[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.
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?