a sick hedgehog, that has crawled out into the ‘crisp’ gravel walk round your box at Hampstead, and oppose only the feeble pricks of your hunch’d-up back to the kicks of any one who wishes less to hurt you, than to drive you into your den.”
TheQuarterlyof the same month contained the notorious review ofFoliage. Southey, in a counterfeited Cockney style, contorts Hunt’s devotion to his leafy luxuries, his flowerets, wine, music and other social joys into Epicureanism[492]and like unsound principles. Heevengoes so far as to accuse him of incest and adultery in his private life. There are disguised but unmistakable references to Keats and to Shelley; the latter is credited with evil doings that fall little short of machinations with the devil. The volume of poems, which was the ostensible pretext for this parade of foul slander, not a word of which was true, has, Southey says, richness of language and picturesquenessof imagery.[493]The July number ofBlackwood’swent a step beyond Southey and identified the characters of theStory of Riminiwith Hunt and his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent. After ostentatiously giving currency to the scandal, “Z” then proceeds to deny the rumor—which had no existence save in the minds of Hunt’s vilifiers—in order to preserve immunity from libel. At the time that Lamb replied to Southey in 1823 he took up these charges made against Hunt in 1818. He said:
“I was admitted to his household for several years, and do most solemnly aver that I believe him to be in his domestic relations as correct as any man. He chose an ill-judged subject for a poem.... In spite of ‘Rimini,’ I must look upon its author as a man of taste and a poet. He is better than so; he is one of the most cordial-minded men that I ever knew, and matchless as a fireside companion. I do not mean to affront or wound your feelings when I say that in his more genial moods, he has often reminded me of you.”[494]
“I was admitted to his household for several years, and do most solemnly aver that I believe him to be in his domestic relations as correct as any man. He chose an ill-judged subject for a poem.... In spite of ‘Rimini,’ I must look upon its author as a man of taste and a poet. He is better than so; he is one of the most cordial-minded men that I ever knew, and matchless as a fireside companion. I do not mean to affront or wound your feelings when I say that in his more genial moods, he has often reminded me of you.”[494]
A facetious bit of proseOn Sonnet Writingand aSonnet on MyselfinBlackwood’sof April, 1819, parodied excellently the Cockney conceit and mannerisms. The September number contrasted Henry Hunt, the representative of the Cockney School of Politics, with Leigh Hunt, of the Cockney School of Poetry; resenting loudly the claim of the two to prominence for “even Douglasses never had more than one Bell-the-cat at a time.” While Henry Hunt “the brawny white feather of Cockspur-street” addresses street mobs, the other Hunt, “thelank and sallow hypochondriac of the ‘leafy rise’ and ‘farmy fields’ of Hampstead,” “the whining milk-sop sonneteer of the Examiner” is said to speak to a “sorely depressed remnant of ‘single gentlemen’ in lodgings, and single ladies we know not where—a generation affected with headaches, tea-drinking and all the nostalgia of the nerves.” It is hardly necessary to add that there was no connection whatsoever between the two men.
Blackwood’sof October, 1819, announcedFoliageto 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. TheSonnet On Receiving a Crown of Ivy from Keatscame in for especial derision—“a blister clapped on his head” would have been considered more appropriate.
Hunt’sLiterary Pocket Booksfor 1819 and 1820 were reviewed inBlackwood’sin 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’sof September, 1820, reviewedThe Indicator; of December, 1821, the 1822Literary Pocket Book; the last contained coarse 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 Examinerof December 16, 1821, in an article entitledModern Criticism, italicised extracts fromBlackwood’sto bring out peculiarities of grammar and diction.Blackwood’sof 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 ofThe Liberaland, through Byron’s “noble generosity,” Hunt’s departure with his wife and “little Johnnys” upon a “perilous voyage on the un-cockney ocean.... He and his companions will now, like his own Nereids,
turnAnd toss upon the ocean’s lifting billows,Making thembanks andpillows,Upon whosespringinessthey lean and ride;Some with aninward back; someupward-eyed,Feeling the sky; and some withsidelong hips,O’er which the surface of the water slips.”
The first number of theNoctes Ambrosianæappeared in March. The following passage refers to the launching ofThe Liberalin a dialogue between the Editor and O’Doherty:
O. Hand me the lemons. This holy alliance of Pisa will be a queer affair.The Examinerhas 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 Shelly [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? TheQuarterly(who killed him, as Shelly 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.)
