The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎49v] (103/244)

588
THE NINETEENTH
April
One would have thouglit that, during the long tract of seventy-
years through which this stanza of Byron's has been quoted, and that
story of Shelley's to which it lent epigrammatic point has continued
more or less current, mere natural curiosity would have induced
hundreds of persons to make direct acquaintance with the terrible
article charged with such tragic consequences. But people are indo
lent in such matters ; and what Byron's shrewd common-sense led
him to do in 1821—viz. read the notorious article for himself, to test
its killin g power—seems to have been done by very few since. Anyone
who chooses, however, may now take down from a library shelf Volume
XIX. of the Quarterly Review, containing the numbers for April
and July 1818, and there see the article on Keats's
It is the seventh article in the first of these numbers; which number,
however, was not actually out, both Mr. Buxton Forman and Mr.
Sidney Colvin inform us, till the last week of September.
The actual article, I am sure, will considerably surprise those
who may have judged of it by hearsay. It will surprise, in the first
place, by its extreme brevity and slightness. Instead of being an
onslaught in thirty pages or so, as one would have expected of an
article credited with such crushing and death-dealing effect, it is a
wretched little thing of exactly four pages altogether. It cannot have
been the bulk of the article, therefore, that overwhelmed Keats ; it
must have been the killing quality of the matter of the four pages.
Let us see.
Reviewers have been sometimes accused [so the article opens] of not reading
the works they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate
the authors 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 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 pain
fully toiled, than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into.
A few words of qualified praise are then interjected.
It is not [says the Reviewer] 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 somewhere been called Cockney poetry—which may be
defined to consist in the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language.
Then, after referring sarcastically to Leigh Hunt as the chief of
this school, and characterising the author of as ' a copyist
of Mr. Hunt/ but ' more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as
diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd,' the Reviewer glances
at the story of the poem.