In October 1817 J. G. Lockhart launched his notorious attack in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine on what he christened the 'Cockney' school. 'Its chief Doctor and Professor', he wrote, 'is Mr Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects.'¹ Most critical accounts of Hunt's influence on Keats approach the subject from the point of view of such detractors as the ideologically-motivated Tories who regarded it as their duty to attack such radicals as Hunt. In this paper I want to examine Hunt's 'Cockney' aesthetics through his eyes, using his own words. And I want to answer the questions: what were his guiding principles as a poet? And how influential were those principles on Keats?

Some of Hunt's most accomplished sonnets may be found in the series "To Hampstead."

As one who after long and far-spent years
Comes on his mistress in an hour of sleep,
And half-surprised that he can silence keep
Stands smiling o'er her through a flash of tears,
So see how sweet and self-same she appears;
Till at his touch, with little moving creep
Of joy, she wakes from out her calmness deep,
And then his heart finds voice, and dances round her ears—
So I, first coming on my haunts again,
In pause and stillness of the early prime,
Stood thinking of the past and present time
With earnest eyesight, scarcely crossed with pain;
Till the fresh moving leaves, and startling birds,
Loosened my long-suspended breath in words.

If "To Hampstead" represents Hunt at his poetic best—as I think it does—the prevailing critical view would be that it does so in spite of itself. The sentimentality of the central metaphor, and self-conscious diction of such phrases as 'flash of tears' and 'little moving creep / of joy', are the very features that offended Hunt's early readers. And yet, if you detach yourself from the prejudices that have led to his decline on the literary stock market, you begin to feel more persuaded by the voice that addresses us—even, perhaps, touched by what it is trying to say. It may be, in fact, that "To Hampstead," like all enduring verse, possesses the power to renew our responses at each reading. If we regard Hunt's technique as a matter of deliberation rather than as the result of incompetence, we may even suspect that its accumulation of adjectives and awkward constructions are the expression, surprisingly, of confidence—a confidence mediated through the assurance of tone and technical mastery. His most recent apologist, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, has argued that the Huntian manner represents the beginning of 'a distinctive rococo sensibility' that culminated in the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde.³ In this light, "To Hampstead" may be seen as one of Hunt's most accomplished works. From the opening word it knows exactly where it is taking us. The octave and sestet are no more than the two sides of a metaphor resolved only in the concluding line, with our emergence out of fantasy into Hampstead Health in early morning. But the poet cushions our descent to earth with that most evocative and moving of qualities: romantic possibility.

So I, first coming on my haunts again,
In pause and stillness of the early prime,
Stood thinking of the past and present time
With earnest eyesight, scarcely crossed with pain;
Till the fresh moving leaves, and startling birds,
Loosened my long-suspended breath in words.

The aesthetic that mediates these impressive lines was not the result of either accident or vulgarity; it was the product of deliberation, the work of a mind that, to use Wordsworth's phrase, had thought long and deeply. In Imagination and Fancy (1832), Hunt spelled out his principles in an essay entitled "An answer to the question What Is Poetry?":

Poetry is a passion, because it seeks the deepest impressions; and because it must undergo, in order to convey, them. . . . Poetry is imaginative passion . . . He who has thought, feeling, expression, imagination, action, character, and continuity, all in the largest amount and highest degree, is the greatest poet.⁴

These remarks sound familiar because Hunt is echoing Wordsworth who, as early as 1800, had said that 'the reader cannot be too often reminded that poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings'.⁵ It was Wordsworth, too, who in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads had spoken of his 'deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind (and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it which are equally inherent and indestructible)'.⁶ Hunt followed Wordsworth in tracing imaginative power back to the formative influence on the mind of intense emotional experience. That respect for the psychological integrity of the moment may be why the sonnet "To Hampstead" works when other, more fanciful poems such as "The Nymphs," do not. It is curious enough that Hunt's poetry may be read in Wordsworthian terms at all; that he himself sought to explain it in those terms is remarkable. At a time when few, if any, critics, understood the principles set out in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hunt was among a handful of people who advocated them. This is all the more surprising when one reflects that Hunt was a late convert to Wordsworth's poetry. He allied himself with Wordsworth's detractors as early as 1811, when, in The Feast of the Poets, first published in The Reflector, Hunt denied the elder poet a seat at the table of Apollo. At this comparatively early stage in his own publishing career, Wordsworth kept a close eye on his attackers, and probably read the Feast not long after publication; indeed, there was a copy of The Reflector at Rydal Mount in later years. However, when a second edition of the poem appeared in 1814, Hunt modified his earlier views in an extensive footnote. The first Wordsworth knew of this was when Sir George Beaumont, a mutual acquaintance, wrote to him on 2 June 1814: 'Leigh Hunt no great favourite of mine—after some severe sarcasms in verse has thought proper to do you some justice in a note which follows'.⁷ On 23 June Wordsworth replied:

Mr Lee Hunt whose 'amende honorable' you mention had not read a word of my Poems, at the time he wrote his sarcasms. This I know from an acquaintance of his; so that neither the censure nor the praise of such people is in itself of any value. It however affects the immediate sale of works, and authors who are tender of their own reputation would be glad to secure Mr Hunt's commendations. For my own part, my dignity absolutely requires an indifference upon this point.⁸

This frigid acknowledgement of Hunt's declared ignorance would hardly seem to provide the basis for a friendship. All the same, relations between the two warmed considerably in succeeding months. Wordsworth knew that Hunt had been imprisoned in the Surrey Jail since February 1813 for libelling the Prince Regent. On a visit to Lowther in September 1814 he met Hunt's defence counsel, Henry Brougham, who told Wordsworth that 'his writings were valued by Mr Hunt'.⁹ In response Wordsworth sent Hunt a copy of his collected Poems (1815) the following February, just a few days after Hunt's release from prison, and Hunt went to some pains to pacify him when he complained about Hazlitt's comments on political apostasy in The Examiner later in 1815. Copies of Hunt's reprinted Descent of Liberty: A Mask were available by October¹⁰ and Wordsworth was one of the earliest recipients of a copy bearing the author's presentation inscription.¹¹ In December Benjamin Robert Haydon, by then Wordsworth's principal informant on matters Huntian, told him that 'Leigh Hunt's respect for you seems to encrease daily—His Brother it is who has had your bust made'.¹² By spring 1816 Wordsworth was contributing sonnets to The Examiner and remarked to R. P. Gillies that 'I have great respect for the Talents of its Editor'.¹³ From someone known for his scrupulous meanness with words of praise, this was no puff.

And yet, in the light of these unexpectedly cordial relations, Hunt's comments on Wordsworth in the 1814 Feast of the Poets are surprisingly equivocal. Admittedly, he does commend 'the greatness of Mr. Wordsworth's genius',¹⁴ but goes on to characterise the author of Lyrical Ballads as subject to 'solitary morbidities':

we get up, accompany the poet into his walks, and acknowledge them to be the best and most beautiful; but what do we meet there? Idiot Boys, Mad Mothers, Wandering Jews, Visitations of Ague, and Frenzied Mariners, who are fated to accost us with tales that almost make one's faculties topple over. . . . Let the reader observe that I am not objecting to these subjects on behalf of that cowardly self-love falsely called sensibility, or merely because they are of what is termed a distressing description, but because they are carried to an excess that defeats the poet's intention, and distresses to no purpose.¹⁵

Coming from someone as renowned for his committed radicalism as Hunt these criticisms are surprising, to say the least. Though he does not say it in so many words, the element of Wordsworth's poetry that causes him most disquiet is its preoccupation with social and political ills. Not that he objects to political poetry per se; he earlier expresses approval for The Female Vagrant, the radicalism of which dates from Wordsworth's infatuation with Godwinian philosophy in 1793. And The Examiner occasionally published poetry with an overtly political message, some of it by the editor. What offended Hunt was what he regarded as Wordsworth's morbid obsession with social outcasts; adverting to Wordsworth's attack in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads on sickly and stupid German tragedies, Hunt remarks:

He wishes to turn aside our thirst for extraordinary intelligence to more genial sources of interest, and he gives us accounts of mothers who have gone mad at the loss of their children, of others who have killed their's in the most horrible manner, and of hard-hearted masters whose imaginations have revenged upon them the curses of the poor. In like manner, he would clear up and simplicize our thoughts; and he tells us tales of children that have no notion of death, of boys who would halloo to a landscape nobody knew why, and of an hundred inexpressible sensations, intended by nature no doubt to affect us, and even pleasurably so in the general feeling, but only calculated to perplex and sadden us in our attempts at analysis.

Wordsworth, he goes on, 'turns our thoughts away from society and men altogether, and nourishes that eremitical vagueness of sensation,—that making a business of reverie,—that despair of getting to any conclusion to any purpose, which is the next step to melancholy or indifference'.¹⁶ Hunt criticizes not the determined radicalism of Wordsworth's poetry, but its apparent failure to produce anything besides perplexity and sadness. Few men of his time were more preoccupied with the need for political change, but poetry, for him, was the proper domain of truth, beauty, and power. To Hunt, these were not airy abstractions plucked out of chaos and old night; they were profoundly moral, with a solid foundation in real life. They were calculated also to produce pleasure. In the Preface to Foliage (1818), he insisted that 'a delight in rural luxury'—that is, the love of the natural world—was 'within the reach of every one, and much more beautiful in reality, than people's fondness for considering all poetry as fiction would imply. The poets only do with their imaginations what all might do with their practice,—live at as cheap, natural, easy, and truly pleasurable a rate as possible'.¹⁷ In its way, this was as egalitarian in its aims as the millenarian brotherhood envisaged by Wordsworth and Coleridge during the 1790s. But Hunt never believed, with them, that didactic poetry was the key to political reform; instead, 'We should consider ourselves as we really are,—creatures made to enjoy more than to know'.¹⁸ For him, the purpose of poetry was 'pleasure and exaltation'¹⁹ —a crucial determinant not just of Hunt's critical judgements, but of the content of his own poetry. 'I do not write, I confess, for the sake of a moral only, nor even for that purpose principally:—I write to enjoy myself.²⁰ That is why Hunt could publish "To Hampstead" in The Examiner for 14 May 1815, adjacent to reports of Napoleon's doings in Paris, the price of bread, and reports of what was euphemistically referred to as the King's illness: its very point was that it had nothing to say about those events. It was, like the poems by Keats that appeared in the same pages, a kind of light relief.

This may have been the only aesthetic principle over which they differed, but it is sufficient to explain why Hunt, beginning his review of Wordsworth's Peter Bell in 1819, could say: 'This is another didactic little horror of Mr. Wordsworth's'.²¹ It was why he so admired Byron's Don Juan,²² and why Wordsworth believed that the same poem 'will do more harm to the English character, than anything of our time'.²³ Wordsworth could never have sympathised with the view that poetry was primarily a form of entertainment. To him it was a weapon in the fight for the betterment of mankind, and—what may seem crazy to us—the means by which he would play his part in bringing about the millennium, Christ's 1000-year rule on earth.²⁴

Keats could not have known this in October 1816, when he first met Hunt. It was at this period that he also met Reynolds, Haydon, and Shelley. But Hunt was his first poetic guide; he gave Keats the encouragement and support the younger man needed to postpone his training as an apothecary and embark on a literary career. The reassurance provided by Hunt in opposition to the pressures exerted by Keats' less sympathetic guardian, Richard Abbey, led to a period of intense closeness. As Walter Jackson Bate puts it, 'The autumn [of 1816] was altogether intoxicating.'²⁵ Keats often stayed overnight at Hunt's house in the Vale of Health, to which Hunt had moved a year before Reviewing Keats' "Sleep and Poetry" in The Examiner, Hunt recalled that it 'originated in sleeping in a room adorned with busts and pictures'²⁶ —his own library. Charles Cowden Clarke also remembered the beginnings of Keats' poem: 'It was in the library at Hunt's cottage, where an extemporary bed had been made up for him on the sofa, that he composed the frame-work and many lines of the poem on "Sleep and Poetry"—the last sixty or seventy being an inventory of the art garniture of the room'.²⁷ During the months following their first meeting in October, Keats absorbed Hunt's aesthetic ideas; more intriguingly, Hunt in turn appropriated his young friend's writing as support for them.

This process of appropriation began with Hunt's review of Keats' Poems, published in The Examiner from 1 June-13 July 1817. Hunt begins by surveying the state of modern poetry, and commending Wordsworth 'who in spite of some morbidities as well as mistaken theories in other respects, has opened upon us a fund of thinking and imagination, that ranks him as the successor of the true and abundant poets of the older time' (i.e. Spenser and Milton).²⁸ Having given Wordsworth qualified praise, he introduces Keats in distinctly Wordsworthian terms: 'our author has all the sensitiveness of temperament requisite to receive these impressions [of the images of things]; and wherever he has turned hitherto, he has evidently felt them deeply'.²⁹ So far, so good; he then enlists Keats in support of the criticisms of Wordsworth published in The Feast of the Poets three years before:

Mr. Keats takes an opportunity . . . to object to the morbidity that taints the productions of the Lake Poets. They might answer perhaps, generally, that they chuse to grapple with what is unavoidable, rather than pretend to be blind to it; but the more smiling Muse may reply, that half of the evils alluded to are produced by brooding over them . . . ³⁰

This is followed by a passage from "Sleep and Poetry"³¹ which Hunt entitled 'Happy Poetry Preferred'—a heading that might be said to sum up his poetic credo. The extract begins by describing some poets' subject-matter as 'ugly clubs, the Poets Polyphemes / Disturbing the grand sea', and concludes by stating that poetry 'should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man'. If this was Keats at his most Huntian, Hunt was nonetheless incorrect in framing it as an attack on Wordsworth; in fact, Richard Woodhouse, who had reason to know, recorded that as far as their author was concerned, Keats' criticisms were directed at Byron.³² It was nonetheless convenient for Hunt to appropriate these lines as further support for his ideas. On the face of it, Keats might be expected to have acquiesced in his public enrolment as a disciple of Hunt's. After all, in lines from "Sleep and Poetry" not quoted in Hunt's review, he had proclaimed:

All hail delightful hopes!
As she was wont, th' imagination
Into most lovely labyrinths will be gone,
And they shall be accounted poet kings
Who simply tell the most heart-easing things. (11. 264-8)

Only someone who had sat at Hunt's feet absorbing his theories could have proposed 'the most heart-easing things' as the fittest subject for the poet-king; it was a position Keats would soon repudiate. But if, in late 1816, when "Sleep and Poetry" was composed, he agreed with Hunt's central beliefs, there are no grounds for thinking that he enjoyed being implicated in Hunt's campaign against Wordsworthian morbidity. After all, Keats was more enthusiastic about Wordsworth than Hunt ever was. In 1818 Keats could tell Haydon: 'I am convinced that there are three things to rejoice at in this Age—The Excursion Your Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste';³³ it was a view Hunt would never share. Given the extent of the younger poet's admiration for Wordsworth, it would be remarkable if the Examiner article was not the cause of some strain between Keats and Hunt. The evidence indicates that it was; by 8 October, a few months after its publication, Hunt had compounded the appropriation of Keats in his review by his heavy-handed editing of Endymion: 'I am quite disgusted with literary Men and will never know another except Wordsworth',³⁴ Keats told Benjamin Bailey, 'after all I shall have the Reputation of Hunt's elevé—His corrections and amputations will by the knowing ones be trased in the Poem—This is to be sure the vexation of a day'.³⁵

Every major poet, however immature, carries some distinctive element of his or her vision with them from the moment they start writing. Even when he met Hunt in 1816 Keats was sufficiently in possession of his talent to resist complete assimilation into Hunt's way of thinking. This is evident from the two sonnets on the grasshopper and cricket, which Keats and Hunt composed during one of their sonnet-writing contests on 30 December 1816.³⁶ They each completed their sonnets in 15 minutes, and the results appeared, side by side, in the Examiner for 21 September 1817.

TWO SONNETS ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET.

I.

[FROM POEMS BY JOHN KEATS.]

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's;—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one, in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
December 30, 1816.

II.

BY LEIGH HUNT; NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED.

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice left stirring midst the lazy noon,
When ev'n the bees lag at the summoning brass;—
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;—
O sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,
One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine; both though small are strong
At your clear hearts; and both were sent on earth
To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song,
—In doors and out,—summer and winter,—Mirth.
December 30, 1816.

Keats' reference to 'summer luxury' picks up a term used often by Hunt, and indicates his acceptance of the Huntian faith in pleasure as a primary objective of poetry. Even so, his sonnet resolves itself very differently from his mentor's. Hunt's suggestion that both insects provide their listeners with 'Mirth' turns them into models of the poet himself, and concentrates our attention on the guiding principle underlying Hunt's poetry: as Edgecombe has observed, the poem offers 'a covert philosophical proposition—[Hunt's] philosophy of cheer'.³⁸ Keats' sonnet, by comparison, is more reserved; in his concluding sestet, the cricket transports the listener from the dead of winter into high summer, as its song is transformed by the musing mind into that of the grasshopper. The reverie that produces this transformation is, it might be argued, distinctively Huntian; after all, a similar reverie features in the sonnet "To Hampstead." But the Huntian sense of repletion is offset by the failure of the grasshopper to materialise before us. Hunt's poem presents both insects simultaneously; by contrast, Keats leaves them just offstage throughout the sestet: unseen, the cricket sings from the stove, while the grasshopper sounds from 'among some grassy hills'. They foreshadow that elusive nightingale, whose

plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades . . .

Even at the height of their involvement, Keats stops short of the Huntian tendency fully to gratify the reader's expectations. The distinction may seem minor, but it was always characteristic of Keats, from that early celebration of tormented love, Fill for me a brimming bowl (composed August 1814), to the Odes of 1819. The one exception was, of course, "The Eve of St Agnes"—which Hunt regarded as 'the most delightful and complete specimen of his genius'.³⁹ The difference between Hunt and Keats is akin to that between the experience of hearing music, and merely straining to hear it. Keats is preoccupied with potentiality, capability, immanence; Hunt with indulgence and surfeit. Hence the listener of Keats' sonnet, 'in drowsiness half lost', only 'seems' to hear the cricket's song; in the Preface to Poems (1815), a copy of which was sitting in Hunt's library, Wordsworth had discoursed on the potency of the word 'seems' as used by Milton.⁴⁰ With that word, Keats' sonnet allows the imagination, as Wordsworth conceives it, to operate on the perceiving mind, as the listener turns the cricket's song into that of the grasshopper, thus turning winter to summer, and solitude into the hope of companionship. In that respect Keats' poem stands in a line of works in which the company of insects provides momentary reassurance to human onlookers, including Wordsworth's Written in Germany, on one of the coldest days of the Century and Burns' To a Louse.

The experience, it should be remembered, is apparent rather than actual, and that restraint leaves a psychological vacuum at the heart of the poem: the cricket is not a grasshopper; the nightingale's song is doomed to die away; the Grecian urn will always remain inscrutable. Keats specialises in the kind of emotional suspension that leaves the reader expectant and hopeful, as if there is something more to come after the poem has finished. Once again, it is an effect Keats has in common with Wordsworth, who at his most optimistic had written:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home,
Is with infinitude, and only there—
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

The ambiguity of this stance, the room it leaves for doubt and disappointment, is something Hunt would have deplored. Not only do Keats and Wordsworth wish to accommodate pain and suffering, but those 'morbid' elements are essential to their vision. This is what Keats meant when, in April 1819, he asked George and Georgiana Keats, 'Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul, a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways?'⁴² If Hunt would have answered, 'no', there can be little doubt that Keats would hardly have posed the question in the first place had he not been an admirer of the poet who had written: 'Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark, / And shares the nature of infinity'.⁴³

By October 1817 Keats was as aware of the limitations of Huntian aesthetics as he would ever be, the most significant being Hunt's emphasis on the pleasure-principle. Haydon anticipated this line of thought when, in November 1816, he confided to his diary: 'Such is the morbid sensibility of his temperament that the supposition he can be guilty of Sin gives gloomy pain & he must be kept in a continual excitement of pleasure & voluptuousness by amorous poems & bodily sensations to keep himself in a state of ordinary every day comfort'.⁴⁴ A few months later, in January 1817, he went further:

. . . Hunt's imagination is naturally and inherently gloomy, and all his leafy bowers & clipsome waists & balmy bosoms proceed not from a lovely fancy shooting out without effort the beauties of its own superabundant brightness, but are the produce of a painful, hypochodriac Soul that struggles by dwelling on the reverse of its own real thoughts, perpetually to illumine its natural and forlorn dinginess; hence his painful wit, his struggling jokes, his hopeless puns; hence his wish to be surrounded by inferior intellects and being delighted to suck in their honey praise; hence his unwillingness to leave company or be left by them; hence his gloated trifling with Women, for in reality he has a contempt for them, for he says all women should submit to the infidelities of their husbands without feeling insulted; & hence his seeing only the gloomy prospects of damnation in believing Christianity, and hence his horror of being left alone even for an hour!⁴⁵

Haydon, who had by then known Hunt for over a decade, traces Hunt's 'rococo' manner to its psychological roots in a desire to escape his 'morbid sensibility' and 'painful, hypochondriac Soul'. Crude though his conclusions may appear, they are to some extent corroborated by Hunt's attitude to Wordsworth, the main fault of whose poetry, Hunt had written, was that it was 'only calculated to perplex and sadden us', and 'distresses to no purpose'. In short, the constituent of Wordsworth's poetry that most repelled him was identical to that which, as Haydon saw it, Hunt was trying to evade in his own work. Of course, Haydon's perspective was coloured by the resentment that had grown up between him and Hunt during recent months, largely through their religious wranglings, but his interpretation is supported by Hunt's Preface to Rimini, which itself traces the preference for happy poetry to the need for healing, or, as he puts it, 'comfort':

But besides the tendency I have from animal spirits, as well as from need of comfort, to indulge my fancy in happier subjects, it appears to me, that the world has become experienced enough to be capable of receiving its best profit through the medium of pleasurable, instead of painful, appeals to its reflection. There is an old philosophic conviction reviving among us as a popular one (and there could not be one more desirable), that it is time for those who would benefit their species, to put an end to recriminations, and denouncements, and threats, and agree to consider the sufferings of mankind as arising out of a want of knowledge rather than defect of goodness,—as intimations which, like the physical pain of a wound, or a galling ligament, tell us that we are to set about removing the causes of pain, instead of venting the spleen of it.⁴⁶

Written in 1832, this retrospective justification of his poetic manner nonetheless foregrounds its limitations; to put suffering down to ignorance rather than evil, as Hunt contends, is to turn tragedy into farce. If the result is indeed to remove the cause of pain, it is also to view human nature only in the rosiest possible light. Spleen, like it or not, is as much a product of passion as any of the more pleasurable moods which Hunt prefers. For a poet to exclude it from his work is as restrictive as for a painter to decide not to use the colour red.

What distinguishes the case against Hunt, as made by both friends and enemies, is that in his case aesthetics were inextricably intertwined with morality. It is not hard to see why; after all, to eliminate malignancy from one's understanding of psychology renders moral judgements virtually impossible. If everyone is either good or ignorant, all human actions are effectively reduced to the same level. Of course, this discussion might have been carried on in such intellectual terms at the time, but in Hunt's case it was personalised from the outset. Haydon saw Hunt's position in the light of his resistance to formalised religion, reporting in his diary on 20 January 1817: '"The question is," said Hunt, "who are the wicked? It is difficult to tell, I believe." Alas, what must be the state of that man, he who sophisticates as to what is wicked & yet has dawnings he does not do right, who disbelieves Christianity and yet fears damnation.'⁴⁷ For Haydon, religion, morality and art were all of a piece. Doubt God, and that faithlessness would be expressed in your work. Which is why the painting with which Haydon was preoccupied at that moment, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, which contained portraits of Keats and Wordsworth, exemplifies so effectively both his religious faith and artistic convictions. Haydon believed that if you didn't know right from wrong, you were in no position to make critical judgements either. This was the argument of his letter to Wordsworth on 15 April, in which he complains about 'Leigh Hunt's weathercock estimation of you':

When you were in Town you visited him—you remember what he said with an agitated mouth—'The longer I live, and the older I grow, I feel my respect for your Genius encrease, Sir.' These were his words—Before a month was over, I again perceived doubts & hums, and ha's, instead of the momentary enthusiasm for you displayed for about that time—Scott & I and all his Friends accounted for it in the usual way—knowing he never holds one opinion one month he does not sophisticate himself out of before the next is over . . . When first I knew Leigh Hunt, he was really a delightful fellow, ardent in virtue, & perceiving the right thing in everything but Religion . . . his great error is inordinate personal vanity—& he who pampers it not, is no longer received with affection—I am daily getting more estranged from him—and indeed all his old Friends, are dropping off . . . ⁴⁸

For Haydon, virtue is equivalent to constancy of judgement, just as its lack leads inevitably to a lack of perspective about oneself and the rest of the world. Significantly, Keats' letter to Haydon of 11 May takes the same line; in relation to Hunt, he observed that 'There is no greater Sin after the 7 deadly than to flatter oneself into an idea of being a great Poet'.⁴⁹

What is so astonishing about Leigh Hunt is that in his case the criticisms of his friends and enemies were very similar. The Cockney school did not exist until J. G. Lockhart, writing as 'Z.', invented the term in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and appointed Hunt as its ringleader. The first of his attacks, published in October 1817, concentrated on Hunt's alleged immorality, and takes the same line as Haydon—that ethics are directly related to art:

Every man is, according to Mr Hunt, a dull potato-eating blockhead—of no greater value to God or man than any ox or drayhorse—who is not an admirer of Voltaire's romans, a worshipper of Lord Holland and Mr Haydon, and a quoter of John Buncle and Chaucer's Flower and Leaf. Every woman is useful only as a breeding machine, unless she is fond of reading Launcelot of the Lake, in an antique summer-house.

How such a profligate creature as Mr Hunt can pretend to be an admirer of Mr Wordsworth, is to us a thing altogether inexplicable. One great charm of Wordsworth's noble compositions consists in the dignified purity of thought, and the patriarchal simplicity of feeling, with which they are throughout penetrated and imbued. We can conceive a vicious man admiring with distant awe the spectacle of virtue and purity; but if he does so sincerely, he must also do so with the profoundest feeling of the error of his own ways, and the resolution to amend them. His admiration must be humble and silent, not pert and loquacious. Mr Hunt praises the purity of Wordsworth as if he himself were pure, his dignity as if he also were dignified.⁵⁰

The most important feature of Lockhart's case is that it is ideologically motivated. One reason for targeting Hunt was his radicalism, and the adjectives used to describe him—'profligate', 'vicious', 'humble'—are calculated to appeal to the class prejudices of Blackwood's Tory readership; at the same time, Wordsworth's 'patriarchal' simplicity of feeling elevates him to the same level as the politicians whose fear of revolution led to the Peterloo massacre. The paragraph thus plays out a drama—that of the patrician poet besieged by the dissolute imitator of a lower class, desperate for a share of his fame. Repeated ascriptions of 'purity' almost suggest that Wordsworth is in danger of being raped. Hunt is alleged to worship Lord Holland⁵¹ and Haydon in much the same way that he sullies the purity of Wordsworth; it is simply another example of a social reprobate getting above himself. But behind the histrionics, Lockhart is worrying away at an aesthetic matter, for the clues to Hunt's alleged depravity are literary: Voltaire, Chaucer, John Buncle, Launcelot of the Lake. For Lockhart, they are examples of either radical (in the case of Voltaire) or 'low' culture (as with Thomas Amory's novel, John Buncle). And why should The Flower and the Leaf be included in this list—at the time thought to have been written by Chaucer, but now ascribed to an anonymous female poet of the last quarter of the 15th century?⁵² Because, only months before, on 16 March, The Examiner had published Keats' sonnet Written on a Blank Space at the end of Chaucer's Tale of 'The Floure and the Lefe'. Hunt had published it under a brief introductory note: 'The following exquisite Sonnet, as well as one or two others that have lately appeared under the same signature, is from the pen of the young poet (KEATS), who was mentioned not long since in this paper, and who may already lay true claim to that title:—"The youngest he, / That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree."'⁵³ The inclusion of The Flower and the Leaf in Lockhart's list reveals that he had noted Keats' poem and Hunt's proprietorial note, and, for those in the know, it suggests that Keats' strategy is no different from Hunt's—that of contaminating other writers by pretending to understand and admire them. More disturbing, Lockhart signals to Keats that he is next. Such was Keats' interpretation when, still in shock, he reported the article to Bailey on 3 November: 'There has been a flaming attack upon Hunt in the Endinburgh Magazine—I never read any thing so virulent accusing him of the greatest Crimes . . . I have no doubt that the second Number was intended for me'.⁵⁴

Lockhart's essay upset Hunt sufficiently for him to challenge its anonymous author, in The Examiner for 16 November, to 'avow himself; which he cannot fail to do, unless to an utter disregard of all Truth and Decency, he adds the height of Meanness and COWARDICE.'⁵⁵ There were no less than three appeals in the Examiner to 'Z' to disclose his identity, none of which were heeded.⁵⁶ That his article was so obviously partisan should not obscure the fact that Lockhart's distortions were closer to the truth than he can have suspected. Hunt himself admitted that his literary principles arose out of ethical beliefs, and that his dislike of morbidity dictated a resistance to the kind of radical poetry composed by the young Wordsworth. Admittedly, this is not the position Lockhart criticises—his portrait of Hunt is caricature—but without being aware of it, he echoes anxieties current, for different reasons, among Hunt's associates, not least Haydon and Keats. And his central argument—that politics, morality, and literature are mutually determining—holds water; it is, in fact, a forerunner of the more ambitious propositions of today's new historicists.

Keats knew what was in store; his poetry received rough treatment from a number of reviewers, partly through his association with Hunt. Wielding the hatchet in August 1818, Lockhart took care to inform his colleagues that 'Keats belongs to the Cockney School of Politics, as well as the Cockney School of Poetry'.⁵⁷ Worse was to come, but Keats' reaction against Hunt was never as strong as it is sometimes claimed to be. Much as many critics would like to banish him from the story of Keats' development after 1818, the truth is that Keats' precocity owed much to the fact that he discovered his voice comparatively quickly, thanks to having worked alongside a literary personality so well defined as was Hunt's. That Huntian aesthetics permeate Keats' poetry right up to the end is ample proof of this. The central image in the 'Bright star' sonnet—that of the poet's head 'Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast'—is, of course, a Huntian luxury, just one step away from the intense emotion between the lovers in "To Hampstead:"

Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Notes

¹ 'Z.' [J. G. Lockhart]. "On the Cockney School of Poetry No. 1," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 2 (1817) 38-41, p. 38.

² Text from Romanticism: An Anthology ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 668.

³ Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), p. 23.

⁴Imagination and Fancy (1832), pp. 2-3.

⁵Romanticism, p. 249.

⁶Romanticism, p. 254.

⁷ This letter, hitherto unpublished, is retained at the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere. I am grateful to the Chairman and Trustees of the Library for permission to quote.

⁸The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: A Supplement of New Letters ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 144-5; his italics.

⁹The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years 1806-20 ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969-70) (hereafter MY), ii 195.

¹⁰ Edmund Blunden, Leigh Hunt: A Biography (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930), p. 94.

¹¹ Chester L. and Alice C. Shaver, Wordsworth's Library (New York, 1979), p. 133; MY ii 273.

¹²Letter of 29 December 1815, now retained at the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere.

¹³MY ii 299.

¹⁴Feast of the Poets (1814), p. 89.

¹⁵Feast, pp. 94-5.

¹⁶Feast, pp 96-7.

¹⁷Foliage, pp. 18-19.

¹⁸Foliage, p. 16.

¹⁹Imagination and Fancy, p. 1.

²⁰Foliage, p. 18.

²¹Examiner, 2 May 1819, p. 282.

²² See his review of Don Juan, The Examiner, 31 October 1819, pp. 700-2.

²³The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years 1821-53 ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill (4 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-88) (hereafter LY), ii 579.

²⁴ The best explication of the philosophy of The Recluse is provided by Jonathan Wordsworth, The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), Epilogue.

²⁵ Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (London: The Hogarth Press, 1992), p. 111.

²⁶Examiner, 13 July 1817, p. 443.

²⁷ Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (Fontwell: Centaur Press, 1969), pp. 133-4.

²⁸Examiner, 1 June 1817, p. 345.

²⁹Examiner, 6 July 1817, p. 428.

³⁰Examiner 13 July 1817, p. 443.

³¹ Lines 230-47.

³² See The Poems of John Keats ed. Miriam Allott (Harlow: Longman, 1970), p. 79, notes to 11. 231, 233-5, 241-2.

³³The Letters of John Keats ed. Hyder E. Rollins (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), i 203.

³⁴ This statement seems to undermine Beth Lau's claim that 'It is therefore likely that the young poet at this time also adopted Hunt's opinion of Wordsworth's faults' (Keats's Reading of the Romantic Poets [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991], p. 21).

³⁵ Rollins i 169-70.

³⁶The occasion is recalled by Clarke, Recollections, pp. 135-6.

³⁷Examiner, 21 September 1817, p. 599.

³⁸ Edgecombe, p. 210.

³⁹Imagination and Fancy, p. 314.

⁴⁰ See Wordsworth's commentary on Paradise Lost ii 642: '"So seemed": and to whom "seemed"? To the heavenly muse who dictates the poem, to the eye of the poet's mind, and to that of the reader, present at one moment in the wide Ethiopian, and the next in the solitudes, then first broken in upon, of the infernal regions!' (Romanticism, p. 479).

⁴¹Thirteen-Book Prelude vi 538-42; Romanticism p. 362.

⁴²Romanticism, p. 1053.

⁴³ Wordsworth, The Borderers 1543-4; The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (5 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940-9), i 188.

⁴⁴The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon ed. Willard Bissell Pope (5 vols., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960-3), ii 68.

⁴⁵ Pope, ii 81.

⁴⁶Leigh Hunt: Selected Writings wed. David Jesson Dibley (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), p. 17.

⁴⁷ Pope ii 87.

⁴⁸ Wordsworth Library, Grasmere. No doubt Haydon's letter influenced Wordsworth's later opinion: 'Mr Leigh Hunt is a Coxcomb, was a Coxcomb, and ever will be a Coxcomb' (LY ii 401).

⁴⁹ Rollins i 143.

⁵⁰ "On the Cockney School of Poetry No. 1", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 2 (1817) 38-41, p. 40.

⁵¹ Hunt's dealings with Holland were not extensive; in fact, if his Autobiography is to be believed, it was more a case of his being courted by Holland; see The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London: Cresset Press, 1948), p. 226.

⁵² For a full account of the arguments concerning the attribution of both works see Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York: Peter Smith, 1933), pp. 423-4, 408-9.

⁵³Examiner, 16 March 1817, p. 173.

⁵⁴ Rollins i 180.

⁵⁵Examiner, 16 November 1817, p. 729.

⁵⁶ On 2 November, 16 November, and 14 December, pp. 693, 729, 788.

⁵⁷Romanticism, p. 1007.