personal correspondence reflecting, almost to minuteness, the Benjamin Robert Haydon to John Keats. May 11, 1817. My dear Keats,-I have been intending to write to you every hour this week, but have been so interrupted that the postman rang his bell every night in vain, and with a sound that made my heart quake. I think you did quite right to leave the Isle of Wight if you felt no relief; and being quite alone, after study you can now devote your eight hours a-day with just as much seclusion as ever. Do not give way to any forebodings. They are nothing more than the over-eager anxieties of a great spirit stretched beyond its strength, and then relapsing for a time to languid inefficiency. Every man of great views is, at times, thus tormented, but begin again where you left off without hesitation or fear. Trust in God with all your might, my dear Keats. This dependence, with your own energy, will give you strength, and hope, and comfort. I am always in trouble, and wants, and distresses; here I found a refuge. From my soul I declare to you I never applied for help or for consolation, or for strength, but I found it. I always rose up from my knees with a refreshed fury, an ironclenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life. Never despair while there is this path open to you. By habitual exercise you will have habitual intercourse and constant companionship; and at every want turn to the Great Star of your hopes with a delightful confidence that will never be disappointed. I love you like my own brother. Beware, for God's sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, 1 Reference to Leigh Hunt. and the cause he undertook to support injured by his own neglect of character. I wish you would come up to town for a day or two that I may put your head in my picture. I have rubbed in Wordsworth's, and advanced the whole. God bless you, my dear Keats! do not despair; collect incident, study character, read Shakespeare, and trust in Providence, and you will do, you must. Ever affectionately yours, CCLXXXIX. B. R. HAYDON. Benjamin Robert Haydon to Miss Mitford. September, 1823. Oh, human nature! and human criticism! Did mankind know the motives which instigate all criticism on living talent, or within ten years after its existence, how cautious it would be of suffering itself to be led by modern critics? When Keats was living, I could not get Hazlitt to admit Keats had common talents! Death seems to cut off all apprehensions that our self-love will be wounded by acknowledging genius. But let us see, and sift the motives of this sudden change. 'Blackwood's' people Hazlitt would murder, morally or physically, no matter which, but to murder them he wishes. To suppose Keats's death entirely brought on by 'Blackwood's' attacks is too valuable and mortal a blow to be given up. With the wary cunning of a thoroughbred modern review writer, he dwells on this touching subject, so likely to be echoed by all who have suffered by 'Blackwood's' vindictive animosities. Now, Keats is an immortal; before, he was a pretender! Now, his sensitive mind withered under their ' murderous criticisms,' when, had Keats been a little more prominent, Hazlitt, as soon as any man, would have given him the first stab! He thus revenges his own mortification by pushing forward the sheeted ghost of poor fated Keats. Hazlitt and his innamorata have now gone to Italy, the land of Art, and he has left 'the land of spinning jennies and Sundayschools,' as he says-and, as he forgot to say, the land also of Shakespeare and Milton, Bacon and Newton, Hampden and Locke. In the Morning Chronicle' of yesterday is his first letter, full of his usual good things, and-bad things; but still I hope he will continue them. Any man who can leave England, and look back upon her shore and think only of spinning jennies and of nothing else, must be a bastard son. Alas! what England suffers from her unnatural children! Disappointed painters, disappointed poets, disappointed statesmen, disappointed placehunters, all unite to decry her genius, her worth, her grandeur, and her power. CCXC. Mr. Haydon's estimate of Wordsworth's poetry portrays with tolerable exactness the tone of public criticism half a century ago, criticism which Professor Shairp has succeeded in modifying in some directions and altogether dissipating in others. With regard to the second half of this letter it may be remembered that Byron never attempted to ' skin' Keats for his drivelling idiotism.' He recanted after reading 'Hyperion,' and deplored the early death of Keats as a loss to our literature. Benjamin Robert Haydon to Miss Mitford. [1824.] You are unjust, depend upon it, in your estimate of Byron's poetry, and wrong in your ranking Wordsworth beyond him. There are things in Byron's poetry so exquisite, that fifty or five hundred years hence they will be read, felt, and adored throughout the world. I grant that