One immediate result of the Edinburgh criticism was to provoke an almost incredible outburst of jealous fury on the part of the personage then most conspicuous on the stage of England’s, nay of the world’s, poetry, Lord Byron. Byron, with next to no real critical power, could bring dazzling resources of wit and rhetoric to the support of any random opinion, traditional or revolutionary, he might happen by whim or habit to entertain. In these days he was just entering the lists as a self-appointed champion of Pope, the artificial school, and eighteenth century critical tradition in general, against Pope’s latest editor and depreciator, the clerical sonneteer William Lisle Bowles. Ever since the Pope-Boileau passage in Keats’s Sleep and Poetry it had been Byron’s pleasure to regard Keats with gratuitous contempt and aversion. When Murray sent him the Lamia volume with a parcel of other books to Ravenna, he wrote back, ‘Pray send me no more poetry but what is rare and decidedly good. There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables that I am ashamed to look at them.... No more Keats, I entreat;—flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself; there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.’ A month later, evidently not having read a word of Keats’s book, he comes across Jeffrey’s praise of it in the Edinburgh Review, and thereupon falls into a fit of anger so foul-mouthed and outrageous that his latest, far from squeamish editors have had to mask its grossness under a cloud of asterisks. A little later he repeats the same disgusting obscenities in cool blood: his only quotable remark on the subject being as follows:—‘Of the praises of that little dirty blackguard Keates in the Edinburgh, I shall observe as Johnson did when Sheridan the actor got a pension: “What, has he got a pension? Then it is time I should give up mine.” Nobody could be prouder of the praises of the Edinburgh than I was, or more alive to their censure. At present all the men they have ever praised are degraded by that insane article.’ By and by he proceeded to administer his own castigation to ‘Mr John Ketch’ in a second letter written for the Pope-Bowles controversy: but Keats having died meanwhile he withheld this from publication, and a little later, perhaps at the prompting of his own better mind, but more probably through the good influence of Shelley, took in Don Juan the altered tone about Keats which all the world knows, and having been at first thus savagely bent on hunting with the hounds, turned and chose to run part of the way, as far as suited him, with the hare.
Shelley, of course, judged for himself; was incapable of a thought towards a brother poet that was not generous; and had moreover a feeling of true and particular kindness towards Keats. We have seen how wisely and fairly he judged Endymion. Were we to take merely his own words written at the time, we might think that he failed to do justice to the new volume as a whole. His first impression of it, coupled with a wildly overdrawn picture which had reached him of Keats’s sufferings under the stings of the reviewers, apparently determined him to sit down and draft that indignant letter to Gifford, never completed or delivered, pleading against the repetition of any such treatment of his new volume as Endymion had received from the Quarterly. In this Shelley speaks of Hyperion as though it were the one thing he admired in the book: and writing about the same time to Peacock, he says ‘Among modern things which have reached me is a volume of poems by Keats; in other respects insignificant enough, but containing the fragment of a poem called Hyperion. I dare say you have not time to read it; but it certainly is an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats which I confess I had not before.’ And again, ‘Among your anathemas of modern poetry, do you include Keats’s Hyperion? I think it very fine. His other poems are worth little; but if the Hyperion be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.’ In considering these utterances we should remember that they were addressed to correspondents bound to be unsympathetic. Gifford would be so as a matter of course: while Peacock had from old Marlow days been a disbeliever in Keats and his poetry, and had lately adopted a public attitude of disbelief in modern poetry altogether. We must also remember that Shelley had himself been wrought into a mood of unwonted intolerance of certain fashions in poetry by some of Barry Cornwall’s recent performances, which he held to be an out-Hunting of Hunt and out-Byroning of Byron.[8] There is a statement of Medwin’s which, if Medwin were ever a witness much to be trusted, we would rather take as representing Shelley’s ripened and permanent opinion of the contents of the Lamia volume than his own words to Gifford or Peacock. ‘He perceived’, says Medwin, ‘in every one of these productions a marked and continually progressing improvement, and hailed with delight his release from his leading strings, his emancipation from what he called a “perverse and limited school”. The Pot of Basil and The Eve of St Agnes he read and re-read with ever new delight, and looked upon Hyperion as almost faultless, grieving that it was but a fragment and that Keats had not been encouraged to complete a work worthy of Milton.’ At all events Shelley, apart from the immortal tribute of Adonais, has left other words of his own which may content us, addressed to a different correspondent, as to what he felt about Keats and his work and promise on the whole, without reference to one poem rather than another. I mean those in which he expresses to Mrs Leigh Hunt his hope to see and take care of Keats in Italy:—‘I consider his a most valuable life, and I am deeply interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician both of his body and of his soul, to keep the one warm, and to teach the other Greek and Spanish. I am aware, indeed, in part, that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me; and this is an additional motive, and will be an added pleasure.’
