The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt/Preface

by James Henry Leigh Hunt

PREFACE.

When the Author was a boy at school, writing twice the number of verses required by the master, and thinking of nothing but poetry and friendship, he used to look at one of the pocket volumes of Cooke's Edition of Gray, Collins, and others, then in course of publication, and fancy that if ever he could produce anything of that sort in that shape, he should consider himself as having attained the happiest end of a human being's existence. The form had become dear to him for the contents, and the reputation seemed proved by the cheapness. He has lived to qualify the opinion not a little, as far as others are concerned in what he does; but in respect to his wishes for his mere self, they are precisely the same as they were then; and when Mr. Moxon proposed to him the present volume, he seemed to realise the object of his life, and to require no other prosperity.

In order, however, not to confound the show of success with the substance, in any greater degree than it might be in his power to avoid, he has taken the opportunity, in this edition of his poems, to evince a proper respect for a chance of their duration beyond the day, by giving them a careful revision, rejecting superfluities, and correcting mistakes of all kinds. To this end he has re-written a considerable portion of the "Story of Rimini," not because he would give up to wholesale objection what has had the good fortune to obtain the regard of the public, but because he wrote it before he visited Italy, had made it in some respects too English, and, above all, had told an imaginary story instead of the real one. The landscapes are now freed from northern inconsistencies; the moral is no longer endangered, as some thought it, by dwelling too much on the metaphysics of a case of conscience; and the story contains the real catastrophe and the spirit of the probable characters of all the parties, without contradicting the known truth by any of the circumstances invented. He is aware of the objections made to altered poems in general, and heartily agrees with them; but the case, as thus stated, becomes, he conceives, an exception to the rule. Dante, who though a very great poet, had a will still greater than his poetry, and was in all things a partisan, was a friend and public agent of the heroine's father, and he has not told the deception that was practised on her. He left it to transpire through the commentators. This point of the story was at no time omitted in the version which the Author, in a fit of youthful confidence, undertook to make from the inimitable original; but, on the other hand, the surprise and murder of the lovers by the husband were converted into a duel with one, and the remorse of both; and not a word was said of the husband's ferocious character and personal deformity^[1]. These things, if he is not mistaken, make all the difference on the point in question. He has desired to relate the truth in the poem almost ever since he wrote it; the moral objections of the critics increased the desire; and, indeed, he has long ceased to be of opinion, that an author has a right to misrepresent admitted historical facts. He has often, as a reviewer, had occasion to object to the licence in others. It appears to him the next thing to falsifying a portrait; and possibly even hazards something of that general inconsistency of features, which is observed to result from the painter's misrepresentation of any one of them.

Two additional improvements the Author hopes he has made in this poem. He has delivered it from many weak lines, too carelessly thrown off, and from certain conventionalities of structure, originating in his having had his studies too early directed towards the artificial instead of the natural poets. He had not the luck to possess such a guide in poetry as Keats had in excellent Charles Cowden Clarke. The mode of treatment still remains rather material than spiritual. He would venture to prefer, for instance, that of the military procession in "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" to the handling of the same point in the "Story of Rimini." But he could not make alterations to such an extent without writing the whole over again; and though he considers Darwin to have been absurd, when he identified poetry with picture, he regards it as a sin of another extreme against the poet's privilege of universality, to dispute his right to the more tangible imagery of the painter. The descriptions, though long, of that procession, and of the forest, and garden, appear to him to have a certain analogy with the luxury of the South, and at once to heighten and alleviate the catastrophe. If the reader be fatigued with them, he gives himself up to his rebuke. If not, he hopes he shall be defended against more formal objections, on the authority of the critic who said, that every kind of writing was a proper kind, "except the tiresome."

The reader of the "Feast of the Poets" will be good enough to bear in mind, that it was first written a long time ago, never contained all the names that had a right to be in it, and therefore still less professes to contain them now. The Author would have written a new one, on purpose to introduce them, especially Mr. Knowles and his brother dramatists; but the truth is, that these are delicate matters for contemporaries to meddle with; and a young writer will find in after years that he had better have shown his admiration of reigning names in a shape less particular. Circumstances may even conspire to make him fear misconstructions painful on all sides, where acknowledgment of another sort would seem to give double reasons for its extension. Such are the perplexities in preparation for juvenile confidence! The Author therefore must beg that the "Feast of the Poets" may be regarded rather as a fancy of by-gone years than a criticism. The "Feast of the Violets" is avowedly such. It is not that he thinks less of any of the poets mentioned considered without reference to others, but higher of some than he used; and that the number seated at Apollo's table ought either to have been less or greater. Admiration is a delight and a duty; but when it even implies comparative criticism, it touches upon a peril which among contemporaries is proverbially odious, and not seldom rash and to be repented. A sense of justice, for instance, to a name so great in other respects that it has injured his reputation for poetry (most people finding it difficult to entertain two ideas at once on this subject) compels me to observe, that in fighting hard for the honours of Wordsworth, at a time when the advocacy was not superfluous, I was not sufficiently attentive to those of Coleridge; and that without entering into the comparative merits of the two, or lowering a jot of my estimation of the former, considered in himself, it appears to me, that since the days of Milton there has been no greater name for pure quintessential poetry, than that of the author of "Christabel" and the "Ancient Mariner." This, of course, is stated out of a sense of what is due on my own part, and not from any overweening supposition that the mere statement of an opinion is to settle the question for others.

