To advert to what Lord Byron wrote about Keats as having been killed by The Quarterly Review is hardly worth while. His first reference to the subject is in a letter to Mr. Murray (publisher of The Quarterly) dated April 26, 1821. In this he expressly names Shelley as his informant, and with Shelley as an authority for the allegation I have already dealt.
There are two writings of Leigh Hunt in which the question of Keats and his critics is touched upon. The first is the review, August 1820, of the “Lamia” volume. In speaking of the “Ode to a Nightingale” he says—
“The poem will be the more striking to the reader when he understands, what we take a friend’s liberty in telling him, that the author’s powerful mind has for some time past been inhabiting a sickened and shaken body; and that in the meanwhile it has had to contend with feelings that make a fine nature ache for its species, even when it would disdain to do so for itself—we mean critical malignity, that unhappy envy which would wreak its own tortures upon others, especially upon those that really feel for it already.”
Hunt’s posthumous Memoir of Keats was first published in 1828. He refers to the attack in Blackwood upon himself and upon Keats, and says: “I little suspected, as I did afterwards, that the hunters had struck him; that a delicate organization, which already anticipated a premature death, made him feel his ambition thwarted by these fellows; and that the very impatience of being impatient was resented by him and preyed on his mind.” Hunt also says regarding Byron—“I told him he was mistaken in attributing Keats’s death to the critics, though they had perhaps hastened and certainly embittered it.”
Another item of evidence may be cited. It is from a letter written by George Keats to Mr. Dilke in April 1824, and refers to the insolences of Blackwood’s Magazine. George, it will be remembered, was already out of England before the articles appeared in Blackwood and in The Quarterly, and he only saw a little of John Keats at the close of the ensuing year, 1819. “Blackwood’s Magazine has fallen into my hands. I could have walked 100 miles to have dirked him à l’Américaine for his cruelly associating John in the Cockney School, and other blackguardisms. Such paltry ridicule will have wounded deeper than the severest criticisms, particularly as he regarded what is called the cockneyism of the coterie with so much disgust. He either knew John well, and touched him in the tenderest place purposely; or knew nothing of him, and supposed he went all lengths with the set in their festering opinions and cockney affectations.” And from a later letter dated in April 1825: “After all, Blackwood and The Quarterly, associated with our family disease, consumption, were ministers of death sufficiently venomous, cruel, and deadly, to have consigned one of less sensibility to a premature grave.... John was the very soul of courage and manliness, and as much like the Holy Ghost as ‘Johnny Keats.’”
The evidence of latest date on this subject (there is none such in Severn’s correspondence[17]) is that of Cowden Clarke. In his “Recollections,” already mentioned, he refers to the attacks upon Keats, having his eye, it would seem, rather upon those in Blackwood than in The Quarterly, and he remarks: “To say that these disgusting misrepresentations did not affect the consciousness and self-respect of Keats would be to under-rate the sensitiveness of his nature. He did feel and resent the insult, but far more the injustice of the treatment he had received. They no doubt had injured him in the most wanton manner; but, if they or my Lord Byron ever for one moment supposed that he was crushed or even cowed in spirit by the treatment he had received, never were they more deluded.”
I have now given all the evidence at first or second hand which seems to be producible on that much-vexed question—Was Keats (to adopt Byron’s phrase) “snuffed out by an article"? The upshot appears to me to be as follows. In his inmost mind Keats was from first to last raised very far above that level where the petty gales of review-criticism blow, puffing out the canvas of feeble reputations, and fraying that of strong ones. Nevertheless he was sensitive to derisive criticism, and more especially to personal ridicule, and even (as Haydon records) gave way to his feelings of irritation with reckless and culpable self-abandonment. This passed off partially, and would have passed off entirely—it has left in his letters no trace worth mentioning, and in his poetry no trace at all, other than that of executive power braced up to do constantly better and yet better; but then, about a year and a half after the reviews, supervened his fatal illness (which cannot be reasonably supposed to have had its root in any critiques), and all the heartache of his unsatisfied love. This last formed the real agony of his waning life: it must have been reinforced to some extent by resentment against a mode of reviewing which would contribute to the thwarting of his poetic ambition, and make him go down into the grave with a “name writ in water;” but the reviews themselves counted for very little in the last wrestlings of his spirit with death and nothingness. By general constitution of mind few men were less adapted than Keats for being “snuffed out by an article,” or more certain to snuff one out and leave all its ill-savour to its scribe.
CHAPTER VI.
The first important poem to which Keats sets his hand after finishing “Endymion” was “Isabella, or The Pot of Basil.” This was completed by April 27, 1818, the same month in which “Endymion” was published. Hamilton Reynolds had suggested the project of producing a volume of tales in verse, founded upon stories in Boccaccio’s “Decameron”; some of the tales would have been executed by Reynolds himself, who did in fact produce on this plan the two poems named collectively “The Garden of Florence.” As it turned out, however, Keats’s tale appeared in a volume of his own, 1820, and Reynolds’s two came out independently in the succeeding year.