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 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
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 1891 
 
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COBWEBS OF CRITICISM. 
 
COBWEBS OFCRITICISM. 
 
 A REVIEW 
 
 OF THE FIRST REVIEWERS OF 
 
 THE 'LAKE,' ' SATANIC; AND ' COCKNEY' SCHOOLS. 
 
 T. HALL CAINE. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, EC. 
 
 1883. 
 
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 THE FABLE OF THE CRITICS. 
 
 ' For is it not, I ask, very unfair, when every trade and pro- 
 fession is allowed its own sport aud travesty, not to extend the 
 same per?7iission to literature ?' — Erasmus. 
 
 T N the midst of a fair country there- stood an exceeding 
 high and holy mountain whereon the sun never set, 
 but parleyed with it through all ages of ages, from 
 the dawn of morning light over the moorlands till the 
 shadows died along them at eve. And on tin summit 
 of this great steepness there was a fountain, ana the sun 
 and the skies were mirrored in its waters, and he that 
 drank thereof might never die. 
 
 Ami multitudes came from the uttermost parts of the 
 earth to climb the steepness, and drink of the spring 
 and live for ever. Some of them that came were in 
 tattered mantles, and the _ food whereon they lived was 
 bread and water ; and some were in fine raiment and 
 lived sumptuously : but all turned their steps upward to 
 where the mountain kissed the sky. 
 
 And in every age the few strong men who adventured 
 so far attained the summit ; but the sides of the mountain 
 were hard and rugged and many fell by the way ; and 
 where each man fell, there they buried him, and at the 
 foot were the graves of the many who had fallen. 
 
 So, for their great truth's sake, fourteen vassals of the 
 people stepped out from the concourse that had gathered to- 
 gether, and cried aloud and said, For Truth's sake and 
 
vi The Fable of the Critics. 
 
 Fame's, shall we be true-men in this combat of mortals 
 with the sacred steepness, and guard the foot thereof; and 
 let no man deceive himself, thinking to gain the summit, 
 if by reason of weakness he may not climb thereto — for 
 we will cut him in pieces if we can, and none shall ask 
 of us wherefore was his death. This, forsooth, they did 
 for the pity that was in them for the multitudes that fell 
 by the way, and for their honouring of the holy hill that 
 was profaned by the graves of the vanquished. 
 
 And there was great rejoicing among the people, who 
 straightway fell back seven spears-length, and the true- 
 men divided themselves into two companies, seven to the 
 North and seven to the South, and behold the path of the 
 sun was between them. Each vassal of the two companies 
 made himself at once true-man and guard, judge and 
 combatant, and each bore shield upon arm, laid lance in 
 rest, and laced up his helmet. Each man, also, wore 
 his vizor down, so that none might know with whom he 
 was called to do battle. 
 
 Then came great numbers to climb the mountain and 
 drink of the water and live for ever, and every one as 
 he came was challenged of the true-men. And some, when 
 they saw the guard that hedged round the hill, turned 
 about, and, for very fear, fled far away ; and some that 
 overcame the guard sank down among the mountain fast- 
 nesses, wherefrom their cry was heard in places higher 
 than they could gain. Some by sleight were allowed to 
 go up without combat, whereof it was seen that the most 
 fell backward ere yet they had passed the lowest steps, and 
 thereat the multitude laughed aloud and the true-men 
 tasted of the bitterness of shame. 
 
 Now, it chanced on a day that seven strong men came 
 to do their devoir to the true-men and scale the steepness 
 and drink of the fountain and live for ever. The first to 
 come was one who bore nor shield nor lance, and wore nor 
 
The Fable of the Critics. vii 
 
 helmet nor breastplate ; but about him was wrapped a 
 leathern cloak, and he was a giant in stature. Him the 
 true-men challenged and lifted up their voice and said, 
 Who art thou that earnest in thy simple leathern coat 
 to scorn us in thy contempt of mail ? But he that was 
 spoken to answered not again, and went upward with 
 bowed head, ofttimes stopping to pluck a primrose that 
 might grow between stones. Hereupon the true-men, in 
 wrath, charged at him ; but when they came nigh abreast 
 of him, he turned about and looked at them, when sud- 
 denly they found awe upon them, for none might gaze on 
 his countenance unmoved. Then one by one they slunk 
 back, and he went on his way, and eftsoons he gained the top. 
 
 The second to come was a comely man, right manly in 
 his going; and .when the true-men were brought to 
 speech of him there was quarrelling in their companies, for 
 he had kinsmen in both their camps, and loath were they 
 to do battle with him. But those that knew him not 
 dealt him many back-handed blows, and for every stroke 
 he received he gave two others, and inch by inch he fought 
 his way upward with his face kept steadfastly to the true- 
 men and his back to the summit. And though the guard 
 cut away both coif and' laurel in the strife, yet because his 
 kinsmen fought not against him but against their fellows 
 to his behoof, therefore he prevailed and won the heights. 
 
 The third to come was a stalwart man and strong, but, 
 his face was pale and his eyes were dim with reverie, 
 as if he had seen the meteor of his fancies swim beyond 
 his ken and leave only the cloud- eclipsed stars. Sinewy 
 was he, but his steps were loitering and uneven, and 
 when his foot struck the ridges of the earth, strength went 
 out of him. His eyes were fixed on the mountain whither 
 his way lay, and as he went he sang the soothest song. 
 Him the true-men at the foot of the high mountain fol- 
 lowed hard, and they dealt him many a stroke, but it was 
 
viii The Fable of the Critics. 
 
 with the flat of the sword they struck him, the edge 
 failing them. Then again they dealt him many more, 
 but the strokes were given aslant. And when they per- 
 ceived that their blows touched him not they were sore 
 dismayed, and turned and fled from him, and he, too, 
 scaled the' top. 
 
 The fourth to come was a right hardy knight, and the 
 horse he rode was starker than any of the horses of the 
 true-men ; and in the skin of the gazelle it was capari- 
 soned, and in shawls wove with gold, so that the glory 
 thereof shone over the field and dazzled the eyes of the 
 beholders; but there was soil upon them, and earth was 
 on his garments. His countenance bewrayed passion, 
 scorn, and desperation, albeit sometimes melancholy also, 
 as if a burden lay close at his heart. And as he rode 
 at speed, dallying meanwhile with the heft of a sabre 
 that was set in coral and pearl, the true-men smote him 
 unaware, and tore away his gorgeous trappings. Then 
 he gnashed his teeth, and turning about smote them again. 
 His breast-plate was three-fold, and when he gave his 
 horse the spur and with arm stretched back lay prone to 
 the saddle-bow and met the shields of the guard, his lance 
 brake in twain ; but in his seat he sat firm, and with a 
 two-edged sword he won the field. Then all the people 
 marvelled and shouted aloud that he had conquered, and 
 celebrated his victory with rejoicing. And being now 
 brought to his feet, the vassals with supple knees and ■ 
 fawningly made shew to attend him as far up the moun- 
 tain as they could toil, but straightway he turned his 
 horse's head upward, and rode so fast over bush and 
 brake that when he reached the topmost stones the horse 
 fell dead beneath him. 
 
 The fifth to come was one who wore a wreath of haw- 
 thorn around his head, and seemed much to doubt his 
 enterprise, as though to think happy man were he who- 
 
The Fable of the Critics. ix 
 
 soever had never attempted so much. But the companies 
 of the true-men were again divided, for he, likewise, had 
 kinsmen among them ; and while they quarrelled he stole 
 in between them, yet whether he gained the summit or fell 
 short thereof none could rightly say. 
 
 The sixth to come was like unto a drooping flower, or a 
 spirit among men that went in and out none knew how. 
 He, too, sang a song, whereof no man could say certainly 
 whether it were his or the lark's. He went forward with 
 a wand in his hand, but no helmet was on his head, and 
 over his heart no breast-plate. One blow from the true- 
 men he received, and it went in about the third rib, near 
 the heart, and for awhile he fainted ; but presently recover- 
 ing himself he stood up and turned his eyes wistfully to 
 the path, and in a moment disappearing was lost in a 
 thick it, and was seen again of none till he came forth at 
 the top. 
 
 The last to come was a well-favoured youth, and he had 
 the sun on his face, and his eyes were bright as of one who 
 tees a vision, yea, the fiery pillar of hope before him. On 
 a swift char gey was he mounted, and he rode as fearing no 
 let, neither seeing any foeman that fell not beneath his 
 shield. Then with one accord the true-men who did guard 
 the great steepness at the top whereof is the spring at which 
 whoso drinks lives for ever, fell upon the youth, him of the 
 lightsome countenance, and ere he had passed above two 
 spears-length they struck him on every side. And the 
 wounds they gave him were mortal, and their lances came 
 forth red. Then did the girth of his horse burst asunder, 
 and with the saddle he was torn from his seat and fell 
 heavily to the ground. And all the people thought he 
 was stricken unto death, and they lifted up their voices 
 against the true-men for that they had done this deed. 
 But he arose with many wounds, and went steadfastly sun- 
 ward, though the stones of his path were stained with the 
 
x The Fable of the Critics. 
 
 blood that did gush from him. And when he had toiled 
 sorely to that height to which no true-man might ever 
 ascend, his sandals (the latchets whereof were broken in the 
 combat) slipped away from under him, and with bare feet 
 that did bleed he clomb the jagged stones. When nigh 
 the top, footsore and faint, the one who went before (he 
 who was like unto a flower swayed by the wind and who 
 sang as the lark) bent down and bore him up, and ran to 
 the spring, and, touching his lips, offered him to drink, 
 and laved his hectic cheek. But he was too far spent, 
 and swooned and died ; and they buried him upon the 
 summit of the mountain, at the foot of the great stone 
 that stands by the brink of Castaly. And when they 
 had written his name on the stone above him, behold the 
 waters of the spring rose up higher and did cover it ; 
 and his peers read the name therein, and said, ' Lo, it 
 is indeed writ in water !' Thus did he live and yet die, 
 so that they who dwelt on the heights for ever both had 
 him with them and had him not, and said among them- 
 selves that by the rumour of the living waters he was 
 gone farther than all they. 
 
 And for their vain endeavours to keep down the seven 
 strong men from the mountain whereunto they would go, 
 all the people laughed long at the true-men, and cried 
 aloud in wrath against them, thinking to overwhelm them 
 with tumult ; and presently they were seen no more. Some 
 say they fought one with the other till all fell dead together, 
 and some that they followed the strong men up the hard 
 mountain, but slipped their feet in its ridges and rolled 
 with one accord to the bottom thereof, and were there 
 buried. And it came to pass that the multitude of the 
 people called the name of that place, The Valley of Dry 
 Bones, saying, ' The gods having delivered us.' 
 
 END OF FABLE. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Introduction.— Critical activity of the eighteenth 
 century— A joint creative and critical era — Causes 
 of conflict — The temper of contemporary criticism xv-xxiv 
 
 'THE LAKE SCHOOL.' 
 
 WORDSWORTH. — The criticaljournals of theeighteenth 
 century — The Edinburgh Review — Preface to the 
 Edinburgh, and contents of the first issue — Review 
 of 'Thalaba' — The new poetic sect— Wordsworth's 
 first critic — The Edinburgh on the ' Lyrical 
 Ballads' — Ode on the Intimations of Immortality 
 — Parody in ' Rejected Addresses ' — ' The Excur- 
 sion ' — The poet changes his politics— Satirical 
 verses in the Morning Chronicle — Wordsworth's 
 attitude to his critics — The philosophy of their 
 antagonism 
 
 SOUTHEY. — The Monthly Review on the Bristol 
 poems — Change of politics — The Quarterly 
 Review and the Edinburgh on the ' Curse of 
 Kehama ' — Southey's political apostasy — Satirical 
 verses in the Examiner by the ' Bellman of St. 
 Paul' — 'Lay of the Laureate' — The Southey- 
 Smith controversy — The Examiner on the 
 laureate's politics — ' Death and funeral of the late 
 Mr. Southey' — Coleridge on Southey as a man - 
 
 1-29 
 
 30-5 
 
xii Contents. 
 
 Coleridge. — The Examiner on ' the dog-in-the- 
 manger of literature ' — The Monthly Review on 
 the political lectures — the Bristol poems— Cole- 
 ridge's sonnet satirical of himself — The 'Ancient 
 Mariner' — It fails of recognition — The Edinburgh 
 and Examiner on ' Christabel ' and ' Kubla Khan ' 
 — Blackwood on the 'Biographia Literaria' — 
 The Examiner on Coleridge's defence of Southey 
 — The Edinbicrgh on the ' Biographia Literaria ' — 
 Change of tone on Coleridge's death — The Edin- 
 burgh and Blackwood eat their own words— The 
 two grave charges against Coleridge — Why did 
 the poet produce so little ? — Philosophy of the 
 antagonism of the critics S4-S7 
 
 'THE SATANIC SCHOOL.' 
 Byron.— Macaulay on Byron's place as a poet — The 
 Edinburgh on the juvenile volume— ' English 
 Bards and Scotch Reviewers' — The Eclectic 
 Review— ' Childe Harold' — Altered tone of the 
 critics— Byron's personal influence— His affecta- 
 tions — The story of his amours — His domestic 
 infelicities — Blackwood's review of ' Don Juan ' — 
 The Edinburgh at Byron's death— The causes of 
 Byron's success - 91-119 
 
 'THE COCKNEY SCHOOL.' 
 Leigh Hunt— The christening of the 'Cockney 
 School'— 'Z' on the new 'Delia Cruscans'— Love- 
 song by ' a junior member of the Cockney School ' 
 —The Cockney School of politics— The religion of 
 the Cockney School— The Examiner under Hunt's 
 editorship— Blackwood on ' Rimini '—Leigh Hunt 
 leaves England for Italy— His supposed relation 
 to Byron— Gross accusations against Hunt's pri- 
 vate life— Edinburgh against London— Hunt as a 
 poet — As a man 
 
 1=3 157 
 
Contents. xiii 
 
 Keats. — The Quarterly on ' Endymion '— Gifford— 
 Defence of an Exeter paper — Silence of the 
 Examiner — Blackwood's echo of the Quarterly — 
 'Z' on Keats — The Edinburgh on Keats — Brutal 
 attacks after the death of the poet — Did Keats 
 mature ? — The moral core of Keats — Keats as a 
 man — His death — How far did he suffer from 
 criticism? - - 158-190 
 
 SHELLEY. — The Poetical Register on. ' Original Poetry 
 by Victor and Cazire ' — The Quarterly Review on 
 Shelley's private life — On ' Laon and Cythna ' — 
 Black-woods inconsistencies — Blackwood on 
 ' Prometheus Unbound ' — On ' Adonais ' — * Elegy 
 on my Tom-cat ' — The story of Adonais — The 
 Literary Gazette on the 'Cenci'— On 'Prome- 
 theus Unbound' — On 'Queen Mab' — Gross 
 accusations against Shelley's private life— -The 
 charges made by the poet's contemporaries exactly 
 stated — The evidence sifted— Shelley a subjective 
 poet only— The light his poetry casts upon his 
 character — His constitutional deficiency - - 191-231 
 
 The Quarrels of Critics.— Blackwood against 
 the Edinburgh — The Examiner against the 
 Quarterly— The Literary Gazette against all four 
 —Blackwood on the dishonesty of the Edin- 
 burgh and Quarterly— Blackwood on the Edin- 
 burgh's neglect of Keats and Shelley, and on its 
 own appreciation of these poets — Blunders of 
 Blackwood— The ' Hypocrisy Unveiled ' contro- 
 versy—Hunt's ' Feast of the Poets '—His satire 
 on Gifford, ' Ultra-Crepidarius'— Hazlitt's quarrels 
 with Gifford— The Edinburgh on the periodical 
 press _The uses of criticism - 232-25' 
 
XIV 
 
 Contents. 
 
 Conclusion. — The poets on their critics — Kinds and 
 uses of praise and censure — The Author's property 
 in reputation — Principles in criticism — The aim 
 and scope of ' Cobwebs of Criticism ' - - 252-266 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 A JOINT creative and critical era is almost an un- 
 exampled thing in the history of letters ; yet 
 a time of twofold literary activity began in England 
 in the first years of this century. Such a period of 
 creative activity had not been known in England for 
 two hundred years ; and the critical activity of the 
 period was hardly less ardent. In 1800, the Gentle- 
 man's Magazine had been going nearly seventy years, 
 the Monthly Review fifty years, the European Maga- 
 zine eighteen years, the Monthly Mirror and the 
 Monthly Magazine four years. But these publica- 
 tions were chiefly literary miscellanies, and it was not 
 until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the 
 periodical press began first to assume the duty of 
 guiding public opinion in the formation of principles 
 of judgment in literature. The Edinburgh Review 
 appeared first in 1802, and was followed by the 
 
xvi Introduction. 
 
 Examiner in 1 808, the Quarterly Review in 1 809, the 
 New Monthly Magazine in 18 14, and the Edinburgh 
 Monthly (afterwards, as now, called Blackwood's 
 Magazine) in 18 17. Did this great critical movement 
 signalise ' a disinterested endeavour to learn and pro- 
 pagate the best that was known and thought in the 
 world,' or did it indicate the growth of the more 
 aggressive spirit to which the motto chosen by the 
 first Edinburgh Reviewers gave emphatic expression : 
 ' The judge is condemned when the guilty man is 
 absolved or escapes condemnation ' ? The latter 
 mainly, we may think. 
 
 An era of criticism succeeding an era of creative 
 activity is usually characterised by wisdom, or at 
 least, sanity ; an era of criticism preceding a creative 
 era is generally free from glaring errors of anticipa- 
 tion ; but an era of criticism cannot, it would seem, 
 coexist with an era of creative impulse and energy 
 without witnessing ludicrous and painful mistakes. 
 Some examples of errors of judgment made during 
 the first quarter of the century are here collected and 
 collated ; and it is the purpose of the book to present 
 them in a form suitable for the use of those who have 
 little leisure to spend in the perusal of the many 
 volumes of forgotten magazines from whose super- 
 annuated pages they have been extracted. In these 
 
Introduction. xvii 
 
 excerpts it will be seen in what esteem Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, Southey, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Hunt 
 were held by the professional critics of their age, and 
 what grossly erroneous abridgments of the judgment 
 of time were first pronounced by those whose business 
 it was to anticipate the popular voice. 
 
 The author has attempted to traverse the whole 
 body of the criticism published during the first quarter 
 of the century on the great poets of the second poetic 
 period in our literature. He does not expect that the 
 public will be surprised at the bitterness of the ad- 
 verse tone usually adopted in the articles from which 
 he has quoted. Most readers are conscious of the 
 asperity of the criticism at first directed against the 
 poets of what were styled the ' Lake,' the 'Satanic,' 
 and the 'Cockney' schools. The ungenerous personal 
 attacks, of which we all know something, were in the 
 main due to the humiliating, the scarcely explicable, 
 the all but insurmountable fact of literary envy and 
 malice, and at this fact we have long ceased to marvel. 
 But the author thinks it will be fuund instructive to 
 observe, by contrast of the extracts he has set side by 
 side, how hard it always is to the critical intelligence 
 to judge of a work independently of accepted canons 
 of taste, and how painfully in every age it toils after 
 the creative instinct into those unbeaten paths which 
 
 b 
 
xviii Introduction. 
 
 genius delights to open up. If it were possible to 
 place over against the critical anomalies here un- 
 earthed, the many sonorous puffs printed month after 
 month side by side with them, on indifferent writers 
 in prose and verse long since forgotten, we would 
 almost begin to question the value and function of 
 criticism. But ' no ashes are lighter than those of 
 incense, and few things burn out sooner.' A search 
 through the pages of forgotten periodicals affords a 
 glimpse of the philosophy of life so broad and far- 
 reaching that it is doubtful if any abstract teaching 
 can quite match it. One thinks one sees with a vivid- 
 ness not less than startling that the writer who 
 would win the applause of his contemporaries must 
 often put by all hope of gaining that of their suc- 
 cessors ; that he who labours for ultimate great ends 
 must be willing to forego immediate rewards ; that 
 he whose life is as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, 
 must not expect to escape calumny. On the other 
 hand, one thinks one sees that honest work pursued 
 steadfastly, patiently, loyally, year after year, through 
 evil report and good, must one day work its way to 
 that rank which Time itself reserves for its best. 
 
 The author trusts he has not been betrayed into any 
 undue exhibition of feeling in quoting these anomalies. 
 As a critic he is naturally not without a proper regard 
 
Introduction. xix 
 
 for criticism as an auxiliary to creative activity. He 
 recognises to the full how hard it is to anticipate in the 
 present the judgment of the future, and to appear at 
 once to lead the flocks like the Eastern shepherd, and to 
 follow them like the shepherd of the West. It is no 
 easy task to note the indications, often so elusive, of 
 those changes in the current of thought and feeling by 
 which the whole stream of the intellectual life of a 
 people is turned aside. There is a criticism that may 
 keep pace with creative activity, but it is not the cold, 
 sinister, suspicious criticism of which examples are 
 here furnished. It is the criticism that is itself creative, 
 the criticism of which we rejoice to see certain of the 
 best fruits in our own time, the criticism that was in 
 the mind of F. D. Maurice (himself an admirable 
 critic), when he wrote : 
 
 ' The main use of criticism is to recover the illus- 
 trious men, whom God has given us, from the mis- 
 representation of opponents who hated them, and of 
 
 admirers who did not understand them The 
 
 true critical discernment which separates that which 
 is capricious and transitory from that which abides, 
 that which belongs to all from that which may be the 
 rightful and proper inheritance of some here and some 
 there, must make everyone richer. That criticism 
 which distinguishes the substance and the shadow, the 
 
 5—2 
 
xx Introduction. 
 
 reality and its counterfeit, must bring us into nearer 
 connection with truth, and therefore with freedom.' 
 
 The author made choice of the years 1800-25, be- 
 cause they cover the period he knew best ; because 
 from lifelong familiarity with the facts as well as the 
 fruits of the neo-romantic movement in English poetry 
 he was able to traverse the periodical literature con- 
 temporary with it with some sense of command, per- 
 ceiving at once where the critics were in the right, 
 and putting a finger readily enough, and without neces- 
 sity for reference, upon a lie. Fortunately, however, 
 the period that suited him best, suited best with his 
 subject. For three reasons that period appears to be 
 the only one capable of illustrating with any degree 
 of completeness the main theory of this book. 
 
 First, because periodical literature, so far as it con- 
 cerns criticism as a distinct vocation, really began with 
 the present century. Criticism in Shakespeare's day 
 must have been in great part an unknown quantity, 
 though Greene has left us his ' Groatsworth,' and Ben 
 Jonson his colloquies with Drummond. In Pope's day, 
 and later, it was confined to the pamphleteering of the 
 Dennises, Ralphs, and Kenricks. In Fielding's day it 
 took sometimes a less fugitive shape, if we may judge 
 of its character from the prefatory chapters to his books. 
 But not yet had literary criticism become in any sense 
 
Introduction. xxi 
 
 a profession, though political criticism had done so, 
 mainly, no doubt, by the instrumentality of the 
 Gentleman's Magazine and the Monthly Review. It 
 was therefore at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century that English critical literature, properly so 
 called, began. 
 
 Second, because the critical activity in question was, 
 as we say, called into existence by the creative activity 
 that immediately preceded it and co-existed with it ; 
 but no two things could have been more dissimilar in 
 the temper inspiring them, and therefore no two things 
 could have been more likely to come into immediate 
 conflict. Criticism must, in the nature of things, lag 
 behind creation — it usually establishes its tenets on 
 the accepted doctrines of the period anterior to it. 
 Creative effort is linked in no such palpable way with 
 the past. It may break entirely with the canons of 
 art that preceded it ; but when it does so, there inevit- 
 ably ensues a struggle with criticism, which at once 
 makes attempt to bind it down to the conditions of 
 whatever law Time seems to have ratified. This was 
 the character of the war that took place in the first 
 years of the century. The neo-romantic movement 
 had two leading purposes. First, to substitute for the 
 prose temper' of the poetry of Pope, the romantic 
 temper of the poetry of Coleridge. Next, to substitute 
 
xxiv Introduction. 
 
 standing our refinement of manners in criticism, 
 it is doubtful if our morals in criticism are much im- 
 proved since the days when those diatribes were 
 written, which it has become the business of the 
 writer of this book to review. 
 
 For good or ill, however, criticism is less powerful 
 now than it was eighty years ago. To reverse a 
 formula of Joubert's, the period here treated of was 
 one in which criticism acted (or made pretence to 
 act) upon the world ; now the world acts on criticism. 
 Notwithstanding the multiplicity of literary guides — 
 perhaps by reason of their great number and the con- 
 sequent clashing of their opinions — criticism seems to 
 lose ground in England, and to look more than ever 
 to the popular judgment to give hint as to the way it 
 should go. Critics can still make people buy books, 
 but they can neither make them read nor applaud 
 them— as one man may lead a horse to water, though 
 twenty cannot make him drink. 
 
 This volume is called COBWEBS OF CRITICISM 
 as symbolical of those exudations that cling about 
 dark places and are swept away when the air and the 
 light of day are cast upon them. 
 
THE LAKE SCHOOL.' 
 
WORDSWORTH. 
 
 COLERIDGE said the representative creative 
 work of the last half of the eighteenth century- 
 was pseudo-poetic, and it must be added that the re- 
 presentative critical work of that period was pseudo- 
 critical. The Monthly Review had in the main been 
 engaged, since its origin in 1749, in deifying the rem- 
 nants of scholasticism, and in expelling mysticism from 
 religion. The Town and Country Magazine and the 
 Gentleman's Magazine were miscellanies discharging 
 the functions proper to second-rate magazines of our 
 own time. The European Magazine was too often 
 devoted to the glorification of soldiers and such-like 
 substantial heroes; and the Monthly Mirror, a theatrical 
 organ, to the apotheosis of the tangible heroes of the 
 stage. The Monthly Magazine, to which Coleridge 
 contributed fugitive pieces, had scarcely begun. On 
 the whole, it may without serious injustice be said that 
 the periodical press was barren to the point of sterility. 
 "With the dawn of the creative era, signalled by the 
 -triumvirate of Lake poets, began a period of extra- 
 
 1 — 2 
 
Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ordinary critical activity. Of this, the earliest phe- 
 nomena were manifest beyond the Tweed. In 1802, 
 the Edinburgh Review was started. Its founders were 
 a handful of gifted young men, of whom some had 
 scarcely attained their majority, and none had passed 
 their early manhood. They recognised at the outset the 
 hard etymological significance of the word criticism. 
 The preface to their first issue will repay perusal. 
 
 ' The editors think it will be easily perceived that it forms no 
 part of their object to notice every publication that issues from 
 the press. ... Of the books that are daily presented to the 
 world, a very large proportion is evidently destined to obscurity 
 by the insignificance of their subjects or the defects of their 
 execution. A review of such productions, like a biography of 
 private individuals, could afford gratification only to the parti- 
 ality of friends or the malignity of enemies.' 
 
 These are sensible words beyond doubt, read in dry 
 light ; and it will be painful indeed if it appear that in 
 no single year of its first decade did the review 
 started under such auspices escape the odium of both 
 flattery and malignancy, or the questionable distinc- 
 tion of glorifying dubious talent and neglecting mani- 
 fest genius. It can hardly be said that the Edinburgh 
 Review started well. Let us remember what lasting 
 works were published about the date of its first 
 issue, and then glance down the table of contents. 
 Chatterton's 'Remains,' edited by Southey, appeared in 
 Bristol in the year of this first issue, but no review of 
 that poet finds a place in these pages.* There is a 
 disquisition on ' the causes and effects ' of an astonish- 
 ing tide of ' Emigration from the Highlands of Scot- 
 land ;' there had been a more astonishing emigration 
 
 * A notice of the 'Remains' appears in a later volume. 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 from Brooke Street, Holborn, of which nothing is 
 said. Schiller's ' Wallenstein,' translated by Coleridge, 
 had been published in 1800; but in place of any 
 mention of that work, readers are given an essay on 
 ' The Utility of County Banks.' The ' Lyrical Ballads ' 
 had appeared in a double series in 1798 and 1800, 
 but such poetry as ' The Ancient Mariner ' had to 
 make way for Dr. Parr's ' Spital Sermons,' and 
 Wood's ' Optics.' Wordsworth's book, ' Descriptive 
 Sketches,' was issued in 1793 ; and though that was 
 nine years earlier than the date of this issue, v/e 
 might reasonably look for a notice of it here, for the 
 reviewers were avowedly superior to the newsman's 
 craving for early intelligence, having said : 
 
 ' As the value of a publication conducted upon this principle 
 will not depend very materially upon the earliness of its intelli- 
 gence, they (the editors) have been induced to prefer a quarterly 
 to a monthly period of publication.' 
 
 But no ; Southey's ' Thalaba ' alone, of the really 
 important books of the year, appears to have been 
 found on that level of poetic importance which removed 
 all notice of it, in the pages of the new critical organ, 
 from suspicion of partiality or malevolence. 
 
 The article in the first issue of the Edinburgh 
 Review, purporting to be a criticism of ' Thalaba,' was 
 in the main a declaration of war against the school 
 of poetry of which Southey was understood to be a 
 faithful disciple, and to the glory of which he had, 
 according to the new authority, sacrificed greater 
 talents and acquisitions than could be boasted of by 
 any of his associates. This is how the article begins : 
 
Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ' Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that 
 its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, 
 whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.' 
 
 It will be agreed that the temper of such criticism 
 hardly seems promising of any just or even tolerant 
 estimate of poets who made deliberate revolt against 
 the previously received canons of judgment in 
 poetry. The next passage is yet more emphatic, for 
 therein we are told that poetry and religion have this 
 also in common — 
 
 ' That many profess to be entirely devoted to it, who have no 
 good works to produce in support of their pretensions. The 
 Catholic poetical church, too, has worked but few miracles since 
 the first ages of its establishment ; has been more prolific, for 
 a long time, of doctors than of saints ; it has had its corrup- 
 tions and reformations also, and has given birth to an infinite 
 variety of heresies and errors, the followers of which have hated 
 and persecuted each other as cordially as bigots.' 
 
 Here, then, at the outset was no uncertain sound ; 
 and the parallel made of the reference to good 
 ■works is significant as showing the disposition in which 
 the northern writers approached the poetry of the time. 
 
 One remembers what Keats said on the good and 
 ill done by the Kirk-men of Scotland, and one 
 wonders what the ' little pagan, five feet high ' would 
 have thought of such a trespass of sectarianism as 
 the above passage involves on the domain proper to 
 poetry. ' These Kirk-men,' said Keats, ' have done 
 Scotland good. They have made men, women ; old 
 men,youngmen; oldwomen, young women; boys, girls 
 and all infants — careful ; so that they are formed into 
 regular phalanxes of savers and gainers. . . . These 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 Kirk-men have done Scotland harm ; they have 
 banished puns, love, and laughing.' It is certain that 
 the author of ' Endymion ' would have denied to such 
 a national temperament as is indicated in the foregoing 
 extracts, the possibility of its ever producing a poet. 
 ' Think,' he says, ' of the fate of Burns : poor, unfor- 
 tunate fellow ! his disposition was Southern. . . 
 His misery is a dead-weight upon the nimbleness of 
 one's quill. . . . How sad it is when a luxurious ima- 
 gination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its 
 delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it 
 may not have leisure to go mad after things that are 
 not!' But there is more of the Kirk-men kind to 
 follow. 
 
 ' The author who is now before us belongs to a sect of poets 
 that has established itself in this country within these ten or 
 twelve years, and is looked upon, we believe, as one of its chief 
 champions and apostles. The peculiar doctrines of this sect, 
 it would not, perhaps, be very easy to explain ; but, that they 
 are dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criti- 
 cism is admitted, and proved indeed by the whole tenor of their 
 compositions. Though they lay claim, we believe, to a creed 
 and a revelation of their own, there can be little doubt that their 
 doctrines are of German origin.' 
 
 After remarking that the disciples of this school 
 boast much of its originality, and seem to value them- 
 selves very highly for having broken loose from the 
 bondage of ancient authority and reasserted the inde- 
 pendence of genius, the Edinburgh continues : 
 
 ' Originality, however, we are persuaded is rarer than mere 
 alteration, and a man may change a good master for a bad 
 one without finding himself at all nearer to independence. . . . 
 The productions of this school, we conceive, are so far from 
 being entitled to the praise of originality that they cannot be 
 
Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 better characterized than by an enumeration of the sources from 
 which their materials have been derived. 1 
 
 Then follows a statement of the factors in the 
 formation of the new school of poetry, which will be 
 seen to be on the whole about as conclusive as 
 Thomas Rymer's celebrated statement of the moral 
 uses of Shakspeare's ' Othello.' * The moral use of 
 this fable,' says Rymer, ' is very instructive. First, it 
 may be a caution to all maidens of quality, how, 
 without their parents' consent, they run away with 
 blackamoors. Secondly, it may be a warning to all 
 good wives that they look well to their linen.' (Here 
 is, of course, a contemptuous allusion to the fatal 
 handkerchief.) ' And thirdly, it may be a lesson to hus- 
 bands that before their jealousy be tragical the proof 
 may be mathematical.' This analytical marvel of 
 criticism appears in Rymer's ' Short View of Tragedy,' 
 which, surely, might have been with advantage by^its 
 short length yet shorter. The sources from which 
 the Lake School derived their materials are said to 
 have been 
 
 ' i. The antisocial principles and distempered sensibility of 
 Rousseau — his discontent with the present constitution of 
 society — his paradoxical morality, and his perpetual hanker- 
 ing after some unattainable state of voluptuous virtue and 
 perfection. 
 
 ' 2. The simplicity and energy (horresco refcrens) of Kotzebue 
 and Schiller. 
 
 ' 3. The homeliness and harshness of some of Cowper's lan- 
 guage and versification, interchanged occasionally with the 
 innocence of Ambrose Phillips, or the quaintness of Quarles 
 and Dr. Donne.' 
 
 The Edinburgh reviewers loved to feel the firm 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 ground beneath their feet, but from their concrete 
 standpoint they must have forgotten, when penning 
 the above, that Rousseau, Ambrose Phillips, Quarles 
 and Donne could scarcely furnish the German origin 
 from which the doctrines of the new school were said 
 to be derived. The statement of derivative sources 
 was, however, considered conclusive, and the public 
 were assured that from the diligent study of these 
 few originals an entire art of poetry might be col- 
 lected, by the assistance of which the gentlest of 
 readers might soon be qualified ' to compose a poem 
 as correctly versified as ' Thalaba,' and to deal out 
 sentiment and description with all the sweetness of 
 Lambe {sic), and all the magnificence of Coleridge.' 
 The cut at the simplicity of Lamb which lurked 
 behind the reference to the gentlest of readers was 
 obviously too subtly destructive not to be followed up 
 with renewed energy. 
 
 'Their most distinguishing symbol is undoubtedly an affecta- 
 tion of great simplicity and familiarity of language. They dis- 
 dain to make use of the common poetic phraseology, or to en- 
 noble their diction by a selection of fine or dignified expressions. 
 There would be too much art in this. . . . We may excuse a 
 certain homeliness of language in the productions of a plough- 
 man, or a milkwoman ; but we cannot bring ourselves to admire 
 it in ah author who has had occasion to indite odes to his 
 college bell and inscribe hymns to the Penates.' 
 
 After admitting, with amiable condescension, that 
 there may, possibly, be a class of persons (the Edin- 
 burgh is afraid they cannot be called readers) to whom 
 the representation of vulgar manners, in vulgar 
 language, will afford pleasure, the reviewers con- 
 tinue : 
 
io Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ' Now this style ' (the representative style of the new school in 
 general, and that of Thalaba' in particular) ' we conceive possesses 
 no one character of excellence ; it is feeble, low, and disjointed ; 
 without elegance, and without dignity ; the offspring we should 
 imagine of mere ignorance and neglect, or the unhappy fruit of 
 a system that would teach us to undervalue that vigilance and 
 labour which sustained the loftiness of Milton, and gave energy 
 and direction to the pointed and fine propriety of Pope.' 
 
 Time was when Milton himself, whose name is here 
 employed to display a transfiguring contrast between 
 feebleness and vigilance, was liable to criticism not 
 less damaging. Of his ' Paradise Lost' it was remarked 
 in the poet's own age, that the 'blind schoolmaster' 
 had written a poem whereof the only notable charac- 
 teristics were dreariness and length. But Milton had 
 in 1800 long lived down all illiterate abuse, and it 
 may fairly be presumed that in the view of the 
 young northern critics, at all events, he had taken his 
 final place among those ' inspired writers whose 
 authority,' to use their own phrase, ' it was no longer 
 lawful to call in question.' The most Miltonic poet 
 since Milton, however, was not yet safe from the self- 
 elected judges who found thoughtless ridicule of a 
 contemporary more attractive than a just estimate of 
 his excellences and defects. 
 
 We might find specimens in abundance of the 
 continued cannonading against a school of poetry of 
 which one disciple, Coleridge, said the only thing its 
 leaders claimed in common was good sense, confirmed 
 by imitation of the long-established models of the 
 best times of Greece, Rome, Italy and England. It 
 cannot but prove a pure gain to hold constantly the 
 torch of a salutary warning over the gulf of all that 
 
Wordsworth. 1 1 
 
 omnivorous egotism in which the early critics of cer- 
 tain great poets were swallowed up. 
 
 Of Wordsworth's work it may confidently be said 
 that outside the pages of the ' Biographia Literaria,' no 
 fair and philosophical inquisition into its merits was 
 made in the author's early days — none perhaps in 
 which either the premises were not palpably irrational 
 and the deductions illegitimate, or the keenness and 
 asperity of the damnatory style employed were not 
 such as to excite suspicion of the criminal intrusion 
 of personal insult. Quarter after quarter, month after 
 month, week after week, Wordsworth was, for many 
 years, arraigned with a malignity which no diversity 
 of poetic taste could explain ; and which could only 
 be grounded on the distempered state of the moral 
 associations of his critics. Let us glance at the actual 
 text of a few of the articles of which we have all 
 heard much. 
 
 The earliest notice of Wordsworth which we can 
 find appears in the Monthly Review for 1793, and 
 concerns his first book, ' Descriptive Sketches.' Of this 
 work Coleridge says : ' Seldom, if ever, was the emer- 
 gence of an original poetic genius above the literary 
 horizon more evidently announced ;' yet this is how 
 the critics of the time began an unprovoked hostility 
 which may be said to have ended only with the death 
 of the poet : 
 
 ' More descriptive poetry ! Have we not yet enough ? Must 
 eternal changes be rung on upland and lowland, and nodding 
 forests and brooding clouds, and cells, and dells, and dingles. 
 Yes ; more and yet more : so it is decreed.' 
 
12 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 After quoting the lines in which appears the 
 couplet : 
 
 ' Where falls the purple morning far and wide 
 In flakes of light upon the mountain-side,' 
 
 the reviewer remarks that he is ' sorry to see the purple 
 morning confined so like a maniac in a strait-waist- 
 coat !' The notice concludes with a pathetic appeal 
 to authors to spare the weary pen the iteration of so 
 much wisdom as had fallen from it so frequently in a 
 vain endeavour to make men believe that the first 
 business of a poet is to know what, ' in the name of 
 God or Beelzebub,' he is ' driving at.' 
 
 ' How often shall we in vain advise those, who are so delighted 
 with their own thoughts that they cannot forbear from putting 
 them into rhyme, to examine those thoughts till they themselves 
 understand them ? No man will ever be a poet till his mind be 
 sufficiently powerful to sustain this labour.' 
 
 It is amusing to wonder what form of supernatural 
 suicide the wraith of the man who wrote this critique 
 would devise if he were to arise in our day, and wit- 
 ness the homage paid to the great poet to whose early 
 muse he offered such presumptuous insult. 
 
 The ' Lyrical Ballads,' in two volumes (1800), appear 
 to have been, at the first, in some respects successful 
 with the public and with the lesser periodical press; but 
 the more notable quarterly and monthly publications 
 were silent with respect to them — pursuant, it may be 
 presumed, of the scheme which the foremost of those 
 journals claimed to have originated, of reviewing those 
 books only which were susceptible or deserving of argu- 
 mentative criticism. Instead, however, of leaving such 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 trash as they affected to believe these books to be, to 
 sink into oblivion by their own weight, they snarled 
 at them often and long, under the cover of works said 
 to be more meritorious. Speaking, in that review of 
 'Thalaba' (1802) from which passages are already 
 quoted, of the alleged representation by the Lake 
 School of vulgar manners in vulgar language, the 
 commander-in-chief of the critical onslaught writes : 
 
 ' He (Southey) appears to us to be less addicted to this fault 
 than most of his fraternity ; and if we were in want of 
 examples to illustrate the preceding observations, we should 
 certainly look for them in the effusions of that poet who com- 
 memorates with so much effect the chattering of Harry Gibbs' 
 teeth, tells the tale of the one-eyed huntsman who had " a cheek 
 like a cherry," and beautifully warns his studious friend of the 
 risk he ran of " growing double." ' 
 
 The foregoing passage is of interest, as affording a 
 clue to the reviewer's method of criticism. It is clear, 
 by his own showing, that the justice of the sentence 
 pronounced upon the poem is not made certain to the 
 critic's mind by the faultiness of the passages ex- 
 tracted, which are merely chosen to support a verdict, 
 the general grounds for which have been previously 
 conceived without reference to them. In other words, 
 it is obvious that the critic first attributed qualities to 
 the poem, and then pronounced judgment upon it 
 before he had read it page after page, perhaps before 
 he had read it at all, and afterwards, as was admitted, 
 pricked with a pin for passages wherewith to illus- 
 trate his opinions. This method of review is about as 
 humiliating to our sense of the nobility of the practice 
 and proper functions of criticism as it would be to our 
 
14 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 love of political purity to be compelled to conclude 
 that Junius first forged his impeachments of minis- 
 terial corruption without reference, to the crimes of 
 any special offender, and then glanced along the 
 treasury bench in order to alight upon a man who 
 would suit well with the general lines of his precon- 
 ceived satanic portraiture. What should we say of 
 the invisible knight who there, in those political lists, 
 wore his visor down, if we had it on his own clear 
 showing that by such method as is here indicated he 
 prepared his tirade against Lord Rockingham, or his 
 yet more lasting panegyric on Lord Chatham ? For 
 with just such damnatory sentence as we would visit 
 upon him, should we brand for ever the critic who, with 
 face equally hidden and a mock device of justice on 
 his shield, poised his lance in this Edinburgh Review 
 with even greater skill. 
 
 Little wonder that such thrusts in the dark as are 
 directed against Wordsworth in the foregoing passage 
 should meet with protest. We know that followers 
 of the poet wrote repeatedly in remonstrance, and it 
 was doubtless in allusion to some outburst of indig- 
 nation that the editors affixed this footnote to a 
 subsequent issue : ' We have no desire to display our 
 powers of repartee in a public disputation with 
 anonymous correspondents.' This repudiation of any 
 right to a rejoinder on the part of the persons ag- 
 grieved brings to mind a similar but more amusing 
 piece of tyranny by an Oriental professor of the 
 bastinado, who, during an attempt to extort, by 
 forcible arguments, a full confession from a culprit, 
 
Wordsworth. 1 5 
 
 was interrupted by his outcry of pain. ' This is a 
 mere digression,' said the stern wielder of the basti- 
 nado. 'All this noise, sir, is nothing to the point; 
 your howls are no answer to my question !' ' Ah ! 
 but/ replied the sufferer, ' they are the most pertinent 
 reply in nature to your blows.' 
 
 Criticism soon became weary of a conscious 
 effort to ignore a poet whose name was yearly 
 rising to established rank, and then it first took that 
 tone which silence finds always most germane to it — 
 banter. 
 
 In 1 807, Wordsworth published his ' Poems ' in 
 two volumes. The Monthly Review (following up 
 the spirit of its reproof offered thirteen years pre- 
 viously) noticed the work adversely ; but to the Edin- 
 burgh (1807) was reserved the poor glory of reviewing 
 it with equal paltry conceit and lampoon. 
 
 After observing that the author is known to be- 
 long to a certain brotherhood of 'whining and 
 hypochondriacal poets ' who have ' haunted for some 
 years about the lakes of Cumberland,' the reviewers 
 go on to say that there were times and moods in 
 which they were led to suspect themselves of un- 
 justifiable severity in their dealings with these poets ; 
 but the volume before them has freed them from all 
 regret that they declared themselves against the 
 school it represents with prompt and emphatic 
 hostility. Indeed, this book has brought the matter 
 to ' a test which must/ they say, ' be convincing even 
 to the author himself.' Then comes the following: 
 
Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ' Mr. Wordsworth's diction has nowhere any pretensions to 
 elegance or dignity ; and he has scarcely ever condescended to 
 give grace or correctness or melody to his versification.' 
 
 If the style of Wordsworth were merely ' slovenly 
 and neglectful,' however, the Edinburgh thinks it 
 might be endured, but it remains no longer tolerable 
 to christian, pagan, or man, when it comes coupled 
 with the 'poor ambition of originality,' and a jibber- 
 ing disposition to ' break into ecstasies about spades, 
 or sparrow's eggs, or men gathering leeches, or women 
 in duffel cloaks, or plates, or porringers, or washing- 
 tubs.' The review continues : 
 
 ' All the world laughs at elegiac stanzas to a sucking-pig — a 
 hymn on washing-day — sonnets to one's grandmother, or 
 Pindarics on gooseberry-pie ; and yet we are afraid it will not 
 be quite easy to convince Mr. Wordsworth that the same ridi- 
 cule must infallibly attach to the pathetic pieces in this volume.' 
 
 After this preliminary stroke of humour, the re- 
 viewer proceeds to deal in detail with the several 
 contents of the volume. 
 
 ' The " Redbreast and the Butterfly " is, it must be confessed, 
 " silly sooth " in good earnest. The three last lines seem to be 
 downright raving. We have a piece of namby-pamby " To the 
 Small Celandine." . . . The next piece, entitled " The Beggars," 
 may be taken as a touchstone of Mr. Wordsworth's merit. . . . 
 To us, we will confess, it appears to be a very paragon of silli- 
 ness and affectation. ... If the printing of such trash as 
 " Alice Fell " be not felt as an insult on public taste, we are 
 afraid it cannot be insulted. . . . The next is a very tedious, 
 affected performance called " Yarrow Unvisited." .... We 
 have a rapturous mythical " Ode to the Cuckoo," in which the 
 author, striving after force and originality, produces nothing but 
 absurdity.' 
 
 It is hard, without tangible evidence, to believe 
 
Wordsworth. 1 7 
 
 that anything so wanting in psychical insight can 
 have been written about the rarely beautiful poem in 
 which occur the lines : 
 
 ' O cuckoo ! shall I call thee bird, 
 Or but a wandering voice ?' 
 
 We have heard the Lake School charged, by these 
 critics, with deriving inspiration from German sources ; 
 but surely the German mind, with its great love of 
 the world of actualities, and its constant striving to 
 keep close to the ground, has never produced, even in 
 the more spiritual moods of Goethe, any such purely 
 imaginative fantasy as is here presented in the idea 
 of a wandering, disembodied voice. Wordsworth's 
 work has the same feeling elsewhere, and Shelley's 
 poetry is drenched in the dew of a similar spirit ; but 
 the reach of imagination which therein both poets 
 compass is of course too distant and too subtle to 
 abide (as Jeremy Taylor says, in a like connection) 
 the decision, whether it be true or false, of him that 
 reads in the spirit of ridicule, or of him that reads 
 after dinner. 
 
 It is yet more difficult to believe that the great 
 ' Ode on Intimations of Immortality' can ever have 
 wanted worshippers. The unique homage with which 
 Coleridge regarded it seems to us now to have been 
 no more than was due to that greatest of all Words- 
 worth's great things. It is, however, open to question 
 if a truly original poem ever obtains both adequate 
 and immediate recognition. Byron held a contrary 
 opinion, but perhaps the electrical response to his 
 own work was father to his judgment in this particular. 
 
 2 
 
1 8 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 Perhaps, too, it is true, as Wordsworth himself said, that 
 every great and original writer, in proportion as he is 
 great and original, ' must himself create the taste by 
 which he is to be relished — must teach the art by 
 which he is to be seen.' Certain it is that much true 
 poetry, ultimately and finally seen to be good and 
 noble, obtained at first but scant acknowledgment of 
 its worth. Rarely, however, can it have fallen to the 
 lot of any poem to encounter so much insensate op- 
 position as at the outset became all but the sole share 
 of the ' Ode on Immortality,' every line of which is 
 now valuable in all eyes. This is how our golden idol 
 turned to clay in the hands of the Edinburgh Review : 
 
 ' The volume is wound up with an " Ode " with no other title 
 but the motto Paulo Majora Caiiamus. This is, beyond doubt, 
 the most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication. We 
 can pretend to give no analysis or explanation of it ; our readers 
 must make what they can of the following extracts.' 
 
 Then follows that noblest passage of the poem, 
 beginning, 
 
 ' O joy ! that in our embers ;' 
 and ending, 
 
 ' And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.' 
 
 The reviewer proceeds to say that he has gone 
 through this publication with a view to enable readers 
 to determine whether the author of the verses he has 
 exhibited is entitled to claim the honour of an im- 
 prover of our poetry, or to found a new school to 
 supersede or new-model all our maxims on the sub- 
 ject. With the following remarks the review con- 
 cludes : 
 
Wordsworth. 1 9 
 
 ' We venture to hope that there is now an end of this folly, 
 and that, like other follies, it will be found to have cured itself 
 by the very extravagances resulting from its unbridled indulgence. 
 . . . We think there is every reason to hope that the lamentable 
 consequences which have resulted from Mr. Wordsworth's open 
 violation of the established laws of poetry will operate as a 
 wholesome warning to those who might otherwise have been 
 seduced by his example, and be the means of restoring to that 
 ancient and venerable code its due honour and authority.' 
 
 As one reads this expression of a sage hope that 
 there is now an end of the folly of writing as Words- 
 worth wrote, one remembers another hope equally 
 sage, and equally destined to unlooked-for disappoint- 
 ment — that of Madame De Sevign6, who observed 
 of Racine that as the taste for his works had come in 
 with the rage for coffee, so she hoped with the rage 
 for coffee would the taste disappear. 
 
 Due no doubt to such assaults as this one of the 
 Edmhtro-/z,the ' Poems/ at first fairly prosperous, finally 
 fell flat in the market ; and when Joseph Cottle made 
 over his business at Bristol to Longman of London, 
 the copyright of the 'Lyrical Ballads' was set down 
 in the inventory at nil, and was afterwards given back 
 to the author. Quite remorselessly, however, did the 
 young critics follow up their advantage. When op- 
 portunity of direct onslaught did not offer, the occasion 
 to review contemporary poetry was used as a means 
 of attack. A review of Crabbe's ' Poems ' (1808) pre- 
 sented a channel of assault. Few men to-day would 
 be daring enough to couple Crabbe's name with 
 Wordsworth's in any computation of poetic import- 
 ance ; but the Edinburgh said there was ' a misguided 
 fraternity of writers (the Wordsworths, the Southeys, 
 
20 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 and the Coleridges), from whose works those of Mr. 
 Crabbe might receive all that elucidation which results 
 from contrast' Then one by one the characters of 
 Crabbe's somewhat weary and forgotten 'Tales' are 
 set over in glowing advantage against the characters 
 touched by the hand of Wordsworth. The passage in 
 which this is done is too amusing to be omitted. 
 
 ' Mr. Wordsworth has a village schoolmaster also . . . but the 
 grey-haired rustic pedagogue is represented as a sort of half- 
 crazy, sentimental person, overrun with fine feelings, consti- 
 tutional merriment and a most humorous melancholy.' 
 
 The reviewer has obviously forgotten his charge 
 against the Lake School of presenting vulgar manners 
 in vulgar language. 
 
 ' Mr. Wordsworth has written more than 300 lines on a frail 
 damsel (a character common enough in all poems), but instead 
 of new images of tenderness, or delicate representations of 
 intelligible feelings, he has contrived to tell us nothing whatever 
 about the unfortunate fair one but that her name is Martha 
 Ray ; and that she goes up to the top of a hill, in a red cloak, 
 and cries, " O misery !" The rest of the poem is filled with a 
 description of an old thorn and a pond, and of the silly stories 
 which the neighbouring old women told about them . . . 
 
 ' The sports of childhood and the untimely death of promising 
 youth is {sic) also a common topic of poetry. Mr. Wordsworth 
 has some blank verse about it, but all he is pleased to communicate 
 of the rustic child is that he used to amuse himself with shouting 
 to the owls and hearing them answer ; . . . for the sake of this 
 one accomplishment, we are told that the author has frequently 
 stood mute and gazed on his grave for half an hour together. . . . 
 
 ' Love and the fantasies of lovers have afforded an ample 
 theme to poets of all ages. Mr. Wordsworth, however, has 
 thought fit to compose a piece, illustrating this subject by one 
 single thought. A lover trots away to see his mistress one fine 
 evening, staring all the way at the moon ; when he gets to her 
 door — 
 
Wordsworth. 2 1 
 
 ' " O mercy ! to myself I cried, 
 If Lucy should be dead !" 
 
 And there the poem ends.' 
 
 Of course Wordsworth's well-known preface greatly 
 
 offends the reviewer, who says that to make such a 
 
 preliminary announcement as the poet makes, is as 
 
 ludicrous 
 
 ' — as it would be in the author of an ode or an epic to say, 
 " Of this piece the reader will necessarily form a very erroneous 
 judgment unless he is apprised that it was written by a pale' 
 man in a green coat — sitting cross-legged on an oaken stool — 
 with a scratch on his nose, and a spelling dictionary on the 
 table." ' 
 
 From such childish and absurd affectations as are 
 herein indicated, any reader of candour and discern- 
 ment will, the reviewer thinks, turn with delight to 
 the poetry of Mr. Crabbe. 
 
 In 1819 and again in 1820 (on both. occasions under 
 some colourable pretext), the Edinburgh continues 
 the attack. The 'Rejected Addresses' had appeared 
 in 1812, and in a review of the book, the lines satirical 
 of Wordsworth are quoted and pronounced by 'no 
 means a parody, but a fair, indeed flattering imitation.' 
 That 'flattering imitation' (probably of 'Alice Fell') 
 runs as follows : 
 
 ' My brother Jack was nine in May, 
 And I was eight on New Year's day ; 
 
 So in Kate Wilson's shop 
 Papa (he's my papa and Jack's) 
 Bought me last week a doll of wax, 
 
 And brother Jack a top. 
 ' Jack's in the pouts, and this it is, 
 He' thinks mine came to more than his ; 
 So to my drawer he goes, 
 
22 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 Takes out the doll, and O my stars ! 
 He pokes her head between the bars, 
 And melts off half her nose !' 
 
 Everyone knows that if he go to Wordsworth (or 
 indeed to any author whose choice of subject is less 
 homely) to discover passages that can be turned into 
 ridicule, abundant material can readily be found ; but 
 surely parody is one of the lowest forms of criticism, 
 and the gift which the street arabs possess of broad 
 mimicry (or even the appreciation of it) ought scarcely 
 to have come within the accomplishments of a quar- 
 terly review which began by disclaiming so many 
 small vices. 
 
 When the 'Excursion' was published, in 1814, the 
 Monthly Review criticized it adversely. The Monthly 
 Magazine, on the other hand, said it was the best 
 poem of the age, and hazarded the questionable state- 
 ment that no one could lay it down without reading 
 it through. The European Magazine was friendly in 
 tone, and the British Critic was defensive of the author. 
 
 With the substance of Jeffrey's celebrated review, 
 beginning 'This will never do/ most readers are 
 familiar. We can therefore content ourselves with a 
 single extract : 
 
 ' It bears, no doubt, the stamp of the author's heart and fancy, 
 but unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar 
 system. ... It is longer, weaker, and tamer than any of Mr. 
 Wordsworth's other productions ; with less boldness of originality 
 and less even of that extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone 
 which wavered so prettily in the " Lyrical Ballads" between silli- 
 ness and pathos. We have imitations of Cowper, and even of 
 Milton, here, engrafted on the natural drawl of the Lakers. 
 vVhat Mr. Wordsworth's ideas of length are, we have no means 
 
Wordsworth. 2 3 
 
 of accurately judging, but we cannot help suspecting that they 
 are liberal to a degree that will alarm the weakness of most 
 modern readers. As far as we can gather from the preface, the 
 entire poem is of a biographical nature, and is to contain the 
 history of the author's mind, and of the origin and progress of 
 his poetical powers, up to the period when they were sufficiently 
 matured to qualify him for the great work on which he has been 
 so long employed. Now the quarto before us contains an 
 account of one of his youthful rambles in the vales of Cumber- 
 land, and occupies precisely the period of three days ; so that by 
 the use of a very powerful calculus some estimate may be formed 
 of the probable extent of the entire biography. . . . The volume 
 before us, if we were to describe it very shortly, we should 
 characterize as a tissue of moral and devotional ravings, in 
 which innumerable changes are rung upon a few very simple 
 and familiar ideas ; but with such an accompaniment of long 
 words, long sentences, and unwieldy phrases ; and such a hub- 
 bub of strained raptures and fantastical sublimities, that it is 
 often extremely difficult for the most skilful and attentive student 
 to obtain a glimpse of the author's meaning — and altogether 
 impossible for an ordinary reader to conjecture what he is about. 
 • . . The chief advocate of Providence and virtue (in the poem) 
 is an old Scotch Pedlar, retired indeed from business, but 
 still rambling about in his former haunts and gossiping among 
 his old customers without his pack on his shoulders. The other 
 personages of the drama are a retired military chaplain who has 
 grown half an atheist and half a misanthrope — the wife of an 
 unprosperous weaver — a servant girl with her infant — a parish 
 pauper and one or two other personages of equal rank and 
 dignity. . . . His (Wordsworth's) taste for simplicity is evinced 
 by sprinkling up and down his interminable declamations a 
 few descriptions of baby-houses, and of old hats with wet brims ; 
 and his amiable partiality for humble life by assuring us that a 
 wordy rhetorician, who talks about Thebes and allegorizes all the 
 heathen mythology, was once a pedlar — and making him break 
 in upon his magnificent orations with two or three awkward 
 notices of something that he had seen when selling winter 
 raiment about the country — or of the changes in the state of 
 society which had almost annihilated his former calling.' 
 
 It will be necessary to quote only one other example 
 of the many such at hand, and this last critique is 
 
24 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 selected for the reason that it concerns Wordsworth's 
 political character rather than his poetic pretensions. 
 
 It is easy to remember countless cases of men who 
 began life as ardent Liberal partisans and ended it as 
 stolid Tory advocates. The phenomenon is not hard 
 of explanation where the poetical temperament inter- 
 poses between a man's convictions and his sympathies. 
 However pronounced at the first a poet's political 
 principles may be on the side of liberty and equality, 
 and however vehemently his whole nature may 
 inveigh against the injustice or tyranny of existing 
 orders of society, he cannot, it would seem, resist 
 the influence of a temperament which inclines him to 
 repose, to a kind of reform induced only by the quiet 
 rule of individual rectitude, and which makes him 
 hate popular gabble and the wanton desire for change. 
 Wordsworth's was in part such a case as we have 
 indicated. He began life with passionate hopes for the 
 French Revolution, zeal for which was then dominat- 
 ing all ardent spirits — full, as it appeared to be, of 
 high aims ; and ensured, as it seemed to be, of 
 noble ends. To the poet the days in which his 
 life was cast seemed controlled to imperishable 
 issues : 
 
 ' Dear God ! it was a luxury to be, 
 And to be young was very heaven.' 
 
 It is — we must confess it — a damping drop from 
 the air-blown bladder of so much hopefulness to be- 
 hold all this youthful enthusiasm reduced, twenty years 
 later, to the dull duty of distributing stamps in the 
 county of Westmoreland ; yet Wordsworth's political 
 
Wordsworth. 2 5 
 
 ardour found, if not its death, its grave-clothes in 
 such an office. And when the poet became distributor 
 of stamps, be sure the Liberal press did not forget to 
 remind him of his apostasy. Like the Athenian 
 fellow-journeymen of Nick Bottom the weaver, when 
 he donned the ass's head, they did not omit to cry out : 
 ' Bottom, thou art translated !' This is how the 
 Morning Chronicle in 18 13 satirizes the poet : 
 
 'When Favour's golden hook is baited, 
 How swiftly patriot-zeal relaxes ; 
 In silent state see Wordsworth seated 
 Commissioner of stamps and taxes. 
 
 ' Wordsworth, most artless among Bards, 
 Who talk'd of Milton and of Freedom, 
 Scorn'd service purchased by rewards, 
 And pitied those who chanced to need 'em. 
 
 ' Since poets are but men, 'tis said 
 The question may be well disputed, 
 If they can eat Corruption's bread 
 And still continue unpolluted. 
 
 'With dangerous friends, and dangerous foes, 
 O whither whither do we tend us ! 
 May Heaven in mercy interpose 
 
 And from the shafts of both defend us !' 
 
 These critiques are dead now, and it seems almost 
 sorry sport to summon them from their graves and 
 make them walk in their shrouds in a light from which 
 seventy years' twilight has been spirited away. But 
 surely their sinister figures, that look out through the 
 film of the vanished eyes of the years that are gone, 
 should for ever stalk through the world as a witness 
 and a warning. One knows not what else of the 
 nature of presumably impossible blundering one may 
 
26 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 not accredit after being compelled to believe that 
 Wordsworth was the poet who was spoken of through- 
 out his life in such terms as those quoted of ridicule 
 and contempt. It is true, indeed, that we may not 
 prescribe to any critic how soft or how hard, how 
 friendly or how bitter shall be the phrases he employs 
 in reprehension or ridicule ; but how shall we tolerate 
 the asperity of a style of criticism which is grounded 
 in a habit of attack, or countenance a method of 
 inquisition which never makes pretence of entering 
 the domain of fair and philosophical investigation ? 
 
 To criticism, argumentative and honourable, yet 
 spirited, stinging and severe, Wordsworth's work is 
 fairly subject, and this it will assuredly one day en- 
 counter. It may, for example, be doubted if his im- 
 agination is of that highest order to which it was said 
 to belong after the imagination of Shakspeare and 
 Milton. There are those of us who (shirking nothing of 
 the allegiance proper to Wordsworth) believe that in 
 this respect Coleridge and Shelley stand ahead of him. 
 It may further be doubted if vital impulse was more 
 fully developed in his muse than a habit of poetic 
 contemplation. And touching his theory of poetry, 
 it may be questioned if the daily language of the 
 peasant is more properly the language of real life 
 than the language of Milton was ; or if poetry has its 
 origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity, rather 
 than from the fiery ordeal itself, crystallized at the point 
 of passion. To criticism like this,shadowed forth inpart 
 in the 'Biographia Literaria,' Wordsworth is indeed 
 subject. But such criticism has nothing in common 
 
Wordsworth. 2 7 
 
 with the noisy gabble which denied to him every title 
 to. sanity and talent, and advanced the charge of 
 raving and imbecility. 
 
 And throughout the fifty years wherein the critics 
 of England and Scotland sneered at his work in notes 
 of fatuous pedantry, how was it with him ? It was 
 exactly as we could have wished it to be. The voices 
 of the crowd had no power to reach the poet, who 
 was consulting his own heart simply, and patiently 
 leaving the rest to posterity. ' Let the age continue to 
 love its own darkness/ he said ; ' I shall continue t6 
 write, with, I trust, the light of Heaven upon me.' 
 Again, ' It is impossible,' he writes, ' that any ex- 
 pectations can be lower than mine concerning 
 the immediate effect of my work upon what is 
 called the public. I do not here take into consi- 
 deration the envy . and malevolence and all the 
 bad passions which always stand in the way of a 
 work of any merit from a living poet ; but merely 
 think of the pure, absolute, honest ignorance in which 
 all worldlings of every rank and situation must be 
 enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings and 
 images on which the life of my poems depends. The 
 things which I have taken, whether from within or 
 from without, what have they to do with routs, 
 dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from 
 street to street, on foot or in carriage ; with Mr. Pitt 
 or Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the 
 Westminster election or the borough of Honiston ?' 
 Truly, for the poor glory of a popular following he 
 cared but little, and by the frenzy of an enfeebled 
 
28 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 enemy he remained untouched. Nevertheless of the 
 solid splendour of generous recognition he was not, 
 by ignorance and malevolence, wholly bereft. In 1 843, 
 Sir Robert Peel offered him the Laureateship ; and 
 when, four years earlier, Oxford tendered him his 
 honorary degree, he came down from his mountain 
 home to receive it. ' No one present in the theatre that 
 day,' says Frederick Robertson, ' will forget the scene 
 he witnessed.' Every man felt he must lend his help 
 to lift away the load of unmerited obloquy that enve- 
 loped a gifted soul ; and when the poet came forward 
 to accept the honour designed for him there ' broke 
 forth a burst of applause, echoed and taken up again 
 and again when it seemed about to die, and again 
 thrice repeated.' It was a noble tribute, but we love 
 to think of the calm, silvery-haired old man, not 
 amidst the tumult of an assembly, but in the solitude 
 and silence of Rydal. There in that valley, lying 
 within the arms of the hills that encircle it, he lived 
 a sweet, sunny life, free from fear that mere dust and 
 noise could shut him out from the honoured hierarchy 
 of English men of letters. 
 
 The relations maintained towards Wordsworth by 
 his early critics have an interest apart from all con- 
 sideration of their injustice or severity. They show, 
 as we have said, how hard it is to the critical in- 
 telligence to judge independently of the currently re- 
 ceived canons of taste which, whether from love of 
 change, from craving after originality, or from some 
 far higher impulse, the creative instinct in every age 
 displays a disposition to over-ride. Perhaps the Edin- 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
 burgh was wrong in concluding that, in the exact 
 sense of the word, Wordsworth was the originator of 
 the new poetic sect. What that poet did for poetry 
 in the substitution of the language of real life for the 
 unduly elaborated language of the representative 
 eighteenth-century verse, Cowper had done, and Burns 
 also had compassed, not designedly, but out of the 
 unconscious healthiness of a robust nature. Yet 
 Wordsworth was, if not the first to employ the lan- 
 guage of heightened and imaginative prose in the 
 realm of poetry, the first to do so consciously, and to 
 formulate a theory upon his practice. And in these 
 criticisms we perceive with what bitterness of revolt the 
 disciples of the poetic taste that was soon to perish 
 rose against the innovation and against the declared 
 innovator. It is interesting to see how tenaciously 
 the critics of the old school clung to the canons on 
 which they had been suckled, and how grudgingly 
 they relinquished them when wrung from their grasp. 
 Rightly viewed, therefore, the articles from which we 
 have quoted are instructive and suggestive rather than 
 irritating. 
 
SOU THEY. 
 
 SOUTHEYwas the first of the Lake poets to obtain 
 substantial recognition, and though the atten- 
 tion afforded him was at first of a kind as unenviable 
 as unlooked-for, it had a distinction (even if only of 
 hatred) which, to a man of his placid temperament, 
 could in the end be nothing but pure gain. In con- 
 junction with Robert Lovell, he published, through 
 the genial Cottle of Bristol, a volume of verse in 1795. 
 The reception of the book was at least unequivocal. 
 After the enumeration of a whole battalion of imper- 
 fections, the Monthly Review concluded a notice in 
 the following terms : 
 
 ' Of these faults, and some others, the present poems are too 
 frequently guilty. We particularly object to a certain wobe- 
 gone and debilitating affectation of fine feeling, and we hope 
 this mawkish and pernicious doctrine will soon not have a 
 single advocate.' 
 
 The book was published not only before the begin- 
 ning of the author's acquaintance with Wordsworth, 
 but before Coleridge had begun to formulate his new 
 theory of poetry. Moreover, the poems were charac- 
 
Southey. 3 i 
 
 terized by the endeavour, then so general, to preserve 
 a diction that should be ornate and uniformly sus- 
 tained ; certainly they bore no trace of the tenets of the 
 poetic sect soon afterwards started. Indeed, they were 
 in harmony with the pseudo-classical poetic taste of 
 the age, as it filtered through the channel of French 
 literature. Their worst faults were such as are peculiar 
 to poems produced in youth ; assuredly they were in 
 no respect inferior in poetic insight to the ' Joan of 
 Arc' which was issued a year later, or were, at the 
 utmost, only behind that epic in the facility which 
 came with habit and experience and a development 
 of power. Yet, though such as I have quoted was 
 the sentence pronounced on the early effort, no 
 utterance less extravagant than the following served 
 the same critic wherewith to characterize the later 
 work. 
 
 ' Conceptions more lofty and daring, sentiments more com- 
 manding and language more energetic than some of the best 
 passages in this poem afford, will not easily be found. The 
 language is, for the most part, modelled on that of Milton, and 
 not unfrequently it has a strong relish of Shakspeare.' 
 
 What the worth is of such critical opinion will be 
 promptly gauged when it is said that the reviewer 
 considers there is too much sameness in the visionary 
 passages which Coleridge contributed to the second 
 book of the poem ; and what the purity was of the 
 encomium tendered will be as speedily estimated when 
 it is added that Southey had contributed sundry 
 original poems to the pages of the periodical in the 
 interval between the dates of the first adverse criticism 
 and of the second laudatory one. 
 
32 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 Southey's revolt against established forms in poetry 
 was less pronounced than that of Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge. True, indeed, he aimed as little as either 
 of his colleagues at ' the pointed and fine propriety of 
 Pope ;' and when his powers attained their maturity, 
 his productions were as little tainted as theirs could 
 be with the mimic affectations of French classicism. 
 In later years he seemed even anxious to repudiate 
 the allegation that he had ever been concerned with 
 his friends in founding a common school of poetry. 
 It is obvious to us, however, who look back over 
 eighty years of poetic progression, that Southey was 
 influenced by exactly the same forces of conviction 
 as operated in Wordsworth's case ; and that, notwith- 
 standing his personal opposition to such classification, 
 he may properly be classed with the leaders of 
 Wordsworth's school. 
 
 The difference between his own practice of poetry 
 and that adopted by his precursor was one mainly ot 
 method. The principle of his revolt against the 
 popular poetic taste was the same. His varied methods 
 helped him the more speedily to established place. 
 Southey's art shocked fewer preconceived ideas of 
 the proper domain and purpose of poetry. The 
 worst it did was to jaunt in a single poem through all 
 the metres known to literature. Southey never freed 
 himself absolutely from the shackles prescribed for 
 poets of ' sense ' and ' wit.' His vital impulse never 
 burst forth unmanageably into spiritual landscapes 
 hitherto untrodden. No ungovernable flash of natural 
 magic ever came uppermost in his soul to pester his 
 
Southcy. t 33 
 
 genius with dread of trespassing on the realm of 
 arbitrary reason. He was never troubled to weave 
 into the woof of his rational art, the weft of some 
 irrational emotion. All that came to him, came 
 tranquilly ; all that he could see he could command ; 
 and no unsatisfied yearning after unattainable things 
 ever threatened to drive him beyond limits of sanity. 
 Moreover, his poetry dealt with lofty or obscure, noble, 
 dubious, or distant subjects, not with homely ones. 
 
 He did not offend public vision by proving plainly 
 that it must be blind as a mole to the loveliness of 
 objects that lay touched with beauty all about its 
 feet. That way lay Wordsworth's offence. That 
 way, too, lay the rock on which Coleridge split ; but 
 Southey's muse rode safely over the breakers that en- 
 compassed it, and came soonest to anchor. Southey's 
 popularity from 1796 to 18 10 (a period in which 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge were constantly assailed 
 with what must be termed insensate vindictiveness) 
 is only to be explained on such grounds as are here 
 indicated. 
 
 Southey, unlike Wordsworth, did not deify plates 
 and porringers, and men gathering leeches, and old 
 Scotch pedlars and female vagrants ; unlike Cole- 
 ridge, he did not 'elegise an ass.' Instead of this, 
 he apotheosized in his early years the remote 
 mythology, and made a great show of shaking 
 a red rag of mystery before men's eyes. And 
 men ran crazy after him for a little while as the 
 consequence. If he desired to illustrate the innate 
 religious bias of the race, and the ineradicable human 
 
 3 
 
34 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 consciousness that life must always live, he did not 
 select so homely a medium as a little rustic cottage 
 girl, eight years old, sitting beneath the churchyard 
 tree and singing of her brother and sister in the 
 graves that were green beneath it : 
 
 '" But they are dead : these two are dead ! 
 Their spirits are in Heaven V 
 'Twas throwing words away : for still 
 The little maid would have her will 
 And said, " Nay, we are seven !" ' 
 
 In the place of such childlike matter, Southey, 
 with shrewder judgment, or more submissive spirit, 
 carried his readers to a far-distant land, and there 
 made a dread destroyer dream a dream wherein some 
 kindred truth became revealed. And men approved 
 of the one method, and damned the other. Words- 
 worth, with resolute perverseness, might run his head 
 against the sober, solid fact of human vanity, and 
 human stupidity too, but Southey buttressed up the 
 dense mass of its colossal clumsiness. It is well said 
 that we are never so entirely pleased as when shown 
 our own faces reflected in a mirror that beautifies us ; 
 and it was because Southey knew how to turn to 
 account the assumption of profundity which found 
 favour in his time that he was pardoned certain trans- 
 gressions on conventional usage, which in other and 
 greater poets was visited with merciless condemna- 
 tion. 
 
 From 1805 to 18 10 Southey was, so far as we are 
 able to judge from perusal of the periodical press, 
 entirely popular in England. The Monthly Review 
 
Southey. 3 5 
 
 had by that time become convinced of the ' nobility 
 of his genius ;' the European Magazine regarded him 
 favourably and the British Critic affectionately. 
 What the attitude was of the Monthly Mirror and the 
 Monthly Magazine is scarcely worth while to inquire. 
 Perhaps the severest strictures on his productions ap- 
 peared parenthetically in the otherwise laudatory 
 notices of the Eclectic Review. ' To think,' said the 
 reviewer, after an enumeration of the incidents of the 
 'Curse of Kehama/ 'that amidst the beams of the sun 
 and moon, the light of the Christian religion, and the 
 sense and philosophy of modern Europe, a genius 
 like Mr. Southey's should be solemnly employed in 
 business like this !' ' Tis much,' as Christopher Sly 
 would say ; but the whipping is a gentle and humane 
 one, such as friend Launce might have administered 
 to his unchristian dog Crab. 
 
 To all that has been said of Southey's early popu- 
 larity with the critics, exception must of course be 
 claimed in favour of the robust puritanism of the 
 Edinburgh Review. The clever ' Kirk-men ' could no 
 more pardon Southey his violation of the principles 
 of the catholic poetic church of which they were 
 in their proper persons the last-surviving doctors and 
 saints, than they could pardon Wordsworth a like 
 offence. The following appears in the Edinburgh for 
 1802 : 
 
 'The subject of this poem "Thalaba"is almost as ill-chosen 
 as the diction ; and the conduct of the fable as disorderly 
 as the versification. . . . Our readers will easily perceive 
 that it consists altogether of the most wild and extravagant 
 fictions, and openly sets nature and probability at defiance. 
 
 3—2 
 
2,6 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 In its action it is not an imitation of anything ; and excludes 
 all rational criticism. . . . Tales of this sort may amuse 
 children, and interest for a moment by the prodigies they 
 exhibit. . . . The pleasure afforded by performances of this 
 sort is very much akin to that which may be derived from 
 the exhibition of a harlequin farce ; where instead of just 
 imitations of nature and human character, we are entertained 
 with the transformation of cauliflowers and beer-barrels, the 
 apparition of ghosts and devils and all the magic of the 
 wooden sword.' 
 
 One wonders as one reads such contemptuous 
 allusion to amusements usually considered harm- 
 less, that some mad wag of that day did not 
 shake his forefinger in the faces of these northern 
 censors, and address them in the scalding words of 
 Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio : 'Dost thou think, 
 because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more 
 cakes and ale ?' It must not be forgotten, however, 
 that three years later (1805), Southey had the wisdom 
 to have his new poem ' Madoc ' printed by Ballantyne 
 of Edinburgh ; and then the rigour of the reviewers' 
 asperity was softened by the admission that 'the 
 poem bore distinctive testimony to the genius and 
 amiable character of the author.' But just when the 
 breach appeared to be closing, and the Edinburgh 
 (not without many an austere snarl and an austerer 
 smile) was manifesting a disposition to come round to 
 the popular appreciation of Southey's genius, political 
 rancour intervened between the poet and his northern 
 critics, and left them, like the cliffs in ' Christabel,' 
 gaping at each other until the end, from opposite 
 sides of an impassable chasm. The story of that 
 further separation involves the hasty traversing of 
 
Southey. 3 7 
 
 the oft-repeated history of the early Socialism and 
 subsequent Toryism of the Lakers. 
 
 When Coleridge, Southey and Lovell left their 
 universities, they were all three passionate pantisocra- 
 tists. The French Revolution was in their case, as in 
 Wordsworth's, dominating all ardour and enthusiasm. 
 They could no more resist the spirit of the day that 
 controlled young natures to socialistic issues than 
 Hamlet and Horatio could have held their way at 
 Wittenberg against the encroaching current of religious 
 reform ; and just as the one circle carried to Elsinore 
 the bias of mind that inclined them to see too plainly 
 how woefully the time was out of joint, so the other 
 brotherhood took to Bristol a visionary scheme de- 
 signed to set it right. 
 
 The young socialists — or should we say commu- 
 nists? — recognised to the full the barbarityand injustice 
 of much existing inequality ; perceived the tyrannical 
 wickedness of a world in which the days of the mass 
 of men were few and evil ; beheld beneath the upward 
 and outward glitter of the temple of commercial pro- 
 gression, a seething mass of corruption, war and 
 yet more devastating peace of many kinds. All this 
 insight was theirs in common with thinking men in 
 all ages, but their departure from the beaten path of 
 those who — any time for five hundred years — had 
 grinned under such anomalies and borne them, lay in 
 their solemn hopefulness of soothing down the sore 
 ills men suffered from. 
 
 They despaired of encompassing the infinity of evil 
 from within ; so they agreed to spread canvas to the 
 
Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 gale and betake themselves to undivided dales on the 
 banks of the Susquehannah, there to drive the tinkling 
 team by day, and at sober eve to tune the rustic reed in 
 ' solemn cenotaph ' of ' time-shrouded minstrelsy ' to 
 some happier Chatterton than the one whose ashes 
 they would leave behind. Strange fantasies, and as 
 vain as strange, the fleeting offspring of ardent hearts, 
 musing in moods dreamy and vague on the sad 
 truths of stern life. Few of us are so free of such 
 weaknesses, however, that we can afford to stand on 
 the ' humour of our state ' and contemplate them with 
 exalted ' demure travel of regard.' Robert Owen 
 and Lanark ; Emerson, Hawthorne, and Brook Farm ; 
 Ruskin and the Guild of St. George, are witnesses to 
 man's unquenchable faith in the possibility of a state 
 of comparative social perfectibility. More of us than 
 would care to own to it, and some of us who are so 
 far from being as ' hoary-headed ' as the Edinburgh 
 reviewers announced themselves to be that we have 
 scarcely passed the period of early manhood, have once 
 cherished a vain scheme for social amelioration which 
 the stress of years has torn out of our grasp. Of 
 course there are superior souls who have remained 
 throughout untouched by the ' brood of idle phantasy,' 
 who have never dwelt with so mean a thing as en- 
 thusiasm for some hopeless project, or known the 
 white dove of their expectations go forth over the 
 waste of waters and return to them empty and weary 
 of wing. Such sober spirits live in the sun, and, like 
 the moralist, practise behaviour to their own shadows. 
 They affect to begin where we have ended, and we 
 
Sou they. 39 
 
 weaker brethren are wont to marvel when we see 
 them pass us by, ' quenching ' (like the ' rare turkey 
 cock,' Malvolio) , ' the familiar smile, with an austere 
 regard of control.' 
 
 Such projects for societies with a community of 
 simple interests are always relinquished sooner or later, 
 and the Susquehannah scheme was abandoned before 
 an attempt to realize it was begun. Were the young 
 reformers convicted of error ? Ah no ! a more potent 
 and immediate obstacle intervened to defer all contem- 
 plated immigration. The fact was, as most of us re- 
 member, there were at Bristol sisters of the name of 
 Fricker, and Coleridge and Southey interrupted further 
 socialistic preliminaries in order to marry them. 
 Matrimony put an effectual stop to all plans for social 
 improvement, except such as began, like charity, at 
 home. How could an ardent communist, who was a 
 bard to boot, trouble himself with schemes for the 
 amelioration of the race at a time when (as the good 
 Joseph Cottle avers) he was troubled in his soul to 
 find a frying-pan, and still more to find a sole to (fry 
 in it ? And so, Susquehannah and ' tinkling teams,' 
 and ' solemn cenotaphs ' went the way of all such. 
 
 The bearing of all this on Southey's subsequent re- 
 lation to his critics becomes obvious when we consider 
 the political position of the periodical press. The 
 Courier was emphatically Tory ; and the European 
 Magazine was also Ministerial. The Edinburgh was 
 the last prominent organ of the old school of criticism, 
 but it was the first notable propagandist of the new 
 school of politics. The Examiner followed, six years 
 
40 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 after its Scotch precursor, with more than its prede- 
 cessor's ardour of Whig partizanship and an added 
 scurrility which speedily earned for it many oppro- 
 brious names, and for its editor, Leigh Hunt, im- 
 prisonment. As a counter- weight to so much vigorous 
 opposition the Quarterly Review was started in 1809. 
 The review was, at the time, supposed to be the 
 official organ of the Government, and certainly 
 Canning and Croker appear to have had some share 
 in its initiation. Gifford was its editor, and he 
 gathered about him a large circle of able writers, 
 calculated to hold their own against the Jeffreys and 
 the Broughams of the rival periodical. Now, Southey's 
 political leanings had been slowly gravitating towards 
 Toryism since the early days of his Pantisocracy, 
 and of his and Coleridge's Jacobin lectures at Bristol. 
 Indeed Southey had already got so far as to say that 
 to his mind the only remedy for the sedition that was 
 rife at the time, was to check the press, and to sup- 
 press all calumny by the penal transportation of those 
 who disseminated it. So the poet was offered a foremost 
 place on the staff of the Quarterly, and he accepted- 
 it, and held it almost down to his death. Of course 
 this proceeding seemed to the rival reviewers ' most 
 tolerable,' as Dogberry might say, ' and not to be 
 endured.' It must be allowed that in the exercise of 
 his functions as a political writer Southey sometimes 
 passed those lines beyond which men cease to be 
 reasonably tolerant to persons whose opinions are 
 opposed to their own. Hence every criticism of his 
 poetry written after 18 10 must be interpreted by the 
 
Southey. 41 
 
 light of the critic's attitude towards the poet's politics. 
 If we find that the. Examiner tells him, with abundant 
 frankness, that he is ' the high priest of impertinence 
 in poetry,' we must not rashly conclude that such was 
 the sincere opinion of the paper, but rather remember 
 that the said priest thundered his anathemas against 
 the writers in the Examiner as against sciolists, 
 profligates and coxcombs. If, again, we find another 
 journal style him a ' prose-poet,' and add that he is ' an 
 apostate and a contemptuously malignant renegado,' 
 we must bear it in mind that the poet pronounced the 
 critic's judgment the ' effervescence of his incorrigible 
 overweening self-opinion — a thing that ought to be 
 put down by the rack and the thumb-screw.' Of 
 course the Edinburgh, with exalted and austere 
 superiority to all sense of rivalry, never allowed itself 
 to make allusion to the political and anonymous side 
 of Southey 's writings ; but nevertheless it kept that 
 side constantly in mind, and touched upon it as an 
 interlude to the criticism of the other side. It took 
 care that Southey lost no particle of contempt from 
 the circumstance that it ignored the Quarterly. This 
 is how the Edinburgh in 181 1 approaches Southey's 
 ' Curse of Kehama,' published a year earlier : 
 
 1 We admire the genius of Mr. Southey ; we reverence the 
 lofty principles and we love the tenderness of heart that are 
 visible in all his productions.' 
 
 (The reviewer, like the clown in the' Twelfth Night,' 
 is obviously one of those gentle ones that would use 
 the devil himself with courtesy.) 
 
 ' We have been accused of malice and of partiality respect- 
 
42 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ing Mr. Southey. . . . We profess the stately office of cor- 
 recting and instructing. . . . Mr. Southey, of course, equally 
 despises our censure and our advice ; and we have no quarrel 
 with him for this. We have been too long conversant with 
 the untractable generation of authors, to expect that our 
 friendly expostulations should have any effect upon them — 
 except as exponents of the silent, practical judgment of the 
 public. To that superior tribunal, however, we do think 
 ourselves entitled to refer. . . . There is, indeed, another and 
 a final appeal — to Posterity — from the benefit of which we are 
 far from wishing to exclude any unfortunate persons whose 
 circumstances may reduce them to rely on it. . . .' 
 
 (This is, of course, a sneer at Wordsworth.) 
 
 'But the cases, we believe, are wonderfully rare in which 
 that mysterious and inaccessible judge has ever reversed the 
 unfavourable sentences of the ordinary jurisdictions ; and there 
 seems even to be great reason for thinking, that such reversals 
 will be still fewer in time to come.' 
 
 The omniscient reviewer scarcely bargained on the 
 reversal of his own sentences ; but, nevertheless, as 
 the old hermit of Prague, who never saw pen and ink, 
 very wittily remarked : ' That, that is, is.' 
 
 ' Things are wonderfully changed in this respect, since a 
 licentious and illiterate age withheld from Milton the fame 
 which its successor was so proud to bestow.' 
 
 The Edinburgh said exactly the reverse of this (con- 
 cerning the relation of Milton to his age) two years 
 previously. 
 
 ' All this takes away almost the possibility of that neglect 
 which, in former times, stood so often in the way, not merely 
 of reputation, but of fair trial. ... We leave Mr. Southey the 
 full benefit of his chance. ... He should take warning while 
 it is yet time. His admirers, we fear, are not the best sort of 
 admirers ' 
 
Soidhey. 43 
 
 (They were — among others — Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 "Wilson, Lamb, Sir Robert Peel and Canning.) 
 
 ' In so far as we have been able to gather, there are but few 
 persons of cultivated taste and sober judgment in his train ; 
 and his glories are celebrated, we think, chiefly by the young, 
 the enthusiastic and the uninstructed — persons whose fancies 
 are easily captivated with glitter, exaggeration and novelty, and 
 whose exuberant sensibility is apt to flame out at the approach 
 even of the false fire of bombast and affectation. . . . Al- 
 most all nice critics and fastidious judges ' 
 
 (These were, beyond question, Jeffrey, Brougham, 
 and a host of lesser critics long since forgotten). 
 
 ' and the greater part indeed of men of improved and 
 
 delicate taste, not only refuse to admire Mr. Southey and his 
 colleagues, but treat them with absolute contempt and derision. 
 . . . For our own part, we consider it indeed our chief duty to 
 counteract the neglect into which he seems to be falling.' 
 
 Merciful judges ! but mark how on the next page 
 
 they assail Southey with so much acrimony that he 
 
 might have sung some contemporary euphemism to 
 
 the familiar lines : 
 
 ' It was all very well to dissemble your love, 
 But why did you kick me downstairs ?' 
 
 The review continues : 
 
 ' His taste in description is as remarkably childish as his 
 powers of execution in this branch of his art are rare and ad- 
 mirable. Everything in his pictures is gaudy and glitteringj 
 full of coloured light and gems, and metallic splendour ; and 
 sparkles with such portentous finery as to remind us of the 
 old-fashioned grottoes and shell-work of the last generation, or 
 the gilded caverns and full-lighted transparencies of the opera- 
 house. His excessive love of the marvellous and gigantic is a 
 symptom not less decisive ; and his delineations of persons 
 and affection are still more strongly marked with the same 
 infantine character. He seems to think grown men and 
 women too corrupt and hardened for poetical purposes ; and 
 
44 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 therefore all his interesting personages lisp like sucklings, and 
 his unamiable ones are, as nearly as possible, such sort of 
 monsters as nurses imagine to frighten naughty boys into 
 obedience.' 
 
 It is a problem that must always present difficulties 
 to an impartial onlooker, how a periodical can pro- 
 nounce passages of poems utterly unfit for publication 
 and an insult to public taste, and yet deliberately re- 
 print them in full, one after one, and so magnify 
 the mischief in the degree in which its own circulation 
 is greater than that of the book reviewed. After twelve 
 entire pages of extracts from Southey's ' Curse of 
 Kehama,' the Edinburgh concludes with this curious 
 utterance : 
 
 ' We close our extracts and take our leave of Mr. Southey. 
 We wish we could entertain any tolerable hopes of converting 
 him from the damnable heresies into which he has fallen, and 
 to which, if he does not reform speedily, we fear his reputation 
 will die a martyr.' 
 
 The critiques on Southey which appeared in the 
 Edinburgh after 1809 had always the look of indirect 
 thrusts at the Quarterly. The ribble-rabble of the 
 Examiner's poetical animosity was more open and 
 amusing. When Southey was made Laureate (and 
 afterwards further endowed with a pension of .£200 a 
 year), the Examiner published the following satirical 
 verses, purporting to be written by the bellman of the 
 parish of St. Paul, Covent Garden : 
 
 ' My honest masters, take care of extremes. 
 Bob Southey, once upon a time it seems 
 (Too young to know the value of decorum), 
 Held in disdain all crowns and those who wore 'em • 
 
Southey. 4 5 
 
 For suffering them, he saw no reason why ; 
 As to flattering them, he'd rather die. 
 Such was his tone for years, and such his scorning', 
 When lo ! one fine autumnal blushing morning, 
 Changing his mind and coat, as Crabbe would say, 
 He comes to Court — the oddest of the gay, 
 And there not only lays his notions by, 
 Kissing the Regent's hand with down-dropt eye 
 He puts the Crown on, that was worn by Pye ! 
 My noble masters, how could this change be ? 
 
 * * * * 
 
 I'll tell you what it was, my masters dear — 
 Pure weakness, and a hundred pounds a year. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 In what, my candid masters, I have said, 
 
 Do not suppose I've been by malice led ; 
 
 I would not of his fame the Laureate rob ; 
 
 Think not your Bellman would speak ill of Bob ; 
 
 'Tis of his odd extremes I speak alone ; 
 
 In all things else — his verse, his taste, his tone, 
 
 I'm sure I look on Bob's fame as my own.' 
 
 This appeared in 18 14, and when two years after- 
 wards Southey published his ' Lay of the Laureate,' 
 addressed to Princess Charlotte, it was made so 
 manifest that his political principles had suffered total 
 eclipse, that the anger of the Examiner could no longer 
 find vent by the medium of polite speech. The 
 journalist called the poet ' a cad,' a ' painful hiero- 
 glyphic of humanity,' a ' canting hypocrite,' an ' apos- 
 tate,' a ' renegado,' a ' shallow idiot,' an ' incorrigible 
 bigot,' and by other such gentle names. 
 
 ' The poetry of the " Lay " is beneath criticism ; it has all sorts 
 of obvious commonplace defects, without any beauties either 
 obvious or recondite. It is the namby-pamby of the Taber- 
 nacle ; a Methodist sermon turned into doggerel verse Does 
 
 our Laureate think it according to Court etiquette that he should 
 be as old-fashioned in his language as in the cut of his clothes ? 
 
46 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ... He not only thinks whatever opinion he holds for the time 
 infallible, but that no other is even to be tolerated, and that 
 none but knaves and fools can differ from him. . . . He regards 
 a Catholic or a Presbyterian, a Deist or an Atheist with equal 
 repugnance, and makes no difference between the Pope, the 
 Turk and the Devil. ... He thinks a bad poet a bad man, and 
 would suspect the principles, moral, political, and religious, of 
 anyone who did not spell the word Laureate with an e at the 
 end of it. If Mr. Southey were a bigot, it would be well ; but 
 he has only the intolerance of bigotry. . . . He calls on the 
 Princess Charlotte in the names of the souls of ten thousand 
 little children, who are without knowledge in this age of light, 
 " Save, or we Perish ;'' and yet, sooner than they should be saved 
 by Joseph Fry or Joseph Lancaster, he would see them damned. 
 . . . He endeavours to prove that the Prince Regent and the 
 Duke of Wellington (put together) are greater than Bonaparte, 
 but that he is by his own rule a greater man than all three of 
 them. . . . We do assure Mr. Southey that we do not envy him 
 his honour. Many people laugh at ! him, some may blush for 
 him, but nobody envies him. . . . Though we do not think Mr. 
 Southey has been quite consistent, we do not now think him a 
 hypocrite. This poem proves it. How should he maintain the 
 same opinion all his life when he cannot maintain it for two 
 stanzas together? The weakness of his reasoning shows that 
 he is the dupe of it. He has not the faculty of perceiving 
 contradictions. He is not accountable for his opinions. There 
 is not a single sentiment advanced in any part of the "Lay" which 
 is not flatly denied in some other part of it.' 
 
 Perhaps the most amusing, as also the most ghastly- 
 part of the Examiners critiques on Southey centres 
 round the Laureate's controversy with Mr. William 
 Smith. The incidents of that controversy require a 
 word of explanation. In Southey's early Jacobin days, 
 at Bristol (1794), he wrote a dramatic poem, entitled 
 ' Wat Tyler,' satirical of kings and queens, and all tax- 
 gatherers. This he did not publish, but years after- 
 wards a publisher surreptitiously possessed himself 
 of the manuscript and printed it. Southey was highly 
 
Southey. 47 
 
 incensed, but powerless. In 18 17 (twenty-three years 
 later than the date of the poem) he wrote in the 
 Quarterly an article on ' Parliamentay Reform,' com- 
 bating with more than his wonted vehemence the 
 advance of Whig principles. 
 
 One day a certain Mr. Smith, M.P., took down to 
 the house a copy of the poem stowed away in one 
 pocket, and a copy of the review stowed away in the 
 other. First lugging out the poem, he read a choice 
 extract, which was of the nature of a dialogue between 
 the blacksmith and his visitor, as they stand together 
 in the smithy while the tax-gatherer goes by — the 
 moral of which, in the ' vaine of ancient Pistol,' 
 might be said to be : ' Base is the slave that pays.' 
 Then lugging out the Quarterly, he read some ultra- 
 Tory utterance against conspiracy and sedition. It is 
 not altogether easy to understand how Mr. Smith was 
 allowed to attack an absent man who had not com- 
 mitted an indictable offence ; in a place, too, in which 
 the person impeached could never have opportunity 
 of reply. But the thing was done, and done effectually ; 
 and all that remained to Southey was to retort in 
 print. This he did in the form of a letter, similar in 
 spirit to that which Burke addressed to the Duke of 
 Bedford in defence of his pension, and obviously de- 
 signed to compass a similar result. The little hubbub 
 was, of course, a mighty tempest to the Examiner, 
 which forthwith devoted three double-paged articles 
 to a review of the two coupled works in question, 
 choosing as motto (with refined cruelty), a version of 
 lines by the Laureate's friend Wordsworth : 
 
48 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ',So was it when my life began ; 
 So is it now I am a man ; 
 So shall it be when I grow old and die. 
 The child's the father of the man : 
 Our years flow on 
 Linked each to each by natural piety.' 
 
 The review taunted Southey with a desire to 'jump 
 the stripling' (of nine-and-twenty) (?) ' into the man,' 
 whenever the latter had a mind ' to jump into a place 
 and pension,' and assured him that he publicly exposed 
 his mind to be anatomized whilst he was living — 
 laying open his character to the scalping-knife, guiding 
 the philosophic hand in its painful researches, while 
 on the ' bald crown of our petit tondu, in vain concealed 
 under withered bay leaves and a few contemptible grey 
 hairs,' might be seen the organ of vanity triumphant. 
 
 The review runs : 
 
 ' It is said to be a wise child that knows its own father ; and 
 we understand Mr. Southey (who is in this case reputed father 
 and son) utterly disclaims the hypostatical union between the 
 Quarterly Review and the Dramatic Poet, and means to enter 
 an injunction against the latter as a bastard and impostor. 
 Appearances are somewhat staggering against the legitimacy of 
 the descent, yet we perceive a strong family likeness remaining 
 in spite of the lapse of years and alteration of circumstances. 
 We should not, indeed, be able to predict that the author of 
 " Wat Tyler " would ever write the article on Parliamentary 
 Reform, nor should we, either at first or second sight, perceive 
 that the Quarterly Reviewer had ever written a poem like that 
 which is before us ; but if we were told that both performances 
 were literally and bond fide by the same person, we should have 
 little hesitation in saying to Mr. Southey, " Thou art the man." 
 We know no other person in whom fierce extremes meet with 
 such mutual self-complacency ; whose opinions change so much 
 without any change in the author's mind ; who lives so entirely 
 in " the present ignorant thought " without the smallest " dis- 
 course of reason looking before or after." Mr. Southey is a 
 
Soutkey. 49 
 
 man incapable of reasoning connectedly on any subject. He 
 has not strength of mind to see the whole of any question : he 
 has not modesty to suspend his judgment till he has examined 
 the grounds of it. . . . The woman that deliberates is lost. So it 
 is with the effeminate soul of Mr. Southey. . . . His public spirit 
 was a prude and a scold ; and " his poor virtue " turned into a 
 literary prostitute is grown more abusive than ever. . . . The 
 author of " Wat Tyler " was an ultra-Jacobin ; the author of 
 Parliamentary Reform is an ultra-Royalist ; the one was a 
 frantic demagogue ; the other is a servile court-tool : the one 
 vented those opinions which gratified the vanity of youth ; the 
 other adopts those prejudices which are most conducive to the 
 convenience of age : the one vilified kings, priests, and nobles ; 
 the other vilifies the people — the one is for universal suffrage ; 
 . . . and the other is for the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus, 
 and the putting down of theExaminer by the sword, the dagger, 
 or the thumb-screw. 
 
 ' Our simple Laureate was sharp upon his hoyden Jacobin 
 mistress, who brought him no dowry, neither place nor pension, 
 who " found him poor and kept him so " by her prudish notions 
 of virtue. He divorced her, in short, for nothing but the spirit 
 and success with which she resisted the fraud and force to which 
 the old bawd Legitimacy was for ever resorting to overpower 
 her resolution and fidelity. He said she was a virago, a cunning 
 gipsy, always in broils about her honour and the inviolability 
 of her person, and always getting the better in them ; furiously 
 scratching the face or cruelly tearing off the hair of the said 
 pimping old lady, who would never let her alone night or day. 
 But since her foot slipped one day on the ice, and the detestable 
 old hag tripped up her heels, and gave her up to the kind keep- 
 ing of the allied Sovereigns, Mr Southey has devoted himself to 
 her more fortunate and wealthy rival : he is become uxorious in 
 his second matrimonial connection ; and though his false 
 Duessa has turned out a very witch, a foul, ugly witch, a 
 murderess, a sorceress, perjured and a harlot, drunk with 
 insolence, mad with power, a griping rapacious wretch, bloody, 
 luxurious, wanton, malicious, not sparing steel, or poison, or 
 gold, to gain her ends — bringing famine, pestilence and death 
 in her train— infecting the air with her thoughts, killing the 
 beholders with her looks, claiming mankind as her property 
 
 4 
 
50 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 and using them as her slaves — driving everything before her, 
 and playing the devil wherever she comes, Mr. Southey sticks 
 to her in spite of everything, and for very shame lays his head 
 in her lap, paddles with the palms of her hands, inhales her 
 hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in her ears, calls 
 her little fondling names, Religion, Morality, and Social Order ; 
 takes for his motto, 
 
 ' " Be to her faults a little blind, 
 Be to her virtues very kind ;" 
 
 sticks close to his filthy bargain, and will not give her up, 
 because she keeps him, and he is down in her will. Faugh !' 
 
 ' 'Twas much ;' but the Laureate was soon to be 
 laid double in other sense. In the Examiner (1817) 
 was published what at first sight seemed to be the 
 most matter-of-fact announcement of ' the death and 
 funeral of the late Mr. Southey.' 
 
 ' On Thursday se'nnight, according to a notice in the Courier, 
 from the pen of his friend and physician the celebrated Dr. 
 Paracelsus Broadhum Coleridge, departed this life the better 
 portion of Robert Southey, Esquire, formerly " Man of 
 Humanity," and Independent Poet, latterly Poet Laureate, and 
 Member of the Royal Spanish Academy.' 
 
 It was the supposed death and funeral of Southey 's 
 reputation that was announced. The Examiner dwelt 
 lovingly on a few gentle traits of the character of the 
 departed. 
 
 ' He would go galloping after divers Reformers, calling out 
 to them all the while in such terms as the following : " Hallo, 
 there ! you vagabonds, thieves, liars, incendiaries, and worse 
 than housebreakers, whom I formerly agreed with, — I was an 
 honest and virtuous youth, a stripling of nine-and-twenty, for 
 thinking as you do ; ^o\x\you are a pack of rascals, yelping curs, 
 bears, tigers, and boars, for thinking as I did ; and you 
 especially who are no older than I was, and only think half of 
 what I did, are a parcel of provoking beasts, brutes, cattle, 
 vermin, and reptiles." ' 
 
Soathey. 5 1 
 
 Then follows a detailed account of the processional 
 order of the funeral, showing the places of Coleridge, 
 Wordsworth, Wilson, Gifford, Murray, Canning, and 
 Croker. The Examiner had not yet done. Having 
 made a ghostly hit so signal, it was resolved hence- 
 forth to improve the occasion. The following week's 
 issue presented a 'startling statement' of extraordi- 
 nary procedure on the part of ' the dead body of the 
 late Mr. Southey.' The remains of the deceased 
 Laureate had while awaiting interment been lying at 
 the house of ' Murrian,' the publisher, and there Cole- 
 ridge, Wilson, Gifford, and company were holding a 
 solemn wake, all solaced by pipes and brandy, when 
 the deceased rose in his shroud aud pronounced a 
 scalding invective on Mr. William Smith, whose 
 calumny had followed and haunted him even beyond 
 the grave. This is the close of the oration : 
 
 ' How far the name of Southey will be immortal, time will 
 decide ; and I have no doubt, decide as he has done himself. 
 I shall not perish, that's certain — I shall have lives of me 
 " always prefixed to my works " and " transferred to literary 
 histories and to the biographical dictionaries, not only of this 
 but of all countries." It strikes me also that I shall be in all 
 accounts of eminent men, in indexes, catalogues, lists, references, 
 quotations, extracts, choice flowers, and other reminiscences of 
 infinite sorts, both here, hereafter and everywhere. There it 
 will be related, among other excellent traits, that I lived in the 
 bosom of my family (which of course nobody else does), and in 
 " absolute retirement " (which is a merit in me, though not in 
 others). . . . Therein it will be related of me that I grew older 
 as most people do, and altered my opinions as many (silly) 
 people do not. Finally, there it will be said that " in an age of 
 personality I abstained from all satire," with the small exception 
 of the instances mentioned ; and that the " only occasion on 
 which I condescended to reply ," instead of attack anonymously, 
 was when a certain Mister in Parliament — namely you, Mister 
 
 4—2 
 
52 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 William Smith — was base, mean, odious, foolish, peevish, 
 egotistical and atrocious enough to attack me openly.' 
 
 ' So saying, to the great apparent satisfaction of himself, and 
 relief of poor Murrian, the posthumous orator returned majesti- 
 cally to his bier, and adjusted his repose with a greater and 
 more Cesarean dignity than ever Liston did on a like occasion, 
 gave one look round him of mingled triumph and contempt, 
 and relapsed into his proper mortality. Peace be to his 
 shade !' 
 
 All these tempests are now passed — all these 
 phantoms are laid. Southey, the poet, has taken his 
 place among men of letters, and perhaps it is not a 
 foremost place. The critic who goes to his work to- 
 day finds many finished pictures, much brilliance of 
 colouring, infinite boldness and novelty of invention, 
 incomparable moral grandeur, and many sober beau- 
 ties of language and construction ; but the touchstone 
 of ultimate greatness he may not find. The highest 
 lyric gift was beyond Southey, but how few have 
 compassed it ? He dissipated his dexterity of hand ; 
 he attempted too many kinds of composition ; nor, 
 had he conservated his energies, would his genius have 
 lifted him to much loftier rank. But it is his poetry 
 alone that affords material for censure. His guerdon 
 of praise must be without suspicion of blame where 
 his life and character stand for judgment. His 
 personal purity was indeed the purity of Marcus 
 Cato, who was virtuous by the necessity of a happy 
 nature which could not be otherwise. 
 
 ' I dwell,' says Coleridge, ' with unabated pleasure 
 on the strong and sudden, yet I trust not fleeting, in- 
 fluence which my moral being underwent on my 
 acquaintance with him. . . As son, brother, hus- 
 
Southey. 5 3 
 
 band, father, master, friend, he is alike unostentatious 
 and exemplary.' It is possible to make too much of 
 a man's private character where his public behaviour 
 comes up for comment ; we resent such intrusion of 
 the inward on the domain of the outward life ; but 
 Southey was so frequently in his own day charged 
 with over-reaching ambition that an impartial critic 
 coming more than fifty years later cannot forbear to 
 quote, in repudiation of the charge, a portion of a 
 letter never meant for the public eye. When Sir 
 Robert Peel offered Southey a baronetcy, as an adorn- 
 ment of what he termed 'the greatest name in English 
 literature,' and eminent men in London urged him to 
 leave his solitude at the foot of Skiddaw, and live 
 among them, he wrote to a friend : 
 
 ' There is such a comfort in one's old coat and old 
 hoes, one's own chair and own fireside, one's own 
 writing-desk and own library — with a little girl climb- 
 ing to my neck and saying, " Don't go to London 
 papa ; you must stay with Edith" — and a little boy 
 whom I have taught to speak the language of cats, 
 dogs, cuckoos, jackdaws, etc., before he can articulate 
 a word of his own — there is such a comfort in all 
 these things that transportation to London seems a 
 harder punishment than any sins of mine deserve.' 
 
 Shall we not, indeed, drop the curtain gently on 
 such a scene ? 
 
COLERIDGE. 
 
 MUCH as we now admire the genius of this 
 writer, we are none of us amazed when we 
 learn that in his own time he was the subject of merci- 
 less lampoon, and the victim of malignant assault. 
 What had he in common with the many personi- 
 fications of pedantry and jealousy that walked the 
 earth in his day in the guise of learning and morality? 
 At his worst and their best — he was erratic, and they 
 were endowed with the amiable regularity of an^eight- 
 day clock. Coleridge never properly felt the solid 
 Earth beneath his feet ; he was, indeed, ' the reverse 
 of Antasus, and the contact of earth took all strength 
 out of him.' When he did tread the world of actuali- 
 ties, he was constantly caught in tangled brambles. 
 His realm was above the earth ; it was in the region 
 which an able writer has called 'Nowhere;' and 
 within that dreamland of mingled music and colour, 
 in which his genius lived, his sway was absolute. 
 But none the less on that account did the critics of 
 his period discharge at him and at it many por- 
 tentous volleys from the puny popgun of criticism. 
 
Coleridge. 55 
 
 The following passage, published in the Examiner 
 in 1816, denotes but too accurately the attitude ob- 
 served towards him by his contemporaries. 
 
 ' No man ever gave Mr. Coleridge a penny for his thoughts. 
 His are all maiden ideas : immaculate conceptions. . . . Each 
 several work exists only in the imagination of the author, and is 
 quite inaccessible to the understandings of his readers. . . . We 
 can give as good a guess at the design of his Lay-Sermon which 
 is not published as of the Friend, the Preliminary Articles 
 in the Courier, the Watchman, the Condones ad Populum. . . . 
 Let the experiment be tried, and if, on committing the manu- 
 script to the press, the author is caught in the fact of a single 
 intelligible passage, we will be answerable for Mr. Coleridge's 
 loss of character. . . . What is his Friend itself but an 
 enormous title-page ; the longest and most tiresome prospectus 
 ever written ; an endless preface to an imaginary work ; a 
 table of contents that fills the whole volume ; a huge bill of 
 fare of all possible subjects, with not an idea to be had for lov- 
 er money ? . . . Mr. Coleridge appears in the character of the 
 Unborn Doctor — the very Barmecide of knowledge — the 
 Prince of preparatory authors ! 
 
 ' He never is — but always to be wise. He is the Dog in the 
 Manger of literature, an intellectual Mar-Plot, who will neither 
 let anybody else come to a conclusion, nor come to one him- 
 self.' 
 
 ' His ideas seek to avoid, all contact with substances. In- 
 numerable evanescent thoughts dance before his sight, like 
 insects in the evening sun. Truth to him is a ceaseless round 
 of contradictions ; he lives in the belief of a perpetual lie ; and 
 in affecting to think what he pretends to say. His mind is in a 
 constant state of flux and reflux ; he is like the sea-horse in the 
 ocean ; he is the man in the Moon, the Wandering Jew. . . . 
 
 ' Mr. Shandy would have settled him — " You have little or no 
 nose, sir." . . . 
 
 ' His genius has angel's wings, but neither hands nor feet. . . . 
 His imagination thus becomes metaphysical, his metaphysics 
 fantastical, his wit heavy, his arguments light, his poetry prose, 
 his prose poetry, his politics turned— bat not to account' 
 
 The earliest notice of Coleridge which we can find 
 
56 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 appears in the Monthly Review for 1796, and the 
 entire text of it is as follows : 
 
 ' 2 Political Lectures. 
 
 This animated author tells us, in his preface, that these two 
 discourses were delivered in February, 1795. They are replete 
 with violent anti-ministerial declamation, but not vulgar.' 
 
 'Another Lecture. 
 
 " Ditto repeated," as our good friend Mr. Gallipot so often 
 expresses it, in his annual bill for Baume de Vie disguised, and 
 James's Powder under some other name.' 
 
 The above curt summary of the contents of these 
 lectures is at least as amusing as, and infinitely less 
 reprehensible than, the following on a similar subject 
 published in the Examiner twenty years later. 
 
 ' This Lay-Sermon (on the Distress) puts us in mind of 
 Mahomet's coffin which was suspended between heaven and 
 earcn, or of the flying island at Laputa, which hovered over the 
 head of Gulliver. Or it is like the descent of Cloven Tongues. . . . 
 
 ' This work is so obscure, that it has .been supposed to be 
 written in cypher, and that it is necessary to read it upwards and 
 downwards, or backwards and forwards, as it happens to make 
 head or tail of it. The effect is monstrously like the qualms 
 produced by the heaving of a ship becalmed at sea ; the motion 
 is so tedious, unprogressive and sickening.' 
 
 It is significant of the value of contemporary 
 criticism in the case of Coleridge that these of his 
 works which have not endured until now, met at the 
 outset with encomiastic comment ; and that only the 
 three or four works which last, and are likely to last, 
 met with critical mangling or the contempt of silence. 
 In 1796 Coleridge published, through Cottle of 
 Bristol, a small volume of juvenile pieces. The poems 
 were written in a laborious and florid diction ; indeed, 
 
Coleridge. 5 7 
 
 they were chiefly characterized by an utterly indis- 
 criminate use of elaborate and swelling language and 
 imagery. Yet the following are the terms in which 
 the Monthly Review noticed the publication. 
 
 ' Poets have been called maniacs, and their writings too 
 frequently justify the application of the degrading epithet. Too 
 long has the modern copied the ancient poet in decorating folly 
 with the elegant attractions of verse. It is time to enthrone 
 reason on the summit of Parnassus. Mr. Coleridge seems 
 solicitous to consecrate his noble lyre to truth, virtue, and 
 humanity.' 
 
 Coleridge speedily stepped beyond his effeminate 
 beginnings into a method of art a long way ahead of 
 his early efforts in simplicity and directness, but be- 
 fore he got quite quit of his early rhetoric, he wrote 
 a Sonnet satirical of his own verses, which is so 
 masterly and amusing in itself, and so unique as a 
 criticism of the literary faults it ridicules, that we 
 cannot forbear to find a place for it here. It was 
 published under the pseudonym of Nehemiah Higgin- 
 bothom, in the second number of the Monthly 
 Magazine. 
 
 'THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT. 
 
 ' And this reft house is that, the which he built, 
 Lamented Jack ! and here his malt he piled, 
 Cautious in vain ! these rats that squeak so wild, 
 Squeak not unconscious of their father's guilt. 
 Did he not see her gleaming through the glade ! 
 Belike 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn. 
 What though she milked no cow with crumpled horn, 
 Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she strayed : 
 
58 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight ! 
 Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, 
 And through those brogues, still tattered and betorn, 
 His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white. 
 Ah ! thus through broken clouds at night's high noon 
 Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon.' 
 
 Only two years after the date of the juvenile 
 volume, which we have seen so injudiciously praised, 
 appeared the first series of the ' Lyrical Ballads,' con- 
 taining, as Coleridge's contribution, ' The Rime of the 
 Ancyent Marinere,' yet we can find no direct review 
 of this poem in any of the foremost periodicals of the 
 day, although the Monthly Review and the Critical 
 Review allude to it. Occasional mention of the weird 
 supernaturalism of ' a certain wild creation,' known 
 by its name, is found at long intervals, coupled with 
 allusion to the political writer by whom it was 
 written. The following appears parenthetically in 
 the British Critic, in a review of a prose work by 
 Coleridge. 
 
 ' In his poetical compositions we own we see but little on 
 which it would be prudent to bestow unqualified commendation. 
 They exhibit few traces of fine feeling, and still fewer of correct 
 and polished taste ; wildness of imagination is the predominant 
 quality of his genius.' 
 
 Of such kind, were the allusions made to the 
 poems, of which the 'Ancient Mariner' was the 
 chief. Even Hazlitt could find nothing better to say 
 of the great work in question than that the moral 
 sentiment in it appeared to impair the imaginative 
 excellence. It is indeed a solid and enduring reply 
 to the asperity of the criticism (and the silence too) 
 of the critics of the time, that posterity has assigned 
 
Coleridge. 59 
 
 to that poem a place amongst the highest examples 
 of lyric art. It is not that the 'Ancient Mariner' 
 solves any ' problems ' of human life or destiny that 
 we value it. As a poet, Coleridge was too inconclu- 
 sive to attempt anything of that nature. He was too 
 purely a poet to be anything but irresponsible in the 
 exercise of his art. He had no care for moral 
 problems where poetry was his aim. He was haunted 
 by no spirit of didacticism. What his precise vision 
 of life is in his great sea-story, it is more than 
 meaningless to inquire. Be sure he hated at all 
 times, and as heartily as Keats, the poetry that has a 
 palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, 
 ' puts its hand in its trousers-pocket.' Not that the 
 'Ancient Mariner' exhibits any of 'the splendid in- 
 completeness ' with which Coleridge is constantly 
 charged ; it is a finished work of art, and if we would 
 find the soul of it, we must regard it as art, not 
 nature, or the masquerade of nature, and yield our- 
 selves to its charm. The mystery of it is then dis- 
 sipated, though in a higher sense it remains ; the 
 purpose of it is plain, yet hidden. We know all that 
 we need to know of how it came to be what it is. 
 
 The 'Ancient Mariner' is a poem of which (in 
 the experience of most of us) the first impression 
 dates back to those earliest years when the Bible 
 and the Pilgrim's Progress made up the whole body 
 of serious reading ; but if we could encounter it 
 first of all late in life, after the stream of more 
 modern literature had filtered into our minds, it 
 would probably seem to us like meeting for the first 
 
6o Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 time in person some great writer of whom we have 
 known much through his books. For just as in the 
 one case, many qualities of mind and heart which have 
 endeared the writer to us, find to our heightened sense 
 a kind of visible embodiment in the face, voice, gait 
 and gesture of the man in whose work we recognised 
 them ; so in the other, many exquisite and original 
 imaginative fantasies which we must have seen 
 wandering through uncertain channels, would find 
 their true place and fitting mission in the beautiful 
 and complete conception from which they were 
 borrowed. Many familiar lines of profound insight 
 would come upon us with a fine and startling sudden- 
 ness, and banish the regret that they had haunted us 
 as shadowy wraiths that could find no home until 
 they found one there. 
 
 When we said that the few works (in addition to 
 the ' Ancient Mariner ') which last, and are likely to 
 last, were mercilessly assailed by contemporary critics, 
 we had not in mind the tragedy entitled ' Remorse,' 
 though that was ridiculed on the ground of some 
 supposed metaphysical obscurity ; or yet the poems 
 called ' Sibylline Leaves,' though many of them were 
 laughed at for the opposite fault of infantine sim- 
 plicity. We were rather thinking of the rarely 
 beautiful and permanently good and noble poems, 
 ' Christabel ' and ' Kubla Khan.' 
 
 These are the terms in which the Edinburgh re- 
 viewed ' Christabel ' on its publication : 
 
 ' Upon the whole, we look upon this publication as one of the 
 most notable pieces of impertinence of which the press has lately- 
 been guilty ; and one of the boldest experiments that has yet 
 
Coleridge. 6 1 
 
 been made on the patience or understanding of the public. It 
 is impossible, however, to dismiss it without a remark or two. 
 The other publications of the Lake School have generally ex- 
 hibited talents thrown away upon subjects so mean that no 
 power of genius could ennoble them ; or perverted and rendered 
 useless by a false theory of poetical composition. But even in 
 the worst of them, if we except the " White Doe" of Mr. Words- 
 worth, and some of the laureate odes, there were always some 
 gleams of feeling or of fancy. But the thing now before us is 
 utterly destitute of value. It exhibits, from beginning to end, 
 not a ray of genius. . . . With the exception of one passage, 
 there is literally not one couplet in the publication before us 
 which would be reckoned poetry, or even sense, were it found in 
 the corner of a newspaper, or on the window of an inn. Must we 
 then be doomed to hear such a mixture of raving and drivelling 
 extolled as the work of a " wild and original" genius, simply be- 
 cause Mr. Coleridge has now and then written fine verses, and 
 a brother poet chooses, in his milder mood, to laud him from 
 courtesy or from interest ? Are such panegyrics to be echoed 
 by the mean tools of a political faction, because they relate to 
 one whose early prose is understood to be dedicated to the sup- 
 port of all that courtiers think should be supported ? If it be 
 true that the author has thus earned the patronage of those 
 liberal dispensers of bounty, we have no objection that they 
 should give him proper proofs of their gratitude ; but we cannot 
 help wishing — for his sake as well as our own — that they would 
 pay in solid pudding instead of empty praise, and adhere, at 
 least in this instance, to the good old system of rewarding their 
 champions with places and pensions, instead of puffing their 
 bad poetry, and endeavouring to cram their nonsense down the 
 throats of all the loyal and well-affected.' 
 
 The Edinburgh was not alone in its opinion. The 
 Anti-Jacobin (1816), said : 
 
 ' For our own part we confess the perusal of it has excited in 
 our minds nothing but astonishment and disgust ; we have dis- 
 covered in it wildness enough to confound common-sense. . . . 
 Any attempt to characterize such versification would be vain.' 
 
 The Examiner, in the same year, said : 
 
 ' Mr. Coleridge's style is essentially superficial, pretty, orna- 
 
62 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 mental, and he has forced it into the service of a story that is 
 petrific. . . . The author, uncertain of the approbation of his 
 readers, thinks he shows his superiority to it by shocking their 
 feelings at the outset, as a clown who is at a loss how to behave 
 himself begins by affronting the company. This is what is 
 called throwing a crust to the critics. . . . The conclusion of the 
 second part of "Christabel" is to us absolutely incompre- 
 hensible.' 
 
 The publisher (Murray) had advertised 'Christabel' 
 as a poem of which Lord Byron had somewhere 
 said : ' It is a singularly wild and beautiful creation.' 
 On this the Edinburgh had the following : 
 
 ' We are a little inclined to doubt the value of the praise which 
 one poet lends another. It seems nowadays to be the practice of 
 that once irritable race to laud each other without bounds ; and 
 one can hardly avoid suspecting that what is thus lavishly 
 advanced may be laid out with a view to being repaid with 
 interest. . . . 
 
 ' Much of the art of the wild writers consists in sudden transi- 
 tions — opening eagerly upon some topic, and then flying from 
 it immediately. This, indeed, is known to the medical men 
 who not unfrequently have the care of them, as an unerring 
 symptom.' 
 
 The peculiar metre of ' Christabel ' did not escape 
 comment. On this the Edinburgh said : 
 
 ' One word as to the metre of " Christabel," or, as Mr. Cole- 
 ridge terms it, " The Christabel "—happily enough ; for indeed 
 we doubt if the peculiar force of the definite article was ever 
 more strongly exemplified. He says, that though the reader may 
 fancy there prevails a great irregularity in the metre, some 
 lines being of four, others of twelve syllables, yet in reality it is 
 quite regular— only that it is founded on a new principle, namely 
 that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables.' We 
 say nothing of the monstrous assurance of any man coming 
 forward coolly at this time of day, and telling the reader of 
 English poetry, whose ear has been tuned to the lays of 
 Spenser, Milton, Dryden and Pope, that he makes his metre 
 
Coleridge. 63 
 
 ' on a new principle," but we utterly deny the truth of the asser- 
 tion, and defy him to show us any principle upon which the 
 lines can be conceived to tally. We give two or three speci- 
 mens, to confound at once this miserable piece of coxcombry 
 and shuffling.' 
 
 ' Christabel ' lay many years in manuscript before 
 
 its publication in 18 16 — the first part being written 
 
 in 1797, and the second part in 1800. In the interval, 
 
 the poem was read to nearly all the leading poets 
 
 of the age. Scott's friend Stoddart, among others, 
 
 heard it, and being (unluckily for Coleridge) endowed 
 
 with a remarkably retentive memory, he repeated the 
 
 poem, or part of it, to Scott. The result was that 
 
 Scott at once set about the writing of romantic 
 
 stories in octosyllabics with anapaestic variations. 
 
 Byron also imitated Coleridge in his substitution of 
 
 accentual for syllabic scansion. It had therefore 
 
 become necessary that Coleridge should establish 
 
 his right to be considered the originator, not the 
 
 copyist, of the innovated method. On the preface 
 
 in which he attempted to do this, the Anti-Jacobin 
 
 Review said : 
 
 ' Mr. Coleridge might have spared himself the trouble of anti- 
 cipating the charge of " plagiarism or of servile imitation ;" it is 
 a perfectly original composition, and the like of it is not to be 
 found in the English language. The metre of the poem, the 
 author gravely tells the public, "is not, properly speaking, 
 irregular, though it may seem so.'' ... If we were called upon 
 seriously to investigate this new principle, we could soon show 
 the folly of it ; but really, gravely to discuss so wretched a per- 
 formance is beneath the dignity of criticism.' 
 
 On the ' sublime inconclusiveness ' of ' Christabel,' 
 the same critic has the following : 
 
64 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ' Thus ends this poem — that is, all that is at present printed. 
 But in his preface the author threatens us with three more parts. 
 It is to be hoped, however, that he will think better of it, and 
 not attempt to put his threat into'execution. ... In truth, a more 
 senseless, absurd, and stupid composition has scarcely of late 
 years issued from the press. Yet it is not, we are surprised to 
 learn, a Jiasty composition ; the first part of it having been 
 written eighteen years, and the second, eight years ago ! (sic). 
 That a man, at any time when he had not his sober senses about 
 him, might commit such balderdash to paper is conceivable ; 
 but that after it had been thrown by for so many years, he 
 should calmly look over it, and deliberately resolve to give it to 
 the public, is scarcely credible !' 
 
 ' Kubla Khan ' fared scarcely better than ' Christa- 
 bel.' The Examiner said of it : 
 
 ' " Kubla Khan," we think, only shows that Mr. Coleridge can 
 write better nonsense verses than any man in England.' 
 
 The Edinburgh gave the following account of the 
 poem, and how it came to be written : 
 
 ' Mr. Coleridge was in bad health — the particular disease is 
 not given, but the careful reader will form his own conjectures. 
 He took an anodyne which threw him into a deep sleep in his 
 chair (whether after dinner or not he omits to state), "at the 
 moment that he was reading a sentence in Purchas's ' Pilgrims, 
 relative to a palace of Kubla Khan." The effects of the anodyne 
 and the sentence together were prodigious ; they produced the 
 "curiosity" now before us. ... The lines here given smell 
 strongly, it must be owned, of the anodyne.' 
 
 The Anti- Jacobin Reviciv, however, began to re- 
 lent, after disposing of the greater work : 
 
 ' These (" Kubla Khan " and " The Pains of Sleep ") have none 
 of the wildness and deformity of " Christabel," and though they 
 are not marked by any striking beauties, they are not wholly 
 discreditable to the author's talents.' 
 
 It is hard to believe that the ' Kubla Khan ' spoken 
 
Coleridge. 65 
 
 of in these articles is the poem of which a poet in our 
 
 day has said : 
 
 ' In reading it we seem rapt into that paradise revealed to 
 Swedenborg, where music and colour and perfume were one, 
 where you could hear the hues and see the harmonies of heaven. 
 For absolute melody and splendour it were hardly rash to call it 
 the first poem in the language.'* 
 
 It must surely be allowed that the adverse criticism 
 on ' Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' which is here quoted 
 is outside all tolerant treatment, whether of raillery 
 or of banter. It is difficult to attribute such false 
 verdict to pure and absolute ignorance. Even when 
 we make all due allowance for the prejudices of 
 critics whose only possible enthusiasm went out to 
 ' the pointed and fine propriety of Pope,' we can 
 hardly believe that the exquisite art which is among 
 the most valued of our possessions could encounter 
 so much garrulous abuse without the criminal inter- 
 vention of personal malignancy. He who chooses to 
 follow up the trace we indicate, in the periodical 
 literature of the period, will, we fear, find his re- 
 search but too well rewarded. The story of Jeffrey's 
 visit to Coleridge at Keswick, told in the ' Biographia 
 Literaria,' and in an initialed note to an article in 
 the Edinburgh for 18 17, and commented upon in 
 Blackwood of October, 18 17, will be found to serve 
 the purposes of the stern-lamp of a ship, which (as 
 Coleridge said of the uses of experience) casts its 
 light only on the path that is past. Perhaps, how- 
 ever, the lovers of this author can afford to believe 
 that possibly there was something in the aroma which 
 * Mr. Swinburne : ' Essays.' 
 
 5 
 
66 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 adhered to his few creations that was honestly 
 offensive to persons accustomed by long habit to in- 
 hale only the atmosphere that gathered about an 
 effete art, since dead and buried. Certainly there 
 were many indications in those early critiques that 
 the ' illustrious obscure ' who pronounced this poetry 
 mere raving and madness, the jingling of incoherent 
 words, expressive only of extravagance and incon- 
 gruity, must have pleaded guilty to the impeachment 
 of knowing little or nothing of so pure a thing as 
 genuine poetry. This is perhaps a hard judgment, 
 but it can easily be shown to be a just one. It cannot 
 be forgotten that the 'Edinburgh put Warton's 
 sonnets ahead of Milton's, and in a gratuitous 
 computation of relative poetic importance placed 
 Campbell, Rogers, Montgomery, and Crabbe before 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. What 
 wonder that such critics should think it fair treat- 
 ment to quote separate lines of a poem in support 
 of their petulant diatribes ? It can no longer be 
 accounted rash to say that each line of ' Christabel ' 
 is scarcely less than faultless, both in emotion and 
 metrical movement, when taken together with the 
 rest ; but the too transparent and altogether intoler- 
 able artifice of detaching single lines from the whole 
 body of the poem enabled critics to go the astound- 
 ing length of appearing to prove (incredible as it 
 sounds), that the witch Geraldine was intended to re- 
 present a man who had seduced Christabel, after 
 getting drunk with her. But this bears no further 
 comment, and admits of no citation. 
 
Coleridge. 67 
 
 More depreciatory, perhaps, if that be possible, 
 certainly more brutal, than the celebrated Edinburgh 
 article on the ' Biographia Literaria ' (attributed to 
 Hazlitt by his contemporaries, and claimed for him 
 by his biographer), was the review of the same book 
 that opened the second volume (Oct. 18 17) of Black- 
 wood. Having said that, considered merely in a 
 literary point of view, ' the work is most execrable/ 
 and that without benefiting the cause either of virtue, 
 knowledge, or religion, it exhibits many mournful 
 sacrifices of personal dignity, after which it seems 
 impossible that Mr. Coleridge can be greatly respected 
 either by the public or himself, the reviewer abandons 
 further restraint, and gives way to his unamiable im- 
 pulses in the following choice outburst : 
 
 ' It is impossible to read many pages of this work without 
 thinking that Mr. Coleridge conceives himself to be a far greater 
 man than the public is likely to admit ; and we wish to waken 
 him from what seems to us a most ludicrous delusion. He 
 seems to believe that every tongue is wagging in his praise- 
 that every ear is open to imbibe the oracular breathings of his 
 inspiration. Even when he would fain convince us that his soul 
 is wholly occupied with some other illustrious character, he 
 breaks out into laudatory exclamations concerning himself; no 
 sound is so sweet to him as that of his own voice ; the ground 
 is hallowed on which his footsteps tread, and there seems to 
 him something more than human in his very shadow. He will 
 lead no books that other people read ; his scorn is as misplaced 
 and extravagant as his admiration ; opinions that seem to tally 
 with his own wild ravings are holy and inspired, and, unless 
 agreeable to his creed, the wisdom of ages is folly ; and wits, 
 ■whom the world worship, are dwarfed when they approach his 
 -venerable side. His admiration of nature and of man, we had 
 almost said his religious feeling toward his God, are all narrowed, 
 •weakened and corrupted, and poisoned by inveterate and 
 diseased egotism ; and instead of his mind reflecting the beauty 
 
 5-2 
 
68 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 and glory of nalure, he seems to consider the mighty universe 
 itself as nothing better than a mirror in which, with a grinning 
 and idiot self-complacency, he may contemplate the physio- 
 gnomy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though he has done 
 nothing in any one department of human knowledge, yet he 
 speaks of his theories, and plans, and views, and discoveries, as 
 if he had produced some memorable revolution in science. He 
 at all times connects his name in poetry with Shakespeare, and 
 Spenser, and Milton ; in politics with Burke, and Fox, and Pitt ; 
 in metaphysics with Locke, and Hartley, and Berkeley, and Kant 
 — feeling himself not only to be worthy compeer of those illus- 
 trious spirits, but to unite, in his own mighty intellect, all the 
 glorious powers and faculties by which they were separately dis- 
 tinguished, as if his soul were endowed with all human power, 
 and was the depository of the aggregate, or rather the essence 
 of all human knowledge. So deplorable a delusion as this has 
 only been equalled by that of Joanna Southcote, who mistook a 
 complaint in the bowels for the divine afflatus, and believed her- 
 self about to give birth to the regenerator of the world, when sick 
 unto death of an incurable and loathsome disease.' 
 
 After the statement that though in London literary 
 society Mr. Coleridge is well known and admired 
 for his extraordinary loquacity — at least within a 
 little circle of admirers, whose foolish babbling he 
 mistakes for the voice of the world — it is remarked 
 (as proof of a higher intelligence existing north of the 
 Tweed, not as evidence of a lower culture in that 
 quarter) that in Scotland few people know or care 
 anything about him ; that few know how to spell or 
 pronounce his name, and that were he to drop from 
 the clouds in that northern region, he would find it 
 impossible to make any intelligent communication re- 
 specting himself; for of him and his writings there 
 would prevail only a perplexing dream, or the most 
 untroubled ignorance. Oblivious of the questionable 
 credit attaching to such boasting, the reviewer next 
 
Coleridge. 69 
 
 says that he cannot see that the state of literature 
 would have been different if Coleridge had been cut 
 off in his childhood, or had never been born, for he 
 has done nothing worthy remembrance, excepting 
 only a few wild and fantastical ballads which he has 
 scattered around him as sibylline leaves, with as 
 majestic an air as if a crowd of enthusiastic admirers 
 were rushing forward to grasp the divine promulga- 
 tions, ' instead of their being (as in fact they are) 
 coldly received by the accidental passenger, like a 
 lying lottery puff or a quack advertisement.' Then 
 follows a long statement of the principal events of 
 Coleridge's literary life, and this is throughout set in so 
 new a light that readers might easily fail to recognise 
 it. The statement in question leads up to the assur- 
 ance, advanced in the utmost confidence by the re- 
 viewer, that ' All good men, of all parties, regard Mr. 
 Coleridge with pity and contempt.' The story of the 
 visit to Klopstock is re-told with added humour, and 
 the story of the smoking at Birmingham is repeated 
 with subtracted decency. The writer can ' conceive 
 nothing more odious and brutal than two young igno- 
 rant lads from Cambridge forcing themselves upon 
 the retirement of this illustrious old man,' and instead 
 of listening with love, admiration and reverence to his 
 sentiments and opinions, ' insolently obtruding upon 
 him their own crude and mistaken fancies.' The 'folly 
 and insolence' of Wordsworth on this occasion are 
 especially provocative of the reviewer's wrath. As to 
 the meeting at the house of the 'Brummagem Patriot,' 
 it would appear that Mr. Coleridge ' got dead-drunk 
 
Jo Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 of strong ale and tobacco,' and in that pitiable state 
 was exposed, with all the " staring stupidity of his 
 lamentable condition,' to the derision of his disciples. 
 In the early part of this year (1817) the Examiner 
 published a letter signed ' Vindex,' which may be 
 understood to be a rejoinder to Coleridge's defence of 
 Southey in the ' Biographia Literaria.' 
 
 ' The author of the " Friend " is troubled at times and seasons 
 with a treacherous memory ; but perhaps he may remember a 
 visit to Bristol. He may remember (I allude to no confidential 
 whisperings, no unguarded private moments, but to facts of open 
 and ostentatious notoriety) — he may remember, publicly, before 
 several strangers, and in the midst of a public library, turning 
 into the most merciless ridicule "the dear Friend " whom he 
 now calls Southey the Philologist, " Southey the Historian," 
 Southey the Poet of Thalaba, the Madoc, and the Roderic. Mr. 
 Coleridge recited an ode of his dear Friend, in the hearing of 
 these persons, with a tone and manner of the most contemptu- 
 ous burlesque, and accused him of having stolen from Words- 
 worth images which he knew not how to use. Does he 
 remember that he also took down the "Joan of Arc," and recited) 
 in the same ridiculous tone (I do not mean his usual tone, but 
 one which he meant should be ridiculous), more than a page of 
 the poem, with the ironical comment, " This, gentlemen, is 
 poetry " f Does he remember that he then recited, by way of 
 contrast, some forty lines of his own contribution to the poem, 
 in his usual bombastic manner ? and that after this disgusting 
 display of egotism and malignity, he observed, " Poor fellow, he 
 may be a Reviewer, but Heaven bless the man if he thinks 
 himself a Poet " f 
 
 ' " Absentem qui rodit amicum 
 
 Hie niger est : hunc tu Romane caveto." ' 
 
 The assaults of criticism in Coleridge's case were 
 not confined in their range within the narrow limits 
 of his work. He could have borne to be told that his 
 poetry was ' intolerable balderdash,' and that his prose 
 
Coleridge. 7 1 
 
 was obscure to persons who (as Goethe says of all 
 such critics) might have found the plainest writing 
 illegible in the darkness of their own minds. But to 
 find flung in his face the brand of domestic infidelity, 
 carrying the shameful allegation that he had left 
 ' his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute,' 
 was more than he could always patiently endure. 
 ' If,' he says, ' it were worth while to mix together, as 
 ingredients, half of what I know to be true, con- 
 cerning the character, qualifications and motives of 
 our anonymous critics, whose decisions are oracles for 
 our reading public, I might safely borrow the words 
 of the apocryphal Daniel : " Give me leave and I will 
 slay this dragon without sword or staff;" for the com- 
 pound would be as " the pitch and fat and hair which 
 Daniel took and did seethe them togetJier, and make 
 lumps thereof, and put into tlie dragon's mouth, and so 
 the dragon burst in sunder ; and Daniel said, Lo, 
 THESE ARE THE GODS YE WORSHIP !" ' 
 
 The closing years of Coleridge's life were not 
 marked by any special effort. The celebrated 'Hazlitt' 
 review of the 'Biographia Literaria' (Edinburgh, 1817) 
 is too well known to require that extensive excerpts 
 should be made from it. We can perhaps content 
 ourselves with a passage which may be considered 
 representative of its general tone. This, then, is the 
 ' grasp of the powerful hand ' which, according to 
 Blackwood, had at an earlier date crumpled up the 
 poet's ' vile verses like so much waste paper.' 
 
 ' The cant of Morality, like the cant of Methodism, comes in 
 most naturally to close the scene ; and as the regenerated sinner 
 
72 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 keeps alive his old raptures and newly-acquired horrors, by anti- 
 cipating endless ecstasies or endless tortures in another world, 
 so our disappointed demagogue keeps up that "pleasurable 
 poetic fervour" which has been the cordial and the bane of his 
 existence, by indulging his maudlin egotism and his mawkish 
 spleen in fulsome eulogies of his own virtues and nauseous abuse 
 of his contemporaries — in making excuses for doing nothing 
 himself, and assigning bad motives for what others have done. 
 Till he can do something better, we would rather hear no more 
 of him.' 
 
 And they did hear no more of him, at all events 
 until 1834, when to the merited confusion of all 
 quacks in criticism, periodicals of every kind, daily, 
 weekly, monthly and quarterly, teemed — as they can 
 teem only once or twice in a hundred years — with 
 announcements of the death and records of the 
 career of one of the great writers of the century. 
 
 Nor were Blackwood and the Edinburgh ashamed 
 to join the chorus of applause. If it were worth 
 while to set over against the passages just quoted, 
 wherein reputable critics exhibit their contempt of 
 common justice, the rhapsodies of praise which were 
 afterwards poured forth on the same subject in the 
 same journals, such a contrast of the earlier and 
 later utterances would perhaps display their con- 
 tempt of common decency. Even when we make 
 all proper allowance for that change of conviction 
 which none of us consider reprehensible, and when 
 we remember that the conflicting opinions were in 
 many cases the products of different pens, we have 
 only shifted the point of our attack : we have only 
 added another to our list of the abuses that dis- 
 grace and endanger the principle of anonymity in 
 
Coleridge. 73 
 
 the press. That principle has retained its hold so 
 long from the humiliating circumstance that the 
 public memory is so short. On no other ground can 
 we account for the fact that a journal having any 
 pretensions to consistency of teaching can survive 
 the degradation of being obliged by force of public 
 opinion to publish under a single editorial regime, 
 and within a score of years, articles involving a 
 total reversal of its critical verdicts. We have seen 
 how in 1 8 17 Blackwood said Coleridge had done 
 nothing worthy of remembrance : what must we 
 say when we find that in allusion to the insufficient 
 recognition received by the poet at that and an 
 earlier period the same journal tells its public in 
 1834 that 'the poets themselves knew right well, 
 and so did almost all the poetical mind in England, 
 that there was not within the four seas a brighter 
 genius than Coleridge '? We have read what Black- 
 wood said in 1817 of the untroubled ignorance in 
 which the intelligent part of the world lay respect- 
 ing those wild and fantastic ballads, those sibylline 
 leaves, that were coldly received by the accidental 
 passenger like a lying lottery puff, or a quack adver- 
 tisement : what shall we think when in Blackwood 
 for 1834 we read that 'despite all the assaults of 
 malice,' the sweet, soft, still breath of praise, like that 
 of purest incense, arose from many a secret place, 
 where genius and sensibility abided ; and Coleridge, 
 amidst the simpers of the silly, and the laughter of 
 the light, and the scorn of the callous, and the 
 abuse of the brutal, and the blackguardism of the 
 
74 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 beggar-poor — received the laurel crown woven by the 
 hands of the best of his brother bards — and wore 
 it ever afterwards cheerfully, but without pride, round 
 his lofty forehead — and it was green as ever the day he 
 died '? We have heard what Blackwood said in 1817 
 of the extraordinary loquacity which helped Cole- 
 ridge, within the little circle of his babbling admirers, 
 to regard the mighty universe as itself nothing better 
 than a mirror in which to contemplate with a grinning 
 and idiot self-complacency his own physiognomy : 
 what shall we say when we read in Blackwood of 
 1834 that Coleridge 'alone perhaps of all men that 
 ever lived was always a poet— in all his moods, and 
 they were many, inspired ;' that his genius ' never 
 seemed to burn low, to need fuel or fanning ;' that 
 his waking thoughts had ' all the vividness of visions, 
 all the variousness of dreams ;' that his conversational 
 displays, ' spontaneous as breathing,' were the ' only 
 eloquence . . . ever heard that deserved the name '? 
 What in view of such contradictions shall we think and 
 say ? What indeed, but that the latter utterances, 
 equally with the earlier ones, are valueless, as the 
 opinion of a journal wherein private enmity in the 
 one case, and personal friendliness in the other, hid it- 
 self behind the mask of anonymous criticism ? It is no 
 part of the present purpose to set the adverse opinions 
 of Coleridge's genius which were published during the 
 poet's lifetime in contrast with the laudatory ones 
 which found expression after his death ; but in order 
 to see at their worst what Coleridge himself called 
 ' the Cerberean whelps of fury and slander,' we may 
 
Coleridge. 7 5 
 
 with profit glance at the volumes of the Edinburgh 
 for 1816 and 1835. We have already heard how in 
 the earlier year the journal in question pronounced 
 ' Christabel ' ' one of the most notable pieces of im- 
 pertinence of which the press has lately been guilty,' 
 a ' thing ' ' utterly destitute of value,' exhibiting ' from 
 beginning to end not a ray of genius.' Let those say 
 who are best masters of the recreant art of eating 
 their own words how it is possible to tolerate such 
 graceless penance as this, which appeared in the 
 Edinburgh for 1835 : 
 
 ' Coleridge learnt little from others, and brought out the prin- 
 ciples and elements of his compositions, both in prose and 
 poetry, from the stores of his own singular genius. . . . The 
 supernatural imagery of his ' Christabel,' for example, is some- 
 thing of a peculiar and exquisite cast, which stands unrivalled 
 in modern poetry. By the side of the mysterious Geraldine, the 
 familiar spirits of Scott and Byron seem as corporeal and robust 
 as the sturdy theatrical ghost which used to occupy the chair of 
 Banquo at Macbeth's haunted feast.' 
 
 Explanation — not, certainly, of the journalistic in- 
 consistency — but of the earlier and more insensate 
 attack, is readily obtainable. In the concluding 
 chapter of the ' Biographia Literaria,' Coleridge tells 
 us that during the many years which intervened 
 between the composition and the publication of 
 ' Christabel,' it became almost as well known among 
 literary men as if it had been on common sale ; the 
 same references were made to it, and the same liber- 
 ties were taken with it. ' Year after year,' he says, 
 ' and in societies of the most different kinds, I had 
 been entreated to recite it ; and the result was still 
 the same in all. . . . This was before publication. 
 
j 6 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 And since then,' he adds, ' with very few exceptions, 
 I have heard nothing but abuse, and this, too ; in a 
 spirit of bitterness at least as disproportionate to the 
 pretensions of the poem, had it been the most pitiably 
 below mediocrity, as the previous eulogies, and far 
 more inexplicable. In the Edinburgh Review it was 
 assailed with a malignity and a spirit of personal 
 hatred that ought to have injured only the work in 
 which such a tirade was suffered to appear ; and this 
 review was generally attributed (whether rightly or 
 not I know not) to a man, who both in my presence 
 and in my absence, has repeatedly pronounced it the 
 finest poem of its kind in the language.' Few readers 
 will doubt that the man here pointed at is the same 
 who was subsequently chosen to review in the same 
 quarter the ' Biographia Literaria' itself. If Cole- 
 ridge's conjecture .vere a good one as to the identity 
 of his critic, that person was one who at the beginning 
 of his career owed everything to the poet — one who 
 supported his attenuated intellect mainly on the crumbs 
 that fell from the great man's table, and who was 
 consequently chargeable not only with gross and pal- 
 pable insincerity, but with deliberate and shameless 
 lying and subornation. 
 
 Fortunately Coleridge himself was as little affected 
 as it was possible for man to be by these malignant 
 lampoons, which in their contempt of humanity and 
 even of decency were calculated to endanger the liberty 
 of the press. ' I can truly say,' he writes, ' that the 
 grief with which I read this rhapsody of predeter- 
 mined insult had the rhapsodist himself for its whole 
 
Coleridge. 7 7 
 
 and sole object, and that the indignant contempt 
 which it excited in me was as exclusively confined to 
 his employer/ 
 
 Two only of the many charges urged against Cole- 
 ridge during his lifetime deserve attention now. One 
 of them is of the nature of a personal accusation ; the 
 other concerns the poet's literary character alone. It 
 was, as we have seen, again and again remarked with 
 every variety of gibe, banter, and sneer, that Cole- 
 ridge, as a man, was an overweening egotist. He was 
 accused of connecting his own name in poetry with 
 the names of Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, and 
 of talking of himself as a philosopher, as if he were a 
 worthy compeer of Berkeley, Locke and Hartley. 
 That he observed a resemblance in his own eyes to 
 the eyes in the picture of Lessing, which he saw at 
 Klopstock's ; that he disputed the supremacy of 
 Goethe, and that he offered gratuitous and humiliating 
 advice to Tennyson, seemed to the writers of his time 
 and to some writers since then, to denote a condition 
 of mind which could only be described as morbid 
 egotism. Now, granted that a habit of self-reverence 
 is a mark of egotism, there remains the contention 
 that it is egotism of the most innocent description ; 
 and this is so even when that habit of self-reference 
 busies itself but little with what tends to humiliate the 
 spirit of the egotist, and occupies itself largely with 
 what distends his pride. Egotism as a metaphysical 
 disease is broadly divisible into two sorts of distemper; 
 the one wholly harmless and even sometimes salutary, 
 the other entirely baneful and often fatal. First, 
 
7 8 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 there is that principle of self-love which gives to every 
 person and thing its due place, and elevates itself by- 
 association with the highest ; and next, there is that 
 other principle of self-love which seeks to subordinate 
 everything to itself. The latter is by no means an 
 aggravated form of the former ; it will be seen to 
 be a distinct malady. 
 
 With the former kind of egotism Coleridge was 
 throughout chargeable. He shirked nothing of the 
 admiration proper to great work of whatever descrip- 
 tion, and he did not hesitate to couple his own doings 
 with the highest of their several kinds, even as he was 
 too true an artist to seek any model save the best. He 
 had that unsatisfied yearning after unattainable excel- 
 lence which belongs to the finest spirits, and he had also 
 that restful confidence in himself which is always a 
 part — even if sometimes an unconscious or concealed 
 part — of a great nature. Having passed the rubicon of 
 his own constant criticism, he knew his value, and did 
 not attempt to hide his sense of it. Thus far he was 
 indubitably an egotist ; but he was such an egotist as 
 Shakspeare was in his 55th sonnet ; as Michael Dray- 
 ton was in his ' Polyolbion ;' as Milton was in his 
 opening to the third book of ' Paradise Lost ;' as Pope 
 was in the ' Dunciad ;' as Burns was when he settled 
 his rank in his own mind, before the public had pro- 
 nounced in his favour ; as Wordsworth was in ignor- 
 ing present reputation, and writing with ' the light 
 of Heaven' upon him for posterity ; as Campbell- was 
 in writing so little 'from fear of the shadow' of his 
 own distinction ; as Keats was when he foretold the 
 
Coleridge. 79 
 
 certainty that he should take a place among English 
 poets. There is nothing baneful in the self-conscious- 
 ness of genius. Genius always is self-conscious. Those 
 who doubt that it is so usually tell us the story of the 
 two physicians who sat discussing the human system 
 in the presence of a burly farmer. On some moot-point 
 each had given the result of his personal experience 
 and observation, when their robust companion inter- 
 rupted them with a startling disclosure : ' For my part, 
 gentlemen, I have no system.' He had the best sys- 
 tem of them all. The highest physical health is cer- 
 tainly unconscious of itself; but not so the highest 
 intellectual power. The body cannot contemplate 
 itself : the mind can do so. That Coleridge knew his 
 own worth in the world is no impeachment of his 
 character if the annunciation of that knowledge was 
 not offensive. That other men mistake their place is 
 only a matter for ridicule, when the deplorable delusion 
 does in fact resemble that of the Joanna Southcote to 
 whom Blackwood likened Coleridge. 
 
 If Coleridge's personal claim was, in fact, as large as 
 his detractors represented, it has been more than justi- 
 fied by the tribute of the best minds of his own time 
 and later times. ' I am grieved,' writes Southey, 
 that you never met Coleridge ; all other men whom 
 I have ever known are mere children to him.' ' His 
 fancy and diction,' says Scott, ' would long ago 
 have placed him above all his contemporaries 
 had they been under the direction of a sound 
 judgment and a steady will.' ' He is,' said De 
 Quincey, ' the largest and most spacious intellect, 
 
80 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 the subtlest and most comprehensive that has yet 
 existed among men.' ' Impiety to Shakspeare !' cries 
 Landor touching this rhapsody of the Opium Eater ; 
 ' treason to Milton ! I give up all the rest, even 
 Bacon. Certainly, since their day we have had 
 nothing at all comparable to him. . Byron and Scott 
 were but as gunflints to a granite mountain ; Words- 
 worth has one angle of resemblance.' 
 
 By the other and more dangerous form of the 
 malady of the egotist Coleridge was assuredly un- 
 tainted. No diagnosis of the distemper can be better 
 than his own. In a preface to his poems he says, 
 ' There is one species of egotism which is truly 
 disgusting; not that which leads us to communicate 
 our feelings to others, but that which would reduce 
 the feelings of others to an identity with our own. 
 The atheist who exclaims, " Pshaw !" when he glances 
 his eye on the praises of the Deity, is an egotist ; an 
 old man, when he speaks contemptuously of love 
 verses, is an egotist.' This is the egotism with which 
 we are constantly rubbing shoulders in the walks 
 of daily life. It is that mental chorea of which 
 Emerson speaks, in which the patient continues to 
 spin round on one spot. We meet with it in the 
 railway trains, where some Dogberry who is in broad- 
 cloth blusters; we see it in the pulpit, where some 
 Malvolio who is not in cross-garters smirks ; we 
 encounter it in journalism, where some Nick Bottom 
 has not yet realized what change has come over him 
 since he was translated. It is not Coleridge's egotism, 
 but the egotism of his first critics. 
 
Cdleridge. 81 
 
 The heavy accusation which has been brought 
 against Coleridge's literary character, that of ob- 
 scurity, has an appearance of justice to recommend it. 
 A certain turgidness of diction with a profusion of 
 newly-coined double epithets did, as he allowed, cause 
 many passages of his best work in prose and verse 
 to acquire a degree of indefiniteness, which explained, 
 if it did not justify, Hazlitt's picture of Coleridge's 
 mind as ' a world of vapours, unhealthy, unsubstantial, 
 with gorgeous tints and ever-varying forms.' That 
 there is in some of Coleridge's best verses — the ' Hymn 
 before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni,' the ' Ode to 
 the Departing Year,' and the ' Ode to France ' — an 
 occasional cloud of smoke whose ' turbulence is not 
 grandeur,' no judicious lover of the poet will be 
 anxious to deny. It is easy for the imagination to 
 be led captive by the mere mistiness that surrounds 
 an uncertain object and magnifies it. Wordsworth 
 used to tell a story touching some lines by Campbell, 
 which he considered sheer nonsense, and nothing 
 more than a poetical indigestion. Once, at his house, 
 Professor Wilson having repeated the lines in question 
 with the emphasis of admiration, a sensible and 
 accomplished lady who happened to be present begged 
 him to explain to her their meaning. Wilson was 
 extremely angry, recited the lines again and declared 
 that they were splendid. ' Well, sir,' said the lady, 
 ' but what do they mean ? Dashing the book on the 
 floor, he exclaimed in his broad Scotch accent, ' I'll 
 be daumed if I can tell !' There are those of us who, 
 though far from resting under the suspicion of dis- 
 
 6 
 
82 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 loyalty to Coleridge, are in Professor Wilson's position 
 with respect to some of this poet's lines. But here 
 Coleridge is on common ground with every great 
 writer, and the proportion of his work which will not 
 yield a meaning in return for attention and sympathy 
 is probably as small in his case as in that of Milton, 
 or yet Shakspeare. Coleridge's own defence against 
 the accusation of obscurity is this : 
 
 ' An author is obscure when his conceptions are dim and im- 
 perfect, and his language incorrect or inappropriate, or involved. 
 A poem that abounds in allusions, like ' The Bard' of Gray, or 
 one that impersonates high and abstract truths, like Collins's 
 ' Ode on the Poetical Character,' claims not to be popular, but 
 should be acquitted of obscurity. The deficiency is in the reader. 
 But this is a charge which every poet, whose imagination is 
 warm and rapid, must expect from his contemporaries. Milton 
 did not escape it ; and it was adduced with virulence against 
 Gray and Collins. "We now hear no more of it ; not that their 
 poems are better understood at present than they were at their 
 first publication ; but their fame is established, and a critic 
 would accuse himself of frigidity or inattention who should pro- 
 fess not to understand them.' 
 
 Perhaps a better form of defence was shadowed 
 forth in the opening pages of the ' Biographia Lite- 
 raria,' where the poet says that satisfied as he had 
 been that the thoughts, such as they were, could not 
 have been expressed otherwise, or at least more per- 
 spicuously, he forgot to inquire whether the thoughts 
 themselves did not demand a degree of attention un- 
 suitable to the nature and objects of poetry. This 
 no doubt touches the right trace where any alleged 
 obscurity of Coleridge's poetry is in question. The 
 theses and terms that are applicable to practical 
 chemistiy would probably be found impenetrably 
 
Coleridge. 83 
 
 obscure in practical mechanics. In his ' Religious 
 Musings,' and ' Fears in Solitude,' Coleridge perhaps 
 made the mistake of a wrong choice of subjects for 
 poetic treatment, of ' desiring to give a poetic colour- 
 ing to abstract and metaphysical truths/ and a 
 measure of obscurity was the inevitable result of the 
 error. 
 
 With the yet heavier accusation against Coleridge 
 of literary plagiarism it is not within our purpose to 
 deal. The charge was made after the poet's death, 
 and that alone puts it beyond our province. But 
 neither De Quincey, who advanced it, nor Julius 
 Hare, who replied to it, could say much more or 
 much less as to the nature or extent of the appropria- 
 tions in dispute than Coleridge himself had said in 
 anticipation of one of the many items in the sub- 
 sequent indictment : 
 
 ' For readers in general,' he says, ' let whatever shall be 
 found in this or any future work of mine that resembles or co- 
 incides with the doctrine of my German predecessor, though 
 contemporary, be wholly attributed to him, provided that the 
 absence of direct reference to his books, which I could not at 
 all times make with truth, as designating citations or thoughts 
 actually derived from him, and which I trust would, after this 
 general acknowledgment, be superfluous, be not charged on me 
 as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism.' 
 
 When all is said that can be said about Coleridge's 
 literary obligations and the acknowledgment of them, 
 there remain the facts that thought is not traditional, 
 and that what Coleridge took from Milton, from Klop- 
 stock, from Goethe, and from Schelling, is less than 
 any of these had taken — less than he himself took — 
 from Homer, and Bacon, and Shakspeare. 
 
 6—2 
 
84 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 Coleridge cannot be said to have founded a school, 
 either in poetry or in philosophy. Nevertheless, he 
 must have been of all men one of the most magnetic 
 and awakening. He has left a great following. It 
 may reasonably be questioned if his influence on the 
 thought of our own time is second to that of any man 
 whatever. He lived a twofold intellectual life. His 
 was, in its best and happiest moments, a bright and 
 beautiful genius, though it got too often hidden away 
 among the mazes of more mysticism than his age 
 could master. 
 
 Why did he produce so little ? Was it, as Southey 
 said, because his powers were palsied by a total want 
 of moral strength that he left nothing to justify to 
 the world the opinions of the friends who shrank not 
 from linking his name with the greatest names in the 
 literature ? Scott likened him to a lump of coal, rich 
 in gas, which lay expending itself in puffs and gleams, 
 and no shrewd body could clap it into a cast-iron box, 
 and compel the compressed element to do itself 
 justice. Why was the sweet singer silent save for six 
 out of sixty years ? We know not — perhaps, as a 
 critic in Blackwood of 1834 truly said, it is far better 
 for us we do not know — what is happening in one 
 another's hearts. Perhaps Coleridge was not ambitious ; 
 perhaps despondency too often dimmed the visions 
 that passed before him. Beginning to write about 
 1795, he ceased for practical purposes when the 
 literary life was published in 18 16. What stayed his 
 hand we cannot say in a word or two, but surely 
 there is nothing in poetry more profoundly affecting 
 
Coleridge. 85 
 
 than those lines written in 1827, in which, as an old 
 man, he looks back on the opportunities that are lost 
 to him with the youth that is lost : in which he seems 
 to see from afar, and as from a high mountain, the 
 land of promise he may never enter. 
 
 WORK WITHOUT HOPE. 
 All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair — 
 The bees are stirring — birds are on the wing — 
 And Winter, slumbering in the open air, 
 Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring ! 
 And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, 
 Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. 
 
 Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, 
 Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. 
 Bloom, O ye amaranths ! bloom for whom ye may, 
 For me ye bloom not ! Glide, rich streams, away ! 
 With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll ; 
 And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ? 
 Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, 
 And Hope without an object cannot live. 
 
 Not with lips unbrightened or with wreathless 
 brow, nevertheless. Solemn and terrible, indeed, is 
 the reflection— serving to show that labour is in truth 
 the law of life — that for every nearest duty which we 
 permit to fall aside neglected, some power goes from 
 us of performing whatever duties remain, until in the 
 end, whether we be the least or the greatest of 
 mortals, there may have fallen from our graspless 
 hand every task and every opportunity, until life may 
 have lost its work, and work its hope, and hope its 
 object, and we stand, under the Great Taskmaster's 
 eye, weighed down with the burden of the talents we 
 can no longer use. 
 
 What was said in an earlier chapter on the philo- 
 
86 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 sophy of the antagonistic relations of Wordsworth and 
 his first critics, is broadly applicable to Coleridge and 
 his critics also. There is a noteworthy point of 
 difference, nevertheless. The head and front of Cole- 
 ridge's offending against received canons of taste in 
 poetry, was a much deeper thing than a change of 
 expressional medium. It concerned his imaginative 
 faculty. The workings of Wordsworth's imagination 
 were in much closer accord with accepted ideas as to 
 the functions of the imagination than was the case 
 with Coleridge. Perhaps Wordsworth was not in the 
 strictest and highest sense an imaginative poet at all, 
 though, as a critic* has said, his magnificent image of 
 Time and Death under the yew-tree is worthy of any 
 imaginative poet whatever. Imagination is a thing 
 almost wholly self-inclusive : primarily it goes to 
 work upon itself. Now Wordsworth's mind never 
 went to work on its own vision. Sir Henry Taylor 
 has well observed that the mind of this poet required 
 always an impulse from without to send it far into 
 regions of thought. In all this, Wordsworth was at 
 one with Pope and the poets of the school preceding 
 his own, but he was wholly in antagonism with Cole- 
 ridge, than whom no poet, perhaps, since Shakespeare 
 possessed so much purely imaginative ardour, or was 
 so little dependent for his effects upon the sensuous 
 promptings of eye and ear. Well, as a result of the 
 exercise of his self-inclusive imaginative faculty, Cole- 
 ridge produced works which were in the full sense of 
 the word creations. Nothing like the 'Ancient 
 
 * Athenaum, May 27, 1882. 
 
Coleridge. 8 J 
 
 Mariner,' ' Christabel ' and ' Kubla Khan ' had existed 
 before them. They were sheer mid-day poetic 
 witchery. They could be judged by no rules except 
 such as they formulated for themselves. They sprang 
 forth obedient to no accepted laws of inception . 
 What wonder that, with so little that was in harmony 
 with known and prescribed taste, they seemed to those 
 who first read them to run riot in a lawless freedom. 
 Nevertheless, we now perceive that the 'wild and 
 original ' genius that produced them was submissive 
 to an instinct as unyieldingly exact as that which gave 
 unity, harmony, and naturalness to the ' wood-notes 
 wild ' of Shakespeare himself. It is instructive to 
 witness the difficulty critics found in recognising this 
 fact. It may be said to be the greatest fact of all in 
 the development of what is called the neo-romantic 
 movement. 
 
THE SATANIC SCHOOL.' 
 
BYRON. 
 
