II. EXTRACTS FROM THE EXAMINER FOR SUNDAY THE 4TH OF MAY 1817. IN Letters VIII and IX Keats writes to Leigh Hunt and Haydon, on the 10th and 11th of May 1817, concerning papers which had appeared in The Examiner of the previous Sunday, the 4th of May. Hunt, Haydon, and Hazlitt had taken up a large proportion of the whole paper in dealing with subjects which appear to have interested Keats. The "horrid subject" mentioned at page 57 as Hunt's was in the seventh of a series of Letters "to the English People." This dealt especially with the subject of religious intolerance, defining blasphemy from different points of view, and reducing ad absurdum the blasphemy persecutions and prosecutions of the day (not yet, it seems, obsolete). The Letter is not by any means a remarkable one for Hunt to have written; and the allusions to and quotations from Tertullian, Erasmus, Sir Philip Sidney, are familiar enough. But "the dreadful Petzelians and their expiation by blood," is a phrase requiring elucidation, if for no other reason, because the word Petzelians has hitherto been printed Patzelicians. The Petzelians do not figure in Hunt's Letter; but in another part of the same number of The Examiner is the following paragraph : "VIENNA, APRIL 16.-Letters from Upper Austria speak of a Sect formed there, called Petzelians, from the name of the founder, Petzel, a Priest of Branaw. Atrocious accounts are related of this Sect. In imitation of the Spenceans of England, they preach the equality and community of property, and they sacrifice (I dare scarcely touch upon these horrors) men, to purify others from their sins. It is added, that this Sect sacrificed, during Passion Week, several men, who died in the most horrible torments. A girl of 13 was put to death in the village of Afflewang, on Good Friday. Seven men have been the victims of this abominable faith. The author of the Sect, Petzel, with 86 followers, are arrested: military detachments have been quartered in the villages, and tranquillity has been restored to the hearts of the wretched inhabitants. Petzel has been sent to the fortress of Spielberg, where he will soon be brought to trial." "Hazlitt's Southey," mentioned by Keats at the same page (57), was the first part, to be followed by a second. and third, of a review of a pamphlet entitled A Letter to William Smith, Esq. M.P. from Robert Southey, Esq. (Murray, 1817). The occasion of the letter was the fact. that Mr. Smith, in a discussion in Parliament, had compared certain passages in The Quarterly Review with the opinions held by Southey twenty-three years earlier, when he wrote Wat Tyler, a comparison made pointedly to the disadvantage of Southey. Not only to Hunt does Keats express the wish that Hazlitt had "left out the grey hairs" in reviewing this pamphlet; but at page 65 he expresses the same wish to Haydon. To appreciate fully the soundness of the young poet's taste in this matter, we must have the particular passage in evidence. Here it is: "As some persons bequeath their bodies to the surgeons to be dissected after their death, Mr. Southey publickly exposes his mind to be anatomised while he is living. He lays open his character to the scalping knife, guides the philosophic hand in its painful researches, and on the bald crown of our petit tondu, in vain concealed under withered bay-leaves and a few contemptible grey hairs, you see the organ of vanity triumphant-sleek,— smooth, round, perfect, polished, horned and shining, as it were in a transparency. This is the handle of his intellect, the index of his mind; 'the guide, the anchor of his purest thoughts, and soul of all his moral being;' the clue to the labyrinth of all his tergiversations and contradictions; the medius terminus of his political logic." The "concluding thunderclap," and the sentence "like a whale's back in the sea of prose," are as follows : "In advocating the cause of the French people, Mr. Southey's principles and his interest were at variance, and therefore he quitted his principles when he saw a good opportunity: in taking up the cause of the Allies, his principles and his interest became united and thenceforth indissoluble. His engagement to his first love, the Republic, was only upon liking; his marriage to Legitimacy is for better, for worse, and nothing but death shall part them. Our simple Laureate was sharp upon his hoyden Jacobin mistress, who brought him no dowry, neither place nor pension, who 'found him poor and kept him so,' by her prudish notions of virtue. He divorced her, in short, for nothing but the spirit and success with which she resisted the fraud and force to which the old bawd Legitimacy was for ever resorting to overpower her resolution and fidelity. He said she was a virago, a cunning gipsey, always in broils about her honour and the inviolability of her person, and always getting the better in them, furiously scratching the face or cruelly tearing off the hair of the said pimping old lady, who would never let her alone, night or day. But since her foot slipped one day on the ice, and the detestable old hag tripped up her heels, and gave her up to the kind keeping of the Allied Sovereigns, Mr. Southey has devoted himself to her more fortunate and wealthy rival: he is become uxorious in his second matrimonial connection; and though his false Duessa has turned out a very witch, a foul, ugly witch, a murderess, a sorceress, perjured, and a harlot, drunk with insolence, mad with power, a griping rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton, malicious, not sparing steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her endsbringing famine, pestilence, and death in her train-infecting the air with her thoughts, killing the beholders with her looks, claiming mankind as her property, and using them as her slaves-driving every thing before her, and playing the devil wherever she comes, Mr. Southey sticks to her in spite of every thing, and for very shame lays his head in her lap, paddles with the palms of her hands, inhales her hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in her ears, calls her little fondling names, Religion, Morality, and Social Order, takes for his motto, 'Be to her faults a little blind, sticks close to his filthy bargain, and will not give her up, because she keeps him, and he is down in her will. Faugh! 'What's here? Gold! yellow, glittering, precious gold! -The wappened widow, Whom the spittle-house and ulcerous sores Would heave the gorge at, this embalms and spices To the April day again.' The above passage is, we fear, written in the style of Aretin, which Mr. Southey condemns in the Quarterly. It is at least a very sincere style: Mr. Southey will never write so, till he can keep in the same mind for three and twenty years together. Why should not one make a sentence of a page long, out of the feelings of one's whole life? The early Protestant Divines wrote such prodigious long sentences from the sincerity of their religious and political opinions. Mr. Coleridge ought not to imitate them." Truly there was enough of biting invective here to have enabled Hazlitt to dispense with the grim personality about the grey hairs! Haydon's "remarks on the manuscript" to which Keats also alludes at page 65 are the views put forward by the painter in a letter on the subject of a book which made a great stir at the time,-Manuscrit Venu de St. Helène. It is not a favourable example of Haydon's contributions to The Examiner. The conclusion is as follows: "Never was a little book so interesting! never was such a laying open of characters, events, and circumstances, mutually acting on each other!-never were words so pregnant with meaning, or the mightiest events so concisely expressed!-never were political errors so courageously acknowledged, or the deepest crimes so sophistically glossed. It can only proceed from a mind long used to such conclusions. And if it be not by Napoleon, it is from an intellect of similar construction. B. R. H.” |