Early October 1817: Haydon’s Influence & the Problem of Literary Men
22 Lisson Grove North (now No. 1 Rossmore Road), London
22 Lisson Grove North: where the established historical painter Benjamin Robert Haydon moves, 27 September, after having his studio at Great Marlborough Street, London.
Haydon becomes Keats’s friend a year earlier, in October 1816, when the life-changing expansion of Keats’s London connections takes place through celebrity journalist, poet, and critic Leigh Hunt, co-publisher of the independent (and openly progressive) journal, The Examiner, and the venue in which Keats is first published.
Haydon is central to Keats’s social and
intellectual expansion.* Haydon greatly respects the young, unknown Keats—in fact,
he feels
they are bonded, kindred spirits. Earlier in the year, on 17 March, Haydon signs off
a letter
to Keats with let our hearts be buried in each other.
Initially, at least, Keats is
hugely impressed by the older (by almost 10 years) and well-known Haydon, and Haydon
returns
much respect while offering incredibly strong belief in Keats’s calling as a poet.
In
anticipation of meeting him, Keats’s refers to him as this glorious Haydon
(letters, 31
Oct 1816). For his part, as Haydon recalls in his diaries, what amazes him about Keats
is his
prematurity of intellectual and poetic power
(Haydon’s Diaries and Journals, [1853, 1950] p. 295). Haydon in fact views Keats in the same
way he sees himself: as the sensitive, unacknowledged genius, though barely beneath
Haydon’s
character lurks an off-putting combination of aggressive stubbornness and aggrandizement,
which came across to some as simply vanity. But he is much more complex than that,
as his
diaries reveal.
No doubt Haydon’s theories and opinions about
art influence Keats, given, first, Haydon’s intense commitment to art and its greater
social,
aesthetic, and historical importance; and second, how much time Keats and Haydon spent
together during, arguably, Keats’s most formative period. Before meeting Keats, we
find
dispersed in Haydon’s earlier journals that some of his notions about art’s importance
and its
qualities partly square with Keats’s developing poetics, and, again, these ideas almost
certainly spilled over into the large number of conversations Haydon had with Keats.
For
example, dispersed throughout his journals, Haydon is clearly passionate about the
idea and
privileging importance of beauty; and at one point, in the context of describing an
appropriate response to the Elgin Marbles, Haydon writes about being alive to their beauty
and truth
(in his journal entry of 23 Feb 1816). The anticipatory proximity to Keats’s
remarkably memorable phrasing at the end of his own homage to Greek art in Ode on a Grecian
Urn—Beauty is truth, truth beauty
—should not be lost on us. This of course
reminds us of the fact that it is Haydon who takes Keats to see the Elgin Marbles earlier in the year (early March), and it is Haydon who, before this,
publicly and passionately expresses how the Marbles represent a supreme expression
of ideal
beauty. Again, some of this thinking no doubt rubbed off on young Keats.
Haydon includes Keats in his large heroic
painting, Christ’s Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem, a canvas
that takes a few years to complete—a few years too many, in fact: bad eyesight and
troubled
striving for impossible perfection handicap him, since he truly believed in his own
and the
painting’s greatness. As suggested, Haydon overestimates his own self-proclaimed genius,
and
flaws in technique and composition are not difficult to see (Haydon’s complex explanation
and
aggrandizing assessment of the painting are best expressed in his 6 October 1831 letter
to a
certain Col Wild
). Haydon also does not manage his own career and affairs very well,
and money issues will later come between Keats and Haydon (Haydon in June 1821 is
arrested for
his debts and jailed two years later). Too often Haydon is quarrelsome and defensive,
both in
his professional and personal encounters—his tragic end is tied to his compounded
difficulties
and personality. He fully believed that one role he had (or was entitled to) was to
save
British art and to raise it to new heights.
Now, in October 1817, a year after Keats falls in with this London network, he has
come to
know some of these persons better, and his wide-eyed enthusiasm is tempered. To Benjamin Bailey, his scholarly friend at Oxford (and
with whom he stays most of September), Keats writes that he is disgusted
by the
pettiness between literary men,
and particularly Haydon and Hunt, who find themselves
jealous Neighbours
at this time, talking behind each others’ backs (8 Oct). Keats is
clearly disenchanted with many aspects of Hunt, who still sees himself as mentor to
Keats, and
who, Keats finds out, makes somewhat condescending comments about the very long poem
Keats is
currently writing and struggling a little with, Endymion;
Haydon warns Keats not to show Hunt his work on the poem, given that Hunt might highhandedly
condemn it, and thereby upset Keats (8 Oct).
In the history of his relationship with Hunt,
Keats finds him likable enough, and he very much respects Hunt’s journalistic and
independent
edge, but the charge of egotism
that begins in May 1817 continues, and perhaps peaks in
an outburst in a letter Keats writes to his brother, George, and wife,Georgiana, at the end of the year: in reality he [Hunt] is vain,
egotistical and disgusting in matters of tastes and morals
(17 Dec). That’s pretty
direct. But perhaps most importantly, especially in terms of Keats’s developing idea
of
beauty’s unassailable, enduring truth, is how Hunt can put his own intellectual egotism
above
a beautiful work itself; thus, as Keats notes, making fine things petty and beautiful
things hateful . . . many a glorious thing when associated with him [Hunt] becomes
a
nothing
(17 Dec 1818). This, for Keats, is almost a kind of heresy. A higher principle
of beauty sustains Keats, and this principle exists beyond opinions, ego, and fashion.
At this point in his poetic progress, independence of direction begins to feature
more
frequently in Keats’s thinking. It bothers him to be seen as Hunt’s pupil (letters, 8 Oct), and Haydon does warn Keats away from Hunt’s sway—Haydon disparagingly
refers to it as the Examiner clique
in his autobiography— as does another good friend,
John Hamilton Reynolds. The low public point
of Keats’s poetic pairing with Hunt is to come: in two devastating reviews, over about
a
month-long period in September 1818 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine and The Quarterly Review, Keats is
denigrated as being nothing more than Hunt’s defective, pretentious apprentice and
disciple.
Keats will waver in his attitude about the reviews: at moments he is infuriated; and
at times
he rises above the clever, cutting attacks, realizing they are motivated more by politics
than
by poetical principles. Truth be known: those negative reviews are largely correct
in what
they point to as the more flimsy and ineffectual qualities of Keats’s early poetry.
[*See this flowchart for Haydon’s key placement as a node in Keats’s social network.]