Wordsworth is very pure and very holy, and very orthodox, and occasionally very elevated, highly poetical, and oftener insufferably obscure, starched, dowdy, anti-human and anti-sympathetic, but he will never be ranked above Byron nor classed with Milton, he will not, indeed. He wants the constructive power, the lucidus ordo of the greatest minds, which is as much a proof of the highest order as any other quality. I dislike his selfish Quakerism; his affectation of superior virtue; his utter insensibility to the frailties-the beautiful frailties of passion. I was once walking with him in Pall Mall; we darted into Christie's. A copy of the Transfiguration' was at the head of the room, and in the corner a beautiful copy of the 'Cupid and Psyche' (statues) 6 kissing. Cupid is taking her lovely chin, and turning her pouting mouth to meet his while he archly bends his own down, as if saying, 'Pretty dear!' You remember this exquisite group? . . . Catching sight of the Cupid, as he and I were coming out, Wordsworth's face reddened, he showed his teeth, and then said in a loud voice, 'The Dev-v-v-vils!' There's a mind! Ought not this exquisite group to have roused his 'Shapes of Beauty,' and have softened his heart as much as his old grey-mossed rocks, his withered thorn, and his dribbling mountain streams? altered about Wordsworth, very much, from finding him a bard too elevated to attend to the music of humanity. No, No! give me Byron, with all his spite, hatred, depravity, dandyism, vanity, frankness, passion, and idleness, to Wordsworth, with all his heartless communion with woods and grass. I am When he came back from his tour, I breakfasted with him in Oxford Street. He readLaodamia' to me, and very finely. He had altered, at the suggestion of his wife, Laodamia's fate (but I cannot refer to it at this moment), because she had shown such weakness as to wish her husband's stay. Mrs. Wordsworth held that Laodamia ought to be punished, and punished she was. I will refer to it. Here it is She whom a trance of passion thus removed, I have it in his own hand. This is different from the first edition. And as he repeated it with self-approbation of his own heroic feelings for banishing a wife because she felt a pang at her husband going to hell again, his own wife sat crouched by the fireplace and chanted every line to the echo, apparently congratulating herself at being above the mortal frailty of loving her William. You should make allowance for Byron's not liking Keats. He could not. Keats's poetry was an immortal stretch beyond the mortal intensity of his own. An intense egotism, as it were, was the leading exciter of Byron's genius. He could feel nothing for fauns or satyrs, or gods, or characters past, unless the association of them were excited by some positive natural scene where they had actually died, written, or fought. All his poetry was the result of a deep feeling roused by what passed before his eyes. Keats was a stretch beyond this. Byron could not enter into it any more than he could Shakespeare. He was too frank to conceal his thoughts. If he really admired Keats he would have said so (I am afraid I am as obscure here as Wordsworth). So, in his controversy with Bowles, Byron really thought Pope the greater poet. He pretended that a man who versified the actual vices or follies was a greater, and more moral poet than he who invented a plot, invented characters which by their action on each other produced a catastrophe from which a moral was inferred. This at once showed the reach of his genius. CCXCI. This entertaining narrative is inserted for the especial consideration and guidance of dramatic critics. Benjamin Robert Haydon to Miss Mitford. August 18, 1826. were poorly. What -'s safe arrival again, How do you find yourself? I heard you are you about? I was happy to hear of and I shall be most happy to see him, though tell him he will find no more Solomons' towering up as a background to our conversations. Nothing but genteel-sized drawing-room pocket-history— Alexander in a nutshell; Bucephalus no bigger than a Shetland pony, and my little girl's doll a giantess to my Olympias. The other night I paid my butcher; one of the miracles of these times, you will say. Let me tell you I have all my life been seeking for a butcher whose respect for genius predominated over his love of gain. I could not make out, before I dealt with this man, his excessive desire that I should be his customer; his sly hints as I passed his shop that he had a bit of South Down, very fine; a sweetbread, perfection; and a calf's foot that was all jelly without bone!' The other day he called, and I had him sent up into the painting-room. I found him in great admiration of Alexander.' 'Quite alive, Sir!' 'I am glad you think so,' said I. 'Yes, Sir, but, as I have said often to my sister, you could not have painted that picture, Sir, if you had not eat my meat, Sir !' |