Adonais Part 2

His poems, consisting of three successive volumes, have been already referred to here. The first volume, the _Poems_ of 1817, is mostly of a juvenile kind, containing only scattered suggestions of rich endowment and eventual excellence. _Endymion_ is lavish and profuse, nervous and languid, the wealth of a prodigal scattered in largesse of baubles and of gems. The last volume--comprising the _Hyperion_--is the work of a n.o.ble poetic artist, powerful and brilliant both in imagination and in expression. Of the writings published since their author's death, the only one of first-rate excellence is the fragmentary _Eve of St. Mark_.

There is also the drama of _Otho the Great_, written in co-operation with Armitage Brown; and in Keats's letters many admirable thoughts are admirably worded.

As to the relations between Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, I have to refer back to the preceding memoir of Sh.e.l.ley.

ADONAIS:

ITS COMPOSITION AND BIBLIOGRAPHY.

For nearly two months after the death of Keats, 23 February, 1821, Sh.e.l.ley appears to have remained in ignorance of the event: he knew it on or before 19 April. The precise date when he began his Elegy does not seem to be recorded: one may suppose it to have been in the latter half of May. On 5 June he wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne: 'I have been engaged these last days in composing a poem on the death of Keats, which will shortly be finished; and I antic.i.p.ate the pleasure of reading it to you, as some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it. It is a highly wrought piece of art, and perhaps better, in point of composition, than anything I have written.'

A letter to Mr. Ollier followed immediately afterwards.

'Pisa, June 8th, 1821,

'You may announce for publication a poem ent.i.tled _Adonais_. It is a lament on the death of poor Keats, with some interspersed stabs on the a.s.sa.s.sins of his peace and of his fame; and will be preceded by a criticism on _Hyperion_, a.s.serting the due claims which that fragment gives him to the rank which I have a.s.signed him. My poem is finished, and consists of about forty Spenser stanzas [fifty-five as published]. I shall send it to you, either printed at Pisa, or transcribed in such a manner as it shall be difficult for the reviser to leave such errors as a.s.sist the obscurity of the _Prometheus_. But in case I send it printed, it will be merely that mistakes may be avoided. I shall only have a few copies struck off in the cheapest manner. If you have interest enough in the subject, I could wish that you enquired of some of the friends and relations of Keats respecting the circ.u.mstances of his death, and could transmit me any information you may be able to collect; and especially as [to] the degree in which (as I am a.s.sured) the brutal attack in the _Quarterly Review_ excited the disease by which he perished.'

The criticism which Sh.e.l.ley intended to write on _Hyperion_ remained, to all appearance, unwritten. It will be seen, from the letter of Sh.e.l.ley to Mr. Severn cited further on (p. 34), that, from the notion of writing a criticism on _Hyperion_ to precede _Adonais_, his intention developed into the project of writing a criticism and biography of Keats in general, to precede a volume of his entire works; but that, before the close of November, the whole scheme was given up, on the ground that it would produce no impression on an unregardful public.

In another letter to Ollier, 11 June, the poet says: 'Adonais is finished, and you will soon receive it. It is little adapted for popularity, but is perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions.'

Sh.e.l.ley on 16 June caused his Elegy to be printed in Pisa, 'with the types of Didot': a small quarto, and a handsome one (notwithstanding his project of cheapness); the introductory matter filling five pages, and the poem itself going on from p. 7 to p. 25. It appeared in blue paper wrappers, with a woodcut of a basket of flowers within an ornamental border. Its price was three and sixpence: of late years 40 has been given for it--perhaps more. Up to 13 July only one copy had reached the author's hands: this he then sent on to the Gisbornes, at Leghorn. Some copies of the Pisa edition were afterwards put into circulation in London: there was no separate English edition. The Gisbornes having acknowledged the Elegy with expressions of admiration, the poet replied as follows:

'Bagni [di Pisa], July 19.

'MY DEAREST FRIENDS,

'I am fully repaid for the painful emotions from which some verses of my poem sprung by your sympathy and approbation; which is all the reward I expect, and as much as I desire. It is not for me to judge whether, in the high praise your feelings a.s.sign me, you are right or wrong. The poet and the man are two different natures: though they exist together, they may be unconscious of each other, and incapable of deciding on each other's powers and efforts by any reflex act. The decision of the cause whether or not I am a poet is removed from the present time to the hour when our posterity shall a.s.semble: but the court is a very severe one, and I fear that the verdict will be "Guilty--death."'