The opinions of neither of these two famous men, Byron and Shelley, will have had any immediate effect in England. Murray could not possibly disseminate Byron’s private obscenities, and Byron’s own intended public castigation of Keats in a second letter to Bowles was, as we have seen, withheld. On the other side Shelley made no public use of the draft of his indignant letter to Gifford, and Peacock would not be by way of saying much about his private expressions of enthusiasm for Hyperion. But we can gather the impression current in sympathetic circles about Keats’s future from a couple of entries in the December diaries of Crabb Robinson. He tells how he has been reading out some of the new volume, first Hyperion and then The Pot of Basil, to his friends the Aders’, and adds,—‘There is a force, wildness, and originality in the works of this young poet which, if his perilous journey to Italy does not destroy him, promise to place him at the head of our next generation of poets. Lamb places him next to Wordsworth—not meaning any comparison, for they are dissimilar’ ... and again, ‘I am greatly mistaken if Keats do not soon take a high place among our poets. Great feeling and a powerful imagination are shown in this little volume.’ Had his health held out, such recognition would have been all and more than all Keats asked for or would have thought he had yet earned. But praise and dispraise were all one to him before now, and we must go back and follow the tragedy of his personal history to its close.
[1] A letter of Procter’s to Keats shows that he had been among Keats’s visitors during the weeks that followed his attack of hæmorrhage (see Buxton Forman, Complete Works, v. 163). Whether they had been much or at all acquainted before then seems uncertain, but Procter’s impressions of Keats recorded almost half a century later read as though he had known him while still in health:—
‘I saw him only two or three times before his departure for Italy. I was introduced to him by Leigh Hunt, and found him very pleasant, and free from all affectation in manner and opinion. Indeed, it would be difficult to discover a man with a more bright and open countenance. He was always ready to hear and to reply; to discuss, to reason, to admit; and to join in serious talk or common gossip. It has been said that his poetry was affected and effeminate. I can only say that I never encountered a more manly and simple young man. In person he was short, and had eyes large and wonderfully luminous, and a resolute bearing; not defiant, but well sustained.’
[2] As against this judgment, formed from photographs of the wrecked picture and from the general character of Haydon’s work, let it be remembered that Hazlitt, no mean judge, declares that the head of Wordsworth is of all his portraits ‘the most like his drooping weight of thought and expression.’ Lamb’s complimentary punning address, In tabulam eximii pictoris, with its English translation, may be taken as exercises in friendly congratulation rather than in criticism. The picture in its present state is reproduced and discussed by Mr Louis A. Holman in the New York Bookman, Feb. 1913, pp. 608 sqq.
[3] Medwin’s carelessness of statement and workmanship are well known: he is perfectly casual in the use of quotation marks and the like, and in the original edition of his untrustworthy Life of Shelley it was difficult to be sure that these words were quoted as textually Mrs Lindon’s own. But in re-editing the book from its author’s revised and expanded copy, Mr Buxton Forman has left no doubt on the matter.
[4] I allude to the various editions issued in recent years by the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, to whom I would hereby appeal to let the piece be cancelled on the plates and the earlier text re-established.
[5] The recognition of this review and its inclusion in the canon of Lamb’s works is one of the many services for which thanks are due to his never-enough-to-be-praised editor, Mr E. V. Lucas (The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. I, pp. 200, 470).