Famous Reviews by Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

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

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

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

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

There is no need for us to sink down this unhappy man into deeper
humiliation. Never before did the abuse and prostitution of talents
bring with them such prompt and memorable punishment. The pestilential
air which Leigh Hunt breathed forth into the world to poison and
corrupt, has been driven stiflingly back upon himself, and he who strove
to spread the infection of loathsome licentiousness among the tender
moral constitutions of the young, has been at length rewarded, as it was
fitting he should be, by the accusation of being himself guilty of those
crimes which it was the object of "The Story of Rimini" to encourage and
justify in others. The world knew nothing of him but from his works; and
were they blameable (even though they erred) in believing him capable of
any enormities in his own person, whose imagination feasted and gloated
on the disgusting details of adultery and incest? They were repelled and
sickened by such odious and unnatural wickedness--he was attracted and
delighted. What to them was the foulness of pollution, seemed to him the
beauty of innocence. What to them was the blast from hell, to him was
the air from heaven. They read and they condemned. They asked each other
"What manner of man is this?" The charitable were silent. It would
perhaps be hard to call them uncharitable who spoke aloud. Thoughts were
associated with his name which shall be nameless by us; and at last the
wretched scribbler himself has had the gross and unfeeling folly to
punish them all to the world, and that too in a tone of levity that
could have been becoming only on our former comparatively trivial
charges against him of wearing yellow breeches, and dispensing with the
luxury of a neckcloth. He shakes his shoulders, according to his rather
iniquitous custom, at being told that he is suspected of adultery and
incest! A pleasant subject of merriment, no doubt, it is--though
somewhat embittered by the intrusive remembrance of that unsparing
castigator of vice, Mr. Gifford, and clouded over by the melancholy
breathed from the shin-bone of his own poor old deceased grandmother.
What a mixture of the horrible and absurd! And the man who thus writes
is--not a Christian, for that he denies--but, forsooth, a poet! one of
the

Great spirits who on earth are sojourning!

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

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

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

Arcades ambo
Et cantare pares--

Shall we add,

et respondere parati?

Z. ON KEATS

[From _Blackwood's Magazine_, August, 1818]

COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

No. IV

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

CORNELIUS WEBB.

Of all the manias of this mad age, the most incurable, as well as the
most common, seems to be no other than the _Metromanie_. The just
celebrity of Robert Burns and Miss Baillie has had the melancholy effect
of turning the heads of we know not how many farm-servants and unmarried
ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a
superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of
lyrics behind her in her band-box. To witness the disease of any human
understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an
able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more
afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the
case of Mr. John Keats. This young man appears to have received from
nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior order--
talents which, devoted to the purposes of any useful profession, must
have rendered him a respectable, if not an eminent citizen. His friends,
we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound
apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has
been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we have alluded.
Whether Mr. John had been sent home with a diuretic or composing draught
to some patient far gone in the poetical mania, we have not heard. This
much is certain, that he has caught the infection, and that thoroughly.
For some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit
or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the
"Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so
seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of
"Endymion." We hope, however, that in so young a person, and with a
constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly
incurable. Time, firm treatment, and rational restraint, do much for
many apparently hopeless invalids; and if Mr. Keats should happen, at
some interval of reason, to cast his eye upon our pages, he may perhaps
be convinced of the existence of his malady, which, in such cases, is
often all that is necessary to put the patient in a fair way of being
cured.

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

What though, for shewing truth to flattered state,
_Kind Hunt_ was shut in prison, yet has he,
In his immortal spirit been as free
As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.
Minion of grandeur! think you he did wait?
Think you he nought but prison walls did see,
Till, so unwilling, thou unturn'dst the key?
Ah, no! far happier, nobler was his fate!
_In Spenser's halls_! he strayed, and bowers fair,
Culling enchanted flowers; and he flew
_With daring Milton_! through the fields of air;
To regions of his own his genius true
Took happy flights. Who shall his fame impair
When thou art dead, and all thy wretched crew?