A considerable, though in no sense of the word the better part of the poem entitled "Captain Sword and Captain Pen," was devoted to an exhibition of the horrors of war. I detailed them, because, at the time I wrote it, I thought it my duty to do so. That opinion has ceased, owing to the progress of mechanical science and its fusion of nations one with another; for the closeness of their intercourse will assuredly render war as absurd and impossible by-and-by, as it would be for Manchester to fight with Birmingham, or Holborn Hill with the Strand. The superfluous part of these horrors, therefore, has disappeared from the poem, and only enough of them been retained to give entireness to the subject, and a due contrasting effect to the blessings of the growth of knowledge and good-will. I must add, that I objected to war in no spirit of mere inconsiderate common-place, or effeminate shrinking from pain; as any reader may see who chooses to look at the original edition with its notes. Indeed, if I had shrunk from pain, I should have avoided the subject; for it sometimes gave me more than I choose to express; nor would anything but a sense of duty have induced me to go on with it; though if I might venture to state what I regard as the most approaching to poetry, essentially so called, in any of the longer effusions in this book, I should say it was in passages of this poem, and of the "Legend of Florence."

The "Legend of Florence" is founded on a romance of real life in a periodical Italian publication called the "Florentine Observer" (Osservatore Fiorentino). Among the pleasures which I had in writing this play was the melancholy one of thinking that the beloved friend whom I lost in Italy had chosen the same story for a poem, of which he has left a fragment. I was thus united with him, in a manner, once more, and upon a subject to which even his noble dramatic genius would have welcomed me for love's sake, and the moral's.

May I be permitted to add, that I shall never forget the honour which Her Majesty did my play in coming twice to see it, and the gracious words in which she was pleased to express her approbation of it to the manager? Doubtless the beauty of Miss Ellen Tree's acting, and of the occasional music, contributed to procure me this good fortune; not perhaps without a condescending wish on the part of the Royal visitor to assist a writer who was known to be struggling with difficulties, and who had already tasted her beneficence. Most heartily do I give up any portion of the credit of it, attributable to her Majesty's princely good-nature. It was not the last benefit which the Royal disposition had conferred on me; for I am further indebted to it for the discovery, that "Laureat" odes, or such as by an extra-official courtesy might have been termed such, may be written out of the truest and even the most disinterested feelings of gratitude; and I hereby beg pardon of all Laureats, past and to come, for anything I may have formerly said against them, proviped their effusions have as much sincerity as my own.

As to any other effusions of a hostile nature poured forth in the course of one of the most stirring periods of political warfare, when I was in the thick of editorial fight, I shall not belie the honesty and heartiness with which such fights may be carried on during the zeal of the moment; but I have now lived, enjoyed, erred, suffered, and thought enough, to come to the conclusion, that neither modesty of self-knowledge nor largeness of policy is in favour of advancing the circumstances of the community, by attacking individuals who are the creatures of them; and in accordance with this new sense of duty, the volume offered to the public does not contain, it is trusted, one verse which can give pain to any living being. It aspires to be the reader's companion during his quietest and his kindest moments; to add zest to intercourse, and love to the love of nature; and the Author would fain have left nothing in its pages rebukeable either by the cordial voices of the fireside, or by the pensive breath of the wind as it passes by the ear in field or garden.

1. A Latin writer, quoted in the "Amori e Rime di Dante Alighieri," p. xcii., says, that he was called Giovanni the Hip-broken (Sciancato), adding, that, though he was deformed in body, he had a daring and ferocious mind:—"Johannes Scancatus, sic denominatus, erat mirè claudus; vir corpore deformis, sed animo audax et ferox." The commentators tell us, that the brother (a very handsome man) was pointed out to Francesca as her future husband, while passing through a square.