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Title: Life of John Keats - His Life and Poetry, his Friends, Critics and After-fame
Author: Colvin, Sidney, 1845-1927
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Life of John Keats - His Life and Poetry, his Friends, Critics and After-fame" ***
Transcriber's notes:
(1) Characters following a carat (^) were printed in superscript.
(2) Macrons and breves above letters and dots below letters were not
inserted.
(3) The following typographical errors have been corrected:
Page 39: "The shield and helmet of Diomed, with the accompanying
simile, in the opening of the third book; and the prodigious
description of Neptune's passage to the Achive ships, in the
thirteenth book:" 'Achive' amended to 'Argive'.
Page 146: "And his references to this passage are frequent in his
letters.--But in those exquisite stanzas," 'references' amended from
'reference'.
Page 478: "Many of them, considered in any other character than
that of authors, are, we have no doubt, entitled to be considered
as very worthy people in their own way." 'considered' amended from
'considerd'.
Page 480: "... or no regard to truth. It is, in truth, at least is
full of genius as of absurdity; and he who does not find a great
deal in it to admire and to give delight ..." 'of' amended from
'af'.
Page 490: "... we are like a Quartett of fighting cocks this
morning." 'Quartett' amended from 'Quratett'.
[Illustration: PL. I]
JOHN KEATS
HIS LIFE AND POETRY
HIS FRIENDS CRITICS
AND
AFTER-FAME
BY
SIDNEY COLVIN
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1917
COPYRIGHT
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
S. C.
TO
F. C.
PREFACE
To the name and work of Keats our best critics and scholars have in
recent years paid ever closer attention and warmer homage. But their
studies have for the most part been specialized and scattered, and there
does not yet exist any one book giving a full and connected account of
his life and poetry together in the light of our present knowledge and
with help of all the available material. Ever since it was my part, some
thirty years ago, to contribute the volume on Keats to the series of
short studies edited by Lord Morley, (the _English Men of Letters_
series), I have hoped one day to return to the subject and do my best to
supply this want. Once released from official duties, I began to prepare
for the task, and through the last soul-shaking years, being over age
for any effectual war-service, have found solace and occupation in
carrying it through.
The following pages, timed to appear in the hundredth year after the
publication of Keats's first volume, are the result. I have sought in
them to combine two aims not always easy to be reconciled, those of
holding the interest of the general reader and at the same time of
satisfying, and perhaps on some points even informing, the special
student. I have tried to set forth consecutively and fully the history
of a life outwardly remarkable for nothing but its tragic brevity, but
inwardly as crowded with imaginative and emotional experience as any on
record, and moreover, owing to the open-heartedness of the man and to
the preservation and unreserved publication of his letters, lying bare
almost more than any other to our knowledge. Further, considering for
how much friendship counted in Keats's life, I have tried to call up the
group of his friends about him in their human lineaments and relations,
so far as these can be recovered, more fully than has been attempted
before. I believe also that I have been able to trace more closely than
has yet been done some of the chief sources, both in literature and in
works of art, of his inspiration. I have endeavoured at the same time to
make felt the critical and poetical atmosphere, with its various and
strongly conflicting currents, amid which he lived, and to show how his
genius, almost ignored in its own day beyond the circle of his private
friends, was a focus in which many vital streams of poetic tendency from
the past centred and from which many radiated into the future. To
illustrate this last point it has been necessary, by way of epilogue, to
sketch, however briefly, the story of his posthumous fame, his after
life in the minds and hearts of English writers and readers until
to-day. By English I mean all those whose mother language is English. To
follow the extension of Keats's fame to the Continent is outside my aim.
He has not yet, by means of translation and comment in foreign
languages, become in any full sense a world-poet. But during the last
thirty years the process has begun, and there would be a good deal to
say, did my scheme admit it, of work upon Keats done abroad, especially
in France, where our literature has during the last generation been
studied with such admirable intelligence and care.
In an attempt of this scope, I have necessarily had to repeat matters of
common knowledge and to say again things that others have said well and
sufficiently already. But working from materials hitherto in part
untouched, and taking notice of such new lights as have appeared while
my task was in progress, I have drawn from them some conclusions, both
biographical and critical, which I believe to be my own and which I hope
may stand. I have not shrunk from quoting in full poems and portions of
poems which everybody knows, in cases where I wanted the reader to have
their text not merely in memory but actually before him, for re-studying
with a fresh comment or in some new connexion. I have also quoted very
largely from the poet's letters, even now not nearly as much read as
things so full of genius should be, both in order that some of his story
may be told in his own words and for the sake of that part of his
mind--a great and most interesting part--which is expressed in them but
has not found its way into his poems. It must be added that when I found
things in my former small book which I did not see my way to better and
which seemed to fit into the expanded scale of this one, I have not
hesitated sometimes to incorporate them--to the amount perhaps of forty
or fifty pages in all.
I wish I could hope that my work will be found such as to justify the
amount and variety of friendly help I have had in its preparation.
Thanks for such help are due in more quarters than I can well call to
mind. First and foremost, to Lord Crewe for letting me have free and
constant access to his unrivalled collection of original documents
connected with the subject, both those inherited from his father
(referred to in the notes as 'Houghton MSS.') and those acquired in
recent years by himself (referred to as 'Crewe MSS.'). Speaking
generally, it may be assumed that new matter for which no authority is
quoted is taken from these sources. To Miss Henrietta Woodhouse of
Weston Lea, Albury, I am indebted for valuable documentary and other
information concerning her uncle Richard Woodhouse. Next in importance
among collections of Keats documents to that of Lord Crewe is that of Mr
J. P. Morgan in New York, the chief contents of which have by his leave
been transcribed for me with the kindliest diligence by his librarian
Miss Greene. For other illustrative documents existing in America, I
believe of value, I should like to be able to thank their owners, Mr Day
and Mr Louis Holman of Boston: but these gentlemen made a condition of
their help the issue of a limited edition _de luxe_ of the book
specially illustrated from their material, a condition the publishers
judged it impossible to carry out, at any rate in war-time.
Foremost among my scholarly helpers at home has been my friend Professor
W. P. Ker. For information and suggestions in answer to enquiries of one
kind or another I am indebted to Professor Israel Gollancz and Mr Henry
Bradley; to Professor Ernest Weekley, the best living authority on
surnames; to Mr A. H. Bullen; to Mr Falconer Madan and Mr J. W. Mackail;
to Mr Thomas J. Wise; to Mr H. C. Shelley; to Mr J. D. Milner, Director
of the National Portrait Gallery; and to my former colleague Mr A. H.
Smith, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. Mr
George Whale supplied me with full copies of and comments on the entries
concerning Keats in the books of Guy's Hospital. Dr Hambley Rowe of
Bradford put at my disposal the results, unfortunately not yet
conclusive, of the researches made by him as a zealous Cornishman on
Keats's possible Cornish descent. I must not omit thanks to Mr Emery
Walker for his skill and pains in preparing the illustrations for my
book. With reference to these, I may note that the head from the
portrait painted by Severn in 1859 and now in Lord Crewe's possession
was chosen for colour reproduction as frontispiece because it is the
fullest in colouring and, though done from memory so long after the
poet's death, to my mind the most satisfying and convincing in general
air of any of the extant portraits. Of the miniature done by Severn from
life in 1818, copied and recopied by himself, Charles Brown and others,
and made familiar by numberless reproductions in black and white, the
original, now deposited by the Dilke Trustees in the National Portrait
Gallery, has the character of a monochrome touched with sharp notes or
suggestions of colour in the hair, lips, hands, book, etc. I have
preferred not to repeat either this or the equally well known--nay,
hackneyed--and very distressing death-bed drawing made by Severn at
Rome. The profile from Haydon's life-mask of the poet is taken, not,
like most versions of the same mask, from the plaster, but from an
electrotype made many years ago when the cast was fresh and showing the
structure and modellings of the head more subtly, in my judgment, than
the original cast itself in its present state. Both cast and electrotype
are in the National Portrait Gallery. So is the oil-painting of Keats
seated reading, begun by Severn soon after the poet's death and finished
apparently two years later, which I have reproduced, well known though
it is, partly for its appositeness to a phrase in one of his letters to
his sister. Besides the portraits of Keats, I have added from
characteristic sources those of the two men who most influenced him at
the outset of his career, Leigh Hunt and Haydon. A new feature in my
book is provided by the reproductions of certain works of art, both
pictures and antiques, which can be proved or surmised to have struck
and stimulated his imagination. The reproductions of autographs, one of
his own and one of Haydon's, speak for themselves.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
1795-1815: BIRTH AND PARENTAGE: SCHOOLDAYS AND APPRENTICESHIP 1
CHAPTER II
OCTOBER 1815-MARCH 1817: HOSPITAL STUDIES: POETICAL AMBITIONS:
LEIGH HUNT 27
CHAPTER III
WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST
FOR POETRY 59
CHAPTER IV
THE 'POEMS' OF 1817 85
CHAPTER V
APRIL-DECEMBER 1817: WORK ON _ENDYMION_ 130
CHAPTER VI
_ENDYMION._--I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM 164
CHAPTER VII
_ENDYMION._--II. THE POETRY: ITS QUALITIES AND AFFINITIES 206
CHAPTER VIII
DECEMBER 1817-JUNE 1818: HAMPSTEAD AND TEIGNMOUTH: EMIGRATION
OF GEORGE KEATS 242
CHAPTER IX
JUNE-AUGUST 1818: THE SCOTTISH TOUR 272
CHAPTER X
SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1818: BLACKWOOD AND THE QUARTERLY: DEATH OF
TOM KEATS 297
CHAPTER XI
DECEMBER 1818-JUNE 1819: KEATS AND BROWN HOUSE-MATES: FANNY
BRAWNE: WORK AND IDLENESS 321
CHAPTER XII
JUNE 1819-JANUARY 1820: SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, HAMPSTEAD: TROUBLE
AND HEALTH FAILURE 358
CHAPTER XIII
WORK OF 1818, 1819.--I. THE ACHIEVEMENTS 385
CHAPTER XIV
WORK OF 1818, 1819.--II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS 424
CHAPTER XV
FEBRUARY-AUGUST 1820: HAMPSTEAD AND KENTISH TOWN: PUBLICATION
OF _LAMIA_ VOLUME 455
CHAPTER XVI
AUGUST 1820-FEBRUARY 1821: VOYAGE TO ITALY: LAST DAYS AND DEATH
AT ROME 485
CHAPTER XVII
EPILOGUE 513
APPENDIX 551
INDEX 559
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE PAGE
I. HEAD OF KEATS _Frontispiece_
From a posthumous oil painting by Joseph Severn in the
possession of the Marquis of Crewe, K.G.
II. PORTRAIT OF JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT 46
From an engraving by Mayer after a drawing by J. Hayter.
III. PORTRAIT OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON 62
From an engraving by Thomson after Haydon.
IV. LIFE-MASK OF KEATS 144
From an electrotype in the National Portrait Gallery.
V. 'ONWARD THE TIGER AND THE LEOPARD PANTS, WITH ASIAN
ELEPHANTS' 230
From an engraving after a sarcophagus relief at Woburn Abbey.
VI. A SACRIFICE TO APOLLO 264
From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.
VII. THE ENCHANTED CASTLE 266
From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.
VIII. 'AND THERE I'D SIT AND READ ALL DAY LIKE A PICTURE OF
SOMEBODY READING' 338
From an oil painting by Joseph Severn in the National
Portrait Gallery
IX. 'FIGURES ON A GREEK VASE--A MAN AND TWO WOMEN' 342
From an etching in Piranesi's _Vasi e Candelabri_.
X. PAGE FROM _ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL_ 394
From an autograph by Keats in the British Museum.
XI. THE SOSIBIOS VASE: PROFILE AND FRIEZE 416
From an engraving in the _Musée Napoléon_.
XII. 'WHAT PIPES AND TIMBRELS? WHAT WILD ECSTASY?' 418
Bacchanalian friezes, (A) from the Townley Vase in the British
Museum, (B) from the Borghese Vase in the Louvre.
XIII. PAGE FROM A LETTER OF HAYDON TO ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1834 532
CHAPTER I
1795-1815: BIRTH AND PARENTAGE: SCHOOLDAYS AND APPRENTICESHIP
Obscure family history--The Finsbury livery stable--The surname
Keats--Origin probably Cornish--Character of parents--Traits of
childhood--The Enfield School--The Edmonton home--The Pymmes
Brook--Testimonies of schoolmates--Edward Holmes--Charles Cowden
Clarke--New passion for reading--Left an orphan--Apprenticed to a
surgeon--Relations with his master--Readings in the poets--The _Faerie
Queene_--The Spenser fever--Other poetic influences--Influences of
nature--Early attempts in verse--Early sympathizers--George Felton
Mathew--Move to London.
For all the study and research, that have lately been spent on the life
and work of Keats, there is one point as to which we remain as much in
the dark as ever, and that is his family history. He was born at an hour
when the gradually re-awakened genius of poetry in our race, I mean of
impassioned and imaginative poetry, was ready to offer new forms of
spiritual sustenance, and a range of emotions both widened and deepened,
to a generation as yet only half prepared to receive them. If we
consider the other chief poets who bore their part in that great
revival, we can commonly recognize either some strain of power in their
blood or some strong inspiring quality in the scenery and traditions of
their home, or both together. Granting that the scenic and legendary
romance of the Scottish border wilds were to be made live anew for the
delight of the latter-day world, we seem to see in Walter Scott a man
predestined for the task alike by origin, association, and opportunity.
Had the indwelling spirit of the Cumbrian lakes and mountains, and their
power upon the souls and lives of those living among them, to be newly
revealed and interpreted to the general mind of man, where should we
look for its spokesman but in one of Wordsworth's birth and training?
What, then, it may be asked, of Byron and Shelley, the two great
contrasted poets of revolution, or rather of revolt against the
counter-revolution, in the younger generation,--the one worldly,
mocking, half theatrically rebellious and Satanic, the other unworldly
even to unearthliness, a loving alien among men, more than half truly
angelic? These we are perhaps rightly used to count as offspring of
their age, with its forces and ferments, its violent actions and
reactions, rather than of their ancestry or upbringing. And yet, if we
will, we may fancy Byron inspired in literature by demons of the same
froward brood that had urged others of his lineage on lives of adventure
or of crime, and may conceive that Shelley drew some of his instincts
for headlong, peremptory self-guidance, though in directions most
opposite to the traditional, from the stubborn and wayward stock of
colonial and county aristocracy whence he sprang.
Keats, more purely and exclusively a poet than any of these, and
responding more intuitively than any to the spell alike of ancient
Greece, of mediæval romance, and of the English woods and fields, was
born in a dull and middling walk of London city life, and 'if by
traduction came his mind',--to quote Dryden with a difference,--it was
through channels hidden from our search. From his case less even than
from Shakespeare's can we draw any argument as to the influence of
heredity or environment on the birth and growth of genius. His origin,
in spite of much diligent inquiry, has not been traced beyond one
generation on the father's side and two on the mother's. His father,
Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to London, and while
still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery-stable
kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Seven or eight years later,
about the beginning of 1795, he married his employer's daughter, Frances
Jennings, then in her twentieth year. Mr Jennings, who had carried on a
large business in north-eastern London and the neighbouring suburbs, and
was a man of substance, retired about the same time to live in the
country, at Ponder's End near Edmonton, leaving the management of the
business in the hands of his son-in-law. At first the young couple lived
at the stable, at the sign of the Swan and Hoop, Finsbury Pavement,
facing the then open space of Lower Moorfields. Here their eldest child,
the poet JOHN KEATS, was born prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of
October, 1795. A second son, named George, followed on February 28,
1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, 1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in
infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the 3rd of June, 1803, a daughter,
Frances Mary. In the meantime the family had moved from the stable to a
house in Craven Street, City Road, half a mile farther north.
The Keats brothers as they grew up were remarked for their intense
fraternal feeling and strong vein of family pride. But it was a pride
that looked forward and not back: they were bent on raising the family
name and credit, but seem to have taken no interest at all in its
history, and have left no record or tradition concerning their forbears.
Some of their friends believed their father to have been a Devonshire
man: their sister, who long survived them, said she remembered hearing
as a child that he came from Cornwall, near the Land's End.
There is no positive evidence enabling us to decide the question. The
derivation of English surnames is apt to be complicated and obscure, and
'Keats' is no exception to the rule. It is a name widely distributed in
various counties of England, though not very frequent in any. It may in
some cases be a possessive form derived from the female Christian name
Kate, on the analogy of Jeans from Jane, or Maggs from Margaret: but the
source accepted as generally probable for it and its several variants is
the Middle-English adjective 'kete', a word of Scandinavian origin
meaning bold, gallant. In the form 'Keyte' the name prevails principally
in Warwickshire: in the variants Keat (or Keate) and Keats (or
Keates[1]) it occurs in many of the midland, home, and southern,
especially the south-western, counties.
Mr Thomas Hardy tells me of a Keats family sprung from a horsedealer of
Broadmayne, Dorsetshire, members of which lived within his own memory as
farmers and publicans in and near Dorchester, one or two of them
bearing, as he thought, a striking likeness to the portrait of the poet.
One Keats family of good standing was established by the mid-eighteenth
century in Devon, in the person of a well-known headmaster of Blundell's
school, Tiverton, afterwards rector of Bideford. His son was one of
Nelson's bravest and most famous captains, Sir Richard Godwin Keats of
the 'Superb', and from the same stock sprang in our own day the lady
whose tales of tragic and comic west-country life, published under the
pseudonym 'Zack', gave promise of a literary career which has been
unhappily cut short. But with this Bideford stock the Keats brothers can
have claimed no connexion, or as schoolboys they would assuredly have
made the prowess of their namesake of the 'Superb' their pride and
boast, whereas in fact their ideal naval hero was a much less famous
person, their mother's brother Midgley John Jennings, a tall lieutenant
of marines who served with some credit on Duncan's flagship at
Camperdown and by reason of his stature was said to have been a special
mark for the enemy's musketry. In the form Keat or Keate the name is
common enough both in Devon, particularly near Tiverton, and in
Cornwall, especially in the parishes of St Teath and Lanteglos,--that is
round about Camelford,--and also as far eastward as Callington and
westward as St Columb Major: the last named parish having been the seat
of a family of the name entitled to bear arms and said to have come
originally from Berkshire.
But neither the records of the Dorsetshire family, nor search in the
parish registers of Devon and Cornwall, have as yet yielded the name of
any Thomas Keat or Keats as born in 1768, the birth-year of our poet's
father according to our information. A 'Thomas Keast', however, is
registered as having been born in that year in the parish of St Agnes,
between New Quay and Redruth. Now Keast is a purely Cornish name,
limited to those parts, and it is quite possible that, borne by a
Cornishman coming to London, it would get changed into the far commoner
Keats (a somewhat similar phonetic change is that of Crisp into Cripps).
So the identification of this Thomas Keast of St Agnes as the father of
our Keats is not to be excluded. The Jennings connexion is of itself a
circumstance which may be held to add to the likelihood of a Cornish
origin for the poet, Jennings being a name frequent in the Falmouth
district and occurring as far westward as Lelant. Children are
registered as born in and after 1770 of the marriage of a John Jennings
to a Catherine Keate at Penryn; and it is a plausible conjecture (always
remembering it to be a conjecture and no more) that the prosperous
London stable-keeper Jonn Jennings was himself of Cornish origin, and
that between him and the lad Thomas Keats, whom he took so young first
as head stableman and then as son-in-law, there existed some previous
family connexion or acquaintance. These, however, are matters purely
conjectural, and all we really know about the poet's parents are the
dates above mentioned, and the fact that they were certainly people
somewhat out of the ordinary. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time
as a man of sense, spirit, and conduct: 'of so remarkably fine a
commonsense and native respectability,' writes Cowden Clarke, in whose
father's school the poet and his brother were brought up, 'that I
perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanour used to be
canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys.' And
again:--'I have a clear recollection of his lively and energetic
countenance, particularly when seated on his gig and preparing to drive
his wife home after visiting his sons at school. In feature, stature,
and manner John resembled his father.' Of Frances Keats, the poet's
mother, we learn more vaguely that she was 'tall, of good figure, with
large oval face, and sensible deportment': and again that she was a
lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and
supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some
imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of
her family as follows:--'my grandfather Mr Jennings was very well off,
as his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible
would have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with
enthusiasm of his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never
saw a woman of the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my
mother.'
As to the grandmother and her estimable qualities all accounts are
agreed, but of the mother the witness quoted himself tells a very
different tale. This Mr Richard Abbey was a wholesale tea-dealer in
Saint Pancras Lane and a trusted friend of Mr and Mrs Jennings. In a
memorandum written long after their death he declares that both as girl
and woman their daughter, the poet's mother, was a person of unbridled
temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways and
was no credit to her family.[2] Whatever truth there may be in these
charges, it is certain that she lived to the end under her mother's roof
and was in no way cut off from her children. The eldest boy John in
particular she is said to have held in passionate affection, by him
passionately returned. Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be
left quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping
watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in.
Haydon, an artist who loved to lay his colours thick, gives this
anecdote of the sword a different turn:--'He was when an infant a most
violent and ungovernable child. At five years of age or thereabouts, he
once got hold of a naked sword and shutting the door swore nobody should
go out. His mother wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously
she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through the
window saw her position and came to the rescue.' Another trait of the
poet's childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, on the authority of a gammer
who had known him from his birth, is that when he was first learning to
speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of making a rime to
the last word people said and then laughing.
The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send
them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school
kept by a Mr John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats,
including the boys' admired uncle, the lieutenant of marines, had been
educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of
exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. The school-house had
been originally built for a rich West India merchant, in the finest
style of early Georgian classic architecture, and stood in a spacious
garden at the lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was
used for a railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to
stand: but later it was taken down, and the central part of the façade,
with its fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was
transported to the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum,
and is still preserved there as a choice example of the style. It is
evident that Mr Clarke was a kind and excellent schoolmaster, much above
the standards of his time, and that lads with any bent for literature or
scholarship had their full chance under him. Still more was this the
case when his son Charles Cowden Clarke, a genial youth with an ardent
and trained love of books and music, grew old enough to help him as
usher in the school-work. The brothers John and George Keats were mere
children when they were put under Mr Clarke's care, John not much over
and George a good deal under eight years old, both still dressed, we are
told, in the childish frilled suits which give such a grace to groups of
young boys in the drawings of Stothard and his contemporaries.
Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, whose
horse fell and threw him in the City Road as he rode home late one night
after dining at Southgate, perhaps on his way home from the Enfield
School. His skull was fractured: he was picked up unconscious about one
o'clock and died at eight in the morning. This was on the 16th of April,
1804. Within twelve months his widow had taken a second husband--one
William Rawlings, described as 'of Moorgate in the city of London,
stable-keeper,' presumably therefore the successor of her first husband
in the management of her father's business. (It may be noted
incidentally that Rawlings, like Jennings, is a name common in Cornwall,
especially in and about the parish of Madron). This marriage must have
turned out unhappily, for it was soon followed by a separation, under
what circumstances or through whose fault we are not told. In the
correspondence of the Keats brothers after they were grown up no mention
is ever made of their stepfather, of whom the family seem soon to have
lost all knowledge. Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live at
Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about
this time left a widow. The family was well enough provided for, Mr
Jennings (who died March 8, 1805) having left a fortune of over £13,000,
of which, in addition to other legacies, he bequeathed a capital
yielding £200 a year to his widow absolutely; one yielding £50 a year to
his daughter Frances Rawlings, with reversion to her Keats children
after her death; and £1000 to be separately held in trust for the said
children and divided among them on the coming of age of the youngest.
Between the home, then, in Church Street, Edmonton, and the neighbouring
Enfield school, where the two elder brothers were in due time joined by
the youngest, the next five years of Keats's boyhood (1806-1811) were
passed in sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain
the years, or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and
almost the only recollections he has left of his own early days refer to
holiday times in his grandmother's house at Edmonton. They are conveyed
in some rimes which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to
amuse his young sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to
little boys not of genius, for dabbling by the brookside and keeping
small fishes in tubs,--
There was a naughty boy Tittlebat
And a naughty boy was he Not over fat,
He kept little fishes Minnow small
In washing tubs three As the stal
In spite Of a glove
Of the might Not above
Of the Maid, The size
Nor afraid Of a nice
Of his Granny-good Little Baby's
He often would Little finger--
Hurly burly O he made
Get up early 'Twas his trade
And go Of Fish a pretty kettle
By hook or crook A kettle--
To the brook A kettle--
And bring home Of Fish a pretty kettle
Miller's thumb, A kettle!
In a later letter to his sister he makes much the same confession in a
different key, when he bids her ask him for any kind of present she
fancies, only not for live stock to be kept in captivity, 'though I will
not now be very severe on it, remembering how fond I used to be of
Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows, Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock salmons and
all the whole tribe of the Bushes and the Brooks.' Despite the changes
which have overbuilt and squalidly or sprucely suburbanized all those
parts of Middlesex, the Pymmes brook still holds its course across half
the county, is still bridged by the main street of Edmonton, and runs
countrywise, clear and open, for some distance along a side street on
its way to join the Lea. Other memories of it, and of his childish
playings and musings beside it, find expression in Keats's poetry where
he makes the shepherd-prince Endymion tell his sister Peona how one of
his love-sick vagaries has been to sit on a stone and bubble up the
water through a reed,--
So reaching back to boy-hood: make me ships
Of moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips,
With leaves stuck in them; and the Neptune be
Of their petty ocean.
If we learn little of Keats's early days from his own lips, we have
sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school
companions; which was that of a fiery, generous little fellow, handsome
and passionate, vehement both in tears and laughter, and as placable and
loveable as he was pugnacious. But beneath this bright and mettlesome
outside there lay deep in his nature, even from the first, a strain of
painful sensibility making him subject to moods of unreasonable
suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was accustomed to
conceal from all except his brothers, to whom he was attached by the
very closest of fraternal ties. George, the second brother, had all
John's spirit of manliness and honour, with a less impulsive disposition
and a cooler blood. From a boy he was the bigger and stronger of the
two: and at school found himself continually involved in fights for, and
not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery senior. Tom, the
youngest, was always delicate, and an object of protecting care as well
as the warmest affection to the other two.
Here are some of George Keats's recollections, written after the death
of his elder brother, and referring partly to their school days and
partly to John's character after he was grown up:
I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of
his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we
quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my
schoolfellows will bear witness that John's temper was the cause of
all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are.
From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and
fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure
relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible
spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He
avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and
often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him
relief.
Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to
their confirmation in the words of two of Keats's school friends; and
first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards a musical critic
of note and author of a well-known _Life of Mozart_:--
Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His _penchant_ was for
fighting. He would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his
brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him. Jennings their
sailor relation was always in the thoughts of the brothers, and they
determined to keep up the family reputation for courage; George in a
passive manner; John and Tom more fiercely. The favourites of John
were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed to prefer
them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour. I recollect at this
moment his delight at the extraordinary gesticulations and pranks of a
boy named Wade who was celebrated for this.... He was a boy whom any
one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty might easily
fancy would become great--but rather in some military capacity than in
literature. You will remark that this taste came out rather suddenly
and unexpectedly. Some books of his I remember reading were _Robinson
Crusoe_ and something about Montezuma and the Incas of Peru. He must
have read Shakespeare as he thought that 'no one would care to read
_Macbeth_ alone in a house at two o'clock in the morning.' This seems
to me a boyish trait of the poet. His sensibility was as remarkable as
his indifference to be thought well of by the master as a 'good boy'
and to his tasks in general.... He was in every way the creature of
passion.... The point to be chiefly insisted on is that he was _not
literary--his love of books and poetry manifested itself chiefly about
a year before he left school_. In all active exercises he excelled.
The generosity and daring of his character with the extreme beauty and
animation of his face made I remember an impression on me--and being
some years his junior I was obliged to woo his friendship--in which I
succeeded, but not till I had fought several battles. This violence
and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of disposition--in
passions of tears or outrageous fits of laughter--always in
extremes--will help to paint Keats in his boyhood. Associated as they
were with an extraordinary beauty of person and expression, these
qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more popular.[3]
Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given by a school
friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation
and encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first became
aware of his own vocation for poetry. This was the aforementioned
Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the head master, who towards the close
of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature and of
his generation in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of Keats:--
He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a
highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most
picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw. One of the
transports of that marvellous actor, Edmund Kean--whom, by the way, he
idolized--was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very
dissimilar in face and figure. Upon one occasion when an usher, on
account of some impertinent behaviour, had boxed his brother Tom's
ears, John rushed up, put himself into the received posture of
offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who could, so to say,
have put him in his pocket. His passion at times was almost
ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the taller
and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing
when John was 'in one of his moods,' and was endeavouring to beat him.
It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an
intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the
most trying occasions. He was not merely the favourite of all, like a
pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his highmindedness,
his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his
generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never
heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had
known him.[4]
The same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in
his earlier school days Keats showed no particular signs of an
intellectual bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did.
But during his last few terms, that is in his fifteenth and sixteenth
years, he suddenly became a passionate student and a very glutton of
books. Let us turn again to Cowden Clarke's words:--
My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing
prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of
voluntary work; and such was Keats's indefatigable energy for the last
two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that,
upon each occasion, he took the first prize by a considerable
distance. He was at work before the first school-hour began, and that
was at seven o'clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation
were so devoted; and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at
play, he would be in the school--almost the only one--at his Latin or
French translation; and so unconscious and regardless was he of the
consequences of so close and persevering an application, that he never
would have taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes
driven out for the purpose by one of the masters....
One of the silver medals awarded to Keats as a school prize in these
days exists in confirmation of this account and was lately in the
market. Cowden Clarke continues:--
In the latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he
remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading.
Thus, his _whole_ time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive
memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those
last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted
principally of abridgements of all the voyages and travels of any
note; Mavor's collection, also his _Universal History_; Robertson's
histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss
Edgeworth's productions, together with many other books equally well
calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly
recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lemprière's
_Classical Dictionary_, which he appeared to _learn_, and Spence's
_Polymetis_. This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with
the Greek mythology; here was he 'suckled in that creed outworn;' for
his amount of classical attainment extended no farther than the
_Æneid_, with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before
leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a
considerable portion....
He must have gone through all the better publications in the school
library, for he asked me to lend him some of my own books; and, in my
'mind's eye,' I now see him at supper (we had our meals in the
schoolroom), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding the
folio volume of Burnet's _History of his Own Time_ between himself and
the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's
_Examiner_--which my father took in, and I used to lend to Keats--no
doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty.
In the midst of these ardent studies of Keats's latter school days
befell the death of his mother, who had been for some time in failing
health. First she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell
into a rapid consumption, which carried her off at the age of
thirty-five in February 1810. We are told with what devotion her eldest
boy attended her sick-bed,--'he sat up whole nights with her in a great
chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine, or even cook her food,
but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease,'--and how
bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,--'he gave way to such
impassioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook under the
master's desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in all who
saw him.'
From her, no doubt, came that predisposition to consumption which showed
itself in her youngest son from adolescence and carried him off at
nineteen, and with the help of ill luck, over-exertion, and distress of
mind, wrecked also before twenty-five the robust-seeming frame and
constitution of her eldest, the poet. Were the accounts of her character
less ambiguous, or were the strands of human heredity less inveterately
entangled than they are, it would be tempting, when we consider the deep
duality of Keats's nature, the trenchant contrast between the two selves
that were in him, to trace to the mother the seeds of one of those
selves, the feverishly over-sensitive and morbidly passionate one, and
to his father the seeds of the other, the self that was all manly good
sense and good feeling and undisturbed clear vision and judgment. In the
sequel we shall see this fine virile self in Keats continually and
consciously battling against the other, trying to hold it down, and
succeeding almost always in keeping control over his ways and dealings
with his fellow-men, though not over the inward frettings of his spirit.
In the July following her daughter's death, Mrs Jennings, being desirous
to make the best provision she could for her orphan grand-children, 'in
consideration of the natural love and affection which she had for them,'
executed a deed putting them under the care of two guardians, to whom
she made over, to be held in trust for their benefit from the date of
the instrument, the chief part of the property which she derived from
her late husband under his will.[5] The guardians were Mr Rowland
Sandell, merchant, who presently renounced the trust, and the aforesaid
Mr Richard Abbey, tea-dealer. Mrs Jennings survived the execution of
this deed more than four years,[6] but Mr Abbey seems at once to have
taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his authority John
Keats was withdrawn from school at the end of the summer term, 1811,
when he was some months short of sixteen, and made to put on harness for
the practical work of life. With no opposition, so far as we learn, on
his own part, he was bound apprentice to a Mr Thomas Hammond, a surgeon
and apothecary of good repute at Edmonton, for the customary term of
five years.[7]
The years between the sixteenth and twentieth of his age are the most
critical of a young man's life, and in these years, during which our
other chief London-born poets, Spenser, Milton, Gray, were profiting by
the discipline of Cambridge and the Muses, Keats had no better or more
helpful regular training than that of an ordinary apprentice, apparently
one of several, in a suburban surgery. But he had the one advantage, to
him inestimable, of proximity to his old school, which meant free
access to the school library and continued encouragement and advice in
reading from his affectionate senior, the head master's son. The fact
that it was only two miles' walk from Edmonton to Enfield helped much,
says Cowden Clarke, to reconcile him to his new way of life, and his
duties at the surgery were not onerous. As laid down in the ordinary
indentures of apprenticeship in those times, they were indeed chiefly
negative, the apprentice binding himself 'not to haunt taverns or
playhouses, not to play at dice or cards, nor absent himself from his
said master's service day or night unlawfully, but in all things as a
faithful apprentice he shall behave himself towards the said master and
all his during the said term.'
Keats himself, it is recorded, did not love talking of his apprentice
days, and has left no single written reference to them except the
much-quoted phrase in a letter of 1819, in which, speaking of the
continual processes of change in the human tissues, he says, 'this is
not the same hand which seven years ago clenched itself at Hammond.' It
was natural that the same fiery temper which made him as a small boy
square up against an usher on behalf of his brother,--an offence which
the headmaster, according to his son Cowden Clarke, 'felt he could not
severely punish,'--it was natural that this same temper should on
occasion flame out against his employer the surgeon. If Keats's words
are to be taken literally, this happened in the second year of his
apprenticeship. Probably it was but the affair of a moment: there is no
evidence of any habitual disagreement or final breach between them, and
Keats was able to put in the necessary testimonial from Mr Hammond when
he presented himself in due course for examination before the Court of
Apothecaries. A fellow-apprentice in after years remembered him as 'an
idle loafing fellow, always writing poetry.' This, seeing that he did
not begin to write till he was near eighteen, must refer to the last two
years of his apprenticeship and probably represents an unlettered view
of his way of employing his leisure, rather (judging by his general
character) than any slackness in the performance of actual duty. One of
the very few glimpses we have of him from outside is from Robert Hengist
Horne ('Orion' Horne), another alumnus of the Enfield school who lived
to make his mark in literature. Horne remembered Mr Hammond driving on a
professional visit to the school one winter day and leaving Keats to
take care of the gig. While Keats sat in a brown study holding the
reins, young Horne, remembering his school reputation as a boxer, in
bravado threw a snowball at him and hit, but made off into safety before
Keats could get at him to inflict punishment. The story suggests a
picture to the eye but tells nothing to the mind.
Our only real witness for this time of Keats's life is Cowden Clarke. He
tells us how the lad's newly awakened passion for the pleasures of
literature and the imagination was not to be stifled, and how at
Edmonton he plunged back into his school occupations of reading and
translating whenever he could spare the time. He finished at this time
his prose version of the _Aeneid_, and on free afternoons and evenings,
five or six times a month or oftener, was in the habit of walking over
to Enfield,--by that field path where Lamb found the stiles so many and
so hard to tackle,--to see his friend Cowden Clarke and bring away or
return borrowed books. Young Clarke was an ardent liberal and disciple
of Leigh Hunt both in political opinions and literary taste. In summer
weather he and Keats would sit in a shady arbour in the old school
garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks
and exclamations of delight. From the nature of Keats's imitative first
flights in verse, it is clear that though he hated the whole 'Augustan'
and post-Augustan tribe of social and moral essayists in verse, and
Pope, their illustrious master, most of all, yet his mind and ear had
become familiar, in the course of his school and after-school reading,
with Thomson, Collins, Gray, and all the more romantically minded poets
of the middle and later eighteenth century. But the essential service
Clarke did him was in pressing upon his attention the poetry of the
great Elizabethan and Jacobean age, from _The Shepheard's Calendar_ down
to _Comus_ and _Lycidas_,--'our older and nobler poetry,' as a few had
always held it to be even through the Age of Reason and the reign of
Pope and his followers, and as it was now loudly proclaimed to be by all
the innovating critics, with Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt among the foremost.
On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden Clarke introduced him for the first
time to Spenser, reading him the _Epithalamion_ in the afternoon and at
his own eager request lending him the _Faerie Queene_ to take away the
same evening. With Spenser's later imitators, playful or serious, as
Shenstone and Thomson, Beattie and the more recent Mrs Tighe, Keats, we
know, was already familiar; indeed he owned later to a passing phase of
boyish delight in Beattie's _Minstrel_ and Tighe's languorously romantic
_Psyche_. But now he found himself taken to the fountain head, and was
enraptured. It has been said, and truly, that no one who has not had the
good fortune to be attracted to the _Faerie Queene_ in boyhood can ever
quite wholeheartedly and to the full enjoy it. The maturer student,
appreciate as he may its innumerable beauties and noble ethical temper,
can hardly fail to be critically conscious also of its arbitrary forms
of rime and language, and sated by its melodious redundance: he will
perceive its faults now of scholastic pedantry and now of flagging
inspiration, the perplexity and discontinuousness of the allegory, and
the absence of real and breathing humanity amidst all that luxuriance of
symbolic and decorative invention, and prodigality of romantic incident
and detail. It is otherwise with the greedy and indiscriminate
imaginative appetite of boyhood. I speak as one of the fortunate who
know by experience that for a boy there is no poetical revelation like
the _Faerie Queene_, no pleasure equal to the pleasure of being rapt for
the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by those rivers
and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive with glancing
figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and
Saracen,--with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous
shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in
distress. Through the new world thus opened to him Keats went ranging
with delight: 'ramping' is Cowden Clarke's word: he showed moreover his
own instinct for the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm
on epithets of special felicity or power. For instance, says his friend,
'he hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, "What
an image that is--_sea-shouldering whales_!"'
Spenser has been often proved not only a great awakener of the love of
poetry in youth, but a great fertilizer of the germs of original
poetical power where they exist; and Charles Brown, Keats's most
intimate companion during the two last years of his life, states
positively that it was to the inspiration of the _Faerie Queene_ that
his first notion of attempting to write was due. 'Though born to be a
poet, he was ignorant of his birthright until he had completed his
eighteenth year. It was the _Faerie Queene_ that awakened his genius. In
Spenser's fairy-land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and
became another being; till enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to
imitate it, and succeeded. This account of the sudden development of his
poetic powers I first received from his brothers and afterwards from
himself. This, his earliest attempt, the _Imitation of Spenser_, is in
his first volume of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting to those
acquainted with his history.' Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years
earlier, but his memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest. We may
fairly take Brown to be on this point the better informed of the two,
and may assume that it was some time in the second year after he left
school that the Spenser fever took hold on Keats, and with it the
longing to be himself a poet. But it was not with Spenser alone, it was
with other allegoric and narrative poets as well, his followers or
contemporaries, that Keats was in these days gaining acquaintance. Not
quite in his earliest, but still in his very early, attempts, we find
clear traces of familiarity with the work both of William Browne of
Tavistock and of Michael Drayton, and we can conceive how in that
charming ingenuous retrospect of Drayton's on his boyish vocation to
poetry, addressed to his friend Henry Reynolds, Keats will have smiled
to find an utterance of the same passion that had just awakened in his
own not very much maturer self.
Let it be remembered moreover that the years of Keats's school days and
apprenticeship were also those of the richest and most stimulating
outburst of the new poetry in England. To name only their chief
products,--the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Coleridge and Wordsworth had come
while he was only a child: during his school days had appeared
Wordsworth's still richer and not less challenging volumes of 1807, and
the succession of Scott's romantic lays (but these last, in spite of
their enormous public success, it was in circles influenced by Leigh
Hunt not much the fashion to admire): during his apprentice years at
Edmonton, the two first cantos of Byron's _Childe Harold_ and the still
more overwhelmingly successful series of his Eastern tales: and finally
Wordsworth's _Excursion_, with which almost from the first Keats was
profoundly impressed. But it was not, of course, only by reading poetry
that he was learning to be a poet. Nature was quite as much his teacher
as books; and the nature within easy reach of him, tame indeed and
unimpressive in comparison with Wordsworth's lakes and mountains, had
quite enough of vital English beauty to afford fair seed-time to his
soul. Across the levels of the Lea valley, not then disfigured as they
are now by factories and reservoir works and the squalor of sprawling
suburbs, rose the softly shagged undulations of Epping forest, a region
which no amount of Cockney frequentation or prosaic vicinity can ever
quite strip of its primitive romance. Westward over Hornsey to the
Highgate and Hampstead heights, north-westward through Southgate towards
the Barnets, and thence in a sweep by the remains of Enfield Chase, was
a rich tract of typically English country, a country of winding
elm-shadowed lanes, of bosky hedge and thicket and undulating
pasture-land charmingly diversified with parks and pleasaunces. Nearly
such I can myself remember it some sixty years ago, and even now, off
the tram-frequented highways and between the devastating encroachments
of bricks and mortar, forlorn patches of its ancient pastoral self are
still to be found lurking.
It was in his rambles afield in these directions and in his habitual
afternoon and evening strolls to Enfield and back, that a delighted
sense of the myriad activities of nature's life in wood and field and
brook and croft and hedgerow began to possess Keats's mind, and to blend
with the beautiful images that already peopled it from his readings in
Greek mythology, and to be enhanced into a strange supernatural thrill
by the recurring magic of moonlight. It is only in adolescence that such
delights can be drunk in, not with conscious study and observation but
passively and half unaware through all the pores of being, and no youth
ever drank them in more deeply than Keats. Not till later came for him,
or comes for any man, the time when the images so absorbed, and the
emotions and sympathies so awakened, define and develop themselves in
consciousness and discover with effort and practice the secret of
rightly expressing themselves in words.
After Keats, under the stimulus of Spenser, had taken his first plunge
into verse, he went on writing occasional sonnets and other pieces:
secretly and shyly at first like all other young poets: at least it was
not until some two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed
anything that he had written to his friend and confidant Cowden Clarke.
This was a sonnet on the release of Leigh Hunt after serving a two
years' sentence of imprisonment for a political offence. Clarke relates
how he was walking in to London from Enfield to call on and congratulate
the ex-prisoner, whom he not only revered as a martyr in the cause of
liberty but knew and admired personally, when Keats met him and turned
back to accompany him part of the way. 'At the last field-gate, when
taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled _Written on the day that Mr
Leigh Hunt left prison_. This I feel to be the first proof I had
received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I
remember the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it!
There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with
life.' About a score of the pieces which Keats had written and kept
secret during the preceding two years are preserved, and like the work
of almost all beginners are quite imitative and conventional, failing to
express anything original or personal to himself. They include the
aforesaid Spenserian stanzas, which in fact echo the cadences of
Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_ much more than those of Spenser himself;
an ode to Hope, quite in the square-toed manner of eighteenth century
didactic verse, and another to Apollo, in which style and expression owe
everything to Gray; a set of octosyllabics recording, this time with
some touch of freshness, a momentary impression of a woman's beauty
received one night at Vauxhall, and so intense that it continued to
haunt his memory for years; two sets of verses addressed in a vein of
polite parlour compliment to lady friends at the seaside; and several
quite feeble sonnets in the Wordsworthian form, among them one on the
peace of Paris in 1814, one on Chatterton and one on Byron.
Of Keats's outward ways and doings during these days when he was growing
to manhood we know nothing directly except from Cowden Clarke, and can
only gather a little more by inference. It is clear that he enjoyed a
certain amount of liberty and holiday, more, perhaps, than would have
fallen to the lot of a more zealous apprentice, and that he spent part
of his free time in London in the society of his brother George, at this
time a clerk in Mr Abbey's counting-house, and of friends to whom George
made him known. Among these were the family of an officer of marines
named Wylie, to whose charming daughter, Georgiana, George Keats a
little later became engaged, and another family of prosperous
tradespeople named Mathew. Here too there were daughters, Caroline and
Ann, who made themselves pleasant to the Keats brothers, and to whom
were addressed the pair of complimentary jingles already mentioned. One
of the sisters, asked in later life for her recollections of the time,
replied in a weariful strain of evangelical penitence for the
frivolities of those days, and found nothing more to the purpose to say
of Keats than this:--'I cannot go further than say I always thought he
had a very beautiful countenance and was very warm and enthusiastic in
his character. He wrote a great deal of poetry at our house but I do not
recollect whether I ever had any of it, I certainly have none now; Ann
had many pieces of his.' A cousin of this family, one George Felton
Mathew, was a youth of sensibility and poetical leanings, and became for
a time an intimate friend of Keats, and next to his brothers and Cowden
Clarke the closest confidant of his studies and ambitions. Their
intimacy began in the Edmonton days and lasted through the earlier
months of his student life in London. Looking back upon their relations
after some thirty years, Mr Felton Mathew, then a supernumerary official
of the Poor Law Board, struggling meekly under the combined strain of a
precarious income, a family of twelve children, and a turn for the
interpretation of prophecy, wrote as follows:--
Keats and I though about the same age, and both inclined to
literature, were in many respects as different as two individuals
could be. He enjoyed good health--a fine flow of animal spirits--was
fond of company--could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities
of life--and had great confidence in himself. I, on the other hand was
languid and melancholy--fond of repose--thoughtful beyond my
years--and diffident to the last degree. But I always delighted in
administering to the happiness of others: and being one of a large
family, it pleased me much to see him and his brother George enjoy
themselves so much at our little domestic concerts and dances.... He
was of the sceptical and republican school. An advocate for the
innovations which were making progress in his time. A faultfinder with
everything established. I, on the contrary, hated controversy and
dispute--dreaded discord and disorder--loved the institutions of my
country.... But I respected Keats' opinions, because they were
sincere--refrained from subjects on which we differed, and only asked
him to concede with me the imperfection of human knowledge, and the
fallibility of human judgment: while he, on his part, would often
express regret on finding that he had given pain or annoyance by
opposing with ridicule or asperity the opinions of others.
Of Keats's physical appearance and poetical preferences the same witness
writes further:--
A painter or a sculptor might have taken him for a study after the
Greek masters, and have given him 'a station like the herald Mercury,
new lighted on some heaven-kissing hill.' His eye admired more the
external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse. He
delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description,
but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. He used to
spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never observed the tears
in his eyes nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme
sensibility. These indeed were not the parts of poetry which he took
pleasure in pointing out.
This last, it should be noted, seems in pretty direct contradiction with
one of Cowden Clarke's liveliest recollections as follows:--'It was a
treat to see as well as hear him read a pathetic passage. Once when
reading _Cymbeline_ aloud, I saw his eyes fill with tears, and his voice
faltered when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen saying
she would have watched him--
Till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay follow'd him till _he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air_; and then
Have turn'd mine eye and wept.'
Early in the autumn of 1815, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday,
Keats left the service of Mr Hammond, his indentures having apparently
been cancelled by consent, and went to live in London as a student at
the hospitals, then for teaching purposes united, of Guy's and St
Thomas's. What befell him during the eighteen months that followed, and
how his career as a student came to an end, will be told in the next two
chapters.[8]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Between the forms with and without the final 's' there is no hard
and fast line to be drawn, one getting changed into the other either
regularly, by the normal addition of the possessive or patronymic
suffix, or casually, through our mere English habit of phonetic
carelessness and slipshod pronunciation. I learn from a correspondent
belonging to the very numerous St Teath stock, and signing and known
only as Keat, that other members of his family call themselves Keats.
And my friend Mr F. B. Keate, working-man poet and politician of
Bristol, whose forbears came from Tiverton and earlier probably from
St Teath, assures me that he is addressed Keates in speech and
writing as often as not. There are several families in Bristol, most
of them coming from Wilts or (as the famous flogging headmaster of
Eton came) from Somerset, whose names are spelt and spoken Keat or
Keats and Keate or Keates indifferently.
[2] This document, a memorandum written for the information of
Keats's friend and publisher, John Taylor, was sold in London in
1907. I saw and took rough note of it before the sale, meaning to
follow it up afterwards: but circumstances kept me otherwise fully
occupied, and later I found that the buyer, a well known and friendly
bookseller, had unfortunately mislaid it: neither has he since been
able to recover it from among the chronic congestion of his shelves.
[3] Houghton MSS.
[4] Charles Cowden Clarke,_ Recollection of Writers_, 1878.
[5] _Rawlings v. Jennings._
[6] She was buried at St Stephen's, Colman Street, Decr. 19, 1814,
aged 78.
[7] Mistakes have crept into the received statements (my own
included) as to the dates when Keats's apprenticeship began and
ended. The witnesses on whom we have chiefly to depend wrote from
thirty to fifty years after the events they were trying to recall,
and some of them, Cowden Clarke especially, had avowedly no memory
for dates. The accepted date of Keats's leaving school and going as
apprentice to Mr Hammond at Edmonton has hitherto been the autumn of
1810, the end of his fifteenth year. It should have been the late
summer of 1811, well on in his sixteenth, as is proved by the
discovery of a copy of Bonnycastle's _Astronomy_ given him as a prize
at the end of the midsummer term that year (see _Bulletin of the
Keats-Shelley Memorial_, Rome, 1913, p. 23). On the other hand we
have material evidence of his having left by the following year, in
the shape of an Ovid presented to him from the school and inscribed
with a fine writing-master's flourish, 'JOHN KEATS, emer: 1812;'
_emer_, added in a fainter ink, is of course for _emeritus_, a boy
who has left school. This book is in the Dilke collection of Keats
relics at Hampstead, and the inscription has been supposed to be
Keats's own, which it manifestly is not. Another school-book of
Keats's, of five years' earlier date, has lately been presented to
the same collection: this is the French-English grammar of
Duverger,--inscribed in much the same calligraphy with his name and
the date 1807. He must have studied it to some purpose, if we may
judge by the good reading knowledge of French which he clearly
possessed when he was grown up.
[8] Surmise, partly founded on the vague recollections of former
fellow-students, has hitherto dated this step a year earlier, in the
autumn of 1814. But the publication of the documents relating to
Keats from the books of the hospital show that this is an error. He
was not entered as a student at Guy's till October 1, 1815. If he had
moved to London, as has been supposed, a year earlier, he would have
had nothing to do there, nor is it the least likely that his guardian
would have permitted such removal. That he came straight from Mr
Hammond's to Guy's, without any intermediate period of study
elsewhere, is certain both from a note to that effect against the
entry of his name in the hospital books, and from the explicit
statement of his fellow-student and sometime housemate, Mr Henry
Stephens. It results that the period of his life as hospital student
in a succession of London lodgings must be cut down from the supposed
two years and a half, October 1814-April 1817, to one year and a
half, Oct. 1815-April 1817. There is no difficulty about this, and I
think that both as to his leaving school and his going to London the
facts and dates set forth in the present chapter may be taken as well
established.
CHAPTER II
OCTOBER 1815-MARCH 1817: HOSPITAL STUDIES: POETICAL AMBITIONS: LEIGH
HUNT
Hospital days: summary--Aptitudes and ambitions--Teachers--Testimony
of Henry Stephens--Pride and other characteristics--Evidences of a
wandering mind--Services of Cowden Clarke--Introduction to Leigh
Hunt--Summer walks at Hampstead--Holiday epistles from Margate--Return
to London--First reading of Chapman's Homer--Date of the Chapman
sonnet--Intimacy with Leigh Hunt--The _Examiner_: Hunt's
imprisonment--His visitors in captivity--His occupations--_The Feast
of the poets_--Hunt's personality and charm--His ideas of poetical
reform--_The story of Rimini_--Its popularity--Dante and
namby-pamby--Hunt's life at Hampstead--Hunt and Keats compared--Keats
at Hunt's cottage--Prints in the library--The intercoronation
scene--Sonnets of Hunt to Keats--Sonnets of Keats to Hunt--Keats's
penitence.
The external and technical facts of Keats's life as a medical student
are these. His name, as we have said, was entered at Guy's as a six
months' student (surgeon's pupil) on October 1, 1815, a month before his
twentieth birthday. Four weeks later he was appointed dresser to one of
the hospital surgeons, Mr Lucas. At the close of his first six months'
term, March 3, 1816, he entered for a further term of twelve months. On
July 25, 1816, he presented himself for examination before the Court of
Apothecaries and obtained their licence to practise. He continued to
attend lectures and live the regular life of a student; but early in the
spring of 1817, being now of age and on the eve of publishing his first
volume of verse, he determined to abandon the pursuit of medicine for
that of poetry, declared his intention to his guardian, and ceased
attending the hospitals without seeking or receiving the usual
certificate of proficiency. For the first two or three months of this
period, from the beginning of October 1815 till about the new year of
1816, Keats lodged alone at 8 Dean Street, Borough, and then for half a
year or more with several other students over the shop of a tallow
chandler named Markham[1] in St Thomas's Street. Thence, in the summer
or early autumn of 1816, leaving the near neighbourhood of the
hospitals, he went to join his brothers in rooms in The Poultry, over a
passage leading to the Queen's Head Tavern. Finally, early in 1817, they
all three moved for a short time to 76 Cheapside. For filling up this
skeleton record, we have some traditions of the hospital concerning
Keats's teachers, some recollections of fellow students,--of one, Mr
Henry Stephens, in particular,--together with further reminiscences by
Cowden Clarke and impressions recorded in after years by one and another
of a circle of acquaintances which fast expanded. Moreover Keats begins
during this period to tell something of his own story, in the form of a
few poems of a personal tenor and a very few letters written to and
preserved by his friends.
As to his hospital work, it is clear that though his heart was not in it
and his thoughts were prone to wander, and though he held and declared
that poetry was the only thing worth living for, yet when he chose he
could bend his mind and will to the tasks before him. The operations
which as dresser he performed or assisted in are said to have proved him
no fumbler. When he went up for examination before the Court of
Apothecaries he passed with ease and credit, somewhat to the surprise of
his fellow students, who put his success down to his knowledge of Latin
rather than of medicine. Later, after he had abandoned the profession,
he was always ready to speak or act with a certain authority in cases of
illness or emergency, and though hating the notion of practice
evidently did not feel himself unqualified for it so far as knowledge
went. He could not find in the scientific part of the study a satisfying
occupation for his thoughts; and though a few years later, when he had
realized that there is no kind of knowledge but may help to nourish a
poet's mind, he felt unwilling to lose hold of what he had learned as
apprentice and student, he was never caught by that special passion of
philosophical curiosity which laid hold for a season on Coleridge and
Shelley successively, and drew them powerfully towards the study of the
mechanism and mysteries of the human frame. The practical
responsibilities of the profession at the same time weighed upon him,
and he was conscious of a kind of absent uneasy wonder at his own skill.
Once when Cowden Clarke asked him about his prospects and feelings in
regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of his
unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that 'the other day, during
the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole
troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to
Oberon and fairy-land.' 'My last operation,' he once told another
friend, 'was the opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the
utmost nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the
time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet
again.'
The surgeon to whom he was specially assigned as pupil, Mr Lucas, seems
to have had few qualifications as a teacher. We have the following
lively character of him from a man afterwards highly honoured in the
profession, John Flint South, who walked the hospitals at the same time
as Keats:--'A tall ungainly awkward man, with stooping shoulders and a
shuffling walk, as deaf as a post, not overburdened with brains, but
very good natured and easy, and liked by everyone. His surgical
acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly
performed, and accompanied with much bungling, if not worse.' But the
teacher from whom Keats will really, as all witnesses agree, have
learnt the best of what he knew was the great dissector and anatomist,
Astley Cooper, then almost in the zenith of his power as a lecturer and
of his popular fame and practice. He is described as one of the
handsomest and most ingratiating of men, as well as one of the most
indefatigable and energetic, with an admirable gift of exposition made
racy by a strong East Anglian accent; and it is on record that he took
an interest in young Keats, and recommended him to the special care of
his own dresser and namesake, George Cooper. It was in consequence of
this recommendation that Keats left his solitary lodging in Dean Street
and went to live as housemate in St Thomas's Street with three other
students, the aforesaid George Cooper, one George Wilson Mackereth, and
Henry Stephens, the last-named afterwards a surgeon in good repute as
well as a dabbler in dramatic literature. It is from Stephens that we
get much the fullest picture of Keats in these student days. I give the
pith of his reminiscences, partly as quoted from his conversation by an
intimate friend in the same profession, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson,[2]
partly as written down by himself for Lord Houghton's information in
1847.[3]
Whether it was in the latter part of the year 1815 or the early part
of the year 1816 that my acquaintance with John Keats commenced I
cannot say. We were both students at the united hospitals of St
Thomas's and Guy's, and we had apartments in a house in St Thomas's
Street, kept by a decent respectable woman of the name of Mitchell I
think. [After naming his other fellow students, the witness goes
on]--John Keats being alone, and to avoid the expense of having a
sitting room to himself, asked to join us, which we readily acceded
to. We were therefore constant companions, and the following is what I
recollect of his previous history from conversation with him. Of his
parentage I know nothing, for upon that subject I never remember his
speaking, I think he was an orphan. He had been apprenticed to a Mr
Hammond surgeon of Southgate from whence he came on the completion of
his time to the hospitals. His passion, if I may so call it, for
poetry was soon manifested. He attended lectures and went through the
usual routine but he had no desire to excel in that pursuit.... He was
called by his fellow students 'little Keats,' being at his full growth
no more than five feet high.... In a room, he was always at the
window, peering into space, so that the window-seat was spoken of by
his comrades as Keats's place.... In the lecture room he seemed to sit
apart and to be absorbed in something else, as if the subject
suggested thoughts to him which were not practically connected with
it. He was often in the subject and out of it, in a dreamy way.
He never attached much consequence to his own studies in medicine, and
indeed looked upon the medical career as the career by which to live
in a workaday world, without being certain that he could keep up the
strain of it. He nevertheless had a consciousness of his own powers,
and even of his own greatness, though it might never be recognised....
Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations: the only
thing worthy the attention of superior minds: so he thought: all other
pursuits were mean and tame. He had no idea of fame or greatness but
as it was connected with the pursuits of poetry, or the attainment of
poetical excellence. The greatest men in the world were the poets and
to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition. It may
readily be imagined that this feeling was accompanied with a good deal
of pride and conceit, and that amongst mere medical students he would
walk and talk as one of the Gods might be supposed to do when mingling
with mortals. This pride exposed him, as may be readily imagined, to
occasional ridicule, and some mortification.
Having a taste and liking for poetry myself, though at that time but
little cultivated, he regarded me as something a little superior to
the rest, and would gratify himself frequently by showing me some
lines of his writing, or some new idea which he had struck out. We had
frequent conversation on the merits of particular poets, but our
tastes did not agree. He was a great admirer of Spenser, his _Faerie
Queene_ was a great favourite with him. Byron was also in favour, Pope
he maintained was no poet, only a versifier. He was fond of imagery,
the most trifling similes appeared to please him. Sometimes I ventured
to show him some lines which I had written, but I always had the
mortification of hearing them condemned, indeed he seemed to think it
presumption in me to attempt to tread along the same pathway as
himself at however humble a distance.
He had two brothers, who visited him frequently, and they worshipped
him. They seemed to think their brother John was to be exalted, and
to exalt the family name. I remember a student from St Bartholomew's
Hospital who came often to see him, as they had formerly been
intimate, but though old friends they did not cordially agree.
Newmarsh or Newmarch (I forget which was his name) was a classical
scholar, as was Keats, and therefore they scanned freely the
respective merits of the Poets of Greece and Rome. Whenever Keats
showed Newmarch any of his poetry it was sure to be ridiculed and
severely handled.
Newmarch was a light-hearted and merry fellow, but I thought he was
rather too fond of mortifying Keats, but more particularly his
brothers, as their praise of their brother John amounted almost to
idolatry, and Newmarch and they frequently quarrelled. Whilst
attending lectures he would sit and instead of copying out the
lecture, would often scribble some doggrel rhymes among the notes of
Lecture, particularly if he got hold of another student's syllabus. In
my syllabus of chemical lectures he scribbled many lines on the paper
cover. This cover has been long torn off, except one small piece on
which is the following fragment of doggrel rhyme:--
Give me women, wine and snuff
Until I cry out, 'hold! enough'
You may do so, sans objection
Until the day of resurrection.
This is all that remains, and is the only piece of his writing which
is now in my possession. He was gentlemanly in his manners and when he
condescended to talk upon other subjects he was agreeable and
intelligent. He was quick and apt at learning, when he chose to give
his attention to any subject. He was a steady quiet and well behaved
person, never inclined to pursuits of a low or vicious character.
The last words need to be read in the light of the convivial snatch of
verse quoted just above. Keats in these days was no rake, indeed, but
neither was he a puritan: his passions were strong in proportion to the
general intensity of his being: and his ardent absorption in poetry and
study did not save him from the risks and slips incident to appetite and
hot blood.
Another fellow student relates:--'even in the lecture room of St
Thomas's I have seen Keats in a deep poetic dream; his mind was on
Parnassus with the Muses. And here is a quaint fragment which he one
evening scribbled in our presence, while the precepts of Sir Astley
Cooper fell unheeded on his ear.' The fragment tells how Alexander the
Great saw and loved a lady of surpassing beauty on his march through
India, and reads like the beginning of an attempt to tell the story of
the old French _Lai d'Aristote_ in the style and spelling of an
early-printed English prose romance,--possibly the _Morte d'Arthure_.
Into his would-be archaic prose, luxuriantly describing the lady's
beauty, Keats works in tags taken direct from Spenser and Shakespeare
and Milton, all three. He no doubt knew this favourite mediæval
tale--that of the Indian damsel whose charms enslaved first Alexander in
the midst of his conquests and then his tutor Aristotle--either in the
eighteenth-century prose version of Le Grand or the recent English verse
translation by G. L. Way, who turns the tale in couplets of this
style:--
At the first glance all dreams of conquest fade
And his first thought is of his Indian maid.
I cannot but think the Indian maiden of this story must have been still
lingering in Keats's imagination when he devised the episode of that
other Indian maiden in the fourth book of _Endymion_.[4]
Besides these records, we have an actual tangible relic to show how
Keats's attention in the lecture room was now fixed and now wandered, in
the shape of a notebook in which some other student has begun to put
down anatomy notes and Keats has followed. Beginning from both ends, he
has made notes of an anatomical and also of a surgical course, which are
not those of a lax or inaccurate student, but full and close as far as
they go; only squeezed into the margins of one or two pages there are
signs of flagging attention in the shape of sketches, rather prettily
touched, of a pansy and other flowers.[5]
After the first weeks of autumn gloom spent in solitary lodgings in the
dingiest part of London, Keats expresses, in a rimed epistle to Felton
Mathew, the fear lest his present studies and surroundings should stifle
the poetic faculty in him altogether. About the same time he takes pains
to get into touch again with Cowden Clarke, who had by this time left
Enfield and was living with a brother-in-law in Clerkenwell. In a letter
unluckily not dated, but certainly belonging to these first autumn weeks
in London, Keats writes to Clarke:--'Although the Borough is a beastly
place in dirt, turnings, and windings, yet No 8, Dean Street, is not
difficult to find; and if you would run the gauntlet over London Bridge,
take the first turning to the right, and, moreover, knock at my door,
which is nearly opposite a meeting, you would do me a charity, which, as
St Paul saith, is the father of all the virtues. At all events, let me
hear from you soon: I say, at all events, not excepting the gout in your
fingers.' Clarke seems to have complied promptly with this petition, and
before many months their renewed intercourse had momentous consequences.
Keats's fear that the springs of poetry would dry up in him was not
fulfilled, and he kept trying his prentice hand in various modes of
verse. Some of the sonnets recorded to have belonged to the year 1815,
as _Woman, when I behold thee, Happy is England_, may have been written
in London at the close of that year: a number of others, showing a
gradually strengthening touch, belong, we know, to the spring and early
summer of the next. For his brother George to send to his _fiancée_,
Miss Georgiana Wylie, on Valentine's day, Feb. 14, 1816, he wrote the
pleasant set of heptasyllabics beginning 'Hadst thou lived in days of
old.' In the same month was published Leigh Hunt's poem _The Story of
Rimini_, and by this, working together with his rooted enthusiasm for
Spenser, Keats was immediately inspired to begin an attempt at a
chivalrous romance of his own, _Calidore_; which went no farther than an
Induction and some hundred and fifty opening lines.
Cowden Clarke had kept up his acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, and was in
the habit of going up to visit him at the cottage where he was now
living at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health. Some time in the late spring
of 1816 Clarke made known to Hunt first some of Keats's efforts in
poetry and then Keats himself. Both Clarke and Hunt have told the story,
both writing at a considerable, and Clarke at a very long, interval
after the event. In their main substance the two accounts agree, but
both are in some points confused, telescoping together, as memory is apt
to do, circumstances really separated by an interval of months. One firm
fact we have to start with,--that Hunt printed in his paper, the
_Examiner_, for May 5th, 1816, Keats's sonnet, _O Solitude, if I with
thee must dwell_. This was Keats's first appearance in print, and a
decisive circumstance in his life. Clarke, it appears, had taken up the
'Solitude' sonnet and a few other manuscript verses of Keats to submit
to Leigh Hunt for his opinion,[6] and had every reason to be gratified
at the result. Here is his story of what happened.
I took with me two or three of the poems I had received from Keats. I
could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and
indeed approvingly, of the compositions--written, too, by a youth
under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating
and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty
lines of the first poem. Horace Smith happened to be there on the
occasion, and he was not less demonstrative in his appreciation of
their merits.... After making numerous and eager inquiries about him
personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind and
manner, the visit ended in my being requested to bring him over to the
Vale of Health.
That was a 'red-letter day' in the young poet's life, and one which
will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and
expression of Keats's features would arrest even the casual passenger
in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I
could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him
from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention,
with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter
and receive. As we approached the Heath, there was the rising and
accelerated step, with the gradual subsidence of all talk. The
interview, which stretched into three 'morning calls,' was the prelude
to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its
neighbourhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the
household, and was always welcomed.
In connexion with this, take Hunt's own account of the matter, as given
about ten years after the event in his volume, _Lord Byron and his
Contemporaries_:
To Mr Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance with him. I shall
never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of
genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise
of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We
became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet's heart as
warm as his imagination. We read and walked together, and used to
write verses of an evening on a given subject. No imaginative pleasure
was left unnoticed by us, or unenjoyed, from the recollections of the
bards and patriots of old to the luxury of a summer's rain at our
window or the clicking of the coal in winter-time.
Some inquirers, in interpreting these accounts, have judged that the
personal introduction did not take place in the spring or early summer
at all, but only after Keats's return from his holiday at the end of
September. I think it is quite clear, on the contrary, that Clarke had
taken Keats up to Hampstead by the end of May or some time in June.
Unmistakeable impressions of summer strolls there occur in his poetry of
the next few months. The 'happy fields' where he had been rambling when
he wrote the sonnet to Charles Wells on June the 29th were almost
certainly the fields of Hampstead, and there is no reason to doubt
Hunt's statement that the 'little hill' from which Keats drank the
summer view and air, as told at the opening of his poem _I stood
tiptoe_, was one of the swells of ground towards the Caen wood side of
the Heath. At the same time it would seem that their intercourse in
these first weeks did not extend beyond a few walks and talks, and that
it was not until after Keats's return from his summer holiday that the
acquaintance ripened into the close and delighted intimacy which we find
subsisting by the autumn.
For part of August and September he had been away at Margate, apparently
alone. A couple of rimed epistles addressed during this holiday to his
brother George and to Cowden Clarke breathe just such a heightened joy
of life and happiness of anticipation as would be natural in one who had
lately felt the first glow of new and inspiriting personal sympathies.
To George, besides the epistle, he addressed a pleasant sonnet on the
wonders he has seen, the sea, the sunsets, and the world of poetic
glories and mysteries vaguely evoked by them in his mind. The epistle to
George is dated August: that to Cowden Clarke followed in September. In
it he explains, in a well-conditioned and affectionate spirit of
youthful modesty, why he has hitherto been shy of addressing any of his
own attempts in verse to a friend so familiar with the work of the
masters; and takes occasion, in a heartfelt passage of autobiography, to
declare all he has owed to that friend's guidance and encouragement.
Thus have I thought; and days on days have flown
Slowly, or rapidly--unwilling still
For you to try my dull, unlearned quill.
Nor should I now, but that I've known you long;
That you first taught me all the sweets of song:
The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine;
What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine:
Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,
And float along like birds o'er summer seas;
Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness,
Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness.
Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly
Up to its climax and then dying proudly?
Who found for me the grandeur of the ode,
Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load?
Who let me taste that more than cordial dram,
The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram?
Show'd me that epic was of all the king,
Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring?
You too upheld the veil from Clio's beauty,
And pointed out the patriot's stern duty;
The might of Alfred, and the shaft of Tell;
The hand of Brutus, that so grandly fell
Upon a tyrant's head. Ah! had I never seen,
Or known your kindness, what might I have been?
What my enjoyments in my youthful years,
Bereft of all that now my life endears?
And can I e'er these benefits forget?
And can I e'er repay the friendly debt?
No doubly no;--yet should these rhymings please,
I shall roll on the grass with two-fold ease:
For I have long time been my fancy feeding
With hopes that you would one day think the reading
Of my rough verses not an hour misspent;
Should it e'er be so, what a rich content!
Some of these lines are merely feeble and boyish, but some show a fast
ripening, nay an almost fully ripened, critical feeling for the poetry
of the past. The couplet about Spenser's vowels could scarcely be
happier, and the next on Milton anticipates, though without at all
approaching in craftsmanship, the 'Me rather all that bowery loneliness'
of Tennyson's famous alcaic stanzas to the same effect.
Coming back from the seaside about the end of September to take up his
quarters with his brothers in their lodging in the Poultry, Keats was
soon to be indebted to Clarke for another and invaluable literary
stimulus: I mean his first knowledge of Chapman's translation of Homer.
This experience, as every reader knows, was instantly celebrated by him
in a sonnet, classical now almost to triteness, which is his first high
achievement, and one of the masterpieces of our language in this form.
The question of its exact date has been much discussed: needlessly,
seeing that Keats himself signed and dated it in full, when it was
printed in the _Examiner_ for the first of December following, 'Oct^r
1816, JOHN KEATS.' The doubts expressed have been due partly to the
overlooking of this fact and partly to a mistake in Cowden Clarke's
account of the matter written many years later. After quoting Keats's
invitation of October 1815 to come and find him at his lodging in the
Borough, Clarke goes on:--
This letter having no date but the week's day, and no postmark,
preceded our first symposium; and a memorable night it was in my
life's career. A beautiful copy of the folio edition of Chapman's
translation of _Homer_ had been lent me. It was the property of Mr.
Alsager, the gentleman who for years had contributed no small share of
celebrity to the great reputation of the _Times_ newspaper by the
masterly manner in which he conducted the money-market department of
that journal....
Well then, we were put in possession of the _Homer_ of Chapman, and to
work we went, turning to some of the 'famousest' passages, as we had
scrappily known them in Pope's version. There was, for instance, that
perfect scene of the conversation on Troy wall of the old Senators
with Helen, who is pointing out to them the several Greek Captains;
with the Senator Antenor's vivid portrait of an orator in Ulysses,
beginning at the 237th line of the third book:--
But when the prudent Ithacus did to his counsels rise,
He stood a little still, and fix'd upon the earth his eyes,
His sceptre moving neither way, but held it formally,
Like one that vainly doth affect. Of wrathful quality,
And frantic (rashly judging), you would have said he was;
But when out of his ample breast he gave his great voice pass,
And words that flew about our ears like drifts of winter's snow,
None thenceforth might contend with him, though naught admired for
show.
The shield and helmet of Diomed, with the accompanying simile, in the
opening of the third book; and the prodigious description of Neptune's
passage to the Achive ships, in the thirteenth book:--
The woods and all the great hills near trembled beneath the weight
Of his immortal-moving feet. Three steps he only took,
Before he far-off Ægas reach'd, but with the fourth, it shook
With his dread entry.
One scene I could not fail to introduce to him--the shipwreck of
Ulysses, in the fifth book of the _Odysseis_, and I had the reward of
one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:--
Then forth he came, his both knees falt'ring, both
His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth
His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.
_The sea had soak'd his heart through_; all his veins
His toils had rack'd t'a labouring woman's pains.
Dead-weary was he.
On an after-occasion I showed him the couplet, in Pope's translation,
upon the same passage:--
From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran,
And _lost in lassitude lay all the man_. (!!!)
Chapman supplied us with many an after-treat; but it was in the
teeming wonderment of this his first introduction, that, when I came
down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter
with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, _On First Looking into
Chapman's Homer_. We had parted, as I have already said, at
day-spring, yet he contrived that I should receive the poem from a
distance of, may be, two miles by ten o'clock.
The whole of the above is a typical case of what I have called the
telescoping action of memory. Recollections not of one, but of many,
Homer readings are here compressed into a couple of paragraphs. They
will have been readings carried on at intervals through the autumn and
winter of 1816-17: an inspiring addition to the other intellectual gains
and pleasures which fell to Keats's lot during those months. There is no
reason to doubt the exactness of Clarke's account of the first night the
friends spent together over Chapman and its result in the shape of the
sonnet which lay on his table the next morning. His error is in
remembering these circumstances as having happened when he and Keats
first foregathered in London in the autumn of 1815, whereas Keats's
positive evidence above quoted shows that they did not really happen
until a year later, after his return from his summer holiday in 1816.[7]
Before printing the Chapman sonnet, Leigh Hunt had the satisfaction of
hearing his own opinion of it and of some other manuscript poems of
Keats confirmed by good judges. I quote his words for the sake of the
excellent concluding phrase. 'Not long afterwards, having the pleasure
of entertaining at dinner Mr Godwin, Mr Hazlitt, and Mr Basil Montague,
I showed them the verses of my young friend, and they were pronounced to
be as extraordinary as I thought them. One of them was that noble sonnet
on first reading Chapman's _Homer_, which terminates with so energetic a
calmness, and which completely announced the new poet taking
possession.' But by this time Keats had become an established intimate
in the Leigh Hunt household, and was constantly backwards and forwards
between London and the Hampstead cottage.
This intimacy was really the opening of a new chapter both in his
intellectual and social life. At first it was a source of unmixed
encouragement and pleasure, but seeing that it carried with it in the
sequel disadvantages and penalties which gravely affected Keats's
career, it is necessary that we should fix clearly in our mind Hunt's
previous history and the place held by him in the literary and political
life of the time. He was Keats's senior by eleven years: the son of an
eloquent and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable
preacher, sprung from a family long settled in Barbadoes, who having
married a lady from Philadelphia had migrated to England and exercised
his vocation in the northern suburbs of London. Brought up at Christ's
Hospital about a dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, Leigh Hunt
gained at sixteen a measure of precocious literary reputation with a
volume of juvenile poems which gave evidence of great fluency and, for a
boy, of wide and eager reading. A few years later he came into notice as
a theatrical critic, being then a clerk in the War Office: an occupation
which he abandoned at twenty-four (in 1808) in order to take part in the
conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper, then just founded by his brother
John Hunt. For nearly five years the brothers Hunt, as manager and
editor of that journal, helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism,
in those days of tense grapple with the Corsican ogre abroad and stiff
re-action and repression at home, with a dexterous brisk audacity and an
unflinching sincerity of conviction. So far they had escaped the usual
penalty of such courage. Several prosecutions directed against them
failed, but at last, late in 1812, they were caught tripping. To go as
far as was safely possible in satire of the follies and vices of the
Prince Regent was a tempting exercise to the reforming spirits of the
time. Provoked by the grovelling excesses of some of the Prince's
flatterers, the _Examiner_ at last broke bounds and denounced him as 'a
violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a
despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man
who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the
gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.' This attack
followed within a few weeks of another almost as stinging contributed
anonymously by Charles Lamb. Under the circumstances the result of a
prosecution could not be doubtful: and the two Hunts were condemned to a
fine of £500 each and two years imprisonment in separate jails. Leigh
Hunt bore himself in his captivity with cheerful fortitude, suffering
severely in health but flagging little in spirits or industry. He
decorated his apartment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol with a rose-trellis
paper and a ceiling to imitate a summer sky, so that it looked, said
Charles Lamb, like a room in a fairy tale, and spent money which he had
not got in converting its backyard into a garden of shrubs and flowers.
Very early in life Hunt had been received into a family called Kent at
the instance of an elder daughter who greatly admired him. Not long
afterwards he engaged himself to her younger sister, then almost a
child, and married her soon after the _Examiner_ was started. She proved
a prolific, thriftless woman and ill housekeeper, but through all the
rubs and pinches of his after years he was ever an affectionate husband
and father. His wife was allowed to be with him in prison, and there
they received the visits of many friends old and new. Liberal statesmen,
philosophers, and writers, including characters so divers as Bentham and
Byron, Brougham and Hazlitt, James Mill and Miss Edgeworth, Tom Moore
and Wilkie the painter, pressed to offer this victim of political
persecution their sympathy and society. Charles Lamb and his sister were
the most constant of all his visitors. Tom Moore, who both before and
after the sentence on the brothers Hunt managed in his series of verse
skits, _The Twopenny Post Bag_, to go on playing with impunity the game
of Prince-Regent-baiting,--the light-hearted Tom Moore joined in deepest
earnest the chorus of sympathy with the prisoners:--
Yet go--for thoughts as blessed as the air
Of Spring or Summer flowers await you there:
Thoughts such as He, who feasts his courtly crew
In rich conservatories, _never_ knew;
Pure self-esteem--the smiles that light within--
The Zeal, whose circling charities begin
With the few lov'd ones Heaven has plac'd it near,
And spread, till all Mankind are in its sphere;
The Pride, that suffers without vaunt or plea,
And the fresh Spirit, that can warble free,
Through prison-bars, its hymn to Liberty!
Among ardent young men who brought their tributes was Cowden Clarke with
a basket of fruit and flowers from his father's garden; and this was
followed up by a weekly offering in the same kind. 'Libertas, the loved
Libertas,' was the name found for Hunt by such fond young spirits and
adopted by Keats.
During his captivity Hunt was allowed the full use of his library, and
his chief reading was in the fifty volumes of the _Parnaso Italiano_. As
a result he acquired and retained for life a really wide and familiar
knowledge of Italian poetry. He continued to edit the _Examiner_ from
prison and occupied himself moreover with three small volumes in verse.
One of these was _The Descent of Liberty, A Mask_, celebrating the
downfall of Napoleon in 1814, and embodying gracefully enough the
Liberal's hope against hope that with that catastrophe there might
return to Europe not only peace but freedom. (We have told already how
Keats at Edmonton tried his boyish hand at a sonnet on the same occasion
and to the same purpose.) Another of his prison tasks was the writing of
his poem, _The Story of Rimini_; a third, the recasting and annotating
of his _Feast of the Poets_, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse
first printed two years before and modelled on the precedent of several
rimed skits of the Caroline age such as Suckling's _Session of the
Poets_ and the Duke of Buckinghamshire's _Election of a Poet Laureate_.
It represented Apollo as convoking the contemporary British poets, or
pretenders to the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper.
Some of those who present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others
he cordially welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. In
revising this skit while he was in prison, Hunt modified some of his
earlier verdicts, but in the main he let them stand. Moore and Campbell
fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof;
Coleridge and Wordsworth admonished (but Wordsworth in much more lenient
terms than in the first edition) and dismissed. Hunt's notes are of
still living interest as setting forth, at that pregnant moment of our
literary history, the considered judgments of a kindly and accomplished
critic on his contemporaries. Seen at a distance of a hundred years
they look short-sighted enough, as almost all contemporary judgments
must, and are coloured as a matter of course with party feeling, though
not so grossly as was the habit of the hour. Since Coleridge, Southey
and Wordsworth had been transformed, first by the Terror and then by the
aggressions of Bonaparte, from ardent revolutionary idealists into
vehement partisans of reaction both at home and abroad, the bitterness
of the 'Lost Leader' feeling, common to all liberals, accounts for much
of Hunt's disparagement of them; while besides sharing the prejudice of
his party in general against Scott as a known high Tory and friend to
kings, he had ignorantly and peevishly conceived a special grudge
against that great generous and chivalrous spirit on account of his
lenient handling of Charles II in his _Life of Dryden_. Hunt in his new
notes fully acknowledged the genius, while he condemned the defection
and also what he thought the poetical perversities, of Wordsworth; but
his treatment of Scott, as little more than a mere money-making
manufacturer of pinchbeck northern lays in a sham antique ballad
dialect, is idly flippant and patronizing. The point is of importance in
Keats's history, for hence, as we shall see in the sequel, came probably
a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem paradoxical rancour
with which the genial Hunt, and Keats as his friend and supposed
follower, were by-and-by to be persecuted in Blackwood.
When Hunt's ordeal was over in the first days of February 1815, he
issued from it a butt for savage and vindictive obloquy to the
reactionary half of the lettered world, but little less than a hero and
martyr to the reforming half. He retained the private friendship of many
of those who had sought him out from public sympathy. Tall, straight,
slender, charmingly courteous and vivacious, with glossy black hair,
bright jet-black eyes, full, relishing nether lip, and 'nose of taste,'
Leigh Hunt was one of the most winning of companions, full of kindly
smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and ideas, with an infinity of
pleasant things to say of his own and a beautiful caressing voice to say
them in, yet the most sympathetic and deferential of listeners. To the
misfortune of himself and his friends, he had no notion of even
attempting to balance income and expenditure, and was perfectly
light-hearted in the matter of money obligations, which he shrank
neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circumstances made him
almost invariably a receiver. But men of sterner fibre and better able
to order their affairs have often been much more ready than he was to
sacrifice conviction to advantage, and his friends found more to admire
in his smiling steadfastness under obloquy and persecution than to blame
in his chronic incapacity to pay his way. Hardly anyone had warmer
well-wishers or requited them, so far as the depth of his nature went,
with truer loyalty and kindness. His industry as a writer was incessant,
hardly less than that of Southey himself. The titles he gave to the
several journals he conducted, _The Examiner_, _The Reflector_, _The
Indicator_, define accurately enough his true vocation as a guide to the
pleasures of literature. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy
penetration, and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those
faults to which De Quincey and even the illustrious Coleridge, with
their more philosophic powers and method, were subject, the faults of
roundaboutness and over-laboured profundity.
[Illustration: PL. II
JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY MAYER AFTER J. HAYTER]
The weakness of Leigh Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. 'Matchless,'
according to Lamb's well-known phrase, 'as a fire-side companion,' it
was his misfortune to carry too much of a fire-side or parlour tone, and
sometimes, it must be owned, a very second-rate parlour tone, into
literature. He could not walk by the advice of Polonius, and in aiming
at the familiar was apt, rarely in prose but sadly often in verse, to
slip into an underbred strain of airy and genteel vulgarity, hard to
reconcile with what we are told of his acceptable social qualities in
real life.[8] He was as enthusiastic a student of our sixteenth and
seventeenth century literature as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had
more appreciation than they of the characteristic excellencies of what
he always persists in calling the 'French school,' the school of
polished artifice and convention which came in after Dryden and swore by
the precepts of Boileau, he was not less bent on seeing it overthrown.
In English poetry his predilection was for the older writers from
Chaucer to Dryden, and above all others for Spenser: in Italian for
Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and the later writers of the chivalrous-fanciful
epic style. He insisted that such writers were much better models for
English poets to follow than the French, and fought as hard as anyone
for the return of English poetry from the urbane conventions of the
eighteenth century to the paths of nature and of freedom. But he had his
own conception of the manner in which this return should be effected. He
did not admit that Wordsworth with his rustic simplicities and his
recluse philosophy had solved the problem. 'It was his intention,' he
wrote in prison, 'by the beginning of next year to bring out a piece of
some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce to practice his own
ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate
harmony of the English heroic.' The result of this intention was the
_Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and published a year
after his release, in February or March, 1816. 'With the endeavour,' so
he repeated himself in the preface, 'to recur to a freer spirit of
versification, I have joined one of still greater importance,--that of
having a free and idiomatic cast of language.'
We shall have to consider Hunt's effort to revive the old freedom of the
English heroic metre when we come to the study of Keats's first volume,
written much under Hunt's influence. As to his success with his 'ideas
of what is natural in style,' and his free and idiomatic--or as he
elsewhere says 'unaffected, contemporaneous'--cast of language to
supersede the styles alike of Pope and Wordsworth, let us take a sample
of _Rimini_ at its best and worst. Relating the gradual obsession of
Paolo's thoughts by the charm of his sister-in-law,--
And she became companion of his thought;
Silence her gentleness before him brought,
Society her sense, reading her books,
Music her voice, every sweet thing her looks,
Which sometimes seemed, when he sat fixed awhile,
To steal beneath his eyes with upward smile;
And did he stroll into some lonely place,
Under the trees, upon the thick soft grass,
How charming, would he think, to see her here!
How heightened then, and perfect would appear
The two divinest things this world has got,
A lovely woman in a rural spot!
The first few lines are skilfully modulated, and in an ordinary domestic
theme might be palatable enough; but what a couplet, good heavens! for
the last. At the climax, Hunt's version of Dante is an example of
milk-and-water in conditions where milk-and-water is sheer poison:--
As thus they sat, and felt with leaps of heart
Their colour change, they came upon the part
Where fond Genevra, with her flame long nurst,
Smiled upon Launcelot when he kissed her first:--
That touch, at last, through every fibre slid;
And Paulo turned, scarce knowing what he did,
Only he felt he could no more dissemble,
And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble.
The taste, we see, which guided Hunt so well in appreciating the work of
others could betray him terribly in original composition. The passages
of light narrative in _Rimini_ are often vivacious and pleasant enough,
those of nature description genuinely if not profoundly felt, and
written with an eye on the object: but they are the only tolerable
things in the poem. Hunt's idea of a true poetical style was to avoid
everything strained, stilted, and conventional, and to lighten the
stress of his theme with familiar graces and pleasantries in the manner
of his beloved Ariosto. But he did not realize that while any style,
from that of the _Book of Job_ to that of Wordsworth's _Idiot Boy_, may
become poetical if only there is strength and intensity of feeling
behind it, nothing but the finest social instinct and tradition can
impart the tact for such light conversational graces as he attempted,
and that to treat a theme of high tragic passion in the tone and
vocabulary of a suburban tea-party is intolerable. Contemporaries,
welcoming as a relief any change from the stale conventions and
tarnished glitter of eighteenth century poetic rhythm and diction, and
perhaps sated for the moment with the rush and thrill of new romantic
and exotic sensation they had owed in recent years, first to Scott's
metrical tales of the Border and the Highlands, then to Byron's of
Greece and the Levant,--contemporaries found something fresh and
homefelt in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_, and sentimental ladies and gentlemen
wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine as though they had been
their own. No less a person than Byron, to whom the poem was dedicated,
writes to Moore:--'Leigh Hunt's poem is a devilish good one--quaint here
and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about
it that will stand the test. I do not say this because he has inscribed
it to me.' And to Leigh Hunt himself Byron reports praise of the poem
from Sir Henry Englefield the dilettante, 'a mighty man in the blue
circles, and a very clever man anywhere,' from Hookham Frere 'and all
the arch _literati_,' and says how he had left his own sister and cousin
'in fixed and delighted perusal of it.' Byron's admiration cooled
greatly in the sequel, with or even before the cooling of his regard
for the author. But it is an instructive comment on standards of taste
and their instability that cultivated readers should at any time have
endured to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and
Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like that of the above
quotations. When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer
poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the
attempt to add a familiar ease of manner to variety of movement in this
metre, Shelley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into
Hunt's faults of triviality and under-breeding: but Keats was only too
apt to be betrayed into them.
Hunt had spent the first months after his release in London, but by the
end of 1815, some time before the publication of _Rimini_, had settled
at Hampstead, where he soon made himself a sort of self-crowned laureate
of the beauties of the place, and continued to vary his critical and
political labours with gossiping complimentary verses to his friends in
the form both of sonnet and epistle. The gravest of the epistles is one
addressed in a spirit of good-hearted loyalty to Byron in that
disastrous April when, after four years spent in the full blaze of
popularity and fashion, he was leaving England under the storm of
obloquy aroused by the scandals attending his separation from his wife.
This is in Hunt's reformed heroic couplet: the rest are in a chirruping
and gossiping anapaestic sing-song which is perhaps the writer's most
congenial vein. Here is a summer picture of Hampstead from a letter to
Tom Moore:--
And yet how can I touch, and not linger a while,
On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile?
On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades,
Dark pines, and white houses, and long-allied shades,
With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees
The hills up above him with roofs in the trees?
Now too, while the season,--half summer, half spring,--
Brown elms and green oaks--makes one loiter and sing;
And the bee's weighty murmur comes by us at noon,
And the cuckoo repeats his short indolent tune,
And little white clouds lie about in the sun,
And the wind's in the west, and hay-making begun?--
and here an autumn night-sketch, from a letter expressing surprise that
the wet weather has not brought a visit from Charles Lamb, that
inveterate lover of walking in the rain:--
We hadn't much thunder and lightning, I own;
But the rains might have led you to walk out of town;
And what made us think your desertion still stranger,
The roads were so bad, there was really no danger;
At least where I live; for the nights were so groping,
The rains made such wet, and the paths are so sloping,
That few, unemboldened by youth or by drinking,
Came down without lanthorns,--nor then without shrinking.
And really, to see the bright spots come and go,
As the path rose or fell, was a fanciful shew.
Like fairies they seemed, pitching up from their nooks,
And twinkling upon us their bright little looks.
Such were Leigh Hunt's antecedents, and such his literary performances
and reputation, when Keats at the age of twenty-one became his intimate.
So far as opinions and public sympathies were concerned, those of Keats
had already, as we have seen, been largely formed in boyhood by
familiarity, under the lead of Cowden Clarke, with Leigh Hunt's writings
in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed Voltairian and sceptic as to
revealed religion, and supplied its place with a private gospel of
cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his
own invincibly sunny temperament and partly by the hopeful doctrines of
eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural
sympathy of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and kind-hearted view of
things, and he had a mind naturally unapt for dogma: ready to entertain
and appreciate any set of ideas according as his imagination recognized
their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing
ultimate truth. In matters of poetic feeling and fancy the two men had
up to a certain point not a little in common. Like Hunt, Keats at this
time was given to 'luxuriating' too effusively and fondly over the
'deliciousness' of whatever he liked in art, books, or nature. To the
every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt brought in a
lower degree the same alertness of perception and acuteness of enjoyment
which in Keats were intense beyond parallel. In his lighter and
shallower way Hunt also truly felt with Keats the perennial charm and
vitality of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about this
time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some,
less adequate, of Homer. But behind such pleasant faculties in Hunt
nothing deeper or more potent lay hidden. Whereas with Keats, as time
went on, delighted sensation became more and more surely and
instantaneously transmuted and spiritualized into imaginative emotion;
his words and cadences came every day from deeper sources within him and
more fully charged with the power of far-reaching and symbolic
suggestion. Hence, as this profound and passionate young genius grew, he
could not but be aware of what was shallow in the talent of his senior
and cloying and distasteful in his ever-voluble geniality. But for many
months the harmony of their relations was complete.
The 'little cottage' in the Vale of Health must have been fairly
overcrowded, one would suppose, with Hunt's fast-growing family of young
children, but a bed was made up for Keats on a sofa, 'in a parlour no
bigger than an old mansion's closet,' says Hunt, which nevertheless
served him for a library and had prints after Stothard hung on the walls
and casts of the heads of poets and heroes crowning the bookshelves.
Here the young poet was made always welcome. The sonnet beginning 'Keen,
fitful gusts are whispering here and there' records a night of October
or November 1816, when, instead of staying to sleep, he preferred to
walk home under the stars, his head full of talk about Petrarch and the
youth of Milton, to the city lodgings where he lived with his brothers
the life affectionately described in that other pleasant sonnet written
on Tom's birthday, November 18, beginning 'Small, busy flames play
through the fresh-laid coals.' The well-known fifty lines at the end of
_Sleep and Poetry_, a poem on which Keats put forth the best of his
half-fledged strength this winter, give the fullest and most engaging
account of the pleasure and inspiration he drew from Hunt's
hospitality:--
The chimes
Of friendly voices had just given place
To as sweet a silence, when I 'gan retrace
The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease.
It was a poet's house who keeps the keys
Of pleasure's temple. Round about were hung
The glorious features of the bards who sung
In other ages--cold and sacred busts
Smiled at each other. Happy he who trusts
To clear Futurity his darling fame!
Then there were fauns and satyrs taking aim
At swelling apples with a frisky leap
And reaching fingers, 'mid a luscious heap
Of vine-leaves. Then there rose to view a fane
Of liny marble, and thereto a train
Of nymphs approaching fairly o'er the sward:
One, loveliest, holding her white hand toward
The dazzling sun-rise: two sisters sweet
Bending their graceful figures till they meet
Over the trippings of a little child:
And some are hearing, eagerly, the wild
Thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.
See, in another picture, nymphs are wiping
Cherishingly Diana's timorous limbs;--
A fold of lawny mantle dabbling swims
At the bath's edge, and keeps a gentle motion
With the subsiding crystal: as when ocean
Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o'er
Its rocky marge, and balances once more
The patient weeds; that now unshent by foam
Feel all about their undulating home...
Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green,
Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean
His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they!
For over them was seen a free display
Of out-spread wings, and from between them shone
The face of Poesy: from off her throne
She overlook'd things that I scarce could tell.
It is easy from the above and from some of Keats's later work to guess
at most of the prints which had caught his attention on Hunt's walls and
in his portfolios and worked on his imagination afterwards:--Poussin's
'Empire of Flora' for certain: several, probably, of his various
'Bacchanals,' with the god and his leopard-drawn car, and groups of
nymphs dancing with fauns or strewn upon the foreground to right or
left: the same artist's 'Venus and Adonis': Stothard's 'Bathers' and
'Vintage,' his small print of Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura
and her friend; Raphael's 'Poetry' from the Vatican; and so forth. These
things are not without importance in the study of Keats, for he was
quicker and more apt than any of our other poets to draw inspiration
from works of art,--prints, pictures, or marbles,--that came under his
notice, and it is not for nothing that he alludes in this same poem to
--the pleasant flow
Of words on opening a portfolio.
A whole treatise might be written on matters which I shall have to
mention briefly or not at all,--how such and such a descriptive phrase
in Keats has been suggested by this or that figure in a picture; how
pictures by or prints after old masters have been partly responsible for
his vision alike of the Indian maiden and the blind Orion; what various
originals, paintings or antiques or both, we can recognize as blending
themselves into his evocation of the triumph of Bacchus or his creation
of the Grecian Urn.
On December the 1st, 1816, Hunt, as has been said, did Keats the new
service of printing the Chapman sonnet as a specimen of his work in an
essay in the _Examiner_ on 'Young Poets,' in which the names of Shelley
and Reynolds were bracketed with his as poetical beginners of high
promise. With reference to the custom mentioned by Hunt of Keats and
himself sitting down of an evening to write verses on a given subject,
Cowden Clarke pleasantly describes one such occasion on December 30 of
the same year, when the chosen theme was _The Grasshopper and the
Cricket_:--'The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such
occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my
affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and
perfectly unpretentious encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at
the first line:--
The poetry of earth is never dead.
"Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth and
eleventh lines:--
On a lone winter morning, when the frost
Hath wrought a silence--
"Ah that's perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation on
the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and torpidity.'
The affectionate enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself,
be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another's company and
verses sometimes took forms which to the mind of the younger and wiser
of the two soon came to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817)
the whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves 'after the
manner of the elder bards.' Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy,
Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so
adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they
were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came
in--conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more
anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs Thomas Hood, Marianne, and their young sister
Charlotte. When visitors were announced Hunt took off his wreath and
suggested that Keats should do the same: he, however, 'in his
enthusiastic way, declared he would not take off his crown for any human
being,' and accordingly wore it as long as the visit lasted.[9] Here
are Hunt's pair of sonnets, which are about as good as any he ever
wrote, and which he not long afterwards printed:--
A crown of ivy! I submit my head
To the young hand that gives it,--young, 'tis true,
But with a right, for 'tis a poet's too.
How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread
With their broad angles, like a nodding shed
Over both eyes! and how complete and new,
As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew
My sense with freshness,--Fancy's rustling bed!
Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes
Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks,
And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old
Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes,--
And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent,
Bacchus,--whose bride has of his hand fast hold.
It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind,
Thus to be topped with leaves;--to have a sense
Of honour-shaded thought,--an influence
As from great Nature's fingers, and be twined
With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind,
As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence
A head that bows to her benevolence,
Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind.
'Tis what's within us crowned. And kind and great
Are all the conquering wishes it inspires,--
Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods,
Love of love's self, and ardour for a state
Of natural good befitting such desires,
Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes.
Keats had the good sense not to print his efforts of the day; they are
of slight account poetically, but have a real biographical interest:--
ON RECEIVING A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT
Minutes are flying swiftly, and as yet
Nothing unearthly has enticed my brain
Into a delphic labyrinth--I would fain
Catch an immortal thought to pay the debt
I owe to the kind poet who has set
Upon my ambitious head a glorious gain.
Two bending laurel sprigs--'tis nearly pain
To be conscious of such a coronet.
Still time is fleeting, and no dream arises
Gorgeous as I would have it--only I see
A trampling down of what the world most prizes,
Turbans and crowns and blank regality;
And then I run into most wild surmises
Of all the many glories that may be.
TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED
What is there in the universal earth
More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree?
Haply a halo round the moon--a glee
Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth;
And haply you will say the dewy birth
Of morning roses--ripplings tenderly
Spread by the halcyon's breast upon the sea--
But these comparisons are nothing worth.
Then there is nothing in the world so fair?
The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?
Or June that breathes out life for butterflies?
No, none of these can from my favourite bear
Away the palm--yet shall it ever pay
Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes.
Here we have expressed in the first sonnet the same mood as in some of
the holiday rimes of the previous summer, the mood of ardent expectancy
for an inspiration that declines (and no wonder considering the
circumstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu
should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats's
mind, and the sestet of this sonnet is interesting as containing in its
first four lines the germs of the well-known passage at the beginning of
the third book of _Endymion_,--
There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel--
and in its fifth a repetition of the 'wild surmise' phrase of the
Chapman sonnet. The second sonnet has a happy line or two in its list of
delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interrogative
formula of the opening lines of _Sleep and Poetry_, Keats's chief
venture in verse this winter.
Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is
Hunt's, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of
it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own
name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode
to Apollo:--
God of the golden bow,
And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
And of the golden fire,
Charioteer
Of the patient year,
Where--where slept thine ire,
When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,
Thy laurel, thy glory,
The light of thy story,
Or was I a worm--too low crawling, for death?
O Delphic Apollo!
And so forth: the same half-amused spirit of penitence is expressed in a
letter of a few weeks later to his brother George: and later still he
came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on those days as
a time when he had been content to play the part of 'A pet-lamb in a
sentimental farce.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Another account says Mitchell.
[2] In _The Asclepiad_, April 1884.
[3] Houghton MSS.
[4] Le Grand: _Fabliaux ou Contes, 1781_. G. L. Way: _Fabliaux or
Tales_, London, 1800; 2nd ed. 1815. See Appendix I.
[5] This note-book is in the collection bequeathed by the late Sir
Charles Dilke to the public library at Hampstead.
[6] In a review of Keats's first book written the next year
(_Examiner_, July 9, 1817) Hunt says that when he printed the
'Solitude' sonnet he knew no more of Keats than of any other
anonymous correspondent: but this probably only means that he had not
yet met Keats personally.
[7] Putting day-break in early October at a little before six, there
would have been fully time enough for Keats to walk to the Poultry,
composing as he went, and to commit his draft to paper and send it to
Clerkenwell by ten o'clock. The longer walk to and from the Borough,
had the date been a year earlier, would have made the feat more
difficult. Moreover the feat itself becomes less of a miracle when we
recognize it as performed not at the end of the poet's twentieth year
but at the end of his twenty first. But in view of Keats's own
explicit dating of the piece, the point seems to need no labouring:
or else it might be pointed out that if Clarke had really introduced
him to Chapman in October 1815 Chapman would assuredly not have been
left out of the list of masters whom he quotes as having known
through Clarke in his epistle of the following August quoted above
(pp. 37, 38).
[8] Both Byron and Barry Cornwall have expressed their sense of
contrast between certain vulgarities of Hunt's diction and his
personal good breeding. Byron before their quarrel declared
emphatically that he was 'not a vulgar man'; and Barry Cornwall,
admitting that he 'indulged himself occasionally in pet words, some
of which struck me as almost approaching to the vulgar,' goes on to
say that 'he was essentially a gentleman in conduct, in demeanour, in
manner, in his consideration for others,' and to praise him for his
'great fund of positive active kindness,' his freedom from all
irritable vanity, his pleasure and liberality in praising (Bryan
Walter Procter, _An Autobiographical Fragment_, 1877, pp. 197-200).
[9] This reconstruction of the scene is founded on a comparison of
the sonnets themselves with Woodhouse's note on Keats's subsequent
palinode, _A Hymn to Apollo_. Woodhouse says the friends were both
crowned with laurel, but it seems more likely that he should have
made this mistake than that a similar performance should have been
twice repeated (Houghton MSS.).
CHAPTER III
WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST FOR POETRY
Haydon and the Elgin marbles--Haydon as painter and writer--Vanity,
pugnacity, and piety--Haydon on Leigh Hunt--Keats and Haydon meet--An
enthusiastic friendship--Keats and the Elgin marbles--Sonnets and
protestations--Hazlitt and Lamb--Friendship of Hunt and Shelley--Lamb
and Hazlitt on Shelley--Haydon and Shelley: a battle royal--Keats and
Shelley--A cool relation--John Hamilton Reynolds--His devotion to
Keats--The Reynolds sisters--James Rice--Charles Wells--William
Haslam--Joseph Severn--Keats judged by his circle--Described by
Severn--His range of sympathies--His poetic ambition--The die is
cast--First volume goes to press.
So much for the relations of Keats with Hunt himself in these first six
months of their intimacy. Next of the other intimacies which he formed
with friends to whom Hunt introduced him. One of the first of these, and
for a while the most stimulating and engrossing, was with the painter
Haydon. This remarkable man, now just thirty, had lately been victorious
in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a
temporary semblance of victory in the other. For the last eight years he
had fought and laboured to win national recognition for the deserts of
Lord Elgin in his great work of salvage--for such under the conditions
of the time it was--in bringing away the remains of the Parthenon
sculptures from Athens. By dint of sheer justice of conviction and power
of fight, and then only when he had been reinforced in the campaign by
foreigners of indisputable authority like the archaeologist Visconti and
the sculptor Canova, he had succeeded in getting the pre-eminence of
these marbles among all works of the sculptor's art acknowledged, and
their acquisition for the nation secured, in the teeth of powerful and
bitterly hostile cliques. His opponents included both the
sentimentalists who took their cue from Byron's _Curse of Minerva_ in
shrieking at Elgin as a vandal, and the dilettanti who, blinded to the
true Greek touch by familiarity with smoothed and pumiced Roman copies,
had declared the Parthenon sculptures to be works of the age of Hadrian.
Haydon's victory over these antagonists is his chief title, and a title
both sound and strong, to the regard of posterity. His other and
life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to take him
at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the crown of
heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His high-flaming
energy and industry, his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the
clamour of his indomitable self-assertion and of his ceaseless conflict
with the academic powers, even his unabashed claims for pecuniary
support on friends, patrons, and society at large, had won for him much
convinced or half convinced attention and encouragement, both in the
world of art and letters and in that of dilettantism and fashion. His
first and second great pictures, 'Dentatus' and 'Macbeth,' had been
dubiously received; his third, the 'Judgment of Solomon,' with
acclamation. This had been finished after his victory in the matter of
the Elgin marbles. He was now busy on one larger and more ambitious than
all, 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' in which it was his purpose to
include among the crowd of lookers-on portraits of many famous men both
historical and contemporary. While as usual sunk deep in debt, he was
perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in truth a man
whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of the gifts
of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he possessed
completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch
of feeling and aspiration. 'Never,' wrote he about this time, 'have I
had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have
been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and ether in his
soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of
energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and shot across
me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God.' But for
all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of genius,
the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties which it
is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to Haydon. Its
vision and originality, its gift of 'heavenly alchemy' for transmuting
and new-creating the materials offered it by experience, its sovereign
inability to see with any eyes or create to any pattern but its own,
were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an occasional
bold conception, a trick of colour or craftsmanship not too obviously
caught from greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid
siege to immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the
kingdom not of true great art but of imitative pictorial posturing and
empty pictorial bombast.
As a draughtsman especially, Haydon's touch is surprisingly loose,
empty, and inexpressive. Even in drawing from the Elgin marbles, as he
did with passionate industry, covering reams, he fails almost wholly to
render the qualities which he so ardently perceived, and loses every
distinction and every subtlety of the original.[1] Infinitely better is
his account of them in words: for in truth Haydon's chief intellectual
power was as an observer, and his best instrument the pen. Readers of
his journals and correspondence know how vividly and tellingly he can
relate an experience or touch off a character. In this gift of striking
out a human portrait in words he stood second in his age, if second, to
Hazlitt alone, and in our later literature there has been no one to beat
him except Carlyle. But passion and pugnacity, vanity and the spirit of
self-exaltation, at the same time as they intensify vision, are bound to
discolour and distort it; and the reader must always bear in mind that
Haydon's pen portraits of his contemporaries are apt to be not less
untrustworthy than they are unforgettable. Moreover in this, the
literary, form of expression also, where he aims higher, leaving
description and trying to become imaginative and impressive, we find
only the same self-satisfied void turgidity, and proof of spiritual
hollowness disguised by temperamental fervour, as in his paintings.
But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those
he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his character, and not
his essential commonness of gift and faculty, that impressed his
associates as they impressed himself. Sturdy, loud-voiced, eloquent,
high of colour, with a bald perpendicular forehead surmounting a set of
squarely compressed, pugnacious features,--eyes, lips and jaw all
prominent and aggressive together,--he was a dominating, and yet a
welcome, presence in some of the choicest circles of his day. Wordsworth
and Wordsworth's firm ally, the painter-baronet Sir George Beaumont,
Hazlitt, Horace Smith, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Mary
Mitford, were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by
him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others
after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of
purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit
of thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour
and protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for
deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies,' and the like. 'I always rose
up from my knees,' he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, 'with a
refreshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling
that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of
life.' And he was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in
both particulars, lecturing them loftily on faith and conduct while
he was living without scruple on their bounty.
[Illustration: PL. III
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY THOMSON AFTER HAYDON]
In October 1816, the first month of Keats's intimacy with Hunt, Haydon
also made a short stay at Hampstead. He and Hunt were already
acquainted, and Hunt had published in the _Examiner_ the very able,
cogent and pungent letter with which Haydon a few months before had
clenched the Elgin marble controversy and practically brought it to an
end. Hunt had congratulated Haydon in a sonnet on the occasion, closing
with a gentle hint that, fine as such a victory was, he was himself
devoted to a mission finer still, as
One of the spirits chosen by heaven to turn
The sunny side of things to human eyes.
Their intercourse was now warmly resumed, though never without latent
risk of antagonism and discord. The following letter of Haydon to
Wilkie, more just and temperate than usual, is good for filling in our
picture both of Hunt and of Haydon himself, as well as for adding
another to the number of bewildering contemporary estimates of _Rimini_.
27 October, 1816.
I have been at Hampstead this fortnight for my eyes, and shall return
with my body much stronger for application. The greater part of my
time has been spent in Leigh Hunt's society, who is certainly one of
the most delightful companions. Full of poetry and art, and amiable
humour, we argue always with full hearts on everything but religion
and Buonaparte, and we have resolved never to talk of these,
particularly as I have been recently examining Voltaire's opinions
concerning Christianity, and turmoiling my head to ascertain fully my
right to put him into my picture!
Though Leigh Hunt is not deep in knowledge, moral, metaphysical, or
classical, yet he is intense in feeling, and has an intellect for ever
on the alert. He is like one of those instruments on three legs,
which, throw it how you will, always pitches on two, and has a spike
sticking for ever up and ever ready for you. He 'sets' at a subject
with a scent like a pointer. He is a remarkable man, and created a
sensation by his independence, his courage, his disinterestedness in
public matters, and by the truth, acuteness, and taste of his dramatic
criticisms he raised the rank of newspapers, and gave by his example
a literary feeling to the weekly ones more especially.
As a poet, I think him full of the genuine feeling. His third canto in
_Rimini_ is equal to anything in any language of that sweet sort.
Perhaps in his wishing to avoid the monotony of the Pope school, he
may have shot into the other extreme, and his invention of obscure
words to express obscure feelings borders sometimes on affectation.
But these are trifles compared with the beauty of the poem, the
intense painting of the scenery, and the deep burning in of the
passion which trembles in every line. Thus far as a critic, an editor,
and a poet. As a man, I know none with such an affectionate heart, if
never opposed in his opinions. He has defects of course: one of his
great defects is getting inferior people about him to listen, too fond
of shining at any expense in society, and a love of approbation from
the darling sex bordering on weakness; though to women he is
delightfully pleasant, yet they seem more to dandle him as a delicate
plant. I don't know if they do not put a confidence in him which to me
would be mortifying.
He is a man of sensibility tinged with morbidity, and of such
sensitive organisation of body that the plant is not more alive to
touch than he. I remember once, walking in a field, we came to a muddy
place concealed by grass. The moment Hunt touched it, he shrank back,
saying, 'It's muddy!' as if he meaned that it was full of adders....
He is a composition, as we all are, of defects and delightful
qualities, indolently averse to worldly exertion, because it harasses
the musings of his fancy, existing only by the common duties of life,
yet ignorant of them, and often suffering from their neglect.
A few days later, on October 31, we find Keats writing to Cowden Clarke
of his pleasure at 'the thought of seeing so soon this glorious Haydon
and all his creations.' The introduction was arranged to take place at
Leigh Hunt's cottage, where they met for dinner. Haydon, the sublime
egoist, could be rapturously sympathetic and genuinely kind to those who
took him at his own valuation, and there was much to attract the spirits
of eager youth about him as a leader. Keats and he were mutually
delighted at first sight: each struck fire from the other, and they
quickly became close friends and comrades. After an evening of high talk
at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th of November, 1816,
the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his name with those
of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:--
Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the
following:--
Great spirits now on earth are sojourning:
He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,
Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake,
Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing:
He of the rose, the violet, the spring,
The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake,
And lo! whose steadfastness would never take
A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering.
And other spirits there are standing apart
Upon the forehead of the age to come;
These, these will give the world another heart,
And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings in some distant mart?
Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb.
Haydon was at no time of his life unused to compliments of this kind.
About the same time as Keats another young member of Hunt's circle, John
Hamilton Reynolds, also wrote him a sonnet of eager sympathy and
admiration; and the three addressed to him some years later by
Wordsworth are well known. In his reply to Keats he proposed to hand on
the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which 'puts me,' answers
Keats, 'out of breath--you know with what reverence I would send my
well-wishes to him.' Haydon suggested moreover the needless, and as it
seems to me regrettable, mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out the
words after 'workings' in the last line but one. The poet, however,
accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision.
Some time after the turn of the year we find Keats presented with a copy
of Goldsmith's _Greek History_ 'from his ardent friend, B. R. Haydon.'
All the winter and early spring the two met frequently, sometimes at
Haydon's studio in Great Marlborough Street, sometimes in the rooms of
the Keats brothers in the Poultry or in those of their common
acquaintance, and discussed with passionate eagerness most things in
heaven and earth, and especially poetry and painting. 'I have enjoyed
Shakespeare,' declares Haydon, 'with John Keats more than with any other
human being.' Both he and Keats's other painter friend, Joseph Severn,
have testified that Keats had a fine natural sense for the excellencies
of painting and sculpture. Both loved to take him to the British Museum
and expatiate to him on the glories of the antique; and it would seem
that through Haydon he must have had access also to the collection of
one at least of the great dilettanti noblemen of the day. After a first
visit to the newly acquired Parthenon marbles with Haydon at the
beginning of March 1817, Keats tried to embody his impressions in a
couple of sonnets, which Hunt promptly printed in the _Examiner_. It is
characteristic of his unfailing sincerity with his art and with himself
that he allows himself to break into no stock raptures, but strives
faithfully to get into words the confused sensations of spiritual
infirmity and awe that have overpowered him:--
My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time--with a billowy main--
A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.
He sends this with a covering sonnet to Haydon asking pardon for its
immaturity and justly praising the part played by Haydon in forcing the
acceptance of the marbles upon the nation:--
Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak
Definitely on these mighty things;
Forgive me that I have not Eagle's wings--
That what I want I know not where to seek;
And think that I would not be over meek
In rolling out upfollow'd thunderings,
Even to the steep of Heliconian springs,
Were I of ample strength for such a freak--
Think too, that all those numbers should be thine;
Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture's hem?
For when men star'd at what was most divine
With browless idiotism--o'erwise phlegm--
Thou hadst beheld the Hesperian shine
Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them.
Haydon's acknowledgment is of course enthusiastic, but betrays his
unfortunate gift for fustian in the following precious expansion of
Keats's image of the sick eagle:--
Many thanks, my dear fellow, for your two noble sonnets. I know not a
finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high
feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have
remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams,
in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing angels,
on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless
wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on
objects of their seeking....
In Haydon's journal about the same date there is an entry which reads
with ironical pathos in the light of after events:--'Keats is a man
after my own heart. He sympathises with me, and comprehends me. We saw
through each other, and I hope are friends for ever. I only know that,
if I sell my picture, Keats shall never want till another is done, that
he may have leisure for his effusions: in short he shall never want all
his life.' To Keats himself, more hyperbolically still, and in terms
still more suited to draw the pitying smile of the ironic gods, Haydon
writes a little later:--
Consider this letter a sacred secret.--Often have I sat by my fire
after a day's effort, as the dusk approached and a gauzy veil seemed
dimming all things--and mused on what I had done, and with a burning
glow on what I would do till filled with fury I have seen the faces of
the mighty dead crowd into my room, and I have sunk down and prayed
the great Spirit that I might be worthy to accompany these immortal
beings in their immortal glories, and then I have seen each smile as
it passes over me, and each shake his hand in awful encouragement. My
dear Keats, the Friends who surrounded me were sensible to what talent
I had,--but no one reflected my enthusiasm with that burning ripeness
of soul, my heart yearned for sympathy,--believe me from my soul, in
you I have found one,--you add fire, when I am exhausted, and excite
fury afresh--I offer my heart and intellect and experience--at first I
feared your ardor might lead you to disregard the accumulated wisdom
of ages in moral points--but the feelings put forth lately have
delighted my soul. God bless you! Let our hearts be buried on each
other.
Familiar visitors at this time of Haydon in the Marlborough Street
studio and of Hunt in the Hampstead cottage were two men of finer gift
than either, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. With both of these
seniors (Lamb was forty-one and Hazlitt thirty-eight) Keats now became
acquainted without becoming intimate. Unluckily neither of them has left
any but the slightest personal impression of the young poet, whose
modesty probably kept him somewhat in the background when they were by.
Haydon used to complain that it was only after Keats's death that he
could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius; but Lamb, as we shall see,
with his unerring critical touch, paid to Keats's best work while he was
still living a tribute as splendid as it was just. Keats on his part,
after the publication of Hazlitt's lectures on the characters of
Shakespeare in 1817, reckoned his 'depth of taste' one of the things
most to rejoice at in his age, and was a diligent attendant at his next
course on the English poets. But he never frequented, presumably for
lack of invitation, those Wednesday and Thursday evening parties at the
Lambs of which Talfourd and B. W. Procter have left us such vivid
pictures; and when he met some of the same company at the Novello's, the
friends of his friend Cowden Clarke, he enjoyed it, as will appear
later, less than one would have hoped. He has left no personal
impression of Hazlitt, and of Lamb only the slightest and most casual.
Fortunately we know them both so well from other sources that we can
almost see and hear them: Hazlitt with his unkempt black hair and
restless grey eyes, lean, slouching, splenetic, an Ishmaelite full of
mistrust and suspicion, his habitual action of the hand within the
waistcoat apt in his scowling moments to suggest a hidden dagger; but
capable withal, in company where he felt secure, of throwing into his
talk much the same fine mixture as distinguishes his writing of
impetuous fullness and variety with incisive point and critical
lucidity: Lamb noticeable in contrast by his neat, sombrely clad small
figure on its spindle legs and his handsome romantic head; by his
hurried, stammering utterance and too often, alas! his vinous flush and
step almost as titubant as his tongue; but most of all by that airy
genius of insight and caprice, of deep tenderness and freakish wisdom,
quick to break from him in sudden, illuminating phrases at any moment
and in any manner save the expected.
Yet another acquaintance brought about by Hunt in these days was that
between Keats and Shelley, who was Keats's senior by only three years
and with whom Hunt himself was now first becoming intimate. When Hunt
was sentenced for sedition four years earlier, Shelley, then barely
twenty, had been eager to befriend him and had sent him an offer of
money help; which for once, not being then in immediate need, Hunt had
honourably declined. Since then they had held only slight communication;
but when Hunt included Shelley on the strength of his poem _Alastor_,
among the young poets praised in his _Examiner_ essay (December 1,
1816), a glowing correspondence immediately followed, and a few days
later Shelley came up from Bath to stay at the Hampstead cottage. The
result of a week's visit was an immediate intimacy and enthusiastic
mutual regard, with a prompt determination on Shelley's part to rescue
Hunt from the slough of debt (something like £1400) into which during
and since his imprisonment he had cheerfully muddled himself.
It was the eve of the most harrowing crisis in Shelley's life, when his
principle of love a law to itself entailed in action so dire a
consequence, and his obedience to his own morality brought him into such
harsh collision with the world's. First came the news of the suicide of
his deserted wife Harriet (December 14) and three months later the
sentence of Lord Eldon which deprived him of the custody of his and
Harriet's children. On the day of the first tragic news he writes to
Mary Godwin, whom he had left at Bath, 'Leigh Hunt has been with me all
day, and his delicate and tender attentions to me, his kind speeches of
you, have sustained me against the weight of horror of this event.' In
the interval between the shock of Harriet's death and that of the
judgment sequestering his children Shelley was a frequent guest in the
Vale of Health, sometimes alone and sometimes with Mary, now legally his
wife. Neither in these first days nor later could Hunt persuade his old
intimates Hazlitt and Lamb to take kindly to his new friend Shelley
either as man or poet. Lamb, who seems only to have seen him once, said
after his death, 'his voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was
tormented with'; of his poetry, that it was 'thin sown with profit or
delight'; and of his 'theories and nostrums,' that 'they are oracular
enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is miching malice and
mischief in 'em.' Hazlitt, opening the most studied of his several
attacks on Shelley's poetry and doctrine, gives one of his vivid
portraits, saying 'he has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a
maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech.... He is
sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced.... His bending, flexible form
appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the
world about him, but flows from it like a river.' Still less was a good
understanding possible between Shelley and Haydon, who met him more than
once in these early days at the Vale of Health. He tells how, on the
evening of their first meeting, Shelley, looking hectically frail and
girlish, opened the conversation at dinner with the words, 'as to that
detestable religion, the Christian,'--and how he, Haydon, a man at all
times stoutly and vociferously orthodox, waited till the meal was over
and then, 'like a stag at bay and resolved to gore without mercy,'
struck his hardest on behalf of the established faith, while Hunt in his
airily complacent way kept skirmishing in on Shelley's side, until the
contention grew hot and stormy. The heat and noise, Haydon owns, were
chiefly on his side, and we might guess as much without his admission,
for we have abundant evidence of the unfailing courtesy and sweetness of
manner with which Shelley would in that high-pitched feminine voice of
his advance the most staggering propositions and patiently encounter the
arguments of his adversaries.
Such contentions, victorious as he always held himself to be in them,
annoyed Haydon. The queer blend, in the atmosphere of the Hampstead
cottage, of eager kindness and hospitality and a graceful, voluble
enthusiasm for the 'luxuries' of poetry, art, and nature with slatternly
housekeeping and a spirit of fervent or flippant anti-Christianity,
became distasteful to him, and he afterwards dated from these days his
gradual estrangement from Hunt and his circle. At the same time he began
to try and draw away Keats from Hunt's influence.
Keats, we are told, though much inclining in these days towards the
Voltairian views of his host, would take little part in such debates as
that above narrated, and once even supported another young member of the
circle, Joseph Severn, in a defence of Christianity against Hunt and
Shelley. To Shelley himself, his senior by three years, his relation was
from the first and remained to the end one of friendly civility and
little more. He did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him,
says Hunt, and adds the comment: 'Keats, being a little too sensitive on
the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a
sort of natural enemy.' 'He was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of
rank,' says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his pride had not been
aroused by anticipation, Keats, as we have seen, was eagerly
open-hearted to new friendships, and it may well be that the reserve he
maintained towards Shelley was assumed at first by way of defence
against the possibility of social patronage on the other's part. But he
must soon have perceived that from Shelley, a gentleman of gentlemen,
such an attitude was the last thing to be apprehended, and the cause of
his standing off was much more likely his knowledge that nearly all
Shelley's literary friends were his pensioners,--from Godwin, the
greediest, to Leigh Hunt, the lightest-hearted,--and a fear that he too
might be supposed to expect a similar bounty. It would seem that in his
spirit of independence he gave Shelley the impression of being much
better off than he was,--or possibly instances of his only too ready
generosity in lending from his modest means to his intimates when they
were hard pressed may have come to Shelley's knowledge: at all events a
few months later we find Shelley casting about for persons able to help
him in helping Hunt, and writing under a false impression, 'Keats
certainly can.'
These two young poets, equally and conjointly beloved by posterity, were
in truth at many points the most opposite-natured of men. Pride and
sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not
easy between them. Keats, with the rich elements of earthly clay in his
composition, his lively vein of every-day common-sense and humour, his
keen, tolerant delight and interest in the aspects and activities of
nature and human nature as he found them, may well have been as much
repelled as attracted by Shelley, Shelley the 'Elfin knight,' the spirit
all air and fire, with his passionate repudiation of the world's ways
and the world's law, his passionate absorption in his vision of a
happier scheme of things, a vision engendered in humanitarian dreams
from his readings of Rousseau and Godwin and Plato,--or was it rather
one brought with him from some ante-natal sojourn among the radiances
and serenities of the sunset clouds? Leigh Hunt's way of putting it is
this:--'Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary
flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of
_Hyperion_, was so far inferior in universality to his great
acquaintance, that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with
nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own
hands.' Of the incidents and results of their intercourse at Hampstead
we know little more than that Shelley, wisely enough in the light of his
own headlong early experiments, tried to dissuade Keats from premature
publication; and that Keats on his part declined, 'in order that he
might have his own unfettered scope,' a cordial invitation from Shelley
to come and stay with him at Great Marlow. Keats, though he must have
known that he could learn much from Shelley's trained scholarship and
fine literary sense, was doubtless right in feeling that whatever power
of poetry might be in him must work its own way to maturity in freedom
and not in leading-strings. To these scanty facts Shelley's cousin
Medwin adds the statement that the two agreed to write in friendly
rivalry the long poems each was severally meditating for his summer's
work, Shelley _Laon and Cythna_, afterwards called _The Revolt of
Islam_, and Keats _Endymion_. This may very well have been the case, but
Medwin was a man so lax of memory, tongue, and pen that his evidence,
unconfirmed, counts for little. Of the influence possibly exercised on
Keats by Shelley's first important poem, _Alastor_, or by his _Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty_ printed in the _Examiner_ during the January of
their intercourse at Hunt's, it will be time to speak later on.
A much closer intimacy sprang up between Keats and the other young
poetic aspirant whom Hunt in his December essay in the _Examiner_ had
bracketed with him and Shelley. This was John Hamilton Reynolds, of
whom we have as yet heard only the name. He was a handsome, witty,
enthusiastic youth a year younger than Keats, having been born at
Shrewsbury in September 1796. Part of his boyhood was spent in
Devonshire near Sidmouth, a countryside to which he remained always
deeply attached; but he was still quite young when his father came and
settled in London as mathematical master and head writing master at
Christ's Hospital. The elder Reynolds and his wife were people of
literary leanings and literary acquaintance, and seem to have been
characters in their way: both Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were
frequenters of their house in Little Britain, and Mrs Reynolds is
reported as holding her own well among the talkers at Lamb's evenings.
Their son John was educated at St Paul's school and showed talent and
inclinations which drew him precociously into the literary movement of
the time. At eighteen he wrote an Eastern tale in verse in the Byronic
manner, _Safie_, of which Byron acknowledged the presentation copy in a
kind and careful letter several pages long. Two years later, just about
the time of his first introduction to Keats at Leigh Hunt's, the
youngster had the honour of receiving a similar attention from
Wordsworth in reply to a presentation of another poem, _The Naiad_
(November 1816). Neither of these two youthful volumes, nor yet a third,
_The Eden of Imagination_, showed much more than a quick susceptibility
to nature and romance, and a gift of falling in readily and gracefully
now with one and now with another of the poetic fashions of the hour.
Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt were alternately his models.
The same gift of adaptiveness which Reynolds showed in serious work made
him when he chose a deft, sometimes even a masterly, parodist in the
humourous vein, and his work done in this vein a few years later in
collaboration with Thomas Hood holds its own well beside that of his
associate. Partly owing to the persuasions of the lady to whom he was
engaged, Reynolds early gave up the hope of a literary career and went
into business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell sonnet to
the Muses in a copy of Shakespeare which he gave to Keats, and in 1821
he writes again
As time increases
I give up drawling verse for drawing leases.
In point of fact he continued to write occasionally for some years, and
in the end failed somewhat tragically to prosper in the profession of
law. During these early years he was not only one of the warmest friends
Keats had but one of the wisest, to whom Keats could open his innermost
mind with the certainty of being understood, and who once at least saved
him from a serious mistake. A sonnet written by him within three months
of their first meeting proves with what warmth of affection as well as
with what generosity of admiration the one young aspirant from the first
regarded the other. Keats one day, calling on Cowden Clarke and finding
him asleep over Chaucer, passed the time by writing on the blank space
at the end of _The Floure and the Lefe_, a poem with which he was
already familiar, the sonnet beginning 'This pleasant tale is like a
little copse.'[2] Reynolds's comment after reading it is as follows:--
Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves,
Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed;
They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed
The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eyes,
O'er the excited soul.--Thy genius weaves
Songs that shall make the age be nature-led,
And win that coronal for thy young head
Which time's strange hand of freshness ne'er bereaves.
Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way,
Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung;
Be thou companion of the summer day,
Roaming the fields and older woods among:--
So shall thy muse be ever in her May
And thy luxuriant spirit ever young.
Reynolds had two sisters, Marianne and Jane, older than himself, and a
third, Charlotte, several years younger. With the elder two Keats was
soon on terms of almost brotherly intimacy and affection, seeing them
often at the family home in Little Britain, exchanging lively letters
with them in absence, and contributing to Jane's album sets of verses
some of which have only through this means been preserved. A little
later the piano-playing of the youngest sister, Charlotte, was often a
source of great pleasure to him.
Outside his own family Reynolds had an inseparable friend with whom
Keats also became quickly intimate: this was James Rice, a young
solicitor of literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or
worse in health, but always, in Keats's words, 'coming on his legs again
like a cat'; ever cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and
indefatigable in good offices to those about him: 'dear noble generous
James Rice,' records Dilke,--'the best, and in his quaint way one of the
wittiest and wisest men I ever knew.' It was through Rice that there
presently came to Reynolds that uncongenial business opening which in
worldly wisdom he held himself bound to accept. Besides Reynolds,
another and more insignificant young versifying member, or satellite, of
Hunt's set when Keats first joined it was one Cornelius Webb, remembered
now, if remembered at all, by the derisory quotation in _Blackwood's
Magazine_ of his rimes on Byron and Keats, as well as by a disparaging
allusion in one of Keats's own later letters. He disappeared early from
the circle, but not before he had caught enough of its spirit to write
sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost be taken for the work
of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his weak moments; and for
some years afterwards served as press-reader in the printing-office of
Messrs. Clowes, being charged especially with the revision of the
_Quarterly_ proofs.
To turn to other close associates of Keats during the same period, known
to him not through Hunt but through his brothers,--a word may suffice
for Charles Wells, to whom we find him addressing in the summer of 1816
a sonnet of thanks for a gift of roses. Wells had been a schoolmate of
Tom Keats and R.H. Horne, and is described as in those days a small,
red-headed, snub-nosed, blue-eyed youth of irrepressible animal spirits.
Now or somewhat later he formed an intimacy, never afterwards broken,
with Hazlitt. Keats's own regard for Wells was short-lived, being
changed a year or so later into fierce indignation when Wells played off
a heartless practical joke upon the consumptive Tom in the shape of a
batch of pretended love-letters from an imaginary 'Amena.' It was after
Keats's death that Wells earned a place of his own in literature with
the poetic drama _Joseph and his Brethren_, dead-born in its first
anonymous form and re-animated after many years, but still during the
life-time of its author, through the enthusiasm which its qualities of
intellect and passion inspired in Rossetti and Swinburne.
Of far different importance were two other acquaintanceships, which
Keats owed to his brother George and which in the same months were
ripening into affection, one of them into an affection priceless in the
sequel. The first was with a young solicitor called William Haslam (it
is odd how high a proportion of Keats's intimates were of this
profession). Of him no personal picture has come down to us, but in the
coming days we find him, of all the set, the most prompt and serviceable
on occasions of practical need or urgency: 'our oak friend' he is called
in one such crisis by Joseph Severn. It was as the friend of Haslam, and
through Haslam of his brother George, that Keats first knew Joseph
Severn, whose name is now inseparable from his own. He was two years
Keats's senior, the son of a music-master sprung from an old
Gloucestershire stock and having a good connexion in the northern
suburbs of London. The elder Severn seems to have been much of a
domestic tyrant, and in all things headstrong and hot-headed, but
blessed with an admirable wife whom he appreciated and who contrived to
make the household run endurably if not comfortably. Joseph, the son,
showing a precocious talent for drawing, was apprenticed to a stipple
engraver, but the perpetual task of 'stabbing copper' irked him too
sorely: his ambition was to be a painter, and against the angry
opposition of his father he contrived to attend the Royal Academy
schools, picking up meanwhile for himself what education in letters he
could. He had a hereditary talent for music, an untrained love for books
and poetry, and doubtless some touch already of that engaging social
charm which Ruskin noted in him when they first met five and twenty
years later in Rome. He was beginning to get a little practice as a
miniature painter and to make private attempts in history-painting when
he met the brilliant young poet-student of Guy's, with whom he was shy
and timid at first, as with a sort of superior being. But before long he
became used to drinking in with delight all that Keats, in communicative
hours, was moved to pour out from the play of his imagination or the
stores--infinite as to the innocent Severn they appeared--of his reading
in poetry and history. What especially, he recorded in after life, used
to enrapture him was Keats's talk on the meaning and beauty of the Greek
polytheism as a 'religion of joy.' On his own part he was proud to act
as cicerone to Keats in the British Museum or the British Institution
(the National Gallery as yet was not), and deferentially to point out to
him the glories of the antique or of Titian and Claude and Poussin.
Thus our obscurely-born and half-schooled young medical student, the
orphan son of a Finsbury stable-keeper, found himself at twenty-one,
before the end of his second winter in London, fairly launched in a
world of art, letters, and liberal aspirations and living in familiar
intimacy with some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the most
gifted spirits of his time. The power and charm of genius already shone
from him, and impressed alike his older and his younger companions.
Portraits of him verbal and other exist in abundance. A small, compact,
well-turned figure, broad-chested for its height, which was barely an
inch over five feet; a shapely head set off by thickly clustering
gold-brown hair and carried with an eager upward and forward thrust from
the shoulders; the features powerful, finished, and mobile, with an
expression at once bold and sensitive; the forehead sloping and not
high, but broad and strong: the brows well arched above hazel-brown,
liquid flashing eyes, 'like the eyes of a wild gypsy maid in colour, set
in the face of a young god,' Severn calls them. To the same effect
Haydon,--'an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a
Delphian priestess who saw visions': and again Leigh Hunt,--'the eyes
mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a
noble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears and
his mouth tremble.' In like manner George Keats,--'John's eyes moistened
and his lip quivered at the relation of any tale of generosity or
benevolence or noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress.'
And once more Haydon,--'Keats was the only man I ever met who seemed and
looked conscious of a high calling, except Wordsworth.... He was in his
glory in the fields. The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the
glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble, then his eyes
flashed, his cheek glowed and his mouth quivered.' 'Nothing seemed to
escape him,'--I now quote paragraphs compiled by the late Mr William
Sharp from many jotted reminiscences of Severn's,--
Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undernote of
response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing
of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the
wind--just how it took certain tall flowers and plants--and the
wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of passing
tramps, the colour of one woman's hair, the smile on one child's face,
the furtive animalism below the deceptive humanity in many of the
vagrants, even the hats, clothes, shoes, wherever these conveyed the
remotest hint as to the real self of the wearer. Withal, even when in
a mood of joyous observance, with flow of happy spirits, he would
suddenly become taciturn, not because he was tired, not even because
his mind was suddenly wrought to some bewitching vision, but from a
profound disquiet which he could not or would not explain.
Certain things affected him extremely, particularly when 'a wave was
billowing through a tree,' as he described the uplifting surge of air
among swaying masses of chestnut or oak foliage, or when, afar off, he
heard the wind coming across woodlands. 'The tide! the tide!' he would
cry delightedly, and spring on to some stile, or upon the low bough of
a wayside tree, and watch the passage of the wind upon the meadow
grasses or young corn, not stirring till the flow of air was all
around him, while an expression of rapture made his eyes gleam and his
face glow till he 'would look sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for
some cry from the forest depths,' or like 'a young eagle staring with
proud joy before taking flight.'...
Though small of stature, not more than three-quarters of an inch over
five feet, he seemed taller, partly from the perfect symmetry of his
frame, partly from his erect attitude and a characteristic backward
poise (sometimes a toss) of the head, and, perhaps more than anything
else, from a peculiarly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on
the face of some seamen....
The only time he appeared as small of stature was when he was reading,
or when he was walking rapt in some deep reverie; when the chest fell
in, the head bent forward as though weightily overburdened, and the
eyes seemed almost to throw a light before his face....
The only thing that would bring Keats out of one of his fits of
seeming gloomful reverie--the only thing, during those
country-rambles, that would bring the poet 'to himself again' was the
motion 'of the inland sea' he loved so well, particularly the violent
passage of wind across a great field of barley. From fields of oats or
barley it was almost impossible to allure him; he would stand, leaning
forward, listening intently, watching with a bright serene look in his
eyes and sometimes with a slight smile, the tumultuous passage of the
wind above the grain. The sea, or thought-compelling images of the
sea, always seemed to restore him to a happy calm.
In regard to Keats's social qualities, he is said, and owns himself, to
have been not always quite well conditioned or at his ease in the
presence of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was
pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by
turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and
unaffected. His voice was rich and low, and when he joined in
discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his
occasional bursts of fierce indignation at wrong or meanness bore no
undue air of assumption, and failed not to command respect. 'In my
knowledge of my fellow beings,' says Cowden Clarke, 'I never knew one
who so thoroughly combined the sweetness with the power of gentleness,
and the irresistible sway of anger, as Keats. His indignation would have
made the boldest grave; and they who had seen him under the influence of
injustice and meanness of soul would not forget the expression of his
features--"the form of his visage was changed."'
In lighter moods his powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are
described as great and never used unkindly. He loved the exhibition of
any kind of energy, and was as almost as keen a spectator of the rough
and violent as of the tender and joyous aspects and doings of life and
nature. 'Though a quarrel in the streets,' he says, 'is a thing to be
hated the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a
grace in his quarrel.' His yearning love for the old polytheism and
instinctive affinity with the Greek spirit did not at all blunt his
relish of actualities. To complete our picture and illustrate the wide
and unfastidious range of his contact with life and interest in things,
let us take Cowden Clarke's account of the way he could enjoy and
re-enact such a scene of brutal sport and human low-life as our
refinement no longer tolerates:--
His perception of humour, with the power of transmitting it by
imitation, was both vivid and irresistibly amusing. He once described
to me having gone to see a bear-baiting. The performance not having
begun, Keats was near to, and watched, a young aspirant, who had
brought a younger under his wing to witness the solemnity, and whom he
oppressively patronized, instructing him in the names and qualities of
all the magnates present. Now and then, in his zeal to manifest and
impart his knowledge, he would forget himself, and stray beyond the
prescribed bounds into the ring, to the lashing resentment of its
comptroller, Mr William Soames, who, after some hints of a practical
nature to 'keep back' began laying about him with indiscriminate and
unmitigable vivacity, the Peripatetic signifying to his pupil. 'My
eyes! Bill Soames giv' me sich a licker!' evidently grateful, and
considering himself complimented upon being included in the general
dispensation. Keats's entertainment with and appreciation of this
minor scene of low life has often recurred to me. But his concurrent
personification of the baiting, with his position,--his legs and arms
bent and shortened till he looked like Bruin on his hind legs, dabbing
his fore paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now
and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and
hugged--his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a
remarkable and as memorable a display.
Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have
described, Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check,
but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and
half awe-stricken, passion for the poetic life. Poetry and the love of
poetry were at this period in the air. It was a time when even people of
business and people of fashion read: a time of literary excitement,
expectancy, discussion, and disputation such as England has not known
since. Fortunes, even, had been made or were being made in poetry; by
Scott, by Byron, by Moore, whose _Irish Melodies_ were an income to him
and who was known to have just received a cheque of £3000 in advance for
_Lalla Rookh_. In such an atmosphere Keats, having enough of his
inheritance left after payment of his school and hospital expenses to
live on for at least a year or two, soon found himself induced to try
his luck and his powers with the rest. The backing of his friends was
indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. His brothers, including the
business member of the family, the sensible and practical George, were
as eager that John should become a famous poet as he was himself. So
encouraged, he made up his mind to give up the pursuit of surgery for
that of literature, and declared his decision, being now of age, firmly
to his guardian; who naturally but in vain opposed it to the best of his
power. The consequence was a quarrel, which Mr Abbey afterwards related,
in a livelier manner than we should have expected from him, in the same
document, now unfortunately gone astray, to which I have already
referred as containing his character of the poet's mother. The die was
cast. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the Hampstead cottage, in the
City lodgings of the three brothers and the social gatherings of their
friends, it was determined that John Keats (or according to his
convivial _alias_ 'Junkets') should put forth a volume of his poems.
Leigh Hunt brought on the scene a firm of publishers supposed to be
sympathetic, the brothers Charles and James Ollier, who had already
published for Shelley and who readily undertook the issue. The volume
was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the
author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication
was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats going to one
side quickly produced the sonnet _To Leigh Hunt Esqr_, with its
excellent opening and its weak conclusion:--
Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away;
For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathed incense do we see upborne
Into the East to meet the smiling day:
No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay,
In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,
Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn
The shrine of Flora in her early May.
But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please,
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.
With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the
old pagan world and of gratitude for present friendship, the young
poet's first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of
all his circle, in the first days of March 1817.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] These drawings are preserved in the Department of Prints and
Drawings at the British Museum.
[2] Cowden Clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was
Keats's first acquaintance with Chaucer. He is certainly mistaken. It
was on Feb. 27, 1817, that Keats called and found him asleep as
related in the text. Within a week was published the volume of
_Poems_, with the principal piece, _Sleep and Poetry_, partly
modelled on the _Floure and the Lefe_ itself and headed with a
quotation from it. It is needless to add that later criticism does
not admit _The Floure and Lefe_ into the canon of Chaucer's works.
CHAPTER IV
THE 'POEMS' OF 1817
Spirit and chief contents of the volume--Sonnets and rimed
heroics--The Chapman sonnet--The 'How many bards' sonnet--The
sex-chivalry group--The Leigh Hunt group--The Haydon pair--The Leander
sonnet--Epistles--History of the 'heroic' couplet--The closed and free
systems--Marlowe--Drayton--William Browne--Chapman and Sandys--Decay
of the free system--William Chamberlayne--Milton and
Marvell--Waller--Katherine Philips--Dryden--Pope and his
ascendency--Reaction: The Brothers Warton--Symptoms of
Emancipation--Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott--Leigh Hunt and couplet
reform--Keats to Mathew: influence of Browne--_Calidore_: influence of
Hunt--Epistle to George Keats--Epistle to Cowden Clarke--_Sleep and
Poetry_ and _I stood tiptoe_--Analysis of _Sleep and Poetry_--Double
invocation--Vision of the Charioteer--Battle-cry of the new
poetry--Its strength and weakness--Challenge and
congratulation--Encouragements acknowledged--Analysis of _I stood
tiptoe_--Intended induction to _Endymion_--Relation to
Elizabethans--Relation to contemporaries--Wordsworth and Greek
Mythology--_Tintern Abbey_ and the three stages--Contrasts of
method--Evocation _versus_ Exposition.
The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from
Spenser which he prefixed to it:--
What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?
The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of
release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true
nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered.
And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight:
delight in the beauty and activities of nature, in the vividness of
sensation, in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of
friendship and affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the
exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these
joys.
Technically considered, the volume consists almost entirely of
experiments in two metrical forms: the one, the Italian sonnet of octave
and sestet, not long fully re-established in England after being
disused, with some exceptions, since Milton: the other, the decasyllabic
or five-stressed couplet first naturalized by Chaucer, revived by the
Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative, dramatic, didactic,
elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and employed ever since as the predominant
English metre outside of lyric and drama. The only exceptions in the
volume are the boyish stanzas in imitation of Spenser,--truly rather of
Spenser's eighteenth century imitators; the _Address to Hope_ of
February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth century style and
diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient; the two copies
of verses _To some Ladies_ and _On receiving a curious Shell from some
Ladies_, composed for the Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in
the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles from the days of
Prior to those of Tom Moore; and the set of seven-syllabled couplets
drafted in February 1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss
Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call for little
remark. Both the sea-shell verses and the valentine spring from a brain,
to quote a phrase of Keats's own,
--new stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay
Of old romance,--
especially with chivalric images and ideas from Spenser. Of the second
set of shell stanzas it may perhaps be noted that they seem to suggest
an acquaintance with Oberon and Titania not only through the _Midsummer
Night's Dream_ but through Wieland's _Oberon_, a romance poem which
Sotheby's translation had made well known in England and in which the
fairy king and queen are divided by a quarrel far deeper and more
durable than in Shakespeare's play.[1]
Taking first the score or so of sonnets in the volume, we find that none
of them are love-sonnets and that few are written in any high mood of
passion or exaltation. They are for the most part of the class called
'occasional',--records of pleasant experience, addresses of friendly
greeting or invocation, or compact meditations on a single theme. They
bespeak a temper cordial and companionable as well as enthusiastic,
manifest sincerity in all expressions of personal feeling, and contain
here and there a passage of fine mature poetry. These, however, are
seldom sustained for more than a single quatrain. The great exception of
course is the sonnet, almost too well known to quote,--but I will quote
it nevertheless,--on Chapman's _Homer_. That walk in the morning
twilight from Clerkenwell to the Borough had enriched our language with
what is by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a
close unsurpassed for the combined qualities of serenity and
concentration: concentration twofold, first flashing on our mind's eye
the human vision of the explorer and his companions with their looks and
gestures, then symbolically evoking through that vision a whole
world-wide range of the emotions of discovery.
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer rul'd as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The 'realms of gold' lines in the Chapman sonnet, recording Keats's
range of reading in our older poetry, had been in a measure anticipated
in this other, written six months earlier[2]:--
How many bards gild the lapses of time!
A few of them have ever been the food
Of my delighted fancy,--I could brood
Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime:
And often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
These will in throngs before my mind intrude:
But no confusion, no disturbance rude
Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime.
So the unnumber'd sounds that evening store;
The songs of birds--the whisp'ring of the leaves--
The voice of waters--the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound,--and thousand others more,
That distance of recognizance bereaves,
Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.
Technical points worth attention here are the bold reversal of the
regular accentual stress twice over in the first line, and the strained
use of 'store' for 'fill' and 'recognizance' for 'recognition.' But the
main interest of the sonnet is its comparison of the working of Keats's
miscellaneous poetic reading in his mind and memory with the effect of
the confused but harmonious sounds of evening on the ear,--a frank and
illuminating comment by himself on those stray echoes and reminiscences
of the older poets which we catch now and again throughout his work.
Such echoes and reminiscences are always permitted to genius, because
genius cannot help turning whatever it takes into something new of its
own: and Keats showed himself from the first one of those chartered
borrowers who have the right to draw inspiration as they please, whether
direct from nature or, in the phrase of Wordsworth,
From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty poets.[3]
Compare Shelley in the preface to _Prometheus Unbound_:--'One great poet
is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but
must study.'
Most of the remaining sonnets can best be taken in groups, each group
centering round a single theme or embodying a single mood or vein of
feeling. One is what may be called the sex-chivalry group, including the
sequence of three printed separately from the rest and beginning,
'Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain'; that beginning 'Had I a
man's fair form'; that addressed to Georgiana Wylie, with its admirable
opening, 'Nymph of the downward smile, etc.,' and its rather lame
conclusion; to which, as more loosely connected with the group, and
touched in some degree with Byronic suggestion, may be added 'Happy is
England, sweet her artless daughters.' That excellent critic, the late
F.T. Palgrave, had a singular admiration for the set of three which I
have placed at the head of this group: to me its chief interest seems
not poetical but personal, inasmuch as in it Keats already defines with
self-knowledge the peculiar blend in his nature of ardent, idealizing
boyish worship of woman and beauty with an acute critical sensitiveness
to flaws of character defacing his ideal in actual women: a
sensitiveness which grew with his growth and many a time afterwards put
him ill at ease with his company and himself.
A large proportion of the remaining sonnets centre themselves more or
less closely about the figure of Leigh Hunt. Two introduce him directly
by name and had the effect of definitely marking Keats down, in the
minds of reactionary critics, as a victim to be swooped upon in
association with Hunt whenever occasion offered. The two are the early
sonnet composed on the day of Hunt's release from prison (February 5,
1815), and shown shyly as a first flight to Cowden Clarke immediately
afterwards, and the dedicatory sonnet already quoted on the decay of the
old pagan beauty, written almost exactly two years later. Intermediate
in date between these two come two or three sonnets of May and June 1816
which, whether inspired directly or not by intercourse with Hunt, are
certainly influenced by his writing, and express a townsman's enjoyment
of country walks in a spirit and vocabulary near akin to his:--'To one
who has been long in city pent' (this opening comes with only the change
of a word from _Paradise Lost_), 'O Solitude, if I with thee must
dwell,' 'As late I rambled in the happy fields.' There is a memory of
Wordsworth, and probably also of Epping Forest walks, in the cry to
Solitude:--
Let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
Next comes the autumn group definitely recording the happiness received
by the young poet from intercourse with Hunt and his friends, from the
society of his brothers in London, and from walks between the Hampstead
cottage and in their city lodgings:--'Give me a golden pen,' 'Small,
busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,' 'Keen, fitful gusts are
whispering here and there': to which may be added the sonnet _On the_
_Grasshopper and Cricket_ written in Hunt's house and in friendly
competition with him.
A second new friend, Haydon, has a pair of sonnets in the volume all to
himself, including that well-known one which brackets him with
Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt among great spirits destined to give the world
another heart and other pulses. A few of the sonnets stand singly apart
from the rest by their subject or occasion. Such is the sonnet in honour
of the Polish hero Kosciusko; and such again is that addressed to George
Keats from Margate, with its fine ocean quatrain (Keats was always well
inspired in writing of the sea):--
The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,
Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been.
Now that we are posthumously acquainted with the other sonnets written
by Keats in these early years it is a little difficult to see on what
principle he made his choice of the specimens to be published in this
1817 volume. Among those excluded, he may well have thought the early
attempts on the peace of 1814, on Chatterton, and on Byron, too feeble,
though he has included others scarcely better. That headed 'As from the
darkening gloom a silver dove' he may have counted too conventionally
pious; and that satirizing the starched gloom of church-goers too likely
on the other hand to give offence. The second Haydon pair, on visiting
the Elgin marbles, and the recently discovered pair on receiving a
laurel crown from Leigh Hunt,[4] seem not to have been written (as that
on the _Floure and the Lefe_ certainly was not) until the book was
passing, or had passed, the press. The last-named pair he would probably
have had the good sense to omit in any case, as he has the sonnet
celebrating a like laureation at the hands of a young lady at an earlier
date. But why leave out 'After dark vapours' and 'Who loves to peer,'
and above all why the admirable sonnet on Leander? The date of this was
March 16, 1816, the occasion the gift by a lady of one of James Tassie's
coloured paste reproductions of an engraved gem of the subject.
'Tassie's gems' were at this time immensely popular among lovers of
Grecian taste, and were indeed delightful things, though his originals
were too uncritically chosen and included but a small proportion of true
antiques among a multitude of Renaissance and eighteenth-century
imitations. Keats at one time proposed to make a collection of them for
himself, and at another asked his young sister whether she would like a
present of some. The sonnet opens with lines curiously recalling those
invitations, or invocations, with which Dante begins some of his sonnets
in the _Vita Nuova_.[5] The last three lines are an example, hardly to
be bettered, of condensed expression and of imagination kindling into
instantaneous tragic vitality a cold and meagre image presented to the
eye.
Come hither all sweet maidens soberly,
Down-looking aye, and with a chasten'd light
Hid in the fringes of your eyelids white,
And meekly let your fair hands joined be,
As if so gentle that ye could not see,
Untouch'd, a victim of your beauty bright,
Sinking away to his young spirit's night,--
Sinking bewilder'd 'mid the dreary sea:
'Tis young Leander toiling to his death;
Nigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips
For Hero's cheek, and smiles against her smile.
O horrid dream! see how his body dips
Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile:
He's gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath![6]
More than half the volume is taken up with epistles and meditative
pieces (Drayton would have called them Elegies and Ben Jonson Epigrams)
in the regular five-stressed or decasyllabic couplet. The earliest of
these is the epistle to Felton Mathew from which I have already given a
quotation. The form of the verse in this case is modelled pretty closely
on Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_. Keats, as has been said, was
already familiar with the work of this amiable Spenserian allegorist, so
thin and tedious in the allegorical part of his work proper, in romantic
invention so poorly inspired, so admirable, genuine, and vivacious on
the other hand in his scenes and similitudes from real west-country life
and in notes of patriotism both local and national. By the following
motto chosen from Browne's work Keats seems to put the group of
_Epistles_ in his volume under that poet's particular patronage:--
Among the rest a shepheard (though but young
Yet hartned to his pipe) with all the skill
His few yeeres could, began to fit his quill.
But before coming to questions of the special influences which
successively shaped Keats's aims both as to style and versification in
poems of this form, I shall ask the reader to pause with me awhile and
get freshly and familiarly into his ear and mind, what to special
students is well known but to others only vaguely, the story of the
chief phases which this most characteristic of English measures had gone
through until the time when Keats tried to handle it in a spirit more or
less revolutionary. Some of the examples I shall quote by way of
illustration are passages which we know to have been specially familiar
to Keats and to which we shall have occasion to recur. Let us first
consider Chaucer's use, as illustrated in a part of the prayer of
Emilia to Diana in the _Knightes Tale_:--
O chastë goddesse of the wodës grene,
To whom bothe hevene and erthe and see is sene,
Quene of the regne of Pluto derk and lowe,
Goddesse of maydens, that myn herte hast knowe
Ful many a yeer, and woost what I desire,
As keep me fro thy vengeance and thyn ire,
That Attheon aboughtë cruelly.
Chastë goddessë, wel wostow that I
Desire to been a mayden al my lyf,
Ne never wol I be no love ne wyf.
I am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
A mayde, and love hunting and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodës wilde,
And noght to been a wyf, and be with childe.
Noght wol I knowë companye of man.
Now help me, lady, sith ye may and can,
For tho thre formës that thou hast in thee.
And Palamon, that hath swich love to me,
And eek Arcite, that loveth me so sore,
This grace I preyë thee with-outë more,
As sendë love and pees bitwixte hem two;
And fro me turne awey hir hertës so,
That al hir hotë love, and hir desyr,
And al hir bisy torment, and hir fyr
Be queynt, or turnëd in another place;
And if so be thou wolt not do me grace,
Or if my destinee be shapen so,
That I shal nedës have oon of hem two,
As sende me him that most desireth me.
The rime-syllables with which Chaucer ends his lines are as a rule
strong and followed by a pause, or at least by the grammatical
possibility of a pause, though there are exceptions like the division of
'I | desire.' The general effect of the metre is that of a succession of
separate couplets, though their separation is often slight and the
sentence is allowed to run on with little break through several couplets
divided from each other by no break of more than a comma. When a full
stop comes and ends the sentence, it is hardly ever allowed to break a
line by falling at any point except the end. On the other hand it is as
often as not used to divide the couplet by falling at the end not of the
second but of the first line, so that the ear has to wait a moment in
expectancy until the second, beginning a new sentence, catches up the
rime of the first like an echo. Other, slighter pauses fall quite
variably where they will, and there is no regular breathing pause or
caesura dividing the line after the second or third stress.
When the measure was revived by the Elizabethans two conflicting
tendencies began to appear in its treatment. One was to end each line
with a full and strong rime-syllable, noun or verb or emphatic
adjective, and to let each couplet consist of a single sentence, or at
any rate a single clause of a sentence, so as to be both grammatically
and rhythmically almost independent of the next. Under this, which is
called the closed or stopped couplet system, the rime-pattern and the
sense or sentence-pattern, which together compose the formal elements in
all rimed verse, are made strictly to coincide, and within the limits of
a couplet no full break of the sense is allowed. Rhetorical and
epigrammatical point and vigour are the special virtues of this system:
its weaknesses are monotony of beat and lack of freedom and variety in
sentence structure. The other and opposite tendency is to suffer the
sentence or period to develop itself freely, almost as in prose, running
over as it will from one couplet into another, and coming to a full
pause at any point in the line; and at the same time to let any syllable
whatever, down to the lightest of prepositions or auxiliaries, serve at
need as a rime-syllable. Under this system the sense and consequent
sentence-pattern winds in and out of the rime-pattern variously and
deviously, the rime-echo striking upon the ear now with emphasis, now
lightly and fugitively, and being sometimes held up to follow a full
pause and sometimes hurried on with the merest suggestion or insinuation
of a possible pause, or with none at all. The virtues of this system are
variety and freedom of movement; its special dangers are
invertebrateness and a tendency to straggle and wind itself free of all
real observance of rime-effect or metrical law.
Most of the Elizabethans used both systems interchangeably, now a string
of closed couplets, and now a flowing period carried through a
succession of couplets overrunning into one another. Spenser in _Mother
Hubbard's Tale_ and Marlowe in _Hero and Leander_ were among the
earliest and best revivers of the measure, and both inclined to the
closed couplet system, Spenser the more strictly of the two, as the
satiric and epigrammatic nature of his theme might naturally dictate.
Let us take a well known passage from Marlowe:--
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-ruled by fate.
When two are stript, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:
The reason no man knows; let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
He kneeled; but unto her devoutly prayed:
Chaste Hero to herself thus softly said,
'Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;'
And, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him.
He started up; she blushed as one ashamed;
Wherewith Leander much more was inflamed.
He touched her hand; in touching it she trembled:
Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.
These lovers parlèd by the touch of hands:
True love is mute, and oft amazèd stands.
Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled,
The air with sparks of living fire was spangled;
And Night, deep-drenched in misty Acheron,
Heaved up her head, and half the world upon
Breathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid's day).
The first ten lines, conveying moral saws or maxims, furnish almost a
complete example of the closed couplet system, and not only of that, but
of the division of single lines by a pause or caesura after the second
or third stress. When the narrative begins, the verse moves still
mainly in detached couplets (partly because a line of moral reflection
is now and again paired with a line of narrative), but with a growing
inclination to prolong the sentence and vary the rhythm, and with an
abundant use, in the rimes, of the double or feminine ending, for which
Chaucer affords precedent enough.
Drayton, a poet in whom Keats was well read, is commonly quoted as one
who yielded habitually to the attraction of the closed couplet; and
indeed he will often run on through page on page of twinned verses, or
'gemells' as he calls them, like these from the imaginary Epistle from
Eleanor Cobham to Duke Humphrey:--
Why, if thou wilt, I will myself deny,
Nay, I'll affirm and swear, I am not I:
Or if in that thy shame thou dost perceive,
Lo, for thy dear sake, I my name will leave.
And yet, methinks, amaz'd thou shouldst not stand,
Nor seem so much appallèd at my hand;
For my misfortunes have inur'd thine eye
(Long before this) to sights of misery.
No, no, read on, 'tis I, the very same,
All thou canst read, is but to read my shame.
Be not dismay'd, nor let my name affright;
The worst it can, is but t' offend thy sight;
It cannot wound, nor do thee deadly harm,
It is no dreadful spell, no magic charm.
But Drayton is also very capable of the full-flowing period and the
loose over-run of couplet into couplet, as witness the following from
one of his epistles:--
O God, though Virtue mightily do grieve
For all this world, yet will I not believe
But that she's fair and lovely and that she
So to the period of the world will be;
Else had she been forsaken (sure) of all,
For that so many sundry mischiefs fall
Upon her daily, and so many take
Up arms against her, as it well might make
Her to forsake her nature, and behind
To leave no step for future time behind,
As she had never been, for he that now
Can do her most disgrace, him they allow
The time's chief Champion--.
Turning to Keats's next favourite among the old poets, William Browne of
Tavistock, here is a passage from _Britannia's Pastorals_ which we know
to have stuck in his memory, and which illustrates the prevailing
tendency of the metre in Browne's hands to run in a succession of
closed, but not too tightly closed, couplets, and to abound in double or
feminine rime-endings which make a variation in the beat:--
And as a lovely maiden, pure and chaste,
With naked iv'ry neck, and gown unlaced,
Within her chamber, when the day is fled,
Makes poor her garments to enrich her bed:
First, put she off her lily-silken gown,
That shrieks for sorrow as she lays it down;
And with her arms graceth a waistcoat fine,
Embracing her as it would ne'er untwine.
Her flaxen hair, ensnaring all beholders,
She next permits to wave about her shoulders,
And though she cast it back, the silken slips
Still forward steal and hang upon her lips:
Whereat she sweetly angry, with her laces
Binds up the wanton locks in curious traces,
Whilst (twisting with her joints) each hair long lingers,
As loth to be enchain'd but with her fingers.
Then on her head a dressing like a crown;
Her breasts all bare, her kirtle slipping down,
And all things off (which rightly ever be
Call'd the foul-fair marks of our misery)
Except her last, which enviously doth seize her,
Lest any eye partake with it in pleasure,
Prepares for sweetest rest, while sylvans greet her,
And longingly the down bed swells to meet her.
Chapman, a poet naturally rugged of mind and speech and moreover
hampered by having to translate, takes much greater liberties,
constantly breaking up single lines with a full stop in the middle and
riming on syllables too light or too grammatically dependent on the word
next following to allow naturally any stress of after-pause, however
slight; as thus in the sixth _Odyssey_:--
These, here arriv'd, the mules uncoach'd, and drave
Up to the gulfy river's shore, that gave
Sweet grass to them. The maids from coach then took
Their clothes, and steep'd them in the sable brook;
Then put them into springs, and trod them clean
With cleanly feet; adventuring wagers then,
Who should have soonest and most cleanly done.
When having throughly cleans'd, they spread them on
The flood's shore, all in order. And then, where
The waves the pebbles wash'd, and ground was clear,
They bath'd themselves, and all with glittering oil
Smooth'd their white skins; refreshing then their toil
With pleasant dinner, by the river's side;
Yet still watch'd when the sun their clothes had dried.
Till which time, having dined, Nausicaa
With other virgins did at stool-ball play,
Their shoulder-reaching head-tires laying by.
The other classical translation of the time with which Keats was most
familiar was that of the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid by the traveller and
colonial administrator George Sandys. As a rule Sandys prefers the
regular beat of the self-contained couplet, but now and again he too
breaks it uncompromisingly: for instance,--
Forbear yourselves, O Mortals, to pollute
With wicked food: fields smile with corn, ripe fruit
Weighs down their boughs; plump grapes their vines attire;
There are sweet herbs, and savory roots, which fire
May mollify, milk, honey redolent
With flowers of thyme, thy palate to content.
The prodigal earth abounds with gentle food;
Affording banquets without death or blood.
Brute beasts with flesh their ravenous hunger cloy:
And yet not all; in pastures horses joy:
So flocks and herds. But those whom Nature hath
Endued with cruelty, and savage wrath
(Wolves, bears, Armenian tigers, Lions) in
Hot blood delight. How horrible a sin,
That entrails bleeding entrails should entomb!
That greedy flesh, by flesh should fat become!
While by one creature's death another lives!
Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse often deal with the
metre more harshly and arbitrarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of
St Paul's, though capable of riming with fine sonority and richness,
chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer defiance of the obvious
framework offered by the couplet system; and the same refusal to stop
the sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring of the rime,
the same broken and jerking movement, are plentifully to be matched from
the epistles of Ben Jonson. In later and weaker hands this method of
letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way in almost complete
independence of the rime developed into a fatal disease and decay of the
metre, analogous to the disease which at the same time was overtaking
and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance, to which we
shall have to return, is the _Pharonnida_ of William Chamberlayne,
(1659) a narrative poem not lacking momentary gleams of intellect and
imagination, and by some insatiate students, including Southey and
Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of its (to one reader
at least) intolerable tedium and wretched stumbling, shuffling verse,
which rimes indeed to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and
vexation. For example:--
Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length
The fair Pharonnida recovers strength,
Though sighs each accent interrupted, to
Return this answer:--'Wilt, oh! wilt thou do
Our infant love such injury--to leave
It ere full grown? When shall my soul receive
A comfortable smile to cherish it,
When thou art gone? They're but dull joys that sit
Enthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could
Part, with a less expense of sorrow, would
Our rigid fortune only be content
With absence; but a greater punishment
Conspires against us--Danger must attend
Each step thou tread'st from hence; and shall I spend
Those hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay
Wait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day
Wherein your battles join, how will my fear
With doubtful pulses beat, until I hear
Whom victory adorns! Or shall I rest
Here without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast,
My heart's exposed to every danger that
Assails thy valour, and is wounded at
Each stroke that lights on thee--which absent I,
Prompted by fear, to myriads multiply.'
The tendency which culminated in this kind of verse was met by a
counteracting tendency in the majority of poets to insist on the regular
emphatic rime-beat, and to establish the rime-unit--that is the separate
couplet--as the completely dominant element in the measure, the 'heroic'
measure as it had come to be called. The rule is nowhere so dogmatically
laid down as by Sir John Beaumont, the elder brother of the dramatist,
in an address to King James I:--
In every language now in Europe spoke
By nations which the Roman Empire broke,
The relish of the Muse consists in rime:
One verse must meet another like a chime.
Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace
In choice of words fit for the ending place,
Which leave impression in the mind as well
As closing sounds of some delightful bell.
Milton at nineteen, in a passage of his college _Vacation Exercise_,
familiar to Keats and for every reason interesting to read in connexion
with the poems expressing Keats's early aspirations, showed how the
metre could still be handled nobly in the mixed Elizabethan manner:--
Hail native Language, that by sinews weak
Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,
* * * * *
I have some naked thoughts that rove about
And loudly knock to have their passage out;
And wearie of their place do only stay
Till thou hast deck't them in thy best array;
That so they may without suspect or fears
Fly swiftly to this fair Assembly's ears;
Yet I had rather if I were to chuse,
Thy service in some graver subject use,
Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,
Before thou cloath my fancy in fit sound:
Such where the deep transported mind may soare
Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav'ns dore
Look in, and see each blissful Deitie
How he before the thunderous throne doth lie,
Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings
To th' touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings
Immortal Nectar to her Kingly Sire:
Then passing through the Spheres of watchful fire,
And mistie Regions of wide air next under,
And hills of Snow and lofts of piled Thunder,
May tell at length how green-ey'd Neptune raves,
In Heav'ns defiance mustering all his waves;
Then sing of secret things that came to pass
When Beldam Nature in her cradle was;
And last of Kings and Queens and Hero's old,
Such as the wise Demodocus once told
In solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast,
While sad Ulisses soul and all the rest
Are held with his melodious harmonie
In willing chains and sweet captivitie.
But the strictly closed system advocated by Sir John Beaumont prevailed
in the main, and by the days of the Commonwealth and Restoration was
with some exceptions generally established. Some poets were enabled by
natural fineness of ear and dignity of soul to make it yield fine rich
and rolling modulations: none more so than Andrew Marvell, as for
instance in his noble poem on the death of Cromwell. The name especially
associated in contemporary and subsequent criticism with the attainment
of the admired quality of 'smoothness' (another name for clipped and
even monotony of rime and rhythm) in this metre is Waller, the famous
parliamentary and poetical turncoat who could adulate with equal unction
first the Lord Protector and then the restored Charles. By this time,
however, every rimer could play the tune, and thanks to the controlling
and suggesting power of the metre itself, could turn out couplets with
the true metallic and epigrammatic ring: few better than Katherine
Philips ('the matchless Orinda'), who was a stickler for the strictest
form of the couplet and wished even to banish all double endings. Take
this from her elegy on the death of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia
(1662):--
Although the most do with officious heat
Only adore the living and the great,
Yet this Queen's merits Fame so far hath spread,
That she rules still, though dispossest and dead.
For losing one, two other Crowns remained;
Over all hearts and her own griefs she reigned.
Two Thrones so splendid as to none are less
But to that third which she does now possess.
Her heart and birth Fortune as well did know,
That seeking her own fame in such a foe,
She drest the spacious theatre for the fight:
And the admiring World call'd to the sight:
An army then of mighty sorrows brought,
Who all against this single virtue fought;
And sometimes stratagems, and sometimes blows,
To her heroic soul they did oppose:
But at her feet their vain attempts did fall,
And she discovered and subdu'd them all.
Cowley in his long 'heroic' poem _The Davideis_ admits the occasional
Alexandrine or twelve-syllable line as a variation on the monotony of
the rhythm. Dryden, with his incomparably sounder and stronger literary
sense, saw the need for a richer variation yet, and obtained it by the
free use both of triple rimes and of Alexandrines: often getting fine
effects of sweeping sonority, although by means which the reader cannot
but feel to be arbitrary, imported into the form because its monotony
calls for relief rather than intrinsic and natural to it. Chaucer's
prayer, above quoted, of Emilia to Diana runs thus in Dryden's
'translation':--
O Goddess, Haunter of the Woodland Green,
To whom both Heav'n and Earth and Seas are seen;
Queen of the nether Skies, where half the Year
Thy Silver Beams descend, and light the gloomy Sphere;
Goddess of Maids, and conscious of our Hearts,
So keep me from the Vengeance of thy Darts,
Which Niobe's devoted Issue felt,
When hissing through the Skies the feather'd Deaths were dealt:
As I desire to live a Virgin-life,
Nor know the Name of Mother or of Wife.
Thy Votress from my tender Years I am,
And love, like thee, the Woods and Sylvan Game.
Like Death, thou know'st, I loath the Nuptial State,
And Man, the Tyrant of our Sex, I hate,
A lowly Servant, but a lofty Mate.
Where Love is Duty on the Female Side,
On theirs mere sensual Gust, and sought with surly Pride.
Now by thy triple Shape, as thou art seen
In Heav'n, Earth, Hell, and ev'ry where a Queen,
Grant this my first Desire; let Discord, cease,
And make betwixt the Rivals lasting Peace:
Quench their hot Fire, or far from me remove
The Flame, and turn it on some other Love.
Or if my frowning Stars have so decreed,
That one must be rejected, one succeed,
Make him my Lord, within whose faithful Breast
Is fix'd my Image, and who loves me best.
In serious work Dryden avoided double endings almost entirely, reserving
them for playful and colloquial use in stage prologues, epilogues, and
the like, thus:--
I come, kind Gentlemen, strange news to tell ye;
I am the Ghost of poor departed Nelly.
Sweet Ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil;
I'm what I was, a little harmless Devil.
For, after death, we Sprights have just such Natures,
We had, for all the World, when human Creatures.
In the following generation Pope discarded, with the rarest exceptions,
all these variations upon the metre and wrought up successions of
separate couplets, each containing a single sentence or clause of a
sentence complete, and each line having its breathing-pause or caesura
almost exactly in the same place, to a pitch of polished and glittering
elegance, of striking, instantaneous effect both upon ear and mind,
which completely dazzled and subjugated not only his contemporaries but
three full generations of rimers and readers after them. Everyone knows
the tune; it is the same whether applied to purposes of pastoral
sentiment or rhetorical passion or playful fancy, of Homeric translation
or Horatian satire, of witty and plausible moral and critical reflection
or of savage personal lampoon and invective. Let the reader turn in
memory from Ariel's account of the duties of his subordinate elves and
fays:--
Some in the fields of purest ether play,
And bask and whiten in the blaze of day:
Some guide the course of wandering orbs on high,
Or roll the planets through the boundless sky:
Some, less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light
Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night,
Or suck the mists in grosser air below,
Or dip their pinions in the painted bow,
Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,
Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain.
Others, on earth, o'er human race preside,
Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide,--
let the reader turn in memory from this to the familiarly known lines in
which Pope congratulates himself
That not in fancy's maze he wandered long,
But stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song;
That not for fame, but virtue's better end,
He stood the furious foe, the timid friend,
The damning critic, half approving wit,
The coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit;
Laughed at the loss of friends he never had,
The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad;
The distant threats of vengeance on his head,
The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed;
The tale revived, the lie so oft o'erthrown,
The imputed trash, and dulness not his own,--
and again from this to his castigation of the unhappy Bayes:--
Swearing and supperless the hero sate,
Blasphem'd his gods, the dice, and damn'd his fate;
Then gnaw'd his pen, then dash'd it on the ground,
Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound!
Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there,
Yet wrote and flounder'd on in mere despair.
Round him much embryo, much abortion lay,
Much future ode, and abdicated play;
Nonsense precipitate, like running lead,
That slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head.
The author thus brilliantly and evenly accomplished in one metre and so
many styles ruled as a sovereign long after his death, his works being
published in nearly thirty editions before the end of the century; and
the measure as thus fixed and polished by him became for a full hundred
years the settled norm and standard for English 'heroic' verse, the
length and structure of periods, sentences and clauses having to be
rigidly clipped to fit it. In this respect no change of practice came
till after the whole spirit of English poetry had been changed. Almost
from Pope's own day the leaven destined to produce what came afterwards
to be called the romantic revolution was working, in the main
unconsciously, in men's minds. Of conscious rebels or pioneers, two of
the chief were that admirable, ridiculous pair of clerical brothers
Joseph and Thomas Warton, Joseph long headmaster of Winchester, Thomas
professor of poetry at Oxford and later poet laureate. Joseph Warton
made at twenty-four, within two years of Pope's death, a formal protest
against the reign of the polished and urbane moral essay in verse, and
at all times stoutly maintained 'Invention and Imagination' to be the
chief qualities of a poet; illustrating his views by what he called
odes, to us sadly uninspired, of his own composition. His younger
brother Thomas, with his passion for Gothic architecture, his masterly
editing of Spenser, and his profound labours on the origin and history
of our native English poetry, carried within him, for all his grotesque
personality, many of the germs of the spirit that was to animate the
coming age. As the century advanced, other signs and portents of what
was to come were Chatterton's audaciously brilliant blunder of the
Rowley forgeries, with the interest which it excited, the profound
impression created by the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson, and the
enthusiastic reception of Percy's _Reliques_. But current critical taste
did not recognize the meaning of these signs, and tacitly treated the
breach between our older and newer literatures as complete. Admitting
the older as a worthy and interesting subject of study and welcoming the
labour of scholars--even those of pretended scholars--in collecting and
publishing its remains or what purported to be such, criticism none the
less expected and demanded of contemporary production that it should
conform as a matter of course to the standards established since
language and style had been 'polished' and reduced to 'correctness' by
Dryden and Pope. Thomas Warton, wishing to celebrate in verse the
glories of the Gothic architecture of Oxford, finds himself constrained
to do so strictly in the dominant style and measure. His brother, the
protesting Joseph, actually has to enrol himself among Pope's editors,
and when for once he uses the heroic couplet and lets his fancy play
upon the sight of a butterfly in Hackwood Park, must do so, he too, in
this thoroughly Popeian wise:--
Fair child of Sun and Summer, we behold
With eager eyes thy wings bedropp'd with gold;
The purple spots that o'er thy mantle spread,
The sapphire's lively blue, the ruby's red,
Ten thousand various blended tints surprise,
Beyond the rainbow's hues or peacock's eyes:
Not Judah's king in eastern pomp array'd,
Whose charms allur'd from far the Sheban maid,
High on his glitt'ring throne, like you could shine
(Nature's completest miniature divine):
For thee the rose her balmy buds renews,
And silver lillies fill their cups with dews;
Flora for thee the laughing fields perfumes,
For thee Pomona sheds her choicest blooms.
William Blake, in his _Poetical Sketches_ of 1784, poured scorn on the
still reigning fashion for 'tinkling rhymes and elegances terse', and
himself struck wonderful lyric notes in the vein of our older poetry:
but nobody read or marked Blake: he was not for his own age but for
posterity. Even those of the eighteenth century poets who in the main
avoided the heroic couplet, and took refuge, like Thomson, in the
Spenserian stanza or Miltonic blank verse, or confined themselves to
lyric or elegiac work like Gray,--even they continued to be hampered by
a strict conventional and artificial code of poetic style and diction.
The first full and effective note of emancipation, of poetical
revolution and expansion, in England was that struck by Coleridge and
Wordsworth with the publication and defence of their _Lyrical Ballads_
(1798, 1800). Both these young masters had written in the established
mould in their quite earliest work, but afterwards disused it almost
entirely (_The Happy Warrior_ is of course a conspicuous exception);
while their contemporary Walter Scott avoided it from the first.
The new poetry, whether cast in forms derived from or coloured by the
old ballad literature of the country, or helping itself from the
simplicities and directnesses of common every-day speech, or going back
to Miltonic and pre-Miltonic tradition, fought its way to recognition
now slowly, as in the case of Wordsworth, in whose style all these three
elements play their part, now rapidly in the face of all opposition, as
in the case of Scott with his dashing Border lays. But the heroic
couplet on the Queen Anne model still held the field as the reigning and
official form of verse; and among the most admired poets of Keats's day,
Rogers, Campbell, and Crabbe in the older generation, each in his own
manner, still kept sounding the old instrument essentially to the old
tune, with Byron in the younger following, in _The Corsair_ and _Lara_,
at a pace more rapid and helter-skelter but with a beat even more
monotonous and hammering than any of theirs. We have seen how Leigh Hunt
declared his intention to try a reform of the measure, and how he
carried out his promise in _Rimini_. He did little more than revive
Dryden's expedients of the occasional triplet and Alexandrine, with a
sprinkling of Elizabethan double-endings; failing withal completely to
catch any touch either of the imaginative passion of the Elizabethans or
of Dryden's fine virile energy and worldly good-breeding.
_Rimini_ was not yet published, nor had Keats yet met its author, when
Keats wrote his Epistle to Felton Mathew in November 1815. If, as is the
case, his strain of social ease and sprightliness jars on us a little in
the same manner as Hunt's, it is that there was really as he himself
said on another occasion, something in common between them. At the same
time it should be remembered that some of Keats's most Huntian-seeming
rimes and phrases contain really an echo of the older masters.[7] That
William Browne was his earliest model in the handling of the metre will,
I think, be apparent to any reader who will put the passage from
_Britannia's Pastorals_ above quoted (p. 98), with its easily flowing
couplets varied at intervals by whole clusters or bunches of double
endings, alongside of the following from Keats's first Epistle:--
Too partial friend! fain would I follow thee
Past each horizon of fine poesy;
Fain would I echo back each pleasant note
As o'er Sicilian seas, clear anthems float
'Mong the light skimming gondolas far parted,
Just when the sun his farewell beam has darted:
But 'tis impossible; far different cares
Beckon me sternly from soft 'Lydian airs,'
And hold my faculties so long in thrall,
That I am oft in doubt whether at all
I shall again see Phoebus in the morning:
Or flush'd Aurora in the roseate dawning!
Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream;
Or a rapt seraph in a moonlight beam;
Or again witness what with thee I've seen,
The dew by fairy feet swept from the green,
After a night of some quaint jubilee
Which every elf and fay had come to see:
When bright processions took their airy march
Beneath the curved moon's triumphal arch.
But might I now each passing moment give
To the coy muse, with me she would not live
In this dark city, nor would condescend
'Mid contradictions her delights to lend.
Should e'er the fine-ey'd maid to me be kind,
Ah! surely it must be whene'er I find
Some flowery spot, sequester'd, wild, romantic,
That often must have seen a poet frantic;
Where oaks, that erst the Druid knew, are growing,
And flowers, the glory of one day, are blowing;
Where the dark-leav'd laburnum's drooping clusters
Reflect athwart the stream their yellow lustres,
And intertwin'd the cassia's arms unite,
With its own drooping buds, but very white.
This is artless enough as writing, but obviously sincere, and
interesting as showing how early and instinctively both Greek and
mediæval mythology had become to Keats symbols and incarnations, as
living as in the days of their first creation, of the charm and power of
nature. The piece ends with a queer Ovidian fancy about his friend, to
the effect that he, Mathew, had once been a 'flowret blooming wild'
beside the springs of poetry, and that Diana had plucked him and thrown
him into the stream as an offering to her brother Apollo, who had turned
him into a goldfinch, from which he was metamorphosed into a black-eyed
swan fed by Naiads.
The next experiments in this measure, the fragment of _Calidore_ with
its _Induction_, date from a few months later, after the publication of
_Rimini_, and express the longing of the young aspirant to follow the
example of Hunt, the loved Libertas, and tell, he too, a tale of
chivalry. But the longing is seconded by scarce a touch of inspiration.
The Gothic and nature descriptions are quite cheap and external, the
figures of knights and ladies quite conventional, the whole thing a
matter of plumes and palfreys and lances, shallow graces of costume and
sentiment, much more recalling Stothard's sugared illustrations to
Spenser than the spirit of Spenser himself, whose patronage Keats
timorously invokes. He at the same time entreats Hunt to intercede with
Spenser on his behalf: and in the result it seems as though Hunt had
stepped bodily in between them. In the handling of the metre, indeed,
there is nothing of Hunt's diluted Drydenism: there is the same direct
though timid following of Elizabethan precedents as before, varied by an
occasional echo of _Lycidas_ in the use of the short six-syllable
line:--
Anon he leaps along the oaken floors
Of halls and corridors.
But in the style and sentiment we trace Leigh Hunt, or those elements in
Keats which were naturally akin to him, at every turn. We read, for
instance, of trees that lean
So elegantly o'er the waters brim
And show their blossoms trim:
and of
The lamps that from the high-roof'd hall were pendent
And gave the steel a shining quite transcendent.
A few months later, on his August and September holiday at Margate,
Keats resumes the measure again, in two familiar epistles, one to his
brother George, the other to Cowden Clarke. To his brother he expresses
frankly, and in places felicitously, the moods and aspirations of a
youth passionately and justly conscious of the working of the poetic
impulse in him, but not less justly dissatisfied with the present fruits
of such impulse, and wondering whether any worth gathering will ever
come to ripeness. He tells us of hours when all in vain he gazes at the
play of sheet lightning or pries among the stars 'to strive to think
divinely,' and of other hours when the doors of the clouds break open
and show him visions of the pawing of white horses, the flashing of
festal wine cups in halls of gold, and supernatural colours of dimly
seen flowers. In such moods, he asks concerning an imagined poet:--
Should he upon an evening ramble fare
With forehead to the soothing breezes bare,
Would he naught see but the dark silent blue
With all its diamonds trembling through and through?
Or the coy moon, when in the waviness
Of whitest clouds she does her beauty dress,
And staidly paces higher up, and higher,
Like a sweet nun in holy-day attire?
Ah, yes! much more would start into his sight--
The revelries, and mysteries of night:
And should I ever see them, I will tell you
Such tales as needs must with amazement spell you.
But richer even than these privileges of the poet in his illuminated
moments is the reward which he may look for from posterity. In a long
passage, deeply pathetic considering the after-event, Keats imagines
exultingly what must be a poet's deathbed feelings when he foresees how
his name and work will be cherished in after times by men and women of
all sorts and conditions--warrior, statesman, and philosopher, village
May-queen and nursing mother (the best and most of the verses are those
which picture the May-queen taking his book from her bosom to read to a
thrilled circle on the village green). He might be happier, he admits,
could he stifle all these ambitions. Yet there are moments when he
already tastes the true delights of poetry; and at any rate he can take
pleasure in the thought that his brother will like what he writes; and
so he is content to close with an attempt at a quiet description of the
Thanet scenery and surroundings whence he writes.
In addressing Cowden Clarke Keats begins with an odd image, likening the
way in which poetic inspiration eludes him to the slipping away of drops
of water which a swan vainly tries to collect in the hollows of his
plumage. He would have written sooner, he tells his correspondent, but
had nothing worthy to submit to one so familiar with the whole range of
poetry and recently, moreover, privileged to walk and talk with Leigh
Hunt,--
One, who, of late, had ta'en sweet forest walks
With him who elegantly chats, and talks--
The wrong'd Libertas,--who has told you stories
Of laurel chaplets, and Apollo's glories;
Of troops chivalrous prancing through a city,
And tearful ladies made for love, and pity.
(The allusion in the last three lines is of course to _The Feast of the
Poets and Rimini_. The passage seems to make it certain that whatever
intercourse Keats himself may up to this time have had with Hunt was
slight.) Even now, he goes on, he would not show Clarke his verses but
that he takes courage from their old friendship and from his sense of
owing to it all he knows of poetry. Recurring to the pleasantness of his
present surroundings, he says that they have inspired him to attempt the
verses he is now writing for his friend, which would have been better
only that they have been too long parted. Then follow the lines quoted
farther back (p. 37) in affectionate remembrance of old Enfield and
Edmonton days.
In these early attempts Keats again ventures some way, but not yet far,
in the direction of breaking the fetters of the regular couplet. He runs
his sentences freely enough through a succession of lines, but nine
times out of ten with some kind of pause as well as emphasis on the
rime-word. He deals freely in double endings, and occasionally, but not
often (oftenest in the epistle to George) breaks the run of a line with
a full stop in or near the middle. He is in like manner timid and
sparing as yet in the use, to which a little later he was to give rein
so fully, of Elizabethan word-forms, or forms modelled for himself on
Elizabethan usage.
Somewhat more free and adventurous alike in metre and in diction are the
two poems, _Sleep and Poetry_ and '_I stood tip-toe_,' which Keats wrote
after he came back to London in the autumn. These are the things which,
together with two or three of the sonnets, give its real distinction and
high promise to the volume. Both in substance and intention they are
preludes merely, but preludes of genius, and, although marked by many
immaturities, as interesting and attractive perhaps as anything which
has ever been written by a poet of the same age about his art and his
aspirations. In them the ardent novice communes intently with himself on
his own hopes and ambitions. Possessed by the thrilling sense that
everything in earth and air is full, as it were, of poetry in solution,
he has as yet no clearness as to the forms and modes in which these
suspended elements will crystallize for him. In _Sleep and Poetry_ he
tries to get into shape his conceptions of the end and aim of poetical
endeavour, conjures up the difficulties of his task, counts over the new
achievement and growing promise of the time in which he lives, and gives
thanks for the encouragement by which he has been personally sustained.
In '_I stood tip-toe_' he runs over the stock of nature-images which are
his own private and peculiar delight, traces in various phases and
aspects of nature a symbolic affinity, or spiritual identity, with
various forms and kinds of poetry; tells how such a strain of verse will
call up such and such a range of nature images, and conversely how this
or that group of outdoor delights will inspire this or that mood of
poetic invention; and finally goes on to speculate on the moods which
first inspired some of the Grecian tales he loves best, and above all
the tale of Endymion and Cynthia, the beneficent wonders of whose bridal
night he hopes himself one day to retell.
_Sleep and Poetry_ is printed at the end of the volume, '_I stood
tip-toe_' at the beginning. It is hard to tell which of the two pieces
was written first.[8] _Sleep and Poetry_ is the longer and more
important, and has more the air of having been composed, so to speak,
all of a piece. We know that '_I stood tip-toe_' was not finished until
the end of December 1816. _Sleep and Poetry_ cannot well have been
written later, seeing that the book was published in the first days of
the following March, and must therefore have gone to press early in the
new year. What seems likeliest is that _Sleep and Poetry_ was written
without break during the first freshness of Keats's autumn intimacy at
the Hampstead cottage; while '_I stood tip-toe_' may have been begun in
the summer and resumed at intervals until the year's end. I shall take
_Sleep and Poetry_ first and let '_I stood tip-toe_' come after, as
being the direct and express prelude to the great experiment,
_Endymion_, which was to follow.
The scheme of _Sleep and Poetry_ is to some extent that of _The Floure
and the Lefe_, the pseudo-Chaucerian poem which, as we have seen, had so
strongly caught Keats's fancy. Keats takes for his motto lines from that
poem telling of a night wakeful but none the less cheerful, and avers
that his own poem was the result of just such another night. An opening
invocation sets the blessings of sleep above a number of other
delightful things which it gives him joy to think of, and recounts the
activities of Sleep personified,--'Silent entangler of a beauty's
tresses,' etc.,--in lines charming and essentially characteristic, for
it is the way of his imagination to be continually discovering active
and dynamic qualities in things and to let their passive and inert
properties be. But far higher and more precious than the blessings of
sleep are those of something else which he will not name:--
What is it? And to what shall I compare it?
It has a glory, and nought else can share it:
The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy,
Chasing away all worldliness and folly;
Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder,
Or the low rumblings earth's regions under;
And sometimes like a gentle whispering
Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing
That breathes about us in the vacant air;
So that we look around with prying stare,
Perhaps to see shapes of light, aerial limning,
And catch soft floatings from a faint-heard hymning;
To see the laurel wreath, on high suspended.
That is to crown our name when life is ended.
Sometimes it gives a glory to the voice,
And from the heart up-springs, rejoice! rejoice!
Sounds which will reach the Framer of all things,
And die away in ardent mutterings.
Every enlightened spirit will guess, he implies, that this thing is
poetry, and to Poetry personified he addresses his next invocation,
declaring that if he can endure the overwhelming favour of her
acceptance he will be admitted to 'the fair visions of all places' and
will learn to reveal in verse the hidden beauty and meanings of things,
in an ascending scale from the playing of nymphs in woods and fountains
to 'the events of this wide world,' which it will be given him to seize
'like a strong giant.'
At this point a warning voice within him reminds him sadly of the
shortness and fragility of life, to which an answering inward voice of
gay courage and hope replies. Keats could only think in images, and
almost invariably in images of life and action: those here conveying the
warning and its reply are alike felicitous:--
Stop and consider! life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep
While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep
Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan?
Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;
The light uplifting of a maiden's veil;
A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing school-boy, without grief or care,
Riding the springy branches of an elm.
Then follows a cry for length enough of years (he will be content with
ten) to carry out the poetic schemes which float before his mind; and
here he returns to his ascending scale of poetic ambitions and sets it
forth and amplifies it with a new richness of figurative imagery. First
the realms of Pan and Flora, the pleasures of nature and the country and
the enticements of toying nymphs (perhaps with a Virgilian touch in his
memory from schoolboy days--_Panaque Silvanumque senem nymphasque
sorores_--certainly with visions from Poussin's Bacchanals in his mind's
eye): then, the ascent to loftier regions where the imagination has to
grapple with the deeper mysteries of life and experiences of the soul.
Here again he can only shadow forth his ideas by evoking shapes and
actions of visible beings to stand for and represent them symbolically.
He sees a charioteer guiding his horses among the clouds, looking out
the while 'with glorious fear,' then swooping downward to alight on a
grassy hillside; then talking with strange gestures to the trees and
mountains, then gazing and listening, 'awfully intent,' and writing
something on his tablets while a procession of various human shapes,
'shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,' sweeps on before his view, as
if in pursuit of some ever-fleeting music, in the shadow cast by a grove
of oaks. The dozen lines calling up to the mind's eye the multitude and
variety of figures in this procession--
Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways
Flit onward--
contain less suggestion than we should have expected from what has gone
before, of the events and tragedies of the world, 'the agonies, the
strife of human hearts,'--and close with the vision of
a lovely wreath of girls
Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls,
as if images of pure pagan joy and beauty would keep forcing themselves
on the young aspirant's mind in spite of his resolve to train himself
for the grapple with sterner themes.
This vision of the charioteer and his team remained in Keats's mind as a
symbol for the imagination and its energies. For the moment, so his poem
goes on, the vision vanishes, and the sense of every-day realities seems
like a muddy stream bearing his soul into nothingness. But he clings to
the memory of that chariot and its journey; and thereupon turns to
consider the history of English poetry and the dearth of imagination
from which it had suffered for so many years. Here comes the famous
outbreak, first of indignant and then of congratulatory criticism, which
was the most explicit battle-cry of the romantic revolution in poetry
since the publication of Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of
_Lyrical Ballads_ seventeen years earlier:--
Is there so small a range
In the present strength of manhood, that the high
Imagination cannot freely fly
As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds,
Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds
Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all?
From the clear space of ether, to the small
Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning
Of Jove's large eye-brow, to the tender greening
Of April meadows? Here her altar shone,
E'en in this isle; and who could paragon
The fervid choir that lifted up a noise
Of harmony, to where it aye will poise
Its mighty self of convoluting sound,
Huge as a planet, and like that roll round,
Eternally around a dizzy void?
Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd
With honors; nor had any other care
Than to sing out and sooth their wavy hair.
Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking horse
And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd
Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue
Bared its eternal bosom,[9] and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of,--were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye thought a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it,--no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepid standard out
Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large
The name of one Boileau!
The two great elder captains of poetic revolution, Coleridge and
Wordsworth, have expounded their cause, in prose, with full maturity of
thought and language: Wordsworth in the austere contentions of his
famous prefaces to his second edition (1800), Coleridge in the luminous
retrospect of the _Biographia Literaria_ (1816). In the interval a cloud
of critics, including men of such gifts as Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh
Hunt, were in their several ways champions of the same cause. But none
of these has left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the
ear and haunt the memory like the rimes of this young untrained recruit,
John Keats. It is easy, indeed, to pick his verses to shreds, if we
choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention on their faults. What is
it, for instance, that imagination is asked to do? Fly, or drive? Is it
she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against the light? And why paw?
Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly be other than
strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' Why should the
hair of the muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would
be more intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and
not to 'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit but not a
standard, and a standard flimsy but not a motto. And so on without end,
if we choose to let the mind assume that attitude and to resent the
contemptuous treatment of a very finished artist and craftsman by one as
yet obviously raw and imperfect. Byron, in his controversy with Bowles a
year or two later, adopted this mode of attack effectively enough; his
spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its most convenient
weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, for the genius
and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have in us a touch
of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as distinct from
that of taste and reason and 'correctness',--however clearly we may see
the weak points of a passage like this, yet we cannot but feel that
Keats touches truly the root of the matter: we cannot but admire the
ring and power of his appeal to the elements, his fine spontaneous and
effective turns of rhetoric, and the elastic life and variety of his
verse.
So much for the indignant part of the passage. The congratulatory part
repeats with different imagery the sense of the sonnet to Haydon
beginning 'Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,' and declares that
fine sounds are once more floating wild about the earth, wherefore the
Muses are now glad and happy. But the congratulations, it next occurs to
the young poet, need to be qualified. To some of the recent achievements
of poetry he demurs, declaring that their themes of song are 'ugly
clubs' and the poets who fling them Polyphemuses 'disturbing the grand
sea of song' (Keats is here remembering the huge club which Ulysses and
his companions, in the Homeric story, find in the cave of Polyphemus,
and confusing it with the rocks which the blinded giant later tears up
and hurls after them into the sea).[10] The obvious supposition is that
Keats is here referring to Byron's Eastern tales, with their clamour and
heat and violence of melodramatic action and passion. Leigh Hunt,
indeed, who ought to have known, asserts in his review of the volume
that they are aimed against 'the morbidity which taints some of the
productions of the poets of the Lake School.' I suspect that Hunt is
here attributing to Keats some of his own poetical aversions. What
productions can he mean? Southey's _Curse of Kehama_? Coleridge's
_Ancient Mariner_ or _Christabel_? Wordsworth's relatively few poems, or
episodes, of tragic life--as the _Mad Mother_, _Ruth_, _Margaret_? For
certainly the strained simplicities and trivialities of some of his
country ballads, which were what Leigh Hunt and his friends most
disliked in Wordsworth's work, could never be called thunders.
But these jarring things, Keats goes on, shall not disturb him. He will
believe in and seek to enter upon the kingdom of poetry where all shall
be gentle and soothing like a lawn beneath a myrtle tree,
And they shall be accounted poet-kings
Who simply sing the most heart-easing things.
Then a momentary terror of his own presumption seizes him; but he puts
it away, defies despondency, and declares that for all his youth and
lack of learning and wisdom, he has a vast idea before him, and a clear
conception of the end and aim of poetry. Dare the utmost he will--and
then once more the sense of the greatness of the task comes over him,
and he falls back for support on thoughts of recent friendship and
encouragement. A score of lines follow, recalling happy talks at Hunt's
over books and prints: the memory of these calls up by association a
string of the delights ('luxuries' as in Huntian phrase he calls them)
of nature: thence he recurs to the pleasures of sleep, or rather of a
night when sleep failed him for thinking over the intercourse he had
been enjoying and the place where he now rested--that is on the couch in
Hunt's library. Here follow the lines quoted above (p. 53) about the
prints on the library walls: and the piece concludes:--
The very sense of where I was might well
Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came
Thought after thought to nourish up the flame
Within my breast; so that the morning light
Surprised me even from a sleepless night;
And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay,
Resolving to begin that very day
These lines; and howsoever they be done,
I leave them as a father does his son.
The best reason for thinking that the poem '_I stood tip-toe_,' though
probably finished quite as late as _Sleep and Poetry_, was begun
earlier, is that in it Keats again follows the practice which he had
attempted in _Calidore_ and its _Induction_ but gave up in _Sleep and
Poetry_, namely that of occasionally introducing a lyrical effect with a
six-syllable line, in the manner used by Spenser in the _Epithalamion_
and Milton in _Lycidas_,--
Open afresh your round of starry folds,
Ye ardent marigolds!
No conclusion as to the date when the piece was begun can be drawn from
the scene of summer freshness with which it opens, or from Leigh Hunt's
statement that this description was suggested by a summer's day when he
stood at a certain spot on Hampstead Heath. This may be quite true, but
in the mind of a poet such scenes ripen by recollection, and Keats may
at any after day have evoked it for his purpose, which was to bring his
imagination to the right taking-off place--to plant it, so to speak, on
the right spring-board--from which to start on its flight through a
whole succession of other and kindred images of natural beauty. Some of
the series of evocations that follow are already almost in the happiest
vein of Keats's lighter nature-poetry, especially the four lines about
the sweet peas on tip-toe for a flight, and the long passage recalling
his boyish delights by the Edmonton brookside and telling (in lines
which Tennyson has remembered in his idyll of _Enid_) how the minnows
would scatter beneath the shadow of a lifted hand and come together
again. When in the course of his recapitulation there comes to him the
image of the moon appearing from behind a cloud, he breaks off to
apostrophize that goddess of his imaginative idolatry, that source at
once and symbol, for such to his instinct she truly was, of poetic
inspiration. But for the moment he does not pursue the theme: he pauses
to trace the affinities between several kinds of nature-delight and
corresponding moods of poetry,--
In the calm grandeur of a sober line,
We see the waving of the mountain pine;
And when a tale is beautifully staid,
We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade,--
and so forth. And then, having in his mind's eye, as I should guess,
some of the mythological prints from Hunt's portfolios, he asks what
moods or phases of nature first inspired the poets of old with the
fables of Cupid and Psyche and of Pan and Syrinx, of Narcissus and Echo,
and most beautiful of all, that of Cynthia and Endymion,--and for the
remaining fifty lines of the poem moonlight and the Endymion story take
full possession. The lines imagining the occasion of the myth's
invention are lovely:--
He was a Poet, sure a lover too,
Who stood on Latmus' top, what time there blew
Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below;
And brought in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow
A hymn from Dian's temple; while upswelling,
The incense went to her own starry dwelling.
But though her face was clear as infant's eyes,
Though she stood smiling o'er the sacrifice,
The Poet wept at her so piteous fate,
Wept that such beauty should be desolate:
So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won,
And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion.
Then, treating the bridal night for the moment not as a myth but as a
thing that actually happened, he recounts, in a strain of purely human
tenderness which owes something to his hospital experience and which he
was hardly afterwards to surpass, the sweet and beneficent influences
diffused on that night about the world:--
The breezes were ethereal and pure,
And crept through half-closed lattices to cure
The languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep,
And soothed them into slumbers full and deep.
Soon they awoke clear eyed, nor burnt with thirsting,
Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting:
And springing up, they met the wondering sight
Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight;
Who feel their arms and breasts, and kiss and stare,
And on their placid foreheads part the hair.
Young men and maidens at each other gaz'd
With hands held back, and motionless, amaz'd
To see the brightness in each other's eyes.
Then, closing, he asks himself the momentous question, 'Was there a poet
born?' which he intended that his next year's work should answer.
In neither of these poems is the use of Elizabethan verbal forms, or the
coinage of similar forms by analogy, carried nearly as far as we shall
find it carried later on, especially in _Endymion_. The abstract nouns
expressing qualities pleasant to the senses or the sensuous imagination,
on the model of those in Chapman's _Hymn to Pan_, increase in number,
and we get the 'quaint mossiness of aged roots,' the 'hurrying
freshnesses' of a stream running over gravel, the 'pure deliciousness'
of the Endymion story, the 'pillow silkiness' of clouds, the 'blue
cragginess' of other clouds, and the 'widenesses' of the ocean of
poetry. Once, evidently with William Browne's 'roundly form' in his
mind, Keats invents, infelicitously enough, an adjective 'boundly' for
'bounden.' In the matter of metre, he is now fairly well at home in the
free Elizabethan use of the couplet, letting his periods develop
themselves unhampered, suffering his full pauses to fall at any point in
the line where the sense calls for them, the rime echo to come full and
emphatic or faint and light as may be, and the pause following the
rime-word to be shorter or longer or almost non-existent on occasion. If
his ear was for the moment attuned to the harmonies of any special
master among the Elizabethans, it was by this time Fletcher rather than
Browne: at least in _Sleep and Poetry_ the double endings no longer come
in clusters as they did in the earlier epistle, nor are the intervening
couplets so nearly regular, while there is a marked preference for
emphasizing an adjective by placing it at the end of a line and letting
its noun follow at the beginning of the next,--'the high |
Imagination,'--'the small | Breath of new buds unfolding.' The reader
will best see my point if he will compare the movement of the passages
in _Sleep and Poetry_ where these things occur with the Endymion passage
he will find quoted later on from the _Faithful Shepherdess_ (p. 168).
As to contemporary influences apparent in Keats's first volume, enough
has been said concerning that of Leigh Hunt. The influence of an
incommensurably greater poet, of Wordsworth, is also to be traced in it.
That Keats was by this time a diligent and critical admirer of
Wordsworth we know: both of the earlier poems and of the _Excursion_,
which had appeared when his passion for poetry was already at its height
in the last year of his apprenticeship at Edmonton. There is a famous
passage in the fourth book of _The Excursion_ where Wordsworth treats of
the spirit of Greek religion and imagines how some of its conceptions
first took shape:--
In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose:
And, in some fit of weariness, if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute,
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye
Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart
Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed
That timely light, to share his joyous sport:
And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs,
Across the lawn and through the darksome grove,
Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes
By echo multiplied from rock or cave,
Swept in the storm of chase; as moon and stars
Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven,
When winds are blowing strong.
Keats, we know, was familiar with this passage, and a little later on we
shall find him criticizing it in conversation with a friend. Leigh Hunt,
in a review written at the time, hints that it was in his mind when he
wrote the lines in '_I stood tip-toe_,' asking in what mood or under
what impulse a number of the Grecian fables were first invented and
giving the answers to his own questions. We may take Hunt's word for the
fact, seeing that he was constantly in Keats's company at the time.
Other critics have gone farther and supposed it was from Wordsworth that
Keats first learned truly to understand Greek mythology. I do not at all
think so. He would never have pored so passionately over the stories in
the classical dictionaries as a schoolboy, nor mused on them so intently
in the field walks of his apprentice days by sunset and moonlight, had
not some inborn instinct made the world of ancient fable and the world
of natural beauty each equally living to his apprehension and each
equally life-giving to the other. Wordsworth's interpretations will no
doubt have appealed to him profoundly, but not as something new, only as
putting eloquently and justly what he had already felt and divined by
native instinct.
Again, it has been acutely pointed out by Mr Robert Bridges how some of
the ideas expressed by Keats in his own way in _Sleep and Poetry_ run
parallel with some of those expressed in a very different way by
Wordsworth in _Tintern Abbey_, a poem which we know from other evidence
to have been certainly much in Keats's mind a year and a half later.
Wordsworth in _Tintern Abbey_ defines three stages of his own emotional
and imaginative development in relation to nature: first the stage of
mere boisterous physical and animal pleasure: then that of intense and
absorbing, but still unreflecting passion,--
An appetite, a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye,--
and lastly the higher, more humanized and spiritualized passion doubly
enriched by the ever-present haunting of 'the still, sad music of
humanity,' and by the
sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Mr Bridges finds Wordsworth's conception of these three stages more or
less accurately paralleled in various passages of Keats's _Sleep and
Poetry_. One passage which he quotes, that in which Keats figures human
life under the string of joyous images beginning, 'A pigeon tumbling in
clear summer air', seems to me irrelevant, as being simply the answer of
the poet's soul to certain melancholy promptings of its own. On the
other hand there certainly is something that reminds us of Wordsworth's
three stages in Keats's repeated indication of the ascending scale of
theme and temper along which he hopes to work. And his long figurative
passage beginning--
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life--
may fairly, at its outset, be compared with Wordsworth's final stage:
only, as I have asked the reader to note, the procession of symbolic and
enigmatic forms and actions which Keats summons up before our mind's
eye, so far from having any fixed or increasing character of pensiveness
or gravity, winds up with a figure of sheer animal happiness and joy of
life.
Mr Bridges further notes, very justly, the striking contrast between the
methods of the elder and the younger poet in these passages, defining
Wordsworth's as a subjective and Keats's as an objective method. I
should be inclined to describe the same difference in another way, and
to say that both by gift and purpose it was the part of Wordsworth to
meditate and expound, while the part of Keats was to imagine and evoke.
Wordsworth, bringing strong powers of abstract thinking to bear on his
intense and intensely realized personal experience, expounds the
spiritual relations of man to nature as he conceives them, sometimes, as
in _Tintern Abbey_ and many passages of _The Prelude_ and _Excursion_,
with more revealing insight and a more exalted passion than any other
poet has attained; sometimes, alas! quite otherwise, when his passion
has subsided, and he must needs to go back upon his experiences and
droningly and flatly analyse and explain them. Keats, on the other hand,
had a mind constitutionally unapt for abstract thinking. When he
conceives or wishes to express general ideas, his only way of doing so
is by calling up, from the multitudes of concrete images with which his
memory and imagination are haunted, such as strike him as fitted by
their colour and significance, their quality of association and
suggestion, to stand for and symbolize the abstractions working in his
mind; and in this concrete and figurative fashion he will be found, by
those who take the pains to follow him, to think coherently and
purposefully enough. Again, Keats's sense of personal identity was ever
ready to be dissolved and carried under by the strength of his
imaginative sympathies. It is not the effect of nature on his personal
self that he realizes and ponders over; what he does is with
ever-participating joy and instantaneous instinct to go out into the
doings of nature and lose himself in them. In the result he neither
strives for or attains, as Mr Bridges truly points out, the sheer
intellectual lucidity which Wordsworth in his most impassioned moments
never loses. But as, in regard to nature, Wordsworth's is the genius of
luminous exposition, so Keats's, even among the immaturities of his
first volume, is the genius of living evocation.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The lines I mean are--
This canopy mark: 'tis the work of a fay;
Beneath its rich shade did King Oberon languish,
When lovely Titania was far, far away,
And cruelly left him to sorrow, and anguish.
Shakespeare's hint for his Oberon and Titania was taken, as is well
known, from the French prose romance _Huon of Bordeaux_ translated by
Lord Berners. The plot of Wieland's celebrated poem is founded
entirely on the same romance. With its high-spiced blend of the
marvellous and the voluptuous, the cynically gay and the heavily
moral and pathetic, it had a considerable vogue in Sotheby's
translation (published 1798) and played a part in the English
romantic movement of the time. There are several passages in Keats,
notably in _The Cap and Bells_, where I seem to catch a strain
reminiscent of this _Oberon_, and one instance where a definite
phrase from it seems to have lingered subconsciously in his memory
and been turned to gold, thus:--
Oft in this speechless language, glance on glance,
When mute the tongue, how voluble the heart!
_Oberon_, c. vi, st. 17.
No utter'd syllable, or woe betide!
But to her heart her heart was voluble.
_The Eve of St Agnes_, st. 23.
[2] March 1816 according to Woodhouse.
[3] _The Prelude_, book v.
[4] See above, p. 68.
[5] Particularly Sonnet XII:--
Voi che portate la sembianza umile,
Cogli occhi bassi mostrando dolore.
It would have been easy to suppose that Keats had learnt something of
the _Vita Nuova_ through Leigh Hunt: but they were not yet acquainted
when he wrote the Leander sonnet, so that the resemblance is most
likely accidental.
[6] In the earlier editions this sonnet is headed _On a picture of
Leander_. A note of Woodhouse (Houghton MSS., Transcripts III) puts
the matter right and gives the date. Which particular Leander gem of
Tassie's Keats had before him it is impossible to tell. The general
catalogue of Tassie's reproductions gives a list of over sixty
representing Leander swimming either alone or with Hero looking down
at him from her tower. Most of them were not from true antiques but
from later imitations.
[7] Here, for instance, are verses of Keats that have often been
charged with Cockneyism and Huntism:--
And revelled in a chat that ceased not
When at nightfall among our books we got.
The silence when some rimes are coming out,
And when they're come, the very pleasant rout.
Well, but had not Drayton written in his _Epistle to Henry
Reynolds_?--
My dearly lovèd friend how oft have we
In winter evenings (meaning to be free)
To some well-chosen place used to retire,
And there with moderate meat, and wine, and fire,
Have past the hour contentedly with chat,
Now talked of this and then discoursed of that,
Spoke our own verses 'twixt ourselves, if not
Other men's lines, which we by chance had got.
And Milton in the _Vacation Exercise_?--
I have some lively thoughts that rove about,
And loudly knock to have their passage out.
[8] It is to be remembered that in his famous volume of 1820 Keats
prints first the poem he had last written, _Lamia_.
[9] So Wordsworth in his famous sonnet:--
This sea that bares its bosom to the moon.
[10] In Lord Houghton's and nearly all editions of Keats, including,
I am sorry to say, my own, this phrase has been corrected, quite
without cause, into the trite 'ugly cubs.'
CHAPTER V
APRIL-DECEMBER 1817: WORK ON _ENDYMION_
'Poems' fall flat--Reviews by Hunt and others--Change of
publishers--New friends: Bailey and Woodhouse--Begins _Endymion_ at
Carisbrooke--Moves to Margate--Hazlitt and Southey--Hunt and
Haydon--Ambition and self-doubt--Stays at Canterbury--Joins brothers
at Hampstead--Dilke and Brown--Visits Bailey at Oxford--Work on
_Endymion_--Bailey's testimony--Talk on Wordsworth--Letters from
Oxford--To his sister Fanny--To Jane and J.H. Reynolds--Return to
Hampstead--Friends at loggerheads--Stays at Burford
Bridge--Correspondence--Confessions--Speculations--Imagination and
truth--Composes various lyrics--'O love me truly'--'In drear-nighted
December'--Dryden and Swinburne--_Endymion_ finished--An Autumnal
close--Return to Hampstead.
Keats's first volume had been launched, to quote the words of Cowden
Clarke, 'amid the cheers and fond anticipations of all his circle.
Everyone of us expected (and not unreasonably) that it would create a
sensation in the literary world.' The magniloquent Haydon words these
expectations after his manner:--'I have read your _Sleep and Poetry_--it
is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from their occupations and
keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that _will_ follow.'
Sonnets poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only. I have
already quoted (p. 75) one which Reynolds, familiar with the contents of
the forthcoming book, wrote a few days before its publication to welcome
it and at the same time to congratulate Keats on his sonnet written in
Clarke's copy of the _Floure and the Lefe_. Leigh Hunt, always delighted
to repay compliment with compliment, replied effusively in kind to the
sonnet in which Keats had dedicated the volume to him. Richard
Woodhouse, of whom we shall soon hear more but who was as yet a
stranger, in the closing lines of a sonnet addressed to Apollo, welcomed
Keats as the last born son of that divinity and the herald of his return
to lighten the poetic darkness of the land:--
Have these thy glories perish'd? or in scorn
Of thankless man hath thy race ceased to quire?
O no! thou hear'st! for lo! the beamèd morn
Chases our night of song: and, from the lyre
Waking long dormant sounds, Keats, thy last born,
To the glad realm proclaims the coming of his sire.
Sonnets are not often addressed by publishers to their clients: but one
has been found in the handwriting of Charles Ollier, and almost
certainly composed by him, expressing admiration for Keats's work. The
brothers Ollier, it will be remembered, were Shelley's publishers, and
for a while also Leigh Hunt's and Lamb's, and Charles was the
poetry-loving and enthusiastic brother of the two, and himself a writer
of some accomplishment in prose and verse. But in point of fact, outside
the immediate Leigh Hunt circle, the volume made extremely little
impression, and the public was as far as possible from being roused from
its occupations or made tremble. 'Alas!' continues Cowden Clarke, 'the
book might have emerged in Timbuctoo with far stronger chance of fame
and appreciation. The whole community as if by compact, seemed
determined to know nothing about it.'
Clarke here somewhat exaggerates the facts. Leigh Hunt kept his own
review of the volume back for some three months, very likely with the
just idea that praise from him might prejudice Keats rather than serve
him. At length it appeared, in three numbers of the _Examiner_ for June
and July, the first number setting forth the aims and tendencies of the
new movement in poetry with a conscious clearness such as to those
taking part in a collective, three-parts instinctive effort of the kind
comes usually in retrospect only and not in the thick of the struggle.
In the second and third notices Hunt speaks of the old graces of poetry
reappearing, warns 'this young writer of genius' against
disproportionate detail and a too revolutionary handling of metre, and
after quotation winds up by calling the volume 'a little luxuriant heap
of
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.'
Two at least of the established critical reviews noticed the book at
length, Constable's _Scots and Edinburgh Magazine_, and the _Eclectic
Review_, the chief organ of lettered nonconformity, owned and edited by
the busy dissenting poet and bookseller Josiah Conder. Both criticisms
are of the preaching and admonishing kind then almost universally in
fashion. The Scottish reviewer recognizes in the new poet a not wholly
unsuccessful disciple of Spenser, but warns him against 'the appalling
doom which awaits the faults of mannerism or the ambition of a sickly
refinement,' and with reference to his association with the person and
ideas of Hazlitt and Hunt declares that 'if Mr Keats does not forthwith
cast off the uncleanness of this school, he will never make his way to
the truest strain of poetry in which, taking him by himself, it appears
he might succeed.' The preachment of the _Eclectic_ is still more
pompous and superior. There are mild words of praise for some of the
sonnets, but none for that on Chapman's Homer. _Sleep and Poetry_,
declares the critic, would seem to show of the writer that 'he is indeed
far gone, beyond the reach of the efficacy of either praise or censure,
in affectation and absurdity. Seriously, however, we regret that a young
man of vivid imagination and fine talents should have fallen into so bad
hands as to have been flattered into the resolution to publish verses,
of which a few years hence he will be glad to escape from the
remembrance.'
Notices such as this could not help a new writer to fame or his book to
sale. But before they appeared Keats and his brothers, or they for him,
had begun to fret at the failure of the volume and to impute it, as
authors and their friends will, to some mishandling by the publishers.
George in John's absence wrote to the Olliers taking them to task pretty
roundly, and received the often-quoted reply drafted, let us hope, not
by the sonneteer but by James Ollier, his business brother, and alleging
of the work that--
By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us
have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many
cases offered to take it back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule
which has, time after time, been showered upon it. In fact, it was
only on Saturday last that we were under the mortification of having
our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman, who
told us he considered it 'no better than a take in.'
Meanwhile Keats had found other publishers ready to take up his next
work, and destined to become his staunch and generous friends. These
were Messrs Taylor and Hessey of 93 Fleet Street. John Taylor, the chief
partner, was a man of high character and considerable attainments, who
had come up from Nottinghamshire to open a business in London ten years
earlier. He was already noted as an authority on Junius and was to be a
little later the editor as well as publisher of the _London Magazine_,
and the good friend and frequent entertainer (in the back parlour of the
publishing house in Fleet Street) of his most distinguished
contributors. How and through whom Keats was introduced to his firm is
not quite clear: probably through Benjamin Bailey, a new acquaintance
whom we know to have been a friend of Taylor's. Bailey was an Oxford man
five years older than Keats. He had been an undergraduate of Trinity and
was now staying up at Magdalen Hall to read for orders. He was an ardent
student of poetry and general literature as well as of theology, a
devout worshipper of Milton, and scarcely less of Wordsworth, with whom
he had some personal acquaintance. Of his appetite for books Keats wrote
when they had come to know each other well: 'I should not like to be
pages in your way; when in a tolerably hungry mood you have no mercy.
Your teeth are the Rock Tarpeian down which you capsize epic poems like
mad. I would not for forty shillings be Coleridge's Lays [i.e. _Lay
Sermons_] in your way.' Bailey was intimate with John Hamilton Reynolds
and his family, and at this time a suitor for the hand of his sister
Marianne. In the course of the winter 1816-17 Reynolds had written to
him enthusiastically of Keats's poetical promise and personal charm.
When at the beginning of March Keats's volume came out, Bailey was much
struck, and on a visit to London called to make the new poet's
acquaintance. Though it was not until a few months later that this
acquaintance ripened into close friendship, it may well have been Bailey
who recommended Keats and Taylor to each other.
Relations of business or friendship with Taylor necessarily involved
relations with Richard Woodhouse, a lettered and accomplished young
solicitor of twenty-nine who was an intimate friend of Taylor's and at
this time apparently the regular reader and adviser to the firm.
Woodhouse was sprung from an old landed stock in Herefordshire, some of
whose members were now in the wine-trade (his father, it seems, was
owner or part owner of the White Hart at Bath). He had been educated at
Eton but not at the university: his extant correspondence, as well as
notes and version-books in his hand, show him to have been a good
linguist in Spanish and Italian and a man of remarkably fine literary
taste and judgment. He afterwards held a high position as a solicitor
and was one of the founders of the Law Life Insurance Society.
These three new friendships, with Benjamin Bailey, John Taylor, and
Richard Woodhouse, formed during the six weeks between the publication
of his book (March 3) and the mid-April following, turned out to be
among the most valuable of Keats's life, and were the best immediate
results the issue of his first volume brought him. During this interval
he and his brothers were lodging at 17 Cheapside, having left their old
quarters in the Poultry. Some time in March it was decided, partly on
Haydon's urging, that John should for the sake of quiet and
self-improvement go and spend some time by himself in the country, and
try to get to work upon his great meditated _Endymion_ poem. He writes
as much to Reynolds, concluding with an adaptation from Falstaff
expressive of anxiety for the health of some of those dear to
him--probably his brother Tom and James Rice:--
My brothers are anxious that I should go by myself into the
country--they have always been extremely fond of me, and now that
Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone to
improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me
continually for a great good which I hope will follow. So I shall soon
be out of Town. You must soon bring all your present troubles to a
close, and so must I, but we must, like the Fox, prepare for a fresh
swarm of flies. Banish money--Banish sofas--Banish Wine--Banish Music;
but right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish
Health and banish all the world.
On the 14th of April Keats took the night mail for Southampton, whence
he writes next day a lively letter to his brothers. By the 17th, having
looked at Shanklin and decided against it, he was installed in a lodging
at Carisbrooke. Writing to Reynolds he gives the reasons for his choice,
mentioning at the same time that he is feeling rather nervous from want
of sleep, and enclosing the admirable sonnet _On the Sea_ which he has
just composed--
It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, etc.--
It was the intense haunting of the lines in the scene on Dover Cliff in
_King Lear_ beginning 'Do you not hear the sea,' which moved him, he
says, to this effort. He was reading and re-reading his Shakespeare with
passion, and phrases from the plays come up continually in his letters,
not only, as in the following extract, in the form of set quotations,
but currently, as though they were part of his own mind and being.
Having found in the lodging-house passage an engraved head of
Shakespeare which pleased him and hung it up in his room (his landlady
afterwards made him a present of it), he bethinks him of the approaching
anniversary, April 23:--
I'll tell you what--on the 23d was Shakespeare born. Now if I should
receive a letter from you, and another from my Brothers on that day
'twould be a parlous good thing. Whenever you write say a word or two
on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you,
which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the
same Play forty times--for instance, the following from the Tempest
never struck me so forcibly as at present,
Urchins
_Shall, for the vast of night that they may work_,
All exercise on thee--
How can I help bringing to your mind the line--
In the dark backward and abysm of time.
I find I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal Poetry--half the
day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has
made me a Leviathan I had become all in a Tremble from not having
written anything of late--the Sonnet over-leaf did me good. I slept
the better last night for it--this Morning, however, I am nearly as
bad again. Just now I opened Spenser, and the first Lines I saw were
these--
The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought,
And is with child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest until it forth have brought
Th' eternal brood of glory excellent.
'I shall forthwith begin my _Endymion_,' he adds, and looks forward to
reading some of it out, when his correspondent comes to visit him, in a
nook near the castle which he has already marked for the purpose.
But Haydon's prescription of solitude turned out the worst Keats could
well have followed in the then state of his mind, fermenting with a
thousand restless thoughts and inchoate imaginations and with the
feverish conflict between ambition and self-distrust. The result at any
rate was that he passed the time, to use his own words, 'in continual
burning of thought, as an only resource,' and what with that and lack of
proper food felt himself after a week or ten days 'not over capable in
his upper stories' and in need of change and companionship. He made
straight for his last year's lodging at Margate and got Tom to join him
there. Thence in the second week of May he writes a long letter to Hunt
and another to Haydon. To Hunt he criticizes some points in the last
number of the _Examiner_, and especially, in his kind-hearted,
well-conditioned way, deprecates a certain vicious allusion to grey
hairs in an attack of Hazlitt upon Southey. Later on we shall have to
tell of the critical savagery of _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_, now
long since branded and proverbial. But it should be borne in mind, as it
by no means always is, that the Tories were far from having the savagery
to themselves. When Hazlitt, for one, chose to strike on the liberal
side, he could match Gifford or Lockhart or Wilson or Maginn with their
own weapons. To realize the controversial atmosphere of the time, here
is a passage, and not the fiercest, from the Hazlitt article in which
Keats found too venomous a sting. Southey's first love, rails Hazlitt,
had been the Republic, his second was Legitimacy, 'her more fortunate
and wealthy rival':--
He is becoming uxorious in his second matrimonial connection; and
though his false Duessa has turned out a very witch, a murderess, a
sorceress, perjured, and a harlot, drunk with insolence, mad with
power, a griping rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton,
malicious, not sparing steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her
ends--bringing famine, pestilence, and death in her train--infecting
the air with her thoughts, killing the beholders with her looks,
claiming mankind as her property, and using them as her
slaves--driving every thing before her, and playing the devil wherever
she comes, Mr Southey sticks to her in spite of everything, and for
very shame lays his head in her lap, paddles with the palms of her
hands, inhales her hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in
her ears, calls her little fondling names, Religion, Morality, and
Social Order, takes for his motto,
Be to her faults a little blind,
Be to her virtues very kind--
sticks close to his filthy bargain, and will not give her up, because
she keeps him, and he is down in her will. Faugh!
It is fair to note that the mistress thus depicted as Southey's is an
allegorical being, while the Blackwood scurrilities were often directly
personal.
After asking how Hunt's own new poem, _The Nymphs_, is getting on, Keats
tells how he has been writing some of _Endymion_ every day the last
fortnight, except travelling days, and how thoughts of the greatness of
his ambition and the uncertainty of his powers have thrown him into a
fit of gloom; hinting at such moods of bleak and blank despondency as we
shall find now and again figuratively described in the text of
_Endymion_ itself.
I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other
men, seeing how great a thing it is,... that at last the idea has
grown so monstrously beyond my seeming power of attainment that the
other day I nearly consented with myself to drop into a Phaeton ... I
see nothing but continual uphill journeying. Now is there anything
more unpleasant than to be so journeying and to miss the goal at last?
But I intend to whistle all those cogitations into the sea, where I
hope they will breed storms enough to block up all exit from Russia.
Does Shelley go on telling strange stories of the deaths of kings?[1]
Tell him there are strange stories of the deaths of poets. Some have
died before they were conceived.
The same evening Keats begins to answer a letter of encouragement and
advice he had just had from Haydon. This is the letter of Haydon's from
which I have already quoted the passage about the efficacy of prayer as
Haydon had experienced it. Perfectly sincere and genuinely moved, he can
never for a minute continuously steer clear of rant and fustian and
self-praise at another's expense.
Never despair, he goes on, while the path is open to you. By habitual
exercise you will have habitual intercourse and constant
companionship; and at every want turn to the Great Star of your hopes
with a delightful confidence that will never be disappointed. I love
you like my own brother: Beware, for God's sake, of the delusions and
sophistications that are ripping up the talents and morality of our
friend.[2] He will go out of the world the victim of his own weakness
and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of his
enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to
support injured by his own neglect of character. I wish you would come
up to town for a day or two that I may put your head in my picture. I
have rubbed in Wordsworth's, and advanced the whole. God bless you, my
dear Keats! do not despair; collect incident, study character, read
Shakespeare, and trust in Providence, and you will do, you must.
Keats in answer quotes the opening speech of the King in _Love's
Labour's Lost_,--
Let Fame, that all pant after in their lives
Live registered upon our brazen tombs, etc.,
saying that he could not bear to think he had not the right to couple
his own name with Haydon's in such a forecast, and acknowledging the
occasional moods of depression which have put him into such a state of
mind as to read over his own lines and hate them, though he has picked
up heart again when he found some from Pope's Homer which Tom read out
to him seem 'like Mice' to his own. He takes encouragement also from the
notion that has visited him lately of some good genius--can it be
Shakespeare?--presiding over him. Continuing the next day, he is
downhearted again at hearing from George of money difficulties actual
and prospective. 'You tell me never to despair--I wish it was as easy
for me to deserve the saying--truth is I have a horrid morbidity of
Temperament which has shown itself at intervals it is I have no doubt
the greatest Enemy and stumbling block I have to fear--I may even say it
is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.' Then referring to
Haydon's warning in regard to Hunt, he goes half way in agreement and
declares he would die rather than be deceived about his own achievements
as Hunt is. 'There is no greater sin after the seven deadly,' he says,
'than to flatter oneself into the idea of being a great poet: the
comfort is, such a crime must bring its own penalty, and if one is a
self-deluder indeed accounts must one day be balanced.'
In the same week, moved no doubt by the difficulties George had
mentioned about touching the funds due from their grandmother's estate,
Keats writes to Taylor and Hessey, in a lively and familiar strain
showing the terms of confidence on which he already stood with them,
asking them to advance him an instalment of the agreed price for
_Endymion_. He mentions in this letter that he is tired of Margate (he
had already to another correspondent called it a 'treeless affair') and
means to move to Canterbury. At this point there occurs an unlucky gap
in Keats's correspondence. We know that he and Tom went to Canterbury
from Margate as planned, but we do not know exactly when, nor how long
he stayed there, nor what work he did (except that he was certainly
going on with the first book of _Endymion_), nor what impressions he
received. It was his first visit to a cathedral city, and few in the
world, none in England, are more fitted to impress. Chichester and
Winchester he came afterwards to know, Winchester well and with
affection; but it was with thoughts of Canterbury in his mind that he
planned, some two years later, first a serious and then a frivolous
verse romance having an English cathedral town for scene (_The Eve of St
Mark_, _The Cap and Bells_). The heroine of both was to have been a
maiden of Canterbury called Bertha; not, of course, the historic
Frankish princess Bertha, daughter of Haribert and wife of Ethelbert
king of Kent, who converted her husband and prepared his people for
Christianity before the landing of Saint Augustin, and who sleeps in the
ancient church of Saint Martin outside the walls: not she, but some
damsel of the city, named after her in later days, whom Keats had heard
or read of or invented,--I would fain know which; but I have found no
external evidence of his studies or doings during this spring stay at
Canterbury, and his correspondence is, as I have said, a blank.
Some time in June he returned and the three brothers were together
again: not now in City lodgings but in new quarters to which they had
migrated in Well Walk, Hampstead. Their landlord was one Bentley the
postman, with whom they seem to have got on well except that Keats
occasionally complains of the 'young carrots,' his children, now for
making a 'horrid row,' now for smelling of damp worsted stockings. The
lack of letters continues through these first summer months at
Hampstead. The only exception is a laughingly apologetic appeal to his
new publishers for a further advance of money, dated June 10th and
ending with the words,--'I am sure you are confident of my
responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me.'
For the rest, indirect evidence allows us to picture Keats in these
months as working regularly at _Endymion_, having now reached the second
book, and as living socially, not without a certain amount of convivial
claret-drinking and racket, in the company of his brothers and of his
friends and theirs. Leigh Hunt was still close by in the Vale of Health,
and both in his circle and in Haydon's London studio Keats was as
welcome as ever. Reynolds and Rice were still his close intimates, and
Reynolds's sisters in Lamb's Conduit Street almost like sisters of his
own. He was scarcely less at home in the family of his sister-in-law
that was to be, Georgiana Wylie. The faithful Severn and the faithful
Haslam came up eagerly whenever they could to join the Hampstead party.
An acquaintance he had already formed at Hunt's with the Charles Dilkes
and their friend Charles Brown, who lived as next-door neighbours at
Wentworth Place, a double block of houses of their own building in a
garden at the foot of the Heath, now ripened into friendship: that with
Dilke rapidly, that with Brown, a Scotsman who by his own account held
cannily aloof from Keats at first for fear of being thought to push,
more slowly.
Charles Wentworth Dilke, by profession a clerk in the Navy Pay Office,
by predilection a keen and painstaking literary critic and antiquary,
had been stimulated by the charm of Lamb's famous volume of _Specimens_
to work at the old English dramatic poets, and had recently (being now
twenty-seven) brought out a set of volumes in continuation of Dodsley's
_Old Plays_. In matters political and social he was something of a
radical doctrinaire and 'Godwin-perfectibility man' (the label is
Keats's), loving decision and positiveness in all things and being
therein the very opposite of Keats, who by rooted instinct as well as
choice allowed his mind to cherish uncertainties and to be a
thoroughfare for all thoughts (the phrase is again his own). There were
many but always friendly discussions between Keats and Dilke, and their
mutual regard never failed. Charles Brown, Dilke's contemporary,
schoolfellow, and close friend, was a man of Scottish descent born in
Lambeth, who had in early youth joined a business set up by an elder
brother in Petersburg. The business quickly failing, he had returned to
London and after some years of struggle inherited a modest competence
from another brother. A lively, cultivated, moderately successful
amateur in literature, journalism, and drama, he was in person bald and
spectacled, and portly beyond his years though active and robust; in
habits much of a trencher-man ('a huge eater' according to the
abstemious Trelawny) and something of a _viveur_ within his means;
exactly strict in money matters, but otherwise far from a precisian in
life or conversation; an ardent friend and genial companion, though
cherishing some fixed unreasonable aversions: in a word, a truly
Scottish blend of glowing warm-heartedness and 'thrawn' prejudice, of
frank joviality and cautious dealing.
It was in these same weeks of June or July 1817, soon after the
beginning of the Oxford vacation, that Benjamin Bailey again came to
town and sought after and learned to delight in Keats's company. He
meant to go back and read at Oxford for the latter part of the vacation,
and invited Keats to spend some weeks with him there. Keats accepted,
and the visit, lasting from soon after mid August until the end of
September, proved a happiness alike to host and guest. At this point
our dearth of documents ceases. Bailey's memoranda, though not put on
paper till thirty years later, are vivid and informing, and Keats's own
correspondence during the visit is fairly full. I will take Bailey's
recollections first, and give them in his own words, seeing that they
paint the writer almost as well as his subject; omitting only passages
that seem to drag or interrupt. First comes the impression Keats made on
him at the time of their introduction in the spring, and then his
account of the days they spent together in Oxford.
I was delighted with the naturalness and simplicity of his character,
and was at once drawn to him by his winning and indeed affectionate
manner towards those with whom he was himself pleased. Nor was his
personal appearance the least charm of a first acquaintance with the
young poet. He bore, along with the strong impress of genius, much
beauty of feature and countenance. His hair was beautiful--a fine
brown, rather than auburn, I think, and if you placed your hand upon
his head, the silken curls felt like the rich plumage of a bird. The
eye was full and fine, and softened into tenderness, or beamed with a
fiery brightness, according to the current of his thoughts and
conversation. Indeed the form of his head was like that of a fine
Greek statue:--and he realized to my mind the youthful Apollo, more
than any head of a living man whom I have known.
At the commencement of the long vacation I was again in London, on my
way to another part of the country: and it was my intention to return
to Oxford early in the vacation for the purpose of reading. I saw much
of Keats. And I invited him to return with me to Oxford, and spend as
much time as he could afford with me in the silence and solitude of
that beautiful place during the absence of the numerous members and
students of the University. He accepted my offer, and we returned
together. I think in August 1817. It was during this visit, and in my
room, that he wrote the third book of _Endymion_.... His mode of
composition is best described by recounting our habits of study for
one day during the month he visited me at Oxford. He wrote, and I
read, sometimes at the same table, and sometimes at separate desks or
tables, from breakfast to the time of our going out for
exercise,--generally two or three o'clock. He sat down to his
task,--which was about 50 lines a day,--with his paper before him, and
wrote with as much regularity, and apparently as much ease, as he
wrote his letters.... Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task,
but not often: and he would make it up another day. But he never
forced himself. When he had finished his writing for the day, he
usually read it over to me: and he read or wrote letters until we went
for a walk. This was our habit day by day. The rough manuscript was
written off daily, and with few erasures.
I remember very distinctly, though at this distance of time, his
reading of a few passages; and I almost think I hear his voice, and
see his countenance. Most vivid is my recollection of the following
passage of the finest affecting story of the old man, Glaucus, which
he read to me immediately after its composition:--
The old man raised his hoary head and saw
The wildered stranger--seeming not to see,
The features were so lifeless. Suddenly
He woke as from a trance; his snow white brows
Went arching up, _and like two magic ploughs
Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large,
Which kept as fixedly as rocky marge,
Till round his withered lips had gone a smile._
The lines I have italicised, are those which then forcibly struck me
as peculiarly fine, and to my memory have 'kept as fixedly as rocky
marge.' I remember his upward look when he read of the 'magic
ploughs,' which in his hands have turned up so much of the rich soil
of Fairyland.
When we had finished our studies for the day we took our walk, and
sometimes boated on the Isis.... Once we took a longer excursion of a
day or two, to Stratford upon Avon, to visit the birthplace of
Shakespeare. We went of course to the house visited by so many
thousands of all nations of Europe, and inscribed our names in
addition to the 'numbers numberless' of those which literally
blackened the walls. We also visited the Church, and were pestered
with a commonplace showman of the place.... He was struck, I remember,
with the simple statue there, which, though rudely executed, we agreed
was most probably the best likeness of the many extant, but none very
authentic, of Shakespeare.
His enjoyment was of that genuine, quiet kind which was a part of his
gentle nature; deeply feeling what he truly enjoyed, but saying
little. On our return to Oxford we renewed our quiet mode of life,
until he finished the third Book of _Endymion_, and the time came that
we must part; and I never parted with one whom I had known so short a
time, with so much real regret and personal affection, as I did with
John Keats, when he left Oxford for London at the end of September
or the beginning of October 1817.
[Illustration: PL. IV
_Life-mask of Keats
From an electrotype in the National Portrait Gallery_]
Living as we did for a month or six weeks together (for I do not
remember exactly how long) I knew him at that period of his life,
perhaps as well as any one of his friends. There was no reserve of any
kind between us.... His brother George says of him that to his
brothers his temper was uncertain; and he himself confirms this
judgment of him in a beautiful passage of a letter to myself. But with
his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew. Gentleness was
indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or
insipidity, or want of spirit. Quite the contrary. 'He was gentle but
not fearful,' in the chivalric and moral sense of the term 'gentle.'
He was pleased with every thing that occurred in the ordinary mode of
life, and a cloud never passed over his face, except of indignation at
the wrongs of others.
His conversation was very engaging. He had a sweet toned voice, 'an
excellent thing' in _man_ as well as 'in woman....' In his letters he
talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his conversation.
On the contrary, he was uniformly the apologist for poor, frail human
nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man I ever knew,
especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or
oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden
and animated indignation. He had a truly poetic feeling for women; and
he often spoke to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from
him, with great delicacy and tenderness of affection. He had a soul of
noble integrity: and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his
character. Indeed his character was in the best sense manly.
Our conversation rarely or never flagged, during our walks, or
boatings, or in the evening. And I have retained a few of his opinions
on Literature and criticism which I will detail. The following passage
from Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality was deeply felt by Keats, who
however at this time seemed to me to value this great Poet rather in
particular passages than in the full-length portrait, as it were, of
the great imaginative and philosophic Christian Poet, which he really
is, and which Keats obviously, not long afterwards, felt him to be.
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
_High instincts, before which our mortal nature_
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprized.
The last lines he thought were quite awful in their application to a
guilty finite creature, like man, in the appalling nature of the
feeling which they suggested to a thoughtful mind. Again, we often
talked of that noble passage in the lines on _Tintern Abbey_:--
That blessed mood,
In which _the burthen of the mystery_,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.
And his references to this passage are frequent in his letters.--But
in those exquisite stanzas,
She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove,
ending,--
She lived unknown and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh,
_The difference to me_.
The simplicity of the last line he declared to be the most perfect
pathos.
Among the qualities of high poetic promise in Keats was, even at this
time, his correct taste. I remember to have been struck with this by
his remarks on that well known and often quoted passage of the
_Excursion_ upon the Greek Mythology--where it is said that
Fancy fetched
Even from the blazing chariot of the Sun
A beardless youth who touched a golden lute,
_And filled the illumined groves with ravishment_.
Keats said this description of Apollo should have ended at the 'golden
lute,' and have left it to the imagination to complete the picture,
_how_ he 'filled the illumined groves.' I think every man of taste
will feel the justice of the remark.
Every one now knows what was then known to his friends that Keats was
an ardent admirer of Chatterton. The melody of the verses of the
marvellous Boy who perished in his pride, enchanted the author of
_Endymion_. Methinks I now hear him recite, or _chant_, in his
peculiar manner, the following stanza of the Roundelay sung by the
minstrels of Ella:--
_Come with acorn cup and thorn_
Drain my hertys blood away;
Life and all its good I scorn;
Dance by night or feast by day.
The first line to his ear possessed the great charm. Indeed his sense
of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses; and
in none more than in numerous passages of his _Endymion_.
Another object of his enthusiastic admiration was the Homeric
character of Achilles--especially when he is described as 'shouting in
the trenches.' One of his favourite topics of discourse was the
principle of melody in verse, upon which he had his own notions,
particularly in the management of open and close vowels. I think I
have seen a somewhat similar theory attributed to Mr Wordsworth. But I
do not remember his laying it down in writing. Be this as it may,
Keats's theory was worked out by himself. It was, that the vowels
should be so managed as not to clash one with another, so as to hear
the melody,--and yet that they should be interchanged, like differing
notes of music to prevent monotony....[3]
Bailey here tries to reconstruct and illustrate from memory Keats's
theory of vowel sounds, but his attempt falters and breaks down.
Keats's own first account of himself from Oxford is in a letter of
September 5th to the Reynolds sisters, then on holiday at Littlehampton:
a piece of mere lively foolery and rattle meant to amuse, in a taste
which is not that of to-day. Five days later he writes the first of that
series of letters to his young sister Fanny which acquaints us with
perhaps the most loveable and admirable parts of his character. She was
now just fourteen, and living under the close guardianship of the
Abbeys, who had put her to a boarding school at Walthamstow. Keats shows
a tender and considerate elder-brotherly anxiety to get into touch with
her and know her feelings and likings:--
Let us now begin a regular question and answer--a little pro and con;
letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your
favourite little wants and enjoyments, that I may meet them in a way
befitting a brother.
We have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on
things that I know not whether you prefer the _History of King Pepin_
to Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_--or _Cinderella_ and her glass
slipper to Moor's _Almanack_. However in a few Letters I hope I shall
be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your Pleasure. You
must tell me about all you read if it be only six Pages in a Week and
this transmitted to me every now and then will procure full sheets of
Writing from me pretty frequently.--This I feel as a necessity for we
ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that I may not only,
as you grow up love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my
dearest friend. When I saw you last I told you of my intention of
going to Oxford and 'tis now a Week since I disembark'd from his
Whipship's Coach the Defiance in this place. I am living in Magdalen
Hall on a visit to a young Man with whom I have not been long
acquainted, but whom I like very much--we lead very industrious
lives--he in general Studies and I in proceeding at a pretty good rate
with a Poem which I hope you will see early in the next year.--Perhaps
you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell you. Many
Years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his flocks on a
Mountain's Side called Latmus he was a very contemplative sort of a
Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little thinking
that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love
with him.--However so it was; and when he was asleep on the Grass she
used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long
time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms
to the top of that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming--but I
dare say you have read this and all the other beautiful Tales which
have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece. If you
have not let me know and I will tell you more at large of others quite
as delightful. This Oxford I have no doubt is the finest City in the
world--it is full of old Gothic
buildings--Spires--towers--Quadrangles--Cloisters--Groves etc and is
surrounded with more clear streams than ever I saw together. I take a
Walk by the Side of one of them every Evening and, thank God, we have
not had a drop of rain these days.
He goes on to tell her (herein echoing Hunt's opinion) how much better
it would be if Italian instead of French were taught everywhere in
schools, and winds up:--
Now Fanny you must write soon--and write all you think about, never
mind what--only let me have a good deal of your writing--You need not
do it all at once--be two or three or four days about it, and let it
be a diary of your Life. You will preserve all my Letters and I will
secure yours--and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have
a good Bundle--which, hereafter, when things may have strangely
altered and God knows what happened, we may read over together and
look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come.
Next follows another letter to Jane Reynolds; partly making fun, much
better fun than in the last, about Dilke's shooting and about the rare
havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke's garden were he at Hampstead:
partly grave in the high style into which he is apt at any moment to
change from nonsense:--
Now let us turn to the sea-shore. Believe me, my dear Jane, it is a
great happiness to see that you are, in this finest part of the year,
winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. In truth, the great
Elements we know of, are no means comforters: the open sky sits upon
our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of state--the
Earth is our throne and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before
it--able, like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost
the tempest cares of life. I have found in the ocean's music,--varying
(tho' self-same) more than the passion of Timotheus, an enjoyment not
to be put into words; and, 'though inland far I be,' I now hear the
voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your
sensations.
To Reynolds Keats writes on September the 21st:--
For these last five or six days, we have had regularly a Boat on the
Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number
than your eye-lashes. We sometimes skim into a Bed of rushes, and
there become naturalized river-folks,--there is one particularly nice
nest, which we have christened 'Reynolds's Cove,' in which we have
read Wordsworth, and talked as may be; I think I see you and Hunt
meeting in the Pit.--What a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would
give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. What evenings we might
pass with him, could we have him from Mrs H. Failings I am always
rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a
level.
Then follows a diatribe against the literary and intellectual
pretensions of certain sets of ladies, from which he has felt an
agreeable relief in some verses he has found on taking down from
Bailey's shelves the poems of Katherine Philips, 'the matchless Orinda.'
The verses which pleased him, truly of her best, are those _To M. A. at
parting_, and Keats goes on to copy them in full. Had Orinda been a
contemporary, he might not, indeed, have failed to recognize in her a
true woman of letters: but would he not also have found something to
laugh and chafe at in the poses of that high-flying coterie of mutual
admirers, Silvander and Poliarchus, Lucasia and Rosania and Palæmon, of
which she was the centre? This is one of the very few instances to be
found in Keats's work or correspondence of interest in the poetry of the
Caroline age.
Quite in the last days of his visit Keats, whose mind and critical power
had been growing while he worked upon _Endymion_, and whom moreover the
long effort of composition was clearly beginning to fatigue, confides to
Haydon his dissatisfaction with what he has done:--'You will be glad to
hear that within these last three weeks I have written 1000 lines--which
are the third Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I assure you
are very low--and I would write the subject thoroughly again--but I am
tired of it and think the time would be better spent in writing a new
Romance which I have in my eye for next summer--Rome was not built in a
day--and all the good I expect from my employment this summer is the
fruit of Experience which I hope to gather in my next Poem.'
Coming back in the first week of October to Hampstead, whither his
brothers had by this time also returned from a trip to Paris, Keats was
presently made uncomfortable by evidences of discord among his friends
and reports of what seemed like disloyalty on the part of one of them,
Leigh Hunt, to himself. Haydon had now left the studio in Great
Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove, and the Hunts, having come
away from Hampstead and paid a long late-summer visit to the Shelleys at
Marlow, were lodging near him in the same street. 'Everybody seems at
loggerheads,' Keats writes to Bailey. 'There's Hunt infatuated--there's
Haydon's picture in statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his
painting-room--criticizing every head most unmercifully.' Both Haydon
and Reynolds, he goes on, keep telling him tales of Hunt: How Hunt has
been talking flippantly and patronizingly of _Endymion_, saying that if
it is four thousand lines long now it would have been seven thousand but
for him, and giving the impression that Keats stood to him in the
relation of a pupil needing and taking advice. He declares in
consequence that he is quite disgusted with literary men and will never
know another except Wordsworth; and then, more coolly and sensibly,
'now, is not this a most paltry thing to think about?... This is, to be
sure, the vexation of a day, nor would I say so many words about it to
any but those whom I know to have my welfare and reputation at heart.'
During the six or seven autumn weeks spent at Hampstead after his return
from Oxford Keats was getting on, a little flaggingly, with the fourth
book of _Endymion_, besides writing an occasional lyric or two. Fresh
from the steadying and sympathetic companionship of Bailey, he keeps up
their intimacy by affectionate letters in which he discloses much of
that which lay deepest and was best in him. Writing in the first days of
November he congratulates Bailey on having got a curacy in Cumberland
and promises some day to visit him there; says he is in a fair way to
have finished _Endymion_ in three weeks; mentions an idea he has of
shipping his brother Tom, who has been looking worse, off to Lisbon for
the winter and perhaps going with him; and gets in by a side wind a
masterly criticism of Wordsworth's poem _The Gipsies_ and also of
Hazlitt's criticism of it in the _Round Table_. A fragment of another
letter, dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not for the
first time, to some failure of Haydon's to keep his word or take trouble
about a young man from Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to
receive as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested. The same
fragment records the appearance in _Blackwood_ (the _Endinburgh
Magazine_, as Keats calls it) of the famous first article of the Cockney
School series, attacking Hunt with a virulence far beyond even the
accustomed licence of the time, and seeming by the motto prefixed to it
(verses of Cornelius Webb coupling the names of Hunt and Keats) to
threaten a similar handling of Keats later on. 'I don't mind the thing
much,' says Keats, 'but if he should go to such lengths with me as he
has done with Hunt, I must infallibly call him to an Account if he be a
human being, and appears in Squares and Theatres, where we might
possibly meet--I don't relish his abuse.'
Some time about mid-November Keats, his health and strength being
steadier than in the spring, felt himself in the mood for a few weeks of
solitude and went to spend them at Burford Bridge Inn, in the beautiful
vale of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking. The outing, he wrote,
was intended 'to change the scene--change the air---and give me a spur
to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting 500 lines.' Keats dearly
loved a valley: he loved even the sound of the names denoting one. In
his marginal notes to a copy of _Paradise Lost_ he gave a friend we find
the following:--
'Or have ye chosen this place
After the toil of battle to repose
Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find
To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?'
There is cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is
of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with
the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of
Delphic Abstraction--a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being
reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the
most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry:--
'Others, more mild,
Retreated in a silent valley, sing
With notes angelical to many a harp
Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall
By doom of battle.'
How much of the charm is in the valley!
There, from his inmost self, speaks a poet of another poet, and as if to
and for poets, deep calling unto deep. But in his every-day vein of
speech or writing Keats was always reticent in regard to the scenery of
places he visited, disliking nothing more than the glib ecstasies of the
tourist in search of the picturesque. When he has looked round him in
his new quarters at Burford Bridge he says simply, writing to Reynolds
on November the 22nd, 'I like this place very much. There is Hill and
Dale and a little river. I went up Box Hill this evening after the
moon--"you a' seen the Moon"--came down and wrote some lines.' 'Whenever
I am separated from you,' he continues, 'and not engaged in a continuous
Poem, every letter shall bring you a lyric--but I am too anxious for you
to enjoy the whole to send you a particle:' the whole, that is, of
_Endymion_. The sequel shows him to be just as deep and ardent in the
study of Shakespeare as when he was beginning his poem at Carisbrooke in
the spring. 'I never found so many beauties in the Sonnets--they seem to
be full of fine things said unintentionally--in the intensity of working
out conceits:' and he goes on to quote passages and phrases both from
them and from _Venus and Adonis_. Next, with a sudden change of mind
about letting Reynolds see a sample of _Endymion_, 'By the Whim-King!
I'll give you a stanza, because it is not material in connexion, and
when I wrote it I wanted you to give your vote, pro or con.'--The stanza
he gives is from the song of the Constellations in the fourth book,
certainly one of the weakest things in the poem: pity Reynolds had not
been there indeed, to give his vote _contra_.
On the same day, November 22, Keats writes to Bailey a letter even
richer in contents and more self-revealing than this to Reynolds. It
gives the indispensable key both to much in his own character and much
of the deeper speculative and symbolic meanings underlying his work,
from _Endymion_ to the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Beginning with a wise and
tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble, and throwing out a passing
hint of the distinction between men of Genius, who have not, and men of
Power, who have, a proper individual self or determined character of
their own, Keats passes at the close to an illuminating self-confession
which is also a contrast between himself and his correspondent:--
You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly
happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked
out,--you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led
away--I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness--I look not for
it if it be not in the present hour,--nothing startles me beyond the
moment. The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow
come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the
gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having
befallen another is this--'Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the
pleasure of trying the resources of his Spirit'--and I beg now, my
dear Bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not
to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction--for I
assure you I sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or
affection during a whole Week--and so long this sometimes continues, I
begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other
times--thinking them a few barren Tragedy Tears.
Readers of _Endymion_ will recognize a symbolic embodiment of a mood
akin to this in the Cave of Quietude in the fourth book. But the great
value of the letter, especially great as a help to the study of
_Endymion_ in general, is in the long central passage setting forth his
speculations as to the relation of imagination to truth, meaning truth
ultimate or transcendental. He finds his clue in the eighth book of
_Paradise Lost_, where Adam, recounting to Raphael his first experiences
as new-created man, tells how twice over he fell into a dream and awoke
to find it true: his first dream thus confirmed in the result being how
'One of shape divine' took him by the hand and led him into the garden
of Paradise:[4] his second, how the same glorious shape came to him and
opened his side and from his rib fashioned a creature:
Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair,
That what seem'd fair in all the World, seem'd now
Mean, or in her sum'd up, in her contain'd
And in her looks, which from that time infus'd
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her Air inspir'd
The spirit of love and amorous delight.
She disappear'd, and left me dark, I wak'd
To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure:
When out of hope, behold her, not far off,
Such as I saw her in my dream, adorn'd
With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow
To make her amiable.[5]
It was no doubt this second of Adam's dreams that was chiefly in Keats's
mind. His way of explaining his speculations to his friend is quite
unstudied and inconsecutive; he is, as he says, 'continually running
away from the subject,' or shall we say letting the stream of his ideas
branch out into side channels from which he finds it difficult to come
back? But yet their main current and purport will be found not difficult
to follow, if only the reader will bear one thing well in mind: that
when Keats in this and similar passages speaks of 'Sensations' as
opposed to 'Thoughts' he does not limit the word to sensations of the
body, of what intensity or exquisiteness soever or howsoever
instantaneously transforming themselves from sensation into emotion:
what he means are intuitions of the mind and spirit as immediate as
these, as thrillingly convincing and indisputable, as independent of all
consecutive stages and formal processes of thinking: almost the same
things, indeed, as in a later passage of the same letter he calls
'ethereal musings.' And now let the poet speak for himself:--
O! I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of
your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am
certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections, and
the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must
be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same idea
of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime,
creative of essential Beauty. In a Word you may know my favourite
speculation by my first Book, and the little Song I sent in my last,
which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of
operating in these Matters. The Imagination may be compared to Adam's
dream, he awoke and found it truth:--I am more zealous in this affair,
because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be
known for truth by consecutive reasoning--and yet it must be. Can it
be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without
putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of
Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is 'a Vision in the form of
Youth,' a shadow of reality to come--and this consideration has
further convinced me,--for it has come as auxiliary to another
favourite speculation of mine,--that we shall enjoy ourselves
hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a
finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in
Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam's dream will
do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and its
empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and its spiritual
repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative Mind may have
its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming
continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness. To compare great
things with small, have you never, by being surprised with an old
Melody, in a delicious place by a delicious voice, _felt_ over again
your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on
your soul? Do you not remember forming to yourself the Singer's
face--more beautiful than it was possible, and yet, with the elevation
of the Moment, you did not think so? Even then you were mounted on the
Wings of Imagination, so high that the prototype must be
hereafter--that delicious face you will see.
There is one sentence in the above which gives us special matter for
regret. Keats speaks of 'the little Song I sent in my last, which is a
representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these
matters.' Such a song, if we had it, would doubtless put forth clearly
and melodiously in concrete imagery the ideas which Keats in his letter
tries to expound in the abstract language of which he is by nature so
much less a master. Of 'my last,' that is of his preceding letter to
Bailey, unhappily but a fragment is preserved, and the song must have
been lost with the sheet or sheets which went astray, seeing that none
of Keats's preserved lyrics can be held to answer to his account of this
one. His words have a further interest as proving that now in these days
of approaching winter, with his long poem almost finished, he allowed
himself to digress into some lyric experiments, as in its earlier stages
he had not done. External testimony and reasonable inference enable us
to identify some of these experiments. Two or three lightish
love-lyrics, whether impersonal or inspired by passing adventures of his
own, are among the number. That beginning 'Think not of it, sweet one,
so,' dates definitely from November 11, before he left Hampstead. To
nearly about the same time belongs almost certainly the very daintily
finished stanzas 'Unfelt, unheard, unseen,' which one at least of
Keats's subtlest critics[6] considers (I cannot agree with her) the
first of his technically faultless achievements. So also, I am
convinced, does that much less happily wrought thing, the little
love-plaint discovered only two years ago and beginning--
You say you love, but with a voice
Chaster than a nun's who singeth
The soft vespers to herself
When the chime-bell ringeth--
O love me truly!
You say you love; but with a smile
Cold as sunrise in September,
As you were St Cupid's nun,
And kept his week of Ember.
O love me truly!--
and so forth. Here again, it seems evident, we have an instance of an
echo from one of the old Elizabethan poets (this time an anonymous
song-writer) lingering like a chime in Keats's memory. Listen to the
first three stanzas of _A Proper Wooing Song_, written to the tune of
the _Merchant's Daughter_ and printed in Clement Robinson's _Handful of
Pleasant Delites_, 1584:--
Maide will ye loue me yea or no?
tell me the trothe and let me go.
It can be no lesse than a sinful deed,
trust me truly,
To linger a Louer that lookes to speede,
in due time duly.
You maides that thinke yourselves as fine,
as Venus and all the Muses nine:
The Father Himselfe when He first made man,
trust me truly,
Made you for his helpe when the world began,
in due time duly.
Then sith God's will was even so
why should you disdaine your Louer tho?
But rather with a willing heart,
loue him truly;
For in so doing you do your part
let reason rule ye.
The metrical form of Keats's verses is not, indeed, the same as that of
the Elizabethan song, but I think he must certainly have had the cadence
of its refrains more or less consciously in his mind's ear.[7]
A definite and dated case of a lyrical experiment suggested to Keats at
this time by an older model is the famous little 'drear-nighted
December' song in which he re-embodies, with new and seasonable imagery,
the ancient moral of the misery added to misery by the remembrance of
past happiness. This was composed, as Woodhouse on the express testimony
of Jane Reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same December,
1817, when Keats was finishing _Endymion_ at Burford Bridge. Any reader
familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the
overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun
to fringe the sluggish meanderings of the Mole, will realize how deeply
the sentiment of the scene and season has sunk into Keats's verse. Well
as the piece is known, I shall quote it entire, not in the form in which
it is printed in the editions, but in that in which alone it exists in
his own hand-writing and in the transcripts by his friends Woodhouse and
Brown[8]:--
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them,
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writh'd not at passed joy?
The feel of _not_ to feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.[9]
Keats's model in this instance is a song from Dryden's _Spanish Fryar_,
a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps
have taken the volume containing it from Bailey's shelves, as he took
the poems of Orinda? Here is a verse to show the tune as set by
Dryden:--
Farewell ungrateful Traitor,
Farewell my perjured swain,
Let never injured creature
Believe a man again.
The pleasure of possessing
Surpasses all expressing,
But 'tis too short a blessing,
And Love too long a pain.
Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be
so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if
the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as
much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture,--do readers
recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up
half a century later in the _Garden of Proserpine_?
But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what
was Keats's main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close
his eight months' task upon _Endymion_. In finishing the poem he was
only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening
lines at Carisbrooke:--
Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white,
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end.
The gold had almost all fallen: in the passage in which Keats makes
Endymion bid what he supposes to be his last farewell to his mortal love
it is the season itself, the season and the autumnal scene, which speak,
just as they spoke in the 'drear-nighted December' lyric:--
The Carian
No word return'd: both lovelorn, silent, wan,
Into the vallies green together went.
Far wandering, they were perforce content
To sit beneath a fair lone beechen tree;
Nor at each other gaz'd, but heavily
Por'd on its hazle cirque of shedded leaves.
and again:--
At this he press'd
His hands against his face, and then did rest
His head upon a mossy hillock green,
And so remain'd as he a corpse had been
All the long day; save when he scantly lifted
His eyes abroad, to see how shadows shifted
With the slow move of time,--sluggish and weary
Until the poplar tops, in journey dreary,
Had reach'd the river's brim. Then up he rose,
And slowly as that very river flows,
Walk'd towards the temple grove with this lament:
'Why such a golden eve? The breeze is sent
Careful and soft, that not a leaf may fall
Before the serene father of them all
Bows down his summer head below the west.
Now am I of breath, speech, and speed possest,
But at the setting I must bid adieu
To her for the last time. Night will strew
On the damp grass myriads of lingering leaves,
And with them shall I die; nor much it grieves
To die, when summer dies on the cold sward.'
That point about making, as it were, a dial-hand of a certain group of
poplars with their moving shadows would have a special local interest if
one could find the place which suggested it. The sun sets early in this
valley in the winter. I know not if there is any group of trees still
standing that could be watched thus lengthening out its afternoon shadow
to the river's edge.
Opposite the last line in the manuscript of _Endymion_ Keats wrote the
date November 28, whence it would appear that it had taken him some ten
days at most to complete the required five hundred lines. He did not
immediately leave Burford Bridge, but stayed on through the first week
or ten days of December, setting to work at once, it would appear, on
the revision of his long poem, and composing, we know, the
'drear-nighted December' lyric, and perhaps one or two others, before he
returned to the fraternal lodgings at Hampstead. The scheme of a winter
flight to Lisbon for the suffering Tom had been given up, and it had
been arranged instead that George should take him to spend some months
at Teignmouth. They were to be there by Christmas, and Keats timed his
return so as to be with them for a week or two at Hampstead before they
started. _Endymion_ was not published until the following April, but
inasmuch as with its completion there ends the first, the uncertain,
experimental, now rapturously and now despondently expectant phase of
Keats's mind and art, let us make this our opportunity for studying it.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Sad stories' in the original text of _Richard II_. The allusion
is to the well-known incident of Shelley alarming an old lady in a
stage coach by suddenly breaking out with this quotation. Whether
Keats had been in his company at the time we do not know.
[2] 'Our friend' of course is Leigh Hunt.
[3] Houghton MSS.
[4] _Paradise Lost_, viii, 288-311.
[5] _Ibid._ viii, 452-490.
[6] The late precociously gifted and prematurely lost Mary Suddard,
in _Essays and Studies_ (Cambridge, 1912).
[7] If it is objected that _The Handful of Pleasant Delites_ is an
excessively rare book, which Keats is not likely to have known, the
answer is that it had been reprinted three years earlier in
_Heliconia_, the great three-volume collection edited by Thomas Park;
and moreover that Park, one of the most zealous and learned of
researchers in the field of old English literature, had long been
living in Church Row, Hampstead, and both as neighbour and elder
fellow-worker can hardly fail to have been known to Dilke and his
circle.
[8] Crewe MSS.
[9] This poem was first printed posthumously in 1829: both in _The
Gem_, a periodical of the _Keepsake_ type then edited by Thomas Hood,
and in Galignani's collective edition of the poems of Coleridge,
Shelley, and Keats published the same year in Paris. In these and all
versions subsequently printed the first lines of stanzas I and II are
altered and read 'In a drear-nighted December,' and the fifth line is
made to run, 'To know the change and feel it.' The first line thus
gets two light syllables instead of one before the first stress,
giving a faint suggestion of a triple-time movement which certainly
does not hurt the metre. The new fifth line is to modern ears more
elegant than the original, as getting rid of the vulgar substantive
form 'feel' for feeling. But 'feel,' which after all had been good
enough for Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney, was to Keats and the
Leigh Hunt circle no vulgarism at all, it was a thing of every day
usage both in verse and prose. And does not the correction somewhat
blunt the point of Keats's meaning? To be emphatically aware of no
longer feeling a joy once felt is a pain that may indeed call for
steeling or healing, while to steel or heal a 'change' seems neither
so easy nor so needful: at all events the phrase is more lax. It may
be doubted whether the alterations are due to Keats at all and not to
someone (conceivably, in the case of _The Gem_, Thomas Hood) editing
him after his death. I should add, however, that I have found what
must perhaps be regarded as evidence that Keats did try various
versions of this final stanza, in the shape of another transcript
made in 1827 by a brother of his friend Woodhouse. In this version
the poem is headed _Pain of Memory_, an apt title, and while the
first and second stanzas keep their original form, the third runs
quite differently, as follows:--
But in the Soul's December
The fancy backward strays,
And darkly doth remember
The hue of golden days,
In woe the thought appalling
Of bliss gone past recalling
Brings o'er the heart a falling
Not to be told in rhyme.
This can hardly be other than an alternative version tried by Keats
himself. The 'Fallings from us, vanishings' of Wordsworth's _Ode on
Intimations of Immortality_, may be responsible for the 'falling' in
the seventh line, and though 'the thought appalling' is a
common-place phrase little in Keats's manner, it is worth noting that
the word occurs in Bailey's report of his spoken comment on this very
passage of Wordsworth (see above, p. 146).
CHAPTER VI
_ENDYMION._--I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM
Invention and imagination--What the moon meant to Keats--Elizabethan
Precedents--Fletcher and Drayton--Drayton's two versions--Debt of
Keats to Drayton--Strain of allegory--The Soul's quest for
beauty--Phantasmagoric adventures--The four elements theory--Its
error--Book I. The exordium--The forest scene--Confession to
Peona--Her expostulation--Endymion's defence--The ascending scale--The
highest hope--Book II. The praise of love--Underworld marvels--The
awakening of Adonis--Embraces in the Jasmine Bower--The quest
renewed--New sympathies awakened--Book III. Exordium--Encounter with
Glaucus--Glaucus relates his doom--The predestined deliverer--The
deliverance--Meaning of the Parable--Its machinery explained--The
happy sequel--Book IV. Address to the Muse--The Indian damsel--An
ethereal flight--Olympian visions--Descent and
renunciation--Distressful farewells--The mystery solved--A chastened
victory--Above analysis justified.
Keats had long been in love with the Endymion story. The very music of
the name, he avers, had gone into his being. We have seen how in the
poem beginning 'I stood tiptoe,' finished at the end of 1816, he tried a
kind of prelude or induction to the theme, and how, laying this aside,
he determined to start fresh on a 'poetical romance' of Endymion on a
great scale. When in April 1817, six weeks after the publication of the
volume of _Poems_, he went off to the Isle of Wight to get firmly to
work on his new task, it is clear that he had its main outlines and
dimensions settled in his mind, but nothing more. He wrote to George
soon after his departure:--
As to what you say about my being a Poet, I can return no Answer but
by saying that the high Idea I have of poetical fame makes me think I
see it towering too high above me. At any rate, I have no right to
talk until _Endymion_ is finished, it will be a test, a trial of my
Powers of Imagination, and chiefly of my invention which is a rare
thing indeed--by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare
circumstance, and fill them with poetry--and when I consider that this
is a great task, and that when done it will take me but a dozen paces
towards the temple of fame--it makes me say--God forbid that I should
be without such a task! I have Heard Hunt say, and I may be asked--why
endeavour after a long Poem? To which I should answer, Do not the
Lovers of Poetry like to have a little Region to wander in, where they
may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many
are forgotten and found new in a second Reading.... Besides, a long
Poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar Star of
Poetry, as Fancy is the Sails--and Imagination the rudder.--Did our
great Poets ever write Short Pieces? I mean in the shape of Tales.
This same invention seems indeed of late years to have been forgotten
as a Poetical excellence--But enough of this, I put on no Laurels till
I shall have finished _Endymion_, and I hope Apollo is not angered at
my having made a Mockery at Hunt's--
In his reiterated insistence on Invention and Imagination as the prime
endowments of a poet, Keats closely echoes Joseph Warton's protest
uttered seventy years before: is this because he had read and remembered
it, or only because the same words came naturally to him in pleading the
same cause? When his task was finished he confessed, in the draft of a
preface afterwards cancelled,--'Before I began I had no inward feel of
being able to finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain.'
But so far as the scale of the poem was concerned he adhered almost
exactly to his original purpose, dividing it into four books and finding
in himself resources enough to draw them out, all except the first, to a
little over a thousand lines each.
Throughout Keats's work, the sources of his inspiration in his finest
passages can almost always be recognized as dual, some special joy in
the delights or sympathy with the doings of nature working together in
him with some special stimulus derived from books. Of such a dual kind
is the whole inspiration of _Endymion_. The poem is a joint outcome of
his intense, his abnormal susceptibility to the spell of moonlight and
of his pleasure in the ancient myth of the loves of the moon-goddess
Cynthia and the shepherd-prince Endymion[1] as made known to him through
the earlier English poets.
The moon was to Keats a power very different from what she has always
been to popular astrology and tradition. Traditionally and popularly she
was the governess of floods, the presiding planet of those that ply
their trade by sea, river, or canal, also of wanderers and vagabonds
generally: the disturber and bewilderer withal of mortal brains and
faculties, sending down upon men under her sway that affliction of
lunacy whose very name was derived from her. For Keats it was her
transmuting and glorifying power that counted, not her pallor but her
splendour, the magic alchemy exercised by her light upon the things of
earth, the heightened mystery, poetry, and withal unity of aspect which
she sheds upon them. He can never keep her praises long out of his early
poetry, and we have seen, in '_I stood tiptoe_,' what a range of
beneficent activities he attributes to her. Now, as he settles down to
work on _Endymion_, we shall find her, by reason of that special
glorifying and unifying magic of her light, become for him, at first
perhaps instinctively and unaware, but more and more consciously as he
goes on, a definite symbol of Beauty itself--what he calls in a letter
'the principle of Beauty in all things,' the principle which binds in a
divine community all such otherwise unrelated matters as those we shall
find him naming together as things of beauty in the exordium of his
poem. Hence the tale of the loves of the Greek shepherd-prince and the
moon-goddess turns under his hand into a parable of the adventures of
the poetic soul striving after full communion with this spirit of
essential Beauty.
As to the literary associations which drew Keats to the Endymion story,
there is scarce one of our Elizabethan poets but touches on it briefly
or at length. Keats was no doubt acquainted with the _Endimion_ of John
Lyly, an allegorical court comedy in sprightly prose which had been
among the plays edited, as it happened, by one of his new Hampstead
friends, Charles Dilke: but in it he could have found nothing to his
purpose. Marlowe is likely to have been in his mind, with
--that night-wandering, pale, and watery star,
When yawning dragons draw her thirling car
From Latmus' mount up to the gloomy sky,
Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty,
She proudly sits.
So will Shakespeare have been certainly, with the call--
Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion,
And would not be awaked,
uttered by Portia at the close of the most enchanting moonlight scene in
all literature. Scarcely less familiar to Keats will have been the
invocation near the end of Spenser's _Epithalamion_, or the reference to
'pale-changeful Cynthia' and her Endymion in Browne's _Britannia's
Pastorals_;[2] or those that recur once and again in the sonnets of
Drummond of Hawthornden, or those he would have remembered from the
masque in the _Maid's Tragedy_ of Beaumont and Fletcher, or in
translations of the love-elegies and heroical epistles of Ovid. But the
two Elizabethans, I think, who were chiefly in his conscious or
unconscious recollection when he meditated his theme are Fletcher and
Michael Drayton. Here is the fine Endymion passage, delightfully
paraphrased from Theocritus, and put into the mouth of the wanton Cloe,
by Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_, that tedious, absurd,
exquisitely written pastoral of which the measures caught and charmed
Keats's ear in youth as they had caught and charmed the ear of Milton
before him.
Shepherd, I pray thee stay, where hast thou been?
Or whither go'st thou? Here be Woods as green
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet,
As where smooth _Zephyrus_ plays on the fleet
Face of the curled Streams, with Flowers as many
As the young Spring gives, and as choise as any;
Here be all new Delights, cool Streams and Wells,
Arbors o'rgrown with Woodbinds, Caves, and Dells,
Chuse where thou wilt, whilst I sit by, and sing,
Or gather Rushes to make many a Ring
For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of Love,
How the pale _Phoebe_ hunting in a Grove,
First saw the Boy _Endymion_, from whose Eyes
She took eternal fire that never dyes:
How she convey'd him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the Mountain with her Brothers light,
To kiss her sweetest.
In regard to Drayton's handling of the story there is more to note. In
early life he wrote a poem in heroic couplets called _Endimion and
Phoebe_. This he never reprinted, but introduced passages from it into a
later piece in the same metre called the _Man in the Moone_. The volume
containing Drayton's earlier _Endimion and Phoebe_ became so rare that
when Payne Collier reprinted it in 1856 only two copies were known to
exist. It is unlikely that Keats should have seen either of these. But
he possessed of his own a copy of Drayton's poems in Smethwick's edition
of 1636 (one of the prettiest of seventeenth century books). The _Man in
the Moone_ is included in that volume, and that Keats was familiar with
it is evident. In it, as in the earlier version, but with a difference,
the poet, having enthroned his shepherd-prince beside Cynthia in her
kingdom of the moon, weaves round him a web of mystical disquisition and
allegory, in which popular fancies and superstitions are queerly jumbled
up with the then current conceptions of the science of astronomy and the
traditions of mediæval theology as to the number and order of the
celestial hierarchies. In Drayton's earlier poem all this is highly
serious and written in a rich and decorated vein of poetry intended, it
might seem, to rival Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_: in his later, where
the tale is told by a shepherd to his mates at the feast of Pan, the
narrator lets down his theme with a satiric close in the vein of Lucian,
recounting the human delinquencies nightly espied by Cynthia and her
lover from their sphere.
The particular points in Keats's _Endymion_ where I seem to find
suggestions from Drayton's _Man in the Moone_ are these. First the idea
of introducing the story with the feast of Pan,--but as against this it
may be said with truth that feasts of Pan are stock incidents in
Elizabethan masques and pastorals generally. Second, his sending his
hero on journeys beside or in pursuit of his goddess through manifold
bewildering regions of the earth and air: for this antiquity affords no
warrant, and the hint may have been partly due to the following passage
in Drayton (which is also interesting for its exceptionally breathless
and trailing treatment of the verse):--
Endymion now forsakes
All the delights that shepherds do prefer,
And sets his mind so gen'rally on her
That, all neglected, to the groves and springs,
He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings
(As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers,
Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers
The silver Naides bathe them in the brack.
Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back,
Amongst the blue Nereides; and when,
Weary of waters, goddess-like again
She the high mountains actively assays,
And there amongst the light Oriades,
That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort;
Sometimes amongst those that with them comport,
The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent;
And there she stays not; but incontinent
Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw,
And with Endymion pleased that she saw,
Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye,
Stripping the winds, beholding from the sky
The Earth in roundness of a perfect ball,--
the sequel is irrelevant, and the passage so loose in grammar and
construction that it matters not where it is broken off.
Thirdly, we have the curious invention of the magic robe of Glaucus in
Keats's third book. In it, we are told, all the rulers and all the
denizens of ocean are figured and indued with magic power to dwindle and
dilate before the beholder's eyes. Keats describes this mystic garment
in a dozen lines[3] which can scarcely be other than a summary and
generalized recollection of a long passage of eighty in which Drayton
describes the mantle of Cynthia herself, inwoven with figures of sea and
storm and shipwreck and sea-birds and of men fishing and fowling (crafts
supposed to be subject to the planetary influence of the moon) in tidal
or inland waters. And lastly, Keats in his second book has taken a
manifest hint from Drayton where he makes Venus say archly how she has
been guessing in vain which among the Olympian goddesses is Endymion's
lover.[4]
Not merely by delight in particular poets and familiarity with favourite
passages, but by rooted instinct and by his entire self-training, Keats
was beyond all his contemporaries,--and it is the cardinal fact to be
borne in mind about him,--the lineal descendant and direct heir of the
Elizabethans. The spirit of Elizabethan poetry was born again in him
with its excesses and defects as well as its virtues. One general
characteristic of this poetry is its prodigality and confusion of
incidental, irrelevant, and superfluous beauties, its lack, however much
it may revel in classical ideas and associations, of the classical
instinct for clarity, simplicity, and selection. Another (I speak
especially of narrative poetry) is its habitual wedding of allegory and
romance, its love of turning into parable every theme, other than mere
chronicle, which it touches. All the masters with whom Keats was at this
time most familiar--Spenser of course first and foremost, William Browne
and practically all the Spenserians,--were men apt to conceive alike of
Grecian myth and mediæval romance as necessarily holding moral and
symbolic under-meanings in solution. Again, it was from Ovid's
_Metamorphoses_, as Englished by that excellent Jacobean translator,
George Sandys, that Keats, more than from any other source, made himself
familiar with the details of classic fable; and Sandys, in the fine
Oxford folio edition of his book which we know Keats used, must needs
conform to a fixed mediæval and Renaissance tradition by 'mythologizing'
his text, as he calls it, with a commentary full not only of
illustrative parallel passages but of interpretations half rationalist,
half ethical, which Ovid never dreamt of. Neither must it be forgotten
that among Keats's own contemporaries Shelley had in his first important
poem, _Alastor_, set the example of embarking on an allegoric theme,
and one shadowing forth, as we shall find that _Endymion_ shadows forth
though on different lines, the adventures and experiences of the poetic
soul in man.
The bewildering redundance and intricacy of detail in _Endymion_ are
obvious, the presence of an underlying strain of allegoric or symbolic
meaning harder to detect. Keats's letters referring to his poem contain
only the slightest and rarest hints of the presence of such ideas in it,
and in the execution they are so little obtruded or even made clear that
they were wholly missed by two generations of his earlier readers. It is
only of late years that they have yielded themselves, and even now none
too definitely, to the scrutiny of students reading and re-reading the
poem by the light of incidental utterances in his earlier and later
poetry and in his miscellaneous letters. But the ideas are certainly
there: they account for and give interest to much that, taken as mere
narrative, is confusing or unpalatable: and the best way of finding a
clue through the mazes of the poem is by laying and keeping hold upon
them wherever we can.
For such a clue to serve the reader, he must have it in his hand from
the beginning. Let it be borne in mind, then, that besides the
fundamental idea of treating the passion of Endymion for Cynthia as a
type of the passion of the poetic soul for essential Beauty, Keats wrote
under the influence of two secondary moral ideas or convictions,
inchoate probably in his mind when he began but gaining definiteness as
he went on. One was that the soul enamoured of and pursuing Beauty
cannot achieve its quest in selfishness and isolation, but to succeed
must first be taken out of itself and purified by active sympathy with
the lives and sufferings of others: the other, that a passion for the
manifold separate and dividual beauties of things and beings upon earth
is in its nature identical with the passion for that transcendental and
essential Beauty: hence the various human love-adventures which befall
the hero in dreams or in reality, and seem to distract him from his
divine quest, are shown in the end to be in truth no infidelities but
only attractions exercised by his celestial mistress in disguise.
In devising the adventures of his hero in accordance with these leading
ideas, Keats works in part from his own mental experience. He weaves
into his tale, in terms always of concrete imagery, all the complex
fluctuations of joy and despondency, gleams of confident spiritual
illumination alternating with faltering hours of darkness and
self-doubt, which he had himself been undergoing since the ambition to
be a great poet seized him. He cannot refrain from also weaving in a
thousand and one irrelevant matters which the activity and ferment of
his young imagination suggest, thus continually confusing the main
current of his narrative and breaking the coherence of its symbolism. He
draws out 'the one bare circumstance,' to use his own phrase, of the
story into an endless chain of intricate and flowery narrative, leading
us on phantasmagoric journeyings under the bowels of the earth and over
the floor of ocean and through the fields of air. The scenery, indeed,
is often not merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy: there is
something of Oriental bewilderment--an Arabian Night's jugglery with
space and time--in the vague suddenness with which its changes are
effected.
Critics so justly esteemed as Mr Robert Bridges and Professor de
Sélincourt have sought a key to the organic structure of the poem in the
supposition that each of its four books is intended to relate the hero's
probationary adventures in one of the four elements, the first book
being assigned to Earth, the second to Fire, the third to Water, the
fourth to Air. I am convinced that this view is mistaken. The action of
the first book passes on earth, no doubt, and that of the second beneath
the earth. Now it is true that according to ancient belief there existed
certain subterranean abodes or focuses of fire,--the stithy of Vulcan,
the roots of Etna where the giants lay writhing, the river of bale
rolling in flames around the city of the damned. But such things did not
make the under-world, as the theory of these critics assumes, the
recognized region of the element fire. According to the cosmology fully
set forth by Ovid at the beginning of his first book, and therefore
thoroughly familiar to Keats, the proper region or sphere of fire was
placed above and outside that of air and farthest of all from earth.[5]
Not only had Keats therefore no ancient authority for thinking of the
under-world as the special region of fire, he had explicit authority to
the contrary. Moreover, if he had meant fire he would have given us
fire, whereas in his under-world there is never a gleam of it, not a
flicker of the flames of Phlegethon nor so much as a spark from the
anvil of Vulcan; but instead, endless shadowy temple corridors, magical
cascades spouting among prodigious precipices, and the gardens and bower
of Adonis in their spring herbage and freshness. It is true, again, that
the third book takes us and keeps us under sea. But the reason is the
general one that Endymion, typifying the poetic soul of man in love with
the principle of essential Beauty, has to leave habitual things behind
him and
wander far
In other regions, past the scanty bar
To mortal steps,
in order to learn secrets of life, death, and destiny necessary to his
enlightenment and discipline. Where else should he learn such secrets if
not in the mysterious hollows of the earth and on the untrodden floor of
ocean? 'Our friend Keats,' Endymion is made to say in one of the poet's
letters from Oxford, 'has been hauling me through the earth and sea
with unrelenting perseverance': and in like manner in the poem itself
the hero asks,
Why am I not as are the dead,
Since to a woe like this I have been led
Through the dark earth, and through the wondrous sea?
But never a word to suggest any thought of the element fire--an element
from which Keats's too often fevered spirit seems even to have shrunk,
for except in telling of the blazing omens of _Hyperion's_ downfall it
is scarce mentioned in his poetry at all. Lastly, it is again true that
in the fourth book Endymion and his earthly love are carried by winged
horses on an ethereal excursion among the stars (though only for two
hundred and seventy lines out of a thousand, the rest of the action
passing, like that of the first book, on the soil of Caria). But this
flight has nothing to do with the element air as such; it is the flight
of the soul on the coursers of imagination through a region of dreams
and visions destined afterwards to come true. Hints for such submarine
and ethereal wanderings will no doubt have come into Keats's mind from
various sources in his reading,--from the passage of Drayton above
quoted,--from the _Arabian Nights_,--it may be from like incidents in
the mediæval Alexander romances (in which the hero's crowning exploits
are always a flight to heaven with two griffins and a plunge under-sea
in a glass case), or possibly even from the _Endimion_ of Gombauld, a
very wild and withal tiresome French seventeenth-century prose romance
on Keats's own theme.[6]
BOOK I. This book is entirely introductory, and carries us no farther
than the exposition by the hero of the trouble in which he finds
himself. For its exordium Keats uses a line, and probably a whole
passage, which he had written many months before and kept by him. One
day in 1816, while he was still walking the hospitals and sharing rooms
in St Thomas's Street with his fellow students Mackereth and Henry
Stephens, Keats called out to Stephens from his window-seat to listen to
a new line he had just written,--'A thing of beauty is a constant
joy,'--and asked him how he liked it. Stephens indicating that he was
not quite satisfied, Keats thought again and came out with the amended
line, now familiar and proverbial even to triteness, 'A thing of beauty
is a joy for ever.'[7] Using this for the first line of his new poem,
Keats runs on from it into a passage, which may or may not have been
written at the same time, declaring the virtues of those things of
beauty--sun, moon, trees, rivulets, flowers, tales of beauty and
heroism indiscriminately--which make for health and quietude amidst the
gloom and distemper of the world. Then he tells of his own happiness in
setting about his cherished task in the prime of spring, and his hopes
of finishing it before winter. He takes us to a Pan-haunted forest on
Mount Latmos, with many paths leading to an open glade. The hour is
dawn, the scene in part manifestly modelled on a similar one in the
Chaucerian poem, _The Floure and Lefe_, in which he took so much
pleasure. First a group of little children come in from the forest paths
and gather round the altar, then a bevy of damsels, then a company of
shepherds; priests and people follow, and last of all the young
shepherd-prince and hero Endymion, now wan and pining from a new,
unexplained soul-sickness.
The festival opens with a speech of thanksgiving and exhortation from
the priest, followed by a choral hymn in honour of the god: then come
dances and games and story-telling. Meantime Endymion and the priest sit
apart among the elder shepherds, who pass the time imagining what happy
tasks and ministrations it will be theirs to ply in their 'homes
ethereal' after death. In the midst of such conversation Endymion goes
off into a distressful trance, during which there comes to him his
sister Peona (this personage and her name are inventions of Keats, the
name perhaps suggested by that of Paeana in the fourth book of the
_Faerie Queene_, or by the Paeon mentioned in Lemprière as a son of
Endymion in the Elean version of the tale, or by Paeon the physician of
the gods in the _Iliad_, whom she resembles in her quality of healer and
comforter; or very probably by all three together). Peona wakes her
brother from his trance, and takes him in a shallop to an arbour of her
own on a little island in a lake. Here she lulls him to rest, the poet
first pausing to utter a fine invocation to Sleep--his second, the first
having been at the beginning of _Sleep and Poetry_. Endymion awakens
refreshed, and promises to be of better cheer in future. She sings
soothingly to the lute, and then questions him concerning his
troubles:--
Brother,'tis vain to hide
That thou dost know of things mysterious,
Immortal, starry; such alone could thus
Weigh down thy nature.
When she has guessed in vain, he determines to confide in her: tells her
how he fell asleep on a bed of poppies and other flowers which he had
found magically new-blown on a place where there had been none before;
how he dreamed that he was gazing fixedly at the stars shining in the
zenith with preternatural glory, until they began to swim and fade, and
then, dropping his eyes to the horizon, he saw the moon in equal glory
emerging from the clouds; how on her disappearance he again looked up
and there came down to him a female apparition of incomparable beauty
(in whom it does not yet occur to him to recognize the moon-goddess);
how she took him by the hand, and they were lifted together through
mystic altitudes
Where falling stars dart their artillery forth
And eagles struggle with the buffeting north
That balances the heavy meteor stone;
how thence they swooped downwards in eddies of the mountain wind, and
finally how, clinging to and embracing his willing companion in a
delirium of happiness, he alighted beside her on a flowery alp, and
there fell into a dream-sleep within his sleep; from which awakening to
reality, he found himself alone on the bed of poppies, with the breeze
at intervals bringing him 'Faint fare-thee-wells and sigh-shrilled
adieus,' and with disenchantment fallen upon everything about him:--
All the pleasant hues
Of heaven and earth had faded: deepest shades
Were deepest dungeons: heaths and sunny shades
Were full of pestilent light; and taintless rills
Seem'd sooty, and o'erspread with upturn'd gills
Of dying fish; the vermeil rose had blown
In frightful scarlet, and its thorns outgrown
Like spikèd aloe.
Here we have the first of those mystic dream-flights of Endymion and his
celestial visitant in company, prefiguring the union of the soul with
the spirit of essential Beauty, which have to come true before the end
but of which the immediate result is that all other delights lose their
savour and turn to ashes. The spirit of man, so the interpretation would
seem to run, having once caught the vision of transcendental Beauty and
been allowed to embrace it, must pine after it evermore and in its
absence can take no delight in nature or mankind. Another way would have
been to make his hero find in every such momentary vision or revelation
a fresh encouragement, a source of joy and inspiration until the next:
but this was not Keats's way. Peona listens with sisterly sympathy, but
her powers of help, being purely human, cannot in this case avail. She
can only try to rouse him by contrasting his present forlorn and languid
state with his former virility and ambition:--
Yet it is strange and sad, alas!
That one who through this middle earth should pass
Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave
His name upon the harp-string, should achieve
No higher bard than simple maidenhood,
Sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood
Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray
He knew not where; and how he would say, _Nay_,
If any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love;
What could it be but love? How a ring-dove
Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path;
And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe
The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses.
And then the ballad of his sad life closes
With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!
His reply in his own defence is long and much of it beautiful: but we
follow the chain of thought and argument with difficulty, so hidden is
it in flowers of poetry and so little are its vital links made obvious.
A letter of Keats, containing one of his very few explanatory comments
on work of his own, shows that he attached great importance to the
passage and felt that its sequence and significance might easily be
missed. Sending a correction of the proof to Mr Taylor, the publisher,
he says--'The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a
consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that
when I wrote it, it was a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a
truth. My having written that argument will perhaps be of the greatest
service to me of anything I ever did. It set before me the gradations of
happiness, even like a kind of pleasure thermometer, and is my first
step towards the chief attempt in the drama.' The first ten lines offer
little difficulty:--
Peona! ever have I long'd to slake
My thirst for the world's praises: nothing base,
No merely slumberous phantasm, could unlace
The stubborn canvas for my voyage prepar'd--
Though now 'tis tatter'd; leaving my bark bar'd
And sullenly drifting: yet my higher hope
Is of too wide, too rainbow-large a scope,
To fret at myriads of earthly wrecks.
Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks
Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
Full alchemiz'd, and free of space. Behold
The clear religion of heaven!
It seems clear that we have here shadowed forth the highest hope and
craving of the poetic soul, the hope to be wedded in full communion or
'fellowship divine'--or shall we say with Wordsworth in love and holy
passion?--with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world. In the next
lines we shall find, if we read them carefully enough, that Keats,
having thus defined his ultimate hope, breaks off and sets out again
from the foot of a new ascending scale of poetical pleasure and
endeavour which he asks us to consider. It differs from the ascending
scale of the earlier poems inasmuch as it begins, not with the toying
of nymphs in shady places and the like, but with thoughts of olden
minstrelsy and romantic tales and prophecies. The verse here is of
Keats's finest:--
--hist, when the airy stress
Of music's kiss impregnates the free winds,
And with a sympathetic touch unbinds
Æolian magic from their lucid wombs:
Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs;
Old ditties sigh above their father's grave;
Ghosts of melodious prophecyings rave
Round every spot where trod Apollo's foot;
Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,
Where long ago a giant battle was;
And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass
In every place where infant Orpheus slept.
It is impressed upon us in the next lines that this is a relatively
unexalted phase of imaginative feeling, and our thoughts are directed to
other experiences of the poetic soul more enthralling and more
'self-destroying' (that is more effectual in purging it of egotism),
namely the experiences of friendship and love, those of love above
all:--
Aye, so delicious is the unsating food,
That men, who might have tower'd in the van
Of all the congregated world, to fan
And winnow from the coming step of time
All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime
Left by men-slugs and human serpentry,
Have been content to let occasion die,
Whilst they did sleep in love's elysium.
And, truly, I would rather be struck dumb,
Than speak against this ardent listlessness:
For I have ever thought that it might bless
The world with benefits unknowingly;
As does the nightingale, upperched high,
And cloister'd among cool and bunched leaves--
She sings but to her love, nor e'er conceives
How tiptoe Night holds back her dark-grey hood.
If a man, next pleads Endymion, may thus reasonably give up even the
noblest of worldly ambitions for the joys of a merely mortal love, how
much more may he do so for those of an immortal. No, he re-assures Peona
in reply to her questioning glance, he is not fancy-sick:--
no, no, I'm sure
My restless spirit never could endure
To brood so long upon one luxury,
Unless it did, though fearfully, espy
A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.
We have now been carried back to the top of the scale, and these lines
again express, although vaguely, the aspirations of the poetic soul at
their highest pitch, rising through thoughts and experiences of mortal
love to the hope of communion with immortal Beauty. But that longed-for,
loftiest phase of the imaginative life, that hope beyond the shadow of a
dream, too vast and too rainbow-bright to be quenched by any fear of
earthly disaster, Endymion cannot attempt to define, least of all to the
practically-minded Peona. He can only try to convince her of its reality
by telling her of later momentary visitations with which the divinity of
his dreams has favoured him--her face reflected at him from a
spring--her voice murmuring to him from a cave--and how miserably in the
intervals he has pined and hungered for her. But now, he ends by
assuring his sister, he will be patient and pine no longer. Yet it is
but a sickly half-assurance after all.
There is a paly flame of hope that plays
Where'er I look: but yet, I'll say 'tis naught,
And here I bid it die. Have I not caught,
Already, a more healthy countenance?
And with this, as she rows him back from her island, the anxious sister
must rest content.
BOOK II. opens with a renewed declamation on the power and glory of
love, and the relative unimportance of the wars and catastrophes of
history. Juliet leaning from her balcony, the swoon of Imogen, Hero
wrongfully accused by Claudio, Spenser's Pastorella among the bandits,
he declares,
Are things to brood on with more ardency
Than the death-day of empires.
The passage has caused some critics to reproach Keats as a mere mawkish
amorist indifferent to the great affairs and interests of the world. But
must one not believe that all poor flawed and fragmentary human loves,
real or fabled, happy or miserable, are far off symbols and shadowings
of that Love which, unless the universe is quite other than we have
trusted, 'moves the sun and the other stars?' Are they not related to it
as to their source and spring? It is quite true that Keats was not yet
able to tell of such loves except in terms which you may call mawkish if
you will (he called them so himself a little later). But being a poet he
knew well enough their worth and parentage. And when the future looks
back on today, even on today, a death-day of empires in a sterner and
vaster sense than any the world has known, will all the waste and hatred
and horror, all the hope and heroism of the time, its tremendous issues
and catastrophes, be really found to have eclipsed and superseded love
as the thing fittest to fill the soul and inspire the songs of a poet?
The invocation ended, we set out with the hero on the adventures that
await him. He gathers a wild-rose bud which on expanding releases a
butterfly from its heart: the butterfly takes wing and he follows its
flight with eagerness. At last they reach a fountain spouting near the
mouth of a cave, and in touching the water the butterfly is suddenly
transformed into a nymph of the fountain, who speaking to Endymion
pities, encourages, and warns him in one breath. Endymion sits and
soliloquizes beside the fountain, at first in wavering terms which
express the ebb and flow of Keats's own inner aspirations and misgivings
about his poetic calling. Anon he invokes the virgin goddess Cynthia to
quell the tyranny of love in him (not yet guessing that his dream
visitant is really she). But no, insensibility would be the worst of
all; the goddess must, he is assured, know of some form of love higher
and purer than the Cupids are concerned with; he prays to her to be
propitious; dreams again that he is sailing through the sky with her;
and makes a wild appeal to her which is answered by a voice from within
the cavern bidding him descend 'into the sparry hollows of the world.'
He obeys, (this plunge into a spring or fountain and thence into the
under-world is a regular incident in a whole group of folk tales, one or
another of which was no doubt in Keats's mind): and we follow him at
first into a region
nor bright, nor sombre wholly,
But mingled up; a gleaming melancholy;
A dusky empire and its diadems;
One faint eternal eventide of gems.
A vein of gold sparkling with jewels serves him for path, and leads him
through twilight vaults and passages to a ridge that towers over many
waterfalls: and the lustre of a pendant diamond guides him further till
he reaches a temple of Diana. What imaginative youth but has known his
passive day-dreams haunted by visions, mysteriously impressive and
alluring, of natural and architectural marvels, huge sculptured caverns
and glimmering palace-halls in endless vista? To such imaginings, fed by
his readings and dreamings on
Memphis, and Nineveh, and Babylon,
Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. Now we find
ourselves in a temple, described as complete and true to sacred custom,
with an image of Diana; and in a trice either we have passed, or the
temple itself has dissolved, into a structure which by its 'abysmal
depths of awe,' its gloomy splendours and intricacies of aisle and vault
and corridor, its dimly gorgeous and most un-Grecian magnificence,
reminds us of nothing so much as of Vathek and the halls of Eblis or
some of the magical subterranean palaces of the _Arabian Nights_.
(Beckford's _Vathek_ and the _Thousand and One Nights_ were both among
Keats's familiar reading.) Endymion is miserable there, and appeals to
Diana to restore him to the pleasant light of earth. Thereupon the
marble floor breaks up beneath and before his footsteps into a flowery
sward. Endymion walks on to the sound of a soft music which only
intensifies his yearnings: is led by a light through the alleys of a
myrtle grove; and comes to an embowered chamber where Adonis lies asleep
among little ministering Loves, with Cupid himself, lute in hand, for
their chief.
Here follows a long and highly wrought episode of the winter sleep of
Adonis and the descent of Venus to awaken him. The original idea for the
scene comes from Ovid, in part direct, in part through Spenser (_Faerie
Queene_, iii, 6) and Shakespeare. But the detail is entirely Keats's own
and on the whole is a happy example of his early luxuriant manner;
especially the description of the entrance of Venus and the looks and
presence of Cupid as bystander and interpreter. The symbolic meaning of
the story is for him evidently much the same as it was to the
ancients,--the awakening of nature to love and life after the sleep of
winter, with all the ulterior and associated hopes implied by such a
resurrection. The first embracements over, Endymion is about to intreat
the favour of Venus for his quest when she anticipates him
encouragingly, telling him that from her upper regions she has perceived
his plight and has guessed (here is one of the echoes from Drayton to
which I have referred above) that some goddess, she knows not which, has
condescended to him. She bids her son be propitious to him, and she and
Adonis depart. Endymion wanders on by miraculous grottoes and palaces,
and then mounts by a diamond balustrade,
Leading afar past wild magnificence,
Spiral through ruggedst loopholes, and thence
Stretching across a void, then guiding o'er
Enormous chasms, where, all foam and roar,
Streams subterranean teaze their granite beds;
Then heighten'd just above the silvery heads
Of a thousand fountains, so that he could dash
The waters with his spear; but at the splash,
Done heedlessly, those spouting columns rose
Sudden a poplar's height, and 'gan to enclose
His diamond path with fretwork, streaming round
Alive, and dazzling cool, and with a sound,
Haply, like dolphin tumults, when sweet shells
Welcome the float of Thetis.
The fountains assume all manner of changing and interlacing imitative
shapes which he watches with delight (this and much else on the
underground journey seems to be the outcome of pure fancy and
day-dreaming on the poet's part, without symbolic purpose). Then passing
on through a dim tremendous region of vaults and precipices he has a
momentary vision of the earth-goddess Cybele with her team of lions
issuing from an arch below him. At this point the diamond balustrade
suddenly breaks off in mid-space and ends in nothing.[8] Endymion calls
to Jove for help and rescue, and is taken up on the wings of an eagle,
(is this the eagle of Dante in the _Purgatory_ and of Chaucer in The
_House of Fame_?) who swoops down with him,--all this still happening,
be it remembered, deep within the bowels of the earth,--to a place of
sweet airs of flowers and mosses. He is deposited in a jasmine bower,
wonders within himself who and what his unknown love may be, longs to
force his way to her, but as that may not be, to sleep and dream of her.
He sleeps on a mossy bed; she comes to him; and their endearments are
related, unluckily in a very cloying and distasteful manner of amatory
ejaculation. It was a flaw in Keats's art and a blot on his genius--or
perhaps only a consequence of the rawness and ferment of his
youth?--that thinking nobly as he did of love, yet when he came to
relate a love-passage, even one intended as this to be symbolical of
ideal things, he could only realize it in terms like these.
The visitant, whose identity is still unrecognized, again disappears; he
resumes his quest, and next finds himself in a huge vaulted grotto full
of sea treasures and sea sounds and murmurs. Here he goes over in memory
his past life and aspirations,
--the spur
Of the old bards to mighty deeds: his plans
To nurse the golden age 'mong shepherd clans:
That wondrous night: the great Pan-festival:
His sister's sorrow; and his wanderings all,
Until into the earth's deep maw he rush'd:
Then all its buried magic, till it flush'd
High with excessive love. 'And now,' thought he,
'How long must I remain in jeopardy
Of blank amazements that amaze no more?
Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core
All other depths are shallow: essences,
Once spiritual, are like muddy lees,
Meant but to fertilize my earthly root,
And make my branches lift a golden fruit
Into the bloom of heaven: other light,
Though it be quick and sharp enough to blight
The Olympian eagle's vision, is dark,
Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark!
My silent thoughts are echoing from these shells;
Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swells
Of noises far away?--list!--'
The poet seems here to mean that in the seeker's transient hour of union
with his unknown divinity capacities for thought and emotion have been
awakened in him richer and more spiritually illuminating than he has
known before. The strange sounds which reach him are the rushing of the
streams of the river-god Alpheus and the fountain-nymph Arethusa;
Arethusa fleeing, Alpheus pursuing (according to that myth which is told
most fully by Ovid and which Shelley's lyric has made familiar to all
English readers); he entreating, she longing to yield but fearing the
wrath of Diana. Endymion, who till now has had no thought of anything
but his own plight, is touched by the pangs of these lovers and prays to
his goddess to assuage them. We are left to infer that she assents: they
plunge into a gulf and disappear: he turns to follow a path which leads
him in the direction of a cooler light and a louder sound:
--and lo!
More suddenly than doth a moment go,
The visions of the earth were gone and fled--
He saw the giant sea above his head.
Throughout this second book Keats has been content to let the mystery
and 'buried magic' of the under-world reveal itself in nothing of more
original invention or of deeper apparent significance than the spring
awakening of Adonis and the vision of the earth-goddess Cybele. His
under-world is no Tartarus or Elysium, no place of souls: he attempts
nothing like the calling-up of the ghosts of dead heroes by Ulysses in
the _Odyssey_, still less like the mystic revelation of a future state
of rewards and punishments in the sixth book of the _Aeneid_. Possibly
the visit of the disguised Diana is meant to have a double meaning, and
of her three characters as 'Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell,' to
refer to the last, that of a goddess of the under-world and of the dead,
and at the same time to symbolize the power of the spirit of Beauty to
visit the poet's soul with joy and illumination even among the 'dismal
elements' of that nether sphere. Into the rest of the underground
scenery and incidents it is hard to read any symbolical meaning or
anything but the uncontrolled and aimless-seeming play of invention. But
in what is now to follow we are conscious of a fuller meaning and a
stricter plan. That from Diana, conscious of her own weakness,
indulgence for the weakness of her nymph Arethusa should be won by the
prayer of Endymion, now for the first time wrought to sympathy with the
sorrows of others, is a clear stage in the development of the poet's
scheme. The next stage is more decisive and significant still.
Book III. Keats begins his third book with a denunciation of kings,
conquerors, and worldly 'regalities' in general, amplifying in his least
fortunate style the ideas contained in the sonnet 'On receiving a laurel
crown from Leigh Hunt' written the previous March in the copy of his
_Poems_ which he gave to Reynolds (see above, p. 57). When Keats read
this passage to Bailey at Oxford, Bailey very justly found fault with
some forced expressions in it such as 'baaing vanities,' and also, he
tells us, with what seemed to him an over-done defiance of the
traditional way of handling the rimed couplet. From denunciation the
verse passes into narrative with the question, 'Are then regalities all
gilded masks?' The answer is, No, there are a thousand mysterious powers
throned in the universe--cosmic powers, as we should now say--most of
them far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of these, swears the
poet, the moon is 'the gentlier-mightiest.' Having once more, in a
strain of splendid nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and
tells how Cynthia, pining no less than Endymion, sends a shaft of her
light down to him where he lies on an under-sea bed of sand and pearls;
how this comforts him, and how at dawn he resumes his fated journey.
Here follows a description of the litter of the Ocean floor which, as we
shall see later, is something of a challenge to Shakespeare and was in
its turn something of an inspiration to Shelley. Endymion now in his own
person takes up the inexhaustible theme of the moon's praise, asking her
pardon at the same time for having lately suffered a more rapturous,
more absorbing passion to come between him and his former youthful
worship of her. At this moment the wanderer's attention is suddenly
diverted,--
For as he lifted up his eyes to swear
How his own goddess was past all things fair,
He saw far in the green concave of the sea
An old man sitting calm and peacefully.
Upon a weeded rock this old man sat,
And his white hair was awful, and a mat
Of weeds were cold beneath his cold thin feet.
The old man is Glaucus, and the rest of the book is taken up almost
entirely with his story. Keats's reading of Ovid had made him familiar
with this story:[9] but he remodels it radically for his own ethical and
symbolic purpose, giving it turns and a sequel quite unknown to
antiquity, and even helping himself as he felt the need to certain
incidents and machinery of Oriental magic from the _Arabian Nights_.
Glaucus at first sight of Endymion greets him joyfully, seeing in him
his predestined deliverer from the spell of palsied age which binds him.
But Endymion cannot endure the thought of being diverted from his own
private quest, and meets the old man's welcome first with suspicious
terror and then with angry defiance. The grey-haired creature weeps:
whereupon Endymion, newly awakened to human sympathies, is struck with
remorse.
Had he then wrong'd a heart where sorrow kept?
* * * * *
He had indeed, and he was ripe for tears.
The penitent shower fell, as down he knelt
Before that careworn sage.
They rise and proceed over the ocean floor together. Glaucus tells
Endymion his history: how he led a quiet and kind existence as a
fisherman long ago, familiar with and befriended by all sea-creatures,
even the fiercest, until he was seized with the ambition to be free of
Neptune's kingdom and able to live and breathe beneath the sea; how this
desire being granted he loved and pursued the sea-nymph Scylla, and she
feared and fled him; how then he asked the aid of the enchantress Circe,
who made him her thrall and lapped him in sensual delights while Scylla
was forgotten. How the witch, the 'arbitrary queen of sense,' one day
revealed her true character, and 'specious heaven was changed to real
hell.' (Is Keats here remembering the closing couplet of Shakespeare's
great sonnet against lust--
This all the world well knows; but none know well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell?)
He came upon her torturing her crowd of spell-bound animals, once human
beings, fled in terror at the sight, was overtaken, and with savage
taunts driven back into his ocean-home. Here he found Scylla cold and
dead, killed by Circe's arts. (In the original myth as told by Ovid and
others Glaucus refuses the temptations of Circe, who in revenge inflicts
on Scylla a worse punishment than death, transforming her into a
sea-monster engirdled with a pack of ravening dogs and stationed as a
terror to mariners at the Straits over against Charybdis). Glaucus then
tells how he conveyed the body of his dead love to a niche in a vacant
under-sea temple, where she still remains. Then began the doom of
paralysed and helpless senility which the enchantress had condemned him
to endure for a thousand years and which still binds him fast,--a doom
which inevitably reminds us of such stories as that of the Fisherman in
the _Arabian Nights_, and of the spell laid by Suleiman upon the
rebellious Djinn, whom he imprisoned for a thousand and eight hundred
years in a bottle until the Fisherman released him.
Glaucus goes on to relate how once, in the course of his miserable
spell-bound existence, he witnessed the drowning of a shipwrecked crew
with agony at his own helplessness, and in trying vainly to rescue a
sinking old man by the hand found himself left with a wand and scroll
which the old man had held. Reading the scroll, he found in it
comfortable words of hope and wisdom. (Note that it was through an
attempted act of human succour that this wisdom came to him). If he
would have patience, so ran the promise of the scroll, to probe all the
depths of magic and the hidden secrets of nature--if moreover he would
piously through the centuries make it his business to lay side by side
in sanctuary all bodies of lovers drowned at sea--there would one day
come to him a heaven-favoured youth to whom he would be able to teach
the rites necessary for his deliverance. He recognizes the predestined
youth in Endymion, who on learning the nature of the promise accepts
joyfully his share in the prescribed duty, with the attendant risk of
destruction to both if they fail. The young man and the old--or rather
'the young soul in age's mask'--go together to the submarine hall of
burial where Scylla and the multitude of drowned lovers lie enshrined.
As to the rites that follow and their effect, let us have them in the
poet's own words:--
'Let us commence,'
Whisper'd the guide, stuttering with joy, 'even now.'
He spake, and, trembling like an aspen-bough,
Began to tear his scroll in pieces small,
Uttering the while some mumblings funeral.
He tore it into pieces small as snow
That drifts unfeather'd when bleak northerns blow;
And having done it, took his dark blue cloak
And bound it round Endymion: then struck
His wand against the empty air times nine.--
'What more there is to do, young man, is thine:
But first a little patience; first undo
This tangled thread, and wind it to a clue.
Ah, gentle! 'tis as weak as spider's skein;
And shouldst thou break it--What, is it done so clean
A power overshadows thee! O, brave!
The spite of hell is tumbling to its grave.
Here is a shell; 'tis pearly blank to me,
Nor mark'd with any sign or charactery--
Canst thou read aught? O read for pity's sake!
Olympus! we are safe! Now, Carian, break
This wand against yon lyre on the pedestal.'
'Twas done: and straight with sudden swell and fall
Sweet music breath'd her soul away, and sigh'd
A lullaby to silence.--'Youth! now strew
These minced leaves on me, and passing through
Those files of dead, scatter the same around,
And thou wilt see the issue.'--'Mid the sound
Of flutes and viols, ravishing his heart,
Endymion from Glaucus stood apart,
And scatter'd in his face some fragments light.
How lightning-swift the change! a youthful wight
Smiling beneath a coral diadem
Out-sparkling sudden like an upturn'd gem,
Appear'd, and, stepping to a beauteous corse,
Kneel'd down beside it, and with tenderest force
Press'd its cold hand, and wept,--and Scylla sigh'd!
Endymion, with quick hand, the charm apply'd--
The nymph arose: he left them to their joy,
And onward went upon his high employ,
Showering those powerful fragments on the dead.
And as he passed, each lifted up his head,
As doth a flower at Apollo's touch.
Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much:
Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house.
The Latmian persever'd along, and thus
All were re-animated. There arose
A noise of harmony, pulses and throes
Of gladness in the air--while many, who
Had died in mutual arms devout and true,
Sprang to each other madly; and the rest
Felt a high certainty of being blest.
They gaz'd upon Endymion. Enchantment
Grew drunken, and would have its head and bent.
Delicious symphonies, like airy flowers,
Budded, and swell'd, and, full-blown, shed full showers
Of light, soft, unseen leaves of sounds divine.
The two deliverers tasted a pure wine
Of happiness, from fairy-press ooz'd out.
Speechless they ey'd each other, and about
The fair assembly wander'd to and fro,
Distracted with the richest overflow
Of joy that ever pour'd from heaven.
The whole long Glaucus and Scylla episode filling the third book, and
especially this its climax, has to many lovers and students of Keats
proved a riddle hard of solution. And indeed at first reading the
meaning of its strange incidents and imagery, beautiful as is much of
the poetry in which they are told, looks obscure enough. Every definite
clue to their interpretation seems to elude us as we lay hold of it,
like the drowned man who sinks through the palsied grasp of Glaucus. But
bearing in mind what we have recognized as the general scope and
symbolic meaning of the poem, does not the main purport of the Glaucus
book, on closer study, emerge clearly as something like this? The spirit
touched with the divine beam of Cynthia--that is aspiring to and chosen
for communion with essential Beauty--in other words the spirit of the
Poet--must prepare itself for its high calling, first by purging away
the selfishness of its private passion in sympathy with human loves and
sorrows, and next by acquiring a full store alike of human experience
and of philosophic thought and wisdom. Endymion, endowed by favour of
the gods with the poetic gift and passion, has only begun to awaken to
sympathy and acquire knowledge when he meets Glaucus, whose history has
made him rich in all that Endymion yet lacks, including as it does the
forfeiting of simple everyday life and usefulness for the exercise of a
perilous superhuman gift; the desertion, under a spell of evil magic, of
a pure for an impure love; the tremendous penalty which has to be paid
for this plunge into sensual debasement; the painful acquisition of the
gift of righteous magic, or knowledge of the secrets of nature and
mysteries of life and death, by prolonged intensity of study, and the
patient exercise of the duties of pious tenderness towards the bodies of
the drowned. At the approach of Endymion the sage recognizes in him the
predestined poet, and hastens to make over to him, as to one more
divinely favoured than himself, all the dower of his dearly bought
wisdom; in possession of which the poet is enabled to work miracles of
joy and healing and to confer immortality on dead lovers.
As to the significance in detail of the rites by which the transfer of
power is effected, we are again helped by remembering that Keats was
mixing up with his classic myth ideas taken from the _Thousand and One
Nights_. Let the student turn to the Glaucus and Circe episodes of
Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, and then refresh his memory of certain Arabian
tales, particularly that of Bebr Salim, with its kings and queens of the
sea living and moving under water as easily as on land, its repeated
magical transformations and layings on and taking off of enchantments,
and the adventures of the hero with queen Lab, the Oriental counterpart
of Circe,--let the student refresh his memory from these sources, and
the proceedings of this episode will no longer seem so strange. In the
Arabian tales, and for that matter in western tales of magic also, the
commonest method of annulling enchantments is by sprinkling with water
over which words of power have been spoken. Under sea you cannot
sprinkle with water, so Keats makes Endymion use for sprinkling the
shredded fragments of the scroll taken by Glaucus from the drowned man.
First Glaucus tears the scroll, uttering 'some mumblings funeral' as he
does so (compare the 'backward mutters of dissevering power' in Milton's
_Comus_). Then follows a series of actions showing that the hour has
come for him to surrender and make over his powers and virtues to the
new comer. First he invests Endymion with his own magic robe. Then he
waves his magic wand nine times in the air,--as a preliminary to the
last exercise of its power? or as a sign that its power is exhausted?
Nine is of course a magic number, and the immediate suggestion comes
from the couplet in Sandys's Ovid where Glaucus tells how the sea-gods
admitted him to their fellowship,--
Whom now they hallow, and with charms nine times
Repeated, purge me from my human crimes.
The disentangling of the skein and the perceiving and deciphering of
runes on the shell[10] which to Glaucus is a blank are evidently tests
Endymion has to undergo before it is proved and confirmed that he is
really the predestined poet, gifted to unravel and interpret mysteries
beyond the ken of mere philosophy. The breaking of the philosopher's
wand against the lyre suspended from its pedestal, followed by an
outburst of ravishing music, is a farther and not too obscure piece of
symbolism shadowing forth the surrender and absorption of the powers of
study and research into the higher powers of poetic intuition and
inspiration. And then comes the general disenchantment and awakening of
the drowned multitude to life and happiness.
The parable breaks off at this point, and the book closes with a
submarine pageant imagined, it would seem, almost singly for the
pageant's sake; perhaps also partly in remembrance of Spenser's festival
of the sea-gods at the marriage of Thames and Medway in the fourth book
of the _Faerie Queene_. The rejuvenated Glaucus bids the whole beautiful
multitude follow him to pay their homage to Neptune: they obey: the
first crowd of lovers restored to life meets a second crowd on the sand,
and some in either crowd recognize and happily pair off with their lost
ones in the other. All approach in procession the palace of
Neptune--another marvel of vast and vague jewelled and translucent
architectural splendours--and find the god presiding on an emerald
throne between Venus and Cupid. Glaucus and Scylla receive the blessing
of Neptune and Venus respectively, and Venus addresses Endymion in a
speech of arch encouragement, where the poet's style (as almost always
in moments of his hero's prosperous love) turns common and tasteless.
Dance and revelry follow, and then a hymn to Neptune, Venus, and Cupid.
This is interrupted by the entrance of Oceanus and a train of Nereids.
The presence of all these immortals is too much for Endymion's human
senses: he swoons; a ring of Nereids lift and carry him tenderly away;
he is aware of a message of hope and cheer from his goddess, written in
starlight on the dark; and when he comes to himself, finds that he is
restored to earth, lying on the grass beside a forest pool in his native
Caria.
BOOK IV. In this book Endymion has to make his last discovery. He has to
learn that all transient and secondary loves, which may seem to come
between him and his great ideal pursuit and lure him away from it, are
really, when the truth is known, but encouragements to that pursuit,
visitations and condescensions to him of his celestial love in disguise.
The narrative setting forth this discovery is pitched in a key which,
following the triumphant close of the last book, seems curiously subdued
and melancholy. An opening apostrophe by the poet to the Muse of his
native land, long silent while Greece and Italy sang, but aroused in the
fulness of time to happy utterance, begins joyously enough, but ends on
no more confident note than this:--
Great Muse, thou know'st what prison
Of flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets
Our spirit's wings: despondency besets
Our pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn
Seems to give forth its light in very scorn
Of our dull, uninspir'd, snail-paced lives.
Long have I said, how happy he who shrives
To thee! But then I thought on poets gone,
And could not pray:--nor could I now--so on
I move to the end in lowliness of heart.--
Keats then tells how his hero, paying his vows to the gods, is
interrupted by the plaint of a forsaken Indian damsel which reaches him
through the forest undergrowth. (Such a damsel lying back on the grass
with her arms among her hair had dwelt, I think, in the poet's mind's
eye from pictures by or prints after Poussin ever since hospital and
early Hunt days, and had been haunting him when he scribbled his
attempted scrap of an Alexander romance in a fellow student's notebook).
Endymion listens and approaches: the poet foresees and deplores the
coming struggle between his hero's celestial love and this earthly
beauty disconsolate at his feet. The damsel, speaking to herself,
laments her loneliness, and tells how she could find it in her heart to
love this shepherd youth, and how love is lord of all. Endymion falls to
pitying and from pitying into loving her. Though without sense of
treachery to his divine mistress, he is torn by the contention within
him between this new earthly and his former heavenly flame. He goes on
to declare the struggle is killing him, and entreats the damsel to sing
him a song of India to ease his passing. Her song, telling of her
desolation before and after she was swept from home in the train of
Bacchus and his rout and again since she fell out of the march, is, in
spite of one or two unfortunate blemishes, among the most moving and
original achievements of English lyric poetry. Endymion is wholly
overcome, and in a speech of somewhat mawkish surrender gives himself to
the new earthly love, not blindly, but realizing fully what he forfeits.
He bids the damsel--
Do gently murder half my soul, and I
Shall feel the other half so utterly.
A cry of 'Woe to Endymion!' echoing through the forest has no sooner
alarmed the lovers than there is a sudden apparition of Mercury
descending. The gods intend for Endymion an unexpected issue from his
perplexities. Their messenger touches the ground with his wand and
vanishes: two raven-black winged horses rise through the ground where he
has touched,--the horses, no doubt, of the imagination, the same or of
the same breed as those 'steeds with streamy manes' that paw up against
the light and trample along the ridges of the clouds in _Sleep and
Poetry_. Endymion mounts the damsel on one and himself mounts the other:
they are borne aloft together,
--unseen, alone,
Among cool clouds and winds, but that the free,
The buoyant life of song, can floating be
Above their heads, and follow them untired.
The poet, seeming to realize that the most difficult part of his tale is
now to tell, again invokes the native Muse, and relates how the lovers,
couched on the wings of the raven steeds, enter on their flight a zone
of mists enfolding the couch of Sleep, who has been drawn from his cave
by the rumour of the coming nuptials of a goddess with a mortal. The
narrative is here very obscure, but seems to run thus. Alike the magic
steed and the lovers reclining on their wings yield to the influence of
sleep, but still drift on their aerial course. As they drift, Endymion
dreams that he has been admitted to Olympus. In his dream he drinks of
Hebe's cup, tries the bow of Apollo and the shield of Pallas; blows a
bugle which summons the Seasons and the Hours to a dance; asks whose
bugle it is and learns that it is Diana's; the next moment she is there
in presence; he springs to his now recognized goddess, and in the act he
awakes, and it is a case of Adam's dream having come true; he is aware
of Diana and the other celestials present bending over him. On the
horse-plume couch beside him lies the Indian maiden: the conflict
between his two loves is distractingly renewed within him, though some
instinct again tells him that he is not really untrue to either. He
embraces the Indian damsel as she sleeps; the goddess disappears; the
damsel awakes; he pleads with her, says that his other love is free from
all malice or revenge and that in his soul he feels true to both.
What is this soul then? Whence
Came it? It does not seem my own, and I
Have no self-passion nor identity.
This charge, be it noted, is one which Keats in his private thoughts was
constantly apt to bring against himself. Foreseeing disaster and the
danger of losing both his loves and being left solitary, Endymion
nevertheless rouses the steeds to a renewed ascent. He and the damsel
are borne towards the milky way, in a mystery of loving converse: the
crescent moon appears from a cloud, facing them: Endymion turns to the
damsel at his side and finds her gone gaunt and cold and ghostly: a
moment more and she is not there at all but vanished: her horse parts
company from his, towers, and falls to earth. He is left alone on his
further ascent, abandoned for the moment by both the objects of his
passion, the celestial and the human. His spirit enters into a region,
or phase, of involved and brooding misery and thence into one of
contented apathy: he is scarcely even startled, though his steed is, by
a flight of celestial beings blowing trumpets and proclaiming a coming
festival of Diana. In a choral song they invite the signs and
constellations to the festival: (the picture of the Borghese Zodiac in
Spence's _Polymetis_ has evidently given Keats his suggestion here).
Then suddenly Endymion hears no more and is aware that his courser has
in a moment swept him down to earth again.
He finds himself on a green hillside with the Indian maiden beside him,
and in a long impassioned protestation renounces his past dreams,
condemns his presumptuous neglect of human and earthly joys, and
declares his intention to live alone with her for ever and (not
forgetting to propitiate the Olympians) to shower upon her all the
treasures of the pastoral earth:--
O I have been
Presumptuous against love, against the sky,
Against all elements, against the tie
Of mortals each to each, against the blooms
Of flowers, rush of rivers, and the tombs
Of heroes gone! Against his proper glory
Has my own soul conspired: so my story
Will I to children utter, and repent.
There never liv'd a mortal man, who bent
His appetite beyond his natural sphere,
But starv'd and died. My sweetest Indian, here,
Here will I kneel, for thou redeemed hast
My life from too thin breathing: gone and past
Are cloudy phantasms. Caverns lone, farewell!
And air of visions, and the monstrous swell
Of visionary seas! No, never more
Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore
Of tangled wonder, breathless and aghast.
Here Keats spins and puts into the mouth of Endymion wooing the Indian
maiden a long, and in some at least of its verses exquisite, pastoral
fantasia recalling, and no doubt partly founded on, the famous passage
in Ovid, itself founded on one equally famous in Theocritus, where
Polyphemus woos the nymph Galatea.[11] Apparently, though it was through
sympathy with the human sorrow of the Indian damsel that Endymion has
first been caught, he proposes to enjoy her society now in detachment
from all other human ties as well as from all transcendental dreams and
ambitions.
But the damsel is aware of matters which prevent her from falling in
with her lover's desires. She puts him off, saying that she has always
loved him and longed and languished to be his, but that this joy is
forbidden her, or can only be compassed by the present death of both
(that is, to the mortal in love with the spirit of poetry and poetic
beauty no life of mere human and earthly contentment is possible); and
so she proposes to renounce him. Despondingly they wander off together
into the forest.
The poet pauses for an apostrophe to Endymion, confusedly expressed, but
vital to his whole meaning. His suffering hero, he says, had the tale
allowed, should have been enthroned in felicity before now (the word is
'ensky'd,' from _Measure for Measure_). In truth he has been so
enthroned for many thousand years (that is to say, the poetic spirit in
man has been wedded in full communion to the essential soul of Beauty
in the world): the poet, Keats himself, has had some help from him
already, and with his farther help hopes ere long to sing of his
'lute-voiced brother': that is Apollo, to whom Endymion is called
brother as being espoused to his sister Diana. This is the first
intimation of Keats's intention to write on the story of Hyperion's fall
and the advent of Apollo. But the present tale, signifies Keats, has not
yet got to that point, and must now be resumed.
Endymion rests beside the damsel in a part of the forest where every
tree and stream and slope might have reminded him of his boyish sports,
but his downcast eyes fail to recognize them. Peona appears; he dreads
their meeting, but without cause; interpreting things by their obvious
appearance she sweetly welcomes the stranger as the bride her brother
has brought home after his mysterious absence, and bids them both to a
festival the shepherds are to hold tonight in honour of Cynthia, in
whose aspect the soothsayers have read good omens. Still Endymion does
not brighten; Peona asks the stranger why, and craves her help with him;
Endymion with a great effort, 'twanging his soul like a spiritual bow',
says that after all he has gone through he must not partake in the
common and selfish pleasures of men, lest he should forfeit higher
pleasures and render himself incapable of the services for which he has
disciplined himself; that henceforth he must live as a hermit, visited
by none but his sister Peona. To her care he at the same time commends
the Indian lady: who consents to go with her, and remembering the
approaching festival of Diana says she will take part in it and
consecrate herself to that sisterhood and to chastity.
For a while they all three feel like people in sleep struggling with
oppressive dreams and making believe to think them every-day
experiences. Endymion tries to ease the strain by bidding them farewell.
They go off dizzily, he stares distressfully after them and at last
cries to them to meet him for a last time the same evening in the grove
behind Diana's temple. They disappear; he is left in sluggish desolation
till sunset, when he goes to keep his tryst at the temple, musing first
with bitterness, then with a resigned prescience of coming death (the
mood of the _Nightingale Ode_ appearing here in Keats's work for the
first time): then bitterly again:--
I did wed
Myself to things of light from infancy;
And thus to be cast out, thus lorn to die
Is sure enough to make a mortal man
Grow impious. So he inwardly began
On things for which no wording can be found;
Deeper and deeper sulking, until drown'd
Beyond the reach of music: for the choir
Of Cynthia he heard not, though rough briar
Nor muffling thicket interpos'd to dull
The vesper hymn, far swollen, soft and full,
Through the dark pillars of those sylvan aisles.
He saw not the two maidens, nor their smiles,
Wan as primroses gather'd at midnight
By chilly finger'd spring. 'Unhappy wight!
Endymion!' said Peona, 'we are here!
What wouldst thou ere we all are laid on bier?'
Then he embrac'd her, and his lady's hand
Press'd saying: 'Sister, I would have command,
If it were heaven's will, on our sad fate.'
At which that dark-eyed stranger stood elate
And said, in a new voice, but sweet as love,
To Endymion's amaze: 'By Cupid's dove,
And so thou shalt! and by the lily truth
Of my own breast thou shalt, beloved youth!'
And as she spake, into her face there came
Light, as reflected from a silver flame:
Her long black hair swell'd ampler, in display
Full golden; in her eyes a brighter day
Dawn'd blue and full of love. Aye, he beheld
Phoebe, his passion!
And so the quest is ended, and the mystery solved. _Vera incessu patuit
dea_: the forsaken Indian maiden had been but a disguised incarnation of
Cynthia herself. Endymion's earthly passion, born of human pity and
desire, was one all the while, had he but known it, with his heavenly
passion born of poetic aspiration and the soul's thirst for Beauty. The
two passions at their height and perfection are inseparable, and the
crowned poet and the crowned lover are one. But these things are still a
mystery to those who know not poetry, and when the happy lovers
disappear the kind ministering sister Peona can only marvel:--
Peona went
Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment.
The poem ends on no such note of joy and triumph over the attained
consummation as we might have expected and such as we found at the close
of the third book, at the point where the faculty and vision of the poet
had been happily enriched and completed by the gift of the learning and
beneficence of the sage. The fourth book closes, as it began, in a minor
key, leaving the reader, like Peona, in a mood rather musing than
rejoicing. Is this because Keats had tired of his task before he came to
the end, or because the low critical opinion of his own work which he
had been gradually forming took the heart out of him, so that as he drew
near the goal he involuntarily let his mind run on the hindrances and
misgivings which beset the poetic aspirant on his way to victory more
than on the victory itself? Or was it partly because of the numbing
influence of early winter as recorded in the last chapter? We cannot
tell.
But why take all this trouble, the reader may well have asked before
now, to follow the argument and track the wanderings of Endymion book by
book, when everyone knows that the poem is only admirable for its
incidental beauties and is neither read nor well readable for its story?
The answer is that the intricacy and obscurity of the narrative, taken
merely as a narrative, are such as to tire the patience of many readers
in their search for beautiful passages and to dull their enjoyment of
them when found; but once the inner and symbolic meanings of the poem
are recognized, even in gleams, their recognition gives it a quite new
hold upon the attention. And in order to trace these meanings and
disengage them with any clearness a fairly close examination and
detailed argument are necessary. It is not with simple matters of
personification, of the putting of initial capitals to abstract
qualities, that we have to deal, nor yet with any obvious and
deliberately thought-out allegory; still less is it with one purposely
made riddling and obscure; it is with a vital, subtly involved and
passionately tentative spiritual parable, the parable of the experiences
of the poetic soul in man seeking communion with the spirit of essential
Beauty in the world, invented and related, in the still uncertain dawn
of his powers, by one of the finest natural-born and intuitively gifted
poets who ever lived. This is a thing which stands almost alone in
literature, and however imperfectly executed is worth any closeness and
continuity of attention we can give it. Having now studied, to the best
of our power, the sources and scheme of the poem, with its symbolism and
inner meanings so far as they can with any confidence be traced, let us
pass to the consideration of its technical and poetical qualities and
its relation to the works of certain other poets and poems of Keats's
time.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In the old Grecian world, the Endymion myth, or rather an
Endymion myth, for like other myths it had divers forms, was rooted
deeply in the popular traditions both of Elis in the Peloponnese, and
of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The central
feature of the Carian legend was the nightly descent of the
moon-goddess Seléné to kiss her lover, the shepherd prince Endymion,
where he lay spell-bound, by the grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep
and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. This legend was early
crystallized in a lyric poem of Sappho now lost, and thereafter
became part of the common heritage of Greek and Roman popular
mythology. The separate moon-goddess, Seléné for the Greeks and Luna
for the Romans, got merged in course of time in the multiform
divinities of the Greek Artemis and the Roman Diana respectively; so
that in modern literatures derived from the Latin it is always of
Diana (or what is the same thing, of Cynthia or Phoebe) that the tale
is told. It is not given at length in any of our extant classical
writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the poets, as
Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and in Cicero and some of
the late Greek prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias.
From these it passed at the Renaissance into the current European
stock of classical imagery and reference.
[2] In another place, Browne makes Endymion shut out from the favour
of Cynthia stand figuratively for Raleigh in disgrace with Elizabeth:
just as in Lyly's comedy the myth had been turned into an allegory of
contemporary court intrigue, with Elizabeth for Cynthia, Leicester
for Endymion, Tellus for Mary Queen of Scots, Eumenides for Sidney,
and so forth.
[3] _Endymion_, iii. 196-209.
[4] _Endymion_, ii. 569-572 and 908-916.
[5] _Metam._ i. 26-31, Englished thus by Sandys:--
Forthwith upsprung the quick and weightless Fire,
Whose flames unto the highest Arch aspire:
The next, in levity and peace, is Air:
Gross elements to thicker Earth repair
Self-clogg'd with weight: the Waters flowing round
Possess the last, and solid Tellus bound.
[6] Keats was more widely read in out-of-the-way French literature
than could have been expected from his opportunities, and there are
passages in _Endymion_ which run closely parallel to Gombauld's
romance, notably the first apparition of Cynthia, with the
description of her hair (_End._ i, 605-618), and the account of the
sudden distaste which afterwards seizes him for former pleasures and
companions. But these may be mere coincidences, and the whole series
of the hero's subsequent adventures according to Gombauld, his
dream-flight to the Caspian under the spell of the Thessalian
enchantress Ismene, and all the weird things that befall him there,
are entirely unlike anything that happens in Keats's poem.
[7] The authority for this story is the late Sir B. W. Richardson,
professing to quote verbatim as follows from Mr Stephens' own
statement to him in conversation.
'One evening in the twilight, the two students sitting together,
Stephens at his medical studies, Keats at his dreaming, Keats breaks
out to Stephens that he has composed a new line:--
A thing of beauty is a constant joy.
"What think you of that, Stephens?" "It has the true ring, but is
wanting in some way," replies the latter, as he dips once more into
his medical studies. An interval of silence, and again the poet:--
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
"What think you of that, Stephens?" "That it will live for ever."'
The conversation as thus related at second hand reads certainly as
though it had been more or less dressed up for effect, but we cannot
suppose the circumstance to have been wholly invented. A careful
reading of the first twenty-four lines of _Endymion_ will show that
they have close affinities with much both in _Sleep and Poetry_ and
'_I stood tip-toe_' in thought as well as style, and especially in
their manner of bringing together, by reason of the common property
of beauty, things otherwise so unlike as the cloak of weeds which
rivulets are conceived as making to keep themselves cool in
summertime (compare '_I stood tip-toe_' II. 80-84) musk-roses in a
woodland brake (compare _Sleep and Poetry_ I. 5), the life of great
spirits after death, and beautiful stories in general. My own
inference is that Keats, having written these two dozen lines some
time in 1816, used them the next spring as a suitable exordium for
_Endymion_, and added the following lines, 25-33, as a (somewhat
clumsy) transition to the actual beginning of the poem 'Therefore
with full happiness,' etc., as written at Carisbrooke.
[8] There is a certain, though slight enough, resemblance between
some of these underground incidents and those which happen in a
romance of travel, which Keats may very well have read, the _Voyage
d'Anténor_, then popular both in France and in an English
translation. Anténor is permitted by the Egyptian priests to pass
through the triple ordeal by fire, water, and air contrived by them
in the vast subterranean vaults under the temple of Osiris. The
points of most resemblance are the suspended guiding light seen from
within the entrance, the rushing of the water streams, and the ascent
by a path between balustrades. The _Voyage d'Anténor_ was itself
founded on an earlier and much rarer French romance, _Sethos_, and
both were freely and avowedly imitated by Thomas Moore in his prose
tale, the _Epicurean_ (1827). Mr Robert Bridges has noticed a point
in common between _Endymion_ and the _Epicurean_ in the sudden
breaking off or crumbling away of the balustrade under the wayfarer's
feet. This does not occur in _Sethos_ or _Anténor_, and was probably
borrowed by Moore from Keats.
[9] How familiar, both with the text and the translator's commentary,
is proved by his adopting as his own, almost literally, a phrase
which Sandys brings in by way of illustrative comment from the
_Imagines_ (a description of an imaginary picture-gallery) of
Philostratus. Philostratus, coming to a picture of Glaucus, tells how
the painter had given him 'thick and arched eyebrows which touched
one another.' Keats writes,--
his snow-white brows
_Went arching up_, and like two magic ploughs
Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large.
It was the look and expression of Keats in reciting this same phrase,
the reader will remember, which so struck Bailey that he found
himself vividly recalling it thirty years later (see above, p. 144).
[10] Mr Mackail sees in this shell and its secret characters a
reminiscence of the mystic shell, which is also a book, carried in
the right hand of the sheikh who is also Don Quixote in the dream
narrated by Wordsworth in the third book of _The Prelude_. I owe so
very much of the interpretation above attempted to Mr Mackail that I
am bound to record his opinion: but as I shall show later (p. 251),
it is scarcely possible that any passages from _The Prelude_ should
have come to Keats's knowledge until after _Endymion_ was finished.
[11] Ovid, _Metam._ xiii, 810-840; Theocr. _Idyll_. xi, 30 _sqq._
CHAPTER VII
_ENDYMION._--II. THE POETRY: ITS QUALITIES AND AFFINITIES
Revival of Elizabethan usages--Avoidance of closed couplets--True
metrical instincts--An example--Rime too much his master--Lax use of
words--Flaws of taste and training--Faults and beauties
inseparable--Homage to the moon--A parallel from Drayton--Examples of
nature-poetry--Nature and the Greek spirit--Greek mythology
revitalized--Its previous deadness--Poetry of love and war--Dramatic
promise--Comparison with models--Sandys's _Ovid--Hymn to Pan_:
Chapman--Ben Jonson--The hymn in _Endymion_--'A pretty piece of
paganism'--Song of the Indian maiden--The triumph of Bacchus--A
composite: its sources--English scenery and detail--Influence of
Wordsworth--Influence of Shelley--_Endymion_ and
_Alastor_--Correspondences and contrasts--_Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty_--Shelley on _Endymion_--Keats and Clarence's dream--Shelley a
borrower--Shelley and the rimed couplet.
Throughout the four books of _Endymion_ we find Keats still working,
more even than in his epistles and meditations of the year before, under
the spell of Elizabethan and early Jacobean poetry. Spenser and the
Spenserians, foremost among them William Browne; Drayton in his
pastorals and elegies; Shakespeare, especially in his early poems and
comedies; Fletcher and Ben Jonson in pastoral and lyrical work like _The
Faithful Shepherdess_ or _The Sad Shepherd_; Chapman's version of Homer,
especially the _Odyssey_ and the _Hymns_, and Sandys's of the
_Metamorphoses_ of Ovid; these are the masters and the models of whom we
feel his mind and ear to be full. In their day the English language had
been to a large extent unfixed, and in their instinctive efforts to
enrich and expand and supple it, poets had enjoyed a wide range of
freedom both in maintaining old and in experimenting with new usages.
Many of the liberties they used were renounced by the differently minded
age which followed them, and the period from the Restoration, roughly
speaking, to the middle years of George III had in matters of literary
form and style been one of steadily tightening restriction and
convention. Then ensued the period of expansion, in which Wordsworth and
Coleridge and Scott had been the most conspicuous leaders, each after
his manner, in reconquering the freedom of poetry. Other innovators had
followed suit, including Leigh Hunt in that slippered, sentimental,
Italianate fashion of his own. And now came young Keats, not following
closely along the paths opened by any of these, though closer to Leigh
Hunt than to the others, but making a deliberate return to certain
definite and long abandoned usages of the English poets during the
illustrious half century from 1590-1640. He chose the heroic couplet,
and in handling it reversed the settled practice of more than a century.
He was even more sedulous than any of his Elizabethan or Jacobean
masters to achieve variety of pause and movement by avoiding the regular
beat of the closed couplet; while in framing his style he did not
scruple to revive all or nearly all those licences of theirs which the
intervening age had disallowed. There was a special rashness in his
attempt considering the slightness of his own critical equipment, and
considering also the strength of the long riveted fetters which he
undertook to break and the charges of affectation and impertinence which
such a revival of obsolete metrical and verbal usages--the marks of what
Pope had denounced as 'our rustic vein And splay-foot verse'--was bound
to bring against him.
First of his revolutionary treatment of the metre. He no longer uses
double or feminine endings, as in his epistles of the year before, with
a profusion like that of _Britannia's Pastorals_. They occur, but in
moderation, hardly more than a score of them in any one of the four
books. At the beginning he tries often, but afterwards gives up, an
occasional trick of the Elizabethan and earlier poets in riming on the
unstressed second syllables of words such as 'dancing' (rimed with
'string'), 'elbow' (with 'slow'), 'velvet' (with 'set'), 'purplish'
(with 'fish'). On the other hand he regularly resolves the 'tion' or
'shion' termination into its full two syllables, the last carrying the
rime, as--'With speed of five-tailed exhalations:' 'Before the deep
intoxication;' 'Vanish'd in elemental passion;' and the like. He admits
closed couplets, but very grudgingly, as a general rule in the
proportion of not more than one to eight or ten of the unclosed. He
seldom allows himself even so much of a continuous run of them as
this:--
Moreover, through the dancing poppies stole
A breeze most softly lulling to my soul;
And shaping visions all about my sight
Of colours, wings, and bursts of spangly light;
The which became more strange, and strange, and dim,
And then were gulph'd in a tumultuous swim:
Or this:--
So in that crystal place, in silent rows,
Poor lovers lay at rest from joys and woes.--
The stranger from the mountains, breathless, trac'd
Such thousands of shut eyes in order plac'd;
Such ranges of white feet, and patient lips
All ruddy,--for here death no blossom nips.
He mark'd their brows and foreheads; saw their hair
Put sleekly on one side with nicest care.
The essential principle of his versification is to let sentences,
prolonged and articulated as freely and naturally as in prose, wind
their way in and out among the rimes, the full pause often splitting a
couplet by falling at the end of the first line, and oftener still (in
the proportion of two or three times to one) breaking up a single line
in the middle or at any point of its course. Sense and sound flow
habitually over from one couplet to the next without logical or
grammatical pause, but to keep the sense of metre present to the ear
Keats commonly takes care that the second line of a couplet shall end
with a fully stressed rime-word such as not only allows, but actually
invites, at least a momentary breathing-pause to follow it. It is only
in the rarest cases that he compels the breath to hurry on with no
chance of stress or after-rest from a light preposition at the end of a
line to its object at the beginning of the next ('on | His left,' 'upon
| A dreary morning'), or from an auxiliary to its verb ('as might be |
Remembered') or from a comparative particle to the thing compared
('sleeker than | Night-swollen mushrooms'); a practice in which Chapman,
Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and their contemporaries indulged, as we have
seen, freely, and which afterwards developed into a fatal disease of the
metre. Keats's musical and metrical instincts were too fine, and his ear
too early trained in the 'sweet-slipping' movement of Spenser, to let
him fall often into this fault. To the other besetting fault of some of
these masters, that of a harsh and jolting ruggedness, he was still less
prone. Although he chooses to forgo that special effect of combined
vigour and smoothness proper to the closed couplet, he always knows how
to make a rich and varied music with his vowel sounds; while the same
fine natural instinct for sentence-structure as distinguishes the prose
of his letters makes itself felt in his verse, so that wherever he has
need to place a full stop he can make his sentence descend upon it
smoothly and skimmingly, like a seabird on the sea.[1] The long passage
quoted from Book III in the last chapter illustrates the narrative verse
of _Endymion_ in nearly all its moods and variations. Here is a
characteristic example of its spoken or dramatic verse. Endymion
supplicates his goddess from underground:--
O Haunter chaste
Of river sides, and woods, and heathy waste,
Where with thy silver bow and arrows keen
Art thou now forested? O Woodland Queen,
What smoothest air thy smoother forehead woos?
Where dost thou listen to the wide halloos
Of thy disparted nymphs? Through what dark tree
Glimmers thy crescent? Wheresoe'er it be,
'Tis in the breath of heaven: thou dost taste
Freedom as none can taste it, nor dost waste
Thy loveliness in dismal elements;
But, finding in our green earth sweet contents,
There livest blissfully. Ah, if to thee
It feels Elysian, how rich to me,
An exil'd mortal, sounds its pleasant name!
Within my breast there lives a choking flame--
O let me cool't the zephyr-boughs among!
A homeward fever parches up my tongue--
O let me slake it at the running springs!
Upon my ear a noisy nothing rings--
O let me once more hear the linnet's note!
Before mine eyes thick films and shadows float--
O let me 'noint them with the heaven's light!
Dost thou now lave thy feet and ankles white?
O think how sweet to me the freshening sluice!
Dost thou now please thy thirst with berry-juice?
O think how this dry palate would rejoice!
If in soft slumber thou dost hear my voice,
O think how I should love a bed of flowers!--
The first fifteen lines of the above are broken and varied much in
Keats's usual way: in the following fourteen it is to be noted how he
throws the speaker's alternate complaints of his predicament and prayers
for release from it not into twinned but into split or parted couplets,
making each prayer rime not with the complaint which calls it forth but
with the new complaint which is to follow it: a bold and to my ear a
happy sacrifice of obvious rhetorical effect to his predilection for the
suspended or delayed rime-echo.
Rime is to some poets a stiff and grudging but to others an officious
servant, over-active in offering suggestions to the mind; and no poet is
rightly a master until he has learnt how to sift those suggestions,
rejecting many and accepting only the fittest. Keats in _Endymion_ has
not reached nor come near reaching this mastery: in the flush and
eagerness of composition he is content to catch at almost any and every
suggestion of the rime, no matter how far-fetched and irrelevant. He had
a great fore-runner in this fault in Chapman, who constantly, especially
in the _Iliad_, wrenches into his text for the rime's sake ideas that
have no kind of business there. Take the passage justly criticized by
Bailey at the beginning of the third Book:--
There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen
Their baaing vanities, to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
From human pastures; or, O torturing fact!
Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd
Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe
Our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. With not one tinge
Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight
Able to face an owl's, they still are dight
By the blear-ey'd nations in empurpled vests,
And crowns, and turbans.
Here it is obviously the need of a rime to 'men' that has suggested the
word 'unpen' and the clumsy imagery of the 'baaing sheep' which follows,
while the inappropriate and almost meaningless 'tinge of sanctuary
splendour' lower down has been imported for the sake of the foxes with
fire-brands tied to their tails which 'singe' the metaphorical
corn-sheaves (they come from the story of Samson in the Book of Judges).
Milder cases abound, as this of Circe tormenting her victims:--
appealing groans
From their poor breasts went sueing to her ear
In vain; _remorseless as an infant's bier_
She whisk'd against their eyes the sooty oil.
Does yonder thrush,
Schooling its half-fledg'd little ones to brush
About the dewy forest, whisper tales.
Speak not of grief, young stranger, or _cold snails
Will slime the rose to-night_.
He rose: he grasp'd his stole,
With convuls'd clenches waving it abroad,
And in a voice of solemn joy, _that aw'd
Echo into oblivion_, he said:--
Yet hourly had he striven
To hide the cankering venom, that had _riven_
His fainting recollections.
The wanderer
Holding his forehead to keep off the _burr_
Of smothering fancies.
Endymion! the cave is secreter
Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall _stir_
No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise
Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling _cloys_
And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.
In some of these cases the trouble is, not that the rime drags in a
train of far-fetched or intrusive ideas, but only that words are used
for the rime's sake in inexact and inappropriate senses. Such laxity in
the employment of words is one of the great weaknesses of Keats's style
in _Endymion_, and is no doubt partly connected with his general
disposition to treat language as though it were as free and fluid in his
own day as it had been two hundred years earlier. The same disposition
makes him reckless in turning verbs into nouns (a 'complain,' an
'exclaim,' a 'shine,' a 'pierce,' a 'quell') and nouns into verbs (to
'throe,' to 'passion,' to 'monitor,' to 'fragment up'); in using at his
convenience active verbs as passive and passive verbs as active; and in
not only reviving archaic participial forms ('dight,' 'fight,' 'raft,'
etc.) but in giving currency to participles of the class Coleridge
denounced as demoralizing to the ear, and as hybrids equivocally
generated of noun-substantives ('emblem'd,' 'gordian'd,' 'mountain'd,'
'phantasy'd'), as well as to adjectives borrowed from Elizabethan use or
new-minted more or less in accordance with it ('pipy,' 'paly,' 'ripply,'
'sluicy,' 'slumbery,' 'towery,' 'bowery,' 'orby,' 'nervy,' 'surgy,'
'sparry,' 'spangly).' It was these and such like technical liberties
with language which scandalized conservative critics, and caused even De
Quincey, becoming tardily acquainted with Keats's work, to dislike and
utterly under-rate it. He himself came before long to condemn the style
of 'the slipshod Endymion.' Nevertheless the consequence of his
experiments in reviving or imitating the usages of the great Renaissance
age of English poetry is only in part to be regretted. His rashness led
him into almost as many felicities as faults, and the examples of the
happier liberties in _Endymion_ has done much towards enriching the
vocabulary and diction of English poetry in the nineteenth century.
Other faults that more gravely mar the poem are not technical but
spiritual: intimate failures of taste and feeling due partly to mere
rawness and inexperience, partly to excessive intensity and
susceptibility of temperament, partly to second-rateness of social
training and association. A habit of cloying over-luxuriance in
description, the giving way to a sort of swooning abandonment of the
senses in contact with the 'deliciousness' of things, is the most
besetting of such faults. Allied with it is Keats's treatment of love as
an actuality, which in this poem is in unfortunate and distasteful
contrast with his high conception of love in the abstract as the
inspiring and ennobling power of the world and all things in it. Add the
propensity to make Glaucus address Scylla as 'timid thing!' and
Endymion beg for 'one gentle squeeze' from his Indian maiden, with many
a like turn in the simpering, familiar mood which Keats at this time had
caught from or naturally shared with Leigh Hunt. It should, however, be
noted as a mark of progress in self-criticism that, comparing the drafts
of the poem with the printed text, we find that in revising it for press
he had turned out more and worse passages in this vein than he left in.
From flaws or disfigurements of one or other of these kinds the poem is
never free for more than a page or two, and rarely for so much, at a
time. But granting all weaknesses and immaturities whether of form or
spirit, what a power of poetry is in _Endymion_: what evidence,
unmistakeable, one would have said, to the blindest, of genius. Did any
poet in his twenty-second year ever write with so prodigal an activity
of invention, however undisciplined and unbraced, or with an imagination
so penetrating to divine and so swift to evoke beauty? Were so many
faults and failures ever interspersed with felicities of married sound
and sense so frequent and absolute, and only to be matched in the work
of the ripest masters? Lost as the reader may often feel himself among
the phantasmagoric intricacies of the tale, cloyed by its amatory
insipidities, bewildered by the redundancies of an invention stimulated
into over-activity by any and every chance feather-touch of association
or rime-suggestion, he can afford to be patient in the certainty of
coming, from one page to another, upon touches of true and fresh
inspiration in almost every strain and mode of poetry. Often the
inspired poet and the raw cockney rimester come inseparably coupled in
the limit of half a dozen lines, as thus in the narrative of Glaucus:--
Upon a dead thing's face my hand I laid;
I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe!
O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?
Could not thy harshest vengeance be content,
But thou must nip this tender innocent
Because I loved her?--_Cold, O cold indeed
Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed
The sea-swell took her hair._
or thus from the love-making of Cynthia:--
Now I swear at once
That I am wise, that Pallas is a dunce--
Perhaps her love like mine is but unknown--
O I do think that I have been alone
In chastity: yes, Pallas has been sighing,
_While every eve saw me my hair uptying,
With fingers cool as aspen leaves_.
In like manner the unfortunate opening of Book III above cited leads on,
as Mr de Sélincourt has justly observed, to a passage in praise of the
moon which is among the very finest and best sustained examples of
Keats's power in nature-poetry. For quotation I will take not this but a
second invocation to the moon which follows a little later, for the
reason that in it the raptures and longings which the poet puts into the
mouth of his hero are really in a large measure his own:--
What is there in thee, Moon! that thou shouldst move
My heart so potently? When yet a child
I oft have dry'd my tears when thou hast smil'd.
Thou seem'dst my sister: hand in hand we went
From eve to morn across the firmament.
No apples would I gather from the tree,
Till thou hadst cool'd their cheeks deliciously:
No tumbling water ever spake romance,
But when my eyes with thine thereon could dance:
No woods were green enough, no bower divine,
Until thou liftedst up thine eyelids fine:
In sowing time ne'er would I dibble take,
Or drop a seed, till thou wast wide awake;
And, in the summer tide of blossoming,
No one but thee hath heard me blythly sing
And mesh my dewy flowers all the night.
No melody was like a passing spright
If it went not to solemnize thy reign.
Yes, in my boyhood every joy and pain
By thee were fashioned in the self-same end;
And as I grew in years, still didst thou blend
With all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen;
Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen--
The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun;
Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won;
Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed--
My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:--
Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
O what a wild and harmonized tune
My spirit struck from all the beautiful!
In the last two lines of the above Keats gives us the essential master
key to his own poetic nature and being. The eight preceding, from 'As I
grew in years' offer in their rhetorical form a curious parallel with a
passage of similar purport in Drayton's _Endimion and Phoebe_:--
Be kind (quoth he) sweet Nymph unto thy lover,
My soul's sole essence and my senses' mover,
Life of my life, pure Image of my heart,
Impression of Conceit, Invention, Art.
My vital spirit receives his spirit from thee,
Thou art that all which ruleth all in me,
Thou art the sap and life whereby I live,
Which powerful vigour doth receive and give.
Thou nourishest the flame wherein I burn,
The North whereto my heart's true touch doth turn.
Was Keats, then, after all familiar with the rare volume in which alone
Drayton's early poem had been printed, or does the similar turn of the
two passages spring from some innate affinity between the two poets,--or
perhaps merely from the natural suggestion of the theme?
In nature-poetry, and especially in that mode of it in which the poet
goes out with his whole being into nature and loses his identity in
delighted sympathy with her doings, Keats already shows himself a master
scarcely excelled. Take the lines near the beginning which tell of the
'silent workings of the dawn' on the morning of Pan's festival:--
Rain-scented eglantine
Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
Man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass
Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold,
To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.
The freshness and music and felicity of the first two lines are nothing
less than Shakespearean: in the rest note with how true an instinct the
poet evokes the operant magic and living activities of the dawn, single
instances first and then in a sudden outburst the sum and volume of them
all: how he avoids word-painting and palette-work, leaving all merely
visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, as they
should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry alone is able to
deal, with those delights which are felt and divined rather than seen,
delights which the poet instinctively attributes to nature as though she
were as sentient as himself. It is like Keats here so to place and lead
up to the word 'old' as to make it pregnant with all the meanings which
it bore to him: that is with all the wonder and romance of ancient
Greece, and at the same time with a sense of awe, like that expressed in
the opening chorus of Goethe's _Faust_, at nature's eternal miracle of
the sun still rising 'glorious as on creation's day.'
It is interesting to note how above all other nature-images Keats, whose
blood, when his faculties were at their highest tension, was always apt
to be heated even to fever-point, prefers those of nature's coolness and
refreshment. Here are two or three out of a score of instances. Endymion
tells how he had been gazing at the face of his unknown love smiling at
him from the well:--
I started up, when lo! refreshfully,
There came upon my face in plenteous showers
Dew-drops, and dewy buds, and leaves, and flowers,
Wrapping all objects from my smothered sight,
Bathing my spirit in a new delight.
Coming to a place where a brook issues from a cave, he says to himself--
'Tis the grot
Of Proserpine, when Hell, obscure and hot,
Doth her resign; and where her tender hands
She dabbles on the cool and sluicy sands:
A little later, and
Now he is sitting by a shady spring,
And elbow-deep with feverous fingering,
Stems the upbursting cold.
For many passages where the magic of nature is mingled instinctively and
inseparably with the magic of Greek mythology, the prayer of Endymion to
Cynthia above quoted (p. 210) may serve as a sample: and all readers of
poetry know the famous lines where the beautiful evocation of a natural
scene melts into one, more beautiful still, of a scene of ancient life
and worship which comes floated upon the poet's inner vision by an
imagined strain of music from across the sea:--
It seem'd he flew, the way so easy was;
And like a new-born spirit did he pass
Through the green evening quiet in the sun,
O'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun,
Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams
The summer time away. One track unseams
A wooded cleft, and, far away, the blue
Of ocean fades upon him; then, anew,
He sinks adown a solitary glen,
Where there was never sound of mortal men,
Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences
Melting to silence, when upon the breeze
Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet,
To cheer itself to Delphi.[2]
Often in thus conjuring up visions of the classic past, Keats effects
true master strokes of imaginative concentration. Do we not feel half
the romance of the _Odyssey_, with the spell that is in the sound of the
vowelled place-names of Grecian story, and the breathing mystery of
moonlight falling on magic islands of the sea, distilled into the one
line--
Aeaea's isle was wondering at the moon?
And again in the pair of lines--
Like old Deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood
Or blind Orion hungry for the morn,
do not the two figures evoked rise before us full-charged each with the
vital significance of his story? Mr de Sélincourt is no doubt right in
suggesting that in the Orion line Keats's vision has been stimulated by
the print from that picture of Poussin's which Hazlitt has described in
so rich a strain of eulogy.
One of the great symptoms of returning vitality in the imagination of
Europe, as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth, was its
re-awakening to the significance and beauty of the Greek mythology. For
a hundred years and more the value of that mythology for the human
spirit had been forgotten. There never had been a time when the names of
the ancient, especially the Roman, gods and goddesses were used so often
in poetry, but simply in cold obedience to tradition and convention;
merely as part of the accepted mode of speech of persons classically
educated, and with no more living significance than belonged to the
trick of personifying abstract forces and ideas by putting capital
initials to their names. So far as concerned any real effect upon men's
minds, it was tacitly understood and accepted that the Greek mythology
was 'dead.' As if it could ever die; as if the 'fair humanities of old
religion,' in passing out of the transitory state of things believed
into the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had
not put on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first.
Faiths, as faiths, perish one after another; but each in passing away
bequeaths for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has
contained of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of
ancient Greece, embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest
gifted human race to explain its earliest experiences of nature and
civilization, of the thousand moral and material forces, cruel or
kindly, which environ and control the life of man on earth, is rich
beyond measure in such elements; and if the modern world at any time
fails to value them, it is the modern mind which is in so far dead and
not they. Some words of Johnson's written forty years before Keats's
time may help us to realize the full depth of the deadness from which in
this respect it had to be awakened:--
He (Waller) borrows too many of his sentiments and illustrations from
the old Mythology, for which it is in vain to plead the example of
ancient poets: the deities, which they introduced so frequently, were
considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination,
whatever sober reason might even then determine. But of these images
time has tarnished the splendour. A fiction, not only detected but
despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though
sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion, or slight illustration.
To rescue men's minds from this mode of deadness was part of the work of
the English poetical revival of 1800 and onwards, and Keats was the poet
who has contributed most to the task. Wordsworth could understand and
expound the spirit of Grecian myths, and on occasion, as in his cry for
a sight of Proteus and a sound of old Triton's horn, could for a moment
hanker after its revival. Shelley could feel and write of Apollo and Pan
and Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, with ardent delight and lyric
emotion. But it was the gift of Keats to make live by imagination,
whether in few words or many, every ancient fable that came up in his
mind. The couple of lines telling of the song with which Peona tries to
soothe her brother's pining are a perfect example alike of appropriate
verbal music and of imagination following out a classic myth, that of
the birth and nurture of Pan, from a mere hint to its recesses and
finding the human beauty and tenderness that lurk there:--
'Twas a lay
More subtle cadencèd, more forest wild
Than Dryope's lone lulling of her child:
Even in setting before us so trite a personification as the god of love,
Keats manages to escape the traditional and the merely decorative, and
to endow him with a new and subtle vitality--
awfully he stands;
A sovereign quell is in his waving hands;
No sight can bear the lightning of his bow;
His quiver is mysterious, none can know
What themselves think of it; from forth his eyes
There darts strange light of varied hues and dyes:
A scowl is sometimes on his brow, but who
Look full upon it feel anon the blue
Of his fair eyes run liquid through their souls.
Keats in one place defines his purpose in his poem, if only he can find
strength to carry it out, as a
striving to uprear
Love's standard on the battlements of song.
His actual love scenes, as we have said, are the weakest, his ideal
invocations to and celebrations of love among the strongest, things in
the poem. One of these, already quoted, comes near the end of the first
book: the second book opens with another: in the third book the incident
of the moonlight spangling the surface of the sea and penetrating thence
to the under-sea caverns where Endymion lies languishing is used to
point an essential moral of the narrative:--
O love! how potent hast thou been to teach
Strange journeyings! Wherever beauty dwells,
In gulph or aerie, mountains or deep dells,
In light, in gloom, in star or blazing sun,
Thou pointest out the way, and straight 'tis won.
When the poet interrupts for a passing moment his tale of the might and
mysteries of love, celestial or human, and turns to images of war, we
find, him able to condense the whole tragedy of the sack of Troy into
three potent lines,--
The woes of Troy, towers smothering o'er their blaze,
Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades,
Struggling, and blood, and shrieks.
From a passage like the following any reasonably sympathetic reader of
Keats's day, running through the poem to find what manner and variety of
promise it might contain, should have augured well of another kind of
power, the dramatic and ironic, to be developed in due time. The speaker
is the detected witch Circe uttering the doom of her revolted lover
Glaucus:--
'Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurse
Made of rose leaves and thistledown, express,
To cradle thee, my sweet, and lull thee: yes,
I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch:
My tenderest squeeze is but a giant's clutch.
So, fairy-thing, it shall have lullabies
Unheard of yet: and it shall still its cries
Upon some breast more lily-feminine.
Oh, no--it shall not pine, and pine, and pine
More than one pretty, trifling thousand years.
... Mark me! Thou hast thews
Immortal, for thou art of heavenly race:
But such a love is mine, that here I chase
Eternally away from thee all bloom
Of youth, and destine thee towards a tomb.
Hence shalt thou quickly to the watery vast;
And there, ere many days be overpast,
Disabled age shall seize thee: and even then
Thou shalt not go the way of aged men;
But live and wither, cripple and still breathe
Ten hundred years: which gone, I then bequeath
Thy fragile bones to unknown burial.
Adieu, sweet love, adieu!'
A vein very characteristic of Keats at this stage of his mind's growth
is that of figurative confession or self-revelation. Many passages in
_Endymion_ give poetical expression to the same alternating moods of
ambition and humility, of exhilaration, depression, or apathy, which he
confides to his friends in his letters. One of the most striking and
original of these pieces of figurative psychology studied from his own
moods is the description of the Cave of Quietude in Book IV:--
There lies a den,
Beyond the seeming confines of the space
Made for the soul to wander in and trace
Its own existence, of remotest glooms.
Dark regions are around it, where the tombs
Of buried griefs the spirit sees, but scarce
One hour doth linger weeping, for the pierce
Of new-born woe it feels more inly smart:
And in these regions many a venom'd dart
At random flies; they are the proper home
Of every ill: the man is yet to come
Who hath not journeyed in this native hell.
But few have ever felt how calm and well
Sleep may be had in that deep den of all.
There anguish does not sting; nor pleasure pall:
Woe-hurricanes beat ever at the gate,
Yet all is still within and desolate.
... Enter none
Who strive therefore: on the sudden it is won.
To the student of _Endymion_ there are few things more interesting than
to observe Keats's technical and spiritual relations to his Elizabethan
models in those places where he has one or another of them manifestly in
remembrance. Here is the passage in Sandys's _Ovid_ which tells how
Cybele, the Earth-Mother, punished the pair of lovers Hippomenes and
Atalanta for the pollution of her sanctuary by turning them into lions
and yoking them to her car:--
The Mother, crown'd
With towers, had struck them to the Stygian sound,
But that she thought that punishment too small.
When yellow manes on their smooth shoulders fall;
Their arms, to legs; their fingers turn to nails;
Their breasts of wondrous strength: their tufted tails
Whisk up the dust; their looks are full of dread;
For speech they roar: the woods become their bed.
These Lions, fear'd by others, Cybel checks
With curbing bits, and yokes their stubborn necks.
This is a typical example of Ovid's brilliantly clever, quite
unromantic, unsurprised, and as it were unblinking way of detailing the
marvels of an act of transformation. Keats's recollection of it--and
probably also of a certain engraving after a Roman altar-relief of
Cybele and her yoked lions--inspires a vision of intense imaginative
life expressed in verse of a noble solemnity and sonority:--
Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below,
Came mother Cybele! alone--alone--
In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown
About her majesty, and front death-pale,
With turrets crown'd. Four maned lions hale
The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws,
Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws
Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails
Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails
This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away
In another gloomy arch.
The four lions instead of two must be a whim of Keats's imagination, and
finds no authority either from Ovid or from ancient sculpture. Should
any reader wish to pursue farther the comparison between Ovid in the
_Metamorphoses_ and Keats in _Endymion_, let him turn to the passage of
Ovid where Polyphemus tells Galatea what rustic treasures he will lavish
upon her if she will be his,--the same passage from which is derived the
famous song in Handel's _Acis and Galatea_: let him turn to this and
compare it with the list of similar delights offered by Endymion to the
Indian maiden when he is bent on forgoing his dreams of a celestial
union for her sake, and he will see how they are dematerialized and
refined yet at the same time made richer in colour and enchantment.
But let us for our purpose rather take, as illustrating the relations of
Keats to his classic and Elizabethan sources, two of the incidental
lyrics in his poem. There are four such lyrics in _Endymion_ altogether.
Two of them are of small account,--the hymn to Neptune and Venus at the
end of the third book, and the song of the Constellations in the middle
of the fourth. The other two, the hymn to Pan in Book I and the song of
the Indian maiden in Book IV, are among Keats's very finest
achievements. The hymn to Pan is especially interesting in comparison
with two of Keats's Elizabethan sources, Chapman's translation of the
Homeric hymn and Ben Jonson's original hymns in his masque of _Pan's
Anniversary_. Here is part of the Homeric hymn according to Chapman:--
Sing, Muse, this chief of Hermes' love-got joys,
Goat-footed, two-horn'd, amorous of noise,
That through the fair greens, all adorn'd with trees,
Together goes with Nymphs, whose nimble knees
Can every dance foot, that affect to scale
The most inaccessible tops of all
Uprightest rocks, and ever use to call
On Pan, the bright-haired God of pastoral;
Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe
By lot all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow;
All tops of hills, and cliffy highnesses,
All sylvan copses, and the fortresses
Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove,
And sometimes, by allurement of his love,
Will wade the wat'ry softnesses. Sometimes
(In quite oppos'd _capriccios_) he climbs
The hardest rocks, and highest, every way
Running their ridges. Often will convey
Himself up to a watch-tow'r's top, where sheep
Have their observance. Oft through hills as steep
His goats he runs upon, and never rests.
Then turns he head, and flies on savage beasts,
Mad of their slaughters...
(When Hesp'rus calls to fold the flocks of men)
From the green closets of his loftiest reeds
He rushes forth, and joy with song he feeds.
When, under shadow of their motions set,
He plays a verse forth so profoundly sweet,
As not the bird that in the flow'ry spring,
Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring
Of her sour sorrows, sweeten'd with her song,
Runs her divisions varied so and strong.
And here are two of the most characteristic strophes from Ben Jonson's
hymns:--
Pan is our all, by him we breathe, we live,
We move, we are; 'tis he our lambs doth rear,
Our flocks doth bless, and from the store doth give
The warm and finer fleeces that we wear.
He keeps away all heats and colds,
Drives all diseases from our folds:
Makes every where the spring to dwell,
The ewes to feed, their udders swell;
But if he frown, the sheep (alas)
The shepherds wither, and the grass.
Strive, strive to please him then by still increasing thus
The rites are due to him, who doth all right for us.
* * * * *
Great Pan, the father of our peace and pleasure,
Who giv'st us all this leisure,
Hear what thy hallowed troop of herdsmen pray
For this their holy-day,
And how their vows to thee they in Lycæum pay.
So may our ewes receive the mounting rams,
And we bring thee the earliest of our lambs:
So may the first of all our fells be thine,
And both the breastning of our goats and kine.
As thou our folds dost still secure,
And keep'st our fountains sweet and pure,
Driv'st hence the wolf, the tod, the brock,
Or other vermin from the flock.
That we preserv'd by thee, and thou observ'd by us,
May both live safe in shade of thy lov'd Maenalus.
Comparing these strophes with the hymn in _Endymion_, we shall realize
how the Elizabethan pastoral spirit, compounded as it was of native
English love of country pleasures and Renaissance delight in classic
poetry, emerged after near two centuries' occultation to reappear in the
poetry of Keats, but wonderfully strengthened in imaginative reach and
grasp, richer and more romantic both in the delighted sense of nature's
blessings and activities and in the awed apprehension of a vast mystery
behind them. The sense of such mystery is nowhere else expressed by
Keats with such brooding inwardness and humbleness as where he invokes
Pan no longer as a shepherd's god but as a symbol of the World-All.
Wordsworth, when Keats at the request of friends read the piece to him,
could see, or would own to seeing, nothing in it but a 'pretty piece of
paganism,' though indeed in the more profoundly felt and imagined lines,
such as those with which the first and fifth strophes open, the
inspiration can be traced in great part to the influence of Wordsworth
himself:--
O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang
From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth
Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death
Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;
Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress
Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;
And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken
The dreary melody of bedded reeds--
In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds
The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;
Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth
Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now,
By thy love's milky brow!
By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan!
O thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles
Passion their voices cooingly 'mong myrtles,
What time thou wanderest at eventide
Through sunny meadows, that outskirt the side
Of thine enmossed realms: O thou, to whom
Broad leaved fig trees even now foredoom
Their ripen'd fruitage; yellow girted bees
Their golden honeycombs; our village leas
Their fairest blossom'd beans and poppied corn;
The chuckling linnet its five young unborn,
To sing for thee; low creeping strawberries
Their summer coolness; pent up butterflies
Their freckled wings; yea, the fresh budding year
All its completions--be quickly near,
By every wind that nods the mountain pine,
O forester divine!
Thou, to whom every faun and satyr flies
For willing service; whether to surprise
The squatted hare while in half sleeping fit;
Or upward ragged precipices flit
To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw;
Or by mysterious enticement draw
Bewildered shepherds to their path again;
Or to tread breathless round the frothy main,
And gather up all fancifullest shells
For thee to tumble into Naiads' cells,
And being hidden, laugh at their out-peeping;
Or to delight thee with fantastic leaping,
The while they pelt each other on the crown
With silvery oak apples, and fir cones brown--
By all the echoes that about thee ring,
Hear us, O satyr king!
O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears,
While ever and anon to his shorn peers
A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn,
When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn
Anger our huntsmen: Breather round our farms,
To keep off mildews, and all weather harms:
Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,
That come a swooning over hollow grounds,
And wither drearily on barren moors:[3]
Dread opener of the mysterious doors
Leading to universal knowledge--see,
Great son of Dryope,
The many that are come to pay their vows
With leaves about their brows!
Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain; be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown--but no more: we humbly screen
With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending,
And giving out a shout most heaven rending,
Conjure thee to receive our humble Paean,
Upon thy Mount Lycean!
The song of the Indian maiden in the fourth book is in a very different
key from this, more strikingly original in form and conception, and but
for a weak opening and one or two flaws of taste would be a masterpiece.
Keats's later and more famous lyrics, though they have fewer faults, yet
do not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of
imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords
of the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of
the best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the
immemorial romance of India and the East; a power like that of
Coleridge, and perhaps partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest
weird and beautiful associations almost with a word; clear visions of
Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of northern imagination; all these
elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual.
Keats calls the piece a 'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far
resembles that its opening measures are repeated at the close. It begins
by invoking and questioning sorrow in a series of dreamy musical stanzas
of which the imagery embodies, a little redundantly and confusedly, the
idea expressed elsewhere by Keats with greater perfection, that it is
Sorrow which confers upon beautiful things their richest beauty. From
these the song passes to tell what has happened to the singer:--
To Sorrow,
I bade good-morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind:
I would deceive her
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.
Beneath my palm tree, by the river side,
I sat a weeping: in the whole world wide
There was no one to ask me why I wept,--
And so I kept
Brimming the water-lily cups with tears
Cold as my fears.
Beneath my palm trees, by the river side,
I sat a weeping: what enamour'd bride,
Cheated by shadowy wooer from the clouds,
But hides and shrouds
Beneath dark palm trees by a river side?
It is here that we seem to catch an echo, varied and new-modulated but
in no sense weakened, from Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_,--
A savage place, as holy as enchanted
As e'er beneath the waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.
Then, with another change of measure comes the deserted maiden's tale of
the irruption of Bacchus on his march from India; and then, arranged as
if for music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and satyrs and
their choral answers:--
'Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye!
So many and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your bowers desolate,
Your lutes, and gentler fate?'
'We follow Bacchus! good or ill betide,
We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our wild minstrelsy!'
'Whence came ye jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye!
So many, and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left
Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'
'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;
For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms,
And cold mushrooms;
For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth;
Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our mad minstrelsy!'
'Over wide streams and mountains great we went,
And save when Bacchus kept his ivy tent,
Onward the tiger and the leopard pants,
With Asian elephants:
Onward these myriads--with song and dance,
With zebras striped, and sleek Arabians' prance,
Web-footed alligators, crocodiles,
Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files,
Plump infant laughers mimicking the coil
Of seamen, and stout galley-rowers' toil:
With toying oars and silken sails they glide,
Nor care for wind and tide.
[Illustration: PL. V
'Onward the tiger and the leopard pants
With Asian elephants'
FROM A SARCOPHAGUS RELIEF AT WOBURN ABBEY]
It is usually said that this description of Bacchus and his rout was
suggested by Titian's famous picture of Bacchus and Ariadne (after
Catullus) which is now in the National Gallery, and which Severn took
Keats to see when it was exhibited at the British Institution in 1816.
But this will account for a part at most of Keats's vision. Tiger and
leopard panting along with Asian elephants on the march are not present
in that picture, nor anything like them. Keats might have found
suggestions for them in the text both of Godwin's little handbook just
quoted and in Spence's _Polymetis_: but it would have been much more
like him to work from something seen with his eyes: and these animals,
with Indian prisoners mounted on the elephants, are invariable features
of the triumphal processions of Bacchus through India as represented on
a certain well-known type of ancient sarcophagus. From direct sight of
such sarcophagus reliefs or prints after such Keats, I feel sure, must
have taken them,[4] while the children mounted on crocodiles may have
been drawn from the plinth of the famous ancient recumbent statue of the
Nile, and the pigmy rowers, in all likelihood, from certain reliefs
which Keats will have noticed in the Townley collection at the British
Museum: so that the whole brilliant picture is a composite (as we shall
see later was the case with the Grecian Urn) which had shaped itself
from various sources in Keats's imagination and become more real than
any reality to his mind's eye. But I am holding up the reader, with this
digression as to sources, from the fine rush of verse with which the
lyric sweeps on to tell how the singer dropped out of the train of
Bacchus to wander alone into the Carian forest, and finally, returning
to the opening motive, ends as it began with an exquisite strain of
lovelorn pathos:--
Come then, sorrow!
Sweetest sorrow!
Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:
I thought to leave thee,
And deceive thee,
But now of all the world I love thee best.
There is not one,
No, no, not one
But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid;
Thou art her mother
And her brother,
Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade.
An intensely vital imaginative feeling, such as can afford to dispense
with scholarship, for the spirit of Greek and Greco-Asiatic myths and
cults inspires these lyrics respectively; and strangely enough the
result seems in neither case a whit impaired by the fact that the
nature-images Keats invokes in them are almost purely English.
Bean-fields in blossom and poppies among the corn, hemlock growing in
moist places by the brookside, field mushrooms with the morning dew
upon them, cowslips and strawberries and the song of linnets, oak,
hazel and flowering broom, holly trees smothered from view under the
summer leafage of chestnuts, these are the things of nature that he has
loved and lived with from a child, and his imagination cannot help
importing the same delights not only into the forest haunts of Pan but
into the regions ranged over by Bacchus with his train of yoked tiger
and panther, of elephant, crocodile and zebra.
Contemporary influences as well as Elizabethan and Jacobean are
naturally discernible in the poem. The strongest and most permeating is
that of Wordsworth, not so much to be traced in actual echoes of his
words, though these of course occur, as in adoptions of his general
spirit. We have recognized a special instance in that deep and brooding
sense of mystery, of 'something far more deeply interfused,' of the
working of an unknown spiritual force behind appearances, which finds
expression in the hymn to Pan. Endymion's prayer to Cynthia from
underground in the second book will be found to run definitely and
closely parallel with Wordsworth's description of the huntress Diana in
his account of the origin of Greek myths (see above, pp. 125-6). When
Keats likens the many-tinted mists enshrouding the litter of Sleep to
the fog on the top of Skiddaw from which the travellers may
With an eye-guess towards some pleasant vale
Descry a favourite hamlet faint and far,
we know that his imagination is answering to a stimulus supplied by
Wordsworth. But it is for the undercurrent of ethical symbolism in
_Endymion_ that Keats will have owed the most to that master. Both
Shelley and he had been profoundly impressed by the reading of _The
Excursion_, published when Shelley was in his twenty-second year and
Keats in his nineteenth, and each in his own way had taken deeply to
heart Wordsworth's inculcation, both in that poem and many others, of
the doctrine that a poet must learn to go out of himself and to live
and feel as a man among fellow men,--that it is a kind of spiritual
suicide for him to attempt to live apart from human sympathies,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
A large part of _Endymion_, as we have seen, is devoted to the
symbolical setting forth of this conviction. For the rest, that
essential contrast between the mental processes and poetic methods of
the elder and the younger man which we have noted in discussing Keats's
first volume continues to strike us in the second. In interpreting the
relations of man to the natural world, Wordsworth's poetry is intensely
personal and 'subjective,' Keats's intensely impersonal and 'objective.'
Wordsworth expounds, Keats evokes: the mind of Wordsworth works by
strenuous after-meditation on his experiences of life and nature and
their effect upon his own soul and consciousness: the mind of Keats
works by instantaneous imaginative participation, instinctive and
self-oblivious, in nature's doings and beings, especially those which
make for human refreshment and delight.
The second contemporary influence to be considered is that of Shelley.
Shelley's _Alastor_, it will be remembered, published early in 1816, had
been praised by Hunt in _The Examiner_ for December of that year, and in
the following January Hunt printed in the same paper Shelley's _Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty_. In the course of that same December and January
Keats had seen a good deal of Shelley at Hunt's and taken part with him
in many talks on poetry. It is certain that Keats read and was impressed
by _Alastor_: doubtless he also read the _Hymn_. How much did either or
both influence him in the composition of _Endymion_? Mr Andrew Bradley
thinks he sees evidence that _Alastor_ influenced him strongly. That
poem is a parable, as _Endymion_ is, of the adventures of a poet's soul;
and it enforces, as much of _Endymion_ does, the doctrine that a poet
cannot without ruin to himself live in isolation from human sympathies.
But there the resemblance between the two conceptions really ends. In
_Alastor_ the poet, having lived in solitary communion 'with all that is
most beautiful and august in nature and in human thought and the world's
past' (the words are Shelley's own prose summary of the imagined
experiences which the first part of the poem relates in splendid verse),
is suddenly awakened, by a love-vision which comes to him in a dream, to
the passionate desire of finding and mating with a kindred soul, the
living counterpart of his dream, who shall share with him the delight of
such communion. The desire, ever unsatisfied, turns all his former joys
to ashes, and drives him forth by unheard-of ways through monstrous
wildernesses until he pines and dies, or in the strained Shelleyan
phrase, 'Blasted by his disappointment, he descends into an untimely
grave.' The essence of the theme is the quest of the poetic soul for
perfect spiritual sympathy and its failure to discover what it seeks.
Shelley does not make it fully clear whether the ideal of his poet's
dream is a purely abstract entity, an incarnation of the collective
response which he hopes, but fails, to find from his fellow creatures at
large; or whether, or how far, he is transcendentally expressing his own
personal longing for an ideally sympathetic soul-companion in the shape
of woman. Both strains no doubt enter into his conception; so far as the
private strain comes in, many passages of his life furnish a mournfully
ironic comment on his dream. But in any case his conception is
fundamentally different from that of Keats in _Endymion_. The essence of
Keats's task is to set forth the craving of the poet for full communion
with the essential spirit of Beauty in the world, and the discipline by
which he is led, through the exercise of the active human sympathies and
the toilsome acquisition of knowledge, to the prosperous and beatific
achievement of his quest.
It is rather the preface to _Alastor_ than the poem itself which we can
trace as having really worked in the mind of Keats. In it the evil fate
of those who shut themselves out from human sympathies is very
eloquently set forth, in a passage which is only partly relevant to the
design of the poem, inasmuch as its warning is addressed not only to the
poet in particular but to human beings in general. The passage may have
had some influence on Keats when he framed the scheme of _Endymion_:
what is certain is that we shall find its thoughts and even its words
recurring forcibly to his mind in an hour of despondency some thirty
months later: let us therefore postpone its consideration until then.
For the rest, it is not difficult to show correspondence between some of
the descriptive passages of _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, especially those
telling of the natural and architectural marvels amid which the heroes
wander. Endymion's wanderings we are fresh from tracing. Alastor before
him had wandered--
where the secret caves
Rugged and dark, winding amid the springs
Of fire and poison, inaccessible
To avarice or pride, their starry domes
Of diamond and of gold expand above
Numerous and immeasurable halls,
Frequent with crystal columns, and clear shrines
Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.
But these are the kind of visions which may rise spontaneously in common
in the minds of almost any pair of youthful dreamers. Shelley's poetic
style is of course as much sounder and less experimental than that of
Keats at this time as his range and certainty of penetrating and
vivifying imagination are, to my apprehension at least, less: he had a
trained and scholarly feeling both for the resources of the language and
for its purity, and Keats might have learnt much from him as to what he
should avoid. But as we have seen, Keats was firmly on his guard against
letting any outside influence affect his own development, and would not
visit Shelley at Marlow during the composition of _Endymion_, in order
'that he might have his own unfettered scope' and that the spirit of
poetry might work out its own salvation in him.
As to the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, written though it was by
Shelley under the fresh impression of the glory of the Alps and also in
the first flush of his acquaintance with and enthusiasm for Plato, I
think Keats would have felt its strain of aspiration and invocation too
painful, too near despair, to make much appeal to him, and that
Shelley's
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon,
would have seemed to him something abstract, remote, and uncomforting.
His own imagination insisted on the existence of something in the
ultimate nature of the universe to account for what he calls the 'wild
and harmonised tune' which he found his spirit striking from all the
scattered and broken beauties of the world. Vague and floating his
conception of that something might be, but it was extraordinarily
intense, partaking of the concentrated essence of a thousand thrilling
joys of perception and imagination. He had read no Plato, though he was
of course familiar enough with Spenser's mellifluous dilution of
Platonic and neo-Platonic doctrine in his four _Hymns_. In _Endymion_,
as in the speculative passages of the letters we have quoted, his mind
has to go adventuring for itself among those ancient, for him almost
uncharted, mysteries of Love and Beauty. He does not as yet conceive
himself capable of anything more than steppings, to repeat his own sober
phrase, of the imagination towards truth. He does not light, he does not
expect to light, upon revelations of truth abstract or formal, and seems
to waver between the Adam's dream idea of finding in some transcendental
world all the several modes of earthly happiness 'repeated in a finer
tone' but yet retaining their severalness, and an idea, nearer to the
Platonic, of a single principle of absolute or abstract Beauty, the
object of a purged and perfected spiritual contemplation, from which all
the varieties of beauty experienced on earth derive their quality and
oneness. But in his search he strikes now and again, for the attentive
reader, notes of far reaching symbolic significance that carry the mind
to the verge of the great mysteries of things: he takes us with him on
exploratory sweeps and fetches of figurative thought in regions almost
beyond the reach of words, where we gain with him glimmering
adumbrations of the super-sensual through distilled and spiritualized
remembrance of the joys of sense-perception at their most intense.
So much for Keats's possible debt to Shelley in regard to _Endymion_.
There is an interesting small debt to be recorded on the other side,
which critics, I think, have hitherto failed to notice. Shelley,
notwithstanding his interest in Keats, did not read _Endymion_ till a
year or more after its publication. He had in the meantime gone to live
in Italy, and having had the volume sent out to him at Leghorn, writes:
'much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's intention
appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet
it is full of the highest and finest gleams of poetry: indeed,
everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described
in it. I think if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it,
I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of
which there is now no danger.' Nothing can be more just; and in the same
spirit eight months later, in May 1820, he writes, 'Keats, I hope, is
going to show himself a great poet; like the sun, to burst through the
clouds, which, though dyed in the finest colours of the air, obscured
his rising.' About the same time, having heard of Keats's hæmorrhage and
sufferings and of their supposed cause in the hostility of the Tory
critics, Shelley drafted, but did not send, his famous indignant letter
to the editor of the _Quarterly Review_. In this draft he shows himself
a careful student of _Endymion_ by pointing out particular passages for
approval. One of these passages is that near the beginning of the third
book describing the wreckage seen by the hero as he traversed the ocean
floor before meeting Glaucus. Everybody knows, in Shakespeare's _Richard
III_, Clarence's dream of being drowned and of what he saw below the
sea:--
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatter'd in the bottom of the sea.
Keats, no doubt remembering, and in a sense challenging, this passage,
wrote,--
Far had he roam'd,
With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam'd,
Above, around, and at his feet; save things
More dead than Morpheus' imaginings:
Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large
Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe;
Rudders that for a hundred years had lost
The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss'd
With long-forgotten story, and wherein
No reveller had ever dipp'd a chin
But those of Saturn's vintage; mouldering scrolls,
Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls
Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude
In ponderous stone, developing the mood
Of ancient Nox;--then skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster.
Jeffrey in his review of the _Lamia_ volume has a fine phrase about this
passage. It 'comes of no ignoble lineage,' he says, 'nor shames its high
descent.' How careful Shelley's study of the passage had been, and how
completely he had assimilated it, is proved by his, doubtless quite
unconscious, reproduction and amplification of it in the fourth act of
_Prometheus Unbound_, which he added as an afterthought to the rest of
the poem in December 1819. The wreckage described is not that of the
sea, but that which the light flashing from the forehead of the infant
Earth-spirit reveals at the earth's centre.
The beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears,
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythèd chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,
Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems
Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!
The wrecks beside of many a city vast,
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes
Huddled in gray annihilation, split,
Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these,
The anatomies of unknown wingèd things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jaggèd alligator, and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts.
The derivation of this imagery from the passage of Keats seems evident
alike from its general conception and sequence and from details like the
anchors, beaks, targes, the prodigious primeval sculptures, the
skeletons of behemoth and alligator and antediluvian monsters without
name. Another possible debt of Shelley to _Endymion_ has also been
suggested in the list of delights which the poet, in the closing passage
of _Epipsychidion_, proposes to share with his spirit's mate in their
imagined island home in the Ægean. If Shelley indeed owes anything to
_Endymion_ here, he has etherealized and transcendentalized his original
even more than Keats did Ovid. Possibly, it may also be suggested, it
may have been Shelley's reading of _Endymion_ that led him at this time
to take two of the myths handled in it by Keats as subjects for his own
two lyrics, _Arethusa_ and the _Hymn to Pan_ (both of 1820); but he may
just as well have thought of these subjects independently; and in any
case they are absolutely in his own vein, nor was their exquisite
leaping and liquid lightness of rhythm a thing at any time within
Keats's compass. It would be tempting to attribute to a desire of
emulating and improving on Keats Shelley's beautifully accomplished use
of the rimed couplet with varied pause and free overflow in the _Epistle
to Maria Gisborne_ (1819) and _Epipsychidion_ (1820), but that he had
already made a first experiment in the same kind with _Julian and
Maddalo_, written before his copy of _Endymion_ had reached him, so that
we must take his impulse in the matter to have been drawn not
intermediately through Keats but direct from Leigh Hunt.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Why will my friend Professor Saintsbury, in range of reading and
industry the master of us all, insist on trying to persuade us that
in the metre of _Endymion_ Keats owed something to the _Pharonnida_
of William Chamberlayne? There is absolutely no metrical usage in
Keats's poem for which his familiar Elizabethan and Jacobean masters
do not furnish ample precedent: he differs from them only in taking
more special care to avoid any prolonged run of closed couplets. I do
not believe he could have brought himself to read two pages of
_Pharonnida_. But that is only an opinion, and the matter can be
decided by a simple computation on the fingers. The fact is that
there are no five pages of _Pharonnida_ which do not contain more of
those unfortunate rimings on 'in' and 'by' and 'to' and 'on' and 'of'
followed by their nouns in the next line, or worse still, on 'to'
followed by its infinitive,--on 'it' and 'than' and 'be' and 'which,'
and all the featherweight particles and prepositions and auxiliaries
and relatives impossible to stress or pause on for a moment,--than
can be found in any whole book of _Endymion_. It is also a fact that
the average proportion of lines not ending with a comma or other
pause is in _Pharonnida_ about ten to one, and in _Endymion_ not more
than two and a half to one. That the sentence-structure of
_Pharonnida_ is as detestably disjointed and invertebrate as that of
_Endymion_ is graceful and well-articulated I hesitate to insist,
because that again is a matter of ear and feeling, and not, like my
other points, of sheer arithmetic.
[2] The flaw here is of course the use of the forced rime-word
'unseam.' The only authority for the word is Shakespeare, who uses it
in _Macbeth_, in a sufficiently different sense and context--
'Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps.'
The vision in Keats's mind was probably of a track dividing, or as it
were ripping apart, the two sides of a valley.
[3] 'All the strange, mysterious and unaccountable sounds which were
heard in solitary places, were attributed to Pan, the God of rural
scenery' (Baldwin's _Pantheon_, ed. 1806, p. 104). Keats possessed a
copy of this well-felt and well-written little primer of mythology,
by William Godwin the philosopher writing under the pseudonym Edward
Baldwin; and the above is only one of several suggestions directly
due to it which are to be found in his poetry.
[4] Two classes of sarcophaguses are concerned, those figuring the
triumph of Bacchus and Hercules with their Indian captives, and those
which show the march of Silenus and his rout of fauns and maenads.
Now it so happens that an excellent original of each class, and with
them also a fine Endymion sarcophagus, had been bought by the Duke of
Bedford from the Villa Aldobrandini in 1815 and were set up in his
grand new gallery at Woburn five years later. Where they were housed
in the meanwhile is not recorded, but wherever it was Haydon could
easily have obtained access to them, (the Duke's agent in the
purchase having been also secretary to Lord Elgin) and I cannot
resist the conviction, purely conjectural as it is, that Keats must
have seen them in Haydon's company some time in the winter of
1816/17, and drawn inspiration from them both in this and some other
passages of _Endymion_. The Triumph relief is the richest extant of
its class, especially in its multitude of sporting children: see
plate opposite.
CHAPTER VIII
DECEMBER 1817-JUNE 1818: HAMPSTEAD AND TEIGNMOUTH: EMIGRATION OF GEORGE
KEATS
Hampstead again: stage criticism--Hazlitt's lectures--Life at Well
Walk--Meeting with Wordsworth--The 'immortal dinner'--Lamb forgets
himself--More of Wordsworth--A happy evening--Wordsworth on
Bacchus--Disillusion and impatience--Winter letters--Maxims and
reflections--Quarrels among friends--Haydon, Hunt and Shelley--A
prolific February--Rants and sonnets--A haunting memory--Six weeks at
Teignmouth--Soft weather and soft men--_Isabella_ or _the Pot of
Basil_--Rich correspondence--Epistle to Reynolds--Thirst for
knowledge--Need of experience--The two chambers of thought--Summer
plans--Preface to _Endymion_--A family break-up--To Scotland with
Brown.
From finishing _Endymion_ at Burford Bridge Keats returned some time
before mid-December to his Hampstead lodging. The exact date is
uncertain; but it was in time to see Kean play _Richard III_ at Drury
Lane on the 15th--the actor's first performance after a break of some
weeks due to illness. J. H. Reynolds had gone to Exeter for a Christmas
holiday, and Keats, acting as his substitute, wrote four dramatic
criticisms for the _Champion_: the first, printed on December 21, on
Kean in general and his re-appearance as Richard III in particular; a
second on a hash of the three parts of Shakespeare's _Henry VI_ produced
under the title _Richard Duke of York_, with Kean in the name-part and
probably Kean also as compiler; a third on a tragedy of small account by
one Dillon, called _Retribution_, or the _Chieftain's Daughter_, in
which the young Macready played the part of the villain; and a fourth on
a pantomime of _Don Giovanni_. No one, least of all one living in
Keats's circle, could well attempt stage criticism at this time without
trying to write like Hazlitt. Keats acquits himself on the whole rather
youthfully and crudely. In one point he is cruder than one would have
expected, and that is where, after re-reading the three parts of _Henry
VI_ for his purpose, he retracts what he had begun to say about them and
declares that they are 'perfect works,' apparently without any suspicion
that Shakespeare's part in them is at most that of a beginner of genius
touching up the hackwork of others with a fine passage here and there.
It is only in the notice of Kean as Richard III that the genius in Keats
really kindles. Here his imagination teaches him phrases beyond the
reach of Hazlitt, to express (there is nothing more difficult) the
specific quality and very thrill of the actor's voice and utterance. The
whole passage is of special interest, both what is groping in it and
what is masterly, and alike for itself and for such points as its
familiar use of tags from the then recent _Christabel_ and _Siege of
Corinth_:--
A melodious passage in poetry is full of pleasures both sensual and
spiritual. The spiritual is felt when the very letters and points of
charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty; the
mysterious signs of our immortal free-masonry! 'A thing to dream of,
not to tell'! The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of
Kean and to one learned in Shakespearian hieroglyphics--learned in the
spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual
grandeur; his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left
them honeyless! There is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by
which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future
while speaking of the instant. When he says in _Othello_, 'Put up your
bright swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat
had commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk,
he speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation
of 'blood, blood, blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the deepest
degree; the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over
them, making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the
wild dog on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can
distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' In
Richard, 'Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!' comes
from him as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns....
Surely this intense power of anatomizing the passions of every
syllable, of taking to himself the airings of verse, is the means by
which he becomes a storm with such fiery decision; and by which, with
a still deeper charm, he does his spiriting gently. Other actors are
continually thinking of their sum-total effect throughout a play. Kean
delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a
thought about anything else. He feels his being as deeply as
Wordsworth, or any other of our intellectual monopolists. From all his
comrades he stands alone, reminding us of him, whom Dante has so
finely described in his Hell:
and sole apart retir'd the Soldan fierce.[1]
Although so many times he has lost the battle of Bosworth Field, we
can easily conceive him really expectant of victory, and a different
termination of the piece.
Keats was by this time left alone in Well Walk, having seen his brothers
off for Teignmouth, whither George carried the invalid Tom for change of
climate. His regular occupation for the next two months was revising and
copying out _Endymion_ for press. Regular also was his attendance at
Hazlitt's evening lectures on the English Poets at the Surrey
Institution. Of the lectures on Shakespeare which Coleridge was in the
same weeks delivering in Fetter Lane Keats makes no mention, and it is
clear that he made no effort to go and hear them, though the distance of
the lecture-hall from his Hampstead lodging was so much less. The reader
who would fain conjure up for himself the contrasted personalities and
styles in public discourse of these two master critics, the shy and
saturnine, yet vigorously straight-hitting and trenchantly effective
Hazlitt, and the ramblingly mellifluous, sometimes beautifully inspired
and sometimes painfully drug-beclouded Coleridge, can draw but a faint
and tantalized satisfaction from the diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson,
that assiduous friend and satellite of men of genius, who punctually
records his attendance at both courses, but lacked the touch that
should have made his record live.
Keats's letters to his brothers in these winter months, with a few more
to Bailey and Reynolds, give us lively glimpses of his social doings,
and others, interesting in the extreme, of the inward growth and
workings of his mind. He tells of a certain amount of common-place
conviviality: an absurd dance and rackety supper at one Redhall's; noisy
Saturday 'concerts' at his own rooms, which means that two or three
intimates came to early afternoon dinner and spent the rest of the day
drinking claret and keeping up a concerted racket, each in imitation of
some musical instrument (Keats himself of the bassoon); but of this
pastime he soon got tired and rather ashamed. His social relations began
to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought
consistent with proper industry. We find him dining with Shelley's
friend, the genial and admirable stockbroker and man of letters Horace
Smith, in company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he
reflects:--'They only served to convince me how superior humour is to
wit, in respect to enjoyment. These men say things which make one start,
without making one feel; they are all alike; they all know fashionables;
they have all a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere
handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low company. "Would I
were with that company instead of yours," said I to myself.' Sunday
evenings were for a while set apart for dining with Haydon, and here, on
the last Sunday of the year, Keats met Wordsworth for the first time.
Wordsworth was on one of his rare visits to London, and had been staying
since the beginning of December with his brother Christopher at Lambeth
rectory. According to Crabb Robinson, he seems to have been in these
weeks in one of his stiffest and most domineering moods of egotism, much
ruffled by the moderate strictures of Coleridge in _Biographia
Literaria_ on certain qualities in his work and not at all appeased by
the splendid praise which so much out-balanced them. One evening in
conversation he went so far as to treat that great helpless genius, his
old bosom-friend and inspirer, with a rudeness of contradiction which
even the devoted Robinson found it hard to forgive.[2] Near about the
same time, hearing that the next Waverley novel was to be about Rob Roy,
he took down his ballad so named, read it aloud, and said 'I do not know
what more Mr Scott can have to say on the subject.'[3] Keats promptly
had full experience of Wordsworth's egotism, but also saw more genial
aspects of his character. Quite coolly and briefly he mentions those
circumstances of their first meeting which Haydon, in a famous passage
of his autobiography, thrusts before us in the insistent colour and
illumination of a magic-lantern picture. 'I think,' writes Keats,
'Ritchie is going to Fezan in Africa; thence to proceed if possible like
Mungo Park. Then there was Wordsworth, Lamb, Monkhouse, Landseer, and
your humble servant. Lamb got tipsy and blew up Kingston--proceeding so
far as to take the candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show
us what a soft fellow he was.' It should be explained that Ritchie was a
young explorer whom Tom had met the summer before on his run to Paris,
and Kingston a thick-witted, thick-skinned, intrusive but kindly
gentleman of lion-hunting proclivities, who as Comptroller of Stamps had
had some correspondence with Wordsworth and on the strength of this
invited himself to join Haydon's party in the poet's honour. Now for
Haydon:--
On December 28th the immortal dinner came off in my painting-room,
with Jerusalem towering up behind us as a background. Wordsworth was
in fine cue, and we had a glorious set-to,--on Homer, Shakespeare,
Milton and Virgil. Lamb got exceedingly merry and exquisitely witty;
and his fun in the midst of Wordsworth's solemn intonations of oratory
was like the sarcasm and wit of the fool in the intervals of Lear's
passion. He made a speech and voted me absent, and made them drink my
health. 'Now,' said Lamb, 'you old lake poet, you rascally poet, why
do you call Voltaire dull?' We all defended Wordsworth, and affirmed
there was a state of mind when Voltaire would be dull. 'Well,' said
Lamb, 'here's to Voltaire--the Messiah of the French nation, and a
very proper one too.'
He then, in a strain of humour beyond description, abused me for
putting Newton's head into my picture,--'a fellow,' said he, 'who
believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a
triangle. And then he and Keats agreed he had destroyed all the poetry
of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. It was
impossible to resist him, and we all drank 'Newton's health, and
confusion to mathematics.' It was delightful to see the good-humour of
Wordsworth in giving in to all our frolics without affectation and
laughing as heartily as the best of us.
By this time other friends joined, amongst them poor Ritchie who was
going to penetrate by Fezzan to Timbuctoo. I introduced him to all as
'a gentleman going to Africa.' Lamb seemed to take no notice; but all
of a sudden he roared out, 'Which is the gentleman we are going to
lose?' We then drank the victim's health, in which Ritchie joined.
In the morning of this delightful day, a gentleman, a perfect
stranger, had called on me. He said he knew my friends, had an
enthusiasm for Wordsworth and begged I would procure him the happiness
of an introduction. He told me he was a comptroller of stamps, and
often had correspondence with the poet. I thought it a liberty; but
still, as he seemed a gentleman, I told him he might come.
When we retired to tea we found the comptroller. In introducing him to
Wordsworth I forgot to say who he was. After a little time the
comptroller looked down, looked up and said to Wordsworth, 'Don't you
think, sir, Milton was a great genius?' Keats looked at me, Wordsworth
looked at the comptroller. Lamb who was dozing by the fire turned
round and said, 'Pray, sir, did you say Milton was a great genius?'
'No, sir; I asked Mr Wordsworth if he were not.' 'Oh,' said Lamb,
'then you are a silly fellow.' 'Charles! my dear Charles!' said
Wordsworth; but Lamb, perfectly innocent of the confusion he had
created, was off again by the fire.
After an awful pause the comptroller said, 'Don't you think Newton a
great genius?' I could not stand it any longer; Keats put his head
into my books. Ritchie squeezed in a laugh. Wordsworth seemed asking
himself, 'Who is this?' Lamb got up, and taking a candle, said, 'Sir,
will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?' He then
turned his back on the poor man, and at every question of the
comptroller he chaunted--
Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John
Went to bed with his breeches on.
The man in office, finding Wordsworth did not know who he was, said in
a spasmodic and half-chuckling anticipation of assured victory, 'I
have had the honour of some correspondence with you, Mr Wordsworth.'
'With me, sir?' said Wordsworth, 'not that I remember.' 'Don't you,
sir? I am a comptroller of stamps.' There was a dead silence;--the
comptroller evidently thinking that was enough. While we were waiting
for Wordsworth's reply, Lamb sung out
Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle.
'My dear Charles!' said Wordsworth,--
Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John,
chaunted Lamb, and then rising, exclaimed, 'Do let me have another
look at that gentleman's organs.' Keats and I hurried Lamb into the
painting-room, shut the door and gave way to inextinguishable
laughter. Monkhouse followed and tried to get Lamb away. We went back
but the comptroller was irreconcilable. We soothed and smiled and
asked him to supper. He stayed though his dignity was sorely affected.
However, being a good-natured man, we parted all in good humour, and
no ill effects followed.
All the while, until Monkhouse succeeded, we could hear Lamb
struggling in the painting-room and calling at intervals, 'Who is that
fellow? Allow me to see his organs once more.'
It was indeed an immortal evening. Wordsworth's fine intonation as he
quoted Milton and Virgil, Keats's eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint
sparkle of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation, that
in my life I never passed a more delightful time. All our fun was
within bounds. Not a word passed that an apostle might not have
listened to. It was a night worthy of the Elizabethan age, and my
solemn Jerusalem flashing up by the flame of the fire, with Christ
hanging over us like a vision, all made up a picture which will long
glow upon--
that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
Keats made Ritchie promise he would carry his _Endymion_ to the great
desert of Sahara and fling it in the midst.