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

Great spirits now on earth are sojourning;
He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,
Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake,
Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing:
_He of the rose, the violet, the spring,
The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake_:
And lo!--whose steadfastness would never take
A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering.
And other spirits there are standing apart
Upon the forehead of the age to come;
These, these will give the world another heart,
And other pulses. _Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings_?--
_Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb_.

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

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

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

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

Add too, the sweetness
Of thy honied voice; the neatness
Of thine ankle lightly turn'd:
With those beauties, scarce discerned,
Kept with such sweet privacy,
That they seldom meet the eye
Of the little loves that fly
Round about with eager pry.
Saving when, with freshening lave,
Thou dipp'st them in the taintless wave;
Like twin water lilies, born
In the coolness of the morn.
O, if thou hadst breathed then,
Now the Muses had been ten.
Couldst thou wish for lineage _higher_
Than twin sister of _Thalia_?
At last for ever, evermore,
Will I call the Graces four.

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

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

So much for the opening bud; now for the expanded flower. It is time to
pass from the juvenile "Poems," to the mature and elaborate "Endymion, a
Poetic Romance." The old story of the moon falling in love with a
shepherd, so prettily told by a Roman Classic, and so exquisitely
enlarged and adorned by one of the most elegant of German poets, has
been seized upon by Mr. John Keats, to be done with as might seem good
unto the sickly fancy of one who never read a single line either of Ovid
or of Wieland. If the quantity, not the quality, of the verses dedicated
to the story is to be taken into account, there can be no doubt that Mr.
Keats may now claim Endymion entirely to himself. To say the truth, we
do not suppose either the Latin or the German poet would be very anxious
to dispute about the property of the hero of the "Poetic Romance." Mr.
Keats has thoroughly appropriated the character, if not the name. His
Endymion is not a Greek shepherd, love of a Grecian goddess; he is
merely a young Cockney rhymster, dreaming a phantastic dream at the full
of the moon. Costume, were it worth while to notice such a trifle, is
violated in every page of this goodly octavo. From his prototype Hunt,
John Keats has acquired a sort of vague idea, that the Greeks were a
most tasteful people, and that no mythology can be so finely adapted for
the purposes of poetry as theirs. It is amusing to see what a hand the
two 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. As for Mr. Keats's "Endymion," it has just as much to do with
Greece as it has with "old Tartary the fierce"; no man, whose mind has
ever been imbued with the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical
poetry or classical history, could have stooped to profane and vulgarise
every association in the manner which has been adopted by this "son of
promise." Before giving any extracts, we must inform our readers, that
this romance is meant to be written in English heroic rhyme. To those
who have read any of Hunt's poems, this hint might indeed be needless.
Mr. Keats has adopted the loose, nerveless versification, and Cockney
rhymes of the poet of Rimini; but in fairness to that gentleman, we must
add, that the defects of the system are tenfold more conspicuous in his
disciples' work than in his own. Mr. Hunt is a small poet, but he is a
clever man. Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of
pretty abilities, which he has done every thing in his power to
spoil....

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

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

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

She gave her fair hands to him, and behold,
Before three swiftest kisses he had told,
They vanish far away!--Peona went
Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment.

And so, like many other romances, terminates the "Poetic Romance" of
Johnny Keats, in a patched-up wedding.

We had almost forgotten to mention, that Keats belongs to the Cockney
School of Politics, as well as the Cockney School of Poetry.

It is fit that he who holds Rimini to be the first poem, should believe
the Examiner to be the first politician of the day. We admire
consistency, even in folly. Hear how their bantling has already learned
to lisp sedition.

There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen
Their baaing vanities, to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
From human pastures; or, O torturing fact!
Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd
Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe
Our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. With not one tinge
Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight
Able to face an owl's, they still are dight
By the blue-eyed nations in empurpled vests,
And crowns, and turbans. With unladen breasts,
Save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount
To their spirit's perch, their being's high account,
Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones--
Amid the fierce intoxicating tones.
Of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums,
And sudden cannon. Ah! how all this hums,
In wakeful ears, like uproar past and gone--
Like thunder clouds that spake to Babylon,
And set those old Chaldeans to their tasks.--
Are then regalities all gilded masks?

