“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 Ambrosianæ 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]