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'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 quâ 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_.