A letter to Mr. Ollier was probably a little later. It says: 'I send you a sketch for a frontispiece to the poem _Adonais_. Pray let it be put into the engraver's hands immediately, as the poem is already on its way to you, and I should wish it to be ready for its arrival. The poem is beautifully printed, and--what is of more consequence--correctly: indeed, it was to obtain this last point that I sent it to the press at Pisa. In a few days you will receive the bill of lading.' Nothing is known as to the sketch which Sh.e.l.ley thus sent. It cannot, I presume, have been his own production, nor yet Severn's: possibly it was supplied by Lieutenant Williams, who had some apt.i.tude as an amateur artist.

I add some of the poet's other expressions regarding _Adonais_, which he evidently regarded with more complacency than any of his previous works--at any rate, as a piece of execution. Hitherto his favourite had been _Prometheus Unbound_: I am fain to suppose that that great effort did not now hold a second place in his affections, though he may have considered that the _Adonais_, as being a less arduous feat, came nearer to reaching its goal. (To Peac.o.c.k, August, 1821.) 'I have sent you by the Gisbornes a copy of the Elegy on Keats. The subject, I know, will not please you; but the composition of the poetry, and the taste in which it is written, I do not think bad.' (To Hunt, 26 August.) 'Before this you will have seen _Adonais_. Lord Byron--I suppose from modesty on account of his being mentioned in it--did not say a word of _Adonais_[13], though he was loud in his praise of _Prometheus_, and (what you will not agree with him in) censure of _The Cenci_.' (To Horace Smith, 14 September,) 'I am glad you like _Adonais_, and particularly that you do not think it metaphysical, which I was afraid it was. I was resolved to pay some tribute of sympathy to the unhonoured dead; but I wrote, as usual, with a total ignorance of the effect that I should produce.' (To Ollier, 25 September.) 'The _Adonais_, in spite of its mysticism, is the least imperfect of my compositions; and, as the image of my regret and honour for poor Keats, I wish it to be so. I shall write to you probably by next post on the subject of that poem; and should have sent the promised criticism for the second edition, had I not mislaid, and in vain sought for, the volume that contains _Hyperion_.' (To Ollier, 14 November.) 'I am especially curious to hear the fate of _Adonais_. I confess I should be surprised if that poem were born to an immortality of oblivion.' (To Ollier, 11 January, 1822.) 'I was also more than commonly interested in the success of _Adonais_. I do not mean the sale, but the effect produced; and I should have [been]

glad to have received some communication from you respecting it. I do not know even whether it has been published, and still less whether it has been republished with the alterations I sent.' As to the alterations sent nothing definite is known, but some details bearing on this point will be found in our Notes, p. 105, &c. (To Gisborne, 10 April) 'I know what to think of _Adonais_, but what to think of those who confound it with the many bad poems of the day I know not.' This expression seems to indicate that Mr. Gisborne had sent Sh.e.l.ley some of the current criticisms--there were probably but few in all--upon _Adonais_: to this matter I shall recur further on. (To Gisborne, 18 June.) 'The _Adonais_ I wished to have had a fair chance, both because it is a favourite with me, and on account of the memory of Keats--who was a poet of great genius, let the cla.s.sic party say what it will.'

Earlier than the latest of these extracts Sh.e.l.ley had sent to Mr. Severn a copy of _Adonais_, along with a letter which I append.

'Pisa, Nov. 29th, 1821.

'DEAR SIR,

'I send you the Elegy on poor Keats, and I wish it were better worth your acceptance. You will see, by the preface, that it was written before I could obtain any particular account of his last moments. All that I still know was communicated to me by a friend who had derived his information from Colonel Finch, I have ventured [in the Preface] to express as I felt the respect and admiration which _your_ conduct towards him demands.

'In spite of his transcendent genius, Keats never was, nor ever will be, a popular poet; and the total neglect and obscurity in which the astonishing remains of his mind still lie was hardly to be dissipated by a writer who, however he may differ from Keats in more important qualities, at least resembles him in that accidental one, a want of popularity.

'I have little hope therefore that the poem I send you will excite any attention, nor do I feel a.s.sured that a critical notice of his writings would find a single reader. But for these considerations, it had been my intention to have collected the remnants of his compositions, and to have published them with a Life and criticism. Has he left any poems or writings of whatsoever kind, and in whose possession are they? Perhaps you would oblige me by information on this point.

'Many thanks for the picture you promise me [presumably a portrait of Keats, but Sh.e.l.ley does not seem ever to have received one from Severn]: I shall consider it among the most sacred relics of the past. For my part, I little expected, when I last saw Keats at my friend Leigh Hunt's, that I should survive him.

'Should you ever pa.s.s through Pisa, I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you, and of cultivating an acquaintance into something pleasant, begun under such melancholy auspices.

'Accept, my dear Sir, the a.s.surance of my highest esteem, and believe me

'Your most sincere and faithful servant,

'PERCY B. Sh.e.l.lEY.

'Do you know Leigh Hunt? I expect him and his family here every day.'

It may have been observed that Sh.e.l.ley, whenever he speaks of critical depreciation of Keats, refers only to one periodical, the _Quarterly Review_: probably he did not distinctly know of any other: but the fact is that _Blackwood's Magazine_ was worse than the _Quarterly_. The latter was sneering and supercilious: _Blackwood_ was vulgarly taunting and insulting, and seems to have provoked Keats the more of the two, though perhaps he considered the attack in the _Quarterly_ to be more detrimental to his literary standing. The _Quarterly_ notice is of so much import in the life and death of Keats, and in the genesis of _Adonais_, that I shall give it, practically _in extenso_, before closing this section of my work: with _Blackwood_ I can deal at once. A series of articles _On the c.o.c.kney School of Poetry_ began in this magazine in October, 1817, being directed mainly and very venomously against Leigh Hunt. No. 4 of the series appeared in August, 1818, falling foul of Keats. It is difficult to say whether the priority in abusing Keats should of right be a.s.signed to _Blackwood_ or to the _Quarterly_: the critique in the latter review belongs to the number for April, 1818, but this number was not actually issued until September.

The writer of the _Blackwood_ papers signed himself Z. Z. is affirmed to have been Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, and afterwards editor of the _Quarterly Review_: more especially the article upon Keats is attributed to Lockhart. A different account, as to the series in general, is that the author was John Wilson (Christopher North), revised by Mr. William Blackwood. But Z. resisted more than one vigorous challenge to unmask, and some doubt as to his ident.i.ty may still remain.

Here are some specimens of the amenity with which Keats was treated in _Blackwood's Magazine_:--

'His friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town.... The frenzy of the _Poems_ [Keats's first volume, 1817] was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of _Endymion_.... We hope however that, in so young a person and with a const.i.tution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable....

Mr. Hunt is a small poet, but a clever man; Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty abilities which he has done everything in his power to spoil.... It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet: so back to the shop, Mr.

John, back to "plaster, pills, and ointment-boxes," &c. But for Heaven's sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.'

Even the death of Keats, in 1821, did not abate the rancour of _Blackwood's Magazine_. Witness the following extracts. (1823) 'Keats had been dished--utterly demolished and dished--by _Blackwood_ long before Mr. Gifford's scribes mentioned his name.... But let us hear no more of Johnny Keats. It is really too disgusting to have him and his poems recalled in this manner after all the world thought they had got rid of the concern.' (1824) 'Mr. Sh.e.l.ley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats's poetry "grasped with one hand in his bosom"--rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. But what a rash man Sh.e.l.ley was to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack's poetry on board!... Down went the boat with a "swirl"! I lay a wager that it righted soon after ejecting Jack.'... (1826) 'Keats was a c.o.c.kney, and c.o.c.kneys claimed him for their own. Never was there a young man so encrusted with conceit.'

If this is the tone adopted by _Blackwood's Magazine_ in relation to Keats living and dead, one need not be surprised to find that the verdict of the same review upon the poem of _Adonais_, then newly published, ran to the following effect:--

'Locke says the most resolute liar cannot lie more than once in every three sentences. Folly is more engrossing; for we could prove from the present Elegy that it is possible to write two sentences of pure nonsense out of three. A more faithful calculation would bring us to ninety-nine out of every hundred; or--as the present consists of only fifty-five stanzas--leaving about five readable lines in the entire....

A Mr. Keats, who had left a decent calling for the melancholy trade of c.o.c.kney poetry, has lately died of a consumption, after having written two or three little books of verses much neglected by the public.... The New School, however, will have it that he was slaughtered by a criticism of the _Quarterly Review_: "O flesh, how art thou fishified!" There is even an aggravation in this cruelty of the Review--for it had taken three or four years to slay its victim, the deadly blow having been inflicted at least as long since. [This is not correct: the _Quarterly_ critique, having appeared in September, 1818, preceded the death of Keats by two years and five months].... The fact is, the _Quarterly_, finding before it a work at once silly and presumptuous, full of the servile _slang_ that c.o.c.kaigne dictates to its servitors, and the vulgar indecorums which that Grub Street Empire rejoiceth to applaud, told the truth of the volume, and recommended a change of manners[14] and of masters to the scribbler. Keats wrote on; but he wrote _indecently_, probably in the indulgence of his social propensities.'

The virulence with which Sh.e.l.ley, as author of _Adonais_, was a.s.sailed by _Blackwood's Magazine_, is the more remarkable, and the more symptomatic of partizanship against Keats and any of his upholders, as this review had in previous instances been exceptionally civil to Sh.e.l.ley, though of course with some serious offsets. The notices of _Alastor, Rosalind and Helen_, and _Prometheus Unbound_--more especially the first--in the years 1819 and 1820, would be found to bear out this statement.

From the dates already cited, it may be a.s.sumed that the Pisan edition of _Adonais_ was in London in the hands of Mr. Ollier towards the middle of August, 1821, purchasable by whoever might be minded to buy it. Very soon afterwards it was reprinted in the _Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review_, published by Limbird in the Strand--1 December, 1821: a rather singular, not to say piratical, proceeding. An editorial note was worded thus: 'Through the kindness of a friend, we have been favoured with the latest production of a gentleman of no ordinary genius, Mr. Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley. It is an elegy on the death of a youthful poet of considerable promise, Mr. Keats, and was printed at Pisa. As the copy now before us is perhaps [surely not] the only one that has reached England, and the subject is one that will excite much interest, we shall print the whole of it.' This promise was not literally fulfilled, for stanzas 19 to 24 were omitted, not apparently with any special object.

After the publication in London of the Pisan edition of _Adonais_, the poem remained unreprinted until 1829. It was then issued at Cambridge, at the instance of Lord Houghton (Mr. Richard Monckton Milnes) and Mr.

Arthur Hallam, the latter having brought from Italy a copy of the original pamphlet. The Cambridge edition, an octavo in paper wrappers, is now still scarcer than the Pisan one. The only other separate edition of _Adonais_ was that of Mr. Buxton Forman, 1876, corresponding substantially with the form which the poem a.s.sumes in the _Complete Works of Sh.e.l.ley_, as produced by the same editor. It need hardly be said that _Adonais_ was included in Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's editions of her husband's Poems, and in all other editions of any fulness: it has also appeared in most of the volumes of Selections.

As early as 1830 there was an Italian translation of this Elegy. It is named _Adone, nella morte di Giovanni Keats, Elegia di Percy Bishe Sh.e.l.ley, tradotta da L. A. Damaso Pareto_. _Genova, dalla Tifografia Pellas_, 1830. In this small quarto thirty pages are occupied by a notice of the life and poetry of Sh.e.l.ley.

I shall not here enter upon a consideration of the cancelled pa.s.sages of _Adonais_: they will appear more appositely further on (see pp. 92-94, &c.). I therefore conclude the present section by quoting the _Quarterly Review_ article upon _Endymion_--omitting only a few sentences which do not refer directly to Keats, but mostly to Leigh Hunt:--

'Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall antic.i.p.ate the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. Not that we have been wanting in our duty; far from it; indeed, we have made efforts, almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it: but, with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists. We should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation--namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into.

'It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)--it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius. He has all these: but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called "c.o.c.kney Poetry," which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language.

'Of this school Mr. Leigh Hunt, as we observed in a former number, aspires to be the hierophant.... This author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd, than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning.