Six weeks later, in the first days of July, appeared the volume Lamia, Isabella, and other Poems in right of which Keats’s name is immortal. La Belle Dame was not in it, nor In drear-nighted December, nor any sonnets, nor any of the verses composed on the Scotch tour, nor the fragment of The Eve of St Mark, nor, happily, The Cap and Bells: but it included all the odes except that on Indolence and the fragment To Maia, as well as nearly all the other minor pieces of any account written since Endymion, such as Fancy, the Mermaid Tavern and Robin Hood lines, with the three finished Tales, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Lamia, and the great fragment of Hyperion in its original, not its recast, form. Keats was too far gone in illness and the hopelessness of passion to be much moved by the success or failure of his new venture. But the story of its first reception is part of his biography, and shall be briefly told in this place.
The first critic in the field was the best: no less a master than Charles Lamb, who within a fortnight of the appearance of the volume contributed to the New Times a brief notice, anonymous but marked with all the charm and authority of his genius.[5] He begins by quoting the four famous stanzas picturing Madeline at her prayers in the moonlit chamber, and comments—‘Like the radiance, which comes from those old windows upon the limbs and garments of the damsel, is the almost Chaucer-like painting, with which this poet illumes every subject he touches. We have scarcely anything like it in modern description. It brings us back to ancient days and “Beauty making-beautiful old rhymes.”’ ‘The finest thing,’ Lamb continues, ‘in the volume is The Pot of Basil.’ Noting how the anticipation of the assassination is wonderfully conceived in the one epithet of ‘the murder’d man,’ he goes on to quote the stanzas telling the discovery of and digging for the corpse, ‘than which,’ he says. ‘there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer or in Spenser.’ It is to be noted that Lamb, who loved things Gothic better than things Grecian, ignores Hyperion, which most critics in praising the volume pitched on to the neglect of the rest, and proceeds to tell of Lamia, winding up with a return to The Pot of Basil:—
More exuberantly rich in imagery and painting is the story of the Lamia. It is of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of. Her first appearance in serpentine form—
| —A beauteous wreath with melancholy eyes— |
her dialogue with Hermes, the Star of Lethe, as he is called by one of these prodigal phrases which Mr Keats abounds in, which are each a poem in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a picture, all the dim regions and their inhabitants, and the sudden coming of a celestial among them; the charming of her into woman’s shape again by the God; her marriage with the beautiful Lycius; her magic palace, which those who knew the street, and remembered it complete from childhood, never remembered to have seen before; the few Persian mutes, her attendants,
| —who that same year Were seen about the markets: none knew where They could inhabit;— |
the high-wrought splendours of the nuptial bower, with the fading of the whole pageantry, Lamia, and all, away, before the glance of Apollonius,—are all that fairy land can do for us. They are for younger impressibilities. To us an ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies, rather than acknowledge she is fair.
Leigh Hunt, who during all this time was in all ways loyally doing his best for Keats’s encouragement and comfort, and had just dedicated his translation of Tasso’s Aminta to him as to one ‘equally pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical,’—Leigh Hunt within a month of the appearance of the volume reviewed and quoted from it with full appreciation in two numbers of the Indicator. His notice contained those judicious remarks which we have already cited on the philosophical weakness of Lamia, praising at the same time the gorgeousness of the snake description, and saying, of the lines on the music being the sole support of the magical palace-roof, ‘this is the very quintessence of the romantic.’ ‘When Mr Keats errs in his poetry,’ says Hunt in regard to the Pot of Basil, ‘it is from the ill-management of a good thing—exuberance of ideas’; and, comparing the contents of this volume with his earlier work, concludes as follows:—
The author’s versification is now perfected, the exuberances of his imagination restrained, and a calm power, the surest and loftiest of all power, takes place of the impatient workings of the younger god within him. The character of his genius is that of energy and voluptuousness, each able at will to take leave of the other, and possessing, in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to the best authors who can less combine them. Mr Keats undoubtedly takes his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets.
But Leigh Hunt’s praise of one of his own supposed disciples of the Cockney School would carry little weight outside the circle of special sympathizers. A better index to the way the wind was beginning to blow was the treatment of the volume in Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, of which the poet Thomas Campbell had lately been appointed editor, with the excellent Cyrus Redding as acting editor under him:—‘These poems are very far superior’, declares the critic, ‘to any which the author has previously committed to the press. They have nothing showy, or extravagant, or eccentric about them; but are pieces of calm beauty, or of lone and self-supported grandeur.’ In Lamia, ‘there is a mingling of Greek majesty with fairy luxuriance which we have not elsewhere seen.’ Isabella is compared with Barry Cornwall’s Sicilian Story: ‘the poem of Mr Keats has not the luxury of description, nor the rich love-scenes, of Mr Cornwall; but he tells the tale with a naked and affecting simplicity which goes irresistibly to the heart. The Eve of St Agnes is ‘a piece of consecrated fancy’, in which ‘a soft religious light is shed over the whole story.’ In Hyperion ‘the picture of the vast abode of Cybele and the Titans is ‘in the sublimest style of Æschylus’: and in conclusion the critic takes leave of Mr Keats ‘with wonder at the gigantic stride which he has taken, and with the good hope that if he proceeds in the high and pure style which he has now chosen, he will attain an exalted and a lasting station among English poets.’ Of the other chief literary reviews in England, the old-established Monthly begins in a strain scarcely less laudatory, but wavers and becomes admonitory before the end, while Keats’s dismal monitor of three years before, the sententious Eclectic Review, acknowledging in him ‘a young man possessed of an elegant fancy, a warm and lively imagination, and something above the average talents of persons who take to writing poetry’, proceeds to warn him against regarding imagination as the proper organ of poetry, to lecture him on his choice of subjects, his addiction to the Greek mythology, and to poetry for poetry’s sake (‘poetry, after all, if pursued as an end, is but child’s play’). The British Critic, more contemptuous even than Blackwood or the Quarterly in its handling of Endymion, this time prints a kind of palinode, admitting that ‘Mr Keats is a person of no ordinary genius’, and prophesying that if he will take Spenser and Milton for models instead of Leigh Hunt he ‘need not despair of attaining to a very high and enviable place in the public esteem’.