“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: