Famous Reviews by Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

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The concluding chapter of this Biography is perhaps the most pitiful of
the whole, and contains a most surprising mixture of the pathetic and
the ludicrous.

"Strange," says he, "as the delusion may appear, yet it is most
true, that three years ago I did not know or believe that I had an
enemy in the world; and now even my strongest consolations of
gratitude are mingled with fear, and I reproach myself for being too
often disposed to ask,--Have I one friend?"

We are thus prepared for the narration of some grievous cruelty, or
ingratitude, or malice--some violation of his peace, or robbery of his
reputation; but our readers will start when they are informed, that this
melancholy lament is occasioned solely by the cruel treatment which his
poem of Christabel received from the Edinburgh Review and other
periodical Journals! It was, he tells us, universally admired in
manuscript--he recited it many hundred times to men, women, and
children, and always with an electrical effect--it was bepraised by most
of the great Poets of the day--and for twenty years he was urged to give
it to the world. But alas! no sooner had the Lady Christabel "come out,"
than all the rules of good-breeding and politeness were broken through,
and the loud laugh of scorn and ridicule from every quarter assailed the
ears of the fantastic Hoyden. But let Mr. Coleridge be consoled. Mr.
Scott and Lord Byron are good-natured enough to admire Christabel, and
the Public have not forgotten that his Lordship handed her Ladyship upon
the stage. It is indeed most strange, that Mr., Coleridge is not
satisfied with the praise of those he admires,--but pines away for the
commendation of those he contemns.

Having brought down his literary life to the great epoch of the
publication of Christabel, he there stops short; and that the world may
compare him as he appears at that aera to his former self, when "he set
sail from Yarmouth on the morning of the 10th September, 1798, in the
Hamburg Packet," he has republished, from his periodical work the
"Friend," seventy pages of Satyrane's Letters. As a specimen of his wit
in 1798, our readers may take the following:--

We were all on the deck, but in a short time I observed marks of
dismay. The Lady retired to the cabin in some confusion; and many
of the faces round me assumed a very doleful and frog-coloured
appearance; and within an hour the number of those on deck was
lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick; and the giddiness
soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of appetite, which I
attributed, in great measure, to the "_saeva mephitis_" of the
bilge-water; and it was certainly not decreased by the _exportations
from the cabin_. However, I was well enough to join the able-bodied
passengers, one of whom observed, not inaptly, that Momus might have
discovered an easier _way to see a man's inside_ than by placing a
window in his breast. He needed only have taken a salt-water trip in a
packet boat. I am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior
to a stage-coach as a means of making men _open out to each other_!

The importance of his observations during the voyage may be estimated by
this one:--

At four o'clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves,_a single
solitary wild duck!_ It is not easy to conceive how interesting a
thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters!

At the house of Klopstock, brother of the Poet, he saw a portrait of
Lessing, which he thus describes to the Public:--"His eyes were
uncommonly _like mine_! if any thing, rather larger and more prominent!
But the lower part of his face I and his nose--O what an exquisite
expression of elegance and sensibility!" He then gives a long account of
his interview with Klopstock the Poet, in which he makes that great man
talk in a very silly, weak, and ignorant manner. Mr. Coleridge not only
sets him right in all his opinions on English literature, but also is
kind enough to correct, in a very authoritative and dictatorial tone,
his erroneous views of the characteristic merits and defects of the most
celebrated German Writers. He has indeed the ball in his own hands
throughout the whole game; and Klopstock, who, he says, "was
seventy-four years old, with legs enormously swollen," is beaten to a
standstill. We are likewise presented with an account of a conversation
which his friend W. held with the German Poet, in which the author of
the Messiah makes a still more paltry figure. We can conceive nothing
more odious and brutal, than two young ignorant lads from Cambridge
forcing themselves upon the retirement of this illustrious old man, and,
instead of listening with love, admiration and reverence, to his
sentiments and opinions, insolently obtruding upon him their own crude
and mistaken fancies,--contradicting imperiously every thing he
advances,--taking leave of him with a consciousness of their own
superiority,--and, finally, talking of him and his genius in terms of
indifference bordering on contempt. This Mr. W. had the folly and the
insolence to say to Klopstock, who was enthusiastically praising the
Oberon of Wieland, that he never could see the smallest beauty in any
part of that Poem.