 ALTHOUGH Byron is hardly more than half 
 a century dead, it is scarcely possible that 
 we can know what he was to his contempo- 
 raries. We could as easily guess what Goethe was 
 to the youth of his ' Werther ' days ; or Schiller to 
 the Leipsic students, who were fired by the spirit of 
 revolt in his ' Robbers.' Perhaps it is as well that this 
 is so — as well that half a century should have re- 
 moved all personal encrustations, leaving only the 
 rift of the ore of poetry to be weighed out as the 
 poet's guerdon of praise and blame. Yet it seems 
 difficult even at this distance of time to mark out 
 Byron's place in literature without regard for his 
 private history : so much of all he wrote is wrapped 
 up with the brief, brilliant, unhappy life he lived. 
 
 Perhaps, therefore, it was by the exercise of that in- 
 genuity which spends itself in classification (ingenuity 
 that too frequently yields delight, not so much by any 
 direct discovery, as by skill in surmounting collateral 
 difficulties that had better never been overcome) that 
 
92 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 Macaulay assigned definite rank to Byron in these 
 terms : 
 
 ' He belonged half to the old and half to the new school of 
 poetry. His personal taste led him to the former ; his thirst of 
 praise to the latter ; his talents were equally suited to both. . . . 
 Lord Byron was the mediator between two generations, between 
 two hostile poetical sects. Though always sneering at Mr. 
 Wordsworth, he was yet, though perhaps unconsciously, the 
 interpreter between Mr. Wordsworth and the multitude. . . . 
 Lord Byron founded what may be called an exoteric Lake 
 School. What Mr. Wordsworth had said like a recluse, Lord 
 Byron said like a man of the world, with less profound feeling, 
 but with more perspicuity, energy, and conciseness.' 
 
 Few readers will find it hard to disturb Macaulay 's 
 theory. If Byron's taste led him to the old school of 
 poetry, his ambition must have approved its impulse, 
 for out of the ' pointed and fine propriety of Pope ' 
 was formulated the leading canon of taste in his day. 
 If thirst of praise inclined the poet to the new school 
 of poetry, what possible assurance could he have of 
 its ever being gratified in his lifetime ? Wordsworth 
 was the most unpopular of all poets, and toiled daily, 
 as Byron could never have toiled, on a work which he 
 knew must be ridiculed, and which he knew must be 
 immortal. If Byron was the mediator between two 
 hostile poetical sects, and the interpreter (however 
 unconsciously) of Wordsworth to the multitude, how 
 did it come about that there never was any tangible 
 sympathy between the men themselves, who surely 
 (in amiable moments at least) might have been ex- 
 pected to guess at their affinity ? Wordsworth pro- 
 bably thought Byron the evil power incarnate, and 
 Byron brought his whole soul to the task of retorting 
 sneer for sneer. If the secret of Byron's early popu- 
 
Byron. 93 
 
 larity lay in his art of saying as a man of the world 
 what Wordsworth said as a recluse, how is it that 
 Byron's popularity has not lasted in all its first 
 splendour until now, when perspicuity, energy, and 
 conciseness are (as they always have been) more in 
 requisition than profound feeling? Byron's genius 
 refuses to be classified. It is because his poetry is 
 wrapped up. with his life, that we cannot consider the 
 one without reference to the other. And Byron 
 must suffer by this thrusting together of inimical 
 elements, for now they are inimical. The enthusiasm 
 has gone out of our estimate of his character : we 
 weep no longer with his wrongs, burn no longer with 
 his loves, and no longer know the sway of his gloomy 
 egotism. The misanthropic colouring with which he 
 invested all his imaginary heroes — Harold, Conrad, 
 Lara, Giaour — has lost much of its serpentine fasci- 
 nation. We now follow Byron no more into those 
 darkest coverts that he inhabits on the ' night-side ' 
 of human nature ; nor are we thrilled by the dimmed 
 lustre of his feverish passion. Nay, already we are 
 not a little weary of his irrepressible self-reference ; 
 weary of his egotism, weary of his querulousness, of 
 his unconscious masquerade, of his sincere despair. 
 And signs are not wanting that we are apt to under- 
 value the poetry as the consequence of this altered 
 attitude towards the man. Byron must suffer, as we 
 say, by this thrusting together of his work and the 
 dead shadow of his life. 
 
 It was not a sceptre of straw that Byron wielded, 
 though his rule was aided by a vague personal 
 
94 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 despotism. Yet, in order to determine how far he 
 was wronged by his critics, we must consider both the 
 poetry and the poet. 
 
 He sprang from an ancient and noble house, im- 
 poverished by the notorious excesses of his ancestors. 
 Like his own Lara, he was 
 
 • Left by his sire, too young such loss to know, 
 Lord of himself, — that heritage of woe.' 
 
 The unpropitious environments into which he was 
 
 born led him — even while still a boy — into dreamy 
 
 self-communion, and his was a nature that a habit of 
 
 introspection did not suit. Genius alone, when it is 
 
 such as his, too often saddens the days of its wayward 
 
 heirs. His first book, ' Poems on Various Occasions,' 
 
 afterwards known as 'Hours of Idleness' (1807), 
 
 feeble enough in most respects, was lashed with a 
 
 severity which no juvenile performance could entirely 
 
 deserve. This is a part of the text of the celebrated 
 
 review published in the Edinburgh in 1808 : 
 
 ' The poesy of this young lord belongs to the class which 
 neither gods nor men are said to permit. . . . His effusions are 
 spread over a dead flat, and can no more get above or below 
 the level than if they were so much stagnant water. As an 
 extenuation of this offence, the noble author is peculiarly for- 
 ward in pleading minority. We have it in the title-page and 
 on the very back of the volume ; it follows his name like a 
 favourite part of his style. . . . Now the law on the point of 
 minority we hold to be perfectly clear. It is a plea available 
 only to the defendant ; no plaintiff can offer it as a supple- 
 mentary ground of action. Thus, if any suit could be brought 
 against Lord Byron, for the purpose of compelling him to put 
 into court a certain quantity of poetry ; and if judgment were 
 given against him, it is highly probable that an exception would 
 be taken, were he to deliver for poetry the contents of this 
 volume. To this he might plead minority; but as he now 
 
Byron. 95 
 
 makes voluntary tender of the article, he : hath no right to sue 
 on that ground for the price in good current praise, should the 
 goods be unmarketable. . . . Perhaps, however, in reality all 
 that he tells us about his youth, is rather with a view to increase 
 our wonder than to soften our censures. He possibly means to 
 say, " See how a minor can write ! This poem was actually 
 composed by a young man of eighteen, and this by one of only 
 sixteen !' But, alas, we all remember the poetry of Cowley at 
 ten and Pope at twelve. . . . He takes care to remember us of 
 Dr. Johnson's saying, that when a nobleman appears as an 
 , author, his merit should be handsomely rewarded. In truth it 
 is this consideration only that induces us to give Lord Byron's 
 poems a place in our review, beside our desire to counsel him, 
 that he do forthwith abandon poetry, and turn his talents, which 
 are considerable, and his opportunities, which are great, to 
 better account. . . . 
 
 ' But whatever judgment may be passed on the poems of this 
 noble minor, it seems we must take them as we find them, and 
 be content ; for they are the last we shall ever have from him. 
 . . . Therefore let us take what we get and be thankful. What 
 right have we poor devils to be nice ? We are well off to have 
 got so much from a man of this lord's station, who does not live 
 in a garret, but " has the sway " of Newstead Abbey. Again, 
 we say, let us be thankful ; and with honest Sancho, bid God 
 bless the giver, nor look the gift horse in the mouth.' 
 
 Mr. J. C. Jeaffreson's theory ('The Real Lord Byron ') 
 that though the blow dealt at Byron in this article 
 came from Edinburgh, the impulse of the blow came 
 from Cambridge, where the poet was then residing, is 
 ingenious. But Jeffrey's well-known repudiation of the 
 authorship, taken together with the graphic, amusing 
 and curiously learned exposition in the article itself, 
 of ' the law on the point of morality,' are surely suffi- 
 cient to criminate ' that venomous reptile Brougham 
 whom Byron, years later, declared to be his ' only hate. 
 
 The article, as a whole, was a piece of compara- 
 tively harmless banter, not characterized by more 
 
96 Cobwebs of Criticism, 
 
 poetic insight than usually distinguished the periodical 
 in which it appeared, and incomparably less heartless 
 than many such on Wordsworth and Southey that 
 had preceded it, and on Coleridge that succeeded it. 
 But the young peer was wounded to the quick. Did 
 he ' break a bloodvessel '? No ; he ' sat down, drank 
 three bottles of claret,' and proceeded to take his 
 ' revenge in keen iambics.'* Perhaps it is im- 
 possible to say, without consideration of each indi- 
 vidual case, in what spirit adverse criticism ought to 
 be received. Some men lose by combativeness : some 
 gain by it; Byron was one of the latter. The 
 ' English Bards and Scotch Reviewers ' contained but 
 little poetry ; on the other hand, it contained much 
 arrogant reprobation of excellent men, and mani- 
 fested both in the body of the satire and in the patch- 
 work notes so much insensibility to indisputable merit 
 that much of the effect of its few just and spirited 
 strictures was lost. But it asserted once for all the 
 inextinguishable entity of its author. True, indeed, 
 some critics regarded the satirist (whose name was at 
 first left for whispers and conjectures — the little work 
 being issued anonymously) rather less as an indignant 
 censor than as a petulant schoolboy smarting almost 
 
 * Not the least interesting of Mr. Jeaffreson's statements is 
 that the ' English Bards ' was practically begun before the 
 publication of the offensive Edinburgh article. Moore gives an 
 extract from a letter written by Byron in 1807, in which refe- 
 rence is made to such a poem as being about to appear. This 
 indefinite document was the ground of Moore's conjecture that 
 the satire was conceived before the personal occasion for it had 
 arisen; buttfMr. Jeaffreson has seen Byronic papers which 
 settle the matter conclusively. 
 
Byron. 97 
 
 to madness with his flagellation, 'blind with rage and 
 anguish, and dealing out his indiscriminate revenge 
 in kicks and blows preposterously excessive in malice 
 and deficient in power.' This is what the Eclectic 
 Review (1809) has about it : 
 
 'The world is said to be indebted for this effusion of " the 
 milk of human kindness " to no less a personage than a certain 
 Lord Byron, on no less an occasion than the discipline bestowed 
 on the said lord for certain " Hours of Idleness" by the Busby 
 hands of the Edinburgh Reviewers. This is just as it should 
 be. For equitable discrimination, for devotedness to truth, for 
 gentlemanly (deportment, and the genuine Christian spirit of 
 candour, amenity, forgiveness of injuries, and reluctance to 
 inflict pain, the combatants are pretty fairly matched. The 
 literary canaille will gaze on this game-cock spectacle with a 
 delight which happily need not be diminished by any compunc- 
 tion for the cause, or apprehension for the consequences. If, 
 however, the noble lord and the learned advocate have the 
 courage requisite to sustain their mutual insults, we shall pro- 
 bably soon hear the explosion of another kind of fiafter-vtzx 
 after the fashion of the ever memorable duel which the latter is 
 said to have fought, or seemed to fight, with " Little Moore." 
 . . . The utmost we can promise the noble lord is, that his wrath 
 will be very entertaining to the public for several weeks to 
 come ; by the end of that period, the same public will perhaps 
 be called upon to deplore his fall in the field of honour, and it 
 may be our melancholy office to criticize elegies on his untimely 
 fate.' 
 
 Byron had taken his revenge ; he had turned the 
 weapons of spleen against the just as well as the 
 unjust ; he had (however unworthily) obtained his 
 individual niche in the world of letters ; yet, when all 
 was over, he could not persuade himself that the 
 great world itself was not filled with persons who 
 rejoiced in the insults that had been offered him. So, 
 sucking the eggs of melancholy which his own heart 
 had produced, he left his home and travelled in 
 
9 8 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 Greece. For three years England was permitted to 
 forget him ; but then came a spasmodic outburst of his 
 muse. In 1 8 1 2 he published the first and second cantos 
 of the ' Pilgrimage of Childe Harold.' The poem was 
 received everywhere with delight ; before its publica- 
 tion it was handed about the London drawing-rooms 
 in advance sheets, and when it appeared, the daily, 
 weekly, monthly, and quarterly publications teemed 
 with its praises. The Edinburgh four years previously 
 had counselled Byron to abandon poetry and turn 
 his talents to better account ; but even the northern 
 critics could resist neither the impetuous passion of 
 the poem, nor the social rage the poet generated. At 
 the cost of eating their own words, they wrote : 
 
 ' Lord Byron has improved marvellously since his last ap- 
 pearance at our tribunal : and this, though it bears a very 
 affected title, is really a volume of very considerable power, 
 spirit and originality — which not only atones for the evil work 
 of his nonage, but gives promise of a further excellence here- 
 after ; to which it is quite comfortable to look forward. . . . 
 The descriptions are often exceedingly good, and the diction, 
 though unequal and frequently faulty, has on the whole a free- 
 dom, copiousness, and vigour which we are'not sure that we 
 could match in any contemporary poet.' 
 
 We know that there was great poetry in the poem, 
 but the secret of its electrical popularity lay else- 
 where than in its just poetic pretensions. Its first 
 and most obvious attraction lay in the story of travel 
 which it embodied. Few books were then so ex- 
 tensively and eagerly read as those which contained 
 narratives of adventure ; and if such works were 
 popular when written in unimaginative prose, now 
 much more fascinating must they have seemed 
 
Byron. 99 
 
 when heightened for the first time by the fervour of 
 verse ? Next, the poem made revolt against canons 
 of morality and religion, long held sacred among 
 men ; and at the time of its publication there was a 
 growing appetite for such rebellion, and an increasing 
 relish for turbulent emotion. Lastly, the poem was 
 clearly informed throughout with the personality of 
 the poet, whose individual character was ever present, 
 and whose voice was heard in its pages — sometimes 
 joyously, brightly, cheerily; sometimes sarcastically, 
 brutally, insensately; sometimes pathetically, sadly, 
 wearily, despairingly. Lord Byron told the world in 
 the opening stanzas of this work, which bore every sign 
 of being autobiographical, that in pique or despair at 
 finding himself rejected by a young lady on whose 
 love he had set his hopes, he had filled his country- 
 house with abandoned women, and spent some time 
 with them in every kind of voluptuous excess. Other 
 poets had conceived such states of feeling and had 
 projected them dramatically into scenes wherein they 
 themselves played no part ; but Byron's personality 
 was hidden behind no veil of the dramatic creator ; 
 his genius fell far short of such objective exercise; 
 and his thirst for notoriety inclined him always to 
 purely subjective utterance. Then was there not ever 
 moaning through all his song in every strain the sad 
 burden of a soul sated of life and all the living ? And 
 when in his loneliest moods he poured forth his 
 hymns to despair, his dirges over happiness, were not 
 the thrilling accents felt by every reader not as sorrows 
 mouthed to the multitude from the housetops, but as 
 
 7—2 
 
ioo Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 secrets whispered to the ear in the confidence and 
 solitude of friendship ? What wonder that one who 
 stormed so many hidden fortresses of delicious pride 
 should find himself at twenty-four years of age lifted 
 to a dazzling eminence of poetic supremacy with 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other incomparably truer 
 poets, at his feet ? 
 
 Byron had returned to England, and his actual 
 personality had heightened the interest felt in his 
 poetry. Men had never quite accepted the necessity 
 that their laureate should live amid the mountains of 
 Cumberland, clad in a duffle-cloak which concealed 
 a coat almost as old-fashioned as the periwigs of their 
 grandfathers. Their poet-hero had need to be a man 
 like unto themselves ; and Byron brought them more 
 than all the splendour of a peer, and some of the 
 courtliness of a Plantagenet. With a face where 
 youth, beauty, birth, and genius strove together, 
 where the auburn ringlets and arched eyebrows 
 matched with the light, lustrous eyes, he was indeed 
 a man to take captive in those days the love of lovely 
 women and command the homage of honoured men. 
 And Byron knew his power, and used it. He had 
 laughed at morality, yet the Monthly Review fondled 
 him ; he had slandered the Tories, yet the Quarterly 
 continued to cherish admiration for him; he had 
 nourished a private resentment against Jeffrey, yet 
 the Edinburgh accepted with scarcely a word the 
 immeasurable fury of his castigation, and retorted 
 only with the magnificent hope that it was in his 
 power to build up a work which should ' endure (with 
 
Byron. 101 
 
 the Lears, Macbeths, and Othellos) among the most 
 august fabrics of the genius of England.' Lastly, he 
 had reviled religion, yet the puritan Blackwood said 
 his work had exhibited 'our fallen nature in near 
 approximation to the glories of its ultimate destiny.' 
 Everything was, indeed, to be forgiven to the idol 
 of the hour. Encouraged by such delusive worship, 
 he prosecuted his self-made species of moral anatomy : 
 he probed his nature for further depths of misan- 
 thropy, further dregs of licentiousness. 
 
 It is not too much to say that the character of 
 Lord Byron, though untainted by the baser vices 
 attributed to it during the poet's lifetime, consisted of 
 a mass of miserable weaknesses and transparent affec- 
 tations, relieved by certain amiable traits and some 
 generous impulses. That one of these affectations 
 was the affectation of athletics is not so much a 
 matter for surprise or subject for contempt in Byron's 
 case as in the case of those men of letters who 
 (without that physical infirmity which perpetually 
 reminded him of one great disadvantage at which he 
 stood towards other men, and without that personal 
 pride which goaded him into a futile assertion of 
 thews and sinews he did not possess) are yet con- 
 stantly following him in a silly pretension to athletic 
 pleasures which are as foreign to their natural func- 
 tions as they were impossible to Byron's powers. 
 But that the personal disfigurement which only a 
 miserable drunken woman at the Old Bailey could 
 mimic, or Byron's coarser assailants in the press could 
 sneer at, should of itself give rise, however indirectly, 
 
102 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 to an affectation of abstemiousness, is a good deal less 
 explicable and a good deal more odious. 
 
 Campbell, who did not usually spare Byron in any 
 particular, was especially abusive of his affectation 
 and pretence as to food. He used to say that the first 
 time he dined with the poet was at Rogers's, where 
 Byron would condescend to eat nothing but vegetables 
 and drink nothing but water. Campbell attributed this 
 behaviour merely to a silly desire on Byron's part to be 
 talked about. After the party broke up he happened to 
 go into the Thatched House Tavern, and whom should 
 he see there but my lord, eating a hearty supper of solid 
 meat and drinking a bottle of claret. ' I was dis- 
 gusted,' said Campbell, ' by his affectation, and took 
 care to speak to him, in order that he might see that 
 I knew what an impostor he was.' This story may 
 be a true one, and yet it hardly follows that Byron 
 must perforce have been in this particular the im- 
 postor that Campbell thought him. It is but too 
 well known that there constantly co-exists with an 
 honest effort after abstemiousness a perpetual and 
 incurable craving. This can often be conquered in 
 society, though in solitude it asserts its sway; and 
 there is nothing in the Campbell story which forbids 
 the assumption that after a period in which Byron 
 had succeeded in crucifying the craving of his too 
 abundant flesh, the reaction had at length found vent 
 without affectation and without pretence, in the manner 
 described. It is hardly too much to say that even 
 Byron's quarrel with his wife was due to the irrita- 
 bility incident to the fatness which he so loathed and 
 
Byron. 103 
 
 of which he tried to get rid. He himself told Medwin 
 that the causes of his separation were too simple 
 (meaning too commonplace) to admit of detailed 
 description ; and Mr. Jeaffreson's book rather lends 
 itself to the somewhat ludicrous theory that even so 
 ' simple ' a cause as Byron's unreasonable anger at 
 the dinner-table upon perceiving that Lady Byron 
 could relish and be nourished by the food which he 
 dare not touch was by no means an unimportant 
 agent in generating that quarrel, which was after- 
 wards erroneously and maliciously attributed to every 
 mysterious or unexplained enormity, from murder 
 to incest. Mr. Jeaffreson appears to think that in 
 Byron's ridiculous (because wholly inordinate) efforts 
 to reduce his corpulence he was sufficiently justified. 
 After showing that Byron's lameness was in large 
 part accountable for the fatness which he loathed, 
 which he tried by every unnatural artifice to reduce, 
 and which in the last resort may be said to have had 
 its influence upon more than one disaster of the 
 poet's life, Mr. Jeaffreson argues that when a man 
 cannot be natural without looking like a hog, he does 
 well to be unnatural for the sake of looking like 
 a man. But, in truth, Byron's efforts to get rid of his 
 corpulence were due much more to a desire to look 
 unlike, rather than to look like, other men ; and it is 
 neither an unjust nor an ungenerous criticism to say 
 that (his affectations being regulated by his vanities) 
 he would hardly have been unwilling to ' look ' like 
 a sow in gestation if in such guise he had found it 
 the easier to make women ' throw up their heads ' at 
 
104 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 him, or ' suffocate ' him with the adulation which was 
 one of his ambitions in life. To the young Marquis 
 of Sligo, after his recovery from the fever that pros- 
 trated him at Patras, he remarked, on regarding 
 himself in a mirror, ' How pale I look ! I should 
 like, I think, to die of a consumption, because then 
 the women would all say, " See that poor Byron- 
 how interesting he looks in dying !" ' Moore was 
 not wrong in attributing importance to this simple 
 incident. 
 
 Byron had the affectation of unworldliness. Mr. 
 Jeaffreson goes to great labour in order to show that 
 the poet was incapable alike of the weakness of cul- 
 tivating the friendship of great people, and of the 
 miserable meanness of surrounding himself with men 
 beneath him in rank for no better reason than that 
 they rendered deference to his social superiority and 
 fed him with flattery. True it is that some of Byron's 
 intimate friends were not only of plebeian origin, but 
 were notably, and sometimes for him inconveniently, 
 poor in purse. Mr. Jeaffreson says a good deal about 
 Byron's friendship for Eddleston, for the farmer's 
 boy at Newstead, and for the youth in Athens to 
 whom he made a handsome gift of money ; and here 
 the biographer is no doubt on ground that is safe and 
 reliable. Less trustworthy, however, or at least more 
 open to question, is what is said in reply to the 
 accusation current in Byron's time that the poet was 
 not without mercenary motives in his choice of a wife. 
 Mr. Jeaffreson shows with much plausibility how 
 remote were the expectations of Miss Milbanke when 
 
Byron. 105 
 
 Byron first proposed to her. But, in truth, the question 
 is not one of how distant were in fact the lady's 
 chances of becoming a rich woman, but of how near 
 her suitor thought them ; and on this point we have 
 the evidence of the poet's published letters and 
 journal. Writing to Moore, September 1814, Byron 
 says : 
 
 ' I am going to be married. . . . She is said to be an heiress. 
 but of that I really know nothing certainly, and shall not 
 inquire.' 
 
 Again, in October 18 14, averring that he had 
 chosen from love, not money : 
 
 ' I certainly did not address Miss Milbanke with these views, 
 but it is likely she will prove a considerable parti. All her 
 father can give or leave her he will ; and from her childless 
 uncle, Lord Wentworth, whose barony it is supposed will 
 descend to Lady Milbanke (his sister), she has expectations.' 
 
 After the marriage (March, 1815) he writes : 
 
 ' Lord W. is now in town, and in very indifferent health. You 
 perhaps know that his property, amounting to £7,000 or ,£8,000 
 a year, will eventually devolve upon Bell.' 
 
 It ought in fairness to be said that the letters which 
 contain these mercenary calculations contain also a 
 good deal that bears witness to an unselfish passion. 
 But Byron's pecuniary embarrassments were at this 
 juncture falling thick upon him ; and there is nothing 
 in the passages quoted to forbid the assumption that 
 the man who for several years affected indifference to 
 the earnings of his pen, and afterwards bartered for 
 its products with a penuriousness that was hardly 
 less than contemptible, was first drawn into his en- 
 gagement with Miss Milbanke by sincere affection, 
 
io6 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 and that he then pursued it in the hope of thereby re- 
 trieving his fallen fortunes. There was nothing neces- 
 sarily ignoble in] thus fostering expectations of worldly 
 advantage which co-existed with, and did not take 
 the place of, unselfish love. The only meanness with 
 which Byron is properlychargeable in this connection 
 is the affectation of superiority to all considerations 
 of gain. 
 
 Growing out of his affectation of unworldliness was 
 his affectation of generosity. It is true enough that 
 from time to time Byron made to friends and de- 
 pendents large gifts of money. But this form of 
 cheap generosity is one of the most conspicuous 
 phenomena of natures tainted by the worst kind of 
 personal selfishness. To part with money when it is 
 not an immediate necessity, and when the loss of it 
 touches no single luxury that comes home to a man's 
 personal comfort, is a thing that few persons could 
 not compass without a pang who are not tarnished 
 by the mere love of possession or greed of gold. To 
 permit the impulses of generosity to entrench upon 
 actual well-being is of course a much higher thing, and 
 of this Byron was from first to last incapable. There 
 is nothing in Mr. Jeaffreson's book more true, there 
 was nothing in Moore's slavering 'Life' less false, than 
 that Byron's nature was grounded in morbid selfishness. 
 When he projected the ill-fated Liberal and saw the 
 necessity for a coadjutor, he made his first proposals 
 to Moore ; and, failing with him, he then had recourse 
 to Hunt. The overtures were entirely on Byron's 
 side ; the scheme was his ; and the only real ad- 
 
Byron. 107 
 
 vantages anticipated were such as concerned Byron 
 more nearly than any other. Yet when the sorry 
 business came to an end, and Byron was so far from 
 reaping the benefits which he expected to accrue that 
 he was involved in a serious loss of money, he was 
 capable of the meanness, not to speak of the de- 
 liberate and shameful untruthfulness, of saying that 
 the brothers Hunt had pressed him to engage in the 
 work, that in an evil hour he had, consented, that he 
 had sacrificed himself to others, and that he had en- 
 gaged in the journal from goodwill towards the 
 editor of the Examiner, and in the hope that the 
 unfortunate cockney might, by the aid of his literary 
 contributions, render himself independent. 
 
 The only affectation which Byron in truth did not 
 possess was the affectation of licentiousness. When 
 he told the world from beginning to end of his career 
 that he was a man who had indulged every natural 
 form of sensual excess, he was speaking with absolute 
 sincerity and reliable truthfulness. Mr. Jeaffreson 
 makes effort to show that the naughty behaviour very 
 clearly indicated in ' Childe Harold,' existed mainly in 
 the poet's inner consciousness. Not to be unneces- 
 sarily severe on a great man long dead, one would 
 express astonishment that a view of Byron's behaviour 
 like this can be taken by one so competent to form a 
 just opinion respecting it. Is it not the fact that in 
 1808, after involving himself at Cambridge in debts to 
 the extent of ^10,000, Byron spent his money in the 
 ordinary pleasures supposed to be appropriate to a 
 young gentleman of quality; that he lived with a saucy 
 
io8 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 fille de joie at Brompton — a girl who used to ride 
 about with him dressed as a boy, who visited Brighton 
 with him, and even spent a time at Newstead ? 
 Are we forbidden by the facts to believe that the 
 Paphian girls, so naughtily alluded to, were neither 
 creatures of the poet's fancy, nor yet (what Mr. 
 Jeaffreson describes them) the sober servitors who 
 cooked the poet's dinner and made his bed ? Is it 
 not the fact that, after dismissing (on the suspicion 
 of some moral 'levity') one of the said Paphian girls 
 who had been supposed to stand rather too high in 
 her master's favour, Byron wrote to Hodgson, ' I have 
 one request to make, which is, never mention a 
 woman again in any letter to me, or even allude to 
 the existence of the sex '? 
 
 It was not until the first two cantos of ' Childe Harold ' 
 had been written and printed, and the advance sheets 
 had been circulated in the drawing-rooms of London 
 with the many mysterious heraldings of the knowing 
 ones, that the social rage which formed an integral 
 part of Byron's reputation while he lived made itself 
 manifest. One of the earliest consequences of that 
 personal celebrity was the liaison with Lady Caroline 
 Lamb — the Mrs. Felix Lorraine of ' Vivian Grey,' 
 the Lady Monteagle of ' Venetia.' Lady Caroline 
 was then one of the queens of society. Beautiful, 
 with the beauty that we have grown to associate with 
 the idea of a fashionable English lady of the eighteenth 
 rather than of the nineteenth century, in character 
 she was akin to the pert combinations of silliness and 
 sin which Fielding depicts with only too startling 
 
Byron. 109 
 
 fidelity. She was not a Lady Bellaston, yet she had 
 some of that woman's characteristics. She was a 
 giddy, light-hearted creature, devoid of moral fibre, 
 though not incapable of a species of affection where 
 her pride, as well as her passions, was consulted. It 
 would be unjust to say that she was in any extreme 
 sense a wicked and designing woman. She was 
 merely a vain creature, with dark eyes and fawn- 
 flaxen hair, with a voice soft, low, and caressing, with 
 a piquant lisp that added a charm to her beauty, and 
 with a fascination of simpleness that was peculiarly 
 hers. She cared little for womanly virtues, for she 
 had never been taught that there was anything in the 
 world better worth attending to than personal at- 
 tractiveness. 
 
 To such a woman it was no crime to be unfaithful 
 in heart, if not in act, to a loyal husband. Why 
 should she alone of all the gay creatures of fashion 
 be denied the social excitements of love intrigues ? 
 She was, in truth, descended from half a hundred 
 noble houses. She was married to one of the finest- 
 natured gentlemen of his time. She had children to 
 think for, and the dignity and honour of a woman 
 to preserve; but what were these things to such an 
 absurd but delightful creature compared with the 
 delirium of having half the men of genius at her feet ? 
 As Mr. Jeaffreson says, her role in the wild world of 
 which she was a queen was that of the saucy, freakish, 
 impulsive, gushing eccentric. At her wedding she 
 fell into a fit of fury about nothing, stormed at the 
 officiating bishop, tore her dress to pieces, and was 
 
1 1 o Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 carried to her carnage nearly unconscious. One day 
 at a ball she met Harness, then a demure young 
 Cantab reading for orders. In a lull in the dance 
 she said to him, ' Gueth how many pairth of thilk 
 thtockingth I have on.' The rather serious young 
 student could not answer the nice question and 
 blushed, whereupon she (raising her skirts above a 
 pretty ankle and pointing to a tiny foot) said 
 ' shicth.' Such a woman as this, with Rogers and 
 Moore already among her lovers, was hardly likely 
 to let Byron go by without making' demand of his 
 homage. ' I must see him,' she said to Rogers. ' He 
 has a club-foot, and bites his nails,' answered the 
 cynical bachelor-banker. ' If he is as ugly as ^Esop, 
 I must know him,' she replied. She met him first at 
 a ball, where the women were ' suffocating ' him with 
 adulation. She walked steadily up to him without 
 speaking a word, looked earnestly at him, and turned 
 on her heel. Then she went home and made this 
 note on the new poet : ' Mad — bad — and dangerous to 
 know.' It was like her capricious character. But 
 she had not the least intention of renouncinsf her 
 purpose to know him, after all. She knew, with the 
 instinct of a coquette, that this was the best way to 
 pique him into loving her. A day or two later they 
 met again ; the next day following Byron called 
 upon her, and for nearly a year he was almost a daily 
 visitor at her house. There are, of course, two ways 
 in which a man possessed of any kind of fascination 
 may encounter a woman like this. The first is the 
 way of a strong man, not necessarily superior to the 
 
Byron. 1 1 1 
 
 blandishments of a beautiful woman's idolatry, but 
 incapable of wanton intrigue, and at once too robust 
 and too self-possessed to be drawn into a connection 
 injurious to her honour, or to do less than protect 
 her in her vanity and her silliness from the confusion 
 with which she would overwhelm herself. The 
 second way is the more familiar one of the practised 
 seducer who accepts every exhibition of womanly 
 weakness as another apology for his transgression. 
 It is to be feared that Byron's way of dealing with 
 Lady Caroline Lamb partook rather of the latter than 
 of the former character. Of course, Lady Caroline, 
 like all the world, knew something of the loose 
 way in which he had amused himself at Newstead ; 
 and if she was not scandalized by his domestic 
 morals in his dealings with Paphian girls, she was 
 hardly likely to expect a very rigorous morality in 
 his intercourse with herself. She was over head and 
 ears in love with him, and seized every occasion for 
 letting the world know everything about the matter. 
 In her first letter to him she offered him all her 
 jewels if he was in want of money. Whenever he 
 entered a room where she was, she pounced down 
 upon him as her peculiar possession. Occasionally 
 upon leaving a party to which she had not been 
 invited he found her waiting for him in the street. 
 Sometimes they quarrelled, and then she would go at 
 midnight to Rogers's for the purpose of entreating 
 him to make up her difference with Byron. The 
 Byromania was then at its height, and at first little 
 was said of all this. But presently Lady Melbourne 
 
ii2 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ventured to entreat her daughter-in-law to be more 
 careful ; and her own mother, Lady Bessborough, begged 
 her to go for a change to Ireland. Of course the advice 
 was regarded as insulting. The lady hastened to 
 Byron to tell him all the barbarities done her, and to 
 implore him to fly with her. But the poet had by 
 this time begun to tire of the fascinating lady, and he 
 repelled her flattering invitation with what the lady 
 considered coolness and sternness. He told her, 
 however, that he would with pleasure give up all 
 here or beyond the grave for her ; he did not care 
 who knew this, or what use was made of it ; he had 
 been, he was, hers, freely and entirely, to obey, to 
 honour, love, and fly with her, when, where, and how 
 herself might determine. It is hardly worth while to 
 pursue this matter further. Enough that, like all 
 similar liaisons, it ran through the several stages 
 beginning with love and ending with hate, until the 
 connection closed with the memorable and barbarous 
 letter printed in the novel which the lady wrote to 
 prove that Byron was of a Satanic character. In 
 ' Glenarvon ' the letter runs : 
 
 ' I am no longer your lover ; and since you oblige me to con- 
 fess it by this truly unfeminine persecution, learn that I am 
 attached to another, whose name it would, of course, be dis- 
 honest to mention. I shall ever remember with gratitude the 
 many instances I have received of the predilection you have 
 shown in my favour. I shall ever continue your friend, if your 
 ladyship will permit me so to style myself. And as a first proof 
 of my regard, I offer you this advice : correct your vanity, which 
 is ridiculous ; exert your absurd caprices on others ; and leave 
 me in peace.' 
 
 The other lady to whom Byron here declares him- 
 self attached was no doubt the Miss Milbanke who 
 
Byron. 113 
 
 became his wife. This lady was in all respects, save 
 beauty, the reverse of her rival. Though an admirer of 
 Byron's genius, she was by no means a Byromaniac, 
 and the poet appears to have had for her a spiritual 
 affection that can hardly have been exercised in Lady 
 Caroline's case. It is needless to traverse afresh the 
 threadbare story of Byron's quarrel with his wife. 
 Seventeen years hence the Hobhouse MS. will be 
 published which is expected to prove that Byron had 
 failings — many failings — but was untainted by the 
 baser vices. Mr. Jeaffreson says that Lady Byron is 
 to be compassionated — like all persons who have 
 come through circumstances rather than by voluntary 
 intrusion to high places for which they are singularly 
 incompetent. This is, we take it, because Lady 
 Byron could not humour a man who did not deserve 
 to be humoured. In withdrawing as speedily as 
 possible from a distasteful union she certainly con- 
 sulted her own happiness primarily. But under what 
 possible obligation did she rest to consult Byron's ? 
 Are we to hear again and again the old and 
 hackneyed story that a man of genius is entitled to 
 more consideration in domestic life than ordinary 
 folks can claim ; that, having more whims and more 
 acerbity Of temper than afflict other people, he is to 
 be more borne with ? The man who could be guilty 
 of the foppish egotism and melodramatic falseness of 
 permitting the ' Fare thee well ' to be printed in the 
 corner of a newspaper before it met the eye of the 
 person to whom it was addressed, was certainly not 
 entitled to much forbearance. But that Byron com- 
 
H4 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 mitted at such a juncture the outrage for bidding for 
 popular sympathy was then the least of his offences 
 against decency and right feeling. He was at this 
 time one of the directors of Drury Lane Theatre, and 
 one day he received in this capacity a visit from 
 a step-daughter of William Godwin's, anxious to go 
 on the stage. Jane Clermont was pretty as well as 
 clever, and that her application did not meet with 
 success is probably to be accounted for on the ground 
 that at such a moment when his wife had newly left 
 him, Byron thought she would be less serviceable as 
 an actress than as his mistress. In due course she 
 became the mother of his child ; and when, in 1816, 
 sympathetic ladies were reading the Farewell with' 
 tears, Byron was consoling himself in his ' Claire's ' 
 smiles. Of course this connection speedily termi- 
 nated. It was the peculiarity of Byron's numerous 
 love affairs that no woman ever loved him ardently 
 who did not in the end hate and loathe him. Towards 
 the close of the year in which this occurred he made 
 the acquaintance in Venice of a linendraper's wife, 
 Marianna Legati, who became his mistress. Not yet, 
 however, was his appetite for licentiousness satiated. 
 Of his excesses in the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice 
 we all know enough. There he received the lowest 
 and most vicious class of Venetian women, and trans- 
 formed the palace of an English nobleman into a 
 very lazar-house of infamy. It is needless to traverse 
 the story of his connection with the Countess 
 Guiccioli — perhaps the least discreditable, only 
 because the most enduring, of his intrigues. So much 
 
Byron. 115 
 
 for his personal character. Of his literary character 
 it was well said that he adorned himself in the per- 
 son of a merciless corsair on a rock in the Mediter- 
 ranean, with every alluring quality — except common , 
 decency and common honesty. But he over-reached 
 himself. What wonder that men should at length 
 take him for the listless and sated libertine he per- 
 sistently said he was ! The principal canon of Byron's 
 morality appeared to have become : ' Hate your 
 neighbour : love your neighbour's wife.' The world, 
 which had stood a good deal, could hardly stand 
 that. Henceforth it must begin another of the 
 septennial periods of moral rectitude which Macaulay 
 describes. When at length Byron's wife was separated 
 from him, and popular sympathy (weary of his ardent 
 and vivid delineations of a morbid personality) began 
 to feel the promptings of a puritanical reaction, a howl 
 of indignation against his excesses drove him again 
 from England. Southey now christened Byron ' the 
 Coryphaeus of the Satanic School.' Blackzvood was 
 among the first to raise the voice in the name of 
 virtue. In a review of Don Juan ' (18 19) it says : 
 
 'Those who are acquainted (as who is not?) with the main 
 incidents in the private life of Lord Byron . . . will scarcely 
 believe that the odious malignity of this man's bosom should 
 have carried him so far as to make him commence a filthy and 
 impious poem with an elaborate satire on the character and 
 manner of his wife— from whom, even by his own confession, he 
 has been separated only in consequence of his own cruel and 
 heartless misconduct. It is vain for Lord Byron to attempt in 
 any way to justify his own behaviour in that affair ; and now 
 that he has so openly and audaciously invited inquiry and re- 
 proach, we do not see any good reason why he should not be 
 
 8—2 
 
1 1 6 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 plainly told so by the general voice of his countrymen. It would 
 not be an easy matter to persuade any Man who has any know- 
 ledge of the nature of Woman, that a female such as Lord Byron 
 has himself described his wife to be, would rashly, or hastily, or 
 lightly separate herself from the love (with) which she had once 
 been inspired for such a man as he is, or was. Had he not 
 heaped insult upon insult and scorn upon scorn — had he not 
 forced the iron of his contempt into her very soul — there is no 
 woman of delicacy and virtue, as he admitted Lady Byron to be, 
 who would not have hoped all things, and suffered all things 
 from one, her love of whom must have been inwoven with so 
 many exalting elements of delicious pride, and more delicious 
 humility. To offend the love of such a woman was wrong — 
 but it might be forgiven ; to desert her was unmanly — but he 
 might have returned and wiped for ever from her eyes the tears 
 of her desertion ; but to injure and desert, and then to turn back 
 and wound her widowed privacy with unhallowed strains of cold- 
 blooded mockery — was brutally, fiendishly, inexpiably mean. 
 For impurities there might be some possibility of pardon, were 
 they supposed to spring only from the reckless buoyancy of 
 young blood and fiery passions — for impiety there might at least 
 be pity, were it visible that the misery of the impious soul were 
 as great as its darkness ; but for offences such as this . . . which 
 speak the wilful and determined spite of an unrepenting, un- 
 softened, smiling, sarcastic, joyous sinner — for such diabolical, 
 such slavish vice there can be neither pity nor pardon.' 
 
 It is clear, as Macaulay said, that those vices 
 which destroy domestic happiness should be as much 
 as possible repressed; and equally clear that they 
 cannot be repressed by penal legislation. It is there- 
 fore right and desirable that public opinion should be 
 directed against them. What, then, the extent was of 
 Byron's culpability we may never know (unless, as 
 seems improbable, Lord Broughton's papers seventeen 
 years hence may tell us) ; whether his private life 
 was merely bad, or very bad, we have at present no 
 means of judging. Perhaps it is true that he was no 
 
Byron. 1 1 7 
 
 more to blame than most men who were not on good 
 terms with their wives; perhaps his offence was 
 a secret sin. Byron was a man of inexhaustible pas- 
 sion, limitless capacity for enjoyment, measureless 
 sensibility to pain ; and it was an error to judge of 
 him by the standards proper to the everyday 
 Browns, Joneses, or Robinsons. We are now only 
 concerned to remember that he betook himself to 
 the Adriatic, carrying there a heart made callous 
 by many blows. With nothing to fear from the 
 morality of the land of his adoption, he plunged, 
 as we have seen, into yet more abject vices, 
 and finally drooped under the weight of six-and- 
 thirty years. His hold of the English public had 
 for years been slipping away. Had his poetry no 
 immutable grasp ? He had reared his fabric on the 
 illusive sands of his own picturesque personality ; 
 only the old-time passions could endure. He had 
 added little or nothing to men's knowledge of the 
 human heart. Very soon it came to be seen that 
 Love, Sorrow and Death, the immortal triumvirate of 
 all noble poetry, found after all only a foster-mother 
 in his muse. He had addressed himself to the sentient 
 faculties; it was observed, not unjustly, that he had 
 familiarized the vocabulary, not of affection, but 
 lust ; and now, grey with few years, broken with 
 many excesses, he must yield up his arbitrary sway. 
 Goethe loved him as a poet ; Shelley loved him as 
 a man, but his day was done. He had failed, 
 miserably failed, in an endeavour to found a political 
 party, and his last prayer was to die sword in hand 
 
n8 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 for the Greek people, then bowed under a cruel yoke. 
 England cared no longer for her prodigal. He was 
 a flower whose bloom had gone. But when in 1824 
 the news came to her from Italy that the young, 
 brilliant, unhappy nobleman she had banished for 
 ever had died at Missolonghi, amidst strangers and 
 aliens, her remorse knew no measure. 
 
 It will be remembered that the Edinburgh coun- 
 selled Byron at the beginning of his career to abandon 
 poetry ; mark now with what accents of unappeasable 
 regret the same review mourns his death. Surely 
 there is ample stimulus in these contrasted utterances 
 for any genuine son of genius who is faint with the 
 wounds of mingled misapprehension and neglect. 
 
 ' Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats's 
 poetry grasped with one hand in his bosom ! These are two 
 out of four poets, patriots and friends, who have visited Italy 
 within a few years, both of whom have been hurried to a more 
 distant shore ... To this band of immortals a third has since 
 been added ! — a mightier genius, a haughtier spirit, whose stub- 
 born impatience and Achilles-like pride only death could quell. 
 Greece, Italy, the world, have lost their poet-hero ; and his 
 death has spread a wider gloom, and been recorded with a 
 deeper awe than has waited on the obsequies of any of the many 
 great who have died within our remembrance. Even detraction 
 has been silent at his tomb ; and the more generous of his 
 enemies have fallen into the rank of his mourners. But he set 
 like the sun in his glory, and his orb was greatest and brightest 
 at the last ; for his memory is now consecrated no less by free- 
 dom than genius ... He probably fell a martyr to his zeal 
 against tyrants. He attached himself to the cause of Greece, 
 and, dying, clung to it with a convulsive grasp, and has thus 
 gained a niche in her history.' * 
 
 In this chapter the aim has been to set in inter- 
 
 * Edinburgh Review : Shelley's 'Posthumous Poems,' 1824. 
 
Byron. 119 
 
 esting contrast the earlier (adverse) and later (laud- 
 atory) reviews of Byron. But earlier and later 
 criticisms are not more unlike in spirit than the 
 works criticized are unlike in merit. One cannot but 
 be struck by the spontaneity and the excellence of the 
 praise bestowed upon this poet throughout the best 
 years of his life. We can meet with no such ad- 
 mirable criticism of poetry in the pages of the 
 Edinburgh, Quarterly, Blackwood, and New Monthly 
 as Byron's work called forth from time to time. To 
 what may this excellence in Byron's case (contrasted 
 with the commonplace that characterized the reviews 
 of other poets appearing in the same places) be 
 attributed ? Was it that Byron stood, as Macaulay 
 said, between the old school and the new, and was 
 the interpreter of both to the multitude ? Surely not. 
 The secret of this poet's success is not far to seek. 
 Byron was the creature of his age : he accepted the 
 dogmas of the poetic sect that found favour in his 
 time, and he caused them to pass through a person- 
 ality which was fascinating in its sorrows and even in 
 its sins. This is not to dig deeply for the constituents 
 of Byron's success, but coupled with a genius that 
 compassed the whole domain of passion, these facts 
 are perhaps sufficient to account for the pre-eminence 
 of the poet in his own day. 
 
THE COCKNEY SCHOOL.' 
 
LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 t 
 
 IT will be remembered that Southey attempted, 
 late in life, to repudiate the allegation that he 
 had ever been concerned with Wordsworth in the 
 formation of a new school of poetry; and that Cole- 
 ridge said the only thing he claimed to possess in 
 common with either of these poets was good sense, 
 confirmed by long study of the best models of 
 Greece, Italy, and England. It is nevertheless not 
 too much to say that all three were influenced by 
 exactly the same forces of rational conviction, and 
 that, notwithstanding their personal opposition to 
 such classification, they may properly be named 
 together as leaders of a single poetic school. Urged 
 doubtless by kindred motives to those which operated 
 in the cases of Southey and Coleridge in their 
 attitude towards Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley 
 endeavoured to repudiate the charge of having been 
 concerned with Leigh Hunt in the formation of a 
 school of poetry. It will be easy to show that in the 
 latter case, unlike the former one, there was ample 
 justification for such repudiation, and that, therefore, 
 
124 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 it is to some extent injudicious and injurious to 
 class together these three poets under the name by 
 which they were known to the great body of their 
 contemporaries. Accident, not special poetic affinity, 
 brought them together ; and they never had much 
 more in common than is usually the case between 
 any three poets who are the creatures of any single 
 age. Certainly their several theories of poetry were 
 dissimilar, if not in absolute antagonism ; and there 
 cannot be shown to exist in ' Rimini,' ' Endymion,' 
 and 'The Revolt of Islam' any such kinship of purpose 
 and contrast of means as gave unity of aim to the 
 associated pieces in the first 'Lyrical Ballads.' Indeed, 
 so much were these men at variance as to the true 
 mission of poetry, that Keats went the rather auda- 
 cious length of advising Shelley to put aside a little 
 of his exuberant magnanimity, and trouble himself 
 more to load every rift of his work with ore ; and 
 Shelley's last warm tribute to the genius of his friend 
 did not go forth without a side-reference to the 
 author's known repugnance to the principles of art 
 on which Keats's best work had been constructed. 
 With so many and such emphatic points of differ- 
 ence, it may be asked with proper surprise how, at 
 anytime, the three poets came to be classed together; 
 and the answer is one that must be sought for where 
 poetry plays no part. The story that requires to be 
 told is short, and is full of interest and suggestion. 
 
 In 1816, Leigh Hunt was editor of the Examiner, 
 then a sixteen-page Sunday paper, devoted chiefly to 
 politics and plays. Towards the close of that year 
 
Leigh Hunt. 125 
 
 the journal developed a literary character, and began 
 to review poetry with peculiar animation. One of 
 the last issues of 1816 contained an article entitled 
 ' Three Young Poets,' treating of inedited poetry by 
 three unknown writers — Cornelius Webb, Percy B. 
 Shelley, and John Keats. Internal evidence pointed 
 to the editor as author ; and certainly the little 
 paper was characterized by the confidential personal 
 tone out of which Leigh Hunt's enemies made so 
 much. Subsequent issues of the Examiner contained 
 sonnets and lyrical pieces by all three authors dealt 
 with in the article in question ; and so the inference 
 remained an obvious one that a little coterie had 
 been formed, of which the office in London of the 
 Sunday journal formed the rallying-point. 
 
 A few months later (April, 1817), Blackwood's 
 Magazine was founded in Edinburgh. The new 
 periodical venture was established primarily to break 
 the supremacy of the Edinburgh Review in politics ; 
 but this was not mooted in the prospectus that pre- 
 ceded it. One of the new features of the magazine 
 was announced to be ' Notices of the most celebrated 
 publications, and the contents of minor journals.' 
 
 Blackwood's first issues contained little or no poli- 
 tical matter ; but it was not the less easy on that 
 account to see that party bias lay at the root of all 
 its criticisms of men and books. Sweltering as it 
 was under the full rigour of united northern Toryism 
 and northern Puritanism, the Examiner speedily fell 
 in its way ; and the number of Blackwood (October, 
 1 8 17) which contained the justly celebrated jeu 
 
126 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 d'esprit entitled ' Chaldee Manuscript' (an allegorical 
 account, in Scriptural language, of the quarrels of the 
 founders of the magazine), contained also the first 
 of a series of audacious attacks on the little band 
 of London poets, of whom Leigh Hunt was at 
 the time the only notable public figure. No two 
 articles could be more dissimilar in spirit than the 
 two in question. The one has been said to be worthy 
 of a permanent place in literature by reason of its 
 felicitous humour ; the other has, not unjustly, been 
 stigmatized as one of the most cowardly and malig- 
 nant assaults that ever disgraced the annals of litera- 
 ture. 
 
 The first article of the series began playfully 
 enough : 
 
 ' 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 necessary to say a single word about another new school of 
 poetry which has of late sprung up amongst us. The school has 
 not, I believe, 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 talent, 
 of extraordinary pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, 
 and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes 
 of thinking, and manners in all respects.' 
 
 One of the characteristics of these childish persons 
 
 was, according to Blackwood, the restless interest which 
 
 they summoned the public to take in everything 
 
 belonging to their own triviality. The critic says : 
 
 ' If Mrs. Robinson's dog had a bad night's repose, it was duly 
 announced to the world ; Mr. Merry's accident in paring his 
 nails solicited a similar sympathy ; the falling off of Mrs. R.'s 
 
Leigh Hunt. 127 
 
 patch at the last ball, or the stains on Mr. M.'s full-dress coat, 
 from the dropping of a chandelier, came before the earth with 
 praiseworthy promptitude.' 
 
 Keats's volume of poems had appeared, containing 
 
 an address to Leigh. Hunt, as well as the well-known 
 
 sonnet, beginning, 
 
 ' Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,' 
 
 and ending, 
 
 ' Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb.' 
 
 On the latter line, Blackwood says : 
 
 ' 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 ?' 
 
 This may, so far, be harmless banter enough, 
 calculated rather to make the victims laugh than cry, 
 and capable of giving serious offence only to the 
 thickest of skulls and the thinnest of skins. Not 
 to blink the facts, it is quite true that the young 
 poets did render themselves liable to much good- 
 humoured chaff. There was a deal of effeminacy in 
 their social relations ; they presented each other with 
 wreaths of bay, bouquets of roses, locks of hair, shells 
 and sea-weed ; and wrote laudatory verses each to 
 each, anticipatory of the renown they were soon to 
 
 win : 
 
 ' We'll talk of . . . Keats 
 The muse's son of promise, and what feats 
 He yet may do.' 
 
 Naturally, such behaviour called down the wrath 
 
 of robust Scotch masculinity. Blackwood said : 
 
 ' None of them are men of genius— none of them are men of 
 
128 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 solitary habits . . . Why then do they perpetually chatter about 
 themselves ? Why is it they seem to think the world has no 
 right to hear one [single word about any other persons than 
 Hunt, the cockney Homer ; Hazlitt, the cockney Aristotle ; and 
 Haydon, the cockney Raphael. These are all very eminent 
 men in their own eyes. . . . Mr. Hazlitt cannot look round 
 him at the Surrey, without resting his smart eye on the idiot 
 admiring grin of several dozens of aspiring apprentices and 
 critical clerks. Mr. Hunt cannot be at home at Hampstead, 
 without having his Johnny Keatses and his Corny Webbs to 
 cram sonnets into his waistcoat-pockets, and crown his majestic 
 brows with 
 
 ' The wreath that Dante wore ! ! ! ' 
 
 Good-humoured raillery was not prominent among 
 the accomplishments of the Edinburgh writer who 
 made it his business to ' wither and blast ' the young 
 London poets ; so playful chaff had speedily to make 
 way for scalding invective : 
 
 ' It is quite ridiculous to see how the vanity of these Cockneys 
 makes them over-rate their own importance, even in the eyes of 
 us that have always expressed such plain unvarnished contempt 
 for them, and who do feel for them all a contempt too calm and 
 profound to admit of any admixture of anything like anger or 
 personal spleen. We should just as soon think of being wroth 
 with vermin, independently of their coming into our apartment, 
 as we should about having any feelings at all about any of these 
 people, other than what are excited by seeing them in the shape 
 of authors.' 
 
 And again, four years later : 
 
 ' There is but one word— of many melancholy and miserable 
 meanings — and which we should not dare to apply to any of our 
 brethren ; but it may be applied, not only innocently but right- 
 fully, to a Cockney ; that one word is — Fool P 
 
 After saying that between thirty or forty years 
 ago the Delia Crusca school was in great force, 
 pouring out monthly, weekly and daily the whole 
 
Leigh Himt. 129 
 
 fulness of its sorrows in verse, revelling in moonlight, 
 sighing with evening gales, lamenting over plucked 
 roses, and bidding melodious farewells to the last 
 butterfly of the season ; after announcing the death 
 and burial of the obscure morning paper in which 
 this ' reign of sympathy ' was first promulgated, and 
 in which milliner's maids and city apprentices pined 
 over the mutual melancholies of Arley and Matilda, 
 Blackwood pathetically remarks that in this world 
 folly is immortal, and that no sooner has one mass of 
 tuneful nonsense been swept away than another 
 succeeds to its glories and its fate. 
 
 ' The Delia Cricsca School [has visited us again. ... Its 
 verses now transpire at one time from the retreats of Cockney 
 dalliance in the London suburbs ; sometimes they visit us by 
 fragments from Venice, and sometimes invade us by wainloads 
 from Pisa. In point of subject and execution there is but slight 
 difference ; both schools are " smitten with nature and nature's 
 love," run riot in the intrigues of anemones, daisies, and butter- 
 cups, and rave to the "rivulets $roud, and the deep-Hushing 
 stars." ' 
 
 The critic goes on to show that the defunct school 
 had at least the merit of moral innocence ; they 
 might talk nonsense without measure; be simple 
 down to the very lowest degree of silliness, and 
 ' babble of green fields ' enough to make men sick of 
 summer ; but they kept their private irregularities to 
 themselves, and sought for no reprobate popularity 
 by avowing a pestilent hatred of everything generous, 
 true and honourable, by desperate personal licentious- 
 ness, and a fiend-like desire to insult every moral tie 
 and Christian principle. It was reserved for the 
 foolish and profligate Cockney School to raise the 
 
 9 
 
130 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 banner of an insensate and black ambition ' whose only- 
 aim was to ruin society.' Of course, much capital was 
 made from time to time of the known facts of Shelley's 
 private life, and of the circumstance that the ' Revolt 
 of Islam ' had first appeared as ' Laon and Cythna ' 
 — a poem portraying the love of a brother and sister. 
 In like manner much was made of the few question- 
 able lines which found their way into the otherwise 
 pure poetry of ' the amiable but infatuated bardling ' 
 known to the critics as ' Master Johnny Keats.' 
 Now Keats's private life was on the whole so chaste, 
 and his conception of the natural dignity of woman was 
 so exalted, that the mere presence of the other sex 
 in the drawing-room is stated to have either thrilled 
 him with a spiritual rapture ' such as might be 
 induced by a symphony of Mozart,' or tortured him 
 with a sense (in which sensuality had no share) of 
 the measure in which the real woman fell short of his 
 ideal. It will be agreed that, however far this 
 attitude of the sexes may have been removed from 
 a rational and enduring relation, it was least of all 
 liable to the charge of raising the banner of a 
 profligate ambition ' whose only aim was to ruin 
 society.' Yet the public were not merely informed 
 that from some of Keats's verses addressed to various 
 amiable females it appeared, ' notwithstanding all his 
 gossamer work, that Johnny's affections ' were not 
 ' entirely confined to objects purely ethereal,' but that 
 sheer indecency of theme and treatment had been 
 throughout the foul moral blot which had caused 
 good men and virtuous women to turn from ' Endy- 
 
Leigh Hunt. 13 1 
 
 mion,' ' Lamia,' ' Eve of St. Agnes,' and ' Hyperion ' 
 with loathing or contempt. Leigh Hunt fared yet 
 worse than Shelley and Keats. He was styled ' the 
 meanest, the filthiest, the most vulgar of Cockney 
 poetasters ;' ' the most worthless and affected versifier 
 of the time ;' one 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.' One cannot 
 forbear remarking upon the marvellous skill displayed 
 by these critics in scenting out indecency of whatever 
 kind in quarters whence people of healthier organs 
 would scarcely hope to extract it ; or upon the yet 
 more extraordinary puritanism with which they re- 
 produced at full length the poetry which they said 
 ought never to have been written. Surely, impartial 
 judges would think the reviewers increased the 
 mischief in the measure in which they helped to 
 disseminate it, notwithstanding that they attempted 
 to fence it with withering denunciations. It must be 
 said that some Scotch critics enjoy the questionable 
 distinction of having ferreted out more filthiness than 
 any other men whatever, and most of us will be 
 content and happy to leave them in full possession of 
 the inglorious boast which one of the keenest of the 
 brotherhood advanced in his own favour, namely, 
 that he had ' torn off the gaudy veil, and transparent 
 drapery, and exhibited the painted cheeks and 
 
 9—2 
 
132 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 writhing limbs, and branded with a burning iron the 
 false face and brazen brow of many a literary harlot' 
 In a review (1822) of a romance by Hunt, Black- 
 wood, once again in a playful vein, says : 
 
 ' It is a gross impertinence in any Cockney to write about — 
 love. Love, correctly speaking, is a tender affair between a 
 lady and a gentleman ; whereas King Leigh and his subjects 
 imagine it to be merely a congress between a male and a 
 female. There is the mistake, and it is a very gross one. . . . 
 We have no doubt that Leigh supposes he can make love; — 
 not he — any more than he can write grammar. No lady in 
 this land could even comprehend what he wished to have, with 
 his eternal sidling and sliding about, and perking up his mouth, 
 and swaling with his coat-tails. The lady would suspect that 
 he wished to throw her off her guard, and that he was watching 
 an opportunity to pick her pocket. But Leigh forgets that ladies 
 do not nowadays wear pockets. However, be that as it may, 
 any Cockney who writes about love deserves to be kicked — that 
 is the short and long of the matter, and there is no occasion to 
 say a single word more on the subject.' 
 
 The Edinburgh critics believed that of all the 
 manias of the mad age in which it was their mis- 
 fortune to live, the most incurable, as well as the 
 most common, seemed to be no other than the 
 ' Metromanie.' Of course the poetry of the London 
 School was then a shut book to their northern intel- 
 lects, just as the poetry of the Lake School had, ten 
 years earlier, been a volume to whose cipher they 
 had possessed no key. A good idea of the notion 
 they entertained of the general characteristics of the 
 poetry of such men as Hunt, Shelley, and Keats, 
 may be gathered from the following parody, which 
 appeared in Blackwood 'as late as 1821. Any apology 
 that may be considered necessary for quoting such 
 doggerel must be grounded in the belief which obtains 
 
Leigh Hunt. 133 
 
 credit in some quarters, that men as frequently put 
 their deepest feeling into their nonsense as their 
 philosophy : 
 
 LOVE SONG 
 
 By a Junior Member of the Cockney School. 
 
 ' Oh ! lovely Polly Savage, 
 
 Oh ! charming Polly Savage, 
 Your eyes beat Day and Martin, 
 Your neck is like red cabbage. 
 
 ' Oh ! once I loved another girl, 
 Her name it was Maria ; 
 But, Polly dear, my love for you, 
 Is forty-five times higher. 
 
 * * * 
 
 ' Oh, then our little son shall be 
 As wanton as a spaniel, 
 Him that we mean to christen'd be 
 Jacques Timothy Nathaniel. 
 
 And if we have a little girl, 
 
 I'm sure you won't be sorry 
 To hear me call the little elf, 
 
 Euphemiar Helen Launzr.' 
 
 This rare effusion appeared in a journal to which 
 Christopher North and our friend 'Z' (is the con- 
 junction necessary ?) contributed ! That such sorry 
 stuff could be put forth by a reputable magazine as 
 a legitimate parody of anything written by Shelley, 
 Keats or even Hunt in his flightiest mood is truly in- 
 explicable. The parody is not, however, without a 
 certain interest as a satire on an article published in 
 the Examiner some time previously in which the 
 editor endeavoured to enforce the propriety of calling 
 children by fine-sounding names. 
 
 Putting aside the petty envy, which alone might 
 have incited the Edinburgh censors to reprobate the 
 work of their London rivals, there can, as we have said, 
 
134 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 be little doubt that political animosity lay at the root 
 of their antagonism. Indeed Blackzvood says : 
 
 ' The Cockney School of Politics is so intimately connected 
 with the Cockney School of Poetry that it is almost impossible 
 to describe the one without using many expressions equally 
 applicable to the other. They are twin establishments created 
 about the same time, supported by the same dupes and enlight- 
 ened by the same quacks.' 
 
 The Examiner was the extreme Liberal organ of 
 its day ; yet but little can be seen in its pages that 
 would excite attention in these times from the vehe- 
 mence of its utterance or the disloyalty of its purpose. 
 The journal contains much that must have been in 
 serious opposition to ministerial measures ; and what 
 it says is put forth in uncompromising language; but 
 it is hard to find anything more extravagant than 
 a passionate resistance of the policy which, in the 
 person of a certain Rev. Mr. Wilson, preacher at St. 
 John's Chapel, Bedford Row, recommended the 
 revival of implicit obedience and non-resistance ' even 
 towards a Nero.' So much for Leigh Hunt's poli- 
 tical partisanship : that of his brother poets was even 
 less emphatic. Shelley was at this time too much 
 concerned with hatching in his unpractical brain 
 entirely new universes, year after year, to care a rush 
 what direction was taken by the political sympathies 
 of the Prince Regent ; and Keats (had Blackwood 
 but known it !) was at first inclining towards Toryism, 
 and was certainly refusing to join Hunt in his abuse 
 of the Liverpool-Castlereagh administration. 
 
 On Leigh Hunt, as the head and front of the 
 political offending of the London School, the whole 
 
Leigh Hunt. 135 
 
 rigour of rancorous diatribe was brought to bear. A 
 serious and honest impeachment of Hunt might 
 easily be forged out of the material which the 
 Examiner alone affords. It could be shown that 
 he spared no man whose political convictions were 
 opposed to his own, and that he was so far from con- 
 fining his criticisms to the direct political utterances 
 of those who differed from him that he availed himself, 
 in his early years, of nearly every unlawful weapon of 
 personal abuse to draw down upon his adversaries 
 the full measure of ridicule and contempt. He 
 charged Gifford with being a servile Court tool, 
 whose championship in the Quarterly was paid for in 
 advance out of the purse of the Government. Now, 
 Gifford was a stern, hard-natured man, who gave way 
 but rarely to the promptings of the more generous 
 side of his nature ; but he was a scholar, a patriot, 
 and, so far as we can see, a gentleman : one who 
 desired sincerely to make public the best that he 
 knew and thought on politics and literature, and who 
 blundered oftenest in argumentative deduction from 
 his self-chosen code of laws. The worst of Hunt's 
 accusations were not confined to the impeachment 
 of Gifford. He called Southey ' a canting hypocrite,' 
 • an apostate,' and ' a shallow idiot.' He said, or 
 permitted another to say, that Coleridge was the 
 'Wandering Jew of Letters,' and 'the dog in the 
 manger of literature.' Nay, it was he who, at the 
 very time when he sat with others at the feet of the 
 ' Seer of Highgate,' and gathered there more scraps 
 perhaps than he found in all the world beside, said 
 
l 
 
 6 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 anonymously (or was responsible for its being said), 
 that ' no man would give Mr. Coleridge a penny for 
 his thoughts,' and that the author of such nonsense 
 as ' Kubla Khan' had never in his life been caught 
 in ' the fact of a single intelligible sentence/ 
 
 It would be a serious conviction indeed, and such 
 as would shatter for ever all faith in Hunt's character, 
 if it were proved that the many and signal benefits 
 conferred upon him by Shelley had been taken with- 
 out ungrudging and lifelong gratitude ; but it could be 
 shown that he rarely manifested the same marked and 
 even obtrusive eagerness to rebut grave charges when 
 made wrongfully against his friend, as was evinced 
 when the libels were directed against himself. The 
 silence of friends has been well said to serve too fre- 
 quently as the confirmation of enemies ; and the pre- 
 sent writer has elsewhere confessed to some feeling of 
 astonishment at the silence of Hunt when Keats was 
 being assailed, and to some feeling of contempt for 
 the explanation which came later, when in full view of 
 the pain that silence inflicted and of the suspicion (on 
 Keats's part) which it engendered* Be this as it may, 
 
 w What I said on this point in the ' Recollections of Rossetti ' 
 (p. 177) called forth more than one protest. The following extract 
 from the letter of an eminent poet explains very fully the grounds 
 of objection to my so-called impeachment of Hunt : ' The cruel 
 injustice you have — of course unwittingly — done to the memory 
 of Leigh Hunt is no matter of opinion ; it is one of fact and 
 evidence. So far from attempting no defence of Keats in 1820, 
 he published, on the appearance of the " Lamia and other 
 Poems " in that year, perhaps the most cordial, generous and 
 enthusiastic tribute of affectionate and ardent praise that had 
 ever been offered by a poet to a poet, in the shape of a review 
 almost overflowing the limits of the magazine in which it appeared 
 
Leigh Hunt. 137 
 
 the editor of the Examiner, who had so often run 
 a-muck with others, should surely have been pre- 
 pared for many thrusts and lunges, and ought to have 
 borne the pains of them, when they came, with equal 
 fortitude and composure. In justice to him, how- 
 ever, let it be said that no man was ever more 
 mendaciously attacked or more dogged by the feet 
 of malice in disguise. We all think he was an able 
 man, and, as Byron said, we are sure he was a poor 
 one ; and he bore the full brunt of hatred and assault 
 which always falls to the share of him who, fenced by 
 no other armour than united poverty and power, 
 dares to hate all rank, and the contumely of all rank, 
 and to ask no quarter from the votaries of toadyism 
 and the slaves of trimming and time-serving. 
 
 {the Indicator). Amore "loud and earnest defence ofKeats" could 
 not be imagined or desired. And if Keats ever forgot this, or ever 
 expressed doubts of Hunt's loyal and devoted regard, it simply 
 shows that Keats was himself a disloyal and thankless son of 
 genius, as utterly unworthy as he was utterly incapable of grateful, 
 and unselfish, and manlyfriendship.' My reply to this, and to such 
 objections as this, is as follows. First, I have nowhere mentioned 
 1820 as the year in which Hunt attempted no defence of Keats. I 
 have pointed distinctly to 1818, the year of the publication of 
 1 Endymion ' and of the Quarterly attack upon it. Next, the 
 Advertisement to the ' Lamia * volume bears date June, 1820, the 
 volume was probably published in July, 1820, and at the middle 
 of September, 1820, Keats left England for Italy. Third, the 
 Indicator article appeared in the numbers for August 2nd and 
 9th (being written by Hunt while Keats was residing with him 
 at Kentish Town), and the laudatory Edinburgh article had 
 appeared before it. Fourth, Keats's letter touching Hunt's 
 neglect was written before he left England. Fifth, Hunt gave 
 a shabby notice of ' Lamia ' in his introduction to the last 
 edition of 'The Story of Rimini.' I shall be rejoiced if the 
 facts I state can be explained away. — T. H. C. 
 
138 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 In 1819, Blackwood says : 
 
 ' The knowing quack doctor has always performed some of his 
 most wonderful cures upon himself, and maintains that, after all, 
 he could not hold out three months without his infallible cordial. 
 Hunt gains the goodwill of his patients by the same sort of 
 tricks. He is always writing about headaches, bile, tea, and 
 suppers of boiled eggs and lettuces, and so persuading his male 
 subscribers that he is "one of us." To win the affections of his 
 ladies, he repeats the usual cant about the absurdity of marriage, 
 and the glorious freedom of concubinage ; and the dear crea- 
 tures are in raptures to find their own " noble theories " sup- 
 ported by a clever gentleman who publishes sixteen pages about 
 the House of Commons and the playhouses every Sunday — 
 besides sweet little volumes of verses every now and then, 
 stuck full of beautiful eulogiums upon adultery and incest.' 
 
 And again : 
 
 ' 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 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 rosebud into his button-hole in the midst of 
 winter. He wears no neckcloth and cuts his hair in imitation of 
 the prints of Petrarch.' 
 
 The following affords a fair view of the personal 
 
 attitude of the Tory critics of Blackwood towards the 
 
 Liberal editor of the Examiner : 
 
 ' 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 "green 
 fields," "jaunty streams," and "o'er-arching leafiness," exactly 
 as a Cheapside shopkeeper 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 Hampstead Hill, nor reclined 
 by any river more pastoral than the Serpentine. But he is 
 
Leigh Hunt. 139 
 
 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. ... In the opinion of these 
 competent judges {i.e. young attorneys and embryo-barristers 
 about town), 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. . . . His religion is a poor tame dilution of the blasphe- 
 mies of the Encyclopaedia — his patriotism a crude, vague, in- 
 effectual and sour Jacobinism. . . . He pretends, indeed, to be 
 an admirer of Spenser 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. . . . Mr. Hunt's 
 ideas concerning the sublime, and concerning his own powers, 
 bear a close resemblance to those of 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 night- 
 ingale." ' 
 
 The reference in this paragraph to the religion of 
 Leigh Hunt provokes the remark that notwith- 
 standing the declared unbelief of the poets of the 
 London School, we can find nothing more heretical 
 in the Examiner than a condemnation of the doctrines 
 of reprobation and eternal punishment — doctrines 
 which men in our day who claim to be Christians 
 believe, with the Examiner, to be in opposition to 
 ' the theories of the amiable author of Christianity, 
 and such as can only show degraded and slavish fear 
 of a powerful Being, not hope and trust in a good one.' 
 Leigh Hunt's heresy might have been overlooked, but 
 his poverty was, as we have hinted, an unpardonable 
 offence. It was of course not to be forgiven that the 
 
140 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 founder of the Cockney School could claim the friend- 
 ship of Lord Byron. On this subject Blackivood 
 said : 
 
 ' How must the haughty spirit of Lara and Harold contemn the 
 subaltern sneaking of our modern tuft-hunter. The insult which 
 he offered 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 con- 
 cerned — excited a feeling of utter loathing and disgust in the 
 public mind.' 
 
 When concealment of the appalling circumstance 
 was no longer possible, that ' one of the most nobly 
 born of English patricians' had been so much im- 
 pressed with the character and powers of the ' paltry 
 Cockney newspaper scribbler ' who had offered him 
 the wanton insult of a dedication, that he had invited 
 him to join Shelley, himself and others at their 
 Italian retreat, with a view to the establishment of 
 the Liberal, the irate Blackwood (1822) bade farewell 
 to the 'Cockney King' in some mock verses, of which 
 these are the first : 
 
 'The kind Cockney Monarch, he bids us farewell, 
 Taking his place in the Leghorn-bound smack — 
 In the smack, in the smack— ah ! will he never come back ? 
 What will become of Webb, Hazlitt, and all the pack ? 
 I'm sure our Star's gone, and we're left in a plight.' 
 
 It was a trying blow to the northern censors, and 
 perhaps it was scarcely a matter for surprise that 
 they had need to solace themselves for such pre- 
 ferment of the enemy, by taking a parting fling at 
 the most * nobly-born patrician,' himself : 
 
Leigh Hunt. 141 
 
 ' It is, on the whole, however, satisfactory to see the Cockney 
 in his proper situation — the menial of a lord. This is the man 
 who, for years, kept abusing nobility ; and now sneaks fawn- 
 ingly, with hat in hand, to " my dear Byron," and is quite happy 
 to do any little dirty job imposed on him by the aristocratical 
 pride of the domineering lord. See him in the Liberal. 
 Enter — Lord Byron with a frown and a stride ; follows — Leigh 
 Hunt with a utensil on a salver, etc., etc. That Satan should 
 stoop to associate with an incubus, shows there is degeneracy in 
 hell.' 
 
 We have kept to the last a part of the first and 
 foulest of Blackwood's long series of critiques on 
 Hunt. It appears in the October number of 18 17. 
 
 ' His (Leigh Hunt's) poetry resembles that of a man who has 
 kept company with kept-mistresses. His muse talks indelicately 
 like a tea-sipping milliner girl.' 
 
 After an insinuation to the effect that perhaps 
 Leigh Hunt is an unfortunate woman disguised in 
 yellow breeches, the first edition contains the follow- 
 ing paragraph, which was struck out of all subsequent 
 editions : 
 
 ' Some excuse for him there might have been, had he been 
 hurried away by imagination or passion. But with him Inde- 
 cency 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.' 
 
 It was felt that the public would certainly require 
 a key to understand this venomous assault, and to 
 enable them to do so, a good-natured friend of 
 Hunt's wrote to them and him as follows : 
 
 ' I have to inform you that report speaks of you as a perfect 
 tyrant in your family, and your wife as the most abject of your 
 slaves, that you are so entirely devoted to the gratifications of 
 
142 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 your passions, and so completely given up to sensuality, that no 
 female of your acquaintance is secure from your addresses, for 
 not any ties are considered by you as sacred, if they come in 
 contact with your inclination ; and that a sister of Mrs. Hunt's 
 resides with you, who is the mother of at least one child, of which 
 you are the father.' 
 
 Leigh Hunt's reply was scarcely satisfying. He 
 began by publishing in his own paper on two suc- 
 cessive weeks, a note addressed to his critic, which 
 ran : 
 
 'The writer of the article signed "Z" in Blackwood's Edin- 
 burgh Magazine for October, 1817, is invited to send his address 
 to the printer of the Examiner, in order that justice may be 
 executed on the proper person.' 
 
 Of course the ' writer of the article signed " Z "' was 
 much too knowing a bird to be caught by such chaff. 
 He declared his unwillingness to be brought into 
 ' unnecessary collision with a lunatic ;' so all that 
 remained to Hunt was simply to rebut the charges 
 of his anonymous slanderer. This he did in the 
 following terms : 
 
 ' " Z." — This poor wretched, lying, and cowardly creature has 
 now had more than ample time to come forward, and has not 
 done so . . . but he or his employers must not think to escape 
 while the same venomous malignity survives. . . . Reptile 
 indeed he is, and most unhappy creature must be, to feel excited 
 to pour forth misrepresentations which could not be falser if he 
 had cried out in his anguish at the blackness of the green leaves, 
 or the hatefulness of affection.' 
 
 Most of us have a kindness for Leigh Hunt. Every- 
 one feels that few men have ever had their merits so 
 grudgingly allowed. No one now believes the 
 rancorous stories that were told with respect to him. 
 Macaulay gave expression to the popular feeling with 
 
Leigh Hunt. 143 
 
 regard to this author when he said : ' Unless we are 
 greatly mistaken, he is a very clever, a very honest, 
 and a very good-natured man.' His worst offences 
 against morality may be found embodied in his 
 ' Story of Rimini,' a poem in which he celebrates, 
 with some show of sympathy, the love of a man for 
 his sister-in-law. This may not involve a very terrible 
 transgression in the eyes of men whose ears are 
 attuned to the strains of the Deceased Wife's Sister 
 Bill. But it was in direct antagonism to the code of 
 honour recognised in Hunt's time ; and, after all, a 
 man has himself to blame if he finds to his cost that 
 the public are unable to separate the morality of the 
 author from the morality of his works, after he has 
 put it in their power to charge him with personal 
 participation in any immorality — or supposed im- 
 morality — to which he has extended his countenance 
 and sympathy. 
 
 A volume like the present is destitute of philoso- 
 phical pretensions if it fails to afford a judicious expla- 
 nation of the critical anomalies it unearths. The 
 attacks made upon Hunt during his lifetime were 
 due to causes less remote and more obvious than 
 operated in the case of any of his contemporaries. 
 Those causes were threefold : the first of them con- 
 cerned the mere accidents of his literary position ; the 
 second, his natural infirmities as a poet ; and the 
 third, his affectations as a man. It was Leigh Hunt's 
 misfortune that his life was cast in London, in days 
 when Edinburgh was making effort to break the 
 literary supremacy of the English metropolis. The 
 
144 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 story of the origin of the Edinburgh Reviezv, which 
 comes to us from Sydney Smith, conveys an idea that 
 political rebellion lay at the root of the scheme. ' The 
 principles of the French Revolution were then fully 
 afloat,' he says, ' and it is impossible to conceive a 
 more violent and agitated state of society. Among 
 the first persons with whom I became acquainted, 
 [i.e. in Edinburgh, where from stress of politics and 
 war he had put in on his way from a curacy on Salis- 
 bury Plain to the University of Weimar], were Lord 
 Jeffrey, Lord Murray, and Lord Brougham ; all of 
 them maintaining opinions upon political subjects a 
 little too liberal for the dynasty of Dundas, then exer- 
 cising supreme power over the northern division of 
 the island. One day we happened to meet in the 
 eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleugh Place, the 
 elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey. I pro- 
 posed that we should set up a Review, and this was 
 acceded to with acclamation. I was appointed Editor, 
 and remained long enough in Edinburgh to edit the 
 first number of the Edinburgh Review. The motto I 
 proposed for the Review was : 
 
 ' " Tenui musam meditamur avena." 
 ' " We cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal." 
 
 But this was too near the truth to be admitted.' 
 There can be little doubt that whatever the germina- 
 tive idea of the Review in question, its governing idea 
 was that of destroying the literary centralisation of 
 London. It had, as we have shown, been going no 
 more than fifteen years, when the Edinburgh Magazine 
 was started with such objects of rivalry as have been 
 
Leigh Hunt. 145 
 
 already explained. But the two Edinburgh periodicals 
 were not so much at variance in political principle as 
 at one in literary purpose. 
 
 The interval between 1802 and 1817 had been an 
 important epoch in periodical literature in London. 
 It had seen the commencement of the Examiner, the 
 Quarterly and the Literary Gazette, not to speak of 
 journals of less moment. London had not seriously 
 suffered from the spurt made by Edinburgh. Another 
 effort could be put forth to establish the credit of the 
 northern metropolis ; and what time could be more 
 suitable for a sortie than the present, when the silly 
 affectation and detestable fidgetyness of a band of 
 journalistic Cockneys were exciting the disgust of per- 
 sons of healthy instincts ? So Edinburgh threw down 
 the gauntlet, and perhaps London accepted the chal- 
 lenge. It is amusing to observe to what depths of mean- 
 ness the rancour of the belligerents speedily descended. 
 There was not even harmony within their own camps, 
 and the only thing that prevented absolute mutiny was 
 the sense of an outside force, against which, in some 
 scarce explicable way, they had common cause. How 
 ridiculous were these squabbles among the tribes of 
 Noodledums will be seen from the following letter, 
 written by one whose powers and position ought surely 
 to have placed him above such pettiness of spirit : 
 ' I passed three days with Walter Scott,' says 
 Southey, 'an amusing and highly estimable man. 
 You see the whole extent of his powers in the Min- 
 strel's " Lay," of which your opinion seems to accord 
 with mine — a very amusing poem.' The key to this 
 
 10 
 
146 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 letter at once peeps out when we remember that 
 Southey as a Quarterly man belongs to London, and 
 Scott as an Edinburgh man, to Edinburgh. ' Scott 
 bears a great part in the Edinburgh Review! continues 
 Southey, 'but does not review well.' Diversity of 
 political opinion could not in this case wring the withers 
 of the man who made such an obvious aberration 
 from the straight line of truth ; both men were 
 Tories, and afterwards they were colleagues. It was 
 merely London against Edinburgh or what stood for 
 Edinburgh. Again, James Hogg said of Wordsworth, 
 ' He seems a very intelligent man — for ahorse-couper.' 
 Diversity of social habit could hardly compel the un- 
 couth shepherd to throw a word like this at his dog. 
 It was merely Edinburgh against London, or what 
 stood for London. Byron was not wrong when he 
 said that the Scotch, Lake and Cockney troubadours 
 and critics were spoilt by living in little circles and 
 petty societies. Such rivalry without object was 
 more than enough to ruin all the creative genius that 
 came within its influence. To productive talent it 
 was what Goethe says all such literary passions must 
 needs be, a noxious mist, a dropping poison, which 
 destroys the tree of creative power. The only men 
 who were not utterly lost to it were those who kept 
 aloof from it and isolated themselves by main force. 
 They alone breathed the undisturbed, somnambu- 
 lant atmosphere in which anything great could 
 thrive. 
 
 It is true that for some score years at the beginnin°- 
 of the century, Edinburgh had its own distinct voice 
 
Leigh Hunt. 147 
 
 in literature. It was not merely that a great organ of 
 public opinion came to us from that city, but that the 
 young men by whom it was written, and the 
 opinions to which it gave expression, were distinctly 
 and peculiarly Scotch. It does not concern us to 
 inquire what the value was of the influence exercised ; 
 it is enough that it was a new influence, or at least an 
 influence brought to bear in a new way and from a 
 new place. But in what did this spurt result? 
 It resulted in collapse — comparative if not abso- 
 lute collapse. The very men who had set out with 
 the avowed object of breaking the supremacy of 
 London, were found one by one to bend the knee to 
 her, and to fly off for London triumphs and London 
 rewards as speedily as London evinced a disposition 
 to receive them. Nor was this all. Upon the critical 
 organs of the north crept gradually the influence of 
 London and of the English and Irish provinces, and for 
 a time Dr. Maginn became the voice of Blackwood and 
 Hazlitt thevoice of the Edinburgh. Therigidpuritanism 
 which had been the governing characteristic of Scotch 
 criticism subsided, and then the conquest of the con- 
 querors was complete. London dominated Edinburgh. 
 The Magazines remained, but the Edinburgh was no 
 more Scotch than the Examiner, or Blackwood than 
 the Quarterly. Edinburgh had lost. 
 
 During the struggle, however, it was natural that 
 Leigh Hunt, as editor of a notorious Liberal journal 
 in London, and head of a circle of poets there, 
 should be the mark at which many of the arrows 
 of Edinburgh should be directed. And the arrows 
 
 10 — 2 
 
148 Cobzvebs of Criticism. 
 
 were sometimes the arrows of truth, though too 
 frequently barbed with malice. But if the accident 
 of Hunt's literary position in London exposed 
 him to many assaults of criticism, his natural in- 
 firmities as a writer exposed him to many more. 
 Perhaps there are few, if any, faults of which 
 Hunt as a critic was not guilty. It is unwise to 
 claim for him the honour of initiating that new school 
 of criticism which in our day has substituted for 
 judgment by fixed law and set rule, interpretative 
 insight and appreciativeness. But he is much under- 
 rated as a poet. Mr. Browning's admiration of Hunt 
 is well known. ' I have always venerated you as a 
 poet,' he writes to the subject of his panegyric ; ' I 
 believe your poetry to be sure of its eventual reward ; 
 other people, not unlikely, may feel like me, that 
 there has been no need of getting into feverish haste 
 to cry out on what is.' It is hard to echo such terms 
 of praise. But the man who can write one good 
 sonnet may be justly said to be a poet, though he 
 have done no more than that to entitle him to the 
 sacred name ; and we have need to search long and 
 in many places before finding anything more pro- 
 foundly expressive of the wonder and awe of the 
 soul of man brought face to face with the mystery 
 of time than Hunt's 'Thought on the Nile.' As a 
 whole, however, Hunt as a poet may be said to 
 be the apostle of those who perceive nothing poetic 
 that is not petty. There is the reverse of largeness 
 in nearly everything from his pen. There is an affec- 
 tation of the bird-like in the very movement of his 
 
Leigh Hunt. 149 
 
 verse. Hunt chirps of hawthorn and lilacs. It is 
 significant that in those later years in which he was 
 ' astonished to find ' that Wordsworth was ' not half 
 the man ' he took him for, the absence of the bird-like 
 quality of music was almost the only reason assigned 
 for the reduced appraisement. Hunt as a poet is 
 certainly free from the reproach of having written as 
 if he were ill, and the whole world a lazaretto. His 
 was not ' Lazaretto poetry ;' it was more open to the 
 charge of cheerful perkiness. As frequently as his 
 contemporary, who invented the name, he wrote 
 poems that might properly be called Gelegenheits- 
 gedichte — poems having reference to actual occur- 
 rences of life. But the occurrences were themselves 
 trivial, and not such as properly came within the 
 province of poetry. This was one of Hunt's two 
 fatal errors. The other error was akin to this, namely 
 that of writing too frequently from the standpoint of 
 his own person. Landor said that many of the poets 
 of his time were too fond of the unsubstantial, and 
 too proud of the ' pure imagination ' from which their 
 conceptions were supposed to come. Landor loved 
 only the poetry that was laid among actual men and 
 women, and concerned itself with recorded actions. 
 Goethe took the same side : ' Poetry is at its zenith,' 
 he said, ' when it seems altogether external ; the more 
 it deals with the personal feeling of the writer the 
 more it is on the downward path.' The point is one 
 on which there may easily be a difference of opinion. 
 Looking at the evidence of history, we find that the 
 highest poets — ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Shakspeare, 
 
150 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 Milton, and even Spenser at his best — stand always 
 among actual men, and write about actual deeds. It is 
 only the lesser poet who is endlessly spinning his web 
 out of the entrails of what he calls his ' subjectivity.' 
 That subjectivity of his is usually a matter of no 
 moment to the world, however serious to himself. It 
 perhaps concerns itself with lamenting the loss of 
 some loved one by distance or death, and is often 
 worthless to literature, and an abuse of poetry. Look- 
 ing at the question from the point of view of art, we 
 perceive that the ' objective ' theme, however sub- 
 stantial, however full of strong human interest, and 
 notwithstanding the garb of poetry in which it is 
 enveloped, is after all little more than the prose of 
 common life if a 'soul of sentiment,' if the 'sub- 
 jectivity ' of the writer is not breathed through it. 
 The great poets who deal with externals are never so 
 far the enemies of subjectivity as to omit to breathe 
 through their work that elevated personal feeling 
 which gives individuality, style and even humanity to 
 poetry. Now, Hunt's grave fault was that in writing 
 from the subjective standpoint — probably for the 
 reason that he could not find matter enough in the 
 objective — his subjectivity was not always important. 
 It was often trivial and petty : it was frequently 
 effeminate, and hence it incurred, quite naturally, the 
 ridicule of the robust Scotch ' bodies ' with whom it 
 was an axiom that a man could not talk of himself 
 without being a coarse egotist. Assuredly in those 
 days a man of Hunt's calibre could hardly talk of 
 himself in poetry without loss. 
 
Leigh Htmt. 1 5 r 
 
 A further cause of collision between Hunt and his 
 critics was his affectation as a man. There were, 
 indeed, men of healthy instincts to whom Hunt's 
 character appeared wholesome and virile. ' I look 
 upon the author of " Rimini," ' says Lamb to Southey, 
 ' as a man of taste and a poet. He is better than so ; 
 he is one of the most cordial-minded men I ever 
 knew — a matchless fireside companion. I mean not 
 to affront or wound your feelings when I say, that in 
 his more genial moods he has often reminded me of 
 you. There is the same air of mild dogmatism — the 
 same condescending to boyish sportiveness in both 
 your conversations.' ' I thought him,' says Haydon, 
 ' with his black bushy hair, black eyes, pale face, and 
 " nose of taste," as fine a specimen of a London 
 editor as could be imagined ; assuming, yet moderate, 
 sarcastic, yet genial, with a smattering of everything, 
 and master of nothing, affecting the dictator, the poet, 
 the politician, the critic, and the sceptic, whichever 
 would at the moment give him the air to inferior 
 minds of being a very superior man. I listened with 
 something of curiosity to his republican independence, 
 though hating his effeminacy and Cockney peculiari- 
 ties.' Haydon was a man of thoroughly manly 
 nature, and there is no getting rid of his portrait of 
 Hunt. Everything justifies it. If Hunt's critic in 
 Blackwood was indeed the stalwart son of a Paisley 
 manufacturer, with hair like eagles' feathers and nails 
 like birds' claws, we can at least understand his con- 
 tempt of effeminacy, though we perceive none the 
 less clearly the malice with which he exposed it. 
 
152 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 But Hunt's personal affectations have an interest 
 beyond the man. There is an interest, at once 
 humorous and pathetic, in taking note of the fact 
 that the mere outward bearing which men of genius 
 in every age adopt towards the world, is sufficient of 
 itself to give hint of their attitude not only towards 
 the drama we call life, but the tragedy we call death, 
 and the mystery known to us as the hereafter. There, 
 for example, were Shakspeare and his coadjutors, when 
 events of moment in politics and religion were over- 
 shadowing the mighty stage of the world, electing to 
 devote their great energies to the mimic world of the 
 stage. Perhaps they never gave a second thought to 
 the futility of their calling, or reflected how after all 
 it formed no essential part of life's business, but was 
 only the idle amusement with which serious men 
 occupied the intervals of life's serious duties. Perhaps, 
 on the other hand, they were throughout conscious of 
 all this, and clung to their pursuits as a sort of 
 sarcasm on the noisy nothingness and 'momentary 
 momentousness ' of more pretentious occupations. 
 They were a gay band of brothers, setting up their 
 booths in empty stackyards, here to-day and gone to- 
 morrow, dressed in their scarlet doublets, French 
 blue hose, and white cockades ; jauntily tripping 
 down Eastcheap in the warmth of the afternoons, 
 having spent their mornings in bed, and being about 
 to see through their midnights at the Boar's Head or 
 the Mermaid. They were great writers, and were 
 fully alive to that fact. They could go a long way, 
 when so minded, to solve the problems of life ; but it 
 
Leigh Htint. 153 
 
 was a part of their solution of those problems that it 
 was not well to think too much about them. So 
 they never carried their mind on their tongue, or 
 their heart on their sleeve, but with a light step they 
 went in and out among their fellows with the sun- 
 shine in their eyes, and on their lips a song, or a 
 badinage, a quibble, or perchance an execrable pun. 
 But half a century had not yet gone by when all this 
 company in scarlet doublets and white cockades was 
 swept away, and the Puritan Milton and his col- 
 leagues came in with their sable cloaks, and with the 
 ' rain and the wind in their faces.' Life had now be- 
 come a more solemn problem, not to be solved by a 
 cheery smile, not to be banished by jovial volatility, 
 only to be met with a grave front, and to be followed 
 constantly, even though it led high up to the 'beetling 
 summit of the cliff,' or deep down to the shadows of 
 the vale of tears. Scarcely more than a further fifty 
 years brings us to yet another order of things. Men 
 of genius are now dressed up to resemble animated 
 bits of Dresden china. In shovel-hats surmounting 
 periwigs, in silk stockings surmounted by gold-laced 
 coats with stainless ruffles, Steele and Savage, and at 
 length Sheridan, strut through life as though they 
 think it a merry sort of comedy in which it is their 
 part, as nature's first walking-gentlemen, merely to 
 exhibit youth and high spirits, liberality and -lavish- 
 ness. Life is now a vulgar problem, ' to be solved by 
 plenty of money and wine and pleasure.' There is 
 nothing farther to say concerning it ; there is nothing 
 more to find out respecting it — nothing, at least, 
 
154 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 until the end of the brisk masquerade, when these 
 gay, good-natured, sorry sons of genius ; these well- 
 dressed, well-shaved dawdlers in life's pageant ; these 
 bankrupts, now, in heart and health — Steele in his 
 retreat in Wales, Savage in his prison at Bristol, and 
 Sheridan in the impoverished home in London, where 
 presently his creditors will go about to arrest him, 
 dead — turn pale with awe at prospect of that Death 
 which has so rarely hitherto occupied their thoughts. 
 Then all this in turn goes by, and we come again to 
 a race of serious men. Clad in dapple cloaks, three or 
 four poets of solemn temperament leave London for 
 the solitude of the mountains. They would have 
 gone farther if the fates had favoured them. Life is 
 now no longer a farce ; the days of men are few 
 and evil ; the existing order of things is for the most 
 part wicked and unjust ; it is the duty of every man to 
 get out of this chaos, and make to himself a kosmos, 
 where none need care for ' routs, dinners, morning 
 calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, 
 on foot or in carriage.' Moreover, another revelation 
 as to the meaning of life has been discovered, and 
 external nature affords a solution of life's problems, 
 which in its placid hopefulness has nothing in common 
 with the turbulence of emotion which has been ex- 
 perienced when the older revelation — that of internal 
 nature — has been appealed to. So Wordsworth, 
 Southey and brethren betake themselves to the moun- 
 tains of Cumberland, and from thence they send a 
 clear voice that is heard above the din of West- 
 minister elections, petitions of the borough of Honis- 
 
Leigh Hunt. 155 
 
 ton, Chartist risings, and Young Ireland Rebellions 
 and heard yet again when the babble of the many- 
 voices has died away. Following soon after, and 
 indeed all but contemporary with, this company of 
 recluses, comes a circle of men of whom Leigh Hunt 
 — though least, perhaps, in genius- — may be accepted 
 as the representative ; for there was something in his 
 mind and feeling that placed him midway between 
 Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and made him in a sense 
 the interpreter of their weaknesses to the world. The 
 texture of Hunt's own mind and feeling was feminine, 
 and his bearing towards the world was effeminate. For 
 him and for some of his friends there was nothing better 
 worth love and reverence than the spirit of beauty. 
 Life for certain of them was a quest for something be- 
 tween millinery and blue-china. Coming after the 
 strong writers, who had just cut out of credit the 
 showy masquerade of eighteenth-century manners and 
 morals, they were as grown men, capable of strenuous 
 endeavour, but busied with embroidery. Theirs was a 
 view of life's functions which fed the fancy on dainties 
 that surfeited it, but which had no stimulus for the 
 mind, and for the heart had no solace. Existence 
 was a little round of trivialities. True indeed there 
 was a certain bluster of republicanism, and a curious 
 parade of unbelief. In Shelley, at least, there was a 
 sincere, if vague, effort after improvements of which 
 human society was thought susceptible. In Keats 
 there was an elevation of feeling touching the poetic 
 office that would have been worthy of Milton. But all 
 this did not establish their masculinity. Both the re- 
 
156 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 publicanism and the unbelief of the Hunt coterie 
 hovered constantly over the borderland of personal 
 feeling. The republicanism came largely of hatred 
 of the Prince Regent, and of the Liverpool-Castlereagh 
 administration ; the unbelief came of instinctive dis- 
 trust of the hierarchy of ' that detestable religion — the 
 Christian.' 
 
 That Leigh Hunt and his circle, from the wee 
 Cornelius Webb to the ' volcanic ' Byron, narrowed 
 down the focus at which they viewed the problem of 
 life could not escape the observation of smaller as 
 well as larger men than themselves. A manly robust- 
 ness of sentiment must needs have led the stalwart 
 and healthy person who is suspected of having written 
 on the banks of Windermere the abuse of them in 
 Blackivood, to despise the effeminacy that under the 
 light of sun or moon could allow capable men to 
 present each other with bouquets of roses and 
 wreaths of bay-leaves and locks of hair, and to ad- 
 dress sonnets to each other commemorative of mutual 
 genius and prophetic of future fame. That the critic 
 in question was carried away by his hatred of this 
 flustering Cockneyism into ridiculous depths of 
 personal malignancy is obvious enough to the reader 
 of the foregoing pages. But what he then saw and 
 despised, others less stirred by private animosity 
 must still see and regret. Hunt in his own person 
 was neither the incestuous monster whom Blackwood 
 depicted, nor the ' Cockney-bred setter of rabbits ' 
 whom Moore satirized, nor the ' honest charlatan who 
 talked Punch in pure simplicity of heart,' with whom 
 
Leigh Hunt.. 157 
 
 Byron quarrelled. Neither was he what Shelley 
 called him — 
 
 ' One of those happy souls 
 Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom 
 This world would smell like what it is — a tomb.' 
 
 He was merely a man whose texture of mind and 
 feeling was, as we say, feminine, and whose bearing 
 towards the world was effeminate. 
 
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 WHEN we speak of authors who were wronged 
 by their critics, the mind turns first to the 
 two young poets who lie together in the Protestant 
 cemetery at Rome. There are many of us who are 
 old-fashioned enough to believe, notwithstanding 
 much that has very properly been said by Lord 
 Houghton and Mr. William Rossetti, that brutal 
 criticism did more than anything else to kill Keats 
 in the year 1821. It is beyond question a good thing 
 to show that manliness is an element of the literary 
 character ; but we fail to see that this is an element 
 that may not coexist with a very keen sensitiveness 
 to what people say about us. He who, without 
 flinching, can bear to be told that he is ' a shallow 
 fool,' and that his poetry is ' drivelling idiocy,' is 
 surely a little too amiable for this unamiable world : 
 he, on the other hand, whose friends are silent when 
 he is charged with indecency and a desire to raise 
 the banner of a black ambition, ' whose only aim is 
 to ruin society,' may not fairly be charged with want 
 of manliness if it become known that he has drooped 
 
Keats. 159 
 
 under the heavy load of unmerited obloquy. It was 
 Byron's ill-judged sneer at Keats — 
 
 ' Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle, 
 Should let itself be snuffed out by an article ' — 
 
 that set men's wits to work to overturn that impres- 
 sion of Keats's susceptibility to criticism, which was 
 at first entertained by Shelley and all, or almost all, 
 the friends that were nearest to Keats. It would have 
 been wiser to upset Byron's inference than to disturb 
 the facts. It was not an article merely that ' snuffed 
 out' the soul of the poet, but all the actual personal 
 injury that was threatened and indeed inflicted by a 
 series of articles. It is, as the present writer has 
 elsewhere said, a circumstance little thought of in 
 the discussion of this matter, that literature had pre- 
 sented the only possible prospect of a livelihood to 
 Keats ; and that when, by reason of the severity of 
 criticism, literature was found likely to fail him, he 
 was left a doomed man, not only without an inde- 
 pendence, but with shattered health and with a pain- 
 ful love project on hand, in regard to which there 
 remained no longer the shadow of any hope that it 
 would finally be realized. Keats might properly have 
 
 said : 
 
 ' you take my life 
 
 When you do take the means by which I live.' 
 
 To live is, as Dante truly says, often a greater proof 
 of a firm soul than to die ; but Keats was such a one 
 as Sydney Smith pathetically describes, walking with 
 bare feet and naked breast, jaded, mangled, and 
 chilled, against driving misery and through stormy 
 
160 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 sorrows over the Alpine paths of life. What wonder 
 if such life seemed to Keats — much more than to his 
 contemporary who said so — 
 
 ' a waste of wearisome hours 
 
 Which seldom the rose of enjoyment adorns ; 
 
 And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers 
 
 Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.' 
 
 Keats's first volume was published in 1817. It is 
 a common mistake to say that this book was hardly 
 noticed at all. It was constantly alluded to in the 
 prominent periodicals. Moreover, Keats enjoyed a 
 measure of distinction as a poet before the appearance 
 of this collection of the miscellaneous products of his 
 youth. In 1816, the Examiner had spoken of him as 
 one who was likely to revive the early vigour of 
 English poetry. This compliment from the quarter 
 whence it came was perhaps a doubtful one, and 
 certainly in its results it was disastrous. 
 
 ' Endymion ' was published in 1818. The follow- 
 ing is a part of the text of the notorious notice of the 
 poem which appeared in the Quarterly in that year : 
 
 ' Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the 
 works which they affect to criticize. On the present occasion 
 we shall anticipate the author's complaint, and honestly confess 
 that we have not read his work. . . . Indeed we have made 
 efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be to 
 get through it . . . and we are no better acquainted with the 
 meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled, 
 than we are with that of the three which we have not looked 
 into. 
 
 ' It is not that Mr. Keats ( if that be his real name, for we 
 almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real 
 name to such a rhapsody) has no powers of language, rays of 
 
Keats. 161 
 
 fancy, etc — he has all these ; but he is unhappily a disciple of 
 the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney 
 poetry ; which may be denned to consist of the most incongru- 
 ous ideas in the most uncouth language. . . . The author is a 
 copyist of Mr. Hunt ; but he is more unintelligible, almost as 
 rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd 
 than his prototype. ... Of the story we have been able to 
 make out but little ; it seems to be mythological, and probably 
 relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion ; but of this, as the 
 scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak 
 with any degree of certainty. ... At first it appeared to us 
 that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself and wearying his 
 readers with an immeasurable game at louts rime's j but, if we 
 recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play, 
 that the rhymes when filled up shall have a meaning ; and our 
 author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems 
 to write a line at random, and then he follows, not the thought 
 excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which 
 it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a 
 complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject 
 to another, from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds, and 
 the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, 
 have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of 
 the catchwords on which they turn.' 
 
 Several public animadversions were called forth on 
 
 the occasion of this article in the Quarterly. One of 
 
 these, appearing in the Morning Chronicle, pointed 
 
 at political animosity as the evil spirit that lay at the 
 
 root of the attack. ' If,' said the writer, ' Mr. Keats 
 
 will give up the society and friendship of Mr. Leigh 
 
 Hunt, he will win the approbation of the Quarterly 
 
 Review! 'We really think so,' said the Examiner, 
 
 quoting this remark ; ' but Mr. Keats is of such a 
 
 spirit that he will stand by his friend.' The Alfred, 
 
 an Exeter paper said : 
 
 ' We have met with a singular instance, in the last number of 
 the Quarterly Review, of that unfeeling arrogance, and cold 
 
 1 1 
 
1 62 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ignorance, which so strongly marked the minds and hearts of 
 Government sycophants and Government writers. The poem of 
 a young man of genius, which evinces more natural power than 
 any other work of this day, is abused and cried down in terms 
 which would disgrace any other pens than those used in the 
 defence of an Oliver or a Castles. We have read the poetic 
 romance of " Endymion " (the book in question) with no little 
 delight; and could hardly believe that it was written by so 
 young a man as the preface infers. Mr. Keats, the author of it, 
 is a genius of the highest order ; and no one but a Lottery 
 Commissioner and a Government Pensioner (both of which 
 Mr. William Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review, is) 
 could, with a false and remorseless pen, have striven to frustrate 
 hopes and aims so youthful and so high as this young poet 
 nurses. . . . Does the author of such poetry as this deserve to be 
 made the sport of so servile a dolt as a Quarterly Reviewer? No. 
 Two things have struck us on the perusal of this singular poem. 
 The first is, that Mr. Keats excels in what Milton excelled — the 
 power of putting a spirit of life and novelty into the heathen 
 mythology. The second is, that in the structure of his verse, 
 and the sinewy quality of his thoughts, Mr. Keats greatly re- 
 sembles old Chapman, the nervous translator of Homer. His 
 mind has " thews and limbs like to its ancestors." Mr. Gifford, 
 who knows something of the old dramatists, ought to have 
 paused before he sanctioned the abuse of a spirit kindred with 
 them. If he could not feel, he ought to know better.' 
 
 The Examiner, October 1 1 th, 1 8 1 8, quoted in full the 
 article from the Exeter paper, and this reproduction 
 of praise constituted the sum of Hunt's ' loud and 
 earnest defence of Keats ' down to August 2nd, 1820. 
 
 So we see that, in 1 8 1 8, a reviewer in the Quarterly 
 believed, or affected to believe, the author's name to 
 be an assumed one which was then first affixed to 
 the poem ' Endymion.' Had not the name, forsooth, 
 an unreal ring ? and was it not beyond belief that any 
 sane mind could father, deliberately and dispassion- 
 ately, a work so devoid as ' Endymion' was of all 
 
Keats. 163 
 
 traces of reasonableness of conception, so wanting in 
 all good qualities of execution, in judgment, in sin- 
 cerity, in lucidity, in facility, in directness, in cadence, in 
 affluence of expression ; in short, so clearly the out- 
 come of certain evil moments of the period of first 
 youth, when the imagination is in a ferment and the 
 whole nature in a turmoil ? Perchance the music of 
 the strange cognomen had sunk into the soul of the 
 moody and unlovely young poet, even as the music 
 of the name of his chief imaginary personage had 
 gone into his being, soothing him with the soft 
 flattery of a fitness that should be beautiful, and of a 
 harmony that should be tender and pensive ! 
 
 Well, if the tree may at all times be known by its 
 fruit, then may it fairly be said that the critic who 
 wrote in this strain of rudest superiority was not 
 usually deficient in poetic insight. He earned a 
 word of warm eulogy from Coleridge for acute, 
 spirited, sometimes stinging, but always argumenta- 
 tive and honourable criticism, in days when the 
 approved mode of conducting critical journals seemed 
 to that master of fair and philosophical investigation 
 little better than the art of the gossip, the backbiter, 
 and the pasquillant But over against his arbitrary 
 and petulant verdict, pronounced on a work which he 
 confessed he had not read, let us place in transfigur- 
 ing contrast a prophecy that has proved in all respects 
 coincident with the result. ' I think I shall be among 
 the English poets after my death.' So wrote the 
 author of ' Endymion,' at that time the author of 
 'Hyperion' also. He was then unmoved, for a brief 
 
 11 — 2 
 
/ 
 
 164 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 period at least, by the goadings of repeated public 
 charges of nonsense or lunacy, as well as by his own 
 much more painful domestic criticism : calm in the 
 modest, if assured, consciousness of high and enduring 
 genius, which could well afford to be true to its own 
 impulses without the least shadow of any thought of 
 the public. This was before the experience of still 
 another untoward year had gathered about that con- 
 sciousness yet bitterer feelings of disappointment 
 and defeat. 
 
 Between the critic and the criticized, the world has 
 long given judgment. Where the one found only 
 alternate raving and madness, and tameness and 
 imbecility, unrelieved by play of healthy passion or 
 sparkle of pure intelligence, the other has discovered 
 a noble creative power, deep and strong, if very far 
 from universal. And now let us leave the blunder 
 where we find it. The stone that was the rejected of 
 the builders has become a corner-stone in the temple : 
 the name that was believed to be a cloak behind 
 which undistinguished inefficiency sought to hide her 
 nakedness, has already taken rank with the names of 
 not the least of the demigods. Rest has followed the 
 heartache of long ago, and of the ludicrous error of 
 shortlived criticism — there an end. Had we not 
 before, and have we not since, endured equal evil 
 with less outcry ? Little will it serve us to add the 
 brand of uncandidness to that of obtuseness or of pro- 
 fligate political partisanship to both. He who values 
 honesty as an element of criticism will fain feel that 
 political rancour could scarcely^spend itself in high 
 
Keats. 165 
 
 places, even by the feeblest of side-blows, on such a 
 puny political entity as Keats was at the best ; 
 while the lover of Keats, who troubles himself to read 
 more of the Quarterly of 18 18 than the four pages 
 which contain all that was published of the oppro- 
 brious review in question, will probably find room 
 enough for the impression — amounting at times to 
 certainty — that the critic was, as we say, a man who 
 desired sincerely to make public his principles of 
 judgment in poetry, and blundered oftenest in deduc- 
 tion from his self-constituted code of laws. 
 
 The review in the Quarterly concludes with the 
 entreaty that if anyone should be so bold as to 
 purchase this ' Poetic Romance' of Leigh Hunt's 
 simple neophyte, and so fortunate as to discover a 
 meaning in it, he will be good enough to make the 
 reviewers acquainted with his success, and then the 
 Quarterly will return to a task which it now abandons 
 in despair. But though the Quarterly said no more 
 on the subject, many a responsive bray came from 
 contemporary periodicals ; and of these, as Mr. 
 Rossetti observes, ' our friend " Z " of Blackwood's was 
 the most jubilant in his eagerness to write himself 
 down an ass.' This is what he says : 
 
 ' His (Keats's) friends, we understand, destined him to the 
 career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years 
 ago to a worthy apothecary in town. . . . 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. . . . The frenzy 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 " Endy- 
 
1 66 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 mion." . . . 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.' 
 
 ' Mr. Hunt,' the critic says, ' is a small poet but a 
 
 clever man : Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he 
 
 is only a boy of pretty abilities which he has done 
 
 everything in his power to spoil.' In conclusion the 
 
 critic ventures to make one little prophecy, that 
 
 Johnny Keats's bookseller would not a second time 
 
 venture £z,o upon anything he can write. 
 
 ' It is,' Blackwood says, ' a better and wiser thing to be a 
 starved apothecary than a starved poet ; so back to the shop, 
 Mr. John, back to "plaster, pills, [and ointment-boxes," etc. 
 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.' 
 
 An enduring reply to the injustice of this critique is 
 furnished by the critic himself only two years later, 
 when, in view of Keats's developing renown and fast- 
 maturing genius, he says : 
 
 ' What is the spell that must seal our lips from uttering an 
 opinion . . . concerning Mr. John Keats, viz., that nature pos- 
 sibly meant him to be a much better poet than Mr. Leigh Himt 
 ever could have been. . . . The truth is, we from the beginning 
 saw marks of feeling and power] in Mr. Keats's verses, which 
 made us think it very likely he might become a real poet of 
 England.' 
 
 It is hard to find a palliative that we can plead for 
 such mendacity as is seen in the two extracts here 
 brought into juxtaposition from the distance of the two 
 
Keats. 167 
 
 years that separate them. But the example is not 
 a solitary one. We can find at least ten other in- 
 stances in point, all equally convicting and equally 
 astounding, from the first ten volumes of the more 
 pretentious Edinburgh Review. It is ever so. When 
 a man of clear genius presents himself, envy and a 
 thousand bad passions (not to speak of what Words- 
 worth terms pure, honest and absolute ignorance) 
 intervene to impede his progress. Progress, by which 
 in this case one means reputation, is what Falstaff calls 
 honour — a mere escutcheon, that will not live with 
 the living, because detraction will not suffer it : it 
 keeps company with the man who died o' Wednesday. 
 But the impulse to endeavour in the writer, as in the 
 fighter, comes from within, and despite petulant 
 abuse the worker holds on his way. Step by step, 
 day by day, he rises to that place from which no 
 malice can pluck him. Then, suddenly, the ragged 
 regiment of all critical blunderers who have assailed 
 him with the bludgeon of personalities and railed at 
 his work in notes of rancorous hatred, lay claim to 
 a share in his reputation on the pretence that they 
 have contributed to raise it. As often as not it is the 
 least excellent portion of a man's work that gets the 
 loudest applause. One remembers the story of the 
 Grecian orator who was interrupted in the middle of 
 his harangue by the rabble shouting their plaudits : 
 the compliment was felt to be a doubtful one, and 
 the orator turned round to a candid friend and asked 
 if he had said anything foolish. 
 
 It was well remarked by Haydon that the greatest 
 
1 68 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 calamity to Keats was his being brought before the 
 world by a set who had so much the habit of puffing 
 each other, that everyone connected with it suffered 
 in public estimation. Haydon had ample personal 
 cause to feel keenly the disadvantages of such an un- 
 evitable position. The northern critics were not slow 
 in identifying the painter of the ' Lazarus ' in certain 
 of the art notices printed in the Examiner. In 1820, 
 Blackwood (' Mr. Wastle's Diary ') said : 
 
 ' It is a pity that this young man, John Keats, author of " En- 
 dymion," and some other poems, should have belonged to the 
 Cockney School, for he is evidently possessed of talents that, 
 under better direction, might have done very considerable 
 things. As it is, he bids fair to sink himself entirely beneath 
 such a mass of affectation, conceit, and Cockney pedantry, as I 
 never expected to see heaped together by anybody except the 
 great founder of the School. What in the name of wonder 
 tempts all these fellows to write on Greek fables ? A man 
 might as well attempt to write a second Anastasius without 
 going into the East. There is much merit in some of the 
 stanzas of Mr. Keats' last volume which I have just seen ; 
 no doubt he is a fine feeling lad — and I hope he will live to 
 despise Leigh Hunt, and be a poet — 
 
 ' "After the fashion of the elder 7iien of England." 
 If he wants to see the story of the " Lamia "—which he has 
 spoiled in one sense and adorned in another— told with real 
 truth and beauty, and explained at once with good sense and 
 imagination, let him look to Wieland's " Life of Peregrinus 
 Proteus," vol. first, I think.' 
 
 With Keats, now sixty years dead, fame has not 
 dealt tardily. Death, that seemed pitilessly to cut 
 short his young life, rich with promise, was not with- 
 out its uses in emphasizing his worth. Indeed, before 
 death came, a flood of grateful recognition had 
 poured itself forth upon his name. The Blackwood 
 
Keats. 1 69 
 
 of 1 8 19 sought, clumsily, but with right feeling, to 
 undo the work of the Blackwood of 1818, and the 
 Edinburgh of 1820, from whatever motive of sincere 
 admiration or political revenge, to reverse the decree 
 of its London rival. 
 The Edinburgh said : 
 
 ' We had never happened to see either of these volumes till 
 very lately, and have been exceedingly struck with the genius 
 they display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all 
 their extravagance. That imitation of our older writers, and 
 especially of our older dramatists, to which we cannot help 
 flattering ourselves that we have somewhat contributed, has 
 brought on, as it were, a second spring in our poetry ; and few 
 of its blossoms are either more profuse in sweetness or richer 
 in promise than this which is now before us. Mr. Keats, we 
 understand, is still a very young man ; and his whole works, 
 indeed, bear evidence of the fact. They are full of extrava- 
 gance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable 
 wanderings, and excessive obscurity. ... A great part of the 
 ■work, indeed, is written in the strangest and most fantastical 
 manner that can be imagined. It seems as if the author had 
 ventured everything that occurred to him in the shape of a 
 glittering image or striking expression — taken the first word 
 that presented itself to make up a rhyme, and then made that 
 word the germ of a new cluster of images — a hint for a new 
 excursion of the fancy— and so wandered on, equally forgetful 
 whence he came, and heedless whither he was going, till he 
 had covered his pages with an interminable arabesque of con- 
 nected and incongruous figures that multiplied as they extended, 
 and were only harmonized by the brightness of their tints and 
 the graces of their forms. . . . There is no work, accordingly, 
 from which a malicious critic could cull more matter for ridi- 
 cule, or select more obscure, unnatural, or absurd passages. 
 But we do not take that to be our office ; and just beg leave, on 
 the contrary, to say that anyone who, on this account, would 
 represent the whole poem as despicable, must either have no 
 notion of poetry or no regard to truth. 
 
 ' It is, in truth, at least as full of genius as of absurdity ; and he 
 who does not find a great deal in it to admire and to give 
 
170 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 delight, cannot in his heart see much beauty in the two exquisite 
 dramas to which we have already alluded, or find any great 
 pleasure in some of the finest creations of Milton and Shake- 
 speare. ... To an unpoetical reader such passages always 
 appear mere raving and absurdity — and to this censure a very 
 great part of the volume before us will certainly be exposed with 
 this class of readers.' 
 
 To soothe down the fire which harsh misjudgment 
 had kindled in Keats, to heal the heart that was 
 breaking, the just tribute of merited applause came 
 late. Already he was as one who had writ his name 
 in water, and not the crown of laurel, cool to the tired 
 brow, could bring back the lost years of peace. But 
 death itself could not remove altogether the scars 
 left by the old quarrel. In 1823 (two years after 
 Keats's death) Blackwood, in reply to an article in the 
 Edinburgh on Shelley's ' Posthumous Poems,' said : 
 
 ' Now the whole of this is made up of direct mis-statement 
 and base misrepresentation. In the first place, long before any 
 Tory review whatever took notice of Keats, he had not merely 
 been puffed in the Examiner, but he had put forth sonnets 
 upon sonnets of his own in honour of Leigh Hunt, calling Leigh 
 Hunt ' a kind martyr,' etc., because he had been clapped into 
 Newgate for a beastly libel upon his sovereign ; and, in short, 
 had identified himself in a hundred different ways with all the 
 bad political principles, as well as with the bad poetical taste, of 
 the Cockney School. Here, therefore, is one clear mis-state- 
 ment as to matter of fact. In the second place, it was not, as 
 is so plainly insinuated, the author of the " Baviad and 
 Maevid" who commenced the attack upon Keats. Keats had 
 been dished — utterly demolished and dished by Blackwood 
 — long before Mr. Gifford's scribes mentioned his name. The 
 Quarterly Review did not invent the name " Cockney School,'' 
 but only adopted that name after it had been introduced by 
 Blackwood into universal use, and had in fact become as much 
 an integral part of the language of English criticism, as any 
 other phrase in the dictionary. It is then absurd, and worse 
 
Keats. 1 7 1 
 
 than absurd to say that Mr. Keats would have altered his con- 
 dition in any respect whatever, by trying to conciliate the smile 
 of the Quarterly editor. It is possible, and indeed it is highly 
 probable, that he was vexed with finding himself and the rest 
 of the Cockney School characterized in the Quarterly by the 
 phrases which Blackwood had invented. But that was a mere 
 flea-bite. All the other reviews had adopted the tone ere then. 
 The concern was utterly undermined three years ere the Quar- 
 terly put a single pickaxe to its foundation. As for the absurd 
 story about Mr. John Keats having been put to death by the 
 Quarterly, or by any other criticism, I confess I really did not 
 expect to meet with a repetition of such stuff in the Edinburgh 
 Review. If people die of these wounds, what a prince of killers 
 and king of murderers must Mr. Jeffrey be ! In law, the inten- 
 tion makes the crime, and he who fires a pistol at my body is a 
 murderer, although he happens to miss me, or although I recover 
 of the wound he inflicts. Granting, then, that this is the law, 
 what are we to say to the man who cut up Byron's " Hours of 
 Idleness"? That review, surely, was meant to be as severe as 
 any review touching poor Johnny Keats. . . . But let us hear 
 no more of Johnny Keats. It really is too disgusting to have 
 him and his poems recalled in this manner, after all the world 
 thought they had got rid of the concern. I would just ask any 
 candid man this question : ' What did Keats write ?' ' Keats !' 
 would be the answer ; ' I never heard the name. Oh yes ; I 
 do remember something— Keats — was it Keats you said ? Are 
 you sure you don't mean Cottle ?' 
 
 A year later (1824) Blackwood said : 
 
 ' Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr.Keats's poetry 
 " grasped with one hand in his bosom "—rather an awkward 
 posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. But what a 
 rash man Shelley was, to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack's 
 poetry on board ! Why, man, it would sink a trireme. In the 
 preface to Mr. Shelley's poems, we are told that " his vessel 
 bore out of sight with a favourable wind ;" but what is that to 
 the purpose ? It had " Endymion " on board, and there was an 
 end. Seventeen ton of pig-iron would not be more fatal ballast. 
 Down went the boat with a " swirl " ! I lay a wager that it 
 righted soon after ejecting Jack.' 
 
172 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 The Edinburgh article here dealt with was at- 
 tributed by Blackwood to Bryan W. Procter. One of 
 ' Mr. Mullion's Letters ' says : 
 
 ' I own, Bryan, you are pathetic on the subject of Jack. 
 " Keats died young, and yet his infelicity had years too many. 
 A canker had blighted the tender bloom that overspread a face 
 in which youth and genius shone with beauty." (What ! be- 
 slobbering men's faces again— fie ! fie !) " The shaft was sped 
 — venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him from his country, 
 with sickness and penury for companions, and followed him to 
 the grave. And yet there are those who could trample on the 
 faded flower — men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of 
 merriment — who laugh loud over the silent urn of genius, and 
 play out their games of venality and infamy with the crumbling 
 bones of genius !" In this last passage you must allude to 
 Cobbett and Tom Paine, for I know not any other person who 
 made play with the crumbling bones of genius on, or rather under, 
 the earth.' 
 
 Again, in their preface to the volume of the 
 magazine for 1826, the editors of Blackwood say : 
 
 ' Keats was a Cockney, and Cockneys claimed him for their 
 own. Never was there a young man so encrusted with conceit. 
 .. . . In truth, the Cockneys themselves broke the boy's heart 
 and blasted all his prospects. We tried to save him by whole- 
 some and severe discipline — they drove him to poverty, expatria- 
 tion, and death.' 
 
 One revoltingly brutal critique which appeared 
 nearly twenty years after Keats's death may well 
 bring our extracts to an end. 
 
 ' A good deal of twaddle was levelled against the conductors 
 of this review when they had the misfortune to criticize a sickly 
 poet, who died soon afterwards, apparently for the express pur- 
 pose of dishonouring us. . . . The article was not written with 
 any intention of damaging Mr. John Keats' lungs or stomach. 
 . . . But how are we to anticipate such contingencies ? Must 
 
Keats. 173 
 
 we, then, adopt the wise precautions of our ancestors in cases 
 of physical torture, and send the proofs to be read over in 
 the presence of a physician who, thumb on pulse, might indi- 
 cate the passages which are too much for human nature to 
 endure ?' 
 
 It has been said that Hunt's sole defence of Keats 
 down to 1820 (Shelley's and Reynolds's are well 
 known) consisted in the reproduction in the Ex- 
 aminer of the article published in the Exeter paper 
 in reply to the Quarterly. We must not, however, 
 omit the mention of any fact that seems to establish 
 an argument for the purity of Hunt's friendship. 
 When Hunt published his satire on Gifford {Ultra- 
 Crepidarius) in 1823, he touched in his preface on 
 the Keats article ; and in the Liberal he had pre- 
 viously said, alluding to Gifford : 
 
 ' Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick, 
 Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick ?' 
 
 — pointing to the period of the Quarterly article on 
 Keats as the time at which the satire had been 
 written. Again reverting to the old Quarterly and 
 Blackwood quarrels in his ' Lord Byron and his Con- 
 temporaries ' (1828), Hunt says: 
 
 ' I have since regretted, on Mr. Keats' account, that I did 
 not take a more active part. The scorn which the public 
 . . . would feel . . . before long was evident enough; but, 
 in the meantime, an injury, in every point of view, was done 
 to a young and sensitive nature, to which I ought to have been 
 more alive. The truth is, I never thought about it, nor, I believe, 
 did he, with a view to my taking any further notice. ... I 
 little suspected at that time, as I did afterwards, that the hunters 
 had struck him ; that a delicate organization, which already anti- 
 cipated a premature death, made him feel his ambition thwarted 
 by those fellows ; and that the very imputation of being im- 
 
1 74 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 patient was resented by him, and preyed on his mind. Had 
 he said but a word to me on the subject, I would have kept no 
 measures with them.' 
 
 It was an assertion frequently made during Keats's 
 lifetime that as a poet he did not progress. It is 
 true that Keats's arch enemy, ' Z ' in Blackwood, pro- 
 fessed an opposite opinion ; but Keats was then on 
 the highway to distinction, and ' Z ' was always ' fonder 
 of warming his hands at a fire already in a blaze 
 than of blowing one.' That Keats did not mature 
 was one of the earliest, and remains one of the latest, 
 critical errors concerning him. The point merits 
 more than passing mention. The lack of proportion 
 which was the conspicuous defect of the poet's early 
 method had almost disappeared before the close of 
 the four years that covered his active career. Perhaps 
 his genius would ever have hovered over such an ex- 
 quisite sense of the luxurious in animated imagery as 
 would have made the chaste shapeliness of a balanced 
 creation a difficult thing to him. But the tissues of 
 his sensuous phantasy were being rapidly separated 
 by keen experience. His earliest works sparkled 
 with the many-coloured brightness of a prism ; his 
 latest works began to glow with the steady presence 
 of a purer light. Scheme in his first efforts was often 
 subordinated to incident, incident to image, image to 
 phrase. It is fair to say that in the days when Keats 
 was yet within what he called the Infant Chamber 
 of Sensation in the mansion of life, he was more 
 intoxicated with the delight of Spenser's allusion to 
 the ' sea- shouldering whale' than with the Titanic 
 
Keats. 175 
 
 sublimities of 'Macbeth.' Shakspeare's own youth ran 
 riot with a like wantonness. Before Marlowe's in- 
 fluence had given shape to his abundant fancy, before 
 the revelation of life's misery, pain, and oppression 
 had come on him with a sad suddenness in the 
 atmosphere of the Chamber of Thought, Shakspeare, 
 like Keats, had revelled in mere love of poetic 
 luxury. But signs are not wanting that even before 
 the completion of ' Endymion,' judgment was doing 
 its work with Keats. Poetic phantasy became greater, 
 and yet the disposition unduly to yield to it became 
 less. Then one after one of the few poems that 
 followed—' Hyperion,' ' Lamia,' ' Isabella,' ' The Eve 
 of St. Agnes ' — revealed Keats's strengthening power 
 over the fixed laws of proportion, and his increasing 
 command over the universal sensuousness that ran 
 wild in the earlier days. We cannot see more clearly 
 to what perfectness the art of this poet had attained 
 than by glancing at a poem which, though little 
 known and less talked of, is one of the last and the 
 loveliest he gave us. The ballad 'La Belle Dame 
 Sans Merci' is wholly simple and direct, and in- 
 formed throughout by a reposeful strength. In all 
 the qualities that rule and shape poesy into unity of 
 form, this little work strides, perhaps, leagues in ad- 
 vance of 'Endymion/ That more ambitious work 
 was in full sense poetic, soft and rich, and sweetly- 
 linked. This harmonious gem is, as Dobell might have 
 said, higher than poetic, it is a poem. As a tale of 
 mid-day witchery it is, though slight, as flawless as 
 the first part of ' Christabel,' and immeasurably in 
 
ij6 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 advance of its own author's ' Lamia.' As a work of 
 sheer beauty there are few poems to match it. 
 
 1 O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 
 
 Alone and palely loitering ? 
 The sedge has wither'd from the lake, 
 And no birds sing. 
 
 ' I see a lily on thy brow, 
 
 With anguish moist and fever dew, 
 And on thy cheeks a fading rose 
 Fast withereth too.' 
 
 Here is no waste of creative force, no transparent 
 suasion of rhyme such as in earlier days was wont to 
 break the spell of vision : no starting off to the 
 two-and-forty palaces of sublimity : no flinging forth 
 of half-realized pearls of conception. The cool fancy 
 weaves its web with contained purpose, and the unex- 
 hausted imagination sees rising up before it the woe- 
 begone face of him who lingers long in solitary places 
 that are silent of the song of birds, and who is deso- 
 late as are the groves they haunted. The ballad is 
 simple and direct, but not of a simplicity and direct- 
 ness proper to prose. In this poem the poet moves 
 through an atmosphere peculiar to poetry : lacing and 
 interlacing his combinations of thought and measure ; 
 incorporating his meaning with his music ; thinking 
 to the melody of his song, and listening to the beat of 
 rhythm echoing always ahead of him. The beautiful 
 fragment entitled ' The Eve of St. Mark ' will furnish 
 the necessary supplement to these remarks ; and if it 
 be objected to what is here advanced that the Ariosto- 
 
Keats. 177 
 
 like ' Cap and Bells' and the loosely-knit * Otho the 
 Great' do not prove that Keats's genius was maturing, 
 it must be replied that the structural imperfections of 
 the latter should not be charged against him, and that 
 the poor babble of the former shows only that Keats, 
 like every lesser man, was subject to hours of inequal- 
 ity, such as may not fairly be measured against his 
 best and happiest moments. The Sonnets show his 
 progress. The fine one on Chapman's ' Homer' came 
 early, it is true, as also did the fanciful one on the 
 ' Flower and Leaf ;' but these came leashed with many 
 a poor draft such as no judicious lover of the poet 
 would grieve to see suppressed. Later came 'The 
 Day is Gone,' 'As Hermes Once,' 'On the Elgin 
 Marbles,' and ' Bright Star.' Those who declined at 
 Keats's death to believe in the growth of his powers, 
 were labouring to discredit his genius by attaching 
 thereto the idea that it had been preternaturally de- 
 veloped. But Keats was by no means what we call a 
 prodigy. The growth of his genius was at first quick, 
 but it was afterwards as gradual as the dawn of a fair 
 day. We know that the day that dawns slowly may 
 know the heat of noon, and see the radiance of a red 
 sunset ; but the day that dawns suddenly, flooding the 
 sky with mid-day blue before the sun has reached its 
 first hour's height, must soon be overcast. Through 
 the dazzling light of such a morning the early herds- 
 men are sometimes seen to lead back the flocks they 
 tend to the folds that will be required to shelter them. 
 But no such splendour of dawn in Keats's case gave 
 
 12 
 
178 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 rise to fears that his genius might not go on to its 
 perfect day. 
 
 It was, as we have seen, the constant practice of 
 the critical press to speak of Keats as a small satellite 
 revolving, about Leigh Hunt. This was one of the 
 penalties the younger poet paid for his intimacy with 
 the elder one, who, though a man of genius, was cer- 
 tainly not a man of sense, least of all of common sense ; 
 otherwise he must have saved his followers those in- 
 dignities to which his own imprudence too often left 
 them open. In Blackwood Keats was almost invari- 
 ably spoken of as ' Johnny Keats.' ' He was as little 
 like Johnny Keats,' said the poet's brother, ' as the 
 Holy Ghost.' The name is significant of the attitude 
 adopted towards him by unfriendly critics. He was a 
 wee bardling who stuffed sonnets into the pockets of 
 King Hunt ; who talked pure Punch from a stool, for 
 the gratification of a small circle that delighted in his 
 precocity, and who got as reward the plums of the 
 Examiner's puffery. Even friendlier eyes — those of 
 Coleridge for example — recognised in Keats only 
 an imaginative boy, sometimes ecstatically inspired, 
 moving forward in this solid-seeming world, in moods 
 that were both intellectually and sensuously vacillatory, 
 and scarcely known to himself. And indeed critical 
 insight seems never yet to have got at the moral core 
 of Keats. What was that moral core ? It was nothing 
 less than the moral core of a great teacher. Let us 
 examine this point. 
 
 It is easy to waste words in digging beneath the sur- 
 face of Keats's poetry for ethical meanings that were 
 
Keats. 1 79 
 
 never hidden there, but it is quite as easy to under- 
 value his sense of what was due from him as a man. 
 True, he said, ' We hate poetry that has a palpable 
 design upon us, and if we do not agree seems to put 
 its hands into its breeches-pocket ;' but in a higher 
 and happier moment he said : ' I find earlier days are 
 gone by ; I find I can have no enjoyment in the world 
 but continually drinking of knowledge. I find there 
 is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good 
 to the world. Some do it with their society ; some 
 with their art ; some with their benevolence ; some 
 with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good 
 humour on all they meet — and, in a thousand ways, 
 all dutiful to the command of nature. There is but 
 one way for me. The road lies through application, 
 study, and thought. I will pursue it.' 
 
 Indications are not wanting that Keats at one period 
 turned all his soul to the love of philosophy. He was 
 never a weakling ; his earliest prose quite clearly 
 proves that the romantic boy who seemed to live in a 
 world of Naiads and Sirens might have reached dis- 
 tinction in any — the most austere — literary walk. 
 Year after year feeling and experience did their work 
 with him. Perhaps at the beginning, and indeed even 
 down to the end, he over-rated the Paradise of Sen- 
 sation in contrast with the Paradise of Mind : 
 
 ' Beauty is truth'; truth Beauty — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' 
 
 But Keats was far from indifferent to the problems 
 of human life and destiny. By gradual transition he 
 
 12 — 2 
 
180 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 was daily rising to where the ' burden of the mystery ' 
 no longer weighs on men. Here is moral teaching 
 which, though concrete, not abstract, in expression, is 
 possessed of almost philosophic definiteness : 
 
 ' Stop and consider ! Life is but a day, 
 A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way 
 From a tree's summit ; a poor Indian's sleep, 
 While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep 
 Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan ? 
 Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown ; 
 The reading of an ever-changing tale ; 
 The light uplifting of a maiden's veil ; 
 A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air ; 
 A laughing schoolboy without grief or care 
 Riding the springy branches of an elm.' 
 
 It may be true that Keats's mind with its loving 
 yearning after loveliness seemed always to have a 
 look southwards. Or it may be true that his whole 
 nature, saturated in sensuousness, appeared to follow, 
 'like the sunflower, the sun constantly,' and to fly 
 from the chill north unvisited by the sun's rays. But 
 he could look steadfastly on the grey shadows of 
 life. 
 
 ' Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget 
 
 What thou among the leaves hast never known, 
 The weariness, the fever and the fret 
 
 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan. 
 Where Palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs 
 
 Where Youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies ; 
 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
 And leaden-eyed despairs ; 
 Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes ; 
 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.' 
 
 Keats knew the full bitterness of the shadowed 
 
Keats. 1 8 1 
 
 valley. About his own steps there fell but too fre- 
 quently the beat of misery's many feet. On him also, 
 however wrapped in poetic luxury, the stress of city 
 life weighed heavily. Even of poverty itself he was 
 not wholly forgotten. Perhaps he fled to his ideal 
 world from the very fangs of London misery. 
 Certainly as much may be said for his first great and 
 obvious imitator, Tom Hood, whose 'Whims and 
 Oddities' were not more surely spontaneous, than 
 designed as foils to the excesses of a sympathetic 
 temperament which, in view of the thousand sore 
 trials of life, sometimes steeped that poet to the lips 
 in pathos. Within the Chamber of Maiden Thought, 
 into which Keats had but newly entered when the 
 end came, he felt the atmosphere heavy with the sobs 
 of the multitude of the oppressed ; and to him, as 
 to Seneca, the voice of suffering was sacred, and 
 seemed through the mist of good and evil to go up to 
 God. Out of the darkened passages in the mansion 
 of life he saw no outlet, but he believed he would one 
 day see his way there clearly, for he knew the veil of 
 so much mystery, behind whose folds he walked 
 darkling, must yet be drawn aside. He says : ' To 
 this point was Wordsworth come, so far as I can con- 
 ceive, when he wrote " Tintern Abbey," and it seems 
 to me his genius is explorative of those dark passages. 
 Now, if we live and go on thinking, we too shall 
 explore them. He is a genius and superior to us in 
 so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries and 
 shed a light on them.' 
 
 This may not be profound teaching, but it gives 
 
1 82 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 palpable hints of that moral core we speak of. Per- 
 haps, as Keats himself hinted, the chance of leaving 
 the world suddenly impressed a sense of his duties 
 upon him. We may sometimes see in what but too- 
 opportune moments his self-reproaches as to mis- 
 directed energies were wrung from him. It may not 
 be unjust to say that if he had lived longer and 
 known the throb of perfect health he might have sunk 
 for a time into grossness. Let that go by. How soon 
 Keats would have risen above the bias of his own 
 sensuous nature, even up to the heights of great 
 purpose, we may not know. Already in the frag- 
 ment ' Hyperion ' we see him sitting awhile at the 
 feet of Milton, than whom no man held his phantasy 
 under stronger command. Keats was the true heir 
 of Shakspeare's early fancy : would he have inherited 
 Shakspeare's later imagination ? He was learning 
 to know and love the old Italian poets : would he at 
 last have stood where Dante sat and laved with him 
 his forehead in the same river of resignation ? Truly 
 we may not know ; but we see him before the com- 
 pletion of his twenty-third year already conscious 
 that the Infant Chamber of Sensation, wherein he 
 first thought to delay for ever, must very soon be 
 passed. ' I take poetry to be the chief, yet there is 
 something else wanting. . . I find earlier days are 
 gone by. . . I find there is no worthy pursuit but the 
 idea of doing some good to the world. . . There is 
 but one way for me. . . I will pursue it.' 
 
 It is undoubtedly true that this moral core in Keats, 
 which might have resulted in his becoming a great 
 
Keats. 183 
 
 teacher of men, did not restrain him from exhibiting 
 in his own person much moral weakness. The record 
 of his life, beautiful and pathetic as it is, leaves him in 
 some measure open to the charge, recently made by 
 Mr. Arnold, of being deficient in those powers of self- 
 command and, if need be, of self-abasement which 
 give true dignity and nobility to life. He began the 
 world, as Haydon says, full of hopes, fiery, ungovern- 
 able, expecting every prize to fall beneath his powers. 
 This is the usual delusion of impetuous youth, and 
 men who are sobered by experience and made wise 
 by the sense of weakness are slow to dissipate it. 
 The world does that only too speedily. Meantime 
 this irrational hopefulness transforms the real to a 
 dream. It is well for the dreamer if he comes very 
 soon to know that it is a dream ; if he can convince 
 himself very early that the world could easily dis- 
 pense with him ; that over hopes as high as his the 
 waters of oblivion constantly creep. But Keats 
 realized all this only when it was too late to profit by 
 it. 'Unable,' says Haydon, 'to bear the sneers of 
 ignorance or the attacks of envy, not having strength 
 of mind to buckle himself together like a porcupine, 
 and present nothing but his prickles to his enemies, 
 he began to despond, flew to dissipation as a relief, 
 which, after a temporary elevation of spirits, plunged 
 him into deeper despondency than ever.' If with 
 the consciousness of peculiar powers Keats had pos- 
 sessed sobriety of temper, he could never have fallen 
 into this pitfall of despair. He would have perceived 
 from the first that the chances were at least equal 
 
184 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 that the world would not come to a general pause as 
 the result of any effort he might put forth ; that of 
 him, as of men of humbler pretensions, it was painfully 
 true that the void that would be made if he were to 
 fall entirely out of the count would probably be un- 
 perceived, while the stolid world would glide along as 
 if he had never been. This bitter lesson Keats had 
 yet to learn, and at what a price ! ' My life since my 
 betrothal,' he says, 'is like brass upon the palate.' 
 'Poor fellow!' says Haydon, 'his genius had no 
 sooner begun to bud, than hatred and malice spat 
 their poison on its leaves, and, sensitive and young, 
 it shrivelled beneath their touch.' Keats had less 
 mental strength than Chatterton, and more moral 
 courage. Chatterton could withstand every enemy 
 save death, Keats every enemy save life. Chatterton, 
 like Keats, was proud and ambitious, hated rank and 
 longed for power. The poems he had written as 
 a boy had fallen flat on the dull senses of his towns- 
 people. Bristol had starved Savage, and might starve 
 him also. London would surely know better how to 
 reward his genius ; and so at seventeen to London 
 Chatterton went. But the dawn of fame was lone in 
 breaking over the, long night of neglect, and he who 
 waited for the morning grew weary and faint. Down- 
 right assault Chatterton could have borne and re- 
 turned it with ,tenfold bitterness, but sheer neglect 
 was killing him. Hunger added her pangs to those 
 of disappointed hope. The indifference of the grim 
 cruel world was wearing him away. Finally, at seven- 
 teen years and nine months Chatterton had decided 
 
Keats. 185 
 
 that no further day in the life that might remain to 
 him was worth waiting for. Keats was of another 
 mettle. The scorn that would have made a strong 
 man of Chatterton, made a weakling of him ; Chatter- 
 ton courted it ; he sank under it, and fell into excess as 
 an escape from it. But never was scorn more cruel 
 or mature man more destitute of a sense of the charm 
 that pertains to the hopefulness of youth than in his 
 case. When Mrs. Hoppner went to Gifford to re- 
 monstrate with him on the subject of his article, she 
 found him totally insensible to all reproach or en- 
 treaty. ' How can you, Gifford,' she said, ' dish up in 
 this dreadful manner a youth who has never offended 
 you ?' ' It has done him good,' replied Gifford, re- 
 moving for a moment his green shade from his eyes as 
 he paused in his writing. ' It has done him good ; he 
 has had £2$ from Devonshire.' 
 
 Before Keats was schooled by misfortune, he had 
 that infirmity of mind abnormally developed which is 
 at once the most common and the most perilous in 
 the literary character. His sense of the dignity of 
 the poetic office was as lofty as Milton's, but his thirst 
 for fame was at first almost abject. Not that he 
 would have bent the knee for an instant to secure it. 
 He was too proud for that. It was true that he could 
 have humbled himself to nothing but 'the eternal 
 spirit of beauty and the memory of great men.' 
 None the less, however, was ambition doing its per- 
 nicious work with him. Certainly it would appear 
 that the thirst for fame eats out of the heart much of 
 all the good it ever contained. It makes men envious 
 
1 86 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 in relation to the world without, and selfish and 
 exacting at home. To the pitiful claims of reputa- 
 tion, the man who is a slave to it may sacrifice not 
 only his own happiness, but the happiness of every- 
 one about him. The horror of ' dying nameless ' 
 torments him ; and when he is lifted above the reach 
 of that bugbear, the desire to attain yet greater heights 
 haunts him with something of the relentlessness 
 of the successful gambler's craving for another and 
 yet another throw. The thing is with him night and 
 day, and every pleasure, every hope must yield to its 
 remorseless sway. It would be nothing or next to 
 nothing if this passion or mania were limited in its 
 influence to the man whose ambition engendered it. 
 We should despise him for his bondage, we should 
 dislike him for his egotism ; but there an end. Not 
 so constrained, however, is the influence of the 
 thirst for fame ; and when it takes its selfish hold of 
 innocent persons who have done nothing to foster 
 it, and turns the joy of their lives to gall, baffling 
 their hopes, hanging like a dead weight on the nimble- 
 ness of their spirits, we hate and loathe the mean 
 souls who are slaves to it. It would be unjust to 
 Keats — even in the face of his letters to Brown, to 
 Woodhouse and to Miss Brawne — to say that he was 
 such a slave. But perhaps it was only the bitter 
 schooling he received from the early scorn of his 
 critics that saved him from that bondage. In this 
 sense even Gifford may have been good to him. To 
 the last, however, and when he had given hint of in- 
 difference to public applause, he was not without a 
 
Keats. 187 
 
 keen sensitiveness to censure. He was ready to give 
 the labour of a lifetime to escape the odium of having 
 done nothing for the art he professed. But his sacri- 
 fice earned for him mortification and discomfort 
 alone. He had worked continuously, but it was only 
 at ' digging his deep furrow in the sides of the hard 
 mountain of fame,' at the bottom whereof lay the 
 tomb of the writer. ' If I should die/ he says, ' I 
 have left no immortal work behind me ; nothing to 
 make my friends proud of my memory/ This is, 
 indeed, a pitiful spectacle of conscious impotence, and 
 none the less pitiful because we know that it is un- 
 true. Keats had in reality left an immortal work 
 behind him, but it is not the fact itself that now 
 concerns us. The temper in which the words were 
 spoken shows but too plainly that the impetuous 
 youth who began by expecting the world to fall 
 beneath his powers, had already followed the funeral 
 of his own ambition. 
 
 But Keats had not yet reached the last act of his 
 life's drama. With the failure of his hopes as an 
 author came the failure of his worldly propects. Hunt 
 tells us that his patrimony, which was inconsiderable, 
 he had freely used in part, and even risked altogether, 
 to relieve the wants of others. Thus the poverty which 
 he had taken up from choice had its beautiful side — 
 but only so long as it remained possible that by his 
 labours in literature he could cope with it. Poverty 
 in itself is rarely beautiful. The poverty that triumphs 
 over its victims is the poverty of squalor and wretch- 
 edness ; but the poverty that is triumphed over and 
 
1 88 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 ' victoriously bound under-foot,' is beautiful beyond all 
 the beauty of wealth, and pathetic beyond all its 
 pathos. Cheerful, loyal endeavour under the restraints 
 of necessity — an unmurmuring obedience to the fate 
 one did not make and cannot alter — is more touching 
 and more noble than the splendours of opulence and 
 the triumphs of success. Keats's poverty was never 
 the poverty of squalor, but it was far from ' victori- 
 ously bound under-foot' In one of his letters to his 
 betrothed, written immediately before his departure 
 for Italy, he says : ' At this moment I should be with- 
 out pence, were it not for his (Charles Brown's) 
 assistance.' 
 
 When on his death-bed his resources were so far 
 reduced, that had he lived many days longer he must 
 have been dependent in his isolation and wretchedness 
 upon his heroic friend Severn for daily necessities as 
 well as for society and solace. But for this climax of 
 catastrophe the cruelty of his critics was of course 
 only partially responsible. ' 
 
 And when the worn-out toiler among men at length 
 reached his last act, how did he act it ? Bent beneath 
 the weight of a weary, wasting disease — all too rapid, 
 nevertheless, and relentless — he had heard his own 
 dirge while he still lived. Exiled from home and 
 kindred — if in truth either of these he can be said to 
 have had — there, in Rome, he lay, with a heart grown 
 violent and intemperate, moody and suspicious ; find- 
 ing love itself vain beyond the vanity of unrequited 
 affection, and fruitless with the fruitlessness of passion 
 that could never be appeased ; yearning to be resigned 
 
Keats. 189 
 
 and pensive ; struggling to project his misery and see 
 it, yet knowing not one day of peace or night of respite ; 
 dragging out weary days in a world no longer his, yet 
 clinging to life with the grasp of one who would drain 
 life's cup to its lees. Was it with fortitude he went 
 through his last act, or with fear ? With neither, but 
 with a crushing sense of failure. From his very deso- 
 lation he might have gathered courage, for were 
 there not some in every age who ' slept soundly with 
 no parent's tears on their faces' ? But where was the 
 philosophy that could gather comfort from contempt ? 
 Keats to his own thinking had failed, and he was 
 dying in the very midst of failure. He had staked 
 much and lost all — his final throw had taken love and 
 life together. The last words of this ' lost wanderer 
 from Arden' are terrible in their burden of agony; 
 they are as the wail of one who calls across a waste 
 of dead water, and hears only his own cry return to 
 him. 
 
 ' The whirligig of Time brings in his own revenges.' 
 The game with Keats was no sooner lost than it was 
 won. The Reviews — Blackwood excepted — that had 
 spurned him while he lived, lost no time in canonizing 
 his virtues now he was dead. They went speedily to 
 the extreme of idolatry. Indeed, not to say it irre- 
 verently, within a year of the poet's death his modest 
 wraith might reasonably have imitated the old Scotch 
 deacon, who, when his health had been proposed in 
 too nattering terms, arose at the highest point of the 
 hep-hep-hurrahing and exclaimed : ' Remember, gen- 
 tlemen, I am but a man !' It is not too much to say 
 
190 
 
 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 that the fame of Keats soon after his death was purer 
 and less equivocal than that of any poet among his 
 surviving contemporaries. But what a sarcasm on 
 the contemporary criticism that fact involves ! 
 
SHELLEY. 
 
 THAT Shelley did not regard himself as a 
 member of any school of poets is obvious 
 enough in all references to himself in his published 
 correspondence; that he did not think he could be 
 understood to have anything in common with Keats 
 is seen in his preface to Adonais, and that he believed 
 he gravitated by force of sympathy much closer to the 
 Lake School, as represented by Coleridge, than to the 
 Cockney School, as represented by Hunt, is also suffi- 
 ciently obvious. In all this he was largely, though not 
 entirely right, but whether he was right or wrong, in 
 his assurance of poetic isolation does not here con- 
 cern us. In the eyes of contemporary critics he was 
 a cockney, and that is the sole point of interest to us 
 now. We did not hesitate to reproduce the personal 
 charges made against Leigh Hunt, but we took care 
 that our selection should be in great part from the 
 more presentable of many prurient libels. No one 
 now accredits the imputation that the private life of 
 Hunt himself was reflected in the ' Story of Rimini.' 
 It seems it is otherwise in the case of Shelley. The 
 
192 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 mawkish sensibility of many good people is even yet 
 tortured by certain unhappy events in the life of 
 this poet, and there are those who will say that much 
 of the criticism of Shelley's contemporaries must 
 serve, if here reproduced, no better purpose than 
 to become food for the ' synodical individuals ' who 
 make it their pass-time or kill-time to worship with 
 something of Egyptian superstition the meanest insects, 
 if only (as Coleridge puts it) ' the brainless head be 
 atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the 
 tail.' To unearth the more serious of the Shelleyan 
 slanders will probably be accounted dangerous, 
 however completely they may be fenced by the 
 comments of an editor : dangerous alike to the 
 esteem in which we have grown to hold Shelley's 
 character, and to the general cause of public 
 morality. The present writer is of another opinion, 
 and the reasons that have prevailed with him to deal 
 frankly with the whole sum of the charges against the 
 poet's life shall in due course be assigned. 
 
 At eighteen years of age Shelley made his first 
 appearance in print as a poet. Together with his sister 
 Elizabeth he published a volume of 64 pages small 
 octavo, entitled 'Original Poetry by Victor and 
 Cazire.' His first critic was the Poetical Register 
 (1810-11). 
 
 The review ran as follows : 
 
 ' There is no Original Poetry in this volume : there is nothing 
 in it but downright scribble. It is really annoying to see the 
 waste of paper which is made by such persons as the putters- 
 together of these 64 pages. There is, however, one consolation 
 
Shelley. 193 
 
 for the critics who are obliged to read all this sort of trash. It 
 is that the crime of publishing is generally followed by condign 
 punishment in the shape of bills from the stationer and printer, 
 and in the chilling tones of the bookseller, when, to the questions 
 of the anxious rhymer how the book sells, he answers that not 
 more than half-a-dozen copies have been sold.' 
 
 It was not until seven years later than the date 
 of this article that Shelley received from the 
 periodical press any special and individualizing 
 attention, though in Dublin he received some press- 
 notice. Just as it happened to Wordsworth to 
 be for years constantly alluded to, but not named> 
 in articles published on Southey in the Edinburgh 
 Review, so it occurred to Shelley to be for a time 
 the subject of unfavourable anonymous mention in 
 articles published on Leigh Hunt in the Qitarterly 
 Review. Perhaps the earliest of such notices appears 
 in the review of 'Foliage' (Quarterly, January, 181 8). 
 The writer is remarking that when we consider the 
 compositions of many of those with whom the author 
 under notice records his sympathy and agreement, 
 we can have no hesitation in assigning to certain 
 passages of his work a most important and offensive 
 object; and in a note to this sentiment he writes : 
 
 ' One of these (i.e. compositions) is now lying before us— the 
 production of a man of some ability, and possessing itself some 
 beauty ; but we are in doubt whether it would be right to lend 
 it notoriety by any comments. We know the author's disgrace- 
 ful and flagitious history well, and could put down some of the 
 vain boasting of his preface. At Eton we remember him noto- 
 rious for setting fire to old trees with burning-glasses, no unmeet 
 emblem for a man who perverts his ingenuity and knowledge to 
 the attacking of all that is ancient and venerable in our civil and 
 religious institutions.' 
 
 Later on in the article the reviewer dwells with 
 
 13 
 
194 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 becoming horror and disgust upon the career of a 
 
 certain friend of Hunt's, in whom Shelley is easily 
 
 identified : 
 
 Mr. Hunt may flatter himself with possessing a finer eye 
 and a warmer feeling for the loveliness of Nature, or congratulate 
 himself on the philosophic freedom with which he follows her 
 impulses — he may look upon us and all who differ from him as 
 dull creatures who have no right to judge of his privileged 
 opinions. Our path may indeed be a plain and a beaten one, 
 but at least it keeps us from some things that seem to be 
 grievous errors — new names and specious declamations do not 
 deceive us. We should not, for instance commend as singularly 
 amiable the receiving great and unmerited favours to be re- 
 turned with venomous and almost frantic hatred ; we are at a 
 loss for the decency which rails at marriage, or the honour which 
 pollutes it ; and we have still a reluctance to condemn as a low 
 prejudice the mysterious feeling of separation which conse- 
 crates and draws to closer intimacy the communion of brothers 
 and sisters. We may be narrow-minded, but we look upon it 
 still as somewhat dishonourable to have been expelled from a 
 University for the monstrous absurdity of a " mathematical 
 demonstration of the non-existence of a God." According to 
 our understandings, it is not proof of a very affectionate heart 
 to break that of a wife by cruelty and infidelity ; and if we were 
 told of a man, who, placed on a wild rock among the clouds, 
 yet even in that height surrounded by a loftier amphitheatre of 
 spire-like mountains, hanging over a valley of eternal ice and 
 snow, where the roar of mighty waterfalls was at times unheeded 
 from the hollow and more appalling thunder of the deep and 
 unseen avalanche — if we were told of a man who, thus witnessing 
 the sublimest assemblage of natural objects, should retire to the 
 cabin near and write oBioo. after his name in the album, we hope 
 our own feeling would be pity rather than disgust ; but we 
 should think it imbecility indeed to court that man's friendship, 
 or to celebrate his intellect or his heart as the wisest or warmest 
 of the age.' 
 
 We find that the Quarterly reviewer speedily came 
 to a conclusion as to whether it was right to lend 
 notoriety to Shelley's work by the publication of his 
 
Shelley. 195 
 
 sapient comments, for in April, 1819, he devoted a 
 long article to the two versions of the poem now 
 known as ' The Revolt of Islam.' The review opens 
 with the intimation that Shelley is one of that indus- 
 trious knot of authors, the tendency of whose works 
 the reviewers have in their late numbers exposed to the 
 caution of their readers ; then the article goes on to 
 say that of all his brethren Shelley carries to the 
 greatest length the doctrines of the sect, and is, for 
 that and other reasons, by far the least pernicious 
 among them, because the very naivete' of his manner 
 deprives his pernicious principles in some measure of 
 their venom : 
 
 ' " Laon and Cythna" is the same poem with " The Revolt of 
 Islam" — under the first name it exhibited some features which 
 made " the experiment on the temper of the public mind," as 
 the author calls it, somewhat too bold and hazardous. This 
 knight-errant in the cause of "a liberal and comprehensive 
 morality" had already sustained some "perilous handling" in 
 his encounters with prejudice and error, and acquired in con- 
 sequence of it a small portion of the better part of valour. Ac- 
 cordingly " Laon and Cythna" withdrew from circulation ; 
 and happy had it been for Mr. Shelley if he had.been contented 
 with his failure and closed his experiments. But with minds of 
 a certain class, notoriety, infamy, anything is better than ob- 
 scurity ; baffled in a thousand attempts after fame, they will still 
 make one more at whatever risk— and they end commonly like 
 an awkward chemist who perseveres in tampering with his 
 ingredients, till, in an unlucky moment, they take fire, and he is 
 blown up by the explosion. . . . Mr. Shelley is no penitent ; he 
 has reproduced the same poison, a little, and but a little", more 
 cautiously disguised.' 
 
 It must have been a matter of some surprise to 
 Shelley to learn that he was an ' unsparing imitator ' 
 of the Lake poets. In freedom from errors of taste in 
 the use of language, and in smooth and harmonious 
 
 13—2 
 
196 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 versification, he is said to resemble Southey ; and it 
 is further alleged that ' he draws largely on the rich 
 stores of another mountain poet, to whose religious 
 mind it must be matter of perpetual sorrow to see 
 the philosophy which comes pure and holy from his 
 pen, degraded and perverted, as it continually is, by 
 this miserable crew of atheists or pantheists, who 
 have just sense enough to abuse its terms, but neither 
 heart nor principle to comprehend its import, or 
 follow its application.' As to ' Laon and Cythna ' — 
 
 ' its merits and its faults equally conspire against it ; it has 
 
 not much ribaldry or voluptuousness for prurient imaginations, 
 and no personal scandal for the malicious ; and even those on 
 whom it might be expected to act most dangerously by its sem- 
 blance of enthusiasm, will have stout hearts to proceed beyond 
 the first canto. As a whole it is insupportably dull, and labori- 
 ously obscure ; its absurdities are not of the kind which provoke 
 laughter, the story is almost devoid of interest and very meagre ; 
 nor can we admire Mr. Shelley's mode of making up for this 
 defect — as he has but one incident where he should have ten, 
 he tells that one so intricately, that it takes the time of ten to 
 comprehend it.' 
 
 The reviewer proceeds to say that Shelley is a 
 
 philosopher by courtesy of the age, and has a theory 
 
 respecting the government of the world ; and of this 
 
 theory the writer goes on to give the outlines, to state 
 
 the manner in which it is demonstrated, and the 
 
 practical consequences proposed to be deducted from it. 
 
 The pith of the definition comes in the closing passage, 
 
 of which the first clauses apply solely to ' Queen Mab :' 
 
 ' kings have introduced war, legislators crime, priests sin ; 
 
 the dreadful consequences have been that the earth has lost her 
 fertility, the seasons their mildness, the air its salubrity, man his 
 freedom and happiness. We have become a foul-feeding, car- 
 nivorous race, are foolish enough to feel uncomfortable after the 
 
Shelley. i o,) 
 
 commission of sin ; some of us even go so far as to consider 
 vice odious ; and we all groan under a multiplied burthen of 
 crimes merely conventional; among which Mr. Shelley specifies 
 with great sangfroid the commission oi incest! , . . The laws 
 and government on which Mr. Shelley's reasoning proceeds, are 
 the Turkish, administered by a lawless despot ; his religion is 
 the Mohammedan, maintained by servile hypocrites ; and his 
 scene for their joint operation Greece, the land beyond all 
 others of recollections of former glory and independence, now 
 covered with shame and sunk in slavery. We are Englishmen, 
 Christians, free, and independent ; we ask Mr. Shelley how his 
 case applies to us f or what we learn from it to the prejudice of 
 our institutions ?' 
 
 The reviewer's opinion of Shelley's claims as a 
 
 philosopher are summarized in one succinct passage : 
 
 ' Let him not be offended at our freedom, but he is really too 
 young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to un- 
 dertake the task of reforming any world, but the little world 
 within his own breast.' 
 
 Though Shelley has not all that is odious and con- 
 temptible in Hunt, though he has not exhibited the 
 bustling vulgarity, the ludicrous affectation, the factious 
 flippancy, or the selfish heartlessness of that person, 
 yet the Quarterly thinks that ' from early childhood 
 he carried about with him a soured and discontented 
 spirit — unteachable in boyhood, unamiable in youth, 
 querulous and unmanly in manhood — singularly un- 
 happy in all three.' As the reviewer closes his 
 remarks on ' Laon and Cythna,' ' Rosalind and 
 Helen' is put into his hands, and he finds it 'less 
 interesting, less vigorous and chaste in language, less 
 harmonious in versification and less pure in thought ; 
 more rambling and diffuse, more palpably and con- 
 sciously sophistical, more offensive and vulgar, more 
 unintelligible.' ' So,' reflects the writer, ' it must ever 
 
198 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 be in the downward course of infidelity and im- 
 morality.' Shelley attributed first to Southey and 
 afterwards to the Rev. H. H. Milman certain of the 
 articles in the Quarterly. ' Priests,' he said, ' have their 
 privilege.' Milman did afterwards write on Shelley in 
 the Quarterly, but the articles here quoted from were 
 neither by him nor by Southey. One of the Quarterly 
 articles compared Shelley to Pharaoh in the Red 
 Sea. 'It describes,' writes the poet, 'the result 
 of my battle with their Omnipotent God ; his pull- 
 ing me under the sea by the hair of my head, like 
 Pharaoh ; my . . . entreating everybody to drown 
 themselves ; pretending not to be drowned myself, 
 when I am drowned ; and lastly being drowned.' 
 
 Such was the criticism of the Quarterly, vituperative 
 yet consistent ; but the criticism published contem- 
 poraneously with it in Blackwood was alternately 
 hostile and encomiastic, and variable and inconse- 
 quential, in obedience to no discoverable or even con- 
 ceivable principle. In January, 18 19, Blackwood 
 perceives in Shelley a member of the Cockney School, 
 but one of greater genius than Hunt and Keats, 
 ' who are men of considerable cleverness, but as poets 
 worthy of sheer and instant contempt.' Whatever 
 Shelley's errors may have been, his northern critic 
 admits that he is a scholar, a gentleman,* and a poet, 
 and as such must needs 'despise from his soul the 
 
 *'It was Hazlitt, we believe,' says Blackwood (1828), 'who 
 accused us of praising Shelley, because he was a gentleman ; 
 and we must confess that the accusation, however shocking, is 
 far from being untrue, and affords an easy and satisfactory ex- 
 planation to Hazlitt of much of our censure of himself.' 
 
Shelley. 1 99 
 
 only eulogies to which he has hitherto been accus- 
 tomed — paragraphs from the Examiner, and sonnets 
 from Johnny Keats.'* Ten months later Blackwood is 
 even more emphatic in Shelley's praise, for it devotes 
 a long article to the defence of his character as poet, 
 philosopher, and man, against the aspersions cast 
 upon all three by the Quarterly. Then a change 
 comes over the spirit of this dream of good-fellow- 
 ship. In 1820 Blackwood has gone the opposite 
 length of ' despising Mr. Shelley's understanding,' and 
 affirming that his ' private life has been a disgrace to 
 humanity, and his poetry a blot on the literature.' 
 One year later still, and Shelley has lost absolutely 
 the good graces of his Scottish critic. He is now 
 hopeless of poetic reputation, and lifting himself into 
 notoriety on the stilts of blasphemy. One pallia- 
 tion of his outrages on life, philosophy, and 
 letters Blackwood is still merciful enough to ad- 
 vance, namely, that it is mentioned in credible 
 quarters that Shelley's reason had become unsettled. 
 It is now realized that the Quarterly attacks were 
 not only justified by the facts of the case, but highly 
 commendable as bulwarks of all that was good in 
 morality and beautiful in poetry. Clearly, however, 
 as Shelley's lucubrations are perceived to be the 
 ravings of imbecility or madness, they are made the 
 subject of banter and lampoon. An elegy on the 
 death of a friend affords a legitimate opportunity for 
 
 * It would be very unwise to spend strength in a wild-goose 
 chase after such phantoms as these eulogistic sonnets by Keats 
 on Shelley. ' Sonnets from Johnny Keats ' was a stock phrase 
 of ridicule in Blackwood. 
 
200 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 consumedly ludicrous travesty. Why not? Black- 
 wood realizes that Shelley has gone over to Cockaigne, 
 and is a mouthpiece of the presumptuous triumvirate 
 of Pisa. These are curious contradictions, but they 
 do not stand alone as isolated and unaccountable in- 
 consistencies, in the pages of the Magazine in question. 
 At one moment Blackwood finds Coleridge, in his 
 poetical character, the most servile of State servitors, 
 in his domestic relations the most heartless ignorer of 
 all the ties of propinquity, in philosophical claim the 
 most daring of charlatans, and in poetic aspiration the 
 most abject of pretenders. Scarcely two years later 
 Coleridge has been raised in Blackwood's esteem to 
 the rank of poet and seer, whose 'Christabel' may be 
 employed on any man as a touchstone by which to 
 judge whether or not he is sensitive to the appeals of 
 the most magical element in poetry, and whose occa- 
 sional utterances, let fall at table or upon the most 
 casual encounter, are more to be observed than the 
 set speeches of the Hazlitts at the Surrey and the 
 Campbells at the Royal Institution. The obvious 
 explanation of this radical change of tone is that the 
 editorship has for practical purposes changed hands, 
 and this accounts satisfactorily enough for much 
 lamentable contradiction. There is excellent reason, 
 nevertheless, to fear that under the same management 
 was published the defence of Shelley (as a ' great poet 
 in the very highest sense of that mysterious word'), 
 and the heartless attack upon his 'Adonais.' The 
 truth is that the public memory is notoriously a 
 short one, and writers in the periodical press do not 
 
Shelley, 201 
 
 always bargain upon seeing the conflicting utter- 
 ances of succeeding years placed side by side, when 
 interest or convenience seems to suggest that they 
 should abuse to-day that which yesterday they ap- 
 plauded. 
 
 When Shelley published his ' Prometheus Unbound,' 
 the critics said that whatever difference of opinion 
 there might be as to his poetic merits, there could be 
 none as to his audacity. The idea of his following in 
 the footsteps of ^Eschylus was not less than appalling 
 to Shelley's first critics. Putting this aside, Black- 
 wood (1821) says : 
 
 'Percy Bysshe feels his hopelessness of poetic reputation, 
 and therefore lifts himself on the stilts of blasphemy. He is 
 the only verseman of the day who has dared, in a Christian 
 country, to work out for himself the character of direct 
 
 ATHEISM.' 
 
 On Shelley's method of art, the same critic says : 
 
 ' He follows his own rhymes, and shapes his subject to the 
 close of his measure. He is a glutton of all names of flowers, 
 and smells, and tastes, and crowds his verse with scarlet and 
 blue, and yellow and green; extracts tears from everything, 
 and makes moss and mud hold regular conversations with him.' 
 
 When the critic comes to review ' Adonais' he affirms 
 that on principles such as these a hundred or a hundred 
 thousand verses might be made without taking the pen 
 off the paper. He himself undertakes the task, but 
 mercifully stops short at a single stanza. He professes 
 that the subject is indifferent to him ; let it be the 
 ' Golden Age,' or ' Mother Goose,' or ' Waterloo,' or the 
 ' Wit of the Watchhouse '— ' Tom Thumb,' or 'Thistle- 
 wood.' By way of experiment the reviewer gives a touch 
 
2Q2 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 of his quality on a theme just then engrossing attention. 
 A city-marshal broke his leg on Lord Mayor's-day, 
 while walking truncheoned from the Mansion House 
 to Blackfriars Bridge : so the event is celebrated in 
 the following fashion, supposed to be satirical of 
 the opening of 'Adonais' : 
 
 ' O weep for Wontner, for his leg is broke ; 
 O weep for Wontner, though our pearly tear 
 Can never cure him. Dark and dimly broke 
 The thunder-cloud o'er Paul's enamelled sphere, 
 When his black barb, with lion-like career, 
 Scatter'd the crowd. — Coquetting Mignonette, 
 Thou Hyacinth fond, thou Myrtle without fear, 
 Haughty Geranium, in your beaupots set, 
 Were then your soft and starry eyes unwet ?' 
 
 In his 'Adonais,' Shelley attacked Blackwood (by 
 implication) very pointedly, and the northern censor 
 revenged itself in these terms : 
 
 ' Locke says the most resolute liar cannot lie more than once 
 in every three sentences. Folly is more engrossing ; for we 
 could prove from the present elegy that it is possible to write 
 two sentences of pure nonsense out of three. A more faithful 
 calculation would bring us to ninety-nine out of every hundred, 
 or — as the present consists of only fifty-five stanzas — leaving 
 about five readable lines in the entire.' 
 
 One knows of nothing more amusingly audacious 
 than this criticism of 'Adonais,' unless it be Vol- 
 taire's notorious criticism of a part of the soliloquy in 
 'Hamlet,' beginning, ' To be, or not to be.' ' A country 
 bumpkin at a fair,' said Voltaire, ' would express him- 
 self with more decency and in nobler language.' Again 
 the reviewer attempts to draw down ridicule on 
 Shelley's poetical method, and produces the follow- 
 
Shelley. 203 
 
 ing ' Elegy on my Tom-cat/ which strikes him, he 
 says, ' to be as a poem incomparably less nonsensical, 
 verbose, and inflated than "Adonais":' 
 
 Elegy on my Tom-cat. 
 
 ' Weep for my Tom-cat ! All ye Tabbies weep, 
 For he is gone at last ! Not dead alone, 
 In flowery beauty sleepeth he no sleep ; 
 
 Like that bewitching youth Endymion ! 
 
 ***** 
 
 O bard-like spirit ! beautiful and swift ! 
 
 Sweet lover of pale night ; when Luna's lamp 
 Shakes sapphire dew-drops through a cloudy rift ; 
 
 Purple as woman's mouth, o'er ocean damp ; 
 Thy quivering rose-tinged tongue — thy stealing tramp ; 
 
 The dazzling glory of thy gold-tinged tail ; 
 Thy whisker-waving lips, as o'er the swamp 
 
 Rises the meteor when the year doth fail, 
 Like beauty in decay, all, all are flat and stale.' 
 
 According to Blackwood the story of 'Adonais' is 
 
 this: 
 
 ' A Mr. John Keats, who had left a decent calling for the 
 melancholy trade of Cockney-poetry, has lately died of a con- 
 sumption, after having written two or three little books of verses 
 much neglected by the public. . . . The New School, however, 
 will have it that he was slaughtered by a criticism of the Quar- 
 terly Review—" O flesh, how art thou fishified !" There is 
 even an aggravation in this cruelty of the Review — for it had 
 taken three or four years to slay its victim, the deadly blow 
 having been inflicted at least as long since. . . . The fact is, the 
 Quarterly finding before it a work at once silly and presump- 
 tuous, full of the servile slang that Cockaigne dictates to its 
 servitors, and the vulgar indecorums which that Grub Street 
 Empire rejoiceth to applaud, told the truth of the volume, and 
 recommended a change of manners and of masters to the 
 scribbler. Keats wrote on ; but he wrote indece7itly, probably 
 in the indulgence of his social propensities.' 
 
 The critic proceeds to say that Mr. P. B. Shelley 
 
204 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 having been the person appointed by the Pisan circle 
 of poets to canonize the name of ' this apprentice,' 
 has produced an elegy in which he weeps 'after the 
 manner of Moschus for Bion;' but the canonizer is 
 worthy of his saint. — ' Et tu, Vitula !' 
 
 The number of Blackwood in which this critique 
 appeared had scarcely got clear of the press, when 
 the news came from Italy that the waters of the 
 Adriatic had swallowed up all that was dear to many 
 in the personality of Shelley. When the body 
 was washed ashore, a copy of Keats's ' Lamia' was 
 found in the pocket of the coat ; and surely the 
 avalanche of reproach and indignation which in the 
 preface to ' Adonais' was hurled upon Keats's calum- 
 niators, must then have applied at least equally to 
 him, Keats's fellow-immortal, whose loyal admiration 
 no ridicule found power to shake. 
 
 Vituperative as were the critics of the Quarterly 
 and Blackwood, the critics of the Literary Gazette 
 (alleged, without sufficient grounds, to be Campbell 
 and his circle) were yet more defamatory. In 1820 
 the Literary Gazette published a long review of the 
 ' Cenci.' After going into some particulars the critics 
 say : 
 
 ' This is the dish of carrion, seasoned with sulphur as spice, 
 which Mr. Shelley serves up to his friend Mr. Leigh Hunt, with 
 a dedication, by way of grace, in which he eulogizes his " gentle, 
 tolerant, brave, honourable, innocent, simple, pure," etc., etc., 
 etc., disposition. What food for a humane, sympathizing crea- 
 ture, like Mr. Hunt ! if, indeed, his tender-heartedness be not 
 of a peculiar kind, prone to feast on "gruel thick and slab" 
 which " like a hell-broth boils and bubbles." ' 
 
 A portion is then transcribed of the ' entertaining 
 
Shelley. 205 
 
 scene' in which the author ' out-herods Herod, and 
 outrages possibility in his personification of villainy, 
 by making Count Cenci a character which transforms 
 a Richard III., an Iago, and Sir Giles Overreach com- 
 paratively into angels of light.' Here follows the 
 Banquet Scene in the Cenci Palace : 
 
 ' This single example, which is far from being the most ob- 
 noxious, unnatural and infernal in the play, would fully justify 
 the reprobation we have pronounced. Mr. Shelley, nor no man, 
 can pretend that any good effect can be produced by the de- 
 lineation of such diabolism ; the bare suggestions are a heinous 
 offence ; and whoever may be the author of such a piece, we 
 will assert that Belzebub alone is fit to be the prompter. The 
 obscenity too becomes more refmedly vicious when Beatrice, 
 whose " crimes and miseries," forsooth, are as the mask and the 
 mantle in which circumstances clothed her impersonation on the 
 scenes of the world is brought prominently forward. But we 
 cannot dwell on this.' 
 
 The writers say that ' the lamentable obliquity of 
 the writer's mind pervades every sentence,' and hence 
 it will be readily felt by their readers why they cannot 
 multiply their extracts. They give nearly three 
 columns of extracts, nevertheless. 
 
 ' Having said, and unwillingly said, this much on a composi- 
 tion which we cannot view without inexpressible dislike, it will 
 not be expected from us to go into particulars further than is 
 merely sufficient to enforce our warning. If we quote a passage 
 of poetic power, it must be to bring tenfold condemnation on 
 the head of the author— for awful is the responsibility where the 
 head condemns the heart, and the gift of talent is so great, as to 
 remind us of Satanic knowledge and lusts, and of " arch-angel 
 fallen." .... The characters are Count Cenci, an old grey- 
 haired man, a horrible fiendish incarnation, who invites an 
 illustrious company to a jubilee entertainment on the occasion 
 of the violent death of two of his sons ; who delights in nothing 
 but the wretchedness of all the human race, and causes all the 
 
206 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 misery in his power ; who, out of sheer malignity, forcibly destroys 
 the innocency of his only daughter ; and is, in short, such a 
 miracle of atrocity, as only this author, we think, could have 
 conceived. Lucretia, the second wife of the Count, a most 
 virtuous and amiable lady, who joins in a plot to murder her 
 husband ; Giacomo, his son, who because his parent has cheated 
 him of his wife's dowry, plots his assassination ; Beatrice the 
 daughter, a pattern of beauty, integrity, grace, and sensibility, 
 who takes the lead in all the schemes to murder her father ; 
 Orsino, a prelate, sworn of course to celibacy, and in love with 
 Beatrice, who enters with gusto into the conspiracy, for the 
 sound reason, that the fair one will not dare to refuse to marry 
 an accomplice in such a transaction ; Cardinal Camillo, a vacil- 
 lating demi-profligate ; two bravos, who strangle the Count in 
 his sleep ; executioners, torturers, and other delectable under- 
 parts. The action consists simply of the rout in honour of the 
 loss of two children, of the incest, of the murderous plot, of its 
 commission, and of its punishment by the torture and execution 
 of the wife, son, and daughter.' 
 
 In 1 820 the Literary Gazette reviewed ' Prometheus 
 
 Unbound ' also : 
 
 ' To our apprehensions " Prometheus" is little else but absolute 
 raving ; and were we not assured to the contrary, we should 
 take it for granted that the author was lunatic — as his principles 
 are ludicrously wicked, and his poetry a mdlange of nonsense, 
 cockneyism, poverty, and pedantry. 
 
 ' These may seem harsh terms ; but it is our bounden duty rather 
 to stem such a tide of literary folly and corruption, than to pro- 
 mote its flooding over the country. . . . We yield ourselves 
 miserable humdrum devils that we are, to this high imaginative 
 faculty of the modern muse. We acknowledge that hyperbole, 
 extravagance, and irreconcilable terms, may be poetry. We 
 admit that common-sense has nothing to do with " the beautiful 
 idealisms" of Mr. Shelley. And we only add, that if this be 
 genuine inspiration, and not the grossest absurdity, then is farce 
 sublime, and maniacal raving the perfection of reasoning : then 
 were all the bards of other time, Homer, Virgil, Horace, drivel- 
 lers ; for their foundations were laid no lower than the capacities 
 of the herd of mankind ; and even their noblest elevations were 
 
Shelley. 207 
 
 susceptible of appreciation by the very multitude among the 
 Greeks and Romans. . . An these extracts do not entitle the 
 author to a cell, clean straw, bread and water, a strait-waistcoat, 
 and phlebotomy, there is no madness in scribbling. It is hardly 
 requisite to adduce a sample of the adjectives in this poem to 
 prove the writer's condign abhorrence of any relation between 
 that part of speech and substantives : sleep-unsheltered hours; 
 gentle darkness ; horny eyes ; keen faint eyes ; faint wings ; fading 
 waves ; crawling glaciers, toads, agony, time, etc. ; belated and 
 noontide plumes ; milky arms ; many-folded mountains ; a lake- 
 surrounding flute ; veiled lightning asleep (as well as hovering) ; 
 unbewailing flowers ; odour-faded blooms ; semi-vital worms ; wind- 
 less pools, windless abodes, and windless air; unerasing' waves ; un- 
 pavilioned skies ; riveted wounds ; and void abysms, are parcel of 
 the Babylonish jargon which is found in every wearisome page of 
 this tissue of insufferable buffoonery. . . . Alas, gentle reader ! 
 for poor Tom, whom the foul fiend hath (thus) led o'er bog and 
 quagmire ; and blisse thee from whirlewindes, starre-blasting, 
 and taking. Would that Mr. Shelley made it his study, like 
 this his prototype, 
 
 '" How to prevent the fiend, and to kill vermin? ' 
 ****** 
 
 Bitter and venomous as these reviews were, they 
 
 were amiability and charity themselves compared with 
 
 the notice of ' Queen Mab,' which the Literary Gazette 
 
 published as late as 1821. Beginning by saying that 
 
 the mixture of sorrow, indignation, and loathing with 
 
 which the volume has overwhelmed them will, they 
 
 fear, deprive them of the power of expressing their 
 
 sentiments upon it, the critics proceed to express 
 
 eleven columns of sentiments, of which the following 
 
 are fair examples : 
 
 ' " Oueen Mab " has long been in limited and private circulation, 
 as a duodecimo ; and the first two or three cantos, under the title 
 of the "Demon of theWorld," were reprinted at the end of a poem 
 called " Alastor ;" as was also the principal note against Christi- 
 anity in a detached pamphlet. Though the hellish ingredients, 
 
208 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 therefore, are now for the first time brought together into one 
 caldron, they have, like those of the evil beings in " Macbeth," pre- 
 viously disgusted the world in forms of separate obsceneness. . . 
 We are aware, that ordinary criticism has little or nothing to 
 do with the personal conduct of authors ; but when the most 
 horrible doctrines are promulgated with appalling force, it is the 
 duty of every man to expose, in every way, the abominations to 
 which they irresistibly drive their odious professors. We declare 
 against receiving our social impulses from a destroyer of every 
 social virtue ; our moral creed from an incestuous wretch ; or 
 our religion from an atheist, who denied God, and reviled the 
 purest institutes of human philosophy and divine ordination, did 
 such a demon exist. ... It is hardly worth while to ask how a 
 theorist of Mr. Shelley's class would act in the relations between 
 man and man. It can hardly be doubted but his practice would 
 square with his principles, and be calculated to disturb all the 
 harmonies of nature ; a disciple following his tenets, would not 
 hesitate to debauch, or, after debauching, to abandon any woman : 
 to such it would be a matter of perfect indifference to rob a con- 
 fiding father of his daughters, and incestuously to live with all 
 the branches of a family whose morals were ruined by the 
 damned sophistry of the seducer ; to such it would be sport to 
 tell a deserted wife to obtain with her pretty face support by 
 prostitution ; and when the unhappy maniac sought refuge in 
 self-destruction, to laugh at the fool while in the arms of associate 
 strumpets. . . . Promiscuous intercourse of the sexes and in- 
 dividual courage of the soul to despise everything but the grati- 
 fication of our appetites — this is the millennium promised by the 
 votaries of Shelley.' 
 
 Shelley has furnished us with an adequate com- 
 mentary on the foregoing in his letter to Lawrence, 
 author of the ' Empire of the Nairs ' : 
 
 ' I am a young man, not yet of age, and have now been 
 married a year to a woman younger than myself. Love seems 
 inclined to stay in the prison ; and my only reason for putting 
 him in chains, whilst convinced of the unholiness of the act, was 
 a knowledge that, in the present state of society, if love is not 
 thus villainously treated, she, who is most loved, will be treated 
 worse by a misjudging world. In short, seduction, which term 
 
Shelley. 209 
 
 could have no meaning in rational society, has now a most tre- 
 mendous one ; the fictitious merit attached to chastity has made 
 that a forerunner of the most terrible of ruins, which, in Malabar, 
 would be a pledge of honour and homage. 
 
 ' If there is any enormous and desolating crime, of which I 
 should shudder to be accused, it is seduction.' 
 
 And how did such attacks affect the poet ? 
 
 ' If any of the reviews abuse me,' he writes, ' cut them out and 
 send them ; if they praise, you need not trouble yourself. I feel 
 ashamed if I could believe that I should deserve the latter : the 
 former, I flatter myself, is no more than a just tribute' (1819). 
 
 ' I hear that the abuse against me exceeds all bounds. Pray, 
 if you see any article particularly outrageous, send it me. As 
 yet, I have laughed : but woe to these scoundrels if they should 
 make me lose my temper' (1821). 
 
 The purely literary relations of the 'Cockney ' School 
 and their critics have an interest (for all who care to 
 look below the surface) similar in kind to that which 
 attaches to the relations of the ' Lake' School and their 
 critics. We have seen how hard it was to the writers 
 of 1800 to judge of the ' Lyrical Ballads' apart from 
 the standards of taste that grew out of a love of the 
 ' pointed and fine propriety' of the school of Pope ; 
 and now we may see how hard it was to the writers 
 of 1820 to escape from the influence of Wordsworth's 
 plea for. the diction of real life, when called upon to 
 judge of an order of poetry as unduly elaborated as 
 was that out of which they had formulated their 
 primary poetical canons. The critics resisted the 
 theory of the ' Lake' School ; but they were neverthe- 
 less insensibly and irresistibly influenced by it ; and 
 after twenty years' enforced schooling, they found 
 their attitude so altered that they must needs judge 
 by the new test all work still newer. And they did 
 
 14 
 
2io Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 so. The only literary impeachment urged against the 
 ' Cockney' poets (apart from the libellous one of their 
 alleged desire to raise ' the banner of a black ambi- 
 tion whose aim was to ruin society'), in short, the 
 only purely critical impeachment, was that, in their 
 desire to employ a language that should be super- 
 poetic, they affected a diction so far removed from 
 the language of everyday life as to degenerate not 
 rarely into gibberish. And there was justice in the 
 accusation. The three early works of the three fore- 
 most poets of the school, 'Rimini,' ' Endymion,' and 
 ' The Revolt of Islam,' are disfigured by much verbal 
 artificiality ; the clear result of an inordinate anxiety 
 to avoid the commonplace. He who cares to pursue 
 this thought may read with profit Hunt's remarks on 
 his neologisms in his preface to the collected poems. 
 In order to grasp the whole theory of the school in 
 question, we have only to reflect upon all that is in- 
 volved in Keats's rather audacious counsel given to 
 Shelley, to put aside a little of his magnanimity and 
 load every rift of his subject with ore. Here lies, we 
 may think, the whole secret of the strength and of 
 the weakness of the school ; here, too, lies a key to 
 the adverse tone of critics who were nurtured first on 
 the poetry of Pope and afterwards on that of Words- 
 worth. 
 
 It will be seen by contrast of the foregoing extracts 
 with the extracts embodied in previous chapters that 
 there is this peculiarity in the animadversions published 
 on Shelley during his lifetime— that the charges made 
 against his private character preceded the misappre- 
 
Shelley. 2 1 1 
 
 ciation of his intellectual labours, and were indeed, as 
 Mr. Browning says, anterior to the knowledge of his 
 earliest noticeable works, and not brought forward to 
 counteract any impression they had succeeded in 
 making. Usually it happens that the disbelief in the 
 man succeeds the belief in the poet, and the misconcep- 
 tion of an author's moral nature is either ignorantly or 
 maliciously put forward to disturb our reception and 
 enjoyment of his works. Such was the case in the 
 instances of Coleridge, of Southey, even of Byron and 
 Hunt. Such must be the case almost invariably, for the 
 appetite for slander even in corrupt human nature is 
 not so voracious that it can attempt to feed on nothing 
 by making an obscure man famous for the sake of 
 maligning him. Before the heart of the most menda- 
 cious calumniator can be tasked to the production of 
 a given lie, there must be a subject sufficiently im- 
 portant to interest people in the falsehood. It was 
 Shelley's peculiar misfortune that the order of that 
 part of corrupt nature which regulates slander was 
 reversed in his case. The public had not yet become 
 conscious that he was the author of the delirious prin- 
 ciples which found intemperate speech in ' Queen 
 Mab,' before it was apprised that his private life was 
 of a kind that afforded such principles a fearful com- 
 mentary. And this fact, while it makes the origin of 
 the worst accusations of Shelley's contemporaries the 
 more difficult to trace, lays upon his admirers the 
 more serious duty of not shrinking from an honest 
 examination of the ambiguous passages in the poet's 
 life. If simultaneously with the beginnings of a con- 
 
 14 — 2 
 
212 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 spicuous literary reputation notorious in the promul- 
 gation of questionable moral principles, Shelley had 
 become known even to the votaries of malice as a 
 loose liver, the worst slanders of his traducers would 
 have been easy of explanation on grounds of deliberate 
 though plausible misconstruction and exaggeration. 
 Where the disposition to personal abuse exists at all, 
 it descends only too easily from the nature of the 
 thing that it is proper to discuss into inferences that 
 have no philosophical bearing upon it : out of ' Queen 
 Mab' a charge of love of concubinage could readily 
 have arisen, as a charge of incest came out of 'Rimini.' 
 Now, if the disbelief in Shelley as a man preceded 
 the disbelief in him as a writer, is it not reasonable to 
 conclude that there had been that in Shelley's life 
 which explained, if it did not justify, so exceptional 
 a phenomenon ? We know there had, and if we are 
 wise lovers of the poet we will forbear, as Mr. Brown- 
 ing puts it, not more in justice to Shelley's critics than 
 in policy to ourselves, to pour forth with too much 
 intemperance of diatribe our wrath against the 'hypo- 
 critical hysterics' of those 'heirs of the dearest tradi- 
 tions of Scribes and Pharisees,' who took Shelley for 
 what to unsympathetic observers he seemed to be but 
 in truth was not. When Mr. Browning wrote his 
 well known Essay* more than thirty years ago, 
 there was a pressing necessity that authentic notices 
 of Shelley's career should establish the purity and 
 beauty of Shelley's life as a whole, and acquit the 
 poet of grave charges in the eyes of those who had 
 
 * ' Introduction to the Letters of Shelley.' 
 
Shelley. 213 
 
 lightly condemned him on the evidence of reviews and 
 gossip. But this necessity has long been met ; the 
 chain of biographical testimony in favour of Shelley's 
 character has for years been complete enough to 
 silence the worst of his slanderers ; and now the more 
 zealous worshippers of the poet are going the unwise 
 length of diverting upon Shelley's calumniators the 
 whole body of the malignancy that was once heaped 
 upon him. Not content with proving that Shelley's 
 character was on the whole simple and beautiful ; that 
 his was boundless benevolence and glowing philan- 
 thropy ; that few are the instances with which we are 
 supplied of sincerity like his coupled with his tender- 
 ness and matched by his courage, the lovers of Shelley, 
 stepping on to the wrong side of idolatry, are practi- 
 cally denying that any of his acts were censurable, 
 and least of all that any derogation from the reverence 
 in which he is held need result from an examination 
 of that one overshadowing incident in his life which 
 furnished the first food for scandal, and suggested all 
 further calumny. This is an attitude towards abuse 
 which might have been becoming to the loyalty and 
 eagerness of partisanship at the moment of attack ; 
 for then the mere vehemence and excess of praise 
 must have been serviceable in counteracting the bit- 
 terness and depth of censure. But surely we have 
 lived too long beyond the first period of the active life 
 of the Shelley slanderers to look at them in any way 
 but dispassionately, or to think it necessary to make 
 feverish efforts to explain away the facts that tell against 
 him : to ' sacrifice particular principles in favour of 
 
2 1 4 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 absorbing sympathy.' Can we not now look fairly in 
 the face the clear, simple, unambiguous facts of Shel- 
 ley's desertion of his wife, and ask ourselves what we 
 should say to-day if a writer of Shelley's notorious 
 antecedents presented himself as an upholder of prin- 
 ciples based upon, or at one with them ? For it is 
 only by such a view of the situation that we can arrive 
 at a just idea of the measure of culpability in which 
 at the best Shelley's detractors are for all time in- 
 volved. Let us adhere to our disposition to believe 
 in him, but let us be certain — as Mr. Browning has 
 well said — that nothing must so shame and grieve 
 Shelley as to see himself exalted at the cost of degra- 
 dation to another. 
 
 A glance over the foregoing reviews will show that 
 the charges against Shelley's private life and charac- 
 ter made in the contemporary periodical press were 
 these : {a) that he deserted his wife ; (b) that he left 
 her without material support ; (c) that he tempted her 
 in her abandoned condition to seek with her pretty 
 face a livelihood by prostitution ; (d) that he lived in 
 open adultery ; (e) that when his deserted wife sought 
 refuge from sorrow in suicide, he laughed at her as a 
 maniac with a bitter mockery ; (/) that having broken 
 down with damned sophistry the morals of a family, 
 he contracted an incestuous alliance with two sisters 
 at one time. Shameless as were many of these accu- 
 sations, and indefensible as were all of them except 
 two, they were presented in forms of malevolent 
 speech, which constituted a separate offence. But in 
 their sheer literalness, what is the truth respecting 
 
Shelley. 215 
 
 them ? — for the time has gone by when we can ignore 
 them, and (Mr. Froude notwithstanding) the time has 
 not yet come when we can persuade ourselves that 
 they are forgotten. 
 
 With regard to the first count in the indictment, 
 the poet stands convicted even in the mind of the 
 most loyal of Shelleyans, who brings to a complete 
 knowledge of the facts a competent judgment. There 
 are grounds for inferring that towards May, 18 14, 
 Harriett was aware that Shelley desired to live apart 
 from her ; and that she herself in some sort made a 
 reluctant submission to a proposal for separation. But 
 there is no evidence that the separation was in fact 
 made by mutual consent. On the contrary, Harriett 
 denied to Peacock that there was any consent on her 
 part. There are no documents published showing 
 that Harriett was a party to the transaction. More- 
 over, letters of hers exist which state that when Shelley 
 left her he permitted his absence to remain for some 
 time unexplained. Biographers who are more jealous 
 of the poet's honour than in this regard he was him- 
 self, may admit in guarded phrase that Shelley 'dis- 
 appeared' from Harriett's "cognizance, without making 
 proper arrangements, or giving any warning or ex- 
 planation of his intentions.' Such language may 
 become those of us who are determined to have faith 
 in him, but we must not expect that part of the world 
 that refuses to sacrifice principle to sympathy to call 
 Shelley's act by any other name than the unequivocal 
 one of deliberate desertion. That Shelley left his 
 wife without making provision for her material support 
 
2i6 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 was a charge for which there was a colourable defence. 
 When he left her about the middle of June, 1814, he 
 gave her all the money he then possessed, but Harriett 
 for herself and child had altogether no more than four- 
 teen shillings in money. Almost certainly a fortnight 
 elapsed in which she was without other means of 
 support known to her husband than these shillings 
 would afford. We shall not hesitate to say what we 
 think — that a brave man (as Shelley indubitably was) 
 without the least affection remaining for his wife, but 
 with some shreds of fidelity outlasting love) should 
 have remained with her until he could make proper pro- 
 vision for her support. We shall not hesitate to say 
 what we further think — that if Shelley abandoned his 
 wife and left her in London (her relatives being then 
 in Bath), with only fourteen shillings of ready money 
 and no reasonable assurance that before that pittance 
 could be exhausted she would be furnished with further 
 supplies, he richly merited the worst chastisement of 
 his reviewers as the reward of pusillanimity and 
 heartlessness. Let not our reverence for the divine 
 poet make us blind to the derogations of duty in the 
 man. We have a right to see how far the aspirations 
 of the one square with the character of the other. But 
 we must acquit Shelley on this second count, that of 
 neglect ; not because as an idealistic poet he might 
 be adjudged deficient in worldly prudence and fore- 
 thought, for Shelley is proved to have been eminently 
 practical in small money matters ; perhaps because 
 his body as well as his soul was at this juncture in a 
 turmoil, and the one was then as little as the other at 
 
Shelley. 2 1 7 
 
 all favourable to the ' steady symmetries of conven- 
 tional life.' 
 
 Later on Shelley manifested an anxiety, almost 
 feverish, to see to his wife's material welfare. The 
 neglect of which he seems to have been guilty during 
 the last half of June, 1814, must be regarded as an 
 accident : the accident probably of the poet's consti- 
 tutional weakness, and the pitiful truce made with it 
 by a laudanum-bottle. There was, therefore, a colour- 
 able pretext, and no more than this, for the statement 
 current in Shelley's time that he had left his deserted 
 wife without support. The further accusation of 
 having tempted Harriett to prostitution was, when so 
 stated, an infamous slander ; yet there is a contem- 
 porary record which, if true at all, shows that the 
 charge was not wholly groundless. In Dr. Polidori's 
 ' Diary' there occurs this entry : ' He (Shelley) married ; 
 and a friend of his liking his wife, he tried all he 
 could to induce her to love him in turn.' It must be 
 said at once that the source of this statement is apo- 
 cryphal : but even if untrue, the statement was current 
 in the poet's private circle, and was not contradicted 
 by the friends whose silence, according to the axiom, 
 must have been the justification of enemies. How far 
 such an act as that pointed at by Dr. Polidori would be 
 an approximation to tempting a wife to prostitution 
 must be a matter of opinion, where no code of formu- 
 lated morality can pronounce judgment. There may 
 be men who, like Mr. Rossetti, understand it in the 
 sense that Shelley, after he had discovered the incom- 
 patibility between himself and Harriett, found also that 
 
2i8 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 the happiness of a friend of his could be promoted by 
 her, and that he then favoured the friend's suit with his 
 wife. There are likely to be many more to whom 
 such a transaction would seem to approach so nearly 
 to procuration that there could be no need to split 
 many hairs about it. Whatever the inference from 
 the fact — if fact it was — Shelley must certainly have 
 the benefit of the doubt respecting it. The fourth 
 charge was one about which there could hardly be 
 much discussion. That Shelley lived for two years in 
 a connubial state which the laws of most civilized 
 countries and the aggregate of opinion in many ages 
 pronounce adultery is not open to dispute. What 
 extenuating circumstances we are accustomed to 
 put forth must arise at another moment for mention. 
 Meantime there is no disguising the truth that if criti- 
 cism of books has any proper dealings with the personal 
 conduct of the authors — and Shelleyans are the first to 
 say that subjective poetry may best receive elucida- 
 tion from the personality of the poet, and that for 
 love's and for understanding's sake the biography is 
 as necessary as the poetry — then the early critics of 
 Shelley were not seriously to blame that they took 
 cognizance of his open violation of one of the doctrines 
 of social life held sacred and inviolable. More serious, 
 more dubious, more slanderous, was the charge that 
 Shelley laughed at his wife as a maniac, when she 
 took refuge from sorrow in suicide. That Harriett 
 had a congenital tendency to self-destruction is obvious 
 enough. What the immediate cause of her act may 
 have been it does not here concern us to inquire. 
 
Shelley. 219 
 
 Perhaps, as Mr. Kegan Paul says, that immediate 
 cause was the shutting of her father's door against 
 her. Or perhaps she was, as De Quincey says, stung 
 to madness by calumnies incidental to her position 
 as a woman abandoned by her husband, for the world 
 is as merciless as a herd of deer to the creature that 
 falls wounded in the chase, and gores it to a yet 
 speedier death than that which already chills and 
 saddens it. But of Shelley's grief, remorse, and 
 horror upon receiving the news of his wife's suicide 
 we have received through Dr. Garnett the most un- 
 equivocal testimony. Probably his feelings partook 
 more of remorse than of grief : remorse at having un- 
 dermined Harriett's sober and safe orthodoxy, wherein 
 such a catastrophe would have been made the more re- 
 mote by the more stringent principles of thought and 
 life which orthodoxy must have induced. Be this as it 
 may, Leigh Hunt says that the impression produced 
 on the poet's sensitive nature by the tragical incident 
 lasted in its first poignant freshness to the close of his 
 life. There is but little to invalidate such evidence ; 
 yet when we come to judge of the accusation made 
 by Shelley's critics, let us not forget that soon after 
 Harriett's death Shelley applied to that poor forlorn 
 outcast among women the name of a ' frantic idiot.'* 
 This is not ' laughing at the fool while in the arms of 
 associate strumpets,' but it is an outburst of intem- 
 perance totally unworthy of a fine spirit (however 
 
 * These and other statements are given on the authority 
 of Shelley's most outspoken biographer, W. M. Rossetti, who 
 combines with the most fearless truthfulness the most sincere 
 enthusiasm. 
 
220 . Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 distraught by the frantic act), and calculated to feed 
 the malice of misapprehensive enemies. There re- 
 mains but one further accusation of Shelley's detrac- 
 tors to treat of, and because it is the foulest of them 
 all it shall be dismissed with the utmost brevity. That 
 Shelley contracted an incestuous alliance with two 
 sisters is a charge which no reasonably healthy nature 
 will think it necessary to spend an hour in seeking to 
 disprove. Jane Clermont was not the sister of Mary 
 Shelley ; she was not her blood relation ; the particular 
 act publicly charged' against the poet in the Literary 
 Gazette, and reported to him by Lord Byron, would at 
 the worst have involved concubinage, not the grosser 
 offence. Shelley's step-sister by affinity had already 
 passed through a liaison with Byron,* and none can 
 say whether it was to him or to the Hoppners with the 
 Swiss nurse, or partly to him and partly to them, and 
 partly to the evil spirits that always live in the ' hellish 
 society of men,' that the vile calumny is due. Shelley 
 was more deeply moved by it than might have been 
 expected in one who had already openly disregarded 
 
 * Documents are said to exist which prove that Jane Clermont 
 was never at any time Byron's mistress, and that the transaction 
 which has become part of their history was suggested by the 
 lady as an occasional psychological experiment in the union of 
 the 'handsomest and cleverest man in Europe' and the ' hand- 
 somest and cleverest woman in Europe'! The story has a 
 Byronic odour. It will cleanse Byron as little to blacken Jane 
 Clermont as it cleanses Shelley to blacken Harriett Westbrook. 
 It is hinted that papers are forthcoming which involve the last- 
 mentioned in still deeper disgrace. No guilt (if it amounts to 
 so much) on the part of the wife of Shelley will entirely absolve 
 the poet himself in the eyes of men of the world. 
 
Shelley. 221 
 
 the serious conventions of life. Stripped of the worst 
 mask in which the charge was made hideous, it remains 
 a loathsome thing ; but we must not be surprised to 
 discover that our horror of it does not find a propor- 
 tionate echo among persons who think that Shelley 
 at his best must run the gauntlet of one accusation 
 only less odious. 
 
 In judging of Shelley's character we have in recent 
 years been wont to set aside conventionalities, whether 
 they come of law or religion, and consider the acts of his 
 life not so much by their essential Tightness or wrong- 
 ness, or what seems to be such, as by the standard of 
 truth whereby he himself thought and spoke. We 
 have been asking ourselves not how far Shelley's deeds 
 were culpable in relation to the world as basis and 
 beginning, but how far they adhered to his sincere 
 conviction of what it was on the whole best for him 
 to do. ' I call Shelley a moral man,' says Mr. Brown- 
 ing, ' because he was true, simple-hearted, and brave, 
 and because what he acted corresponded to what he 
 knew.' And again, ' In Shelley there was nothing of 
 that jarring between the man and the author which 
 has been found so amusing or so melancholy ; no 
 dropping of the tragic mask, as the crowd melts away ; 
 . . what Shelley was, he was with an admirable sin- 
 cerity.' Mr. Symonds, Mr. Rossetti, Dr. Garnett, Miss 
 Blind, and others, have agreed with what Mr. Browning 
 has so well said. But some of these lovers of Shelley 
 appear to make a vairi effort to rest on the horns of a 
 serious dilemma. Persuaded that Shelley's was a 
 nature as generous and self-oblivious as poor humanity 
 
222 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 may ever see, they are compelled to allow that it was 
 once capable of an act of desertion which in its inten- 
 tions was selfish and in its results was cruel. In order 
 to remove the apparent inconsistency between what 
 the poet acted and what he knew, they then appear 
 to show that the woman Shelley abandoned was no 
 fit wife for him ; and that it was well for the world — 
 which is the richer by the productions induced by a hap- 
 pier alliance — and necessary for himself — who might 
 have sunk into death on yet lower steps of youth as 
 the result of an incompatible union — that he should 
 put that woman away. The reasoning is dubious, for it 
 overlooks the fact that in all discussion of the abso- 
 lute morality of Shelley's act we must put aside the 
 poet, who is not arraigned, and deal only with the 
 man, who is. Not to question the statement that 
 Harriett was unworthy of Shelley; that she was 'a 
 splendid animal,'* but without the power to appreciate 
 poetry or understand philosophy ; not to point to the 
 fact that for nearly three years the poet and his wife 
 lived in comparative harmony, and that a few months 
 before the separation they sealed their union with a 
 second marriage, let us ask if a man establishes his 
 character for truth, simple-heartedness, and bravery, 
 according to Shelley's code, by consulting his own feel- 
 ings primarily in breaking an alliance which he himself 
 has made. It is probable that only those who know 
 
 * Just sixteen months earlier than the separation, Shelley was 
 so far from finding Harnett 'a splendid animal' and no more, 
 that he spoke of her in a dedication (' Queen Mab,' February, 
 1813), as the inspirer of all that was purest and noblest in his 
 mind and soul. 
 
Shelley. 
 
 223 
 
 what it is for an elevated spirit to be mated to an 
 incomprehensive piece of physical prettiness can fully 
 or rightly say what a clog such a union ever is upon 
 the best aspirations of the soul ; and perhaps the be- 
 wildered soul of Shelley, sweating now under a new 
 passion that brought agony and not solace, could see 
 no way but flight out of the troubles that tortured it. 
 But Shelley's was a nature too generous to find balm 
 in such a Gilead ; it found the wormwood of remorse 
 there. In taking the full measure of Shelley, let us 
 face the fact that he lacked Shakspeare's masculinity. 
 It is easy to believe that Shakspeare in later life grew 
 tired of the uneducated daughter of a Warwickshire 
 yeoman, whom he had married in youth, and perhaps 
 under restraint. If so, we do not learn that he ever 
 said he wished to be free of her ; like a sensible man 
 of the world, he took without a murmur the fate that 
 from the hands of fortune fell to him. As little can 
 Shelley compare with Coleridge* in masculinity ; and 
 still less with Goethe, who was able to marry and 
 live happily with the ' bonnie lassie' Christiana Vul- 
 pius, after winning the noble love of Frederika, the 
 parson's daughter of Sesenheim, and the admiration 
 of the accomplished Baroness Charlotte von Stein. 
 Nay, the 'apothecary's apprentice,' who has been 
 lately laughed at for his outbursts of fretfulness, had 
 more in him of the stuff out of which a strong man is 
 
 * More than once the lovers of Shelley have attempted to 
 palliate his offence in deserting his wife, by coupling it with the 
 so-called desertion by Coleridge of his wife and children ; but 
 the cases of the two poets are entirely dissimilar, and possess 
 no single point in common. 
 
224 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 made. The letters of Keats to his betrothed, which 
 are too commonly accepted as witnesses to, some 
 plague-spot of the petulant woman in his character, 
 are proof of nothing so surely as his masculine com- 
 mand of a consuming passion which, in its strength, 
 chastity, and unselfishness, only a great nature could 
 conceive. It is true that Shelley's highest virtues 
 overshadow everything of which Keats was capable : 
 yet they were the virtues of a noble woman ; Keals's 
 virtues were the virtues of a man. 
 
 But if we allow that Shelley adhered in word and 
 deed to sincere conviction ; if we grant that what he 
 acted corresponded to what he knew, are we there- 
 fore to conclude that he is rightly called a moral 
 man ? Though we set aside the religion which Shelley 
 ignored, the world is surely our starting-point, and 
 the aggregate of human opinion is our basis of all 
 moral law. These, then — the world and human 
 opinion — are what we have to consider in making 
 our estimate of Shelley as a man. Let the multitude 
 of men go on as we have allowed Shelley to begin, 
 and what would morality be in a month ? It would 
 be the shadow of a reality — that, and no more. 
 True, indeed, that Shelley died before his youth 
 ended ; true, too, that he must be considered ' as a 
 whole, and at his ultimate spiritual standard, and not 
 be judged of at the immaturity, and by the mistakes 
 of ten years before.' And that spiritual standard was 
 so exalted that we who love the poet need not shrink 
 from looking fearlessly at the jarring elements of his 
 character. 
 
Shelley. 225 
 
 If the misapprehension of Shelley as a man pre- 
 ceded the misconception of him as a poet, the latter 
 lost nothing of the virulence peculiar to it from the 
 scurrility that is inseparable from the former. The 
 world is always eager enough to associate, with the 
 thing that is written, the vices that are believed to 
 belong to the man who writes. Shelley's principles 
 were said to square with his habits ; the doctrines he 
 preached were understood to furnish an odious eluci- 
 dation of the abominations he practised. Incest was 
 alleged to be the appalling vice which he dissected with 
 relish, or discussed with sympathy. We know that the 
 premises were false ; but were there any grounds for 
 inferences so damaging as those of Shelley's contem- 
 poraries, even from the facts as they came distorted 
 through the medium of calumny ? The question 
 opens up a problem that touches the vital point of 
 Shelley's ultimate place as a poet. 
 
 When the wave of critical opinion on Shelley, 
 having reached its ebb in the periodical press of 
 1822 to 1830, began to flow in his favour, it was 
 customary for admirers to take the common ground 
 of extolling the poet first of all for his ideality. Later 
 critics with more acuteness perceived that the range 
 and variety of Shelley's powers had been much under- 
 stated. Then ensued a period in which the best of 
 the poet's lovers maintained that mastery had been 
 exhibited 'in six several and very diverse lines of poetic 
 faculty.' Mr. Rossetti has classified these, as (1) the 
 ideal, (2) the tragic, (3) the poetic-familiar, (4) the 
 lyric, (S) the grotesque, (6) poetic translation. There 
 
 IS 
 
226 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 is nothing in this tabulated statement, as here given, 
 which forbids us to determine Shelley's place in one of 
 the~teio great classes into which all poets are divided, 
 and which we call objective and subjective. But the 
 analysis implies a claim it does not state. It is 
 understood that the range and variety in question 
 cover a combination of powers that secure to Shelley's 
 genius a high rank in both classes. The * Cenci ' is 
 expected to establish for him the position of a 
 dramatic, and therefore of an objective poet, as cer- 
 tainly as the ' Prometheus ' establishes for him that 
 of an idealistic, and hence of a subjective poet. Now, 
 is this reasoning tenable ? for upon our answer to 
 that question will be seen to depend not very re- 
 motely our estimate of both the intellectual and 
 moral constitution of the poet and man. It ought 
 not to be difficult to show that it is not tenable ; 
 that Shelley is a subjective poet only, and that being 
 so, his poetry can receive most valuable elucidation 
 from his life, which in turn can receive inestimable 
 commentary from his poetry. First of all, let it not 
 be denied that in the ' Cenci ' Shelley suppressed, as 
 he said, the peculiar feelings and opinions that 
 characterized his other composition ; further, that he 
 ' attended simply to the development of such charac- 
 ters as it is probable the persons represented really 
 were ;' again, that the result is a tragic creation not 
 inferior to the ' Remorse ' as a poem, and incredibly 
 greater as a play exhibiting passion and conveying 
 sentiment ; finally, let it be allowed that the work as 
 a whole is the finest tragedy of modern times. Does 
 
Shelley. 227 
 
 it therefore follow that Shelley's was a dramatic 
 genius, or yet a lyric genius running into the dra- 
 matic ? The question is one that can only be an- 
 swered by an appeal to first principles. The dramatic 
 (that is the objective) genius is both analytical and 
 synthetical : it sifts and filters, it classifies and com- 
 bines. But over and above these functions it has 
 another function — that of the representative. The 
 dramatic genius is primarily representative of man 
 and the universe. It is untroubled by any thought 
 of the tendency and teaching of what it projects into 
 art. Its products have a tendency, and they have a 
 teaching, but it remains for us to trace and interpret 
 these according to our lights. The one great thing dra- 
 matic genius has to do is to sift, to filter and to classify 
 the materials that lie at hand in life and to combine 
 these into a structure that shall represent life in little. 
 The lyric (that is the subjective) genius is neither 
 analytical and synthetical nor representative, but 
 idiosyncratic. It concerns itself first of all with the 
 soul of the poet in whom it resides. It looks inward 
 upon that soul, and if the soul itself look heaven- 
 wards, it also looks towards the Divine. Let us re- 
 mark in passing, and not irreverently, that in the 
 sense described, life and the universe itself are sub- 
 jective creations, whereof the teaching is full of 
 mystery until we betake ourselves to the Author of 
 all, and from knowledge and love of Him gather hints 
 of its purpose, and then the drama of life that seemed 
 to have so many and such conflicting meanings ap- 
 pears harmonious and one. We perceive the bearing 
 
 IS— 2 
 
228 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 of this when we step in each case from the genius 
 itself to the man in whom it resides. The dramatic 
 poet is of small or no consequence to the dramatic 
 poetry. Imagine perfect dramatic poetry, perfect 
 representative drama, and the man who gave it us 
 is no longer valuable to study, for the work is there, 
 and is self-interpretive. Not so in regard to the 
 lyric poet. He is essential to a right understanding 
 of his poetry. The impulses peculiar to his constitu- 
 tion have inspired his work ; and hence whatever 
 weaknesses he may have in his moral character, his 
 productions must have in their intellectual nature. 
 < Macbeth,' the play, can stand alone without elucida- 
 tion derived from knowledge of the man Shakspeare. 
 But in order to see at once that Shelley's was not an 
 objective, but a subjective genius, we have but to ask 
 ourselves, ' Could the " Cenci " stand, as " Macbeth " 
 stands, without a word of interpretation obtained 
 through familiarity with the man who wrote it ?' 
 There can in reason be but one reply ; and what is 
 the simple ground of it ? This : that ' Macbeth ' ap- 
 peals to the common eye of men here, now, every- 
 where and in all ages, because it represents life in 
 little, because it treats of passions that every human 
 soul has felt, and must, by the necessities of its 
 existence, feel ; while the ' Cenci ' appeals to one 
 human idiosyncrasy only — that which appre- 
 hends the hideousness and horror of an unnatural 
 offence. 
 
 The importance of this distinction it is easy to per- 
 ceive. If Shelley was a subjective poet purely, the 
 
Shelley. 229 
 
 first question to ask is, ' How far was his subjectivity 
 good and healthy ?' for just so far will his poetry be 
 pure and right. There has been nothing more true 
 said on our subject of study — where much has been 
 said with truth — than that ' we must betake ourselves 
 to the poet's life before we determine some of the nicer 
 questions concerning his poetry.'* The nicest question 
 of all concerning Shelley's poetry is, ' Why was it that 
 Shelley was twice fascinated by stories involving, 
 nay hanging upon, incest ?' A great poet recently 
 taken from among us used to answer the question 
 frankly, ' Because Shelley was deficient in passion.' 
 It will seem strange if we have to agree with this 
 conclusion : strange if the instinct which we usually 
 account a part of our lower nature is after all essen- 
 tial to spiritual perfection. Yet so it is, and sooner or 
 later we must perceive that a healthy development of 
 passion is the only thing that can save us from find- 
 ing a morbid fascination in offences against nature. 
 We have grown accustomed to regard much of the 
 poetic filth that comes to us from France as indica- 
 tions of passion abnormally indulged. Probably the 
 exact opposite is the fact, and perhaps the instinct 
 we are wont to decry, if it had been operative, would 
 have spared us the ' Fleurs de Mai ' and ' Justine,' 
 and — not to couple too closely two of the meanest 
 with two of the noblest products of genius — it would 
 have spared us the revolting sides of Ford's ' 'Tis 
 Pity,' and Shelley's 'Cenci' also. To prove that 
 Shelley as a man was deficient in passion we need 
 * Mr. Browning. 
 
Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 mention one incident only in his life. Some time 
 after his separation from Harriett, he proposed that 
 she should return to him and take up a place as a 
 member of his household, not as his wife, but side by 
 side with the friend for whom she had been aban- 
 doned, and who still shared his bed.* This extra- 
 ordinary proposal arose out of the most self-oblivious 
 generosity, but what a commentary it affords on 
 Shelley's masculinity ! The man who had no more 
 acute sense than this implies of the beautiful relation 
 of the sexes that is determined by healthy nature 
 may have had the noblest heart, but he was deficient 
 in one attribute. And the fractious men contem- 
 
 * It is necessary to state that neither the exact proposal 
 made by Shelley nor the exact evidence that any such proposal 
 at all was made is known to exist ; but as the story came in the 
 first instance from Basil Montague there is doubtless truth in it. 
 Still, if this be apocryphal, proof of the point raised in the text 
 could surely be found in the letter written by Shelley to J. L. P., 
 from Naples, Dec. 22, 1818, wherein the poet speaks of the 
 ' wicked and mischievous insanity ' of ' Childe Harold,' and 
 adds, ' For its real root is very different from its apparent one. 
 ... . L. B. associates with wretches who seem almost to have 
 lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple 
 to avow practices which are not only not named, but I believe 
 seldom conceived, in England.' The morality here assigned to 
 Lord Byron's associates, and by implication to himself also, is 
 perhaps no more than one stage above that of Count Cenci 
 himself. That Shelley could ever afterwards enjoy the society 
 and acknowledge the friendship of the man of whom he had 
 cause to write in these terms is' only to be accounted for on the 
 ground that with a disproportionate sense of the superiority of 
 Byron's genius compared with his own, he was destitute of that 
 robust manly passion that would have made the subject of such 
 strictures, if true, an object of detestation and loathing. 
 
Shelley. 
 
 231 
 
 porary with him felt this in some uncertain way, 
 though they could not realize it, and their slanderous 
 accusations of licentiousness were the inapt and 
 shameful speech in which their vague feeling ex- 
 pressed itself. 
 
THE QUARRELS OF CRITICS. 
 
 DISCERNING readers of the extracts given in 
 foregoing chapters will not be betrayed by 
 the unanimity of censure which they exhibit into 
 supposing that there was harmony among the critics 
 themselves. Reviewers who were at one in con- 
 demning Wordsworth and in reviling Shelley were 
 assuredly not brought into closer sympathy by that 
 circumstance ; but the accident of disagreement as to 
 the merits of a poet furnished occasion for the bitterest 
 feud. It says much for the hold that literature had 
 on the public mind in the first years of the century 
 that the long-continued and singularly acrimonious 
 controversies appearing constantly in the periodical 
 press, touching the treatment of authors by critics, 
 could be tolerated and even enjoyed. An important 
 part of the 'Noctes Ambrosianae' is concerned with the 
 delinquencies of the Edinburgh Review in this par- 
 ticular. One of the features of the Examiner was an 
 examination of the reviews of books published in the 
 Quarterly Review. The Literary Gazette kept an eye 
 always open for the shortcomings of its weekly, 
 
The Quarrels of Critics. 233 
 
 monthly, and quarterly rivals ; and even the father of 
 modern critical literature, the Edinburgh Review itself, 
 notwithstanding its protestations of superiority to all 
 publications not considered deserving or susceptible 
 of argumentative treatment, was liable to condescend 
 sometimes to revile those 'insects in letters' which 
 stung it by detecting its errors. The most amusing 
 •of these quarrels of critics gravitate, as might be ex- 
 pected, about Blackwood's Magazine, and not the least 
 ludicrous feature of the critical diatribes of that viva- 
 cious periodical is its frank treatment of critics as a 
 class. In 1822 Blackwood said : 
 
 ' Diogenes took a lantern in his hand, and sought all 
 over Athens for an honest man. If he had found one, I know 
 his first question would have been, ' Is not this a world full of 
 humbug ?' and the honest man's answer must have been ' Yes, 
 truly, Diogenes ; and you, with your tub and your lantern, 
 are the finest piece of humbug in the whole of it.' Now, in re- 
 gard to the professional critics of the present day, it appears to 
 me that any given number of their sect resembles very much 
 Diogenes strolling up and down the town with his dark lantern 
 in his hand, exclaiming against humbug, and trying to pass him- 
 self off upon the women and children crossing the streets as a 
 person in pursuit of honesty. . . . What is the opinion of the 
 Quarterly Review upon any given subject? It is possible that 
 it may be the opinion of nobody : at the very best, it is the 
 opinion of Mr. Southey, or of Mr. (another person, who must 
 be pleased,) Gifford himself. . . . Suppose for a moment such 
 a book as Pope's " Dunciad" were to be published to-morrow, Mr. 
 Southey, even though he did not find himself mentioned in it, 
 would infallibly toss up his nose and pronounce it the work of a 
 man of no imagination — no originality— no poetry. Mr. Gifford 
 would not in his heart like it, because he would feel, after read- 
 ing two full pages, that it was all over with his " Baviad and 
 Mseviad." How would this work be reviewed in the Quarterly t 
 ... It would not be reviewed by Mr. Gifford, because Mr. 
 Gifford, though not at all delighted with the book, could not for 
 
234 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 his life be blind to its merits ; and although he might also have 
 many private reasons for not wishing to speak the truth, I do 
 the splenetic Mr. Gifford the justice to say, that I do not believe 
 he is capable of sitting down gravely to write in his own person 
 what he feels to be untrue. 
 
 ' Mr. Southey would receive the book at Keswick by his next 
 mail-coach parcel, and I think he might very possibly set about 
 reviewing it. But then he would speak such utter nonsense 
 about it, that Mr. Gifford would not hear of its being inserted. 
 . . . This is, however, a very unfair way of putting the thing ; 
 for few things are less likely than the appearance of a "Dunciad" 
 in an age when there is so little besides duncery. There is no 
 need of imagining or supposing anything. Just look at what is, 
 and you will be satisfied. Look for example at Mr. Milman, 
 writing three or four articles every year in the Quarterly, and, 
 for his pains, having one article in the year written in praise of 
 himself by some friend of his own. Look at Mr. Mitchell 
 writing two dissertations on " Aristophanes " in the Quarterly 
 Review : and then turn to the next number of the Quarterly, 
 and see Mr. Mitchell praised through thirty pages (no matter 
 how justly and deservedly) for a translation of " Aristophanes,'' 
 to which these very dissertations of his have been prefixed. See 
 Reginald Heber writing regularly in the Review, and his poetry 
 — Reginald Heber's pretty college-prize poetry — quoted — ab- 
 solutely quoted, in the Quarterly Review. Look at Reginald 
 Heber puffing Robert Southey, and Robert Southey puffing 
 Reginald Heber. Look at authors dedicating their books to Mr. 
 Gifford, and Mr. Gifford reviewing their books either by himself 
 or by his true legitimate vassals — his nameless knol-headed 
 templars and curates ! . . . . Look at Mr. Brougham, who has 
 lived, in a great measure, for twenty years of his life, by writing 
 in the Edinburgh Review, and see with what face he can bear 
 to hear the Edinburgh Review puffing him as the immortal 
 statesman and legislator of the age. See the radical Examiner 
 praising the borough-mongering Edinburgh Review, and the 
 Pope-worshipping Edinburgh Review praising the little painted 
 crockery-pots of Mr. Leigh Hunt. See Hazlitt writing in the 
 Edinburgh Review, and Hazlitt praised in the Edinburgh Re- 
 view. See Wordsworth quizzed in the Edinburgh Review, and 
 Keats and Cornwall patted on the back in it. Poor Keats ! I 
 cannot pass his name without saying that I really think he had 
 
The Quarrels of Critics. 235 
 
 some genius about him. I do think he had something that 
 might have ripened into fruit, had he not made such a mum- 
 bling work of the buds — something that might have been wine, 
 and tasted like wine, if he had not kept dabbling with his fingers 
 in the vat, and pouring it out and calling so lustily for quaffers, 
 before the grounds had time to be settled, or the spirit to be 
 concentrated, or the flavour to be formed.' 
 
 In much of this trenchant criticism Blackwood was 
 assuredly on safe ground, and only its own equally 
 obvious delinquencies in precisely similar directions 
 qualified the effect of its just and spirited strictures 
 in the ' Noctes' (xl. 1828), when it complained of the 
 inconsistency of the Edinburgh ; when it exposed the 
 absurdity of saying that the poetry of Crabbe and 
 Scott was fuller of ' real persons, intelligible interests, 
 and conceivable incidents' than any poetry except 
 Shakspeare's in the language ', when it is said that 
 Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge had little chance 
 of being remembered ; or when it reminded the 
 Review that had taken credit to itself for the recogni- 
 tion of Keats, that it had praised the poet somewhat 
 tardily, and had ignored altogether the finest products 
 of his genius. The attitude adopted by Blackwood 
 towards the most powerful and the most immediate of 
 its rivals can best be seen in the following passages 
 quoted from the volume for 1823 : 
 
 ' But before I quit for ever the topic of J. Keats, let me ask 
 Mr. Jeffrey one short and simple question. His Review says, 
 that John's " fine fancy and powerful invention were too obvious 
 to be treated with neglect? and that, therefore, the Tory critics 
 set to abusing John. The question I wish to put is this — If 
 Keats' fancy and invention were so wonderfully obvious, why 
 did the Edinburgh Review take no notice at all of the possessor 
 
236 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 until long after the Tory critics had had such abundance of time 
 to make minced meat of him ? What is the use of a Review, if 
 it be not to watch for the appearance of fine fancy and powerful 
 invention ; and, whenever such qualities make their appearance, 
 to call upon the world to give the new poet his due reception of 
 applause ? The Edinburgh Review, however, suffered all the 
 fancy and invention of Johnny Keats to be puffed in the 
 periodical works, of which its familiar knowledge is now con- 
 fessed — and to be sneered at in those its fearful intimacy with 
 which is the main-spring and sole inspiring principle of the 
 article before us — it suffered all this for many long years, before 
 it had the honesty or the courage to say one syllable about the 
 existence of such a being as Johnny. How is Mr. Jeffrey to 
 answer or account for this ? . . . Why up to this blessed hour 
 has the Edinburgh Review never hinted that there has been 
 such a man in the world as Percy Bysshe Shelley ? Surely, 
 surely his fancy and invention were in the proportion of 1000 
 to 1 compared with those of Johnny Keats. Surely, surely he 
 was abused by the Quarterly, fully as bitterly as ever Keats was". 
 But no— there is a reason for everything. Shelley, with all his 
 faults, was a gentleman, a scholar, and a poet; and his merits as 
 such were uniformly acknowledged in Blackwood's Magazine. 
 That work, if there was a cry against Shelley, did not join it. 
 On the contrary, it was in that work that he -was first praised in 
 a style worthy of his genius ; and, while many severe criticisms 
 appeared there, of and concerning his bad principles, political 
 and religious, there never appeared one word which Shelley, or 
 the friends of Shelley, could complain of, as either illiberal or 
 indecorous towards the man or towards the poet. In a word, 
 the Edinburgh Review neglected his fine qualities, however 
 obvious, and Blackwood praised them warmly and zealously, in 
 spite of his bad qualities, however obvious. But it did not suit 
 Mr. Jeffrey to allude to all this. Why ?— why simply because 
 the object of this article was to denounce all the Tory critics, 
 and Blackwood's in particular, as persons who bestow their 
 praise or censure entirely on political grounds — who were 
 incapable of doing justice to the fine fancy and powerful 
 invention of Johnny Keats, and Leigh Hunt, King of the 
 Cockneys, because these men were, or were supposed to be, 
 politically opposed to their own principles. The least 
 mention of Mr. Shelley's very different treatment must have 
 
The Quarrels of Critics. 237 
 
 at once nullified all this nonsense. It must, at the same time, 
 have given birth to a universal inquiry as to the reasons 
 which have from the beginning, and up to this moment, kept 
 the Edinburgh Review silent as to Mr. Shelley himself, his 
 poetry, and the evil and the good so strangely blended in all 
 his extraordinary productions. It must have set everybody a- 
 saying, ' Why did this Review, that praises Mr. Barry Cornwall, 
 and Mr. Beddoes, and Mr. Knowles, and heaven knows how 
 many more of such small deer, why did it, why does it, never 
 mention the existence of such poems as " The Revolt of Islam " 
 and"TheCenci"?' 
 
 It may be remarked in passing that while it was 
 natural enough that Blackwood should complain in 
 1823 that Shelley had not been reviewed in the pages 
 of the Edinburgh, it was a little ludicrous that it should 
 repeat the complaint in 1828 ('Noctes' xl.),after the 
 Review in question had devoted an article to Shelley's 
 'Posthumous Poems' (1824), and — which makes the 
 slip more silly — after Blackwood had published a letter 
 to Barry Cornwall in reply to that very article, attri- 
 buting it to him. But, indeed, the memory of certain 
 of these critics appears to have been eminently accom- 
 modating, and as much at the bidding of will as 
 were the emotional susceptibilities of our familiar 
 friend the worshipper at the church who accounted for 
 , the phenomenon of his being unmoved throughout a 
 pathetic sermon that suffused the congregation with 
 tears, by explaining that he did not belong to the 
 parish. How Blackwood reconciled its preachments 
 with its practice is a question which we must perforce 
 leave enshrouded in the mystery that envelops it. 
 Perhaps it thought that in order to guard its own pre- 
 serves it was only necessary to make a sufficient show 
 
238 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 of cutting itself off from all that surrounded it. In 
 that case it much resembled the gentleman who built 
 his garden wall higher so as to keep out the rooks. 
 But those full-throated birds found it possible to make 
 their cawings heard, and their offensive presence felt. 
 Hazlitt, whose distinction it was, according to Byron, 
 to talk pimples — 'red and white corruptions dis- 
 charging nothing but their own humours ' — constantly- 
 depreciated Blackwoodby saying that no man who had 
 any regard to his own character would even so much 
 as mention the name of Maga. To this decidedly 
 illogical criticism Blackwood was wont to reply that as 
 Hazlitt had not written a paper of any kind for ten years 
 without using, with many unnecessary liberties, Maga's 
 name, therefore Hazlitt was a man who had no regard 
 to his own character. It was a good syllogism : ' You 
 hae him on the hip there, sir.' The most amusing con- 
 troversy arising out of Blackwood's delinquencies did 
 not, however, originate with Hazlitt. In October, 
 1 818, there appeared in Edinburgh an anonymous 
 pamphlet, entitled ' Hypocrisy Unveiled and Calumny 
 Detected.' This was a bitter attack on Blackwood, in 
 the persons of Wilson and Lockhart A manuscript 
 note (initialled H. C.) in a copy at the British Museum, 
 says the tract was the work of two excellent persons 
 who were afterwards Professors in two Universities. 
 In the Halkett-Laing catalogue of anonymous pub- 
 lications (a good authority), the tract is entered as by 
 'James Grahame, Advocate.' The work is entirely 
 without merit either as an exposure of the bad wit and 
 deep malice of Blackzvood, or as a panegyric on the 
 
The Quarrels of Critics. 239 
 
 good sense and high justice of the Edinburgh. That 
 it was not likely to clear the atmosphere of the critical 
 pestilence that pervaded it, and was not calculated to 
 do the art of poetry much good, is obvious from the 
 following foolish paragraph : 
 
 ' We may also add, as a summing up of their wretched incon- 
 sistencies, that the same writer [who inveighed with so much 
 bitterness against, the poem of " Rimini "] or at least his sworn 
 brother, the Leopard, has praised Byron's " Parisina," and 
 Coleridge's " Christabel " — poems which sin as heinously against 
 purity and decency as it is well possible to imagine.' 
 
 Allusion of this kind to ' Christabel' ought to have 
 been enough to laugh the anonymous critic or critics 
 out of court, whatever the justice of their other accu- 
 sations. Yet this silly scurrility came, in the first in- 
 stance, out of the Examiner, and probably originated 
 with the man who talked red and white corruptions. 
 One further quotation from the tract must suffice : 
 
 ' The leading features of this Magazine, then, will be allowed 
 by all to be matchless impudence and a total want of principle. 
 Calumny is constantly in the mouths of its conductors. . . All 
 the privacies of life are ransacked, all the sanctuaries of our 
 nature explored and violated for the purpose of feeding an in- 
 satiate and depraved appetite for scandal and detraction ... . the 
 two principal writers . . . have employed in turns the florid, the 
 prurient and the obscure style. . . The first, we are told, in 
 " Martinus Scriblerus" is gaudy, like the lowest vegetables which 
 abound at the bottom of ponds and ditches.' 
 
 The most pointed references are made to the pub- 
 lished and acknowledged works of Wilson and Lock- 
 hart, the former being alluded to as the Scorpion, the 
 latter as the Leopard. The noise occasioned by this 
 puerile effort is of itself proof enough to what a depth 
 
240 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 of personal malignancy criticism had been allowed 
 to descend. Each of the two men pointed at wrote 
 to the anonymous author demanding his name and 
 address, that he might ' send a friend ' to deliver his 
 opinion of his critic's character, and ' to settle time and 
 place ' for a meeting at which he might expect satisfac- 
 tion for the public insults that had been offered him. 
 The author replied to each of them in these terms : 
 
 ' If you be not the principal conductor or supporter of the 
 Blackwood's Magazine j if you be not the author of a most 
 
 abusive attack on your friend Mr. W ; if you be not the 
 
 traducer of Mr. Playfair, Mr. Hazlitt and Mr. Coleridge ; if you 
 be not the writer of one or other of the letters addressed in the 
 name of " Z " to Mr. Leigh Hunt, and if you did not take shelter 
 under a quotation from Junius, and submit to be publicly stig- 
 matized by him as a coward and a scoundrel — then you have 
 nothing to say to me. But if all or any of these things apply to 
 you, in that case you have lost every claim to the character of a 
 gentleman, and have no right whatever to demand satisfac- 
 tion.' 
 
 In short the quarrel may be dramatically sum- 
 marized as follows : ' Hypocrisy Unveiled ' to Wilson 
 and Lockhart: 'You are a pair of scoundrels !' W. 
 and L. : ' Then fight us !* ' H. U.' : * No, if you're 
 not scoundrels I don't want to fight you ; and if you 
 are, you are not to be fought.' 
 
 A more ludicrous example of deliberate bullying 
 and of cowardly backing out of what were supposed 
 to be the just consequences of bullying could hardly 
 be found in fact or fiction. After this let us not set 
 too high a value on the invention of Sheridan in 
 bringing together the fire-eating Sir Lucius O'Trigger 
 and the intrepid Bob Acres. Surely the 'Rivals' 
 
The Qtiarrels of Critics. 241 
 
 must have had many rivals in Edinburgh about 181 8. 
 It may be noted that in that year Mr. Blackwood also 
 distinguished himself in a fresh field. A letter from 
 him appears in the Couratit about a quarrel with a 
 man named Douglas, and the consequent horsewhip- 
 ping of that person. Who was Douglas ? Had he 
 anything to do with ' Hypocrisy Unveiled' ? Was he 
 the printer ? or a bookseller who sold the tract exten- 
 sively? Mr. Blackwood seems to have felt proud of 
 his powers on this occasion, and small wonder that he 
 did, for his enemies frequently taunted him by saying 
 that having finished his customary sermon he usually 
 1 retired to count his money, his ribaldry, and his 
 kicks.'* When in 18 18 John Murray undertook the 
 publication of Maga in London, the Examiner said, 
 ' You, Mr. John Murray, now publish the work of a 
 convicted libeller ! . . . a horsewhipped bookseller in 
 Edinburgh ! ! !' It may be supposed that where the 
 critics of the press enjoyed to the full that privilege 
 of a free state of talking and publishing any kind of 
 nonsense, and of indulging and exhibiting any degree 
 of Warburtonian arrogance, their quarrels were con- 
 fined to literature. Not so, however ; the implements 
 of warfare were by no means limited to the grey 
 goose-quill. In the settlement of all matters of 
 personal contention, it is curious how slight is the 
 change in our manners during the past thousand 
 years. In earlier days the knight who published a 
 damaging accusation against a man of equal rank 
 expected to be called upon to prove his statement by 
 
 * Leigh Hunt. 
 
 16 
 
242 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 his sword. If he conquered in the fight, his accusa- 
 tion was proclaimed to be true ; but if he were van- 
 quished, and desired to live, he confessed that his 
 accusation was false, whereupon he was pronounced 
 a base traitor, and his possessions were forthwith 
 confiscated. It was hardly a judicial method of 
 testing the absolute truth of an injurious allegation, 
 but it was a summary and decisive one. The same 
 merit, and no other, can be claimed for the method of 
 settlement resorted to by such recent disputants as 
 Jeffrey and Moore, Blackwood and Douglas, Wilson, 
 Lockhart, and the author of ' Hypocrisy Unveiled.' 
 Now that duelling is neither legal nor fashionable, we 
 adopt another method which has more apparent than 
 actual points of difference. By the time one of our 
 actions for libel has come to a close the public has 
 usually arrived at the conclusion that where so much 
 mud has been thrown on every side it is impossible 
 to say where it does not stick. The old style of 
 settling grievances was more decisive, and perhaps as 
 frequently just. 
 
 The cavils of the critics were always most amusing 
 when they proceeded from the northern metropolis, 
 or were directed towards it ; but the cavils of the 
 critics in London were only less entertaining because 
 only less frantically irrational, or less distinguished 
 by the hysterical note of tragedy that rises to the 
 screech of farce. The most notable of these were 
 the quarrels of the Examiner and Quarterly Review. 
 Gifford, the editor of the latter periodical, began his 
 career Dy publishing a satire (referred to in foregoing 
 
The Quarrels of Critics. 243 
 
 extracts) entitled ' Baviad and Mseviad,' intended to 
 exterminate an ephemeral race of poetasters generated 
 by a Mr. Merry, one of the Academy of Delia Crusca. 
 It is amusing to note that Leigh Hunt began his 
 career by publishing a similar satire entitled ' The 
 Feast of the Poets,' intended to extol great poets 
 like Wordsworth, at the cost of small critics, foremost 
 among whom was Gifford, whose single recommenda- 
 tion in the eyes of the satirist was that he once fell with 
 effect on the plague of poetic butterflies just 'men- 
 tioned. Surely Fate must have enjoyed a broad grin 
 in anticipation of the time near at hand when the 
 'small critic' in question was to fall on Hunt himself 
 as founder of a second college of Delia Cruscans. The 
 ' Feast' gave rise to some of the most inveterate en- 
 mities the author experienced, and convinced him of 
 the folly of a young writer's commencing his career 
 with satire. But Hunt was so far from regretting his 
 participation in that field of warfare that as late as 
 1823 he published the satire entitled ' Ultra-Crepi- 
 darius,' exclusively devoted to William Gifford. 
 Hunt's preface to this production is certainly a satis- 
 fying proof that where 'prosperous insincerity' was 
 the subject of assault, he cbuld ' roar you as gently as 
 any sucking dove,' yea, ' roar you an 'twere any night- 
 ingale.' 
 
 'The person who crawled for his portrait in the following- 
 sketch, has no excuse for the malignity of his very mediocre pre- 
 tensions and slavish success. He is no inexperienced youth ; nor 
 is he poor in his old age. He has grown grey, yet he has not 
 grown wiser. He has endured sickness and melancholy, yet 
 they have not made him humane. The young he has treated as 
 
 l6—2 
 
244 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 if he never wanted encouragement himself, nor found it. The 
 delicate of health he has not spared, though his own hand shook 
 that struck them.' 
 
 Gifford had perhaps a still more implacable enemy 
 in Hazlitt. On one occasion the Quarterly, in re- 
 viewing some strictures of Hazlitt's on Henry VIII., 
 set them aside with this exalted brevity : ' We 
 need not answer this gabble.' An argumentative 
 disputation would probably have pleased Hazlitt, 
 however severely he might have been censured for his 
 opinion ; but this summary sneer whipped him up to 
 the rage of a bull that is mad with the tossing of a red 
 rag from the safe ambush of the right side of a strong 
 fence. Like Shelley, he could have enjoyed the heaven 
 of praise or the hell of censure, but the purgatory of 
 indifference was too much for him. He addressed a 
 long letter to Gifford, in which he said : 
 
 'You are the Government Critic, a character nicely differing 
 from that of a Government spy— the invisible link that connects 
 literature with the police . . . you do well to confine yourself to 
 the hypocrite, for you have too little talent for the sophist.' 
 
 This was the language of the man who spent his 
 youth in the circle of the 'Lake' poets, and who after- 
 wards bitterly assailed Coleridge, offering as excuse 
 the unquestionable circumstance that in politics his 
 old friends had changed sides — not he— and had be- 
 come the associates of men who had slandered them 
 and him. Truly Keats was right when he said, 
 ' Hazlitt is your only good damner,' though the poet 
 missed the pleasure anticipated in the further remark, 
 ' If ever I am damned I should like him to damn 
 
The Quarrels of Critics. 245 
 
 me.' The readers who from any cause fail to 
 look closely at these quarrels of critics will probably 
 be puzzled to know where the right lay, and where 
 the wrong, or will perhaps hastily conclude that 
 where so much abuse was exchanged on every side, 
 there was neither right only nor wrong only discover- 
 able anywhere. The writer of this book has per- 
 formed his task imperfectly if — without deliberately 
 taking sides — he has left any doubt as to the direc- 
 tion which sympathy may properly take when guided 
 by an adequate knowledge of the facts and by a com- 
 petent judgment. 
 
 In 1823 the Edinburgh published an article on the 
 'Periodical Press of Britain,' dealing very frankly with 
 its daily and weekly contemporaries. Blackwood at- 
 tributed the article to Hazlitt, and the Literary 
 Gazette gave it the same ascription. The following 
 passages on the Times may serve as a taste of the 
 quality of the whole : 
 
 ' The Times newspaper is, we suppose, entitled to the 
 character it gives itself, of being the " Leading Journal of 
 Europe," and is perhaps the greatest engine of temporary- 
 opinion in the world. Still it is not to our taste— either in matter 
 or manner. It is pompous, dogmatical, and full of pretensions ; 
 but neither light, various, nor agreeable. . . . But the limes 
 conforms to the changes of the time. It takes up no falling 
 cause ; fights no uphill battle ; advocates no great principle ; 
 holds out a helping hand to no oppressed or obscure individual. 
 It is " ever strong upon the stronger side." Its style is magni- 
 loquent ; its spirit is not magnanimous. It is valiant, swagger- 
 ing, insolent, with a hundred thousand readers at its heels ; but 
 the instant the rascal rout turn round with the " whiff and wind " 
 of some fell circumstance, the Times, the renegade, inconstant 
 Times, turns with them ! Let the mob shout, let the city roar. 
 
246 Cobivebs of Criticism. 
 
 and the voice of the Times is heard above them all, with out- 
 rageous deafening clamour ; but let the vulgar hubbub cease, 
 and no whisper, no echo of it is ever after heard of in the limes. 
 Like Bully Bottom in the play, it then " aggravates its voice so, 
 as if it were a singing dove, an it were any nightingale." Its 
 coarse ribaldry is turned to a harmless jest ; its swelling rhodo- 
 montade sinks to a vapid commonplace ; and the editor amuses 
 himself in the interval, before another great explosion, by col- 
 lecting and publishing from time to time, affidavits of the 
 numbers of his paper sold in the last stormy period of the press.' 
 
 In view of so much disagreement among the critics 
 themselves, the question naturally arises, ' Is periodical 
 criticism beneficial to literature?' The Edinburgh 
 frankly replies by describing in the following terms 
 the function of the critic : 
 
 ' We want another Osmyn to burn and spare not — and then 
 the work of extermination and the work of regeneration would 
 go on kindly together. . . Who is there that can read all those 
 books with which the modern press teems, and which, did they 
 not daily disappear and turn to dust, the world would not be 
 able to contain them ? Are we to blame for despatching the 
 most worthless of these from time to time, or of abridging the 
 process of getting at the marrow of others, and thus leaving the 
 learned at leisure to contemplate the time-hallowed relics, as 
 well as the ephemeral productions of literature ?' 
 
 According to the Edinburgh of 1823, criticism was a 
 sort of filter ; according to the Edinburgh of 1802, it 
 was, as we have seen, a sort of police sergeant ; ac- 
 cording to the periodical press of our own time, it is 
 a sort of tournay in which critics and authors may be 
 both combatants and judges : in which a man may 
 first disport himself in the lists, and afterwards mount 
 the dais and forthwith adjudicate on his rivals. How 
 far periodical criticism promotes or retards the in- 
 
The Quarrels of Critics. 247 
 
 terests of real literature is a question not easy to 
 answer. There is the important fact that German 
 literature was built upon German criticism ; that the 
 Germans had learned to form a judgment upon the 
 literature of other nations before they began to have 
 a literature of their own. Whether it was of the first 
 consequence that Lessing and Kant were older than 
 Goethe is not so easy to determine as may at first sight 
 appear. In reply to the pertinent question of whether 
 Shakspeare could have written as he did had he lived 
 in the present century, it is not enough to point to 
 Scott and Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Tenny- 
 son and George Eliot as a large refutation of the 
 assertion that the effects of criticism are chilling and 
 blighting to original genius. It is true that these 
 writers sprang up in the very hot-bed of criticism, but 
 there is the fact that they kept themselves rigidly 
 aloof from its influence (at least during the years of 
 active production), while Shakspeare was a man of 
 the world, constantly going in and out among men of 
 many classes, busily engaged in the business of life, 
 compelled to participate in some small measure in 
 nearly every passing form of intellectual activity. In 
 a .secondary sense, Shakspeare could no more have 
 isolated himself by main force from the whole current 
 of feeling in his time than Raleigh could have done 
 so, or even Essex. It was well for him that his age 
 was a healthy one : that it had none of the flabby 
 tameness on the one hand, and the feverish fidgeti- 
 ness on the other, which are the great misfortunes of 
 our time. • Shelley, in his letter to the editor of the 
 
248 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 Quarterly Review touching the attack on Keats, 
 says ' contemptuousness of phraseology ' is one of the 
 chilling effects on genius from which ' it is difficult for 
 a critic to abstain.' The poet's own experience was 
 liable to lead him to that conclusion, although it is 
 only the arrogant, and usually the ignorant, critic who 
 finds it necessary to have recourse to this species of 
 wet blanket. But the temper of nineteenth-century 
 criticism has been of a kind very injurious to the 
 growth of those works that must ripen quietly, if they 
 are to ripen at all. On some minds the mere presence 
 of journals in which a writer's doings are certain to be 
 canvassed must have distracting and therefore injuri- 
 ous effects. Think of Rembrandt, whom the Edinburgh 
 instances, living as he did in the retirement of his sump- 
 tuous cell of gorgeous light and shade ; his eye gazing 
 on the dazzling gloom and asking no other object ; 
 think of him there producing one after one his wonder- 
 ful works, removed equally from the low, petty vanities 
 incident to a newspaper puff, and from the disturbing 
 influences of an attack in a weekly journal. Then 
 think of him living, as he did not, in a brilliant saloon, 
 coquetting with fifty accomplishments, coming down 
 in the morning to read the notice of his last picture 
 in the morning paper, or turning from his easel in the 
 evening to glance feverishly for his name in the Pall 
 Mall Gazette. Think of the heroic Luther in the 
 Warteburg burning his midnight lamp over some 
 obscure text in the Vulgate, where he sees the 
 machinations of the evil one designed to lead the 
 ignorant astray — think of him, filled with fierce 
 
The Quarrels of Critics. 249 
 
 defiances of the arch-fiend, with whom he believes 
 himself called to do battle, actually seeing in his 
 vivid imagination the tempter rise up before him, 
 and in a struggle of rage literally hurling the ink-pot 
 at the phantom. Then think of him sitting in a 
 conclave of reformers, eagerly watching for personal 
 slanders, and hurling his ink-pot in another sense at 
 a malevolent critic. Or think of Rousseau in his 
 melancholy solitude, in his suspicion of conspirators 
 lurking everywhere about him — Rousseau, ' shy of 
 light as the mole, and as quick-eared for every 
 whisper of public opinion ' — think of him living in 
 an age of critical journals, and stopping the flood of 
 his serious and vehement eloquence to retort upon 
 a personal calumniator. 
 
 Is it necessary to ask which of these two is the 
 atmosphere in which the work of a great artist, 
 whether of the pen or pencil, could best thrive? 
 There is another side to the shield, however, and we 
 must not swear to the brass until we have looked 
 upon the silver also. Periodical literature is, by virtue 
 of its existence, a witness to the interest taken in 
 letters. Interest of any kind, good or bad, is stimu- 
 lating to creative genius ; indifference or vapid applause 
 kills it, unless these can be forgotten in calm, serene 
 confidence in the interest and intelligent applause 
 of posterity. What, for example, would prompt a 
 poet to publish (he may produce from higher motives) 
 a poem elaborated to the utmost perfection in an ex- 
 tremely difficult measure, if he knew that it would be 
 read by persons unable to distinguish between good 
 
250 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 measure and bad ? Now the true criticism which 
 creates a state of society, an atmosphere, in which 
 works of genius are certain of recognition, in which 
 rules and forms of composition and all on which the 
 highest beauty of human speech depends, are observed 
 and cherished, must be of the greatest importance to 
 literature, because highly conducive to its triumphs. It 
 gives the man of genius dash and daring to know that 
 he will be known, to feel that what he may do will 
 not escape notice, when he is triumphing over diffi- 
 culties in order to obey law, or when he is transgress- 
 ing and can be applauded, though known to be trans- 
 gressing. But criticism, if it is to reach this ultimate 
 standard of usefulness to literature, must be something 
 more or other than it has often been in England. It 
 must be practised with more knowledge and with 
 more sympathy. These were the two elements — 
 knowledge and sympathy — which two great critics 
 of fifty years ago could not find in the criticism 
 of their time. Coleridge maintained that no method 
 of critical investigation could be fair and philo- 
 sophical which did not rest on a code of laws, that 
 code to be independent of all foreseen application 
 to particular authors and works. Goethe maintained 
 that no opinion of any writings could be worth having 
 unless it came from a certain one-sided enthusiasm, 
 namely, that sympathy and enjoyment in what we 
 see, which was in his opinion the only reality. It is 
 doubtful if the readers of this book will be easily able, 
 in the face of the extracts here printed, to take either 
 view alone. The grave blunders into which English 
 
The Quarrels of Critics. 251 
 
 critics of 1800- 182 5 too often fell, were largely the 
 direct result of a too rigid adherence to a code of 
 laws. True, it was a narrow code, and was founded 
 on the authors and works of one period only. It may 
 be said for the critics who were slaves to such con- 
 ventionalities that even their mistakes rose out of a 
 jealousy of the honour of literature ; that they knew 
 the current canons of composition and held themselves 
 bound to defend them against innovation ; that this 
 was a healthy and indeed honourable feeling on their 
 part, and that they kept up the interest of the world 
 in literature. It may farther be contended that even 
 faulty laws are better than no laws, for where there 
 are no laws there are no transgressions, and where 
 there are no transgressions there is no vital interest, 
 and nobody cares what anybody does either for the 
 elevation or the degradation of letters, and nobody 
 is offended or pleased. On the other hand, it may be 
 questioned if sympathy is more than a part of what 
 goes to make salutary criticism. Sympathy without law 
 would be apt to let criticism blow off with the two- 
 and-thirty winds in two-and-thirty different directions, 
 according as the several idiosyncrasies of different critics 
 might determine. There would be a universal allow- 
 ing of every man to say just what he liked, and none 
 to take notice of him. All standards of taste in style 
 would go down in the general submersion of all law. 
 
CONCL US ION. 
 
 WE have reached the end of our extracts from 
 the periodical literature of the first quarter 
 of the century, and but little is left to say. Numerous 
 as are the critiques from which we have quoted, we 
 are conscious that more remain unnoticed. Indeed, 
 it is not improbable that bibliographers, who have 
 from time to time dipped into volumes of old 
 magazines with a view to the elucidation of this 
 point or that touching the early reception of con- 
 spicuous works, may find that no mention has been 
 made of articles which seem to them to be the most 
 notable' examples of the kind sought after. The 
 author will be content if upon investigation of the 
 entire subject it appear that he has brought within 
 the limits of a reasonable compilation a body of re- 
 presentative excerpta, sufficient to convey an adequate 
 idea of public opinion at the period dealt with, and 
 calculated by aid of the explanatory remarks that are 
 interwoven to throw light on the whole matter at 
 issue. In the collecting of passages it has sometimes 
 been difficult to know exactly what to include, and 
 
Conclusion. 
 
 what to withhold, where all have been characterized 
 by qualities equally likely to act as a witness and 
 warning against false principles and ungenerous im- 
 pulses ; but when a doubt has arisen as to which of 
 two articles of kindred tone and temper (but from 
 different sources) to cite as representative of current 
 criticism, the author has ultimately adopted (other 
 things being equal) the article published in the 
 better-remembered of the two periodicals. Hence, as 
 Shelley specialists will observe, he has given pro- 
 minence to the Quarterly Review, where the Literary 
 Gazette might sometimes have served his purpose 
 almost as well. 
 
 It will be seen that no attempt has been made to 
 affix the names of individual authors to the anony- 
 mous articles from which passages have been quoted. 
 In one or two cases names have certainly been 
 mentioned, and in other cases they have been hinted 
 at ; but this uninvidious literary ascription has 
 been done only where the secrets are notoriously 
 ' open secrets,' and where it would be affectation to 
 pretend ignorance of accredited identifications with 
 which most readers are familiar. But where an 
 author has neither claimed an article by reproducing 
 it in his collected works, nor had it claimed for 
 him by his biographer, it has been considered sufficient 
 to attribute it simply to the journal or review in 
 which it first appeared, and whose opinion it was 
 made by virtue of its anonymous publication. And 
 this course has been adopted after mature considera- 
 tion. 
 
254 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 Carrying the mind forward from the time when the 
 author of the book first conceived the idea of collect- 
 ing these anomalies of criticism until now, when he 
 has at length compiled and annotated them, he cannot 
 but be interested to observe the change of feeling 
 that he has experienced with respect to them. In 
 common with most readers he had been conscious in 
 some indefinite way that contemporary criticism on 
 what were called the Lake and Cockney Poets had 
 been hostile, unreasonable, and short-sighted ; but a 
 full realization of the measure of that hostility, too 
 often venomous, spiteful, barbarous and brutal, came 
 upon him with a surprise and shock to which no 
 words could have given utterance that had not been, as 
 much as the articles in question, open to theextremest 
 charge of reckless assault and unbridled ill-nature. 
 He trusts he had outgrown this period of uncharit- 
 ableness before beginning to write, and that the book 
 to which this final word is being appended is reason- 
 ably moderate as to temper. It is not unlikely that 
 the examples of criticism herein unearthed may excite 
 more indignation among professional critics of the 
 press (who might be expected to look jealously to 
 the credit of their craft) than among the general public, 
 who might, out of sympathy, not to say propinquity, 
 with their forefathers (whose antipathies and pre- 
 dilections they must in some measure, though uncon- 
 sciously, have inherited), be forgiven for resenting the 
 misleading of their professed guides. But critics 
 themselves know best of all how easy it is to fall 
 into errors only less serious than those here ex- 
 
Conclusion. 255 
 
 hibited, and that, too, without the criminal interven- 
 tion of mean or unlawful motives. It is so very easy 
 to persuade one's self that a book is good where one's 
 personal sympathies are engaged on behalf of the 
 author, and so much easier still to persuade one's self 
 that a book is bad where the reverse of this is the 
 case, that it does not require the exercise of any con- 
 scious special pleading — the result of friendship and 
 interest — or malicious battery of assault — the out- 
 growth of positive dislike or literary or political 
 antipathy — to lead one into painful mistakes of 
 judgment. Any honest critic may realize the extent 
 to which a conscientious critical intellect is, without 
 knowing it, subservient to influences outside itself, by 
 glancing at his reviews written on the work, say, of a 
 quondam associate who has ceased to be such from 
 circumstances quite apart from any that can operate 
 directly on a literary friendship. It is not less than 
 painful in such a case to perceive how much of all that 
 was said in praise of a book's merits was uncon- 
 sciously heightened by personal regard, and how 
 much of all that was said in extenuation of defects, 
 or withheld in the enumeration of characteristics, was 
 influenced by similar forces of friendliness or esteem. 
 And if this is so where the kindlier feelings are en- 
 listed, why may not the reverse of it be susceptible 
 of explanation on similar grounds ? After putting 
 by a good deal of obvious, and no doubt to some 
 extent irresistible and justifiable thought, as to the 
 effects of conscious and deliberate malice and envy (the 
 cancer of literary fellowship), may we not set down 
 
256 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 some of the blundering to which these extracts bear 
 melancholy witness, to sheer, palpable and honest 
 short-sightedness, ignorance and stupidity ? Much 
 of it is manifestly attributable to one other cause, 
 namely, the difficulty of escaping from ancient and 
 approved but outworn canons of taste ; and when- 
 ever it has seemed possible to advance a charit- 
 able plea based on this fact, an effort has been made 
 to do so. All things taken together, the author is 
 disposed to assign these erroneous abridgments of 
 the judgment of time not to evil motives entirely, or 
 ignorance entirely, or false principles entirely, but 
 partly to each of these, and partly, no doubt, to causes 
 no longer explicable and long since inoperative. 
 
 In reading this body of hostile criticism on Words- 
 worth, Southey, Coleridge, Byron, Hunt, Keats, and 
 Shelley, we naturally ask what the effects of it may have 
 been upon the poets themselves. Those effects were 
 various. ' If the quantity of time,' says Wordsworth, 
 ' consumed in writing critiques on the works of others, 
 were given to original composition, of whatever 
 kind it might be, it would be much better employed ; 
 it would make men sooner find their own level, and it 
 would do infinitely less mischief. . . . The writers in 
 these publications while they prosecute their inglorious 
 employment cannot be supposed to be in a state of 
 mind very favourable for being affected by the finer 
 influences of a thing so pure as genuine poetry.' 
 Southey was at all times restive under criticism, as 
 the author who is also a professional critic is almost 
 nvariably found to be. Coleridge was about as in- 
 
Conchtsion. 257 
 
 different to criticism as any conspicuous writer of his 
 time. ' I have not,' he says, ' cheated myself into mis- 
 taking a weak stomach for strength of mind, nor made 
 a merit of an indifference which it is a misfortune to 
 feel, and the sickliest vanity to affect' ' As for my 
 unfriends the Edinburgh Reviewers,' he continues, 'the 
 object of their articles is to prevent or retard the sale 
 of a work, and this they seem to pursue with most in- 
 veteracy where, from the known circumstances of the 
 author, the injury will fall heaviest. . . . Still the 
 injury is such as ought not to affect, directly at least, 
 the heart of a man of genius — though I have heard of 
 one melancholy case, in which a bee from the muses' 
 hive was stung to death by these literary hornets, 
 who, unable to collect honey from the flowers, destroy 
 and deform the fruits. The allegory is more perfect 
 than I intended.' 
 
 Byron has left on record a statement of the invigor- 
 ating effects produced upon him by hostile criticism ; 
 and a friend who knew Leigh Hunt in the mellower 
 years of his life, says he has heard the author of 
 ' Rimini' say of his critics : ' They did me great wrong, 
 but I feel that I can forgive them.' The ' bee from 
 the muses' hive' referred to by Coleridge may have 
 been Keats, who nevertheless said that his own do- 
 mestic criticism had given him pain beyond all en- 
 durance greater than any inflicted by the Quarterly, 
 and who declared that if Blackwood assailed him as it 
 had assailed Hunt, and he should chance to meet the 
 calumniator in any public place, he would reply by 
 the only argument to which the libeller could be ex- 
 
 17 
 
258 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 pected to be susceptible — a blow. We remember 
 Shelley's attitude, in one memorable case, towards the 
 critics of the press : ' It may be well said that these 
 wretched men know not what they do. They scatter 
 their insults and their slanders without heed as to 
 whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made 
 callous by many blows, or on one composed of more 
 penetrable stuff.' 
 
 It is hard to say how criticism ought to be received 
 or what the value may be to an author of a critic's 
 praise and blame. Certain it is that the restiveness 
 under censure which some authors display is hurtful 
 alike to their credit as writers and to their character as 
 men. A measure of anxiety to know what the verdict 
 of the public will be is natural, and no doubt salutary 
 in a young author putting forth his first work. Such 
 an one has satisfied his own judgment that whatever 
 the imperfections of his production, its merit or its 
 chances are on the whole of a kind to justify its pub- 
 lication ; and now he is eager to learn how far the 
 world to whom he is an unknown and indifferent 
 quantity will second his own judgment, and, it may 
 be, the judgment of reliable friends. But when 
 he has passed this Rubicon, the anxiety ought surely 
 to be at an end, and no blunders or slanders or sneers 
 should seriously disturb the writer who has once for 
 all established his right to be heard, and who ought 
 to have too large a charity and too true a sense of the 
 infirmities of human nature to expect only virtue and 
 wisdom in quarters where vice and folly are as likely to 
 find play. There is, however, another view that may 
 
Conclusion. 259 
 
 reasonably be taken. It may be said that with an 
 author's first success, his stake in the world of literature 
 begins ; that he has then acquired a tangible property in 
 current fame which may be turned into actual money, 
 and which — whatever the use made of it — he has a 
 right to protect from assault ; that with each succeed- 
 ing success acquired in the upward march of repu- 
 tation, that property becomes the greater, and its 
 responsibility the more serious. And this being so, 
 it may be urged that an author does well to concern 
 himself about the doings of those marauders who, 
 however despicable in themselves, and however un- 
 likely to profit by their robberies, would dispossess him 
 of his honest gains. ' It is all very well,' an author might 
 say, ' to remind me that this man, my traducer, is in 
 himself a poor creature, whose verdicts are valueless, 
 and who lives, perchance, on rumpus ; but I have a 
 vested interest in the goodwill and good opinion of 
 the people which this person would take from me by 
 telling the public with oracular dicta, and probably in 
 two hundred thousand copies of a newspaper, that I 
 am a knave who has imposed himself upon their 
 generosity, or a fool who has inflicted himself upon 
 their credulity !' There is force in an objection like 
 this to whatever optimist doctrine may occur to a 
 mind that has never actually gone through the ordeal 
 described. Indeed, such an objection is only to be met 
 by the contention— made venerable but not impotent 
 by age— that truth in the end will prevail, and that 
 the only conditions under which reflections like those 
 enumerated should be painful are where the subject of 
 
 17 — 2 
 
260 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 them is self-convicted of error, and knows that in truth 
 he is somewhat of a quack who has built an insecure 
 popularity on the quicksands of some passing delusion. 
 Restiveness under censure is no doubt a grievous 
 fault, but indifference to applause seems to be almost 
 as serious a failing. We have seen with what dignity 
 of reticence Coleridge regarded the critics who 
 maligned him, reserving the grief with which he read 
 their rhapsodies of insult for the writers themselves 
 and his contempt for their employers. Who shall say 
 that among the forces that operated to keep that poet 
 silent so long, indifference to praise did not fill a fore- 
 most place ? 
 
 ' And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ? 
 Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, 
 And Hope without an object cannot live.' 
 
 Coleridge was not alone in this failing ; and we may 
 find a fit companion for him where the cursory reader 
 would perhaps look last of all. We have recently 
 heard Keats accused of carrying up into his manhood 
 the hysterical manners of the apothecary's apprentice ;' 
 we know that at first he suffered much from criticism ; 
 that perhaps he died when he died largely as the result 
 of ' labour spurned ;' but he who doubts that Keats 
 — notwithstanding the trace of effeminacy already 
 dwelt upon — had the stuff in him out of which a strong 
 man would one day have been made, should read the 
 following letter, written after the publication and con- 
 demnation of ' Endymion :' 
 
 ' I am ambitious of doing the world some good : if I should 
 be spared, that may be the work of future years— in the interval 
 
Conclusion. 261 
 
 I will assay to reach to as high a summit in poetry as the nerve 
 bestowed upon me will suffer. The faint conceptions I have of 
 poems to come bring the blood frequently into my forehead. All 
 1 hope is, that I may not lose all interest in human affairs — that 
 the solitary indifference I feel for applause, even from the finest 
 spirits, will not blunt any acuteness of vision I may have. I do 
 not think it will. I feel assured that I should write from the 
 mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my 
 night's labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever 
 shine upon them.'— To Woodhouse, 27th Oct. 1818. 
 
 If there is a hint of weakness in this letter it is the 
 weakness of indifferentism. Keats over-rated the 
 potentialities of human nature when he supposed it 
 possible to write from mere love of writing, and with- 
 out regard for ' applause even from the finest spirits.' 
 That he would have landed himself at length in a 
 varioloid of indifferentism we may easily believe ; 
 but this would have contributed to put an end to all 
 effort in his case, as in the case of Coleridge, to whom 
 poetry's ' own exceeding great reward did not furnish 
 that object without which his hope could not live. With 
 truer knowledge of his own heart Wordsworth, who 
 was as indifferent to popular applause as Coleridge was, 
 or as Keats believed he was, deceived himself with no 
 idea that what he did was done to soothe his afflic- 
 tion, to endear his solitude, or to nurture his love of 
 the beautiful. With conscious aim Wordsworth wrote 
 for posterity, and the slings of present fortune were 
 not likely to touch the man who was busied only 
 about his future fate. 
 
 And this brings us to a much larger question than 
 can be entered upon here as to the sorts and uses 
 of literary praise and censure. It is only possible to 
 
262 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 indicate what is meant. There are widely different 
 temperaments among men of genius. There are 
 those who, dominated by a high ideal with which the 
 outer world has only a remote concern, have the self- 
 command to go on from year to year evolving a 
 life's interest largely within themselves, oblivious of the 
 world's abuse, and, when it comes, indifferent to the 
 world's applause. Of this temperament were Milton 
 and Wordsworth and, most of all, Coleridge. There 
 are others who, fired by the ambition to dominate a 
 great ideal rather than, to be dominated by it, have 
 the courage to encounter any measure of open 
 hostility, but succumb instantly under indifference. 
 Of this temperament was Chatterton among those 
 who failed, and Byron among those who succeeded. 
 Again, there are those who labour not from choice but 
 irresistible impulse, and who, if they be poets, must, 
 like Shelley, through foul or fair, praise or censure or 
 neglect, sing as the lark sings, because God has given 
 them the gift of it. One further class of tempera- 
 ment in genius exists, and it is that to which Keats 
 belongs : a temperament alive with almost a girlish 
 sensitiveness to every passing effect of enkindling 
 applause or withering hostility or obliterating indif- 
 ference : a temperament that needs for its support a 
 responsive sympathy, without which the ' hopes and 
 purposes of genius sink back on the heart, like a sigh 
 on the tightened chest of a sick man :' a temperament 
 that may become morbidly averse to censure in the 
 event of success, or liable to collapse in case of failure. 
 Such— so far as the present writer's observation 
 
Conclusion. 263 
 
 enabled him to judge — was the temperament of 
 Rossetti also. 
 
 From this point forward a good deal might be said 
 with profit as to the best critical attitude to adopt 
 towards a literary work, in order to obtain the fairest 
 view of it. The popular current theory is that a book 
 may be best criticized by bringing it into juxtaposi- 
 tion with the foremost touchstones of literary excel- 
 lence, that are nearest related to it in purpose ; but 
 in this opinion a great critic is against us. ' Principles 
 of criticism,' says Coleridge [Blackwood, September, 
 1820), 'drawn from philosophy, are best employed to 
 illustrate the works of those whose fame is already a 
 fatum among mankind, and to confirm, augment and 
 enlighten our admiration of the same. The living, 
 on the other hand, ought always to be appreciated 
 comparatively — their works with those of their con- 
 temporaries, each in its kind, and in proportion to 
 the kind. We will not equal the wren with the nightin- 
 gale in song, nor the sparrow with the eagle in flight ; 
 but both shall take precedence of the ostrich, who 
 can neither sing nor fly — though he manages his 
 wings so adroitly, and so well helps out his natural 
 prose with his analogon of poetic power, as to make 
 no worse speed in the world's eye, and perhaps a 
 greater figure.' 
 
 To drop, in a last word or two, the impersonal 
 manner in which this volume is written, I would say 
 that I have been conscious of only one purpose in 
 writing it, that, namely, of doing the arts of poetry and 
 
264 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 criticism some good. If I have done my work at all 
 rightly, I have not merely exhibited certain errors of 
 criticism — that would have been the task of the biblio- 
 grapher — but traced those errors to their source, show- 
 ingsometimes the conditions that explain, andoccasion- 
 ally the circumstances that palliate them, and that is 
 the function of the critic. Other inferences than 
 mine may be drawn from the facts I put forth. I am 
 prepared to find my adjudications disputed. I offer 
 my conclusions with all moderation of spirit, though 
 not without reasonable deliberation. To trace a 
 writer's career through contemporary records is to 
 read literary history in a new way, and that the most 
 simple and direct. It is the natural accident of our 
 position that in making acquaintance with an author 
 of an earlier generation whose fame is established, we 
 begin at the end and go backward to the beginning. 
 We see Milton after the homage of centuries has 
 been offered him, not while he was the subject of a 
 sneer from Warton. The glory of the great men of 
 the past overshadows the petty trials that vexed them 
 in life, as the broad sea that flows to our feet at the 
 flood leaves no sight of the shoals it has swept over. 
 But we who come later miss the stimulus of friction 
 which would be ours if we could see the obstacles 
 that had to be surmounted. I hardly know why 
 modesty should restrain mc from saying that out of 
 a book which strives honestly to present a view of 
 the lives of seven great poets dogged by the feet of 
 envy, malice, selfishness, and most of all of pure 
 
Conclusion. 265 
 
 ignorance and simple love of power, the best intelli- 
 gence now among us that is in any measure the 
 victim of misunderstanding or calumny, need not 
 disdain to gather support and solace. To see how 
 sorely the finest genius cankers amid the rancid 
 breath of controversy, how men of creative powers 
 lose by combativeness, how the voice of discord 
 clamouring at its own echo always in the end shouts 
 itself first hoarse and then silent, ought to help to 
 cultivate the quiet in which alone great work can 
 thrive. Then, on the other hand, to see how critical 
 verdicts the most emphatically enunciated, the most 
 strenuously upheld, have brought about their own 
 speedy reversal, ought to help to beget moderation of 
 opinion and temperance of expression. To the living, 
 this Review of Reviewers will, I trust, be helpful ; 
 but will it be hurtful to the dead ? Surely not. The 
 authors here dealt with are beyond irritation at the 
 touch of an infirmity, and it cannot do them wrong 
 to show where they were believed to be open to 
 attack. The petty passions have subsided that once 
 bore down these great names. Slander is impotent 
 except where it meets with a lover of slander ; and no 
 one now is more disposed to believe the charges of The 
 Literary Gazette against Shelley, than those of Salma- 
 sius against Milton. This is one of the legacies that the 
 years leave us. Time buries away the worthless and 
 the little out of our sight, for ' Eternity looks through 
 Time,' and only the giant figures of his limitless 
 landscape stand revealed against its light, even as 
 
266 Cobwebs of Criticism. 
 
 only the highest headlands stand dipped in the grey 
 of dawn, when the risen sun looks through the fretted 
 clouds behind them, and all the sleeping moorlands 
 lie veiled in mist. 
 
 Elliot Slock, Paternoster Pow, London. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 Crown 8vo., pp. xiii., 297, 7s. <Sd. post free. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 
 
 ■ Mr. Caine has furnished a pleasant book, and a book that, thanks to its 
 subject, must survive.' — Athenceum. 
 
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 spirit of a true disciple, from the inmost chambers where a great and unhappy 
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