O. Hand me the lemons. This holy alliance of Pisa will be a queer affair.The Examinerhas 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 Shelly [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? TheQuarterly(who killed him, as Shelly 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’sof December, 1822, had passages on the Cockney School inNoctes Ambrosianæ. Number VII. of the series of articles on its members reviewed Hunt’sFlorentine Lovers, or, in their phrasing, hisArt 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-tit andHunt 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-Cockneys, after their wrath had begun to cool as seen in the review of theLiterary Pocket Book, was doubtless due to Hunt’s association inThe Liberalwith Byron: “What can Byron mean by patronizing a Cockney?... by far the most unaccountable of God’s works ... a scavenger raking in the filth of the common sewers and stews, for a few gold pieces thrown down by a nobleman.... But that Satan should stoop to associate with an incubus, shows that there is degeneracy in hell.” The tirade closes with a poem of six stanzas of which this is a fair sample:
“The kind Cockney Monarch, he bids us farewellTaking 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 ofThe Liberal,Blackwood’srejoiced 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 mass of oblivion in one bruised and battered sprawl of swipes and venom.”[495]
“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 mass of oblivion in one bruised and battered sprawl of swipes and venom.”[495]
Blackwood’sof 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’sUltra-Crepidarius, a satire on Gifford much in the vein and style of theFeast 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 gods into a man named Gifford. The satire is facetiously attributed byBlackwood’sto Master Hunt, aged ten; a “small, smart, smattering satirist of an air-haparent... Cockney 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 snatch 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 ofUltra-CrepidariusKing of Cockaigne.”
“Had Leigh Hunt, the papa, boldly advanced on any great emergency, at the peril of his life and crown, to snatch 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 ofUltra-CrepidariusKing of Cockaigne.”
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-balls 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’sBacchus in Tuscany, appeared inBlackwood’sof August, 1825. His allegiance to Apollo in Cockaigne 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’stranslation of Homer. The opportunity was not lost to refer unfavorably to Hunt’s translations of the same inFoliage.
The Rebellion of the Beasts; orThe Ass is Dead! Long Live the Ass!!! 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 surpasses 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.
WithLord Byron and Some of His Contemporariesthe rage of the two periodicals reached a grand climax and seemingly exhausted itself. TheQuarterlyin 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 coxcombry and cockneyism: 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’sof the same month pictured Hunt riding in the tourney lists of Cockaigne to the tune of Cock-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-bluster 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 hisplumage! 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.”
“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-bluster 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 hisplumage! 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.”
TheLiterary Gazettejoined in the hue-and-cry against “the pert vulgarity and miserable low-mindedness of Cockney-land,” against “the disagreeable, envious, bickering, hating, slandering, contemptible, drivelling and be-devilling wretches.”[496]Blackwood’sof February, 1830, in a review of Moore’sLife, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, satirizes the conversational habits of the Cockneys “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 inBlackwood’scease after this last, but in 1834 a full and complete apology was tendered Hunt by Christopher North:
“And Shelley 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’sLondon Journalwith 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 ofMaga’sdesertion 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]
“And Shelley 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’sLondon Journalwith 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 ofMaga’sdesertion 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’sand I, poetically, are becoming the best friends in the world. The other day there was an Ode inBlackwoodin honour of the memory of Shelley; and I look for one of Keats. I hope this will give you faith in glimpses of the Golden Age.”[498]Nowheredoes 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, Shelley, Keats, Moore, and many others inThe Examiner, but found an opportunity to say an evil word of most of them afterwards; and that whenBlackwood’sor theQuarterlyattacked him, he was convinced that “it must be really one of his friends who was being struck at through him.”[499]
TheQuarterlydelayed longer in assuming a friendly attitude. 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 ofBlackwood’s.
Carlyle says that Hunt suffered an “obloquy and calumny through the Tory press—perhaps a greater quantity 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.
TheQuarterlyof April, 1818, contained the stupid and savage review ofEndymion, provoked almost solely by the Keats’s offence in being the friend and public protégé 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 passage 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]
“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’sfollowed theQuarterly’slead in August, reviewing Keats’s first volume at the same time withEndymion. 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 inThe Examinerone of “two stars of glorious magnitude.” The sonnetWritten on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison, theSonnet to Haydon, andSleep 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 Cockney 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 ofRimini.”
“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 Cockney 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 ofRimini.”
The denunciation of the “calm, settled, drivelling idiocy” ofEndymionin the same article is famous, but in a discussion of the Cockney 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 Cockneys 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 classical attainments and attempts of the Cockney poets.”
“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 Cockneys 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 classical attainments and attempts of the Cockney 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 passages inAdonais[505]andDon Juan,[506]has long since been dispelled by the evidence of Hunt,[507]Fanny 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 mentionBlackwood’sand 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 embarrassment 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 association 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 inThe Examiner.[510]During the same year three sonnets to Keats appeared inFoliage. 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 in1818as 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; norhad 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]
“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; norhad 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]
TheEdinburgh Reviewof August, 1820, discussedEndymionand 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 ofLamia[514]and the other poems of the 1820 volume appeared inThe Indicatorof the same month.Blackwood’sanswered 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 ofEndymion, and some other poems, should have belonged to the Cockney 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 mass of affectation, conceit, and Cockney 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.”
“It is a pity that this young man, John Keats, author ofEndymion, and some other poems, should have belonged to the Cockney 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 mass of affectation, conceit, and Cockney 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 theEdinburgh 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 theExaminer, independently of all political opinion. That alone decides fate; and fromthat moment he is set upon, pulled in pieces, and hunted into his grave by the whole venal crew in full cry after him. It was crime enough that he dared to accept praise from so disreputable a quarter.”
“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 theExaminer, independently of all political opinion. That alone decides fate; and fromthat moment he is set upon, pulled in pieces, and hunted into his grave by the whole venal crew in full cry after him. It was crime enough that he dared to accept praise from so disreputable a quarter.”
In a letter from Hunt in Italy toThe Examiner, July 7, 1822, an inquiry is made why Mr. Gifford has never noticed Keats’s last volume: “that beautiful volume containingLamia, the story from Boccaccio, and that magnificent fragmentHyperion?”Blackwood’sof August replied to these two defenses in a tirade of twenty-two pages against theEdinburgh Review, Hazlitt, and Hunt. TheNoctesAmbrosianæof October continued in the same strain and, though the grave should have protected Keats from such banter, revived the old allusions to the apothecary and his pills.
In self defense against the charge, that its attacks and those of theQuarterlyhad broken Keats’s heart,Blackwood’sin January, 1826, said that it alone had dealt with Keats, Shelley and Procter with “common senseorcommon feeling”; that, seeing Keats in the road to ruin with the Cockneys, it had “tried to save him by wholesome and severe discipline—they drove him to poverty, expatriation and death.” The most remarkable part of this remarkable justification is this: “Keats outhunted Hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that, although invented in Little Britain, looks as if it were the prospect of some imaginative Eunuch’s muse within the melancholy inspiration of the Haram” (sic).
In March, 1828, in a review ofLord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, theQuarterlyseized the opportunity to revert to the author’s friendship for Keats in its old hostile manner; and, in a criticism of Coleridge’s poems in August, 1834, to speak of his “dreamy, half-swooning style of verse criticised by Lord Byron (in language too strong for print) as the fatal sin of Mr. John Keats.” Finally in March, 1840, inJournalism in France, there is another feeble effort at defense; a resentment of the “twaddle” against theQuarterly“when they had the misfortune to criticise a sickly poet, who died soon afterwards, apparently for the express purpose of dishonoring us.”
One of Hunt’s utterances in regard to Keats and his critics disposes finally of the matter: “his fame may now forgive thecritics who disliked his politics, and did not understand his poetry.”[515]
From Italy Shelley wrote to Peacock:
“I most devoutly wish I were living near London.... My inclination points to Hampstead; but I do not know whether I should not make up my mind to something more completely suburban. What are mountains, trees, heaths, or even glorious and ever beautiful sky, with such sunsets as I have seen at Hampstead, to friends? Social enjoyment, in some form or other, is the Alpha and the Omega of existence. All that I see in Italy—and from my tower window I now see the magnificent peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the plain—is nothing. It dwindles into smoke in the mind, when I think of some familiar forms of scenery, little perhaps in themselves, over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour.”[516]
“I most devoutly wish I were living near London.... My inclination points to Hampstead; but I do not know whether I should not make up my mind to something more completely suburban. What are mountains, trees, heaths, or even glorious and ever beautiful sky, with such sunsets as I have seen at Hampstead, to friends? Social enjoyment, in some form or other, is the Alpha and the Omega of existence. All that I see in Italy—and from my tower window I now see the magnificent peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the plain—is nothing. It dwindles into smoke in the mind, when I think of some familiar forms of scenery, little perhaps in themselves, over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour.”[516]
The attacks of theQuarterlyof May, 1818, on Shelley’s private life and of April, 1819, on theRevolt of Islam, and the reply ofThe Examiner, have already been discussed on p. 77 of the third chapter. The assault was renewed in October, 1821. The dominating characteristic of Shelley’s poetry is said to be “its frequent and total want of meaning.” InPrometheus Unboundthere were said to be many absurdities “in defiance of common sense and even of grammar ... a mere jumble of words and heterogeneous ideas, connected by slight and accidental associations, among which it is impossible to distinguish the principal object from the accessory.” The poem is declared to be full of “flagrant offences against morality and religion” and the poet to have gone out of his way to “revile Christianity and its author.” As a final verdict the reviewer says: “Mr. Shelley’s poetry is, in sober sadness,drivelling prose run mad.... Be his private qualities what they may, his poems ... are at war with reason, with taste, with virtue, in short, with all that dignifies man, or that man reveres.” TheLondon Literary Gazettejoined its forces to theQuarterlyand scoredPrometheus Unboundin 1820,Queen Mabin 1821.The Examinerof June 16, 23 and July 7, 1822, contained Hunt’s answer to the two onslaughts. He accused the writer in theQuarterlyof having used six stars to indicate an omission, in order to imply that the name of Christ had beenblasphemously used; of having put quotation marks to sentences not in the author criticised and of having intentionally left out so much at times as to make the context seem absurd. At the same time Hunt stated that he agreed that Shelley’s poetry was of “too abstract and metaphysical a cast ... too wilful and gratuitous in its metaphors”; and that it would have been better if he had kept metaphysics and polemics out of poetry. But at the same time he asserted that Shelley had written much that was unmetaphysical and poetically beautiful, asThe Cenci, theOde to a SkylarkandAdonais. Of the second he wrote: “I know of nothing more beautiful than this,—more choice of tones, more natural in words, more abundant in exquisite, cordial, and most poetic associations.” He characterized Southey’s reviews as cant, Gifford’s as bitter commonplace and Croker’s as pettifogging.
Blackwood’sreviewedAdonaisandThe Cenciin December, 1821. The Della Cruscans were reported to have come again from “retreats of Cockney dalliance in the London suburbs” and “by wainloads from Pisa.” The Cockneys were said to hate everything that was good and true and honorable, all moral ties and Christian principles, and to be steeped in desperate licentiousness.Adonaisis fifty-five stanzas of “unintelligible stuff” made up of every possible epithet that the poet has been able to “conglomerate in his piracy through the Lexicon.” The sense has been wholly subordinated to the rhymes. The author is a “glutton of names and colours” and has accomplished no more than might be done on such subjects as Mother Goose, Waterloo or Tom Thumb. Two cruel and loathsome parodies follow:Wouther the city marshal broke his legand anElegy on My Tom Cat, which, it is claimed, are less nonsensical, verbose and inflated thanAdonais.The Cenciis “a vulgar vocabulary of rottenness and reptilism” in an “odiferous, colorific and daisy-enamoured style.” It is regretted by the writer that it is impossible to believe that Shelley’s reason is unsettled, for this would be the best apology for the poem.[517]
WhenThe Liberalwas organized Shelley was spoken of thus:
“But Percy Bysshe Shelly has now published a long series of poems, the only object of which seems to be the promotion ofatheismandincest; and we can no longer hesitate to avow our belief, that he is as worthy of co-operating with the King of Cockaigne, as he is unworthy of co-operating with Lord Byron. Shelley is a man of genius, but he has no sort of sense or judgment. He is merely ‘an inspired idiot.’ Leigh Hunt is a man of talents, but vanity and vulgarity neutralize all his efforts to pollute the public mind. Lord Byron we regard not only as a man of lofty genius, but of great shrewdness and knowledge of the world. What canHEseriously hope from associating his name with such people as these?”[518]
“But Percy Bysshe Shelly has now published a long series of poems, the only object of which seems to be the promotion ofatheismandincest; and we can no longer hesitate to avow our belief, that he is as worthy of co-operating with the King of Cockaigne, as he is unworthy of co-operating with Lord Byron. Shelley is a man of genius, but he has no sort of sense or judgment. He is merely ‘an inspired idiot.’ Leigh Hunt is a man of talents, but vanity and vulgarity neutralize all his efforts to pollute the public mind. Lord Byron we regard not only as a man of lofty genius, but of great shrewdness and knowledge of the world. What canHEseriously hope from associating his name with such people as these?”[518]
As in the case of Keats,Blackwood’sdid not have the decency to desist from its indecent articles after Shelley’s death. September, 1824, this vulgar ridicule of the two dead poets appeared in answer to Bryan Waller Procter’s review of Shelley’s poems in the preceding number of theEdinburgh Review:
“Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats’s poetry grasped with the hand in his bosom—rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. But what a rash man Shelley was, to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack’s poetry on board. Why, man, it would sink a trireme. In the preface to Mr. Shelley’s poems we are told that his ‘vessel bore out of sight with a favorable wind;’ but what is that to the purpose? It had Endymion on board, and there was an end. Seventeen ton of pig iron would not be more fatal ballast. Down went the boat with a ‘swirl’! I lay a wager that it righted soon after evicting Jack.”
“Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats’s poetry grasped with the hand in his bosom—rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. But what a rash man Shelley was, to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack’s poetry on board. Why, man, it would sink a trireme. In the preface to Mr. Shelley’s poems we are told that his ‘vessel bore out of sight with a favorable wind;’ but what is that to the purpose? It had Endymion on board, and there was an end. Seventeen ton of pig iron would not be more fatal ballast. Down went the boat with a ‘swirl’! I lay a wager that it righted soon after evicting Jack.”
In the face of these articles against it as evidence,Blackwood’s, as early as January, 1828, had the audacity to claim—perhaps with the expectation that its audience was gifted with a sense of subtle humor—that Shelley had been praised in its pages for his fortitude, patience, and many other noble qualities, and that this praise had irritated the other Cockneys and made the whole trouble. If Keats suffered at the hands of the Edinburgh dictators for his association with Hunt the balance weighed in the other direction in the case of Shelley. All the crimes and opinions of which he was deemed guilty were passed on to Hunt. But Hunt gladly suffered for Shelley.
Hazlitt, although of Irish descent and a native of Shropshire, and of such independence as to belong to no school whatsoever, came in for a share of abuse second only in virulence to that showered on Hunt.[519]In theQuarterlyof April, 1817, in a review of theRound Table, probably in retaliation for his abuse of Southey inThe Examiner, Hazlitt’s papers are denominated “vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill-humour and rancorous abuse.” His characterizations of Pitt and Burke are “vulgar and foul invective,” and “loathsome trash.” The author might have described washerwomen forever, the reviewer asserts, “but if the creature, in his endeavours to see the light, must make his way over the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth which marks his tracks, it is right to point out that he may be flung back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel.”
TheCharacters of Shakespeare’s Playswas made an excuse for dissecting the morals and understanding of this “poor cankered creature.”[520]TheLectures on the English Poetsis characterized as a “third predatory incursion on taste and common sense ... either completely unintelligible, or exhibits only faint and dubious glimpses of meaning ... of that happy texture that leaves not a trace in the mind of either reader or hearer.”[521]ThePolitical Essayswas said to mark the writer as a death’s head hawk-moth, a creature already placed in a state of damnation, the drudge ofThe Examiner, the ward of Billingsgate, the slanderer of the human race, one of the plagues of England.[522]Later, in a discussion ofTable Talk,[523]he becomes a “Slang-Whanger“ (“a gabbler who employs slang to amuse the rabble”).
Hazlitt’sLetter to Gifford, 1819, was a reply to all previous attacks of theQuarterly. For a pamphlet of eighty-seven pages on such a subject it is “lively reading,” for Hazlitt, like Burke, as Mr. Birrell has remarked, excelled in a quarrel.[524]He calls Gifford a cat’s paw, the Government critic, the paymaster of the band of Gentleman Pensioners, a nuisance, a