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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The friendship between John Keats and Benjamin Robert Haydon is one chapter in the life of the poet which has never been satisfactorily written. A biography, like a novel, must needs have a villain; and in Haydon, Keats's biographers have one ready made. He was an egoist, a fanatic, and—worst of all—a failure; and surely, one is likely to think, whenever Haydon and Keats disagreed, Keats must have been right. The fact is that Keats and Haydon were intimate friends during the greater part of Keats's active creative life, and that each held the other, as an artist, in the highest regard. The purpose of the present study is to examine in some detail the course of this friendship and tentatively evaluate the importance of the influence of the painter on the poet.
1 “A gentleman of oblique vision, given to profuse statement” is, for example, one of the kindest of Amy Lowell's remarks on the painter. John Keats (Boston and New York, 1925), i, 253.
2 The source of all quotations in this study not otherwise noted is the most recent edition of The Letters of John Keats, edited by Maurice Buxton Forman (Oxford Press, 1931). I have also accepted the dates assigned by Forman to doubtful letters.
3 I have adopted here the date arrived at by Edmund Blunden in his Leigh Hunt (London 1930), p. 107.
4 The Rev. A. G. K. L'Estrange, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, Told by Herself in Letters to Her Friends (New York, 1870), i, 320.—Sir William, of course, knew Haydon, being a fellow townsman and one of the purchasers of The Judgment of Solomon in 1814.
5 The Autobiography is not clear on the place of this meeting. Haydon's son, however, puts it at Horace Smith's. Frederic Wordsworth Haydon, Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table-Talk (London, 1876), ii, 72, n.
6 Op. cit., i, 273–274.
7 Aldous Huxley, ed., The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (Edited from his Journals by Tom Taylor) (New York, n.d.), i, 251. See also Clarke's “Recollections of John Keats,” Gentleman's Magazine, Feb. 1874, p. 198.
8 Amy Lowell notes that Timon of Athens was on at the Drury Lane for the ten days beginning on Monday, October 28, 1816. Op. cit., i, 202.
9 Ibid., pp. 206–207.
10 Sidney Colvin, John Keats: his Life and Poetry, his Friends, Critics, and After-Fame, 2nd ed. (London, 1918), p. 64.
11 Lowell, op. cit., i, 204.
12 Op. cit., p. 107.—H.B. Forman places Keats's introduction to Hunt in the spring of 1816. M. B. Forman, Op. cit., i, xxix.
13 See Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers, (New York, [1878]), pp. 132 ff.
14 H. S. Milford, ed., The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, (Oxford Press, 1923), p. 243.
15 Thomas Landseer, Life and Letters of Wm. Bewick (London, 1871), i, 129.
16 Roberta D. Cornelius, “Two Early Reviews of Keats's First Volume,” PMLA, xl, 193–210, reprints this review in full.
17 Ibid., p. 199.
18 This letter, reproduced in somewhat garbled form in the Correspondence and Table-Talk, ii, 2, is corrected by Forman (op. cit., i, 14, n.). Throughout the present study Forman's version of Haydon's letters to Keats has been preferred over Frederic Wordsworth Haydon's as being more accurate and more complete. H. B. Forman had access to Haydon's Journals, which are now, unfortunately, not available.
19 The Athenaeum, Feb. 19, 1898, p. 248.
20 Ibid., p. 285.
21 Forman, op. cit., i, 54–55.
22 Ibid.
23 Landseer, op. cit., i, 40.—Bewick was less favorably inclined toward Haydon when, in 1823, he found himself involved in his master's financial ruin.
24 Colvin, op. cit., p. 254: Lowell, op. cit., i, 138.
25 In Wilfred Partington, The Private Letter Books of Sir Walter Scott (London, 1930), pp. 174–175.
26 Op. cit., iii, p. 520.
27 London Magazine, ii (December, 1820), 667–668; 682.
28 Amy Lowell has well summarized the evidence regarding the circumstances surrounding this meeting. Op. cit., i, 542–543.
29 Huxley, op. cit., i, 268–271.
30 From Haydon's Journals it would appear that the usual fee was around two hundred guineas (Huxley, op. cit., ii, 681–682). Keats mentions a subscription for Cripps of between £150 and £200.
31 See Lowell, op. cit., i, 551–552.
32 Landseer, op. cit., i, 41.
33 See F. W. Haydon, op. cit., i, 110.—Coleridge was also listed in the Annals of the Fine Arts, iv (1920), 131, as among the distinguished company which “honored the private day” of the exhibition of drawings of the Raphael Cartoons by Haydon's pupils.
34 William Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (London, 1892), p. 33.
35 William Knight, The Life of William Wordsworth (Edinburgh, 1889), ii, App. v, p. 409.
36 Miss Lowell makes much of the supposition that Keats did not ask “ the return of the whole loan, he merely asked for ‘some’ money” (op. cit., ii, 263–264). What Keats actually wrote was “Do borrow or beg some how what you can for me.” And considering the insignificance of the sum borrowed, it would seem that Miss Lowell's distinction is not important. She then continues with passionate inaccuracy, “Haydon's capacity for borrowing was inexhaustible, but he never paid his debts …” (loc. cit.).
37 Huxley, op. cit., passim.
38 Ibid., i, 288.
39 Op. cit., ii, 472 n.
40 From an inscription, signed by Haydon, in a copy of the first volume of his Lectures on Painting and Design (London, 1844), in the writer's possession, it would appear that the painter had known Dr. Darling since 1810.
41 Huxley, op. cit., i, 282.
42 Ibid., p. 302.
43 Ibid.
44 F. W. Haydon, op. cit., ii, 255.
45 Ibid., i, 88.
46 Ibid., i. 144.
47 James Greig, ed., The Farington Diary (Lond., 1923–28), v, 171–172. Haydon may have acquired this habit from Fuseli, Keeper of the Academy, who was notoriously profane.