Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats Part 3

"Hunt has d.a.m.ned Hampstead and masks and sonnets and Italian tales.

Wordsworth has d.a.m.ned the lakes--Milman has d.a.m.ned the old drama--West has d.a.m.ned wholesale. Peac.o.c.k has d.a.m.ned satire--Ollier has d.a.m.ned Music--Hazlitt has d.a.m.ned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the Man?!"[128]

A parody on the conversation of Hunt's set, in which he is the princ.i.p.al actor, carries with it a ridicule that is unkinder than the bitterness of dislike, and difficult to reconcile with the fact that Keats at the same time preserved the semblance of friendship.[129]

"Scene, a little Parlour--Enter Hunt--Gattie--Hazlitt--Mrs.

Novello--Ollier. _Gattie_:--Ha! Hunt got into your new house? Ha!

Mrs. Novello: seen Altam and his wife? _Mrs. N._: Yes (with a grin) it's Mr. Hunt's isn't it? _Gattie_: Hunt's? no, ha! Mr. Ollier, I congratulate you upon the highest compliment I ever heard paid to the Book. Mr. Hazlitt, I hope you are well. _Hazlitt_:--Yes Sir, no Sir--_Mr. Hunt_ (at the Music) 'La Biondina' etc. Hazlitt, did you ever hear this?--"La Biondina" &c. _Hazlitt_: O no Sir--I never--_Ollier_:--Do Hunt give it us over again--divine--_Gattie_:--divino--Hunt when does your Pocket-Book come out--_Hunt_:--'What is this absorbs me quite?' O we are spinning on a little, we shall floridize soon I hope. Such a thing was very much wanting--people think of nothing but money getting--now for me I am rather inclined to the liberal side of things. I am reckoned lax in my Christian principles, etc., etc., etc., etc."[130]

Such a dual att.i.tude in Keats can be explained only by a dual feeling in his mind, for it is impossible to believe him capable of deliberate deceit. He may have realized Hunt's affectation and superficiality and "disgusting taste"; he was probably swayed by Haydon to distrust Hunt's morals; the suspicions planted by Haydon concerning _Endymion_ rankled; but at the same time Hunt's charm of personality, and the a.s.sistance and encouragement given in the first days of their friendship, formed a bond difficult to break. Of Leigh Hunt's att.i.tude there can be no doubt, for through his long life of more than threescore years and ten, filled with many friendships of many kinds, he can in no instance be charged with insincerity. There is no conclusive proof on record to show him deserving of the insinuations which Keats believed in respect to _Endymion_, for Haydon is not trustworthy, and the opinion of a lady given through Haydon may be dismissed on the same grounds.[131] Reynolds' testimony is not damaging in itself, and in the absence of facts to the contrary may have been wrongly construed by Keats. To the charges against himself, Leigh Hunt has replied in the following pa.s.sage, "affecting and persuasive in its unrestrained pathos of remonstrance":[132]

"an irritable morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had none; for I learned the other day, with extreme pain, such as I am sure so kind and reflecting a man as Mr. Monckton Milnes would not have inflicted on me could he have foreseen it, that Keats at one period of his intercourse suspected Sh.e.l.ley and myself of a wish to see him undervalued! Such are the tricks which constant infelicity can play with the most n.o.ble natures. For Sh.e.l.ley, let _Adonais_ answer. For myself, let every word answer which I uttered about him, living and dead, and such as I now proceed to repeat. I might as well have been told that I wished to see the flowers or the stars undervalued, or my own heart that loved him."[133]

Hunt's feeling towards Keats is nowhere better expressed than in his _Autobiography_: "I could not love him as deeply as I did Sh.e.l.ley. That was impossible. But my affection was only second to the one which I entertained for that heart of hearts."[134]

Keats's atonement is contained in the last letter that he ever wrote: "If I recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness, and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven."[135]

Haydon's influence over Keats was at its height in 1817 and 1818.[136] His gifts and his enthusiasm, his "fresh magnificence"[137] carried Keats by storm. It was not until about July 1818 that a reaction against Haydon in favor of Hunt set in, brought about by money transactions between Keats and Haydon, and the indifference of the latter in repaying a debt when he knew Keats's necessity.[138] Keats probably never ceased to feel that Hunt's influence as a poet had been injurious, as indeed it was, but the relative stability of his two friends adjusted itself after this experience with Haydon. Affairs seem to have been smoothed over with Hunt, and were not disturbed again until a short time before Keats's departure for Italy, when his morbid suspicions, which even led him to accuse his friend Brown of flirting with f.a.n.n.y Brawne,[139] seem to have been renewed.

In 1820, Brown, with whom Keats had been living since his brother Tom's death, went on a second tour to Scotland. Keats, unable to accompany him, took a lodging in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town, to be near Hunt, who was living in Mortimer Street. Brown says: "It was his choice, during my absence to lodge at Kentish Town, that he might be near his friend, Leigh Hunt, in whose companionship he was ever happy."[140] In a letter to f.a.n.n.y Brawne, Keats said Hunt "amuses me very kindly."[141] It is not likely, judging from this overture, that there had ever been an actual cessation of intercourse, notwithstanding what Keats wrote in his letters; and the act points to a revival of the old feeling on his part. About the twenty-second or twenty-third of June, 1820, Keats left his rooms and moved to Leigh Hunt's home to be nursed.[142] He remained about seven weeks with the family, when there occurred an unfortunate incident which resulted in his abrupt departure August 12, 1820. A letter of f.a.n.n.y Brawne's was delivered to him two days late with the seal broken. The contretemps was due to the misconduct of a servant, but it was interpreted by Keats as treachery on the part of the family. At the moment he would accept no explanations or apologies. He writes of this incident to f.a.n.n.y Brawne:

"My friends have behaved well to me in every instance but one, and there they have become tattlers, and inquisitors into my conduct: spying upon a secret I would rather die than share it with anybody's confidence. For this I cannot wish them well, I care not to see any of them again. If I am the Theme, I will not be the Friend of idle Gossips. Good G.o.ds what a shame it is our Loves should be put into the microscope of a Coterie. Their laughs should not affect you (I may perhaps give you reasons some day for these laughs, for I suspect a few people to hate me well enough, _for reasons I know of_, who have pretended a great friendship for me) when in compet.i.tion with one, who if he should never see you again would make you the Saint of his memory. These Laughers, who do not like you, who envy you for your Beauty, who would have G.o.d-bless'd me from you for ever: who were plying me with disencouragements with respect to you eternally.

People are revengeful--do not mind them--do nothing but love me."[143]

In his next letter to her he says:

"I shall never be able to endure any more the society of any of those who used to meet at Elm Cottage and Wentworth Place. The last two years taste like bra.s.s upon my Palate."[144]

The lack of self-control and the distrust seen in these extracts show that Keats was laboring under hallucinations produced by an ill mind and body; the letters from which they have been taken are unnatural, almost terrible, in their pa.s.sion and rebellion against fate.

Keats moved to the residence of the Brawnes. While he was here the trouble seems to have been smoothed over, for in a letter to Hunt he says: "You will be glad to hear I am going to delay a little at Mrs. Brawne's. I hope to see you whenever you get time, for I feel really attached to you for your many sympathies with me, and patience at all my _lunes_.... Your affectionate friend, John Keats."[145] To Brown he says: "Hunt has behaved very kindly to me"; and again: "The seal-breaking business is over-blown.

I think no more of it."[146] Hunt's reply is couched in most affectionate terms:

"Giovani [sic] Mio,

"I shall see you this afternoon, and most probably every day. You judge rightly when you think I shall be glad at your putting up awhile where you are, instead of that solitary place. There are humanities in the house; and if wisdom loves to live with children round her knees (the tax-gatherer apart), sick wisdom, I think, should love to live with arms about it's waist. I need not say how you gratify me by the impulse that led you to write a particular sentence in your letter, for you must have seen by this time how much I am attached to yourself.

"I am indicating at as dull a rate as a battered finger-post in wet weather. Not that I am ill: for I am very well altogether. Your affectionate Friend, Leigh Hunt."[147]

This was probably the last letter written by him to Keats. In September Keats went to Rome with Severn to escape the hardships of the winter climate, after having declined an invitation from Sh.e.l.ley to visit him at Pisa. In the same month, Hunt published an affectionate farewell to him in _The Indicator_. An announcement of his death appeared in _The Examiner_ of March 25, 1821. The story of the personal relations of the two men could not be better closed than with the words of Hunt written March 8, 1821, to Severn in Rome when he believed Keats still alive:

"If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it already, and can put it into better language than any man. I hear that he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, tell him of what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour) think always, that I have seen too many instances of recovery from apparently desperate cases of consumption not to be in hope to the very last. If he still cannot bear to hear this, tell him--tell that great poet and n.o.blehearted man--that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it, as our loves do. Or if this, again, will trouble his spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him; and that, Christian or infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think all who are of one accord in mind and heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall unite somewhere or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted."[148]

The literary relations of Keats and Hunt will be considered under two heads; first, the criticism of Keats's writings by Hunt; and second, his direct influence upon them.

