Chapter 14

We have already given some of our columns to this writer's merits, and we will not now repeat our convictions of his incurable absurdity. On the last occasion of our alluding to him, we were compelled to notice his horrid licentiousness and profaneness, his fearful offences to all the maxims that honorable minds are in the habit of respecting, and his plain defiance of Christianity. On the present occasion we are not met by so continued and regular a determination of insult, though there are atrocities to be found in the poem quite enough to make us caution our readers against its pages. Adonais is an elegy after _the manner of Moschus_, on a foolish young man, who, after writing some volumes of very weak, and, in the greater part, of very indecent poetry, died some time since of a consumption: the breaking down of an infirm constitution having, in all probability, been accelerated by the discarding his neck cloth, a practice of the cockney poets, who look upon it as essential to genius, inasmuch as neither Michael Angelo, Raphael or Tasso are supposed to have worn those antispiritual incumbrances. In short, as the vigour of Sampson lay in his hair, the secret of talent with these persons lies in the neck; and what aspirations can be expected from a mind enveloped in muslin. Keats caught cold in training for a genius, and, after a lingering illness, died, to the great loss of the Independents of South America, whom he had intended to visit with an English epic poem, for the purpose of exciting them to liberty. But death, even the death of the radically presumptuous profligate, is a serious thing; and as we believe that Keats was made presumptuous chiefly by the treacherous puffing of his cockney fellow gossips, and profligate in his poems merely to make them saleable, we regret that he did not live long enough to acquire common sense, and abjure the pestilent and perfidious gang who betrayed his weakness to the grave, and are now panegyrising his memory into contempt. For what is the praise of cockneys but disgrace, or what honourable inscription can be placed over the dead by the hands of notorious libellers, exiled adulterers, and avowed atheists.

Adonais, an Elegy, is the form in which Mr. Shelley puts forth his woes. We give a verse at random, premising that there is no story in the elegy, and that it consists of fifty-five stanzas, which are, to our seeming, altogether unconnected, interjectional, and nonsensical. We give one that we think among the more comprehensible. An address to Urania:--

"Most musical of mourners, weep anew! Not all to that bright station dared to climb; And _happier they their happiness who knew_, Whose _tapers yet burn thro' that night of time In which suns perish'd_; Others more sublime, Struck by the _envious_ wroth of man or GOD!! _Have sunk extinct in their refulgent prime_; And some yet live," &c.----

Now what is the meaning of this, or of any sentence of it, except indeed that horrid blasphemy which attributes crime to the Great Author of all virtue! The rest is mere empty absurdity. If it were worth our while to dilate on the folly of the production, we might find examples of every species of the ridiculous within those few pages.

Mr. Shelley summons all kinds of visions round the grave of this young man, who, if he has now any feeling of the earth, must shrink with shame and disgust from the touch of the hand that could have written that impious sentence. These he classifies under names, the greater number as new we believe to poetry as strange to common sense. Those are--

----"Desires and _Adorations_ Winged _Persuasions_ and veiled Destinies, _Splendours_, and _Glooms_, and glimmering _Incarnations_ Of hopes and fears and twilight Phantasies, And Sorrow with her family of _Sighs_, And Pleasure, _blind with tears_! led by the _gleam_ Of her own _dying_ SMILE instead of eyes!!"

Let our readers try to imagine these weepers, and close with "_blind_ Pleasure led," by what? "by the _light_ of _her own dying smile_--instead of _eyes_!!!"

We give some specimens of Mr. S.'s

_Nonsense--pastoral._ "_Lost Echo_ sits amid the _voiceless mountains_,[M] And feeds her grief with his remember'd lay, _And will no more reply_ to winds and fountains." _Nonsense--physical._ --"for whose disdain she (Echo) pin'd away Into a _shadow_ of all _sounds_!" _Nonsense--vermicular._ "Flowers springing from the corpse ----------------------illumine death And _mock_ the _merry_ worm that wakes beneath." _Nonsense--pathetic._ "Alas! that all we lov'd of him should be But for our grief, as if it had not been, And _grief itself be mortal_! WOE IS ME!" _Nonsense--nondescript._ "In the death chamber for a moment Death, _Blush'd to annihilation_!" _Nonsense--personal._ "A pardlike spirit, beautiful and swift-- A love in _desolation mask'd_;--a Power Girt _round with weakness_;--it can scarce _uplift_ The _weight_ of the _superincumbent hour_!"

We have some idea that this fragment of character is intended for Mr. Shelley himself. It closes with a passage of memorable and ferocious blasphemy:--

"He with a sudden hand Made bare his branded and ensanguin'd brow, Which was like Cain's or CHRIST'S!!!"

What can be said to the wretched person capable of this daring profanation. The name of the first murderer--the accurst of God--brought into the same aspect image with that of the Saviour of the World! We are scarcely satisfied that even to quote such passages may not be criminal. The subject is too repulsive for us to proceed even in expressing our disgust for the general folly that makes the Poem as miserable in point of authorship, as in point of principle. We know that among a certain class this outrage and this inanity meet with some attempt at palliation, under the idea that frenzy holds the pen. That any man who insults the common order of society, and denies the being of God, is essentially mad we never doubted. But for the madness, that retains enough of rationality to be wilfully mischievous, we can have no more lenity than for the appetites of a wild beast. The poetry of the work is _contemptible_--a mere collection of bloated words heaped on each other without order, harmony, or meaning; the refuse of a schoolboy's common-place book, full of the vulgarisms of pastoral poetry, yellow gems and blue stars, bright Phoebus and rosy-fingered Aurora; and of this stuff is Keats's wretched Elegy compiled.

We might add instances of like incomprehensible folly from every stanza. A heart _keeping_, a mute _sleep_, and death _feeding_ on a mute _voice_, occur in one verse (page 8); Spring in despair "throws down her _kindling_ buds as if she Autumn were," a thing we never knew Autumn do with buds of any sort, the kindling kind being unknown to our botany; a _green lizard_ is like an _unimprisoned flame_, _waking_ out of its _trance_ (page 13). In the same page the _leprous corpse_ touched by the tender spirit of Spring, so as to exhale itself in flowers, is compared to "_incarnations of the stars, when splendour is changed to fragrance_!!!" Urania (page 15) _wounds_ the "invisible palms" of her tender feet by treading on human hearts as she journeys to see the corpse. Page 22, somebody is asked to "clasp with panting soul the pendulous earth," an image which, we take it, exceeds that of Shakespeare, to "put a girdle about it in forty minutes."

It is so far a fortunate thing that this piece of impious and utter absurdity can have little circulation in Britain. The copy in our hands is one of some score sent to the Author's intimates from Pisa, where it has been printed in a quarto form "with the types of Didot," and two learned Epigraphs from Plato and Moschus. Solemn as the subject is, (for in truth we must grieve for the early death of any youth of literary ambition,) it is hardly possible to help laughing at the mock solemnity with which Shelley charges the Quarterly Review for having murdered his friend with--a critique![N] If criticism killed the disciples of that school, Shelley would not have been alive to write an Elegy on another:--but the whole is most farcical from a pen which on other occasions, has treated of the soul, the body, life and death agreeably to the opinions, the principles, and the practice of Percy Bysshe Shelley.--_The Literary Gazette_.

[Footnote M: Though there is _no Echo_ and the mountains are _voiceless_, the woodmen, nevertheless, in the last line of this verse hear "a drear murmur between their Songs!!"]

[Footnote N: This would have done excellently for a coroner's inquest like that on _Honey_, which lasted _thirty_ days, and was facetiously called the "Honey-moon."]

JOHN KEATS

_Endymion: A Poetic Romance_. By John Keats. London. 1818. pp. 207.

Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate 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 Cockney 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. Our readers will recollect the pleasant recipes for harmonious and sublime poetry which he gave us in his preface to 'Rimini,' and the still more facetious instances of his harmony and sublimity in the verses themselves; and they will recollect above all the contempt of Pope, Johnson, and such like poetasters and pseudo-critics, which so forcibly contrasted itself with Mr. Leigh Hunt's self-complacent approbation of

--'all the things itself had wrote, Of special merit though of little note.'

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. But Mr. Keats has advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense therefore is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry.

Mr. Keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar circumstances.

'Knowing within myself (he says) the manner in which this Poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public.--What manner I mean, will be _quite clear_ to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.'--_Preface_, p. vii.

We humbly beg his pardon, but this does not appear to us to be _quite so clear_--we really do not know what he means--but the next passage is more intelligible.

'The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press.'--_Preface_, p. vii.

Thus 'the two first books' are, even in his own judgment, unfit to appear, and 'the two last' are, it seems, in the same condition--and as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear and, we believe, a very just estimate of the entire work.

