[84] Same
This was a sin for which “Maga” later atoned by repeated tributes to his genius, to his poetry and its beauty in many subsequent numbers of the periodical. Lockhart two years afterwards spoke of it as “a total departure from the principles of the Magazine”[85]—“a specimen of the very worst kind of spirit which the Magazine professed to be fighting in the Edinburgh Review.”[86] “This is indeed the only one of the various sins of this Magazine for which I am at a loss to discover—not an apology—but a motive. If there be any man of grand and original genius alive at this moment in Europe, such a man is Mr. Coleridge.”[87] And two months after this paper, in the issue for December 1817 appeared a “Letter to the Reviewer of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria”, beginning with the words: “To be blind to our failings and alive to our prejudices, is the fault of almost every one of us.... It is the same with me, the same with Mr. Coleridge, and it is, I regret to state it, the same with his reviewer!”[88]... And this writer, who signs, himself J. S., sums up his valiant defense, declaring “it is from a love I have for generous and fair criticism, and a hate to everything which appears personal and levelled against the man and not his subject—and your writing is glaringly so—that I venture to draw daggers with a reviewer. You have indeed imitated, with not a little of its power and ability, the worst manner of the Edinburgh Review critics. Forgetting ... that freedom of remark does not exclude the kind and courteous style, you have entirely sunk the courteousness in the virulency of it.”[89] Thus “Maga” redeemed itself and Coleridge was avenged.
[85] J. G. Lockhart: Peter’s Letters, V. ii, p. 218
[86] Same
[87] Same
[88] Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, V. ii, p. 285-6
[89] Ibid., V. ii, p. 287
As for the third of the three articles which best illustrate the whoopla-spirit of this new venture, Lockhart’s paper “On the Cockney School of Poetry”, all is said when we say it was the first of a series of corrosive and scurrilous articles directed against Leigh Hunt in particular, and Hazlitt and Webbe, and in general, the “younger and less important members” of that school, “The Shelley’s and the Keatses”! Modern critics! Beware how you cast stones at our Percy Smith’s and Reggie Brown’s! Says our young friend Lockhart in this article that Leigh Hunt is “a man of little education. He knows absolutely nothing of Greek, almost nothing of Latin”[90] ... and so forth and so on. He 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 has never seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill, nor reclined by any streams more pastoral than the Serpentine River. But he is determined to be a poet eminently rural, and he rings the changes—till one is sick of him, on the beauties of the different ‘high views’ which he has taken of God and nature, in the course of some Sunday dinner parties at which he has assisted in the neighborhood of London.... As a vulgar man is perpetually laboring to be genteel—in like manner the poetry of this man is always on the stretch to be grand.”[91]
[90] Ibid., V. ii, p. 38
[91] Ibid., V. ii, p. 39