The other day I'm reading along in Walter Jackson Bate's biography of John Keats when I came to the section concerning the critical reviews of Endymion, Keats's first long poem. The work was savaged in several of the conservative journals of the time, and Byron, in Don Juan, famously surmised that the nasty reviews had mortally wounded Keats, who died (of consumption) just a few years later, at 25:
'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.
Keats actually was not very much affected by the reviews, which nevertheless drew fire from his defenders. There was Hazlitt's "Letter to William Gifford"--Gifford was the editor of Quarterly Review, a Tory magazine that could not abide Keats and his liberal, free-thinking friends--commencing, "You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of anyone you do not like; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it." According to Bate, this "letter" is "one of the half dozen most sustained pieces of invective in English"--I wish I could find it online. But Gifford was only the editor. Of the actual reviewer, John Wilson Croker, Macaulay wrote that he (Croker) would travel "a hundred miles through sleet and snow, on the top of a coach, in a December night, to search a parish register, for the sake of showing that a man is illegitimate, or a woman older than she says she is."
It's good to know that such a fellow could find work in the journalistic organs of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Croker: was he named by Dickens?
Keats himself wrote in a letter that "the commonest man shows a grace in a quarrel," for "the energies displayed in it are fine." I read a lot, and almost all of it is completely forgotten, but bits of barbed invective lodge in my mind for years. Possibly I am just not a very nice person. Here are some examples of things I'll never forget:
- Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, on George Bush II: "He was born on third base, and acts like he hit a triple."
- A condensed review of "Beverly Hills Cop": "Eddie Murphy tricks the white dumbos. For some reason, audiences love it."
- A golf caddy, after a country-club member, having made a score of incalculable proportions, complains of having drawn "the worst caddy ever": "Sir, that would be entirely too great a coincidence."
- To close with a recent example, Christopher Benfey, writing about Mitt Romney at the NYRB Blog: "On television, Mitt looks like someone hired to play the president in a movie that couldn't afford Clooney."