1102. Benjamin Robert Haydon to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 246–247.
[London]
[ca. 28 December 1842] [1]
Keats’ expression too subtle for the Brush!—there’s a pretty confession—there is nothing too subtle for the brush,—one night I made a sketch of him on condition he would make one of me– [2] I’ll send you a repetition (not the one under) but a regular copy
Something like—you shall have a right one.
His expression was exquisite poor dear Keats—I put him in my great Picture of Jerusalem now at Philadelphia. [3]
Never shall I forget one day at Hampstead—Leigh Hunt invited a large party to breakfast[.] I was lodging at Hampstead for bad health & was invited, as I knew the poetical irregularity of Hunt’s domesticities I told Keats I should breakfast before I went & be over about 11—saying I’ll bet 5 to 1 by that time, you will not have seen the breakfast Cloth.
At 11 I walked over & found Keats and a party patrolling before the House on the grass, in doleful sarcasm, as they had been there two hours without a morsel– I laughed ready to drop & said What’s the matter, for this is worse than usual– Oh said Keats his Wife’s Sister, who is in love with Hunt tried to drown herself this morning in one of the ponds, and it was so shallow, she only tumbled in the black mud, & has just gone in covered, being pulled out by two laborers!
After walking, I took my leave, & believe about one—they got their breakfast– Keats called on me after—& we revelled——
He bitterly lamented his intimacy with that incarnate Vanity—as I have done all my life—for he injured me, Keats, & did Byron great harm– [4] There never was born such a mixture & incarnation, of Conceit, impudence, talent, ignorance, malice, geniality[,] amiability, affectation & scepticism with sufficient glimpses of belief to make him afraid of damnation as Leigh Hunt. He disbelieved Christianity, & had too much of the Cockney not to be afraid of the Devil.
B R Haydon
I meant you to keep the Manuscript—shall I inscribe it & send it back? [5]
I shall send for 2 of the Sketches, in a day or two about one in the day.
Address: Miss B. Barrett / 50. Wimpole St.
Publication: EBB-BRH, pp. 15–17 (as before 29 December 1842).
Manuscript: Keats-Shelley Memorial Association.
1. Dated by EBB’s request in letter 1104 for Horne’s comments on the sketch of Keats.
2. Haydon’s profile of Keats, and Keats’s sketch of Haydon, made in 1816, are now in the National Portrait Gallery.
3. “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem” was begun in 1814 and completed in 1820. Haydon recorded on 17 May 1814: “My picture is sketched in” and his diary included twelve preliminary sketches (Pope, I, 351). The picture included amongst the spectators likenesses of Keats, Wordsworth and Hazlitt. At the time Haydon wrote this letter, the picture was being exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
4. In Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828), Leigh Hunt was candid to the point of giving offence (see letter 865, note 7).
5. Haydon sent EBB the last portion (ll. 183–242) of Keats’s manuscript of “I Stood Tip-toe”; at the bottom of the page he wrote: “A Fragment of Dear Keats poetry & writing, given to me by him & by me to Miss Barrett, December 30 1842. B.R. Haydon.” It is now at Harvard (see Reconstruction, L127), with an envelope, postmarked 30 December, addressed to EBB by Haydon.
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