Mr. Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this 'immature and feverish work' in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of the tortures of the '_fierce hell_' of criticism, which terrify his imagination, if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might write more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent which deserves to be put in the right way, or which, at least, ought to be warned of the wrong; and if, finally, he had not told us that he is of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline.

Of the story we have been able to make out but little; it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion; but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we cannot speak with any degree of certainty; and must therefore content ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and versification:--and here again we are perplexed and puzzled.--At first it appeared to us, that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself and wearying his readers with an immeasurable game at _bouts-rimes_; but, if we recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play, that the rhymes when filled up shall have a meaning; and our author, as we have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_ with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of the ideas but of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which they turn.

We shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that least liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem.

----'Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make 'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake, Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: And such too is the grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead; &c. &c.'--pp. 3, 4.

Here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, _moon_ produces the simple sheep and their shady _boon_, and that 'the _dooms_ of the mighty dead' would never have intruded themselves but for the '_fair musk-rose blooms_.'

Again.

'For 'twas the morn: Apollo's upward fire Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre Of brightness so unsullied, that therein A melancholy spirit well might win Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine Into the winds: rain-scented eglantine Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass; Man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold, To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.'--p. 8.

Here Apollo's _fire_ produces a _pyre_, a silvery pyre of clouds, _wherein_ a spirit may _win_ oblivion and melt his essence _fine_, and scented _eglantine_ gives sweets to the _sun_, and cold springs had _run_ into the _grass_, and then the pulse of the _mass_ pulsed _tenfold_ to feel the glories _old_ of the new-born day, &c.

One example more.

'Be still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth.'--p. 17.

_Lodge, dodge_--_heaven, leaven_--_earth, birth_; such, in six words, is the sum and substance of six lines.

We come now to the author's taste in versification. He cannot indeed write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line. Let us see. The following are specimens of his prosodial notions of our English heroic metre.

'Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon, The passion poesy, glories infinite.'--p. 4.

'So plenteously all weed-hidden roots.'--p. 6.

'Of some strange history, potent to send.'--p. 18.

'Before the deep intoxication.'--p. 27.

'Her scarf into a fluttering pavilion.'--p. 33.

'The stubborn canvass for my voyage prepared--.'--p. 39.

'"Endymion! the cave is secreter Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys And trembles through my labyrinthine hair."'--p. 48.

By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning of his sentences and the structure of his lines: we now present them with some of the new words with which, in imitation of Mr. Leigh Hunt, he adorns our language.

We are told that 'turtles _passion_ their voices,' (p. 15); that 'an arbour was _nested_,' (p. 23); and a lady's locks '_gordian'd_ up,' (p. 32); and to supply the place of the nouns thus verbalized Mr. Keats, with great fecundity, spawns new ones; such as 'men-slugs and human _serpentry_,' (p. 41); the '_honey-feel_ of bliss,' (p. 45); 'wives prepare _needments_,' (p. 13)--and so forth.

Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads; thus, 'the wine out-sparkled,' (p. 10); the 'multitude up-followed,' (p. 11); and 'night up-took,' (p. 29). 'The wind up-blows,' (p. 32); and the 'hours are down-sunken,' (p. 36.)

But if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the language with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the parent stock. Thus, a lady 'whispers _pantingly_ and close,' makes '_hushing_ signs,' and steers her skiff into a '_ripply_ cove,' (p. 23); a shower falls '_refreshfully_,' (45); and a vulture has a '_spreaded_ tail,' (p. 44.)

But enough of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte.--If any one should be bold enough to purchase this 'Poetic Romance,' and so much more patient, than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success; we shall then return to the task which we now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to Mr. Keats and to our readers.--_The Quarterly Review_.

COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY.

No[.] IV.

OF KEATS, THE MUSES' SON OF PROMISE, AND WHAT FEATS HE YET MAY DO, &C.

CORNELIUS WEBB.

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 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 purposes 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."

"What though, for shewing truth to flattered state, _Kind Hunt_ was shut in prison, yet has he, In his immortal spirit been as free As the sky-searching lark and as elate. Minion of grandeur! think you he did wait? Think you he nought but prison walls did see, Till, so unwilling, thou unturn'dst the key? Ah, no! far happier, nobler was his fate! _In Spenser's halls!_ he strayed, and bowers fair, Culling enchanted flowers; and he flew _With daring Milton!_ through the fields of air; To regions of his own his genius true Took happy flights. Who shall his fame impair When thou art dead, and all thy wretched crew?"

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 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 [_sic_].