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Lockhart, J. G. (John Gibson), 1794-1854On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. IBlackwood’s Edinburgh MagazineEdinburghOctober 18172738-40
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BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. VII.OCTOBER, 1817.Vol. II.
ON THE COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY. NO. I. Our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on) Of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton, Byron, (Our England’s Dante)—Wordsworth—Hunt, and Keats, The Muses’ son of promise; and of what feats He yet may do. Cornelius Webb.
While the whole critical world is occupied with balancing the
merits, whether in theory or in execution, of what is commonly called The Lake School, it is strange that no one seems to think it at
all necessary to say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late
sprung up among us. This school has not, I believe, as yet received any name; but if I may
be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the
designation of The Cockney School. Its chief Doctor and
Professor is Mr Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of some
talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, and withal of
exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects.
He is a man of little education. He knows absolutely nothing of Greek, almost nothing of
Latin, and his knowledge of Italian literature is confined to a few of the most popular of
Petrarch’s sonnets, and an imperfect
acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of
Mr Hoole. As to the French poets, he dismisses
them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders. The truth is, he is in a
state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaïre nor Phèdre. To those great German poets who have
illuminated the last fifty years with a splendour to which this country has, for a long
time, seen nothing comparable, Mr Hunt is an absolute stranger. Of
Spanish books he has read Don Quixote (in
the translation of Motteux), and some poems of
Lope de Vega in the imitations of my Lord Holland. Of all the great critical writers, either of
ancient or of modern times, he is utterly ignorant, excepting only Mr Jeffrey among ourselves.
With this stock of knowledge, Mr Hunt
presumes to become the founder of a new school of poetry, and throws away entirely the
chance which he might have had of gaining some true poetical fame, had he been less lofty
in his pretensions. The story of Rimini is
not wholly undeserving of praise. It possesses some tolerable passages, which are all
quoted in the Edinburgh Reviewer’saccount of the poem, and not one of which
is quoted in the very illiberal attack
upon it in the Quarterly. But such is the
wretched taste in which the greater part of the work is executed, that most certainly no
man who reads it once will ever be to prevail upon himself to
read it again. One feels the same disgust at the idea of opening Rimini, that impresses itself on the mind of a man of fashion, when he is
invited to enter, for a second time, the gilded drawing-room of a little mincing
boarding-school mistress, who would fain have an At Home in her
house. Every thing is presence, affectation, finery, and gaudiness. The beaux are
attorneys’ apprentices, with chapeau bras and Limerick
gloves—fiddlers, harp teachers, and clerks of genius: the belles are faded
fan-twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school, and enormous citizens’
wives. The company are entertained with lukewarm negus, and the sounds of a paltry piano
forte.
All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society,
and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings; but Mr
Hunt cannot utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the Shibboleth of low birth and low habits. He is the ideal of Cockney
Poet. He raves perpetually about “green fields,” “jaunty streams,”
and “o’er-arching leafiness,” exactly as a Cheapside shop-keeper does
about the beauties of his box on the Camberwell road. Mr Hunt is
altogether unacquainted with the face of nature in her magnificent scenes; he has never
seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill, nor reclined by any stream more pastoral than
the Serpentine River. But he is determined to be a poet eminently rural, and he rings the
changes—till one is sick of him, on the beauties of the different “high
views” which he has taken of God and nature, in the course of some Sunday dinner
parties, at which he has assisted in the neighbourhood of London. His books are indeed not
known in the country; his fame as a poet (and I might almost say, as a politician too) is
entirely confined to the young attorneys and embryo-barristers about town. To the opinion
of these competent judges, London is the world—and Hunt is a
Homer.
Mr Hunt is not disqualified by his ignorance and
vulgarity alone, for being the founder of a respectable sect in poetry. He labours under
the burden of a sin more deadly than either of these. The two great elements of dignified
poetry, religious feeling, and patriotic feeling, have no place in his writings. His
religion is a poor tame dilution of the blasphemies of the Encyclopædie—his patriotism a
crude, vague, ineffectual, and sour Jacobinism. His works exhibit no reverence either for
God or man; neither altar nor throne have any dignity in his eyes. He speaks well of nobody
but two or three great dead poets, and in so speaking of them he does well; but, alas!
Mr Hunt is no conjurer τιχνη υ
λανθαιυ. He pretends, indeed, to
be an admirer of Spenser and Chaucer, but what he praises in them is never what is most
deserving of praise—it is only that which he humbly conceives, bears some resemblance
to the more perfect productions of Mr Leigh Hunt: and we can always
discover, in the midst of his most violent ravings about the Court of Elizabeth, and the days of Sir
Philip Sidney, and the Fairy
Queen—that the real objects of his admiration are the Coterie of Hampstead
and the Editor of the Examiner. When he talks
about chivalry and King Arthur, he is always thinking of himself, and “a small party of friends, who meet once a-week at a Round Table, to
discuss the merits of a leg of mutton, and of the subjects upon which we are to
write.”—Mr Leigh Hunt’s ideas
concerning the sublime, and concerning his own powers, bear a considerable resemblance to
those of his friend Bottom, the weaver, on the same
subjects; “I will roar, that it shall do any man’s heart good to hear
me.”—“I will roar you an ’twere any
nightingale.”
The poetry of Mr Hunt is such as might be
expected from the personal character and habits of its author. As a vulgar man is
perpetually labouring to be genteel—in like manner, the poetry of this man is always
on the stretch to be grand. He has been allowed to look for a moment from the antichamber
into the saloon, and mistaken the waving of feathers and the painted floor for the
sine qua non’s of elegant society.
