V. COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY. No IV. OF KEATS, THE MUSES' SON OF PROMISE, AND WHAT FEATS CORNELIUS WEBE. Of all the manias of this mad age, the most incurable, as well as the most common, seems to be no other than the Metromanie. The just celebrity of Robert Burns and Miss Baillie has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we know not how many farm-servants. It scarcely seems needful to weight or to soil a critical edition of Keats's writings with the whole mass of "Cockney School" articles; but the one article in Blackwood's Magazine specially devoted to the vilification of Keats himself is necessary to a full understanding of this particularly unpleasant episode in the literary history of the nineteenth century. This article, Number IV of the series On the Cockney School of Poetry, appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for August 1818. For those who care to dig further into an unseemly brawl of words it may be recorded here that Numbers I, II, and III, concerning Leigh Hunt, had appeared in the magazine for October 1817, November 1817, and July 1818, that Leigh Hunt had addressed the anonymous author of these attacks twice in The Examiner, that is to say on the 2nd of November 1817 very briefly, and at greater length on the 16th of the same month, and that in Blackwood's Magazine for January 1818 the anonymous author had replied with more scurrility, if possible, than ever, adding to the untruths he had already uttered the false denial that any of his previous statements had regarded Hunt's personal character. and unmarried ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind her in her band-box. To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing; but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr John Keats. This young man appears to have received from nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior order-talents which, devoted to the purpose of any useful profession, must have rendered him a respectable, if not an eminent citizen. 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. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we have alluded. Whether Mr John had been sent home with a diuretic or composing draught to some patient far gone in the poetical mania, we have not heard. This much is certain, that he has caught the infection, and that thoroughly. For some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The Phrenzy of the "Poems" 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 constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable. Time, firm treatment, and rational restraint, do much for many apparently hopeless invalids; and if Mr Keats should happen, at some interval of reason, to cast his eye upon our pages, he may perhaps be convinced of the existence of his malady, which, in such cases, is often all that is necessary to put the patient in a fair way of being cured. The readers of the Examiner' newspaper were informed, some time ago, by a solemn paragraph, in Mr Hunt's best style, of the appearance of two new stars of glorious magnitude and splendour in the poetical horizon of the land of Cockaigne. One of these turned out, by and by, to be no other than Mr John Keats. This precocious adulation confirmed the wavering apprentice in his desire to quit the gallipots, and at the same time excited in his too susceptible mind a fatal admiration for the character and talents of the most worthless and affected of all the versifiers of our time. One of his first productions was the following sonnet, "written on the day when Mr Leigh Hunt left prison." It will be recollected, that the cause of Hunt's confinement was a series of libels against his sovereign, and that its fruit was the odious and incestuous "Story of Rimini.”' The absurdity of the thought in this sonnet is, however, if possible, surpassed in another, "addressed to Haydon" the painter, that clever, but most affected artist, who as little resembles Raphael in genius as he does in person, notwithstanding the foppery of having his hair curled over his shoulders in the old Italian fashion. In this exquisite piece it will be observed, that Mr Keats classes together WORDSWORTH, HUNT and HAYDON, as the three greatest spirits of the age, and that he alludes to himself, and some others of the rising brood of Cockneys, as likely to attain hereafter an 1 For the 1st of December 1816. See foot-note, page 331 of. Volume I of this edition. 2 The writer here quotes in full the sonnet (for which see Volume I, pages 64-6), and goes through a little of the usual Wilsonian buffoonery of imported italics and notes of exclamation. equally honourable elevation. Wordsworth and Hunt! what a juxta-position! The purest, the loftiest, and, we do not fear to say it, the most classical of living English poets, joined together in the same compliment with the meanest, the filthiest, and the most vulgar of Cockney poetasters. No wonder that he who could be guilty of this should class Haydon with Raphael, and himself with Spencer.1 The nations are to listen and be dumb! and why, good Johnny Keats?' because Leigh Hunt is editor of the Examiner, and Haydon has painted the Judgment of Solomon, and you and Cornelius Webb, and a few more city sparks, are pleased to look upon yourselves as so many future Shakspeares and Miltons! The world has really some reason to look to its foundations! Here is a tempestas in matula with a vengeance. At the period when these sonnets were published, Mr Keats had no hesitation in saying, that he looked on himself as "not yet a glorious denizen of the wide heaven of poetry," but he had many fine soothing visions of coming greatness, and many rare plans of study to prepare him for it. The following we think is very pretty raving.' Having cooled a little from this "fine passion," our youthful poet passes very naturally into a long strain of foaming abuse against a certain class of English Poets, whom, with Pope at their head, it is much the fashion 1 Here follows the sonnet to Haydon ending with Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb. This also is given with italics "to taste." It will be found at page 82 of Volume I. 2 Let us bear in mind George Keats's memorable saying that his brother "was as much like the Holy Ghost as Johnny Keats." 3 The passage quoted is from Why so sad a moan? in line 89 of Sleep and Poetry, to the end of line 121. See Volume I, pages 92-3. with the ignorant unsettled pretenders of the present time to undervalue. Begging these gentlemens' [sic] pardon, although Pope was not a poet of the same high order with some who are now living, yet, to deny his genius, is just about as absurd as to dispute that of Wordsworth, or to believe in that of Hunt. Above all things, it is most pitiably ridiculous to hear men, of whom their country will always have reason to be proud, reviled by uneducated and flimsy striplings, who are not capable of understanding either their merits, or those of any other men of power-fanciful dreaming tea-drinkers, who, without logic enough to analyse a single idea, or imagination enough to form one original image, or learning enough to distinguish between the written language of Englishmen and the spoken jargon of Cockneys, presume to talk with contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits the world ever produced, merely because they did not happen to exert their faculties in laborious, affected descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots, or cascades heard at Vauxhall; in short, because they chose to be wits, philosophers, patriots, and poets, rather than to found the Cockney school of versification, morality, and politics, a century before its time. After blaspheming himself into a fury against Boileau &c. Mr Keats comforts himself and his readers with a view of the present more promising aspect of affairs; above all with the ripened glories of the poet of Rimini. Addressing the manes of the departed chiefs of English poetry, he informs them, in the following clear and touching manner, of the existence of "him of the Rose," &c. "From a thick brake, Nested and quiet in a valley mild, Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild |