“I will have no more Wordsworth or Hunt in particular. Why should we be of the tribe of Manasseh when we can wander with Esau? Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses?... I don’t mean to deny Wordsworth’s grandeur and Hunt’s merit, but I mean to say that we need not to be teazed with grandeur and merit, when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. Let us have the old Poets and Robin Hood.”[127]
And again:
“Hunt has damned Hampstead and masks and sonnets and Italian tales. Wordsworth has damned the lakes—Milman has damned the old drama—West has damned wholesale. Peacock has damned satire—Ollier has damned Music—Hazlitt has damned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the Man?!”[128]
A parody on the conversation of Hunt’s set, in which he is the principal actor, carries with it a ridicule that is unkinder than the bitterness of dislike, and difficult to reconcile with the fact that Keats at the same time preserved the semblance of friendship.[129]
“Scene, a little Parlour—Enter Hunt—Gattie—Hazlitt—Mrs. Novello—Ollier. Gattie:—Ha! Hunt got into your new house? Ha! Mrs. Novello: seen Altam and his wife? Mrs. N.: Yes (with a grin) it’s Mr. Hunt’s isn’t it? Gattie: Hunt’s? no, ha! Mr. Ollier, I congratulate you upon the highest compliment I ever heard paid to the Book. Mr. Hazlitt, I hope you are well. Hazlitt:—Yes Sir, no Sir—Mr. Hunt (at the Music) ‘La Biondina’ etc. Hazlitt, did you ever hear this?—“La Biondina” &c. Hazlitt: O no Sir—I never—Ollier:—Do Hunt give it us over again—divine—Gattie:—divino—Hunt when does your Pocket-Book come out—Hunt:—‘What is this absorbs me quite?’ O we are spinning on a little, we shall floridize soon I hope. Such a thing was very much wanting—people think of nothing but money getting—now for me I am rather inclined to the liberal side of things. I am reckoned lax in my Christian principles, etc., etc., etc., etc.”[130]
Such a dual attitude in Keats can be explained only by a dual feeling in his mind, for it is impossible to believe him capable of deliberate deceit. He may have realized Hunt’s affectation and superficiality and “disgusting taste”; he was probably swayed by Haydon to distrust Hunt’s morals; the suspicions planted by Haydon concerning Endymion rankled; but at the same time Hunt’s charm of personality, and the assistance and encouragement given in the first days of their friendship, formed a bond difficult to break. Of Leigh Hunt’s attitude there can be no doubt, for through his long life of more than threescore years and ten, filled with many friendships of many kinds, he can in no instance be charged with insincerity. There is no conclusive proof on record to show him deserving of the insinuations which Keats believed in respect to Endymion, for Haydon is not trustworthy, and the opinion of a lady given through Haydon may be dismissed on the same grounds.[131] Reynolds’ testimony is not damaging in itself, and in the absence of facts to the contrary may have been wrongly construed by Keats. To the charges against himself, Leigh Hunt has replied in the following passage, “affecting and persuasive in its unrestrained pathos of remonstrance”:[132]
“an irritable morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had none; for I learned the other day, with extreme pain, such as I am sure so kind and reflecting a man as Mr. Monckton Milnes would not have inflicted on me could he have foreseen it, that Keats at one period of his intercourse suspected Shelley and myself of a wish to see him undervalued! Such are the tricks which constant infelicity can play with the most noble natures. For Shelley, let Adonais answer. For myself, let every word answer which I uttered about him, living and dead, and such as I now proceed to repeat. I might as well have been told that I wished to see the flowers or the stars undervalued, or my own heart that loved him.”[133]
Hunt’s feeling towards Keats is nowhere better expressed than in his Autobiography: “I could not love him as deeply as I did Shelley. That was impossible. But my affection was only second to the one which I entertained for that heart of hearts.”[134]
Keats’s atonement is contained in the last letter that he ever wrote: “If I recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness, and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven.”[135]
Haydon’s influence over Keats was at its height in 1817 and 1818.[136] His gifts and his enthusiasm, his “fresh magnificence”[137] carried Keats by storm. It was not until about July 1818 that a reaction against Haydon in favor of Hunt set in, brought about by money transactions between Keats and Haydon, and the indifference of the latter in repaying a debt when he knew Keats’s necessity.[138] Keats probably never ceased to feel that Hunt’s influence as a poet had been injurious, as indeed it was, but the relative stability of his two friends adjusted itself after this experience with Haydon. Affairs seem to have been smoothed over with Hunt, and were not disturbed again until a short time before Keats’s departure for Italy, when his morbid suspicions, which even led him to accuse his friend Brown of flirting with Fanny Brawne,[139] seem to have been renewed.