Chapter V (2)

The _Quarterly_ of April, 1818, contained the stupid and savage review of _Endymion_, provoked almost solely by the Keats's offence in being the friend and public protege of Leigh Hunt. The simple and manly preface[502] was misconstrued into a formula for Huntian poetry, and its allusion to a "London drizzle or a Scotch mist" into a "deprecation of criticism in a feverish manner." Leigh Hunt asked years afterwards how "anybody could answer such an appeal to the mercy of strength with the cruelty of weakness. All the good for which Mr. Gifford pretended to be zealous, he might have effected with pain to no one, and glory to himself; and therefore all the evil he mixed with it was of his own making."[503] The general trend of the article and the reviewer's acknowledgment that he had read only the first book of the poem are well known. The following passage refers directly to Keats's connection with Hunt:

"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; who, though he impudently presumed to seat
himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by
his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr. Keats advanced
no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense is
therefore quite gratuitous; he writes it for his own sake, and, being
bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the
insanity of his poetry."[504]

_Blackwood's_ followed the _Quarterly's_ lead in August, reviewing Keats's first volume at the same time with _Endymion_. He is reproached with madness, with metromania, with low origin, with perversion of talents suited only to an apprenticeship, all because he admired Hunt sufficiently to adopt some of his theories and because he had been called in _The Examiner_ one of "two stars of glorious magnitude." The sonnet _Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison_, the _Sonnet to Haydon_, and _Sleep and Poetry_, are anathematized. In the last Keats is said to speak with

"contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits that the world ever
produced, merely because they did not happen to exert their faculties
in laborious affected descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots, or
cascades heard at Vauxhall; in short, because they chose to be wits,
philosophers, patriots, and poets, rather than to found the Cockney
school of versification, morality and politics, a century before its
time. After blaspheming himself into a fury against Boileau, etc.,
Mr. Keats comforts himself and his readers with a view of the present
more promising state of affairs; above all, with the ripened glories
of the poet of _Rimini_."

The denunciation of the "calm, settled, drivelling idiocy" of _Endymion_ in the same article is famous, but in a discussion of the Cockney School it is well to recall the following:

"From his prototype Hunt, John Keats has acquired a sort of vague
idea, that the Greeks were a most tasteful people, and that no
mythology can be so finely adopted for the purpose of poetry as
theirs. It is amusing to see what a hand the Cockneys make of this
mythology; the one confesses that he never read the Greek Tragedians
and the other knows Homer only from Chapman; and both of them write
about Apollo, Pan, Nymphs, Muses, and Mysteries, as might be expected
from persons of their education. We shall not, however, enlarge at
present upon this subject, as we mean to dedicate an entire paper to
the classical attainments and attempts of the Cockney poets."

The versification is said to expose the defects of Hunt's system ten times more than Hunt's own poetry. The mocking close is as follows: "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, 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."

The delusion that these articles were the direct cause of Keats's death, an impression given wide currency by the passages in _Adonais_[505] and _Don Juan_,[506] has long since been dispelled by the evidence of Hunt,[507] Fanny Brawne, C. C. Clarke and, most important of all, Keats's own letters.[508] It is not likely that he was affected by them as much as either Hunt or Hazlitt, for he showed more indifference and greater dignity under fire than either. His courage and his craving for future fame do not seem to have wavered during the year in which they appeared. Joseph Severn has testified that he never heard Keats mention _Blackwood's_ and that he considered what his friend endured from the press as "one of the least of his miseries"; that he knew so little about the whole matter that when he met Sir Walter Scott in Rome many years after he was at a loss to understand Scott's embarrassment when Keats's name was mentioned; and it was not until a friend afterwards explained that Scott was connected with one of the magazines which was popularly supposed to have caused Keats's death that he could fathom it.[509]

It would have been impossible for a more obtuse man than Leigh Hunt not to have realized from the import of these two articles that Keats was abused largely because of the association with himself and, but for that, might have remained in peaceful obscurity. Hunt therefore wisely refrained from further defense as it would only have made matters worse. During the year 1818 only one notice of Keats appeared in _The Examiner_.[510] During the same year three sonnets to Keats appeared in _Foliage_. Yet it has been several times stated that Hunt forsook Keats at this time. Keats, under the hallucination of disease himself, accused Hunt of neglect, yet there were three reasons which made a persistent defense on the part of Hunt not to be expected. First, he was unaware, according to his own statement, of the extent of the defamation; second, he realized that his championship and friendship had been the original cause of wrath in the enemies' camp against Keats and that any activity on his part would only incense them further,[511] and third, he did not approve of Keats's only publication of that year and could not give it his support, as he frankly told Keats himself. Mr. Forman and Mr. Rossetti both scout the idea of disertion and disloyalty. Yet Mr. Hall Caine has made much[512] of a charge which has been denied by Hunt and ultimately repudiated by Keats. He has, moreover, overlooked the fact that Hunt's bitter satire, _Ultra-Crepidarius_, was written in _1818_ as a reply to Keats's critics but was withheld from publication, presumably only for reasons of prudence, until 1823. When Keats's feeling on the subject was brought to his knowledge years later, Hunt wrote:

"Keats appears to have been of opinion that I ought to have taken
more notice of what the critics said against him. And perhaps I
ought. My notices of them may not have been sufficient. I may have
too much contented myself with panegyrizing his genius, and thinking
the objections to it of no ultimate importance. Had he given me a
hint to another effect, I should have acted upon it. But in truth, as
I have before intimated, I did not see a twentieth part of what was
said against us; nor had I the slightest notion, at that period,
that he took criticism so much to heart. I was in the habit, though a
public man, of living in a world of abstractions of my own; and I
regarded him as of a nature still more abstracted, and sure of
renown. Though I was a politician (so to speak), I had scarcely a
political work in my library. Spensers and Arabian Tales filled up
the shelves; and Spenser himself was not remoter, in my eyes, from
all the common-places of life, than my new friend. Our whole talk was
made up of idealisms. In the streets we were in the thick of the old
woods. I little suspected, as I did afterwards, that the hunters had
struck him; and never at any time did I suspect that he could have
imagined it desired by his friends. Let me quit the subject of so
afflicting a delusion."[513]

The _Edinburgh Review_ of August, 1820, discussed _Endymion_ and the 1820 volume. While it lamented the extravagances and obscurities, the "intoxication of sweetness" and the perversion of rhyme, it gave Keats due credit for his genius and his appreciation of the spirit of poetry. Hunt's review of _Lamia_[514] and the other poems of the 1820 volume appeared in _The Indicator_ of the same month. _Blackwood's_ answered the next month, abusing Hunt roundly and faintly praising the poems. The following proves that their chief object was to strike Hunt through Keats:

"It is a pity that this young man, John Keats, author of _Endymion_,
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 beneath such a mass of affectation, conceit, and Cockney
pedantry, as I never expected to see heaped together by anybody,
except the first founder of the School.... There is much merit in
some of the stanzas of Mr. Keats's 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."

Hazlitt, in May of the next year wrote of the persecution of Keats in the _Edinburgh Review_:

"Nor is it only obnoxious writers on politics themselves, but all
their friends and acquaintances, and those whom they casually notice,
that come under their sweeping anathema. It is proper to make a clear
stage. The friends of Caesar must not be suspected of an amicable
intercourse with patriotic and incendiary writers. A young poet comes
forward; an early and favourable notice appears of some boyish verses
of his in the _Examiner_, independently of all political opinion.
That alone decides fate; and from that moment he is set upon, pulled
in pieces, and hunted into his grave by the whole venal crew in full
cry after him. It was crime enough that he dared to accept praise
from so disreputable a quarter."

In a letter from Hunt in Italy to _The Examiner_, July 7, 1822, an inquiry is made why Mr. Gifford has never noticed Keats's last volume: "that beautiful volume containing _Lamia_, the story from Boccaccio, and that magnificent fragment _Hyperion_?" _Blackwood's_ of August replied to these two defenses in a tirade of twenty-two pages against the _Edinburgh Review_, Hazlitt, and Hunt. The _Noctes Ambrosianae_ of October continued in the same strain and, though the grave should have protected Keats from such banter, revived the old allusions to the apothecary and his pills.

In self defense against the charge, that its attacks and those of the _Quarterly_ had broken Keats's heart, _Blackwood's_ in January, 1826, said that it alone had dealt with Keats, Shelley and Procter with "_common sense_ or _common feeling_"; that, seeing Keats in the road to ruin with the Cockneys, it had "tried to save him by wholesome and severe discipline--they drove him to poverty, expatriation and death." The most remarkable part of this remarkable justification is this: "Keats outhunted Hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that, although invented in Little Britain, looks as if it were the prospect of some imaginative Eunuch's muse within the melancholy inspiration of the Haram" (_sic_).

In March, 1828, in a review of _Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries_, the _Quarterly_ seized the opportunity to revert to the author's friendship for Keats in its old hostile manner; and, in a criticism of Coleridge's poems in August, 1834, to speak of his "dreamy, half-swooning style of verse criticised by Lord Byron (in language too strong for print) as the fatal sin of Mr. John Keats." Finally in March, 1840, in _Journalism in France_, there is another feeble effort at defense; a resentment of the "twaddle" against the _Quarterly_ "when they had the misfortune to criticise a sickly poet, who died soon afterwards, apparently for the express purpose of dishonoring us."

One of Hunt's utterances in regard to Keats and his critics disposes finally of the matter: "his fame may now forgive the critics who disliked his politics, and did not understand his poetry."[515]

* * * * *

From Italy Shelley wrote to Peacock:

"I most devoutly wish I were living near London.... My inclination
points to Hampstead; but I do not know whether I should not make up
my mind to something more completely suburban. What are mountains,
trees, heaths, or even glorious and ever beautiful sky, with such
sunsets as I have seen at Hampstead, to friends? Social enjoyment, in
some form or other, is the Alpha and the Omega of existence. All that
I see in Italy--and from my tower window I now see the magnificent
peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the plain--is nothing. It
dwindles into smoke in the mind, when I think of some familiar forms
of scenery, little perhaps in themselves, over which old remembrances
have thrown a delightful colour."[516]

The attacks of the _Quarterly_ of May, 1818, on Shelley's private life and of April, 1819, on the _Revolt of Islam_, and the reply of _The Examiner_, have already been discussed on p. 77 of the third chapter. The assault was renewed in October, 1821. The dominating characteristic of Shelley's poetry is said to be "its frequent and total want of meaning." In _Prometheus Unbound_ there were said to be many absurdities "in defiance of common sense and even of grammar ... a mere jumble of words and heterogeneous ideas, connected by slight and accidental associations, among which it is impossible to distinguish the principal object from the accessory." The poem is declared to be full of "flagrant offences against morality and religion" and the poet to have gone out of his way to "revile Christianity and its author." As a final verdict the reviewer says: "Mr. Shelley's poetry is, in sober sadness, _drivelling prose run mad_.... Be his private qualities what they may, his poems ... are at war with reason, with taste, with virtue, in short, with all that dignifies man, or that man reveres." The _London Literary Gazette_ joined its forces to the _Quarterly_ and scored _Prometheus Unbound_ in 1820, _Queen Mab_ in 1821. _The Examiner_ of June 16, 23 and July 7, 1822, contained Hunt's answer to the two onslaughts. He accused the writer in the _Quarterly_ of having used six stars to indicate an omission, in order to imply that the name of Christ had been blasphemously used; of having put quotation marks to sentences not in the author criticised and of having intentionally left out so much at times as to make the context seem absurd. At the same time Hunt stated that he agreed that Shelley's poetry was of "too abstract and metaphysical a cast ... too wilful and gratuitous in its metaphors"; and that it would have been better if he had kept metaphysics and polemics out of poetry. But at the same time he asserted that Shelley had written much that was unmetaphysical and poetically beautiful, as _The Cenci_, the _Ode to a Skylark_ and _Adonais_. Of the second he wrote: "I know of nothing more beautiful than this,--more choice of tones, more natural in words, more abundant in exquisite, cordial, and most poetic associations." He characterized Southey's reviews as cant, Gifford's as bitter commonplace and Croker's as pettifogging.

_Blackwood's_ reviewed _Adonais_ and _The Cenci_ in December, 1821. The Della Cruscans were reported to have come again from "retreats of Cockney dalliance in the London suburbs" and "by wainloads from Pisa." The Cockneys were said to hate everything that was good and true and honorable, all moral ties and Christian principles, and to be steeped in desperate licentiousness. _Adonais_ is fifty-five stanzas of "unintelligible stuff" made up of every possible epithet that the poet has been able to "conglomerate in his piracy through the Lexicon." The sense has been wholly subordinated to the rhymes. The author is a "glutton of names and colours" and has accomplished no more than might be done on such subjects as Mother Goose, Waterloo or Tom Thumb. Two cruel and loathsome parodies follow: _Wouther the city marshal broke his leg_ and an _Elegy on My Tom Cat_, which, it is claimed, are less nonsensical, verbose and inflated than _Adonais_. _The Cenci_ is "a vulgar vocabulary of rottenness and reptilism" in an "odiferous, colorific and daisy-enamoured style." It is regretted by the writer that it is impossible to believe that Shelley's reason is unsettled, for this would be the best apology for the poem.[517]

When _The Liberal_ was organized Shelley was spoken of thus:

"But Percy Bysshe Shelly has now published a long series of poems,
the only object of which seems to be the promotion of _atheism_ and
_incest_; and we can no longer hesitate to avow our belief, that he
is as worthy of co-operating with the King of Cockaigne, as he is
unworthy of co-operating with Lord Byron. Shelley is a man of genius,
but he has no sort of sense or judgment. He is merely 'an inspired
idiot.' Leigh Hunt is a man of talents, but vanity and vulgarity
neutralize all his efforts to pollute the public mind. Lord Byron we
regard not only as a man of lofty genius, but of great shrewdness and
knowledge of the world. What can HE seriously hope from associating
his name with such people as these?"[518]

As in the case of Keats, _Blackwood's_ did not have the decency to desist from its indecent articles after Shelley's death. September, 1824, this vulgar ridicule of the two dead poets appeared in answer to Bryan Waller Procter's review of Shelley's poems in the preceding number of the _Edinburgh Review_:

"Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats's poetry
grasped with the 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 favorable 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 evicting Jack."