_On first looking into Chapman's Homer_ in _The Examiner_ of December 1st, 1816, was embodied in an article ent.i.tled "Young Poets." It was the first notice of Keats to appear in print and is in part as follows:

"The last of these young aspirants whom we have met with, and who promise to help the new school to revive Nature and

'To put a spirit of youth in everything,'--

is we believe, the youngest of them all, and just of age. His name is John Keats. He has not yet published anything except in a newspaper, but a set of his ma.n.u.scripts was handed us the other day, and fairly surprised us with the truth of their ambition, and ardent grappling with Nature."

In _Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries_, the last line of the same sonnet--

"Silent upon a peak in Darien"--

is called "a basis of gigantic tranquillity."[149]

Leigh Hunt's review of the _Poems_ of 1817[150] was kind and discriminating. He writes characteristically of the first poem, _I stood tiptoe_, that it "consists of a piece of luxury in a rural spot"; of the epistles and sonnets, that they "contain strong evidences of warm and social feelings." This comment is quite characteristic of Hunt. He was as fond of finding "warm and social feelings" in the poetry of others as of putting them into his own. In his anxiety he sometimes found them when they did not exist. He continues: "The best poem is certainly the last and the longest, ent.i.tled _Sleep and Poetry_. It originated in sleeping in a room adorned with busts and pictures [Hunt's library], and is a striking specimen of the restlessness of the young poetical appet.i.te, obtaining its food by the very desire of it, and glancing for fit subjects of creation 'from earth to heaven.' Nor do we like it the less for an impatient, and as it may be thought by some irreverend [sic] a.s.sault upon the late French school of criticism[151] and monotony." But Hunt did not allow his affection for Keats or his approval of Keats's poetical doctrine to blunt his critical ac.u.men. In summarizing he says: "The very faults of Mr. Keats arise from a pa.s.sion for beauties, and a young impatience to vindicate them; and as we have mentioned these, we shall refer to them at once. They may be comprised in two;--first, a tendency to notice everything too indiscriminately, and without an eye to natural proportion and effect; and second, a sense of the proper variety of versification without a due consideration of its principles." In conclusion, the beauties "outnumber the faults a hundred fold" and "they are of a nature decidedly opposed to what is false and inharmonious. Their characteristics indeed are a fine ear, a fancy and imagination at will, and an intense feeling of external beauty in its most natural and least inexpressible simplicity."

Hunt was disappointed with _Endymion_ and did not hesitate to say so.

Keats writes to his brothers:

"Leigh Hunt I showed my 1st book to--he allows it not much merit as a whole; says it is unnatural and made ten objections to it in the mere skimming over. He says the conversation is unnatural and too high-flown for Brother and Sister--says it should be simple, forgetting do ye mind that they are both overshadowed by a supernatural Power, and of force could not speak like Francesca in the _Rimini_. He must first prove that Caliban's poetry is unnatural.

This with me completely overturns his objections. The fact is he and Sh.e.l.ley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously (sic); and from several hints I have had they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made.--But who's afraid? Aye! Tom! Demme if I am."[152]

Leigh Hunt expressed himself thus in 1828: "_Endymion_, it must be allowed was not a little calculated to perplex the critics. It was a wilderness of sweets, but it was truly a wilderness; a domain of young, luxuriant, uncompromising poetry."[153]

_La Belle Dame sans Merci_, which appeared first in _The Indicator_,[154]

was accompanied with an introduction by Hunt, who says that it was suggested by Alain Chartier's poem of the same t.i.tle and "that the union of the imagination and the real is very striking throughout, particularly in the dream. The wild gentleness of the rest of the thoughts and of the music are alike old, and they are alike young." _The Indicator_ of August 2 and 9, 1820, contained a review of the volume of 1820. The part dealing with philosophy in poetry is of more than pa.s.sing interest:

"We wish that for the purpose of his story he had not appeared to give in to the commonplace of supposing that Apollonius's sophistry must always prevail, and that modern experiment has done a deadly thing to poetry by discovering the nature of the rainbow, the air, etc.; that is to say, that the knowledge of natural science and physics, by showing us the nature of things, does away the imaginations that once adorned them. This is a condescension to a learned vulgarism, which so excellent a poet as Mr. Keats ought not to have made. The world will always have fine poetry, so long as it has events, pa.s.sions, affections, and a philosophy that sees deeper than this philosophy. There will be a poetry of the heart, as long as there are tears and smiles: there will be a poetry of the imagination, as long as the first causes of things remain a mystery.

A man who is no poet, may think he is none, as soon as he finds out the first causes of the rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:--he was none before."[155]

Much the same line of discussion is reported of the conversation at Haydon's "immortal dinner," December 28, 1817, when Keats and Lamb denounced Sir Isaac Newton and his demolition of the things of the imagination, Keats saying he "destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism."[156] The pictorial features of the _Eve of St.

Agnes_ were particularly admired by Hunt, as one might be led to expect from the decorative detail of his own narrative poetry. The portrait of "Agnes" (_sic_ for Madeline) is said to be "remarkable for its union of extreme richness and good taste" and "affords a striking specimen of the sudden and strong maturity of the author's genius. When he wrote _Endymion_ he could not have resisted doing too much. To the description before me, it would be a great injury either to add or to diminish. It falls at once gorgeously and delicately upon us, like the colours of the painted gla.s.s." Of the description of the cas.e.m.e.nt window, Hunt asks "Could all the pomp and graces of aristocracy with t.i.tian's and Raphael's aid to boot, go beyond the rich religion of this picture, with its 'twilight saints' and its 'scutcheons blushing with the blood of queens'?"

Elsewhere he says that "Persian Kings would have filled a poet's mouth with gold" for such poetry. Hunt calls _Hyperion_[157] "a fragment, a gigantic one, like a ruin in the desert, or the bones of the mastodon. It is truly of a piece with its subject, which is the downfall of the elder G.o.ds." Later, in _Imagination and Fancy_, Hunt declared that Keats's greatest poetry is to be found in _Hyperion_. His opinion of the whole is thus summed up:

"Mr. Keats's versification sometimes reminds us of Milton in his blank verse, and sometimes of Chapman both in his blank verse and in his rhyme; but his faculties, essentially speaking, though partaking of the unearthly aspirations and abstract yearnings of both these poets, are altogether his own. They are ambitious, but less directly so. They are more _social_, and in the finer sense of the word, sensual, than either. They are more coloured by the modern philosophy of sympathy and natural justice. _Endymion_, with all its extraordinary powers, partook of the faults of youth, though the best ones; but the reader of _Hyperion_ and these other stories would never guess that they were written at twenty.[158] 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 G.o.d 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 combine them. Mr. Keats undoubtedly takes his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets."[159]

The more important division of the literary relations of the two men is the direct influence of Hunt's work upon that of Keats.

On Keats's prose style Hunt's influence was very slight and can be quickly dismissed. At one time Keats, affected perhaps by Hunt's example, thought of becoming a theatrical critic. He did actually contribute four articles to _The Champion_. Keats's favorite of Hunt's essays, _A Now_, contains several pa.s.sages composed by Keats. Mr. Forman considers that "the greater part of the paper is so much in the taste and humor of Keats" that he is justified in including it in his edition of Keats. He has also called attention to a pa.s.sage in Keats's letter to Haydon of April 10, 1818, which bears a striking likeness to Hunt's occasional essay style: "The Hedges by this time are beginning to leaf--Cats are becoming more vociferous--Young Ladies who wear Watches are always looking at them.

Women about forty-five think the Season very backward."

The _Poems_ of 1817 show Hunt's influences in spirit, diction and versification. There are epistles and sonnets in the manner of Hunt. _I stood tiptoe upon a little hill_ opens the volume with a motto from the _Story of Rimini_. The _Specimen of an Induction_ and _Calidore_ so nearly approach Hunt's work in manner, that they might easily be mistaken for it.

_Sleep and Poetry_ attacks French models as Hunt had previously done. The colloquial style of certain pa.s.sages is significant of Hunt's influence upon the poems. A few examples are:

"To peer about upon variety."[160]

"Or by the bowery clefts, and leafy shelves Guess where the jaunty streams refresh themselves."[161]

"The ripples seem right glad to reach those cresses."[162]

"... you just now are stooping To pick up the keepsake intended for me."[163]

"Of this fair world, and all its gentle livers."[164]