He would fain be always tripping and waltzing, and is sorry that he cannot be allowed to
walk about in the morning with yellow breeches and flesh-coloured silk stockings. He sticks
an artificial rose-bud into his button hole in the midst of winter. He
wears no neckcloth, and cuts his hair in imitation of the Prints of Petrarch. In his verses he is always desirous of being
airy, graceful, easy, courtly, and Italian. If he had the
smallest acquaintance with the great demi-gods of Italian poetry, he could never fancy that
the style in which he writes, bears any, even the most remote resemblance to the severe and
simple manner of Dante—the tender stillness of the
lover of Laura—or the sprightly and good-natured
unconscious elegance of the inimitable Ariosto. He
has gone into a strange delusion about himself, and is just as absurd in supposing that he
resembles the Italian Poets as a greater Quack still (Mr
Coleridge) is, in imagining that he is a Philosopher after the manner of
Kant or Mendelshon—and that “the eye of Lessing bears a remarkable likeness to mine,” i.e. the eye of Mr Samuel Coleridge.*
The extreme moral depravity of the Cockney School is another thing which is
for ever thrusting itself upon the public attention, and convincing every man of sense who
looks into their productions, that they who sport such sentiments can never be great poets.
How could any man of high original genius ever stoop publicly, at the present day, to dip
his fingers in the least of those glittering and rancid obscenities which float on the
surface of Mr Hunt’s Hippocrene? His poetry
resembles that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. His muse talks
indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner girl. Some excuse for her there might have been,
had she been hurried away by imagination or passion; but with her, indecency seems a
disease, she appears to speak unclean things from perfect inanition. The very concubine of
so impure a wretch as Leigh Hunt would be to be pitied, but alas! for
the wife of such a husband! For him there is no charm in simple seduction; and he gloats
over it only when accompanied with adultery and incest.
The unhealthy and jaundiced medium through which the Founder of the Cockney
School views every thing like moral truth is apparent, not only from his obscenity, but
also from his want of respect for all that numerous class of plain upright men, and
unpretending women, in which the real worth and excellence of human society consists. Every
man is, according to Mr Hunt, a dull potato-eating
blockhead—of no greater value to God or man than any ox or dray-horse—who is
not an admirer of Voltaire’sromans, a worshipper of Lord Holland and Mr Haydon, and a
quoter of John Buncle and Chaucer’sFlower and Leaf. Every woman is useful only as a breeding machine, unless she
is fond of reading Launcelot of the Lake, in an antique
summer-house.
How such an indelicate writer as Mr Hunt
can pretend to be an admirer of Mr Wordsworth, is to
us a thing altogether inexplicable. One great charm of
Wordsworth’s noble compositions consists in the dignified
purity of thought, and the patriarchal simplicity of feeling, with which they are
throughout penetrated and imbued. We can conceive a vicious man admiring with distant awe
the spectacle of virtue and purity; but if he does so sincerely, he must also do so with
the profoundest feeling of the error of his own ways, and the resolution to amend them. His
admiration must be humble and silent, not pert and loquacious. Mr Hunt
praises the purity of Wordsworth as if he himself were pure, his
dignity as if he also were dignified. He is always like the ball of Dung in the fable,
pleasing himself, and amusing bye-standers with his “nos poma
natamus.” For the person who writes Rimini, to admire the Excursion, is just as impossible as it
would be for a Chinese polisher of cherry-stones, or gilder of tea-cups, to burst into
tears at the sight of the Theseus or the Torso.
The Founder of the Cockney School would fain claim poetical kindred with
Lord Byron and Thomas
Moore. Such a connexion would be as unsuitable for them as for William Wordsworth. The days of Mr
Moore’s follies are long since over and, as he is a thorough
gentleman, he must necessarily entertain the greatest contempt for such an under-bred
person as Mr Leigh Hunt. But Lord
Byron! How must the haughty spirit of
* Mr. Wordsworth
(meaning, we presume, to pay Mr Coleridge a
compliment) makes him look very absurdly, “A noticeable man, with large grey
eyes.”
Lara and Harold contemn the subaltern sneaking of our modern
tuft-hunter. The insult which he offered to Lord Byron in the
dedication of Rimini,—in which he, a
paltry cockney newspaper scribbler, had the assurance to address one of the most nobly-born
of English Patricians, and one of the first geniuses whom the world ever produced, as
“My dear Byron,” although it may have been forgotten and despised by the
illustrious person whom it most nearly concerned,—excited a feeling of utter loathing
and disgust in the public mind, which will always be remembered whenever the name of
Leigh Hunt is mentioned. We dare say Mr Hunt
has some fine dreams about the true nobility being the nobility of talent, and flatters
himself, that with those who acknowledge only that sort of rank, he himself passes for
being the peer of Byron. He is sadly mistaken. He is as completely a
Plebeian in his mind as he is in his rank and station in society. To that highest and
unalienable nobility which the great Roman satirist
styles “sola atque unica,” we fear his pretensions
would be equally unavailing.
The shallow and impotent pretensions, tenets, and attempts, of this
man,—and the success with which his influence seems to be extending itself among a
pretty numerous, though certainly a very paltry and pitiful, set of readers,—have for
the last two or three years been considered by us with the most sickening aversion. The
very culpable manner in which his chief poem was reviewed in the Edinburgh Review (we believe it is no secret, at his own
impatient and feverish request, by his partner in the Round Table), was matter of concern to more readers than
ourselves. The masterly pen which inflicted such signal chastisement on the early
licentiousness of Moore should not have been idle on
that occasion. Mr Jeffrey does ill, when he
delegates his important functions into such hands as those of Mr Hazlitt. It was chiefly in consequence of that gentleman’s
allowing Leigh Hunt to pass unpunished through a scene of
slaughter, which his execution might so highly have graced, that we came to the resolution
of laying before our readers a series of essays on the Cockney
School—of which here terminates the first.