_Reynolds's Peter Bell_.
When the article on John Hamilton Reynolds ("A Friend of Keats") was
written, I had not seen his "Peter Bell" (Taylor and Hessey, London,
1888). This "Lyrical Ballad" is described in a letter of Keats's
published by Mr. Sidney Colvin in _Macmillan's Magazine_, August, 1888.
The point of Reynolds's joke was to produce a parody before the original.
Reynolds was annoyed by what Hood called "The Betty Foybles" of
Wordsworth, and by the demeanour of a poet who was serious, not only in
season, but out of season. Moreover, Wordsworth had damned "a pretty
piece of heathenism" by Keats, with praise which was faint even from
Wordsworth to a contemporary. In the circumstances, as Wordsworth was
not yet a kind of solemn shade, whom we see haunting the hills, and hear
chanting the swan song of the dying England, perhaps Reynolds's parody
scarce needs excuse. Mr. Ainger calls it "insolent," meaning that it has
an unkind tone of personal attack. That is, unluckily, true, but to
myself the parody appears remarkably funny, and quite worthy of "the
sneering brothers, the vile Smiths," as Lamb calls the authors of
"Rejected Addresses." Lamb wrote to tell Wordsworth that he did not see
the fun of the parody--perhaps it is as well that we should fail to see
the fun of jests broken on our friends. But will any Wordsworthian deny
to-day the humour of this?--
"He is rurally related;
Peter Bell hath country cousins,
(He had once a worthy mother),
Bells and Peters by the dozens,
But Peter Bell he hath no brothers,
Not a brother owneth he,
Peter Bell he hath no brother;
His mother had no other son,
No other son e'er called her 'mother,'
Peter Bell hath brother none."
As Keats says in a review he wrote for _The Examiner_, "there is a
pestilent humour in the rhymes, and an inveterate cadence in some of the
stanzas that must be lamented." In his review Keats tried to hurt
neither side, but his heart was with Reynolds; "it would be just as well
to trounce Lord Byron in the same manner."
People still make an outcry over the trouncing of Keats. It was
bludgeonly done, but only part of a game, a kind of horseplay at which
most men of letters of the age were playing. Who but regrets that, in
his "Life of Keats," Mr. Colvin should speak as if Sir Walter Scott had,
perhaps, a guilty knowledge of the review of Keats in _Blackwood_! There
is but a tittle of published evidence to the truth of a theory in itself
utterly detestable, and, to every one who understands the character of
Scott, wholly beyond possibility of belief. Even if Lockhart was the
reviewer, and if Scott came to know it, was Scott responsible for what
Lockhart did in 1819 or 1820, the very time when Mrs. Shelley thought he
was defending Shelley in _Blackwood_ (where he had praised her
_Frankenstein_), and when she spoke of Sir Walter as "the only liberal
man in the faction"? Unluckily Keats died, and his death was absurdly
attributed to a pair of reviews which may have irritated him, and which
were coarse, and cruel even for that period of robust reviewing. But
Keats knew very well the value of these critiques, and probably resented
them not much more than a football player resents being "hacked" in the
course of the game. He was very willing to see Byron and Wordsworth
"trounced," and as ready as Peter Corcoran in his friend's poem to "take
punishment" himself. The character of Keats was plucky, and his estimate
of his own genius was perfectly sane. He knew that he was in the thick
of a literary "scrimmage," and he was not the man to flinch or to repine
at the consequences.