The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎57r] (118/244)

1892 THE STORY OF GIF FORD 603
on which day, a calmer and gentler frame of mind having come at
last, he died peacefully in Severn's arms. He was buried three days
afterwards in the lonely Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of
Cestius, where his ashes still rest, and where visitors now see also
the grave of the faithful Severn, whose honoured life was protracted
fifty-eight years beyond that of the friend with whose memory his
name is imperishably associated. Keats at the time of his death was
twenty-five years and four months old. It was two years and five
months after the article on him in the ; and, knowing
now how much Keats had been doing in the interval, and what a
succession of incidents affecting him had intervened between the two
events, we can judge how little the one can have had to do with the
other.
Although, however, the legend as to the cause of the premature
death of Keats has thus to be dismissed as an impassioned hallucination
of Shelley's, perpetuated by Byron's epigrammatic version of it, those
two articles on Keats's Endymion on its first appearance,—the
wood article of August, 1818, and the Quarterly article of September,
1818,—retain an infamous kind of interest in English literary
history, and cannot be allowed to be forgotten. The recollection of
them suggests various reflections. They exemplify for us, in the
first place, the horrible iniquity, the utter detestability, of the prac
tice of carrying the rancour of party politics into the business of
literary criticism. Almost avowedly, it was because young Keats was a
friend of Leigh Hunt, and was supposed to share the political opinions
of Hunt and a few other Londoners of prominent political notoriety
at the time, that the two periodicals in question made their simul
taneous onslaught on Endymion. They had vowed exterminating
war against Hunt and his political associates, and were lying in wait
for every new appearance in the field of a straggler from that camp;
and what did it matter to them who emerged next, or in what guise ?
Keats had emerged,—in reality no party politician at all, but in every
fibre of his nature a poet and that only,—Keats had emerged ; and
they bludgeoned him ! It is to be hoped that in the literary critic
ism of our day there are, and can be, no such outrages ; but I would
not be too sure. If there is any advice which one might be permitted
to give, to young men especially, in connection with the story I have
been resuscitating, it is that they should abhor the intrusion of party-
politics into higher and finer concerns, and make it their endeavour
all their lives, in their own minds and conduct, to keep the spirit of
party-politics within bounds. But the recollection of those two
reviews of Keats's Endymion, especially when we remember also how
many other instances there are of the kind, may well prompt a still
more extensive reflection. They remind us of the necessary fallibility
of literary criticism, even when it may not be vitiated in the manner