[From _The Quarterly Review_, January, 1816]
_The Story of Rimini, a Poem_. By LEIGH HUNT. fc. 8vo. pp. 111. London,
1816.
A considerable part of this poem was written in Newgate, where the
author was some time confined, we believe for a libel which appeared in
a newspaper, of which he is said to be the conductor. Such an
introduction is not calculated to make a very favourable impression.
Fortunately, however, we are as little prejudiced as possible on this
subject: we have never seen Mr. Hunt's newspaper; we have never heard
any particulars of his offence; nor should we have known that he had
been imprisoned but for his own confession. We have not, indeed, ever
read one line that he has written, and are alike remote from the
knowledge of his errors or the influence of his private character. We
are to judge him solely from the work now before us; and our criticism
would be worse than uncandid if it were swayed by any other
consideration.
The poem is not destitute of merit; but--and this, we confess, was our
main inducement to notice it--it is written on certain pretended
_principles_, and put forth as a pattern for imitation, with a degree of
arrogance which imposes on us the duty of making some observations on
this new theory, which Mr. Leigh Hunt, with the weight and authority of
his venerable name, has issued, ex cathedra, as the canons of poetry and
criticism.
These canons Mr. Hunt endeavours to explain and establish in a long
preface, written in a style which, though Mr. Hunt implies that it is
meant to be perfectly natural and unaffected, appears to us the most
strange, laboured, uncouth, and unintelligible species of prose that we
ever read, only indeed to be exceeded in these qualities by some of the
subsequent verses; and both the prose and the verse are the first
eruptions of this disease with which Mr. Leigh Hunt insists upon
inoculating mankind.
Mr. Hunt's _first_ canon is that there should be a _great freedom_ _of
versification_--this is a proposition to which we should have readily
assented; but when Mr. Hunt goes on to say that by _freedom of
versification_ he means something which neither Pope nor Johnson
possessed, and of which even "they knew less than any poets perhaps who
ever wrote," we check our confidence; and, after a little consideration,
find that by freedom Mr. Hunt means only an inaccurate, negligent, and
harsh style of versification, which our early poets fell into from want
of polish, and such poets as Mr. Hunt still practise from want of ease,
of expression, and of taste.
"_License_ he means, when he cries _liberty_."
Mr. Hunt tells us that Dryden, Spenser and Ariosto, Shakespeare and
Chaucer (so he arranges them), are the greatest masters of _modern_
versification; but he, in the next few sentences, leads us to suspect
that he really does not think much more reverently of these great names
than of Pope and of Johnson; and that, if the whole truth were told, he
is decidedly of opinion that the only good master of versification, in
modern times, is--Mr. Leigh Hunt.
Dryden, Mr. Hunt thinks, is apt to be _artificial_ in his style; or, in
other words, he has improved the harmony of our language from the
rudeness of Chaucer, whom Mr. Hunt (in a sentence which is not grammar,
p. xv) says that Dryden (though he spoke of and borrowed from him)
neither relished nor understood. Spenser, he admits, was musical from
pure taste, but Milton was only, as he elegantly expresses it,
"_learnedly_ so." Being _learned in music_, is intelligible, and, of
Milton, true; but what can Mr. Hunt mean by saying that Milton had
"_learnedly_ a _musical ear_"? "Ariosto's fine ear and _animal spirits_
gave a _frank_ and exquisite tone to all he said"--what does this mean?--
a fine ear may, perhaps, be said to _give_, as it contributes to, an
exquisite tone; but what have _animal spirits_ to do here? and what, in
the matter of _tones_ and _sounds_, is the effect of _frankness_? We
shrewdly suspect that Mr. Hunt, with all his affectation of Italian
literature, knows very little of Ariosto; it is clear that he knows
nothing of Tasso. Of Shakespeare he tells us, "that his versification
escapes us because he _over-informed_ it with knowledge and sentiment,"
by which it appears (as well, indeed, as by his own verses), that this
new Stagyrite thinks that good versification runs a risk of being
spoiled by having _too much meaning_ included in its lines.
To wind up the whole of this admirable, precise, and useful criticism by
a recapitulation as useful and precise, he says, "all these are about as
different from Pope as the church organ is from the bell in the steeple,
or, to give him a more decorous comparison, the song of the nightingale
from that of the cuckoo."--p. xv.
Now we own that what there is so _indecorous_ in the first comparison,
or so especially _decorous_ in the second, we cannot discover; neither
can we make out whether Pope is the organ or the bell--the nightingale
or the cuckoo; we suppose that Mr. Hunt knows that Pope was called by
his contemporaries the _nightingale_, but we never heard Milton and
Dryden called _cuckoos_; or, if the comparison is to be taken the other
way, we apprehend that, though Chaucer may be to Mr. Hunt's ears a
_church organ_, Pope cannot, to any ear, sound like the _church bell_.
But all this theory, absurd and ignorant as it is, is really nothing to
the practice of which it effects to be the defence.
Hear the warblings of Mr. Hunt's nightingales.