Looking upon his own work in his modest and unsanguine way, Shelley could not suppress the hope that this time he had written something that should not be utterly neglected. He had the poem printed at Pisa, whence a small number of copies only were sent to England. One immediate effect was to instigate the last and silliest—happily, perhaps, also the least remembered—of the Blackwood blackguardries. Not even the tragic experiences of the preceding winter had cured the conductors of that journal of their taste for savage ribaldry. John Scott, the keen-witted and warm-hearted editor, formerly of the Champion and latterly of Taylor’s and Hessey’s London Magazine, had denounced the ‘Z’ papers, and demanded a disclosure of Lockhart’s share in them and in the management of the magazine, in terms so peremptory and scathing that the threat of a challenge from Lockhart followed as an inevitable consequence. The clumsy, well meant intromission of third parties had only the effect of substituting Lockhart’s friend Christie in the broil for Lockhart himself. The duel was fought on January 16, 1821, exactly a week before Keats’s death, and Scott was killed. None the less, when late in the summer of the same year copies of Adonais reached England, remarks on it outdoing all previous outbreaks in folly and insolence were contributed to Blackwood by a comparatively new recruit, the learned and drunken young Dublin scholar William Maginn. Professing absurdly to regard the cockney school as a continuation of the ‘Della Cruscan’ school laughed out of existence by Gifford some five-and-twenty years earlier, the writer includes Shelley of all men (forgetting former laudations of him) among the cockneys, flings up a heel at the memory of Keats as ‘a young man who had left a decent calling for the melancholy trade of cockney-poetry and has lately died of a consumption after having written two or three little books of verse much neglected by the public’; and proceeds to give a comic analysis of Adonais, with some specimens of parody upon it, which were afterwards re-published without shame under Maginn’s name.
Eight years later, as we shall see, it was on the enthusiasm of a band of young Cambridge men for Adonais that the fame of Keats began to be spread abroad among our younger generation in England. In the meantime the chief effect of the poem was to confirm in the minds of the few readers whom it reached the sentimental view of Keats as an over-sensitive weakling whom the breath of hostile criticism had withered up. And when two years later Byron printed in the eleventh canto of Don Juan his patronizing semi-palinode, part laudatory part contemptuous, on Keats, his closing couplet,
| Strange that the mind, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuffed out by an article, |
stamped that impression for good on the minds of men in far wider circles, until the publication of Monckton Milnes’s memoir after five-and-twenty years brought evidence to modify if not to efface it.
None of Keats’s friends at home did anything in the days following his death to counteract such impression. Some of them, as we have said, fully shared and helped to propagate it. Haydon, writing to Miss Mitford soon after the news of the death reached England, says ‘Keats was a victim of personal abuse and want of nerve to bear it. Ought he to have sunk in that way because a few quizzers told him he was an apothecary’s apprentice?... Fiery, impetuous, ungovernable and undecided, he expected the world to bow at once to his talents as his friends had done, and he had not patience to bear the natural irritation of envy at the undoubted proof he gave of strength.’ In his private journal Haydon treats the events in the same spirit, not forgetting to imply a contrast between Keats’s weakness and his own power of stubbornly presenting his prickles to his enemies. Reynolds, it would seem, had more excuse than others for adopting the same view, inasmuch as Keats had said to him on his sick-bed, in one of his extremely rare allusions to the subject,—‘If I die, you must ruin Lockhart.’ In the summer following Keats’s death, Reynolds published a little volume of verse dedicated to the young bride at whose bidding he was abandoning literature for law, and included in it the two versified tales from Boccaccio which he had originally planned for printing together with Keats’s Isabella: as to which pieces he says,—
They were to have been associated with tales from the same source, intended to have been written by a friend, but illness on his part, and distracting engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our plan at the time; and Death now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated it for ever! He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I possessed, and yet he was not kinder perhaps to me, than to others. His intense mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have done the world some service, had his life been spared—but he was of too sensitive a nature—and thus he was destroyed!
Later in the same summer, 1822, befell the tragedy of Shelley’s own death, such a tragedy of a poet’s death as a poet might have loved to invent with all its circumstances,—the disappearance of the boat in a squall; the recovery of the body with the volume of Keats’s poems in the coat-pocket; its consumption on a funeral pyre by the Tuscan shore in the presence of Leigh Hunt, newly come to Italy on Shelley’s invitation, of Byron, and of the Cornish sea-rover and social rebel Trelawny, a personage who might well have been a creation of Byron’s brain; the snatching of the heart from the flames; the removal of the ashes to Rome, and their deposit in a new Protestant burial-ground adjacent to the old, where the remains of Trelawny were to be laid beside them after the lapse of nearly sixty years.
Two years later again, when Byron had himself died during the struggle for the liberation of Greece, Hazlitt took occasion to criticize Shelley’s posthumous poems in the Edinburgh Review, and having his own bitter grounds of quarrel with the Blackwood gang, strained the bonds of prose in an outburst of half-lyric indignation on behalf of Keats as follows:—
Mr Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr Keats’s poetry grasped with one hand in his bosom! These are two out of four poets, patriots and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years, both of whom have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. Keats died young; and ‘yet his infelicity had years too many.’ A canker had blighted the tender bloom that o’erspread a face in which youth and genius strove with beauty; the shaft was sped—venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and followed him to his grave. And yet there are those who could trample on the faded flower—men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of merriment—who laugh loud over the silent urn of Genius, and play out their game of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of their victims!
Severn, living on at Rome in the halo of sympathy and regard with which the story of his friend’s death and his own devotion had justly surrounded him, seems to have done nothing to remove from the minds of the English colony through successive years an impression which he knew to have been only in a very partial measure true. And even Brown, when in the year after Keats’s death he came out with his natural son, a child of a few years, to make his home in Italy, in his turn let himself fall in with the view of Keats’s sufferings and of their origin which had taken such strong hold on the minds of most persons interested and commended itself so naturally to the tender-hearted and the righteously indignant. Brown did not come to Rome, but established himself first at Pisa and afterwards at Florence. At Pisa he saw something both of Trelawny and of Byron, who took to him kindly; and made several contributions to the Liberal during the brief period while Hunt continued to conduct that journal at Pisa after Shelley’s death and before his final rupture with Byron and departure from Italy. The Greek adventure having in 1823 carried off Trelawny for a season and Byron never to return, Brown settled at Florence and became for some years a popular member of the lettered English colony in Tuscany, living in intimacy with Seymour Kirkup, the artist and man of fortune who was for many years the centre of that circle, and before long admitted to the regard and hospitality of Walter Savage Landor in his beautiful Fiesolan villa. Landor, as readers will hardly need to be reminded, was an early, firm, and just admirer of Keats’s poetry.