'A Profound Secret Both to Himself and the World'

English majors will recall the evisceration of John Keats in an 1818 review of Endymion in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. John Gibson Lockhart, using the pen name “Z,” mocked Keats’ “Cockney” poetry, his medical training and even his friendship with Leigh Hunt. He dismissed the “imperturbable driveling idiocy of Endymion” and then got personal: 

“We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture 50 quid upon anything he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.”

 

Talk about “triggering.” My generation was taught that Lockhart’s assault was the most savage in English literary history and may have contributed to Keats’ death at age twenty-five in 1821.  Byron recalled the affair in Don Juan:

 

“John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique,

       Just as he really promis’d something great,

If not intelligible, without Greek

       Contriv’d to talk about the gods of late,

Much as they might have been suppos’d to speak.

       Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate;

’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,

Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.”

 

A series of literary demolition jobs from the same era rivals Lockhart’s on Keats for pure dedicated ferocity. In September 1816, Thomas Moore took apart Coleridge and his “Christabel” in the Edinburgh Review: “There is literally not one couplet which would be reckoned poetry, or even sense, were it found in the corner of a newspaper or upon the window of an inn.” Moore called the poem “a mixture of raving and driv’ling.” On September 8, 1816 in the Examiner came another pummeling. William Hazlitt read an advertisement for Coleridge’s Lay Sermon. Without even reading the published work, and freely admitting that he hadn’t, William Hazlitt launched his artillery strike:

 

“The ingenious author, in a preface, which is a master-piece in its kind, having neither beginning, middle, nor end, apologizes for having published a work, not a line of which is written, or ever likely to be written.”

 

That’s merely prelude. Now Hazlitt lets loose with a 216-word, one-sentence cannonade:

 

“He has, it seems, resorted to this expedient as the only way of appearing before the public in a manner worthy of himself and his genius, and descants on the several advantages to be derived from this original mode of composition; -- That as long as he does not put pen to paper, the first sentence cannot contradict the second; that neither his reasonings nor his conclusions can be liable to objection, in the abstract; that omne ignotum pro magnifico est [Tacitus: “everything unknown appears magnificent”], is an axiom laid down by some of the best and wisest men of antiquity; that hitherto his performance, in the opinion of his readers, has fallen short of the vastness of his designs, but that no one can find fault with what he does not write; that while he merely haunts the public imagination with obscure noises, or by announcing his spiritual appearance for the next week, and does not venture out in propria persona with his shroud and surplice on, the Cock-lane Ghost of mid-day, he may escape in a whole skin without being handled by the mob, or uncased by the critics; and he considers it the safest way to keep up the importance of his oracular communications, by letting them remain a profound secret both to himself and the world.”

 

A good drubbing is always a pleasure to read. Lockhart is merely a condescending class-conscious brute. Hazlitt makes brutality witty. We could use more critics like Hazlitt in our age of chummy, powder-puff reviews.