In the face of these articles against it as evidence, _Blackwood's_, as early as January, 1828, had the audacity to claim--perhaps with the expectation that its audience was gifted with a sense of subtle humor--that Shelley had been praised in its pages for his fortitude, patience, and many other noble qualities, and that this praise had irritated the other Cockneys and made the whole trouble. If Keats suffered at the hands of the Edinburgh dictators for his association with Hunt the balance weighed in the other direction in the case of Shelley. All the crimes and opinions of which he was deemed guilty were passed on to Hunt. But Hunt gladly suffered for Shelley.

Hazlitt, although of Irish descent and a native of Shropshire, and of such independence as to belong to no school whatsoever, came in for a share of abuse second only in virulence to that showered on Hunt.[519] In the _Quarterly_ of April, 1817, in a review of the _Round Table_, probably in retaliation for his abuse of Southey in _The Examiner_, Hazlitt's papers are denominated "vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill-humour and rancorous abuse." His characterizations of Pitt and Burke are "vulgar and foul invective," and "loathsome trash." The author might have described washerwomen forever, the reviewer asserts, "but if the creature, in his endeavours to see the light, must make his way over the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth which marks his tracks, it is right to point out that he may be flung back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel."

The _Characters of Shakespeare's Plays_ was made an excuse for dissecting the morals and understanding of this "poor cankered creature."[520] The _Lectures on the English Poets_ is characterized as a "third predatory incursion on taste and common sense ... either completely unintelligible, or exhibits only faint and dubious glimpses of meaning ... of that happy texture that leaves not a trace in the mind of either reader or hearer."[521] The _Political Essays_ was said to mark the writer as a death's head hawk-moth, a creature already placed in a state of damnation, the drudge of _The Examiner_, the ward of Billingsgate, the slanderer of the human race, one of the plagues of England.[522] Later, in a discussion of _Table Talk_,[523] he becomes a "Slang-Whanger" ("a gabbler who employs slang to amuse the rabble").

Hazlitt's _Letter to Gifford_, 1819, was a reply to all previous attacks of the _Quarterly_. For a pamphlet of eighty-seven pages on such a subject it is "lively reading," for Hazlitt, like Burke, as Mr. Birrell has remarked, excelled in a quarrel.[524] He calls Gifford a cat's paw, the Government critic, the paymaster of the band of Gentleman Pensioners, a nuisance, a

"dull, envious, pragmatical, low-bred man.... 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 and spleen of his wrath on others;
answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual
obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness; not to be imposed
upon by shallow appearances; unprincipled rancour for zealous
loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, peevish
effusions of bodily pain and mental imbecility for proofs of
refinement of taste and strength of understanding."[525]

_Blackwood's_ had accepted abstracts of Hazlitt's _Lectures on the English Poets_[526] from P. G. Patmore without comment and even managed a lengthy comparison of Jeffrey and Hazlitt with an approach to fair dealing. But by August, 1818, he had been identified with the "Cockney crew" and he became "that wild, black-bill Hazlitt," a "lounge in third-rate bookshops"; and as a critic of Shakspere, a gander gabbling at that "divine swan." In April of the following year he was christened the "Aristotle" of the Cockneys. His _Table Talk_ provoked ten pages of vituperation,[527] and _Liber Amoris_, two reviews as coarse as the provocation.[528] In the first of these, apropos of his contributions to the _Edinburgh Review_ and in particular of his article on the _Periodical Press of Britain_, the downfall of the magazine and its editor is announced as certain. Hazlitt is called a literary flunky, a sore, an ulcer, a poor devil. In the second he is Hunt's orderly, the "Mars of the Hampstead heavy dragoons."

Hazlitt found relief for his feelings by threatening _Blackwood's_ with a lawsuit. Yet in July, 1824, appeared an elaborate comparison of Hunt and Hazlitt in _Blackwood's_ choicest manner and in March, 1825, a review of the _Spirit of the Age_. After 1828 the defamatory articles ceased entirely. In 1867 appeared what might be construed into an attempt at reparation by Bulwer-Lytton. Hazlitt was still spoken of as the most aggressive of the Cockneys, discourteous and unscrupulous, a bitter politician who would substitute universal submission to Napoleon for established monarchial institutions; but he is credited with strong powers of reason, of judicial criticism and of metaphysical speculation, and with perception of sentiment, truth and beauty.