And now, good-morrow to "the Muses' son of Promise"; as for "the feats
he yet may do," as we do not pretend to say, like himself, "Muse of my
native land am I inspired," we shall adhere to the safe old rule of
_pauca verba_. We venture to make one small prophecy, that his
bookseller will not a second time venture L50 upon any thing he can
write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starving apothecary than
a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to plasters, pills,
and ointment boxes, &c. 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.

Z.

ON SHELLEY

[From _Blackwood's Magazine_, September, 1820]

"PROMETHEUS UNBOUND"

Whatever may be the difference of men's opinions concerning the measure
of Mr. Shelley's poetical power, there is one point in regard to which
all must be agreed, and that is his Audacity. In the old days of the
exulting genius of Greece, Aeschylus dared two things which astonished
all men, and which still astonish them--to exalt contemporary men into
the personages of majestic tragedies--and to call down and embody into
tragedy, without degradation, the elemental spirits of nature and the
deeper essences of Divinity. We scarcely know whether to consider the
_Persians_ or the _Prometheus Bound_ as the most extraordinary display
of what has always been esteemed the most audacious spirit that ever
expressed its workings in poetry. But what shall we say of the young
English poet who has now attempted, not only a flight as high as the
highest of Aeschylus, but the very flight of that father of tragedy--who
has dared once more to dramatise Prometheus--and, most wonderful of all,
to dramatise the _deliverance_ of Prometheus--which is known to have
formed the subject of a lost tragedy of Aeschylus no ways inferior in
mystic elevation to that of the [Greek: Desmotaes].

Although a fragment of that perished master-piece be still extant in the
Latin version of Attius--it is quite impossible to conjecture what were
the personages introduced in the tragedy of Aeschylus, or by what train
of passions and events he was able to sustain himself on the height of
that awful scene with which his surviving _Prometheus_ terminates. It is
impossible, however, after reading what is left of that famous
trilogy,[1] to suspect that the Greek poet symbolized any thing whatever
by the person of Prometheus, except the native strength of human
intellect itself--its strength of endurance above all others--its
sublime power of patience. STRENGTH and FORCE are the two agents who
appear on this darkened theatre to bind the too benevolent Titan--_Wit_
and _Treachery_, under the forms of Mercury and Oceanus, endeavour to
prevail upon him to make himself free by giving up his dreadful secret;--
but _Strength_ and _Force_, and _Wit_ and _Treason_, are all alike
powerless to overcome the resolution of that suffering divinity, or to
win from him any acknowledgment of the new tyrant of the skies. Such was
this simple and sublime allegory in the hands of Aeschylus. As to what
had been the original purpose of the framers of the allegory, that is a
very different question, and would carry us back into the most hidden
places of the history of mythology. No one, however, who compares the
mythological systems of different races and countries, can fail to
observe the frequent occurrence of certain great leading Ideas and
leading Symbolisations of ideas too--which Christians are taught to
contemplate with a knowledge that is the knowledge of reverence. Such,
among others, are unquestionably the ideas of an Incarnate Divinity
suffering on account of mankind--conferring benefits on mankind at the
expense of his own suffering;--the general idea of vicarious atonement
itself--and the idea of the dignity of suffering as an exertion of
intellectual might--all of which may be found, more or less obscurely
shadowed forth, in the original [Greek: Mythos] of Prometheus the Titan,
the enemy of the successful rebel and usurper Jove. We might have also
mentioned the idea of a _deliverer_, waited for patiently through ages
of darkness, and at least arriving in the person of the child of Io--
but, in truth, there is no pleasure, and would be little propriety, in
seeking to explain all this at greater length, considering, what we
cannot consider without deepest pain, the very different views which
have been taken of the original allegory by Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley.