When Byron and Hunt had separated, Blackwood’s attempted to reinstate Byron in his former position by declaring that he had been disgusted beyond endurance on Hunt’s arrival in Italy and that he had cut him very soon in a “paroxysm of loathing.”[484]
The declaration of war between the Cockneys and the Tory press was made with a review of the Story of Rimini in the Quarterly of January, 1816. From this time on Hunt was the choice prey of the two magazines, and others were attacked principally on account of him, or reached through him. Hunt’s writings were termed “eruptions of a disease” with which he insists upon “inoculating mankind;” his language “an ungrammatical, unauthorized, chaotic jargon.” Blackwood’s of October, 1817, contained the first of the long series of abusive articles which appeared in its columns. Hazlitt in the Edinburgh Review in June of the preceding year had acclaimed the Story of Rimini to be “a reminder of the pure and glorious style that prevailed among us before French modes and French methods of criticism.” In it he had discovered a resemblance to Chaucer, to the voluptuous pathos of Boccaccio and to the laughing graces of Ariosto. To offset such statements Blackwood’s dubbed the new school the “Cockney School” and made Hunt its chief doctor and professor. (Later, in 1823, Blackwood’s proudly claimed the honor of christening and said that the Quarterly used the epithet only when it had become a part of English criticism.) It declared the dedication to Byron an insult and the poem the product of affectation and gaudiness and continued:
“The beaux are attorney’s apprentices, with chapeau bras and Limerick gloves—fiddlers, harp teachers, and clerks of genius: the belles are faded, fan-twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school, and enormous citizen’s wives. The company are entertained with luke-warm negus, and the sounds of a paltry piano forte.... His poetry resembles that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. His muse talks indelicately like the tea-sipping milliner’s girl. Some excuse for her there might have been, had she been hurried away by imagination or passion; but with her, indecency seems a disease, she appears to speak unclean things from perfect inanition.” Hunt “would fain be always tripping and waltzing, and he is very sorry that he cannot be allowed to walk about in the morning with yellow breeches and flesh-colored silk stockings. He sticks an artificial rosebud in his button hole in the midst of winter. He wears no neckcloth, and cuts his hair in imitation of the prints of Petrarch.”
Nature in the eyes of a Cockney was said to consist only of “green fields, jaunty streams, and o’er-arching leafiness;” no mountains were higher than Highgate-hill nor streams more pastoral than the Serpentine River.[485] Blackwood’s was near the truth in its criticism of Hunt’s conception of nature. While his appreciation was very genuine, it was restricted to rural or suburban scenes, “of the town, towny.”[486] The scale was that of the window garden or a flower pot. Who but he could rhapsodize over a cut flower or a bit of green; or could speak in spring “of being gay and vernal and daffodilean?”[487] Yet he produced some delightful rural poetry. Take this for instance:
“You know the rural feeling, and the charm
That stillness has for a world-fretted ear,
’Tis now deep whispering all about me here,
With thousand tiny bushings, like a swarm
Of atom bees, or fairies in alarm
Or noise of numerous bliss from distant spheres.”[488]
The general characteristics of the school, briefly summarized, were said to be ignorance and vulgarity, an entire absence of religion, a vague and sour Jacobinism for patriotism, admiration of Chaucer and Spenser when they resemble Hunt, and extreme moral depravity and obscenity. November, 1817, of Blackwood’s contained the notorious accusation against the Story of Rimini of immorality of purpose.[489] The poem was called “the genteel comedy of incest.” Francesca’s sin was declared voluntary and her sufferings sentimental. The changes from the historical version, an espousal by proxy instead of betrothal, the omission of deformity, the substitution of the duel for murder, and the happy opening, were pronounced wilful perversions for the furtherance of corruption. Ford’s treatment of the same theme much more elevated. Hunt’s defense was that the catastrophe was Francesca’s sufficient punishment.[490] In May, 1818, the same charge was repeated: “No woman who has not either lost her chastity, or is desirous of losing it, ever read the ‘Story of Rimini’ without the flushings of shame and of self-reproach.”
The Examiner of November 2 and 16, 1817, quoted extracts from the first of these articles and called upon the author to avow himself; otherwise to an “utter disregard of Truth and Decency, he adds the height of Meanness and Cowardice.”[491] As might have been expected, this demand brought forth nothing more than a disavowal from the London publishers who handled Blackwood’s of all responsibility in the matter. June 14, 1818, The Examiner assailed the editor of the Quarterly as a government critic who disguised a political quarrel in literary garb, as a sycophant to power and wealth:
“Grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence, and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting the driblets of his spleen and impertinence on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness, not to be imposed upon by shallow pretensions; unprincipled rancor for zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, and peevish effusions of bodily pain and mental infirmity, for proofs of refinement of taste and strength of understanding.”
This condescension to a use of his enemies’ weapons only weakened Hunt’s position. Yet in the light of the secrecy maintained at the time and the mystery surrounding the matter ever since, it is interesting to read Blackwood’s contorted reply to Hunt’s demand for an open fight, written as late as January, 1826: