“I wrote to Hunt yesterday—scarcely know what I said in it. I could not talk about Poetry in the way I should have liked for I was not in humour with either his or mine. His self delusions are very lamentable—they have inticed him into a Situation which I should be less eager after than that of a galley Slave,—what you observe thereon is very true must be in time [sic].
Perhaps it is a self delusion to say so—but I think I could not be deceived in the manner that Hunt is—may I die to-morrow if I am to be. There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter oneself into the idea of being a great Poet....”[114]
To judge from the testimony of his brother George it is not surprising that Keats succumbed to Haydon’s influence against Hunt: “his nervous, morbid temperament led him to misconstrue the motives of his best friends.”[115] In the last days of his life, his suspicion and bitterness were general. In a letter to Bailey, June, 1818, Keats says: “I have suspected everybody.”[116] January, 1820, he wrote Georgiana Keats, “Upon the whole I dislike mankind.”[117] Haydon may have sincerely believed Hunt’s influence to be injurious because of the latter’s unorthodoxy in matters of religion. He wrote that Keats “could not bring his mind to bear on one object, and was at the mercy of every petty theory that Leigh Hunt’s ingenuity would suggest.... He had a tendency to religion when I first knew him, but Leigh Hunt soon forced it from his mind.... Leigh Hunt was the unhinger of his best dispositions. Latterly, Keats saw Leigh Hunt’s weaknesses. I distrusted his leader, but Keats would not cease to visit him, because he thought Hunt ill-used. This shows Keats’s goodness of heart.”[118] It is not to be regretted that Haydon lessened Keats’s estimate of Hunt’s literary infallibility, for his influence was most injurious in that direction; but it is to be regretted that he impugned a friendship in which Hunt was certainly sincere and by which Keats had benefited.
In September, just before Keats’s return, he seems somewhat mollified and writes to John Hamilton Reynolds of Leigh Hunt’s pleasant companionship; he has failings, “but then his make-ups are very good.”[119]
On his return to Hampstead in October, 1817, Keats found affairs among the circle in a very bad way.[120]
Everybody “seems at Loggerheads—There’s Hunt infatuated—there’s Haydon’s picture in statu quo—There’s Hunt walks up and down his painting room—criticising every head most unmercifully. There’s Horace Smith tired of Hunt. ‘The web of our life is of mingled yarn.’... I am quite disgusted with literary men and will never know another except Wordsworth—no not even Byron. Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydon and Hunt have known each other many years.... Haydon says to me, Keats, don’t show your lines to Hunt on any Account or he will have done half for you—so it appears Hunt wishes it to be thought. When he met Reynolds in the Theatre, John told him that I was getting on to the completion of 4,000 lines—Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me they would have been 7,000! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he to other people? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on this subject from some Lady—which contains a caution to me, thro’ him, on the subject—now is not all this a most paultry (sic) thing to think about?”[121]
Hunt had tried to persuade Keats not to write a long poem. Keats wrote of this: “Hunt’s dissuasion was of no avail[122]—I refused to visit Shelley that I might have my own unfettered scope; and after all, I shall have the reputation of Hunt’s élève. His corrections and amputations will by the knowing ones be traced in the poem.”[123]
During 1818, Leigh Hunt in his critical work remained silent concerning Keats, probably because of his sincere disapproval of Endymion and secondly, because he realized that his praise would be injurious. The attacks on Hunt in Blackwood’s and the Quarterly had foreshadowed an attack of the same virulent kind on Keats. The realization came with the publication of Endymion. The article on “Johnny Keats,” fourth of the series on the Cockney School in Blackwood’s Magazine, appeared almost simultaneously with his return from Scotland, and the one in the Quarterly in September of the same year. These will be discussed in a later chapter. Suspicions of neglect on the part of Hunt murmured in Keats’s mind like a discordant undertone, although the friendship continued as warm as ever on Hunt’s part. Keats was passive, without, however, the old sense of dependence and trust. December 28, 1817, he writes to his brothers of the “drivelling egotism” of The Examiner article on the obsoletion of Christmas gambols and pastimes.[124] In a journal letter written to George Keats and his wife in Louisville during December and January, 1819, the old liking has become almost repugnance: “Hunt keeps on in his old way—I am completely tired of it all. He has lately published a Pocket Book called the literary Pocket-Book—full of the most sickening stuff you can imagine”;[125] yet Keats suffered himself to become a contributor to this same book with two sonnets, The Human Seasons and To Ailsa Rock. Again in the same letter:
“The night we went to Novello’s there was a complete set-to of Mozart and punning. I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow my own inclinations I should never meet any of that set again, not even Hunt who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are with him, but in reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in matters of taste and morals. He understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself possesses,—he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually. Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts—and many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a nothing.”[126]
Continuing in the same strain: