John Gibson Lockhart

“ The daring spirit of Byron has twice ventured to tread upon the same awful ground. He has represented, both in Manfred and in Parasina, the mutual love of conscious incest. In the first, indeed, we gather only from mysterious hints, that the inexplicable being before us has had his heart torn asunder by the agonies of an unlawful passion for his sister. But we feel not for him the same sympathy which makes us partakers in the thoughts and actions of ordinary men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How such an indelicate writer 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 the spectacle of virtue and purity ”

“ The moon slips from under the dark clouds, and throws
A light, through the leaves, on her smiling repose.
There, there she lies, bower'd;—a slope for her bed;
One branch, like a hand, reaches over her head;
Half naked, half shrinking, with side-swelling grace,
A crook's 'twixt her bosom, and crosses her face,—
The crook of her shepherd; and close to her lips
Lies the Pan-pipe he blows, which in sleeping she sips;—
The giant's knees totter, with passions diverse;
Ah, how can he bear it! Ah! what could be worse! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The bold genius of Dante never touched on ground more dangerous, than when he ventured to introduce into his poem the most dismal catastrophe which had ever befallen the family of his patron. Guido di Polento, Lord of Ravenna, the most generous friend of the Poet, had a lovely daughter, Francesca, who was betrothed in early years to Paolo Malatesta, a younger brother of the house of Rimini, and a perfect model of graceful chivalry; but afterwards compelled, by domestic tyranny, to become the wife of the elder brother of her lover, Lanciotto, a man savage in character, and deformed in person. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In all these productions of immortal poets, we see the same desire to represent incest as a thing too awful to spring up of itself, without the interference of some revengeful power—the same careful avoidance of luxurious images—the same resolution to treat unhallowed love with the seriousness of a judge, who narrates only that he may condemn the guilty and warn the heedless. ”

“ 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 fratricidal paramour, and that tomb to be annually worshipped by the youths and virgins of their country. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 gentlemens' pardon, although Pope was not a poet of the same high order with some who are now living, yet, to deny his genius, is just about as absurd as to dispute that of Wordsworth, or to believe in that of Hunt. ”

“ 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 a 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. ”

“ He who derives a single stain of impurity from Manfred, must come to its perusal with a soul which is not worthy of being clean.
To none of these poems, however, does the subject of Rimini bear so great a resemblance as to Parasina, and it is this very circumstance of likeness which brings before us in the strongest colours the difference between the incest of Leigh Hunt and the incest of Byron. In Parasina, we are scarcely permitted to have a single glance at the guilt before our attention is rivetted upon the punishment. ”

“ But, in truth, we have no inclination to cut up with the small knives the poem of Rimini. Let us hasten to take one glance at the real business of the piece,—the incest of Paolo and Francesca. All the preparations for the actual sin are invented by our Poet "in his own fine free way." The scene is in a little antique temple adorned by sculpture, and had Mr Hunt filled his freezes with funeral processions, or with the agonies of Orestes, or the despair of Œdipus, we might indeed have acknowledged that there was some propriety in his fancy. ”

“ John Keats had no more right to dress up Leigh Hunt in this absurd fashion, than he had to tar and feather him—and we do not doubt, that if Leigh Hunt had ever had the misfortune to have been tarred and feathered, he would have written a sonnet on his plumification, and described himself as a Bird of Paradise. ”

“ In the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, we are presented with the most fearful tragedy of domestic horror which it ever entered into the human fancy to conceive. But it is a spectacle of pure horror, and unpolluted with guilt, for the mother and the son have both sinned in ignorance. The object of Sophocles was to represent not the incest but the punishment—not the weakness or the vice of man, but the unavoidable revenge of an offended Deity. Œdipus and Jocasta are as virtuous in our eyes as if their incest had never been. We pity, but we do not hate, them ”

“ The object of the poet is sufficiently manifest from the whole conduct of the piece, in which every thing that could assist our fancy, in bringing before us the details of guilt, is most studiously avoided, and in which there occur perpetual allusions to the old denunciations of Apollo and the curse of Pelops. [2]
In the Hippolytus of Euripides, the expression is throughout not of horror but of pity. The love is that not of a mother, but of a youthful step-dame; love too, unpartaken, unrequited, and unenjoyed. ”

“ Leigh Hunt is delivered into our hands to do with him as we will. Our eye 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. ”

“ Sir John Swinburne is, we believe, a highly respectable person, and must hate and despise licentiousness, sedition, and impiety. A dedication to him, by a writer who so largely dealt in all of these as the late Leigh Hunt, is a gross public insult, not to himself alone, but to the country-gentlemen of England.
Let us see in what way the deceased Cockney exhibits his love of sociality—of the country—and of the fine imagination of the Greeks. ”

“ 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 unalienable nobility which the great Roman satirist styles "sola atque unica," we fear his pretensions would be equally unavailing. ”

“ The following description, though very conceited and passionless, seems to us the best thing the late Mr Hunt ever did "in the poetical line." But instead of breathing "of the fine imagination of the Greeks," it is nothing more than a copy in words of a picture in oil. Mr Hunt used to be a great lounger in picture-dealer's shops, and was a sad bore among the artists,—who must feel much relieved by his death. Whenever you meet with a vivid image in his verses, you are sure that it is taken from a picture. ”

“ Rational piety and manly patriotism, as far as we can see, need no more hinder Sir John Swinburne from doing that, than from wearing buckskin-breeches and boots when he takes a morning ride, or from having a turkey-carpet in his drawing-room. But both rational piety and manly patriotism ought, in our opinion, to prevent Sir John Swinburne from admiring either the story of Rimini or the Examiner newspaper ”

“ 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 Mr Leigh Hunt. But Lord Byron! ”

“ In our last paper we made an attempt to give a general outline of Mr Hunt's qualifications, both as a poet and as a founder of a sect. We alluded, among other weak points in his writing, to the indecent and immoral tendency of his poem Rimini, and shall now proceed to state, at somewhat greater length, what those circumstances are which induced us to select that production for the object of our unmitigated indignation. It is not our intention to enter into any general argument respecting the propriety of making incest the subject of poetry. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 writings. ”

“ III. His love of the fine imagination of the Greeks.
A man who could ask Jupiter if his tea was sweetened to his mind, must have a truly Greekish imagination of his own no doubt—and pray, where did Mr Hunt find that Hebe was a married lady with six children? What does that great orthographist, Lindley Murray, think of spelling Apollo with a final r, which Mr Hunt is in duty bound to do when he pronounces him Apollar? But Mr Hunt used to read Homer, and to translate choice passages from the Iliad, on which Pope and Cowper had wrought in vain. ”

“ Mr Keats has thoroughly appropriated the character, if not the name. His Endymion is not a Greek shepherd, loved by a Grecian goddess; he is merely a young Cockney rhymester, 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. ”

“ The young and beautiful Hippolytus dies a martyr to his purity, and we sympathize indeed with the feeling of the poet, who prophecies that his tomb shall be the resort of virgins and the scene of prayers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Shakspeares and Miltons! The world has really some reason to look to its foundations! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 is 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. ”