We must now conclude our account of this "unaccountable" production. It
has not been in our power to enter into any discussion with Mr.
Coleridge on the various subjects of Poetry and Philosophy, which he
has, we think, vainly endeavoured to elucidate. But we shall, on a
future occasion, meet him on his own favourite ground. No less than 182
pages of the second volume are dedicated to the poetry of Mr.
Wordsworth. He has endeavoured to define poetry--to explain the
philosophy of metre--to settle the boundaries of poetic diction--and to
show, finally, "What it is probable Mr. Wordsworth meant to say in his
dissertation prefixed to his Lyrical Ballads." As Mr. Coleridge has not
only studied the laws of poetical composition, but is a Poet of
considerable powers, there are, in this part of his Book, many acute,
ingenious, and even sensible observations and remarks; but he never
knows when to have done,--explains what requires no explanation,--often
leaves untouched the very difficulty he starts,--and when he has poured
before us a glimpse of light upon the shapeless form of some dark
conception, he seems to take a wilful pleasure in its immediate
extinction, and leads "us floundering on, and quite astray," through the
deepening shadows of interminable night.

One instance there is of magnificent promise, and laughable
non-performance, unequalled in the annals of literary History. Mr.
Coleridge informs us, that he and Mr. Wordsworth (he is not certain which
is entitled to the glory of the first discovery) have found out the
difference between Fancy and Imagination. This discovery, it is
prophesied, will have an incalculable influence on the progress of all
the Fine Arts. He has written a long chapter purposely to prepare our
minds for the great discussion. The audience is assembled--the curtain
is drawn up--and there, in his gown, cap, and wig, is sitting Professor
Coleridge. In comes a servant with a letter; the Professor gets up, and,
with a solemn voice, reads to the audience.--It is from an enlightened
Friend; and its object is to shew, in no very courteous terms either to
the Professor or his Spectators, that he may lecture, but that nobody
will understand him. He accordingly makes his bow, and the curtain
falls; but the worst of the joke is, that the Professor pockets the
admittance-money,--for what reason, his outwitted audience are left, the
best way they can, to "fancy or imagine."

But the greatest piece of Quackery in the Book is his pretended account
of the Metaphysical System of Kant, of which he knows less than nothing.
He wall not allow that there is a single word of truth in any of the
French Expositions of that celebrated System, nor yet in any of our
British Reviews. We do not wish to speak of what we do not understand,
and therefore say nothing of Mr. Coleridge's Metaphysics....

We have done. We have felt it our duty to speak with severity of this
book and its author--and we have given our readers ample opportunities
to judge of the justice of our strictures. We have not been speaking in
the cause of literature only, but, we conceive, in the cause of Morality
and Religion. For it is not fitting that He should be held up as an
example to the rising generation (but, on the contrary, it is most
fitting that he should be exposed as a most dangerous model), who has
alternately embraced, defended, and thrown aside all systems of
Philosophy--and all creeds of Religion,--who seems to have no power of
retaining an opinion,--no trust in the principles which he defends,--but
who fluctuates from theory to theory, according as he is impelled by
vanity, envy, or diseased desire of change,--and who, while he would
subvert and scatter into dust those structures of knowledge, reared by
the wise men of this and other generations, has nothing to erect in
their room but the baseless and air-built fabrics of a dreaming
Imagination.

ON THE COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

No. I

[From _Blackwood's Magazine_, October, 1817]

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 Zaire nor Phedre. 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's account 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 able 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 pretence,
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 a Cockney
Poet. He raves perpetually about "greenfields," "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. In 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 all dignified poetry, religious feeling, and patriotic feeling, have
no place in his mind. His religion is a poor tame dilution of the
blasphemies of the _Encyclopaedie_--his patriotism a crude, vague,
ineffectual, and sour Jacobinism. He is without 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 [Greek: technae ou
lanthanei]. He pretends, indeed, to be an admirer of Spencer 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 anti-chamber 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 also he is always desirous of being airy, graceful, easy,
courtly, and ITALIAN. If he had the smallest acquaintance with the great
demigods 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.[1]

[1] Mr. Wordsworth (meaning, we presume, to pay Mr. Coleridge a
compliment), makes him look very absurdly,

"A noticeable man, with _large grey eyes_."

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 is that of a
man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. He talks indelicately
like a tea-sipping milliner girl. Some excuse for him there might have
been, had he been hurried away by imagination or passion. But with him
indecency is a disease, and he speaks 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's _romans_, a worshipper of Lord Holland and Mr. Haydon and a
quoter of John Buncle and Chaucer's Flower 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 a profligate creature 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 and 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 by-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 Leigh
Hunt. But Lord Byron! How must the haughty spirit of 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 unalienated 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 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. _Z_.

THE COCKNEY 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 illustrious friendship--to his paid panderism to the
vilest passions 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 prostitute. 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.