To complete our impression of Wordsworth at this time of his winter
visit to London in his forty-eighth year, let us turn for a moment to
Leigh Hunt's recollections of his looks and ways about the same time.
Certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural.
They were like fires half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of
acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the end of two caverns. One
might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes.... He had a
dignified manner, with a deep roughish but not unpleasing voice, and
an exalted mode of speaking. He had a habit of keeping his left hand
in the bosom of his waistcoat; and in this attitude, except when he
turned round to take one of the subjects of his criticism from the
shelves, he was dealing forth his eloquent but hardly catholic
judgments.
Hazlitt, in words written a few years later, gives a nearly similar
portrait:--
He is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat
stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbein's heads,
grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour.... He has a
peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness and a
rugged harmony in the tones of his voice. His manner of reading his
own poetry is particularly imposing, and in his favourite passages his
eye beams with preternatural lustre, and the meaning labours slowly up
from his swelling breast.
Although the great man could praise or care for no contemporary poetry
save his own, and had none of the sympathetic or encouraging criticism
to bestow on Keats which to that ardent young spirit would have meant so
much, he nevertheless showed him no little personal kindness, receiving
him when he called and inviting him several times to dine or sup. On his
first visit Keats was kept waiting till the poet bustled in, full
dressed in stiff stock and knee breeches, in haste to keep a dinner
appointment with one of his official chiefs. This experience proved no
check to their acquaintance: neither did Wordsworth's chilling comment
when Keats was induced to read to him the hymn to Pan from _Endymion_.
'A very pretty piece of Paganism,' he remarked and that was all. Severn
was present at the gathering in Haydon's studio where this reading took
place. The evening's talk, he relates, ran much on the virtues of a
vegetable diet, which was for the moment, through the vehement advocacy
of Shelley, so much in vogue in Leigh Hunt's circle that even the ruddy
and robust Haydon gave himself out for a proselyte like the rest, until
friends one day caught him coming privily smacking his lips out of a
chop-house. Wordsworth was in a jocular mood, and asked his herbivorous
friends whether they did not welcome such a succulent morsel of animal
food as a chance caterpillar in their cabbage. Was it on the same
occasion that the sage and seer condescended to a pun, telling Haydon
that if he ever took the name of another artist, as some of the old
masters used to do, it should be Teniers, seeing that he had been ten
years working on his great picture, still unfinished, of Christ's Entry
into Jerusalem, in which Wordsworth and other leading personages of the
time were to figure among the crowd of lookers on?
A fortnight after their first meeting Keats re-affirms to his brother
the view he had formerly expressed to Haydon that 'If there were three
things superior in the modern world they were _The Excursion_, Haydon's
Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste.' About the same time, that is in
the course of January, he writes of having 'seen Wordsworth frequently':
and again 'I have seen a good deal of Wordsworth.' A later allusion
implies that he has seen him 'with his beautiful wife and his enchanting
sister.' At one meeting Keats must have heard talk or reading that
delighted him, for Severn tells how while he was toiling late one night
over his miniature painting, Keats burst into his lodging fresh from
Wordsworth's company and in a state of eager elation over his
experience. It is hard to refrain from conjecture as to what had
happened. What one would like to think is that Wordsworth had been
reading Keats some of those great passages in the _Prelude_ without
which the master cannot truly be more than half known and which
remained unpublished until the year of his death. Or may we possibly
trace a clue to the evening's enjoyment in this further note of
Hazlitt's on a phase of Wordsworth's conversation?--
It is fine to hear him talk of the way in which certain subjects
should have been treated by eminent poets, according to his notions of
the art. Thus he finds fault with Dryden's description of Bacchus in
the _Alexander's Feast_, as if he were a mere good-looking youth, or
boon companion
Flushed with a purple grace,
He shows his honest face--
Instead of representing the god returning from the conquest of India,
crowned with vine-leaves, and drawn by panthers, and followed by
troops of satyrs, of wild men and animals that he had tamed. You would
think, in hearing him speak on this subject, that you saw Titian's
picture of the meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne--so classic were his
conceptions, so glowing his style.[4]
It is tempting to seek some kind of connexion between Keats in his great
Bacchic ode in _Endymion_ and Wordsworth in this vein of talk. Had we
not known that _Endymion_ was finished before the elder and the younger
poet met, we might have been inclined to attribute to Wordsworth's
eloquence some part of Keats's inspiration. And even as it is such
possibility remains open, for it must be remembered that Keats carefully
re-copied the several cantos of his poem during the spring, the fourth
canto not until March, at Teignmouth, and it is conceivable, though
unlikely, that the triumph of Bacchus might have been an addition made
in re-copying.
It was most likely a result of the interest taken by Wordsworth in Keats
that the young poet received at this time a friendly call, of which he
makes passing mention, from Crabb Robinson.
But the more Keats saw of Wordsworth himself, the more critically, as
his letters show, he came gradually to look upon him. He disliked the
idea of a man so revered dining with the foolish Kingston, and refused
to dine and meet him there. He regrets, after Wordsworth has gone, that
he has 'left a bad impression wherever he has visited in town by his
egotism, Vanity, and bigotry;' adding, 'yet he is a great poet if not a
philosopher.' The fullest expression of this critical attitude occurs in
a letter written to Reynolds at the beginning of February. Keats is for
the moment out of conceit with the poets of his own time; particularly
with Wordsworth, whom he had always devoutly reverenced from a distance,
and with Hunt, next to Cowden Clarke his earliest encourager and
sympathiser, whom to his disappointment he had lately found more ready
to carp than praise when he read him the early books of _Endymion_. It
seems Hunt would have liked the talk of Endymion and Peona to come
nearer his own key of simpering triviality in _Rimini_. 'He says,'
writes Keats 'the conversation is unnatural and too high-flown for
Brother and Sister--says it should be simple, forgetting do ye mind that
they are both overshadowed by a supernatural Power and perforce could
not talk like Francesca in the _Rimini_. He must first prove that
Caliban's poetry is unnatural. This with me completely overturns his
objections.' In revising _Endymion_ for press Keats proved his wise
adherence to his own point of view by cutting out some of the passages
most infected with the taint of Hunt's familiar tea-party manner. The
words in which he expresses his impatience of the several dogmatisms of
Wordsworth and Hunt are vital in relation to his own conception of
poetry and of its right aim and working:--
It may be said that we ought to read our contemporaries, that
Wordsworth etc., should have their due from us. But, for the sake of a
few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a
certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist? Every man
has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over
them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. Many a man
can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to
put down his half-seeing. Sancho will invent a Journey heavenward as
well as anybody. We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us,
and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches
pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters
into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but
with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would
they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying
out, 'Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!' Modern
poets differ from the Elizabethans in this: each of the moderns like
an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, and knows how many
straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions, and
has a continual itching that all the Housewives should have their
coppers well scoured. The ancients were Emperors of vast Provinces,
they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit
them. I will cut all this--I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt
in particular.... I don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and
Hunt's merit, but I mean to say we need not be teazed with grandeur
and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive.
These winter letters of Keats are full of similar first fruits of young
reflection, thoughts forming or half-forming themselves in absolute
sincerity as he writes, intuitions of his first-endeavouring mind on the
search for vital truths of art and nature and humanity. Imperfect,
half-wrought phrases often come from him which prove, when you have
lived with them, to be more sufficient as well as more suggestive than
if they had been chiselled into precision by longer study and a more
confident mind. For instance: 'the excellence of every art is its
intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their
being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth': a sentence worth
whole treatises and fit, sketchy as it is, to serve as text to all that
can justly be discoursed concerning problems of art in its relation to
nature,--of realism, romance, and the rest. Or this:--
Brown and Dilke walked with me and back to the Christmas pantomime. I
had not a dispute, but a disquisition, with Dilke upon various
subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck
me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in
literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean
_Negative Capability_, that is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine
isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from
being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued
through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with
a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration,
or rather obliterates all consideration.
Or this:--
In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from
their centre.
1st. I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by
singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own
highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
2nd. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making
the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the
setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine
over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in
the luxury of twilight.
But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it. And
this leads me to another axiom--That if poetry comes not as naturally
as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. However it may
be with me, I cannot help looking into new countries with 'O for a
muse of Fire to ascend!' If _Endymion_ serves me as a pioneer, perhaps
I ought to be content--I have great reason to be content, for thank
God I can read, and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths; and
I have I am sure many friends, who, if I fail will attribute any
change in my life and temper to humbleness rather than pride--to a
cowering under the wings of great poets, rather than to a bitterness
that I am not appreciated.
Cogitations of this cast, not less fresh than deep, and often throwing a
clear retrospective light on the moods and aims which governed him in
writing _Endymion_, are interspersed at the beginning of the year with
regrets at dissensions rife among his friends. The strain between Haydon
and Hunt had increased since the autumn, and now, over a sordid matter
of money borrowed by Mrs Hunt--by all accounts the most unabashed of
petty spongers--and not repaid, grew into an active quarrel. Another
still fiercer quarrel broke out between Haydon and Reynolds, who with
all his fine qualities seems to have been quick and touchy, and whom we
find later in open breach with his admirable brother-in-law Thomas Hood.
Keats was not involved. With his distinguished good sense and good heart
in matters of friendship, he knew how to keep in close and affectionate
touch with what was loveable or likeable in each of the disputants
severally. His comments are the best key to the best part of himself,
and show him as the true great spirit, by character not less than by
gift, among the group.
Things have happened lately of great perplexity--you must have heard
of them--Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting
for ever--the same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is
unfortunate--Men should bear with each other: there lives not the Man
who may not be cut up, aye lashed to pieces on his weakest side. The
best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual
yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by
which a Man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with
Circumstance. The sure way, Bailey, is first to know a Man's and then
be passive--if after that he insensibly draws you towards him then you
have no power to break the link. Before I felt interested in either
Reynolds or Haydon, I was well read in their faults; yet, knowing
them, I have been cementing gradually with both. I have an affection
for them both, for reasons almost opposite--and to both must I of
necessity cling, supported always by the hope that, when a little
time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully in their esteem, I
may be able to bring them together. The time must come, because they
have both hearts and they will recollect the best parts of each other,
when this gust is overblown.
Of Haydon himself and of his powers as a painter Keats continued to
think as highly as ever, seeing in his pictures, as the friends and
companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt to
see, not so much the actual performance as the idea he had pre-conceived
of it in the light of his friend's enthusiastic ambition and eloquence.
Severn repeatedly insists on Keats's remarkably keen natural instinct
for and understanding of the arts both of music and painting. Cowden
Clarke's piano-playing had been one of the chief pleasures of his
school-days: as to the capacity he felt in himself for judging the works
of painting, here is his own scrupulously modest and sincere estimate
expressed to Haydon a little later:
Believe me Haydon your picture is part of myself--I have ever been too
sensible of the labyrinthian path to eminence in Art (judging from
Poetry) ever to think I understood the emphasis of painting. The
innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between
the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that
trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of beauty. I know not
your many havens of intenseness--nor ever can know them: but for this
I hope nought you achieve is lost upon me: for when a Schoolboy the
abstract idea I had of an heroic painting--was what I cannot describe.
I saw it somewhat sideways, large, prominent, round, and colour'd with
magnificence--somewhat like the feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra.
Or of Alcibiades leaning on his Crimson Couch in his Galley, his broad
shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the Sea.
With Hunt also, in spite of the momentary causes of annoyance we have
seen, Keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds his
intimacy grew daily closer. At Hunt's he again saw something of Shelley.
'The Wednesday before last Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on
the river Nile,' he tells his brothers on the 16th of February, 1818.
The sonnets are preserved. They were to be written, it was agreed, in a
quarter of an hour. Shelley and Keats were up to time, but Hunt had to
sit up half the night to finish his. It was worth the pains, and with it
for once the small poet outdid the two great. 'I have been writing,'
continues Keats, 'at intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be
at Teignmouth to read them over to you.' With the help of his
manuscripts or of the transcripts made from them by his friends, it is
possible to retrace the actual order of many of these fugitive pieces.
On the 16th of January was written the sonnet on Mrs Reynolds's cat,
perhaps Keats's best thing in the humorous vein; on the 21st, after
seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's,
the address to that poet beginning 'Chief of organic numbers!' which he
sends to the prime Milton enthusiast among his friends, Benjamin Bailey,
with the comment, 'This I did at Hunt's, at his request,--perhaps I
should have done something better alone and at home.' The first two
lines,--
Chief of organic numbers,
Old scholar of the spheres!
read like an anticipation in the rough of the first stanza of Tennyson's
masterly set of alcaics already referred to, beginning 'O mighty-mouthed
inventor of harmonies.' To the 22nd belongs the sonnet, 'O golden
tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which Keats bids himself lay aside
(apparently) his Spenser,[5] in order to read again the more rousing and
human-passionate pages of _Lear_. This is one of the last of his sonnets
written in the Petrarchan form as followed by Milton and Wordsworth, and
from henceforth he follows the Shakespearean form almost exclusively. On
the 31st he writes to Reynolds in a rollicking mood, and sends him the
lines to Apollo beginning 'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' part rant
(the word is his own) pure and simple, part rant touched with genius,
and giving words to a very frequent and intense phase of feeling in
himself:--
Aye, when the soul is fled
Too high above our head,
Affrighted do we gaze
After its airy maze,
As doth a mother wild,
When her young infant child
Is in an eagle's claws--
And is not this the cause
Of madness?--God of Song,
Thou bearest me along
Through, sights I scarce can bear:
O let me, let me share
With the hot lyre and thee,
The staid Philosophy.
Temper my lonely hours,
And let me see thy bowers
More unalarm'd!
By way of a sober conclusion to the same letter, he adds the very fine
and profoundly felt sonnet in the Shakespearean form beginning 'When I
have fears that I may cease to be,' which be calls his last. On the 3rd
of February he sends two spirited sets of verses in the favourite
four-beat measure, heptasyllable varied with octosyllable, of the later
Elizabethans and the youthful Milton, namely those to Robin Hood
(suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest) and those
on the Mermaid Tavern. On the 4th comes another Shakespearean sonnet,
that beginning 'Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in
which he recalls the memory of an old, persistent, haunting love-fancy.
The two sonnets of January 31 and February 4 should be read strictly
together:--
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like full garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
Time's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb;
Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand;
Since I was tangled in thy beauty's web,
And snared by the ungloving of thine hand.
And yet I never look on midnight sky,
But I behold thine eyes' well memoried light;
I cannot look upon the rose's dye,
But to thy cheek my soul doth take its flight;
I cannot look on any budding flower,
But my fond ear, in fancy at thy lips,
And hearkening for a love-sound, doth devour
Its sweets in the wrong sense:--Thou dost eclipse
Every delight with sweet remembering,
And grief unto my darling joys dost bring.
The former is far the richer in contents, and in the light of the
tragedy to come its two first quatrains now seem to thrill with
prophetic meaning. But what is singular is that in the third quatrain
should be recalled, in the same high strain of emotion, the vision of a
beauty seen but not even accosted three-and-a-half years earlier (not
really five) in the public gardens at Vauxhall, and then (August, 1814)
addressed in what are almost the earliest of Keats's dated verses, those
in which he calls for a 'brimming bowl,'--
From my despairing heart to charm
The Image of the fairest form
That e'er my reveling eyes beheld,
That e'er my wandering fancy spell'd....[6]
Such, Woodhouse assures us, is the case, and the same memory fills the
second sonnet: but this it might be possible to take rather as a fine
Shakespearean exercise than as an expression of profound feeling. On the
5th, Keats sends another sonnet postponing compliance for the present
with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's to compose something in honour, or in
emulation, of Spenser; and on the 8th, the sonnet in praise of the
colour blue composed by way of protest against one of Reynolds
preferring black, at least in the colouring of feminine eyes. About the
same time he agreed with Reynolds that they should each write some
metrical tales from Boccaccio, and publish them in a joint volume; and
began at once for his own part with the first few stanzas of _Isabella_
or the _Pot of Basil_. A little later in this so prolific month of
February we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird,
and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the
influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly
in a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of
mind, translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of
subtle and haunting cadence, in which, disowning for the nonce his
habitual doctrine of the poet's paramount need of knowledge, he makes
the thrush say,
O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth,
O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
And yet the evening listens.
In the course of the next fortnight we find him in correspondence with
Taylor about the corrections to _Endymion_; and soon afterwards making a
clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing to flit. His
brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at Teignmouth since
December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a scheme of marriage
and emigration; and Tom's health having made a momentary rally, Keats
was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and determined to join
him there. He started in the second week of March, and stayed almost two
months. It was an unlucky season for weather,--the soft-buffeting sheets
and misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing themselves wave on wave, in
the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, throughout almost
the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more than occasional
tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the scenery, the
walks, and flowers. His letters are full of whimsical objurgations not
only against the climate, but against the male inhabitants, whose fibre
he chooses to conceive relaxed by it:--
You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a
splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod
county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em--the
primroses are out, but then you are in--the Cliffs are of a fine deep
colour, but then the Clouds are continually vieing with them--the
women like your London people in a sort of negative way--because the
native men are the poorest creatures in England--because Government
never have thought it worth while to send a recruiting party among
them. When I think of Wordsworth's Sonnet, 'Vanguard of Liberty! ye
men of Kent!' the degenerated race about me are Pulvis ipecac.
simplex--a strong dose. Were I a corsair, I'd make a descent on the
south coast of Devon; if I did not run the chance of having Cowardice
imputed to me. As for the men, they'd run away into the Methodist
meeting-houses, and the women would be glad of it.... Such a quelling
Power have these thoughts over me that I fancy the very air of a
deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, all precocious, have an
Acrasian spell about them--I feel able to beat off the Devonshire
waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the honour of Britain that
Julius Caesar did not first land in this County. A Devonshirer
standing on his native hills is not a distinct object--he does not
show against the light--a wolf or two would dispossess him.
A man of west-country descent should have known better. Why did not the
ghost of William Browne of Tavistock arise and check Keats's hand, and
recite for his rebuke the burst in praise of Devon from _Britannia's
Pastorals_, with its happy echo of the Virgilian _Salve magna parens_
and _Haec genus acre virum_?--
Hail thou my native soil: thou blessed plot
Whose equal all the world affordeth not!
Shew me who can so many christall rills,
Such sweet-clothed vallies, or aspiring hills,
Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines,
Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines:
And if the earth can shew the like again;
Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men.
Time never can produce men to o'er-take
The fames of Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake,
Or worthy Hawkins or of thousands more
That by their power made the Devonian shore
Mock the proud Tagus.
Of the Devonshire girls Keats thought better than of their menkind, and
writes and rimes on them with a certain skittishness of admiration. With
one local family, a Mrs Jeffrey and her daughters, he and his brothers
were on terms of warm friendship, as is shown by his correspondence with
them a year later. One of the daughters married afterwards a Mr Prowse,
and published two volumes of very tolerable sentimental verse: some of
their contents, as interpreted (says Mr Buxton Forman) by Teignmouth
tradition, would indicate that her heart had been very deeply touched by
the young poet during his stay: but of responsive feelings on his own
part his letters give no hint, and it was only a few weeks later that he
wrote how his love for his brothers had hitherto stifled any impression
that a woman might have made on him.
Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering the invalid
Tom, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during
these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of
_Endymion_. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he
had begun at Hampstead, the whole of _Isabella_ or _The Pot of Basil_,
the first of his longer poems written with real maturity of art and
certainty of touch. At the same time, no doubt with his great intended
effort, _Hyperion_, in mind, he was studying and appreciating Milton as
he had never done before. He had been steeped since boyhood in the charm
of the minor poems, from the _Vacation Exercise_ to _Lycidas_, and had
read but not greatly cared for _Paradise Lost_, until first Severn, and
then more energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to
him: and he now threw himself upon that poem, and penetrated with the
grasp and swiftness of genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the
very essence of its power and beauty. His correspondence with his
friends, particularly Bailey and Reynolds, is during this same time
unusually sustained and full. Sometimes his vein is light and titterly
(to use a word of his own) as I have indicated, and sometimes he masks
an anxious heart beneath a lively manner, as thus:--
But ah Coward! to talk at this rate to a sick man, or, I hope, to one
that was sick--for I hope by this you stand on your right foot. If you
are not--that's all,--I intend to cut all sick people if they do not
make up their minds to cut Sickness--a fellow to whom I have a
complete aversion, and who strange to say is harboured and
countenanced in several houses where I visit--he is sitting now quite
impudent between me and Tom--he insults me at poor Jem Rice's--and you
have seated him before now between us at the Theatre, when I thought
he looked with a longing eye at poor Kean. I shall say, once for all,
to my friends, generally and severally, cut that fellow, or I cut you.
On another day he recurs to the mood of half real half mock impatience
against those who rub the bloom off things of beauty by over-commenting
and over-interpreting them, a mood natural to a spirit dwelling so
habitually and intuitively at the heart of beauty as his:--
It has as yet been a Mystery to me how and where Wordsworth went. I
can't help thinking he has returned to his Shell--with his beautiful
Wife and his enchanting Sister. It is a great Pity that People should
by associating themselves with the finest things, spoil them. Hunt has
damned Hampstead and masks and sonnets and Italian tales. Wordsworth
has damned the lakes. Milman has damned the old drama--West has damned
wholesale. Peacock has damned satire--Ollier has damn'd Music--Hazlitt
has damned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the Man? he
is your only good damner, and if ever I am damn'd--damn me if I
shouldn't like him to damn me.
Once, writing to Reynolds, he resumes his habit of a year and a half
earlier, and casts his fancies and reflections into rime. Beginning
playfully, he tells of an odd jumble of incongruous images that had
crossed his brain, a kind of experience expressed by him elsewhere in
various strains of verse, _e.g._ the finished poem _Fancy_ and the
careless lines beginning 'Welcome Joy, and welcome Sorrow.' He supposes
that some people are not subject to such freaks of the mind's eye, but
have it consistently haunted by fine things such as he next proceeds to
conjure up from memory,--
Some Titian colours touch'd into real life,--
The sacrifice goes on; the pontiff knife
Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows,
The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows;
A white sail shows above the green-head cliff,
Moves round the point, and throws her anchor stiff;
The mariners join hymn with those on land.
There exists no such picture of a sacrifice by Titian, and what Keats
was thinking of, I feel sure, was the noble 'Sacrifice to Apollo' by
Claude from the Leigh Court collection, which he had seen at the British
Institution in 1816 (hung, as it happened, next to Titian's Europa from
Cobham Hall), and which evidently worked deeply on his mind. To memory
of it is probably due that magic vision of a little town emptied of its
folk on a morning of sacrifice, which he evoked a year later in the ode
on a Grecian Urn. It shows to the right an altar in front of a temple of
Apollo, and about the altar a group including king and priest and a
young man holding down a victim ox by the horns; people with baskets and
offerings coming up from behind the temple; and to the left tall trees
with a priest leading in another victim by the horns, and a woman with a
jar bringing in libation; a little back, two herdsmen with their goats;
a river spanned by a bridge and winding towards a sea-bay partly
encircled by mountains which close the view, and on the edge of the bay
the tower and roofs of a little town indistinctly seen. Recollection of
this Claude leads Keats on quickly to that of another, the famous
'Enchanted Castle,' which he partly mixes up with it, and partly
transforms by fantasy into something quite different from what it really
is. He forgets the one human figure in the foreground, describes figures
and features of the landscape which are not there, and remembering that
the architecture combines ancient Roman with mediæval castellated and
later Palladian elements, invents for it far-fetched origins and
associations which in a more careless fashion almost remind one of those
invented by Pope for his Temple of Fame. (A year later, all this
effervescence of the imagination about the picture had subsided, and
the distilled and concentrated essence of its romance was expressed--so
at least I conceive--in the famous 'magic casement' phrase at the end of
the Nightingale ode).[7]
[Illustration: PL. VI
A SACRIFICE TO APOLLO
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY VIVARES AND WOOLLETT AFTER CLAUDE]
From this play of fancy about two half-remembered pictures Keats turns
suddenly to reflections, which he would like to banish but cannot, on
the 'eternal fierce destruction' which is part of nature's law:--
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I far was gone.
Still am I sick of it, and tho', to-day,
I've gathered young spring-leaves, and flowers gay
Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,
Still do I that most fierce destruction see,
The Shark at savage prey,--the Hawk at pounce,--
The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,
Ravening a worm,--Away, ye horrid moods!
Moods of one's mind!
The letters of this date should be read and re-read by all who want to
get to the centre of Keats's mind or to hold a key to the understanding
of his deepest poetry. The richest of them all is that in which he sends
the fragments of an ode to Maia written on May day with the (alas!
unfulfilled) promise to finish it 'in good time.' The same letter
contains the re-assertion of a purpose declared in a letter of a week
before to Mr Taylor in the phrases, 'I find I can have no enjoyment in
the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no
worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world.... There is
but one way for me. The road lies through application, study and
thought. I will pursue it.' The mood of the verses interpreting the song
of the thrush a few weeks earlier has passed, the reader will note,
clean out of the poet's mind. To Reynolds his words are:--
An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people--it takes away
the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the
Burden of the Mystery, a thing which I begin to understand a little,
and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in
your letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without
knowledge appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling
continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again,
without wings, and with all [the] horror of a bare-shouldered
creature--in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go
through the same air and space without fear.
Let it never be forgotten that 'sensations' contrasted with 'thoughts'
mean for Keats not pleasures and experiences of the senses as opposed to
those of the mind, but direct intuitions of the imagination as opposed
to deliberate processes of the understanding; and that by 'philosophy'
he does not mean metaphysics but knowledge and the fruits of reading
generally.
The same letter, again, contains an interesting meditation on the
relative qualities of genius in Milton and Wordsworth as affected by the
relative stages of history at which they lived, and on the further
question whether Wordsworth was a greater or less poet than Milton by
virtue of being more taken up with human passions and problems. This
speculation leads on to one of Keats's finest passages of life-wisdom:--
And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether
Milton's apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing
further or not than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth
epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region
of his song. In regard to his genius alone--we find what he says true
as far as we have experienced and we can judge no further but by
larger experience--for axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they
are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel them
to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.--I know
this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when I say that
now I shall relish _Hamlet_ more than I have ever done--Or,
better--you are sensible no man can set down Venery as a bestial or
joyless thing until he is sick of it, and therefore all philosophising
on it would be mere wording. Until we are sick, we understand not; in
fine, as Byron says, 'Knowledge is sorrow'; and I go on to say that
'Sorrow is wisdom'--and further for aught we can know for certainty
'Wisdom is folly.'
[Illustration: PL. VII
THE ENCHANTED CASTLE
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY VIVARES AND WOOLLETT AFTER CLAUDE]
Presently follows the famous chain of images by which Keats, searching
and probing for himself along pathways of the spirit parallel to those
followed by Wordsworth in the _Lines composed a few miles above Tintern
Abbey_, renders account to himself of the stage of development to which
his mind has now reached:--
Well--I compare human life to a large Mansion of many apartments, two
of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut
upon me. The first we step into we call the Infant, or Thoughtless
Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think. We remain
there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second
Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to
hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the
awakening of the thinking principle within us--we no sooner get into
the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought,
than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see
nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in
delight. However among the effects this breathing is father of is that
tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of
Man--of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of Misery and
Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness, and oppression--whereby this Chamber of
Maiden Thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on
all sides of it, many doors are set open--but all dark--all leading to
dark passages. We see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a
mist, _we_ are now in that state, we feel the 'Burden of the Mystery.'
To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he
wrote _Tintern Abbey_, and it seems to me that his genius is
explorative of those dark Passages. Now if we live, and go on
thinking, we too shall explore them.
Here is a typical case of the method of evocation as against the method
of exposition. Wordsworth's lines are written with a high, almost an
inspired, power of describing and putting into direct words the
successive moods of a spirit gradually ripening and deepening in the
power of communion with nature, and through nature, with all life. But
Keats, fully as he has pondered them, cannot be satisfied that they fit
his own case until he has called up the history of his similar
experiences in the form natural to him, the form, that is, of concrete
similitudes or visions of the imagination--the Thoughtless Chamber, the
Chamber of Maiden Thought with its gradual darkening and its many
outlets standing open to be explored. It is significant that such
visions should still be of architecture, of halls and chambers in an
imagined mysterious building.
Apart from his growing sense of the darker sides of human existence and
of the mysteries of good and evil, Keats was suffering at this time from
the pain of a family break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his
mind to emigrate to America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as
he could get possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push
his own fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's part was the
desire to be in a position as quickly as possible to help or if need be
support, his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long
been attached, Miss Georgiana Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was
settled that they were to be married and sail early in the summer. Some
of Keats's letters during the last weeks of his stay at Teignmouth are
taken up with his plans for the time immediately following this change.
He wavered for a while between two incompatible purposes. One was to go
for a summer's walking tour through Scotland with Charles Brown. 'I have
many reasons,' he writes to Reynolds, 'for going wonder-ways; to make my
winter chair free from spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape
disquisitions on poetry, and Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion
and economize shoe-leather.' (How 'economize,' one wonders?) 'I'll have
leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, "over the hills we
go." If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in
turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.' Here we
find Keats in his turn caught by the romance of wild lands and of travel
which had in various ways been so much of an inspiration to Byron and
Shelley before him. A fortnight later we find him inclining to give up
this purpose under an overmastering sense of the inadequacy of his own
attainments, and of the necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more
knowledge, to sustain the flight of poetry.
The habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most
natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so
in Keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in
his strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested
friend might judge. He is inclined, when not on the defensive against
what he felt to be foolish criticism, to under-rate rather than to
overrate his own work, and in his correspondence of the previous year we
have found him perfectly aware that in writing _Endymion_ he has rather
been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than producing a sound
or satisfying work of poetry. And when the time comes to write a preface
to the poem, he in a first draft makes confession to the public of his
'non-opinion of himself' in terms both a little too intimate and too
fidgeting and uneasy. Reynolds seeing the draft at once recognised that
it would not do, and in criticizing it to Keats seems to have told him
that it was too much in the manner of Leigh Hunt. In deference to his
judgment Keats at once abandoned it, and a second attempt says briefly,
with perfect dignity and taste, all that can justly be said in dispraise
of his work. He warns the reader to expect 'great inexperience,
immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a
deed accomplished,' and adds most unboastfully:--'it is just that this
youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope
that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for
verses fit to live.'
Keats and Tom, the latter for the moment easier in health, were back at
Hampstead in the last week of May, in time for the marriage of their
brother George with Miss Georgiana Wylie. This was the young lady to
whom Keats had rimed a valentine for his brother two years earlier (the
lines beginning 'Hadst thou liv'd in days of old') and to whom he had
also on his own account addressed the charming sonnet, 'Nymph of the
downward smile and sidelong glance.' With no other woman or girl friend
was he ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy. The wedding took
place 'a week ago,' writes Keats on June 4, and about the same date, in
order that he may not miss seeing as much of the young couple as
possible before their departure, he declines a warm invitation from
Bailey to visit him again at Oxford. Writing, as usual to this
correspondent, with absolute openness, Keats shows that he is suffering
from one of his moods of overmastering depression. First it takes the
form of apathy. Bailey had written eagerly and judiciously in praise of
_Endymion_ in the _Oxford Herald_. Keats replies on June 1:--
My intellect must be in a degenerating state--it must be--for when I
should be writing about--God knows what--I am troubling you with moods
of my own mind, or rather body, for mind there is none. I am in that
temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come up to
the top--I know very well 'tis all nonsense. In a short time I hope I
shall be in a temper to feel sensibly your mention of my book. In vain
have I waited till Monday to have any Interest in that, or anything
else. I feel no spur at my Brother's going to America, and am almost
stony-hearted about his wedding. All this will blow over. All I am
sorry for is having to write to you in such a time--but I cannot force
my letters in a hotbed. I could not feel comfortable in making
sentences for you.
Nine days later the mood has deepened to one of positive despondency,
but it is the despondency of a great and generous spirit:--
Were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation--on
account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. I should not
by right speak in this tone to you for it is an incendiary spirit that
would do so. Yet I am not old enough or magnanimous enough to
annihilate self--and it would perhaps be paying you an ill compliment.
I was in hopes some little time back to be able to relieve your
dulness by my spirits--to point out things in the world worth your
enjoyment--and now I am never alone without rejoicing that there is
such a thing as death--without placing my ultimate in the glory of
dying for a great human purpose. Perhaps if my affairs were in a
different state, I should not have written the above--you shall judge:
I have two brothers; one is driven, by The 'burden of Society,' to
America; the other, with an exquisite love of life, is in a lingering
state. My love for my Brothers, from the early loss of our parents,
and even from earlier misfortunes, has grown into an affection
'passing the love of women.' I have been ill-tempered with them--I
have vexed them--but the thought of them has always stifled the
impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon me. I have a
sister too, and may not follow them either to America or to the grave.
Life must be undergone, and I certainly derive some consolation from
the thought of writing one or two more poems before it ceases.
Meanwhile his fluctuations of purpose between a plunge into a life of
solitude and study and an excursion in Brown's company to Scotland had
been decided in favour of the Scottish tour. George and his bride having
to set out for Liverpool on June 22, it was arranged that Keats and
Brown should accompany them so far on their way to the north. The coach
started from the Swan and two Necks in Lad Lane, and on the first day
stopped for dinner at Redbourne near St Albans, where Keats's friend of
medical student days, Mr Stephens, was in practice. He came to shake
hands with the travelling party at the poet's request, and many years
afterwards wrote an account of the interview, the chief point of which
is a description of Mrs George Keats. 'Rather short, not what might be
called strictly handsome, but looked like a being whom any man of
moderate sensibility might easily love. She had the imaginative poetical
cast. Somewhat singular and girlish in her attire.... There was
something original about her, and John seemed to regard her as a being
whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her with evident
satisfaction.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cary's Dante: _Inferno_, iv, 126.
[2] _Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson_, as quoted by W. Knight, _Life of
Wordsworth_, ii. 228-9.
[3] C.C. Clarke, _Recollections of Writers_, pp. 149-50.
[4] Hazlitt, _The Spirit of the Age_: Collected Works, iv, 276.
[5] Woodhouse suggests that the romance which he lays aside is his
own _Endymion_, meaning his task of seeing it through the press: but
this must surely be a mistake.
[6] Woodhouse Transcripts (Poetry II) in Crewe MS. These verses are
only to be found in the latest editions of Keats. They are not good,
but interesting as containing in embryo ideas which afterwards grew
into great poetry in the nightingale ode, the first book of
_Endymion_, and the _Ode to Melancholy_.
[7] The 'Enchanted Castle,' which Keats explicitly names, belonged at
this date to Mr Wells of Redleaf, and was not exhibited until 1819,
so that he probably knew it only through the engraving by Vivarès and
Woollett.
CHAPTER IX
JUNE-AUGUST 1818: THE SCOTTISH TOUR
First sight of Windermere--Ambleside, Rydal, Keswick--Attitude towards
scenery--Ascent of Skiddaw--A country dancing-school--Dumfries--The
Galloway coast--Meg Merrilies--Flying visit to Belfast--Contrasts and
reflections--The Duchess of Dunghill--The Ayrshire coast--In Burns's
cottage--Lines on his pilgrimage--Through Glasgow to Loch Lomond--A
confession--Loch Awe to the coast--Hardships--Kerre a and
Mull--Staffa--A sea cathedral--Ben Nevis--Tour cut short--Return to
Hampstead.
The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went on by coach to
Lancaster, thence to begin their tour on foot. Keats took for his
reading one book only, the miniature three-volume edition of Cary's
Dante. Brown, it would appear, carried a pocket Milton. They found the
town of Lancaster in an uproar with the preparations for a contested
election and were glad to leave it. Rising at four in the morning (June
25th) to make a start before breakfast, they were detained by a
downpour, during which Brown preached patience from _Samson Agonistes_;
at seven they set out in a still dripping mist; breakfasted at
Bolton-le-Sands; stopped to dine at the village of Burton-in-Kendal, and
found the inns crowded, to their hosts' distraction, with soldiers
summoned by the Lowther interest to keep order at the election. This was
the famous contest where Brougham had the effrontery, as his opponents
considered it, to go down and challenge for the first time the power of
that great family in their own country. The same state of things
prevailed farther down the road. Hearing that they could not hope to
find a bed at Kendal, they slept in a mean roadside inn at End Moor,
taking interested note of a sad old dog of a drunkard, fallen from
better days, whom they found there; and the next morning walked on,
passing Kendal on their way, as far as Bowness on Windermere. As they
dropped down the hill and came in sight of the lake the weather yielded
fine effects of clearance after rain; and Brown, in the account compiled
twenty years later from his diaries written at the time,[1] expatiates
in full romantic vein on the joy and amazement with which Keats and he
drank in the beauties of the varied and shifting scene before them:--
On the next morning, after reaching Kendal, we had our first really
joyous walk of nine miles towards the lake of Windermere. The country
was mild and romantic, the weather fine, though not sunny, while the
fresh mountain air, and many larks about us, gave us unbounded
delight. As we approached the lake the scenery became more and more
grand and beautiful, and from time to time we stayed our steps, gazing
intently on it. Hitherto, Keats had witnessed nothing superior to
Devonshire; but, beautiful as that is, he was now tempted to speak of
it with indifference. At the first turn from the road, before
descending to the hamlet of Bowness, we both simultaneously came to a
full stop. The lake lay before us. His bright eyes darted on a
mountain-peak, beneath which was gently floating on a silver cloud;
thence to a very small island, adorned with the foliage of trees, that
lay beneath us, and surrounded by water of ? glorious hue, when he
exclaimed--'How can I believe in that a--surely it cannot be!' He
warmly asserted that no view in the world could equal this--that it
must beat all Italy--yet, having moved onward but a hundred
yards--catching the further extremity of the lake, he thought it 'more
and more wonderfully beautiful!' The trees far and near, the grass
immediately around us, the fern and the furze in their most luxuriant
growth, all added to the charm. Not a mist, but an imperceptible
vapour bestowed a mellow, softened tint over the immense mountains on
the opposite side and at the further end of the lake.
After a bathe and a midday meal at Bowness the friends walked on with
ever increasing delight to Ambleside. Spending the night there they
scrambled about the neighbouring waterfalls, and endured as patiently as
they could the advances of a youth lately from Oxford, touring knapsack
on back like themselves but painfully bent on showing himself off for a
scholar and buck about town, airing his pedigree and connexions while
affecting to make light of them. The next day they went on by Grasmere
to Rydal, where they paused that Keats might call and pay his respects
to Wordsworth. But the poet was away at Lowther Castle electioneering
(he had been exerting himself vigorously in the Tory and Lowther
interest since the spring in prospect of this contest). Complete want of
sympathy with the cause of his absence made Keats's disappointment the
keener; and finding none of the family at home he could do no more than
leave a note of regret. The same afternoon the travellers reached the
hamlet of Wythburn and slept there as well as fleas would allow,
intending to climb Helvellyn the next morning. Heavy rain interfering,
they pursued their way by Thirlmere to Keswick, made the circuit of
Derwentwater, visited the Druids' Circle and the Falls of Lodore, and
set out at four the next morning to climb Skiddaw. A cloud-cap settling
down compelled them to stop a little short of the summit, and they
resumed their tramp by Bassenthwaite into the relatively commonplace
country lying between the lakes and Carlisle, making their next night's
resting-place at the old market town of Ireby.
I have shown by a specimen how Brown, working from his diaries of the
tour, expatiates on his and his companion's enthusiasm over the romantic
scenes they visited. Keats in his own letters says comparatively little
about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, not at all with
the descriptive enthusiasm of the picturesque tourist: hardly indeed
with so much of that quality as the sedate and fastidious Gray had shown
in his itineraries fifty years before. Partly, no doubt, a certain
instinctive reticence, a restraining touch of the Greek [Greek: aidios],
keeps him from fluent words on the beauties that most deeply moved him:
his way rather is to let them work silently in his being until at the
right moment, if the right moment comes, their essence and vital power
shall distil themselves for him into a phrase of poetry. Partly, also,
the truth is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like
his hardly needs the stimulus of nature's beauties for long or at their
highest power, but on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply
for itself spirit sunsets, and glories of dream lake and mountain,
richer and more varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery can
witness and register in memory during a lifetime of travel and pursuit.
In this respect Keats's letters written on his northern tour seem more
essentially the letters of a poet than Shelley's from Switzerland and
Italy. Shelley pours out long, set, detailed descriptions, written as
any cultivated and enthusiastic observer visiting such scenes for the
first time might write, only with more beauty and resource of language,
rather than as one made by imagination a born partner and co-creator
with nature herself, free by birthright of her glories and knowing them
all, as it were, beforehand. Keats's way of telling about his travels is
quite familiar and unstrained. Here is a paragraph from his first letter
to his brother Tom, written at Keswick after walking round Derwentwater
and climbing Skiddaw:--
I had an easy climb among the streams, about the fragments of Rocks,
and should have got I think to the summit, but unfortunately I was
damped by slipping one leg into a squashy hole. There is no great body
of water, but the accompaniment is delightful; for it oozes out from a
cleft in perpendicular Rocks, all fledged with ash and other beautiful
trees. It is a strange thing how they got there. At the south end of
the Lake the Mountains of Borrowdale are perhaps as fine as anything
we have seen. On our return from this circuit, we ordered dinner, and
set forth about a mile and a half on the Penrith road, to see the
Druid temple. We had a fag up hill, rather too near dinner-time, which
was rendered void by the gratification of seeing those aged stones on
a gentle rise in the midst of the Mountains, which at that time
darkened all around, except at the fresh opening of the Vale of St.
John. We went to bed rather fatigued, but not so much so as to hinder
us getting up this morning to mount Skiddaw. It promised all along to
be fair, and we had fagged and tugged nearly to the top, when, at
half-past six, there came a Mist upon us, and shut out the view. We
did not, however, lose anything by it: we were high enough without
mist to see the coast of Scotland--the Irish Sea--the hills beyond
Lancaster--and nearly all the large ones of Cumberland and
Westmoreland, particularly Helvelleyn and Scawfell. It grew colder and
colder as we ascended, and we were glad, at about three parts of the
way, to taste a little rum which the Guide brought with him, mixed,
mind ye, with Mountain water. I took two glasses going and one
returning. It is about six miles from where I am writing to the top.
So we have walked ten miles before Breakfast to-day. We went up with
two others, very good sort of fellows. All felt, on arising into the
cold air, that same elevation which a cold bath gives one--I felt as
if I were going to a Tournament.
For an instant only, the poet in Keats speaks vividly in the tournament
touch; and farther back, illustrating what I have said about his
instinct for distillation rather than description, will be found the
germs of two famous passages in his later verse, the 'dark-clustered
trees' that
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep
in the _Ode to Psyche_, and the lines in _Hyperion_ about the
dismal cirque
Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor
When the chill rain begins at shut of eve,
In dull November, and their chancel vault,
The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.
A change, it should be added, was coming over Keats's thoughts and
feelings whereby natural scenery in general was beginning to interest
him less and his fellow creatures more. In the acuteness of childish and
boyish sensation, among the suburban fields or on seaside holidays, he
had instinctively, as if by actual partnership with and self-absorption
into nature, gained enough delighted knowledge of her ways and doings
for his faculties to work on through a lifetime of poetry; and now, in
his second chamber of Maiden-thought, the appeal of nature, even at its
most thrilling, yields in his mind to that of humanity. 'Scenery is
fine,' he had already written from Devonshire in the spring, 'but human
nature is finer.' So far as concerns shrewd and interested observation
of human types encountered by the way, he had a sympathetic companion in
Brown, whose diary sets effectively before us alike the sodden,
wheedling old toper, staggering with hanging arms like a bear on its
hind feet, in the inn at End Moor, and the vulgar, uneasy gentlemanhood
of the flash Oxford man at Ambleside. Here is Brown's account of what
they saw at Ireby:--
It is a dull, beggarly looking place. Our inn was remarkably clean and
neat, and the old host and hostess were very civil and
prepossessing--but, heyday! what were those obstreperous doings
overhead? It was a dancing school under the tuition of a travelling
master! Folks here were as partial to dancing as their neighbours, the
Scotch; and every little farmer sent his young ones to take lessons.
We went upstairs to witness the skill of these rustic boys and
girls--fine, healthy, clean-dressed, and withal perfectly orderly, as
well as serious in their endeavours. We noticed some among them quite
handsome, but the attention of none was drawn aside to notice us. The
instant the fiddle struck up, the slouch in the gait was lost, the
feet moved, and gracefully, with complete conformity to the notes; and
they wove the figure, sometimes extremely complicated to my
inexperienced eyes, without an error, or the slightest pause. There
was no sauntering, half-asleep country dance among them; all were
inspired.
And here is the same scene as touched by Keats:--
We were greatly amused by a country dancing-school holden at the Tun,
it was indeed 'no new cotillon fresh from France.' No, they kickit and
jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and whiskit, and friskit, and toed
it and go'd it, and twirl'd it, and whirl'd it, and stamped it, and
sweated it, tattooing the floor like mad.[2] The difference between
our country dances and these Scottish figures is about the same as
leisurely stirring a cup o' Tea and beating up a batter-pudding. I
was extremely gratified to think that, if I had pleasures they knew
nothing of, they had also some into which I could not possibly enter.
I hope I shall not return without having got the Highland fling. There
was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw; some beautiful
faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of
Patriotism, the glory of making by any means a country happier. This
is what I like better than scenery.
From Ireby the friends walked by way of Wigton to Carlisle, arriving
there on the last day of June. From Carlisle they took coach to
Dumfries, having heard that the intervening country was not interesting:
neither did Keats much admire what he saw of it. Besides the familiar
beauties of the home counties of England, two ideals of landscape had
haunted and allured his imagination almost equally, that of the classic
south, harmonious and sunned and gay, and that of the shadowed, romantic
and adventurous north; and the Scottish border, with its bleak and
moorish rain-swept distances, its 'huddle of cold old grey hills' (the
phrase is Stevenson's) struck him somehow as answering to neither. 'I
know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem
anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish.'
So writes Keats from Dumfries, where they visited the tomb of Burns and
the ruins of Lincluden College, and where Keats expressed his sense of
foreignness and dreamlike discomfort in a sonnet interesting as the
record of a mood but of small merit poetically. Brown also, a Scotsman
from the outer Hebrides, as he believed, by descent, but by habit and
education purely English, felt himself at first an alien in the Scottish
Lowlands. On this stage of the walk they were both unpleasurably struck
by the laughterless gravity and cold greetings of the people, ('more
serious and solidly inanimated than necessary' Brown calls them) and by
the lack of anything like the English picturesque and gardened snugness
in villages and houses: Brown also by the barefoot habit of the girls
and women, but this Keats liked, expatiating to his friend on the beauty
of a lassie's natural uncramped foot and its colour against the grass.
From Dumfries they started on July 2 south-westward for Galloway, a
region not overmuch frequented even now, and then hardly at all, by
tourists: even Wordsworth on his several Scottish trips passed it by
unexplored. Our travellers broke the journey first at Dalbeattie: thence
on to Kirkcudbright, with a long morning pause for breakfast and
letter-writing by the wayside near Auchencairn. Approaching the
Kirkcudbrightshire coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its
embosomed inlets and rocky tufted headlands, its high craggy moors
towering inland, and its backward views over the glimmering Solway to
the Cumberland fells or the hazier hills of Man, they began to enjoy
themselves to the full. Brown bethought him that this was Guy
Mannering's country, and fell talking to Keats about Meg Merrilies.
Keats, who according to the fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for
Scott's poetry, and of the Waverley novels, at this time guessed but not
known to be Scott's, had read _The Antiquary_ (to which he whimsically
preferred Smollett's _Humphrey Clinker_) but not _Guy Mannering_, was
much struck by what he heard.
I enjoyed the recollection of the events [writes Brown] as I described
them in their own scenes. There was a little spot, close to our
pathway, where, without a shadow of doubt, old Meg Merrilies had often
boiled her kettle, and, haply, cooked a chicken. It was among
fragments of rock, and brambles, and broom, and most tastefully
ornamented with a profusion of honeysuckle, wild roses, and fox-glove,
all in the very blush and fullness of blossom. While finishing
breakfast, and both employed in writing, I could not avoid noticing
that Keats's letter was not running in regular prose. He told me he
was writing to his little sister, and giving a ballad on old Meg for
her amusement. Though he called it too much a trifle to be copied, I
soon inserted it in my journal. It struck me as a good description of
that mystic link between mortality and the weird sisters; and, at the
same time, in appropriate language to the person addressed.
Old Meg she was a Gipsy,
And liv'd upon the Moors:
Her bed it was the brown heath turf
And her house was out of doors.
Her apples were swart blackberries,
Her currants pods o' broom;
Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,
Her book a churchyard tomb.
Her Brothers were the craggy hills,
Her Sisters larchen trees--
Alone with her great family
She liv'd as she did please.
No breakfast had she many a morn,
No dinner many a noon,
And 'stead of supper she would stare
Full hard against the Moon.
But every morn of woodbine fresh
She made her garlanding,
And every night the dark glen Yew
She wove, and she would sing.
And with her fingers old and brown
She plaited Mats o' Rushes,
And gave them to the Cottagers
She met among the Bushes.
Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen
And tall as Amazon:
An old red blanket cloak she wore;
A chip hat had she on.
God rest her aged bones somewhere--
She died full long agone!
Keats had in this 'trifle,' using the ballad form for the first time,
handled it with faultless tact, and though leaving out the tragic
features of Scott's creation, had been able to evoke of his own an
instantaneous vision of her in vitally conceived spiritual relation with
her surroundings.[3] He copied the piece out in letters written in
pauses of their walk both to his young sister and to his brother Tom.
The letter to Fanny Keats is full of fun and nonsense, with a touch or
two which shows that he was fully sensitive to the charm of the
Galloway coast scenery. 'Since I scribbled the Meg Merrilies song we
have walked through a beautiful country to Kirkcudbright--at which place
I will write you a song about myself.' Then follows the set of gay
doggrel stanzas telling of various escapades of himself as a child and
since,--'There was a naughty boy;' and then the excuse for them,--'My
dear Fanny, I am ashamed of writing you such stuff, nor would I if it
were not for being tired after my day's walking, and ready to tumble
into bed so fatigued that when I am in bed you might sew my nose to my
great toe and trundle me round the town, like a Hoop, without waking
me.' It was his way on his tour, and indeed always, thus to keep by him
the letters he was writing and add scraps to them as the fancy took him.
The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote regularly and uniformly
in the evenings. 'He affronts my indolence and luxury,' says Keats, 'by
pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; secondly his pens; and
last, his ink. Now I would not care, if he would change a little. I say
now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But I might as well tell
a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead of afterwards.'
From Kirkcudbright they walked on July 5,--taking the beautiful coast
road from Gatehouse of Fleet and passing where Cairnsmore heaves a huge
heathered shoulder above the fertile farmlands of the Cree valley,--as
far as Newton Stewart: thence across the low-rolling Wigtownshire
country by Glenluce to Stranraer and Portpatrick. Here they took the
packet for Donaghadee on the opposite coast of Ireland, with the
intention of seeing the Giant's Causeway, but finding the distances and
expense much exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk
to Belfast, and crossed back again to Portpatrick on the third day. In a
letter to his brother Tom written during and immediately after this
excursion, Keats has some striking passages of human observation and
reflection. The change of spirit between one generation and another is
forcibly brought home to us when we think of Johnson, setting forth on
his Scottish tour forty-five years earlier with the study of men,
manners and social conditions in his mind as the one aim worthy of a
serious traveller, (he had spoken scoffingly, not long before, of the
'prodigious noble wild prospects' which Scotland, he understood, shared
with Lapland), yet forced now and again by the power of scenery to
break, as it were half ashamedly, into stiff but striking phrases of
descriptive admiration; and when now we find Keats, carried northward by
the romantic passion and fashion of a later day for nature and scenery,
compelled in his turn by his innate human instincts to forget the
landscape and observe and speculate upon problems of society and
economics and racial character:--
These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women; old
men, young men; old women, young women; boys, girls; and all infants
careful; so that they are formed into regular Phalanges of savers and
gainers. Such a thrifty army cannot fail to enrich their Country, and
give it a greater appearance of comfort than that of their poor rash
neighbourhood [meaning Ireland]. These Kirk-men have done Scotland
harm; they have banished puns, and laughing, and kissing, etc.,
(except in cases where the very danger and crime must make it very
gustful). I shall make a full stop at kissing, ... and go on to remind
you of the fate of Burns poor, unfortunate fellow! his disposition was
Southern! How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged, in
self-defence, to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity and in things
attainable, that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that
are not!... I have not sufficient reasoning faculty to settle the
doctrine of thrift, as it is consistent with the dignity of human
Society--with the happiness of Cottagers. All I can do is by plump
contrasts; were the fingers made to squeeze a guinea or a white
hand?--were the lips made to hold a pen or a kiss? and yet in Cities
man is shut out from his fellows if he is poor--the cottager must be
very dirty, and very wretched, if she be not thrifty--the present
state of society demands this, and this convinces me that the world is
very young, and in a very ignorant state. We live in a barbarous
age--I would sooner be a wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of
the Kirk; and I would sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a
poor Creature's penance before those execrable elders.
Here is an impression received in Ireland, followed by a promise, which
was fulfilled a few days later with remarkable shrewdness and insight,
of further considerations on the contrasts between the Irish character
and the Scottish:--
On our return from Belfast we met a sedan--the Duchess of Dunghill. It
was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you ever
saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a wretched
thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved from a
scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, with a
pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded
inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head: squat
and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two ragged, tattered
girls carried her along. What a thing would be a history of her life
and sensations; I shall endeavour when I have thought a little more,
to give you my idea of the difference between the Scotch and Irish.
From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking
along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald and Maybole (the same
walk that Stevenson took the reverse way in the winter of 1876) to Ayr.
Brown grows especially lyrical, and Keats more enthusiastic than usual,
over the beauty of the first day's walk from Stranraer by Cairn Ryan and
Glen App, with Ailsa Craig suddenly looming up through showers after
they topped the pass:--
When we left Cairn [writes Keats] our Road lay half way up the sides
of a green mountainous shore, full of clefts of verdure and eternally
varying--sometimes up sometimes down, and over little Bridges going
across green chasms of moss, rock and trees--winding about everywhere.
After two or three Miles of this we turned suddenly into a magnificent
glen finely wooded in Parts--seven Miles long--with a Mountain stream
winding down the Midst--full of cottages in the most happy
situations--the sides of the Hills covered with sheep--the effect of
cattle lowing I never had so finely. At the end we had a gradual
ascent and got among the tops of the Mountains whence in a little time
I descried in the Sea Ailsa Rock 940 feet high--it was 15 Miles
distant and seemed close upon us. The effect of Ailsa with the
peculiar perspective of the Sea in connection with the ground we stood
on, and the misty rain then falling gave me a complete Idea of a
deluge. Ailsa struck me very suddenly--really I was a little alarmed.
Less vivid than the above is the invocatory sonnet, apparently showing
acquaintance with the geological theory of volcanic upheaval, which
Keats was presently moved to address _To Ailsa Rock_. Coming down into
Ballantrae in blustering weather, the friends met a country wedding
party on horseback, and Keats tried a song about it in the Burns
dialect, for Brown to palm off on Dilke as an original: 'but it won't
do,' he rightly decides. From Maybole he writes to Reynolds with pleased
anticipation of the visit to be paid the next day to Burns's cottage.
'One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a
shrine as the cottage of Burns--we need not think of his misery--that is
all gone--bad luck to it--I shall look upon it all with unmixed
pleasure, as I do upon my Stratford-on-Avon day with Bailey.' On the
walk from Maybole to Ayr Keats has almost the only phrase which escapes
him during the whole tour to indicate a sense of special inspiring power
in mountain scenery for a poet:--'The approach to it [Ayr] is extremely
fine--quite outwent my expectations--richly meadowed, wooded, heathed,
and rivuleted--with a Grand Sea view terminated by the black mountains
of the Isle of Arran. As soon as I saw them so nearly I said to myself,
"How is it they did not beckon Burns to some grand attempt at an Epic."'
Nearing Kirk Alloway, Keats had been delighted to find the first home of
Burns in a landscape so charming. 'I endeavoured to drink in the
Prospect, that I might spin it out to you, as the Silkworm makes silk
from Mulberry leaves--I cannot recollect it.' But his anticipations were
deceived, the whole scene disenchanted, and thoughts of Burns's misery
forced on him in his own despite, by the presence and chatter of the man
in charge of the poet's birthplace:--
The Man at the Cottage was a great Bore with his Anecdotes--I hate the
rascal--his life consists in fuz, fuzzy, fuzziest. He drinks glasses
five for the Quarter and twelve for the hour--he is a mahogany-faced
old Jackass who knew Burns. He ought to have been kicked for having
spoken to him. He calls himself 'a curious old Bitch'--but he is a
flat old dog--I should like to employ Caliph Vathek to kick him. O the
flummery of a birthplace! Cant! cant! cant! It is enough to give a
spirit the guts-ache. Many a true word, they say, is spoken in
jest--this may be because his gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog
made me write a flat sonnet. My dear Reynolds--I cannot write about
scenery and visitings--Fancy is indeed less than a present palpable
reality, but it is greater than remembrance--you would lift your eyes
from _Homer_ only to see close before you the real Isle of
Tenedos--you would rather read _Homer_ afterwards than remember
yourself. One song of Burns's is of more worth to you than all I could
think for a whole year in his native country. His Misery is a dead
weight upon the nimbleness of one's quill--I tried to forget it--to
drink Toddy without any Care--to write a merry sonnet--it won't do--he
talked with Bitches--he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. We
can see horribly clear, in the works of such a Man his whole life, as
if we were God's spies.[4] What were his addresses to Jean in the
latter part of his life?
A little farther back Keats had written, 'my head is sometimes in such a
whirl in considering the million likings and antipathies of our Moments
that I can get into no settled strain in my Letters.' But their
straggling, careless tissue is threaded with such strands of genius and
fresh human wisdom that one often wonders whether they are not legacies
of this rare young spirit equally precious with the poems themselves.
Certainly their prose is better than most of the verse which he had
strength or leisure to write during this Scottish tour. As the two
friends tramped among the Highland mountains some days later Keats
composed with considerable pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the
lines beginning 'There is a charm in footing slow across a silent
plain,' intended to express the temper in which his pilgrimage through
and beyond the Burns country had been made. They are written in the
long iambic fourteeners of Chapman's _Iliad_, a metre not touched by
Keats elsewhere, and perhaps chosen to convey a sense of the sustained
continuous trudge of his wayfaring. They are very interesting as an
attempt to capture and fix in words certain singular, fluctuating
intensities of the poet's mood--the pressure of a great and tragic
memory absorbing his whole consciousness and deadening all sense of
outward things as he nears the place of pilgrimage--and afterwards his
momentary panic lest the spell of mighty scenery and associations may be
too overpowering and drag his soul adrift from its moorings of every-day
habit and affection--from the ties of 'the sweet and bitter world'--'of
Brother's eyes, of Sister's brow.' In some of the lines expressing these
obscure disturbances of the soul there is a deep smouldering fire, but
hardly ever that touch of absolute felicity which is the note of Keats's
work when he is quite himself. The best, technically speaking, are those
which tell of the pilgrim's absorbed mood of expectant approach to his
goal:--
Light heather-bells may tremble then but they are far away;
Wood-lark may sing from sandy fern,--the Sun may hear his lay;
Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear,
But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear;
Blood-red the Sun may set behind black mountain peaks;
Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks;
Eagles may seem to sleep wing-wide upon the air;
Ring-doves may fly convuls'd across to some high-cedar'd lair;
But the forgotten eye is still fast lidded to the ground,
As Palmer's, that with weariness, mid-desert shrine hath found.
At such a time the soul's a child, in childhood is the brain;
Forgotten is the worldly heart--alone, it beats in vain.--[5]
Keats makes it clear that he did not write these lines until some days
after he had left Burns's country and was well on into the heart of the
Highlands, and we get what reads like the prose of some of them in a
letter written to Tom on the last stage of his walk before reaching
Oban. Meantime the friends had passed through Glasgow, of which they had
nothing to say except that they were taken, not for the first time, for
pedlars by reason of their knapsacks, and Brown in particular for a
spectacle-seller by reason of his glasses, and that the whole population
seemed to have turned out to stare at them. A drunken man in the street,
accosting Keats with true Glaswegian lack of ceremony, vowed he had seen
all kinds of foreigners but never the like o' _him_: a remark perhaps
not to be wondered at when we recall Mrs Dilke's description of Keats's
appearance when he came home (see the end of this chapter) and Brown's
account of his own weird toggery as follows:--'a thick stick in my hand,
the knapsack on my back, "with spectacles on nose," a white hat, a
tartan coat and trousers and a Highland plaid thrown over my shoulders.'
From Glasgow they walked by Dumbarton through the Loch Lomond country,
round the head of Loch Fyne to Inverary, thence down the side and round
the south-west end of Loch Awe and so past the head of Loch Craignish to
the coast. At his approach to the lower end of Loch Lomond Keats had
thought the scene 'precious good;' but his sense of romance was
disturbed by finding it so frequented. 'Steamboats on Loch Lomond and
Barouches on its sides take a little from the pleasure of such romantic
chaps as Brown and I.' If the scene were to be peopled he would prefer
that it were by another kind of denizen. 'The Evening was beautiful
nothing could surpass our fortune in the weather--yet was I worldly
enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry Barges with Trumpets and Banners
just to die away before me into that blue place among the
mountains'--and here follows a little sketch of the narrow upper end of
the lake from near Tarbet, just to show where the blue place was. At
Inverary Keats has a word about the woods which reminds one of
Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_--'the woods seem old enough to remember two or
three changes in the Crags above them'--and then goes on to tell how he
has been amused and exasperated by a performance of _The Stranger_ to an
accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the next morning,
he got horribly bitten by gad-flies, and vented his smart in a set of
doggrel rhymes. Of all these matters he gossips gaily for the
entertainment of the invalid Tom. Turning on the same day to write to
Benjamin Bailey, the most serious-minded of his friends, he proceeds in
a strain of considerate self-knowledge to confess and define some of the
morbid elements in his own nature. That Bailey may be warned against
taking any future complainings of his too seriously, 'I carry all
matters,' he says, 'to an extreme--so that when I have any little
vexation, it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles.' And then
by way of accounting for his having failed of late to see much of the
Reynolds sisters in Little Britain, he lays bare his reasons for
thinking himself unfit for ordinary society and especially for the
society of women:--
I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women--at this moment
I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they
fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I
thought a fair woman a pure Goddess, my mind was a soft nest in which
some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to
expect more than their reality--I thought them ethereal above men--I
find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small. Insult may
be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of
being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. I do
not like to think insults in a lady's company--I commit a crime with
her which absence would not have known.... I must absolutely get over
this--but how? the only way is to find the root of the evil, and so
cure it 'with backward mutters of dissevering power'--that is a
difficult thing; for an obstinate Prejudice can seldom be produced but
from a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to
unravel, and care to keep unravelled.
And then, as to his present doings and impressions:--
I should not have consented to myself these four months tramping in
the highlands, but that I thought it would give me more experience,
rub off more prejudice, use me to more hardships, identify finer
scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach
in Poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though I
should reach _Homer_. By this time I am comparatively a Mountaineer. I
have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about
their grandeur. I have fed upon oat-cake--not long enough to be very
much attached to it.--The first mountains I saw, though not so large
as some I have since seen, weighed very solemnly upon me. The effect
is wearing away--yet I like them mainly.
The word 'identify' in the above is noticeable, as seeming to imply that
the fruit of his travel was not discovery, but only the recognition of
scenes already fully preconceived in his imagination. Resuming his
letter to Tom at a later stage, he tells of things that have impressed
him: how in Glencroe[6] they had been pleased with the noise of
shepherds' sheep and dogs in the misty heights close above them, but
could see none of them for some time, till two came in sight 'creeping
among the crags like Emmets,' yet their voices plainly audible: how
solemn was the first sight of Loch Awe as they approached it 'along a
complete mountain road' (that is by way of Glen Aray) 'where if one
listened there was not a sound but that of mountain streams'; how they
tramped twenty miles by the loch side and how the next day they had
reached the coast within view of Long Island (that is Luing; the spot
was probably Kilmelfort). It is at this point we get the prose of some
of the lines quoted above from the verses expressing the temper of his
pilgrimage:--
Our walk was of this description--the near Hills were not very lofty
but many of them steep, beautifully wooded--the distant Mountains in
the Hebrides very grand, the Saltwater Lakes coming up between Crags
and Islands full tide and scarcely ruffled--sometimes appearing as one
large Lake sometimes as three distinct ones in different directions.
At one point we saw afar off a rocky opening into the main sea.--We
have also seen an Eagle or two. They move about without the least
motion of Wings when in an indolent fit.
At the same point occur for the first time complaints, slight at first,
of fatigue and discomfort. At the beginning of his tour Keats had
written to his sister of its effects upon his appetite: 'I get so hungry
a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to me.... I
can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do bull's eyes.' Some days
later he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty
miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now, in the remoter parts
of the Highlands, the hard accommodation and monotonous diet and rough
journeys and frequent drenchings begin to tell upon both him and
Brown:--
Last night poor Brown with his feet blistered and scarcely able to
walk, after a trudge of 20 Miles down the side of Loch Awe had no
supper but Eggs and oat Cake--we have lost the sight of white bread
entirely--Now we had eaten nothing but eggs all day--about 10 a piece
and they had become sickening--To-day we have fared rather better--but
no oat Cake wanting--we had a small chicken and even a good bottle of
Port but altogether the fare is too coarse--I feel it a little.
Our travellers seem to have felt the hardships of the Highlands more
than either Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy when they visited the same
scenes just fifteen years earlier, or Lockhart and his brother in their
expedition, only three years before, to the loneliest wilds of Lochaber.
But then the Wordsworth party only walked when they wished, and drove
much of the way in their ramshackle jaunting-car; and the Lockharts,
being fishermen, had their rods, and had besides brought portable soup
with them and a horse to carry their kit. Lockhart's account of his
experience is in curious contrast with those of Keats and Brown:--
We had a horse with us for the convenience of carrying baggage--but
contemning the paths of civilized man, we dared the deepest glens in
search of trout. There is something abundantly delightful in the
warmheartedness of the Highland people. Bating the article of
inquisitiveness, they are as polite as courtiers. The moment we
entered a cottage the wife began to bake her cakes--and having
portable soup with us, our fare was really excellent. What think you
of porritch and cream for breakfast? trout, pike, and herrings for
dinner, and right peat-reek whisky?
Arrived at Oban by way of the Melfort pass and Glen Euchar, the friends
undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for Keats's
strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and Iona
too expensive for their frugal scheme of travel, they were persuaded to
take the ferry to the isle of Kerrera and thence on to the hither shore
of Mull. Did Keats in crossing Kerrera hear of--he would scarcely have
travelled out of his way to visit--the ruins of the castle of Goylen on
its precipice above the sea, with its legend of the girl-child,
unaccountably puny as was thought, who turned out to be really the fairy
mistress of a gentleman of Ireland, and being detected as such threw
herself headlong from the window into the waves? and was this scene with
its story in his mind when he wrote of forlorn fairy lands where castle
casements open on the foam of perilous seas?[7] From the landing place
in Mull they had to take a guide and traverse on foot the whole width of
the island to the extreme point of the Ross of Mull opposite Iona: a
wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some thirty-seven miles, over
difficult ground and in the very roughest weather, broken by one night's
rest in a shepherd's hut at a spot he calls Dun an Cullen,--perhaps for
Derrynacullen. Having crossed the narrow channel to Iona and admired the
antiquities of that illustrious island (the epithet is Johnson's), they
chartered a fresh boat for the trip to Staffa and thence up Loch na
Keal, so landing on the return journey in the heart of Mull and
shortening their walk back across the island by more than half. By the
power of the past and its associations among the monastic ruins of Iona,
and of nature's architecture in building and scooping the basaltic
columns of Fingal's Cave, Keats shows himself naturally impressed. In
this instance, and once or twice afterwards, he exerts himself to write
a full and precise description for the benefit of his brother Tom. In
doing so he uses a phrase which indicates a running of his thoughts upon
his projected poem, _Hyperion_:--
The finest thing is Fingal's cave--it is entirely a hollowing out of
Basalt Pillars. Suppose now the Giants who rebelled against Jove had
taken a whole Mass of black Columns and bound them together like
bunches of matches--and then with immense Axes had made a cavern in
the body of these Columns--of course the roof and floor must be
composed of the broken ends of the Columns--such is Fingal's cave
except that the Sea has done the work of excavations and is
continually dashing there--so that we walk along the sides of the cave
on the pillars which are left as if for convenient stairs--the roof is
arched somewhat gothic-wise and the length of some of the entire
side-pillars is 50 feet.... The colour of the columns is a sort of
black with a lurking gloom of purple therein. For solemnity and
grandeur it far surpasses the finest Cathedral.
More characteristically than this description, some verses he sends at
the same time tell how Fingal's cave and its profanation by the race of
tourists affected him: I mean those beginning 'Not Aladdin Magian,'
written in the seven-syllable metre which he handled almost as well as
his sixteenth and seventeenth century masters, from Fletcher and Ben
Jonson to the youthful Milton. Avoiding word-painting and description,
like the born poet he is, he begins by calling up for comparison visions
of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, bethinking himself
of Milton's cry to Lycidas,
where'er thy bones are hurl'd,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides--
he imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean
and put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his
priestly character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion
of the place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and then dives
suddenly from view. In the six lines which tell of the scene's
profanation the style sinks with the theme into flat triviality:--
So for ever will I leave
Such a taint and soon unweave
All the magic of the place,
Tis now free to stupid face,
To cutters and to Fashion boats,
To cravats and to Petticoats:--
The great sea shall war it down,
For its fame shall not be blown
At each farthing Quadrille dance.
So saying with a Spirit glance
He dived--.
Keats evidently, and no wonder, did not like those six lines from 'Tis
now free' to 'dance': in transcripts by his friends they are dropped out
or inserted only in pencil: but he apparently did not see his way to
mend them, and Brown tells us he could never persuade him to finish or
resume the poem. In the broken close as he left it there is after all an
appropriate abruptness which may content us.
From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scottish tour,
and especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first
distinct and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, which by
reason of his muscular vigour had to his friends hitherto seemed so
robust, and of the development of his hereditary tendency to
consumption. In the same letter to his brother Tom which contains the
transcript of the Fingal poem he speaks of a 'slight sore
throat,'--Brown calls it a violent cold,--which compelled him to rest
for a day or two at Oban. Thence they pushed on in broken weather by
Ballachulish and the shore of Loch Linnhe to Fort William, and from
thence groped and struggled up Ben Nevis, a toilsome climb at best, in a
dissolving mist. Once again Keats makes an exceptional endeavour to
realise the scene in words for his brother's benefit, telling of the
continual shifting and opening and closing and re-opening of the cloud
veils about them; and to clench his effect adds, 'There is not a more
fickle thing than the top of a Mountain--what would a Lady give to
change her headdress as often and with as little trouble?' Seated, so
Brown tells us, almost on the edge of a precipice of fifteen hundred
feet drop, Keats composed a sonnet, above his worst but much below his
best, turning the experience of the hour into a simple enough symbol of
his own mental state in face of the great mysteries of things:--
Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud
Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist!
I look into the chasms, and a shroud
Vap'rous doth hide them,--just so much I wist
Mankind do know of hell; I look o'erhead,
And there is sullen mist,--even so much
Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread
Before the earth, beneath me,--even such,
Even so vague is man's sight of himself!
Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet,--
Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf,
I tread on them,--that all my eye doth meet
Is mist and crag, not only on this height,
But in the world of thought and mental might!
Hearing of a previous ascent by a Mrs Cameron, 'the fattest woman in all
Invernesshire,' he had the energy to compose also for Tom's amusement a
comic dialogue in verse between the mountain and the lady, much more in
Brown's vein than in his own. By the 6th of August the travellers had
reached Inverness, having tramped, as Brown calculates, six hundred and
forty-two miles since leaving Lancaster.
Keats's throat had for some time been getting worse: the ascent, and
especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, shaken and
tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at
Inverness thought his condition seriously threatening, and forbad him to
continue his tour. Accordingly he gave up the purpose with which he had
set out of footing it southward by a different route, seeing Edinburgh,
and on his way home visiting Bailey at his curacy in Cumberland, and
decided to take passage at once for London by the next packet from
Cromarty. Dilke had in the meantime felt compelled to write and recall
him on account of a sudden change for the worse in the condition of the
invalid Tom, so that his tour with Brown would have been cut short in
any case. On their way round the head of Beauly Firth to Cromarty the
friends did not miss the opportunity of visiting the ruins of Beauly
Abbey. The interior was then and for long afterwards used as a burial
place and receptacle for miscellaneous rubbish. Their attention being
drawn to a heap of skulls which they took, probably on the information
of some local guide, for skulls of ancient monks of the Abbey, they
jointly composed upon them a set of verses in Burns's favourite measure
(but without, this time, any attempt at his dialect). Unluckily Brown
wrote the lion's share of the piece and set the tone of the whole. To
the sixteen stanzas Keats contributed, as he afterwards informed
Woodhouse, only the first line-and-a-half of the first stanza, with
three of the later stanzas entire. As the piece has never been published
and is a new document in the history of the tour, it seems to call for
insertion here: but in view of its length and lack of quality (for it
has nowhere a touch of Keats's true magic) I choose rather to relegate
it to an appendix.
It was on the eighth or ninth of August that the smack for London put
out from Cromarty with Keats on board, and Brown, having bidden him
goodbye, was left to finish the tour alone--'much lamenting,' says he,
'the loss of his beloved companionship at my side.' Keats in some degree
picked up strength during a nine days' sea passage, the humours of which
he afterwards described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George.
But his throat trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or
for any length of time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he
arrived at Hampstead, and made his appearance among his friends the next
day, 'as brown and as shabby as you can imagine,' writes Mrs Dilke,
'scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a
great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell what he looked like.' When
he found himself seated, for the first time after his hardships, in a
comfortable stuffed chair, we are told how he expressed a comic
enjoyment of the sensation, quoting at himself the words in which Quince
the carpenter congratulates his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This account was published in _The Plymouth and Devonport Weekly
Journal_, beginning October 1, 1840, but was unluckily stopped after
the fourth number and carries us no farther than to Ballantrae on the
Ayrshire coast. I believe this is the first time that it has been
used or quoted.
[2] Does the reader remember how in a similar scene from the other
side of the Solway, in Scott's _Redgauntlet_, Dame Martin, leading
the dance, 'frisked like a kid, snapped her fingers like castanets,
whooped like a Bacchanal, and bounded from the floor like a tennis
ball'?
[3] It is interesting to note that the present poet laureate has
found something in this piece entitling it to a place in his severely
sifted anthology, _The Spirit of Man_.
[4] The words are King Lear's (act v, sc. iii).
[5] This metre is essentially the same as the 'common' measure, eight
and six, of the hymn-books, only printed out in single lines to be
spoken without--or with only very slight--pause. At the point quoted
Keats varies it, whether carelessly or on purpose, and the first
lines of three successive couplets, beginning from 'Runnels,' etc.,
are not in fourteeners but in twelves or Alexandrines (='short
measure,' six and six, printed out). A similar variation is frequent
in early examples of the metre.
[6] Printed in error 'Glenside' in all the editions: but the MS. is
quite clear, and even were it not so topography would require
Glencroe.
[7] See John Campbell of Islay, _Popular Tales of the West Highlands_
(1860), vol. ii, p. 52. I owe the suggestion and the reference to my
friend Prof. W. P. Ker. Personally I have always associated the magic
casements with the Enchanted Castle of Claude's picture representing
a very different scene. But the poet's mind is a crucible made for
extracting from ingredients no matter how heterogeneous the
quintessence, the elixir, which it needs.
CHAPTER X
SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1818: _BLACKWOOD_ AND THE _QUARTERLY_
_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_--Partisan excesses--Wild
inconsistency--Virulences of first number--The 'Z' papers and Leigh
Hunt--Blackwood and Walter Scott--_The Chaldee Manuscript_--Scott's
warning to Lockhart--Lockhart and Keats--'Z' on _Endymion_--A lesson
to critics--Marks of Lockhart's hand--The Quarterly on
_Endymion_--Indignant friends: Bailey--Reynolds--Woodhouse and
Taylor--Keats's composure under attack--Subsequent effects--Tom Keats
_in extremis_--Three months by the sick-bed--First Journal-letter to
America--Dread of love and marriage--Death of Tom Keats.
On the first of September, within a fortnight of Keats's return from the
North, appeared the threatened attack on him in Blackwood's _Edinburgh
Magazine_. Much as has been said and written on the history and effect
of the 'Cockney School' articles, my task requires that the story should
be retold, as accurately and fairly as may be, in the light of our
present knowledge.
The Whig party in politics and letters had held full ascendency for half
a generation in the periodical literature of Scotland by means of the
_Edinburgh Review_, published by Archibald Constable and edited at this
time by Jeffrey. The Tory rival, the _Quarterly_, was owned and
published also by a Scotsman, but a Scotsman migrated to London, John
Murray. Early in 1817 William Blackwood, an able Tory bookseller in
Edinburgh, projected a new monthly review which should be a thorn in the
side of his astute and ambitious trade rival, Constable, and at the same
time should hold up the party flag against the blue and yellow Whig
colours in the North, and show a livelier and lustier fighting temper
than the Quarterly. The first number appeared in March under the title
of _The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine_. The first editors were two
insignificant men who proved neither competent nor loyal, and flat
failure threatening the enterprise, Blackwood after six months got rid
of the editors and determined to make a fresh start. He added his own
name to the title of the magazine and called to his aid two brilliant
young men who had been occasional contributors, John Wilson and John
Gibson Lockhart, both sound Oxford scholars and Lockhart moreover a
well-read modern linguist, both penmen of extraordinary facility and
power of work, both at this period of their lives given, in a spirit
partly of furious partisanship partly of reckless frolic, to a degree of
licence in controversy and satire inconceivable to-day. Wilson, by birth
the son of a rich Glasgow manufacturer but now reduced in fortune, was
in person a magnificent, florid, blue-eyed athlete of thirty, and in
literature the bully and Berserker of the pair. Lockhart, the scion of
an ancient Lanarkshire house, a dark, proud, handsome and graceful youth
of twenty-three, pensive and sardonically reserved, had a deadly gift of
satire and caricature and a lust for exercising it which was for a time
uncontrollable like a disease. Wilson had lived on Windermere in the
intimacy of Wordsworth and his circle, and already made a certain mark
in literature with his poem _The Isle of Palms_. Lockhart had made a few
firm friends at Oxford and after his degree had frequented the Goethe
circle at Weimar, but was otherwise without social or literary
experience. Blackwood was the eager employer and unflinching backer of
both. The trio were determined to push the magazine into notoriety by
fair means or foul. Its management was informally divided between them,
so that no one person could be held responsible. Of Wilson and Lockhart,
each was at one time supposed to be editor, but neither ever admitted as
much or received separate payment for editorial work. They were really
chief contributors and trusted and insistent chief advisers, but
Blackwood never let go his own control, and took upon himself, now with
effrontery, now with evasion, occasionally with compromise made and
satisfaction given, all the risks and rancours which the threefold
management chose to incur.
Wilson's obstreperousness, even when he had in some degree sobered down
as a university professor, was at all times irresponsible and
irrepressible, but for some of the excesses of those days he expressed
regret and tried to make atonement; while Lockhart, the vitriol
gradually working out of his nature in the sunshine of domestic
happiness and of Scott's genial and paternal influence, sincerely
repented them when it was too late. But they lasted long enough to
furnish one of the most deplorable chapters in our literary history. The
fury of political party spirit, infesting the whole field of letters,
accounts for, without excusing much. It was a rough unscrupulous time,
the literary as well as the political atmosphere thick, as we have seen,
with the mud and stones of controversy, flung often very much at random.
The _Quarterly_, as conducted by the acrid and deformed pedant Gifford,
had no mercy for opponents: and one of the harshest of its contributors
was the virtuous Southey. On the other side the Edinburgh, under the
more urbane and temperate Jeffrey, could sneer spitefully at all times
and abuse savagely enough on occasion, especially when its contributor
was Hazlitt. If a notorious Edinburgh attack on Coleridge's _Christabel_
volume was really by Hazlitt, as Coleridge always believed and Hazlitt
never denied, he in that instance added unpardonable personal
ingratitude to a degree of critical blindness amazing in such a man.
Even Leigh Hunt, in private life one of the most amiable of hearts,
could in controversy on the liberal side be almost as good a damner (to
use Keats's phrase) as his ally, the same Hazlitt himself. But nowhere
else were such felon strokes dealt in pure wantonness of heart as in the
early numbers of Blackwood. The notorious first number opened with an
article on Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_ even more furiously
insulting than the aforesaid Edinburgh article on _Christabel_
attributed to Hazlitt. But for Hazlitt Coleridge was in politics an
apostate not to be pardoned, while for the Blackwood group he was no
enemy but an ally. Why treat him thus unless it were merely for the
purpose of attracting a scandalized attention? More amazing even than
the virulence of Blackwood was its waywardness and inconsistency. Will
it be believed that less than three years later the same Coleridge was
being praised and solicited--and what is more, successfully
solicited--for contributions? Again, nothing is so much to the credit of
Wilson and Lockhart in those days as their admiration for Wordsworth.
The sins of their first number are half redeemed by the article in
Wordsworth's praise, a really fine, eloquent piece of work in Wilson's
boisterous but not undiscriminating manner of laudation. But not even
Wordsworth could long escape the random swash of Wilson's bludgeon, and
a very few years later his friends were astonished to read a ferocious
outbreak against him in one of the _Noctes_ by the same hand. In regard
even to the detested Hazlitt the magazine blew in some degree hot and
cold, printing through several numbers a series of respectful summaries,
supplied from London by Patmore, of his Surrey Institution lectures; in
another number a courteous enough estimate of his and Jeffrey's
comparative powers in criticism; and a little later taking him to task
on one page rudely, but not quite unjustly, for his capricious treatment
of Shakespeare's minor poems and on another page addressing to him an
insulting catechism full of the vilest personal imputations.
The only contemporary whose treatment by the Blackwood trio is truly
consistent was Leigh Hunt, and of him it was consistently blackguardly.
To return to the first number of the new series, three articles were
counted on to create an uproar. First, the aforesaid emptying of the
critical slop-pail on Coleridge. Second, the _Translation from an
ancient Chaldee Manuscript_, being a biting personal satire, in language
parodied from the Bible, on noted Edinburgh characters, including the
Blackwood group themselves, disguised under transparent nicknames that
stuck, Blackwood as Ebony, Wilson as the Leopard, Lockhart as the
Scorpion that delighteth to sting the faces of men. Third, the article
on the Cockney School of Poetry, numbered as the first of the series,
headed with a quotation from Cornelius Webb, and signed with the initial
'Z.' As a thing to hang gibes on, the quotation from the unlucky Webb is
aptly enough chosen:--
Our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on)
Of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron,
(Our England's Dante)--Wordsworth, Hunt, and Keats,
The Muses' son of promise, and what feats
He yet may do--
Nor are the gibes themselves quite unjustified so far as they touch
merely the underbred insipidities of Leigh Hunt's tea-party manner in
_Rimini_. But they are as outrageously absurd as they are gross and
libellous when they go on to assail both poem and author on the score of
immorality.
The extreme moral depravity of the Cockney School is another thing
which is for ever thrusting itself upon the public attention, and
convincing every man of sense who looks into their productions, that
they who sport such sentiments can never be great poets. How could any
man of high original genius ever stoop publicly, at the present day,
to dip his fingers in the least of those glittering and rancid
obscenities which float on the surface of Mr Hunt's _Hippocrene_? His
poetry is that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. He
talks indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner girl. Some excuse for
him there might have been, had he been hurried away by imagination or
passion. But with him indecency is a disease, as he speaks unclean
things from perfect inanition. The very concubine of so impure a
wretch as Leigh Hunt would be to be pitied, but alas! for the wife of
such a husband! For him there is no charm in simple seduction; and he
gloats over it only when accompanied with adultery and incest.
Such is the manner in which these censors set about showing their
superior breeding and scholarship. 'Z' was in most cases probably a
composite and not a single personality, but the respective shares of
Wilson and Lockhart can often be confidently enough disentangled by
those who know their styles.
The scandal created by the first number exceeded what its authors had
hoped or expected. All Edinburgh was in a turmoil about the _Chaldee
Manuscript_, the victims writhing, their enemies chuckling, law-suits
threatening right and left. In London the commotion was scarcely less.
The London agents for the sale of the Magazine protested strongly, and
Blackwood had to use some hard lying in order to pacify them. Murray,
who had a share in the magazine, soon began remonstrating against its
scurrilities, and on their continuance withdrew his capital. Leigh Hunt
in the _Examiner_ retorted upon 'Z' with natural indignation and a
peremptory demand for the disclosure of his name. The libellers hugged
their anonymity, and at first showed some slight movement of panic. In a
second edition of the first number the _Chaldee Manuscript_ was omitted
and the assault on Hunt made a little less gross and personal. For a
while Hunt vigorously threatened legal proceedings, but after some time
desisted, whether from lack of funds or doubt of a verdict or inability
to identify his assailant we do not know, and declared, and stuck to the
declaration, that he would take no farther notice. The attacks were soon
renewed more savagely than ever. The second of the 'Z' papers alone is
scholarly and relatively reasonable. Its phrase, 'the genteel comedy of
incest,' fitly enough labels _Rimini_ in contrast with the tragic
treatment of kindred themes by real masters, as Sophocles, Dante, Ford,
Alfieri, Schiller, even Byron in _Manfred_ and _Parisina_. The third
article, and two other attacks in the form of letters addressed directly
to Hunt with the same signature, are merely rabid and outrageous.
Correspondents having urged in protest that Hunt's domestic life was
blameless, the assailant says in effect, so much the greater his
offence for writing a profligate and demoralizing poem; and to this
preposterous charge against one of the mildest pieces of milk-and-water
sentimentality in all literature he returns (or they return) with
furious iteration.
The reasons for this special savagery against Hunt have never been made
fully clear. He and his circle used to think it was partly due to his
slighting treatment of Scott in the _Feast of the Poets_: nay, they even
idly imagined for a moment that Scott himself had been the
writer,--Scott, than whom no man was ever more magnanimously and
humorously indifferent to harsh criticism or less capable of lifting a
finger to resent it. But some of Scott's friends and idolaters in
Edinburgh were sensitive on his behalf as he never was on his own. Even
for the Blackwood assault on Coleridge one rumoured reason was that
Coleridge had rudely denounced a play, the _Bertram_ of Maturin, admired
and recommended to Drury Lane by Scott; and it is, as a matter of fact,
conceivable that a similar excess of loyalty may have had something to
do with the rancour of the 'Z' articles.
Looking back on the way in which the name of this great man got mixed up
in some minds with matters so far beneath him, it seems worth while to
set forth exactly what were his relations at this time to Blackwood and
the Blackwood group. About 1816-1817 the two rival publishers Blackwood
and Constable, were hot competitors for Scott's favour, and Constable
had lately scored a point in the game in the matter of the _Tales of my
Landlord_. It became in the eyes of Blackwood and his associates a vital
matter to secure some kind of countenance from Scott for their new
venture. They knew they would never attach him as a partisan or secure a
monopoly of his favours, and the authors of the _Chaldee Manuscript_
divined his attitude wittily and shrewdly when they represented him as
giving precisely the same answer to each of the two publishers who
courted him, thus. (The man in plain apparel is Blackwood and the
Jordan is the Tweed):--
44. Then spake the man clothed in plain apparel to the great magician
who dwelleth in the old fastness, hard by the river Jordan, which is
by the Border. And the magician opened his mouth, and said, Lo! my
heart wisheth thy good, and let the thing prosper which is in thy
hands to do it.
45. But thou seest that my hands are full of working and my labour is
great. For lo I have to feed all the people of my land, and none
knoweth whence his food cometh, but each man openeth his mouth, and my
hand filleth it with pleasant things.
46. Moreover, thine adversary also is of my familiars.
47. The land is before thee, draw thou up thy hosts for the battle in
the place of Princes, over against thine adversary, which hath his
station near the mount of the Proclamation; quit ye as men, and let
favour be shewn unto him which is most valiant.
48. Yet be thou silent, peradventure will I help thee some little.
More shrewdly still, Blackwood bethought himself of the one and only way
of practically enlisting Scott, and that was by promising permanent work
on the magazine for his friend, tenant, and dependent, William Laidlaw,
whom he could never do enough to help. So it was arranged that Laidlaw
should regularly contribute a chronicle on agricultural and antiquarian
topics, and that Scott should touch it up and perhaps occasionally add a
paragraph or short article of his own. In point of fact the peccant
first number contains such an article, an entertaining enough little
skit 'On the alarming Increase of Depravity among Animals.' After the
number had appeared Scott wrote to Blackwood in tempered approval, but
saying that he must withdraw his support if satire like that of the
_Chaldee Manuscript_ was to continue. He had been pleased and tickled
with the prophetic picture of his own neutrality, but strongly
disapproved the sting and malice of much of the rest.
One cannot but wish he had put his foot down in like manner about the
'Cockney school' and other excesses: but home--that is
Edinburgh--affairs and personages interested him much more than those
of London. Lockhart he did not yet personally know. They first met eight
months later, in June 1818: the acquaintance ripened rapidly into firm
devotion on Lockhart's part--for this young satirist could love as
staunchly as he could stab unmercifully--a devotion requited with an
answering warmth of affection on the part of Scott. At an early stage of
their relations Scott, recognizing with regret that his young friend was
'as mischievous as a monkey,' got an offer for him of official work
which would have freed him of his ties to Blackwood. In like manner two
years later Scott threw himself heart and soul into the contest on
behalf of Wilson for the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy, not merely
as the Tory candidate, but in the hope--never fully realized--that the
office would tame his combative extravagances as well as give scope for
his serious talents. And when the battle was won and Lockhart, now
Scott's son-in-law, crowed over it in a set of verses which Scott
thought too vindictive, he remonstrated in a strain of admirable grave
and affectionate wisdom:--
I have hitherto avoided saying anything on this subject, though some
little turn towards personal satire is, I think, the only drawback to
your great and powerful talents, and I think I may have hinted as much
to you. But I wished to see how this matter of Wilson's would turn,
before making a clean breast upon this subject.... Now that he has
triumphed I think it would be bad taste to cry out--'Strike up our
drums--pursue the scattered stray.' Besides, the natural consequence
of his situation must be his relinquishing his share in these
compositions--at least, he will injure himself in the opinion of many
friends, and expose himself to a continuation of galling and vexatious
disputes to the embittering of his life, should he do otherwise. In
that case I really hope you will pause before you undertake to be the
Boaz of the Maga; I mean in the personal and satirical department,
when the Jachin has seceded.
Besides all other objections of personal enemies, personal quarrels,
constant obloquy, and all uncharitableness, such an occupation will
fritter away your talents, hurt your reputation both as a lawyer and a
literary man, and waste away your time in what at best will be but a
monthly wonder. What has been done in this department will be very
well as a frolic of young men, but let it suffice.... Remember it is
to the _personal_ satire I object, and to the horse-play of your
raillery.... Revere yourself, my dear boy, and think you were born to
do your country better service than in this species of warfare. I make
no apology (I am sure you will require none) for speaking plainly what
my anxious affection dictates.... I wish you to have the benefit of my
experience without purchasing it; and be assured, that the
consciousness of attaining complete superiority over your calumniators
and enemies by the force of your general character, is worth a dozen
of triumphs over them by the force of wit and raillery.
It took a longer time and harder lessons to cure Lockhart of the
scorpion habit and wean him from the seductions of the 'Mother of
Mischief,' as Scott in another place calls _Blackwood's Magazine_.
Meantime he had in the case of Keats done as much harm as he could. He
had not the excuse of entire ignorance. His intimate friend Christie
(afterwards principal in the John Scott duel) was working at the bar in
London and wrote to Lockhart in January 1818 that he had met Keats and
been favourably impressed by him. In reply Lockhart writes: 'What you
say of Keates (sic) is pleasing, and if you like to write a little
review of him, in admonition to leave his ways, etc., and in praise of
his natural genius, I shall be greatly obliged to you.' Later Benjamin
Bailey had the opportunity of speaking with Lockhart in Keats's behalf.
Bailey had by this time taken orders, and after publishing a friendly
notice of _Endymion_ in the _Oxford Herald_ for June, had left the
University and gone to settle in a curacy in Cumberland. In the course
of the summer he staid at Stirling, at the house of Bishop Gleig; whose
son, afterwards the well-known writer and chaplain-general to the
forces, was his friend, and whose daughter he soon afterwards married.
Here Bailey met Lockhart, and anxious to save Keats from the sort of
treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took the opportunity
of telling him in a friendly way Keats's circumstances and history,
explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt was
personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an
object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any
rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his
disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be
so used by _him_. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to
all appearance, and to Bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he
had thus confidentially communicated.[1]
'That amiable but infatuated bardling, Mister John Keats,' had received
a certain amount of attention from 'Z' already, both in the quotation
from Cornelius Webb prefixed to the Cockney school articles, and in
allusion to Hunt's pair of sonnets on the intercoronation scene which he
had printed in his volume, _Foliage_, since the 'Z' series began. When
now Keats's own turn came, in the fourth article of the series, his
treatment was almost mild in comparison with that of his supposed
leader. 'This young man appears to have received from nature talents of
an excellent, perhaps even of a superior, order--talents which, devoted
to the purposes of any useful profession, must have rendered him a
respectable, if not an eminent citizen.' But, says the critic, he has
unfortunately fallen a victim to the _metromania_ of the hour; the
wavering apprentice has been confirmed in his desire to quit the
gallipots by his admiration for 'the most worthless and affected of all
the versifiers of our time.' 'Mr Hunt is a small poet, but he is a
clever man, Mr Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of
pretty abilities which he has done everything in his power to spoil.'
And so on; and so on; not of course omitting to put a finger on real
weaknesses, as lack of scholarship, the use of Cockney rimes like
_higher_, _Thalia_; _ear_, _Cytherea_; _thorn_, _fawn_; deriding the
Boileau passage in _Sleep and Poetry_, and perceiving nothing but laxity
and nervelessness in the treatment of the metre. In the conceit of
academic talent and training, the critic shows himself open-eyed to all
the faults and stone-blind to all the beauty and genius and promise, and
ends with a vulgarity of supercilious patronage beside which all the
silly venial faults of taste in Leigh Hunt seem like good breeding
itself.
And now, good-morrow to 'the Muses' son of Promise;' as for 'the feats
he yet may do,' as we do not pretend to say like himself, 'Muse of my
native land am I inspired,' we shall adhere to the safe old rule of
_pauca verba_. We venture to make one small prophecy, that his
bookseller will not a second time venture £50 upon any thing he can
write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary
than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to 'plasters,
pills, and ointment boxes,' etc. But, for Heaven's sake, young
Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in
your practice than you have been in your poetry.
There is a lesson in these things. I remember the late Mr Andrew Lang,
one of the most variously gifted and richly equipped critical minds of
our time, and under a surface vein of flippancy essentially
kind-hearted,--I remember Mr Andrew Lang, in a candid mood of
conversation, wondering whether in like circumstances he might not have
himself committed a like offence, and with no _Hyperion_ or _St Agnes'
Eve_ or _Odes_ yet written and only the 1817 volume and _Endymion_
before him, have dismissed Keats fastidiously and scoffingly. Who
knows?--and let us all take warning. But now-a-days the errors of
criticism are perhaps rather of an opposite kind, and any rashness and
rawness of undisciplined novelty is apt to find itself indulged and
fostered rather than repressed. What should at any time have saved
_Endymion_ from harsh judgment, if the quality of the poetry could not
save it, was the quality of the preface. How could either carelessness
or rancour not recognize, not augur the best from, its fine spirit of
manliness and modesty and self-knowledge?
The responsibility for the gallipots article, as for so many others in
the Blackwood of the time, may have been in some sort collective. But
that Lockhart had the chief share in it is certain. According to Dilke,
he in later life owned as much. To those who know his hand, he stands
confessed not only in the general gist and style but in particular
phrases. One is the use of Sangrado for doctor, a use which both Scott
and Lockhart had caught from _Gil Blas_.[2] Others are the allusions to
the _Métromanie_ of Piron and the _Endymion_ of Wieland, particularly
the latter. Wieland's _Oberon_, as we have seen, had made its mark in
England through Sotheby's translation, but no other member of the
Blackwood group is the least likely to have had any acquaintance with
his untranslated minor works except Lockhart, whose stay at Weimar had
given him a familiar knowledge of contemporary German literature. In the
_Mad Banker of Amsterdam_, a comic poem in the vein of Frere's
_Whistlecraft_ and Byron's _Beppo_, contributed by him at this time to
Blackwood under one of his Protean pseudonyms, as 'William Wastle Esq.,'
Lockhart sketches his own likeness as follows:--
Then touched I off friend Lockhart (Gibson John),
So fond of jabbering about Tieck and Schlegel,
Klopstock and _Wieland_, Kant and Mendelssohn,
All High Dutch quacks, like Spurzheim or Feinagle--
Him the Chaldee yclept the Scorpion.--
The claws, but not the pinions, of the eagle,
Are Jack's, but though I do not mean to flatter,
Undoubtedly he has strong powers of satire.
Bailey to the end of his life never forgave Lockhart for what he held to
be a base breach of faith after their conversation above mentioned, and
his indignation communicated itself to the Keats circle and afterwards,
as we shall see, to Keats himself. Mr Andrew Lang, in his excellent
_Life_ of Lockhart, making such defence as is candidly possible for his
hero's share in the Blackwood scandals, urges justly enough that the
only matter of fact divulged about Keats by 'Z' is that of his having
been apprenticed to a surgeon ('Z' prefers to say an apothecary) and
that thus much Lockhart could not well help knowing independently,
either from his own friend Christie or from Bailey's friend and future
brother-in-law Gleig, then living at Edinburgh and about to become one
of Blackwood's chief supporters. When in farther defence of 'Z's'
attacks on Hunt Mr Lang quotes from Keats's letters phrases in dispraise
of Hunt almost as strong as those used by 'Z' himself, he forgets the
world of difference there is between the confidential criticism, in a
passing mood or whim of impatience, of a friend by a friend to a friend
and the gross and re-iterated public defamation of a political and
literary opponent.
Lockhart in after life pleaded the rawness of youth, and also that in
the random and incoherent violences of the early years of Blackwood
there had been less of real and settled malice than in the _Quarterly
Review_ as at that time conducted. The plea may be partly admitted, but
to forgive him we need all the gratitude which is his due for his filial
devotion to and immortal biography of Scott, as well as all the
allowance to be made for a dangerous gift and bias of nature.
The Quarterly article on _Endymion_ followed in the last week of
September (in the number dated April,--such in those days was editorial
punctuality). It is now known to have been the work of John Wilson
Croker, a man of many sterling gifts and honourable loyalties, unjustly
blackened in the eyes of posterity by Macaulay's rancorous dislike and
Disraeli's masterly caricature, but in literature as in politics the
narrowest and stiffest of conservative partisans. Like his editor
Gifford, he was trained in strict allegiance to eighteenth century
tradition and the school of Pope. His brief review of _Endymion_ is that
of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable of judging
it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the pain he
gives. He professes to have been unable to read beyond the first canto,
or to make head or tail of that, and what is worse, turns the frank
avowals of Keats's preface foolishly and unfairly against him. At the
same time, like Lockhart, he does not fail to point out and exaggerate
real weaknesses of Keats's early manner, and the following, from the
point of view of a critic who sees no salvation outside the closed
couplet, is not unreasonable criticism:--
He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the
thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_ with
which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a
complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to
another, from the association, not of ideas but of sounds, and the
work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced
themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on
which they turn.
In another of the established reviews, _The British Critic_, a third
censor came out with a notice even more contemptuous than those of
Blackwood and the Quarterly. For a moment Keats's pride winced, as any
man's might, under the personal insults of the critics, and dining in
the company of Hazlitt and Woodhouse with Mr Hessey, the publisher, he
seems to have declared in Woodhouse's hearing that he would write no
more. But he quickly recovered his balance, and in a letter to Dilke of
a few days later, speaking of Hazlitt's wrath against the Blackwood
scribes, is silent as to their treatment of himself. Meantime some of
his friends and more than one stranger were actively sympathetic and
indignant on his behalf. A just and vigorous expostulation appeared in
the _Morning Chronicle_ under the initials J.S.,--those in all
likelihood of John Scott, then editor of the _London Magazine_, not long
afterwards killed by Lockhart's friend Christie in a needless and
blundering duel arising out of these very Blackwood brawls. Bailey,
being in Edinburgh, had an interview with Blackwood and pleaded to be
allowed to contribute a reply to his magazine; and this being refused,
sought out Constable, who besides the _Edinburgh Review_ conducted the
monthly periodical which had been kind to Keats's first volume,[3] and
proposed to publish in it an attack on Blackwood and the 'Z' articles:
but Constable would not take the risk. Reynolds published in a
west-country paper, the _Alfred_, a warm rejoinder to the _Quarterly_
reviewer, containing a judicious criticism in brief of Keats's work,
with remarks very much to the point on the contrast between his and the
egotistical (meaning Wordsworth's) attitude to nature. This Leigh Hunt
reprinted with some introductory words in the _Examiner_, and later in
life regretted that he had not done more. But he could not have done
more to any purpose. He was not himself an enthusiastic admirer of
_Endymion_, had plainly said so to Keats and to his friends, and would
have got out of his depth if he had tried to appreciate the intensity
and complexity of symbolic and spiritual meaning which made that poem so
different from his own shallow, self-pleasing metrical versions of
classic or Italian tales. Reynolds's piece, which he re-printed, was
quite effective and to the point as far as it went; and moreover any
formal defence of Keats by Hunt would only have increased the virulence
of his enemies, as they both perfectly well knew. Privately at the same
time Reynolds, who had just been reading _The Pot of Basil_ in
manuscript, wrote to his friend with affectionate wisdom as follows:--
As to the poem, I am of all things anxious that you should publish it,
for its completeness will be a full answer to all the ignorant
malevolence of cold, lying Scotchmen and stupid Englishmen. The
overweening struggle to oppress you only shows the world that so much
of endeavour cannot be directed to nothing. Men do not set their
muscles and strain their sinews to break a straw. I am confident,
Keats, that the 'Pot of Basil' hath that simplicity and quiet pathos
which are of a sure sovereignty over all hearts. I must say that it
would delight me to have you prove yourself to the world what we know
you to be--to have you annul _The Quarterly Review_ by the best of all
answers. One or two of your sonnets you might print, I am sure. And I
know that I may suggest to you which, because you can decide as you
like afterward. You will remember that we were to print together. I
give over all intention, and you ought to be alone. I can never write
anything now--my mind is taken the other way. But I shall set my
heart on having you high, as you ought to be. Do _you_ get Fame, and I
shall have it in being your affectionate and steady friend.
Woodhouse, in a correspondence with the unceasingly kind and loyal
publishers Taylor and Hessey, shows himself as deeply moved as anyone,
and Taylor in the course of the autumn sought to enlist on behalf of the
victim the private sympathies of one of the most cultivated and
influential Liberal thinkers and publicists of the time, Sir James
Mackintosh. Sending him a copy of _Endymion_, Taylor writes:--'Its
faults are numberless, but there are redeeming features in my opinion,
and the faults are those of real Genius. Whatever this work is, its
Author is a true poet.' After a few words as to Keats's family and
circumstances he adds, 'These are odd particulars to give, when I am
introducing the work and not the man to you,--but if you knew him, you
would also feel that strange personal interest in all that concerns
him.--Mr Gifford forgot his own early life when he tried to bear down
this young man. Happily, it will not succeed. If he lives, Keats will be
the brightest ornament of this Age.' In concluding Taylor recommends
particularly to his correspondent's attention the hymn to Pan, the
Glaucus episode, and above all the triumph of Bacchus.
Proud in the extreme, Keats had no irritable vanity; and aiming in his
art, if not always steadily, yet always at the highest, he rather
despised than courted such successes as he saw some of his
contemporaries--Thomas Moore, for instance, with _Lalla Rookh_--enjoy.
'I hate,' he says, 'a mawkish popularity.' Wise recognition and
encouragement would no doubt have helped and cheered him, but even in
the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly cherished, there was
nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was conscious of perceiving his
own shortcomings at least as clearly as his critics. Accordingly he took
his treatment at their hands more coolly than older and more experienced
men had taken the like. Hunt, as we have seen, had replied indignantly
to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn, and he and
Hazlitt were both at first red-hot to have the law of them. Keats after
the first sting with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance
as one merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When early in
October Mr Hessey sent for his encouragement the extracts from the
papers in which he had been defended, he wrote:--
I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part.
As for the rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my own
strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on
the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic
on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without
comparison beyond what 'Blackwood' or the 'Quarterly' could possibly
inflict--and also when I feel I am right, no external praise can give
me such a glow as my own solitary re-perception and ratification of
what is fine. J. S. is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod
_Endymion_. That it is so is no fault of mine. No!--though it may
sound a little paradoxical. It is as good as I had power to make
it--by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and
with that view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would
not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble--I will
write independently.--I have written independently _without Judgment_.
I may write independently, and _with Judgment_, hereafter. The Genius
of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be
matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in
itself. That which is creative must create itself. In _Endymion_ I
leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better
acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if
I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took
tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would
sooner fail than not be among the greatest. But I am nigh getting into
a rant.
Two or three weeks later, in answer to a similar encouraging letter from
Woodhouse, he explains, in sentences luminous with self-knowledge, what
he calls his own chameleon character as a poet, and the variable and
impressionable temperament such a character implies. 'Where then,' he
adds, 'is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I
not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of
Saturn and Ops?... I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I
hope enough to make you see that no dependence is to be placed on what I
said that day.' And again about the same time to his brother and
sister-in-law:--
There have been two letters in my defence in the 'Chronicle,' and one
in the 'Examiner,' copied from the Exeter paper, and written by
Reynolds. I don't know who wrote those in the 'Chronicle.' This is a
mere matter of the moment: I think I shall be among the English Poets
after my death. Even as a matter of present interest, the attempt to
crush me in the 'Quarterly' has only brought me more into notice, and
it is a common expression among bookmen, 'I wonder the "Quarterly"
should cut its own throat.'
It does me not the least harm in Society to make me appear little and
ridiculous: I know when a man is superior to me and give him all due
respect--he will be the last to laugh at me and as for the rest I feel
that I make an impression upon them which ensures me personal respect
while I am in sight whatever they may say when my back is turned.
Since these firm expressions of indifference to critical attack have
been before the world, it has been too confidently assumed that Shelley
and Byron were totally misled and wide of the mark when they believed
that _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_ had killed Keats or even much hurt
him. But the truth is that not they, but their consequences, did in
their degree help to kill him. It must not be supposed that such words
of wisdom and composure, manifestly sincere as they are, represent the
whole of Keats, or anything like the whole. They represent, indeed, the
admirably sound and manly elements which were a part of him: they show
us the veins of what Matthew Arnold calls flint and iron in his nature
uppermost. But he was no Wordsworth, to remain all flint and iron in
indifference to derision and in the scorn of scorn. He had not only in a
tenfold degree the ordinary acuteness of a poet's feelings: he had the
variable and chameleon temperament of which he warns Woodhouse while in
the very act of re-assuring him: he had along with the flint and iron a
strong congenital tendency, against which he was always fighting but not
always successfully, to fits of depression and self-torment. Moreover
the reviews of those days, especially the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_,
had a real power of barring the acceptance and checking the sale of an
author's work. What actually happened was that when a year or so later
Keats began to realise the harm which the reviews had done and were
doing to his material prospects, these consequences in his darker hours
preyed on him severely and conspired with the forces of disease and
passion to his undoing.
For the present and during the first stress of the _Blackwood_ and
_Quarterly_ storms, he was really living under the pressure of another
and far more heartfelt trouble. His friends the Dilkes, before they
heard of his intended return from Scotland, had felt reluctantly bound
to write and summon him home on account of the alarming condition of his
brother Tom, whom he had left behind in their lodgings at Well Walk. In
fact the case was desperate, and for the next three months Keats's chief
occupation was the harrowing one of watching and ministering to this
dying brother. In a letter written to Dilke in the third week of
September, he speaks thus of his feelings and occupations:--
I wish I could say Tom was better. His identity presses upon me so all
day that I am obliged to go out--and although I had intended to have
given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and plunge into
abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, and
feebleness--so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be
poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine 'the hateful siege of
contraries'--if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me,
and yet I must do so or suffer.'
And again about the same time to Reynolds:--
I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a Woman has haunted me
these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverish relief of
poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has conquered--I
have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life--I feel
escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am
thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load
of immortality.
What he calls the abstractions into which he had plunged for relief were
the conceptions of the fallen Titans, 'the characters of Saturn and Ops'
at the beginning of _Hyperion_. Those conceptions were just beginning to
clothe themselves in his mind in the verses which every English reader
knows, verses of a cadence as majestic and pathetic almost as any in the
language, yet scarcely more charged with high emotion or more pregnant
with the sense and pressure of destiny than some of the prose of his
familiar letters written about the same time. His only other attempt in
poetry during those weeks was a translation from a sonnet of Ronsard,
whose works Taylor had lent him and from whom he got some hints for the
names and characters of his Titans. As the autumn wore on the task of
the watcher grew ever more sorrowful and absorbing, he was obliged to
desist from poetry for the time. But his correspondence shows no
flagging. Towards the middle of October he began, marking it as A, the
first of the series of journal-letters to his brother and sister in
America, which give us during the next fifteen months a picture of his
outward and inward being fuller and richer than we possess from any
other poet, and except in one single particular absolutely unreserved.
Despatching the packet on his birthday, that is October 29 or 31, he
explains why it is not longer (it is over 7,000 words): 'Tom is rather
more easy than he has been: but is still so nervous that I cannot speak
to him of these Matters--indeed it is the care I have had to keep his
mind aloof from feelings too acute that has made this letter so short a
one--I did not like to write before him a letter he knew was to reach
your hands--I cannot even now ask him for any Message--his heart speaks
to you. Be as happy as you can.' Keats had begun by warning George and
his wife, in language of beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to
prepare their minds for the worst, and assuring them of the comfort he
took in the thoughts of them:--'I have Fanny and I have you--three
people whose Happiness to me is sacred--and it does annul that selfish
sorrow which I should otherwise fall into, living as I do with poor Tom
who looks upon me as his only comfort--the tears will come into your
Eyes--let them--and embrace each other--thank heaven for what happiness
you have, and after thinking a moment or two that you suffer in common
with all Mankind hold it not a sin to regain your cheerfulness.' Between
the opening and the closing note of tenderness, the letter runs through
a wide range of subject and feeling; gossip about the Dilkes and other
acquaintances; an account of the humours of his sea-passage from
Inverness to London; the unruffled allusion to the Tory reviews from
which we have already quoted; two long and curious sex-haunted passages,
one expressing his admiration of the same East Indian cousin of the
Reynoldses, 'not a Cleopatra, but at least a Charmian,' whom we have
found mentioned already in a letter to Reynolds, the other telling what
promised to be an equivocal adventure, but turned out quite
conventionally and politely, with a mysterious lady acquaintance met
once before at Hastings; a rambling discussion on the state of home and
foreign politics; a rhapsody, or as he would have called it rant, in a
mounting strain of verse which rings like a boy's voice singing in alt,
prophesying that the child to be born to George and his wife shall be
the first American poet; then more babble about friends and
acquaintances; then, as if he knew that the invincible thing, the
love-god whose spell he had always at once dreaded and longed for, were
hovering and about to swoop, he tries to re-assure himself by calling up
the reasons why marriage and the life domestic are not for him. The
Charmian passage and the passage in which he seeks to stave off the
approach of love are among the best known in his letters, but
nevertheless the most necessary to quote:--
She has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When
she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty
of a Leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to
repulse any Man who may address her--from habit she thinks that
nothing _particular_. I always find myself more at ease with such a
woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation
which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such
times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or on a tremble. I
forget myself entirely because I live in her. You will by this time
think I am in love with her; so before I go further I will tell you I
am not--she kept me awake one Night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement than which I can feel
none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman the very 'yes'
and 'no' of whose Lips is to me a Banquet. I don't cry to take the
Moon home with me in my Pocket nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I
like her and her like because one has no _sensations_--what we both
are is taken for granted. You will suppose I have by this had much
talk with her--no such thing--there are the Miss Reynoldses on the
look out. They think I don't admire her because I did not stare at
her. They call her a flirt to me. What a want of knowledge! She walks
across a room in such a Manner that a Man is drawn towards her with a
magnetic Power. This they call flirting! They do not know things.
In the next passage, almost as the young priest Ion in the Greek play
clings to his ministration in the temple of Apollo, so we find Keats
cleaving exultingly to his high vocation and to the idea of a life
dedicated to poetry alone. But a great spiritual flaw in his nature--or
was it only a lack of fortunate experience?--betrays itself in his
conception of the alternative from which he shrinks. The imagery under
which he figures marriage joys gives no hint of their power to
discipline and inspire and sustain, and is trivially sensuous and
material.
Notwithstanding your Happiness and your recommendation I hope I shall
never marry. Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at
the end of a Journey or a Walk; though the Carpet were of Silk, the
Curtains of the morning Clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with
Cygnet's down; the food Manna, the Wine beyond Claret, the Window
opening on Windermere, I should not feel--or rather my Happiness would
not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have
described there is a sublimity to welcome me home. The roaring of the
wind is my wife and the Stars through the windowpane are my Children.
The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the
more divided and minute domestic happiness--an amiable wife and sweet
Children I contemplate as a part of that Beauty, but I must have a
thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more
and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live
in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone
than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my
Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard--then
'Tragedy with sceptered pall comes sweeping by.' According to my state
of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with
Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into
Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost Soul upon
the Stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a
voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone. These
things, combined with the opinion I have of the generality of
women--who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a
sugar Plum than my time, form a barrier against Matrimony which I
rejoice in.
Throughout November Keats was so fully absorbed in attendance on his
dying brother as to be unfit for poetry or correspondence. On the night
of December 1 the end came. 'Early the next morning,' writes Brown, 'I
was awakened in bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, who came to
tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we both
remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, my
thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,--"Have nothing
more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! Had you not better live
with me?" He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied, "I think it
would be better." From that moment he was my inmate.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Houghton MSS.
[2] The source is the Spanish _sangrador_, blood-letter; which Le
Sage in _Gil Blas_ converts into a proper name, Sangrado.
[3] The old _Scots Magazine_ lately re-started under a new name; see
above, p. 132.
CHAPTER XI
DECEMBER 1818-JUNE 1819: KEATS AND BROWN HOUSEMATES: FANNY BRAWNE: WORK
AND IDLENESS
Removal to Wentworth Place--Work on _Hyperion_--The insatiable
Haydon--The Misses Porter--A mingled yarn--Charles Lamb and
punning--Hunt and his satellites--Fanny Brawne--A sudden
enslavement--Severn's impressions--Visit to Hampshire--_The Eve of St.
Agnes_--Return and engagement--Ode to Fanny--Love and jealousy--Haydon
again--Letters to Fanny Keats--Two months' idleness--Praise of
claret--Bailey's love-affairs--Fit of languor--Fight with a
butcher--Sonnet-confessions--Reflections ethical and cosmic--Meeting
with Coleridge--The same according to the sage--A tactful
review--Sonnets on fame--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--The right version
quoted--The five Odes--Their date and order--A fruitful
May--Indecision and anxiety--A confidential letter--Departure for
Shanklin.
Dilke and Brown, as has been said already, had built for themselves a
joint block of two houses in a garden near the bottom of John Street,
Hampstead, and had called the property Wentworth Place, after a name
hereditary in the Dilke family. Dilke and his wife occupied the larger
of the two houses forming the block, and Brown, who was a bachelor, the
smaller house, standing to the west.[1] The accommodation in Brown's
quarters included a front and back sitting-room on the ground floor,
with a front and back bedroom over them, and a small spare bedroom or
'crib' where a bachelor guest could be put up for the night. The
arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses,
occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. His
move to his new quarters does not seem to have been quite so immediate
as Brown represents it. Beginning a new journal-letter to his brother
and sister-in-law a week or two after Tom's death, Keats writes, 'With
Dilke and Brown I am quite thick--with Brown indeed I am going to
domesticate, that is, we shall keep house together. I shall have the
front parlour and he the back one, by which I shall be able to avoid the
noise of Bentley's Children--and be better able to go on with my
studies--which have been greatly interrupted lately, so that I have not
a shadow of an idea for books in my head, and my pen seems to have grown
gouty for verse.'
This phase of poetical stagnation, which had naturally set in as his
cares for his dying brother grew more engrossing towards the end, passed
away quickly. By about the middle of December Keats was settled at
Wentworth Place, whither his ex-landlord, Bentley the postman, we are
told, carried down his little library of some hundred and fifty books in
a clothes-basket from Well Walk. In spite of the noisy children Keats
parted not without regret from the Bentleys, and speaks feelingly of Mrs
Bentley's kindness and attention during his late trouble. As soon,
relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in some
measure softened his grief, he plunged once more into poetry, his
special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had already begun to work
before his brother died. But he never got into a quite happy or
uninterrupted flow of work on it. Once and again we find him moved to
lay it aside for a bout of brotherly gossip with George and Georgiana
in America. 'Just now I took out my poem to go on with it--but the
thought of my writing so little to you came upon me and I could not get
on--so I have begun at random and I have not a word to say--and yet my
thoughts are so full of you that I can do nothing else.' And again: 'I
have no thought pervading me so constantly and frequently as that of
you--my Poem cannot frequently drive it away--you will retard it much
more than you could by taking up my time if you were in England. I never
forget you except after seeing now and then some beautiful woman--but
that is a fever--the thought of you both is a passion with me, but for
the most part a calm one.'
This letter, covering some three weeks from mid-December to January 4,
enables us, like others to the same correspondents, to lay our finger on
almost every strand in the 'mingled yarn' of Keats's life and doings. Of
one tiresome interruption which befell him about Christmas he tells
nothing, doubtless in order to spare his brother anxiety. This was a
request for money from the insatiable Haydon. The correspondence on the
matter cannot be read without anger against the elder man and admiring
affection for the generous lad--yet not foolishly or recklessly
generous--on whom he sponged. Haydon's only excuses are a recent
eye-trouble which had hindered his work, and his inflated belief, which
had so far successfully imposed both upon himself and his friends, in
his own huge importance to art and to his country. Keats writes, showing
incidentally how last year's critical rebuffs had changed, more or less
permanently, his attitude in regard to the public and public
recognition:--
Believe me Haydon I have that sort of fire in my heart that would
sacrifice everything I have to your service--I speak without any
reserve--I know you would do so for me--I open my heart to you in a
few words. I will do this sooner than you shall be distressed: but let
me be the last stay--Ask the rich lovers of Art first--I'll tell you
why--I have a little money which may enable me to study, and to
travel for three or four years. I never expect to get anything by my
Books: and moreover I wish to avoid publishing--I admire Human Nature
but I do not like _Men_. I should like to compose things honourable to
Man--but not fingerable over by Men. So I am anxious to exist without
troubling the printer's devil or drawing upon Men's or Women's
admiration--in which great solitude I hope God will give me strength
to rejoice. Try the long purses--but do not sell your drawings or I
shall consider it a breach of friendship.
Haydon answers in a gush of grandiloquent gratitude, promising to try
every corner first, but intimating pretty clearly that he knew his
wealthier habitual helpers were for the present tired out with him. One
of his phrases is a treasure. 'Ah Keats, this is sad work for one of my
soul and Ambition. The truest thing you ever said of mortal was that I
had a touch of Alexander in me! I have, I know it, and the World shall
know it, but this is a purgative drug I must first take.' 'This' means
his own perpetual need and habit of living on other people. In the next
letter Haydon of course accepts Keats's offer, and in the Christmas
weeks, when he should have been wholly engrossed in _Hyperion_, Keats
had much and for some time fruitless ado with bankers, lawyers, and
guardian in endeavouring to fulfil his promise. To his brother he only
says he has been dining with Haydon and otherwise seeing much of him;
mentions the painter's eye-trouble; and quotes him as describing vividly
at second hand the sufferings of Captain (afterwards Sir John) Ross and
his party on their voyage in search of the North-West passage.
From Ross in Baffin's Bay the same letter rambles to Ritchie in the
deserts of Morocco, and thence to gossip about the best way of keeping
his own and George's brotherly intimacy unbroken across the ocean; about
the 'sickening stuff' printed in Hunt's new _Literary Pocket Book_ (it
was when he was seeing most of Haydon that Keats was always most
inclined to harsh criticism of Hunt); about Mrs Dilke's cats, and about
Godwin's novels and Hazlitt's opinion of them, and the rare pleasure he
has had at Haydon's in looking through a book of engravings after early
Italian frescoes in a church at Milan. 'Milan' must be a mistake, for
there are no such engravings,[2] and what Keats saw must certainly have
been the fine series by Lasinio, published in 1814, after the frescoes
of Orcagna, Benozzo Gozzoli, and the rest in the Campo Santo at Pisa. 'I
do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare. Full of
romance and the most tender feeling--magnificence of draperies beyond
everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael's. But Grotesque to a
curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole--even finer to me than
more accomplished works--as there was left so much room for
Imagination.' It is interesting to find Keats thus vividly awake, as
very few yet were either by instinct or fashion, to the charm of the
Italian primitives, and to remember how it was a copy of this same book
of prints, in the possession of young John Everett Millais thirty years
later, which first aroused the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm in him and his
associates Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt (the last-named is our
witness for the fact).
Keats tells moreover how an unknown admirer from the west country had
sent him a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a
further tribute in the shape of a £25 note; how he had been both pleased
and displeased,--'if I had refused it I should have behaved in a very
braggadocio dunderheaded manner, and yet the present galls me a little';
and again how he has received through Woodhouse a glowing letter of
sympathy and encouragement from Miss Jane Porter, the then famous
authoress of _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and _The Scottish Chiefs_, who desires
his acquaintance on her own behalf and that of her sister Anna Maria,
almost equally popular at the hour by her romance of _The Hungarian
Brothers_. By all this, says Keats, he feels more obliged than
flattered--'so obliged that I will not at present give you an
extravaganza of a Lady Romancer. I will be introduced to them if it be
merely for the pleasure of writing to you about it--I shall certainly
see a new race of People.' Pity he failed to carry out his purpose:
pen-portraits satirical and other are not lacking of these admired
sisters, the tall and tragical Jane, the blonde and laughing Anna Maria,
'La Penserosa' and 'L'Allegra,' but a sketch by Keats would have been an
interesting addition to them. Still in the same letter, he complains of
the sore throat which he finds it hard to shake off, and tells how he
has given up or all but given up taking snuff (nearly everybody in that
generation snuffed), and how he has been shooting with Dilke on
Hampstead Heath and shot a tomtit,--a feat which for a moment calls up
this divine poet to our minds in the guise of one of the cockney
sportsmen of Seymour's caricatures. Never mind: he can afford it.
From an enquiry about the expected baby in America,--'will the little
bairn have made his entrance before you have this? Kiss it for me, and
when it can first know a cheese from a Caterpillar show it my picture
twice a week,'--from this he passes to the re-assuring statement that
the attack upon him in the Quarterly has in some quarters done him
actual service. He tells how constrained and out of his element he feels
in ordinary society; a common experience of genius, and part of the
price it pays for living at a different level and temperature of thought
and feeling from the herd. 'I am passing a Quiet day--which I have not
done for a long while--and if I do continue so, I feel I must again
begin with my poetry--for if I am not in action of mind or Body I am in
pain--and from that I suffer greatly by going into parties where from
the rules of society and a natural pride I am obliged to smother my
Spirit and look like an Idiot--because I feel my impulses given way to
would too much amaze them--I live under an everlasting restraint--never
relieved except when I am composing--so I will write away.' And
resuming apparently on Christmas Day:--'I think you knew before you
left England, that my next subject would be "the fall of Hyperion." I
went on a little with it last night, but it will take some time to get
into the vein again. I will not give you any extracts, because I wish
the whole to make an impression. I have however a few Poems which you
will like, and I will copy out on the next sheet.' Nearly a week later
he adds, 'I will insert any little pieces I may write--though I will not
give any extracts from my large poem which is scarce began.' The phrase
about _Hyperion_ must be taken as indicating on how great a scale he had
conceived the poem rather than how little he had yet written of it. In
point of fact all we have of this mighty fragment must have been written
either by his brother's bedside in September-October 1818 (but then
certainly only a little) or else in these Christmas weeks from
mid-December to mid-January 1818-19. The short poems he sends are the
spirited sets of heptasyllabics, _Fancy_, and _Lines on the Mermaid
Tavern_, the former one of the best things in the second and lighter
class of his work: and with them the fragment written for music, 'I had
a dove.' In relation to these he says 'It is my intention to wait a few
years before I publish any minor poems--and then I hope to have a volume
of some worth--and which those people will relish who cannot bear the
burthen of a long poem.'
Presently Charles Lamb comes for a moment upon the scene. 'I have seen
Lamb lately--Brown and I were taken by Hunt to Novello's--there we were
devastated and excruciated with bad and repeated puns--Brown don't want
to go again.' Punning, like snuffing, was the all but universal fashion
of that age, as those of us can best realize who are old enough to
remember grandfathers that belonged to it; and judging by the specimens
Brown and Keats have themselves left, puns too bad for them are scarce
imaginable. Novello is of course the distinguished organist, composer
and music-publisher, Vincent Novello, whose Sunday evening musical
parties were frequented by all the Lamb and Hunt circle, and whose
eldest daughter, Mary Victoria, was married some ten years later to
Cowden Clarke. At this time she was but a child of ten, but writing many
years afterwards she has left a vivid reminiscence of Keats at her
father's house, 'with his picturesque head, leaning against the
instruments, one foot raised on his knee and smoothed beneath his hands'
(an attitude said to have been perpetuated in a lost portrait by
Severn). Is the above a memory of the one evening only which Keats
himself mentions, or of others when his love of music may have drawn him
to the Novellos' house in spite of the puns and of company for the
moment not much to his taste? For the ways of Hunt and some of his
circle, their mutual flatteries, their habit of trivial, chirping
ecstasy over the things they liked, their superfluity of glib,
complacent comment rubbing the bloom off sacred beauties of art and
poetry and nature, were jarring on Keats's nerves just now; and though
perfectly aware of Hunt's essential virtues of kind-heartedness and good
comradeship, he writes with some irritability of impatience:--
Hunt has asked me to meet Tom Moore some day so you shall hear of him.
The night we went to Novello's there was a complete set-to of Mozart
and punning. I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow
my own inclinations I should never meet any one of that set again, not
even Hunt who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are
with him--but in reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in
matters of taste and in morals. He understands many a beautiful thing;
but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of
perception as he himself professes--he begins an explanation in such a
curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually.
Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things
hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white
Busts--and many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a
nothing. This distorts one's mind--makes one's thoughts
bizarre--perplexes one in the standard of Beauty.
A little later he improvises a sample, not more than mildly satirical,
from a comedy he professes to be planning on the ways and manners of
Hunt and his satellites.
In the same letter a new personage makes her momentous entry on the
scene. 'Mrs Brawne who took Brown's house for the summer still resides
at Hampstead--she is a very nice woman--and her daughter senior is I
think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and
strange--we have a little tiff now and then, and she behaves better, or
I must have sheered off.' This Mrs Brawne was a widow lady of West
Indian connexions and some little fortune, with a daughter, Fanny, just
grown up and two younger children. She had rented Brown's house while he
and Keats were away in Scotland, and had naturally become acquainted
with the Dilkes living next door and sharing a common garden. After
Brown's return Mrs Brawne moved with her family to a house in Downshire
Street close by. The acquaintance with the Dilkes was kept up, and it
was through them, not long after he came back from Scotland, that Keats
first met Fanny Brawne. His next words about her are these:--
Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height with a fine style
of countenance of the lengthened sort--she manages to make her hair
look well--her nostrils are fine--though a little painful--her mouth
is bad and good--her Profile is better than her full-face which indeed
is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone. Her shape is
very graceful and so are her movements--her Arms are good, her hands
bad-ish her feet tolerable--she is not seventeen--but she is
ignorant--monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions,
calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the
term _Minx_--this is I think not from any innate vice but from a
penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am however tired of such
style and shall decline any more of it.
An attraction which has begun by repulsion is ever the most dangerous of
all. The heightened emotional strain of his weeks of tendance on his
dying brother had laid Keats open to both influences at their fullest
power; he was ripe, as several passages from his letters have made us
feel, for the tremendous adventure of love; and the 'new, strange, and
threatening sorrow' from which he had with relief declared himself
escaped when the momentary lure of the East-Indian Charmian left him
fancy-free, was about to fall on him in good earnest now. Before many
weeks he was hopelessly enslaved, and passion teaching him a sensitive
secretiveness and reserve, he says to brother and sister no word more of
his enslaver except by way of the lightest passing allusion. From his
first semi-sarcastic account of her above quoted, as well as from
Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in Titian's
picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length silhouette
of her that has been preserved, it is possible to realise something of
her aspect and presence.
A brisk and blooming young beauty of a little over eighteen (Keats's
'not seventeen' is a mistake) with blonde hair and vivid palish
colouring, a somewhat sharply cut aquiline cast of features, a slight,
shapely figure rather short than tall, a liveliness of manner bordering
on the boisterous, and no doubt some taking air and effluence of youth
and vitality and sex,--such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her
character we have scant means of judging. Neither she nor her mother can
have been worldly-minded, or they would never have encouraged the
attentions of a youth like Keats, whose prospects were problematical or
null. It is clear that, though certainly high-spirited, inexperienced,
and self-confident, she was kind and in essentials constant to her
lover, and patient and unresentful under his occasional wild outbursts
of jealousy and suspicion. But it seems equally clear that she did not
half realise what manner of man he was, nor how high and privileged was
the charge committed to her. She had no objection to the prospect of a
long engagement, and despite her lover's remonstrances held herself free
in the meantime to enjoy to the full the pleasures of her age and the
admiration of other men.[3] One day early in the new year Keats took
the devoted Severn to call on his new friends. Severn was much pleased
with the mother, who seems to have been in truth a cultivated kind and
gentle person; but he did not take to the daughter or even much admire
her looks, and though perceiving her attraction for Keats did not then
or till long afterwards realise the fatal strength of its hold upon him.
'That poor idle Thing of Womankind to whom he has so unaccountably
attached himself'--so she is styled by Reynolds in a letter to Taylor a
year and a half later. Brown, who knew her much better, and whose
friendship with her sometimes showed itself in gallantries at which
Keats writhed in secret, writes of her always in terms of kindness and
respect, but never very explicitly. The very few of Keats's friends who
came to be in his confidence, including Dilke and his wife, seem to have
been agreed, although they bore her no ill will, in regarding the
attachment as a misfortune for him.
So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any
passion for a woman have been. Blow on blow had in truth begun to fall
on Keats, as though in fulfilment of the constitutional misgivings to
which he was so often secretly a prey. First the departure of his
brother George had deprived him of his closest friend, to whom alone he
had from boyhood been accustomed to confide those obsessions of his
darker hours and in confiding to find relief from them. Next the
exertions of his Scottish tour had proved too much for his strength, and
laid him open to the attacks of his hereditary enemy, consumption.
Coming back, he had found his brother Tom almost at his last gasp in the
clutch of that enemy, and in nursing him had both lived in spirit
through all his pains and breathed for many weeks a close atmosphere of
infection. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little as they
might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and
carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his
practical hopes from literature. Now were to be added the pangs of
love,--love requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of
fruition: and even love disdained might have made him suffer less. The
passion took him, as it often takes consumptives, in its fiercest form:
Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there
is no withstanding, never harried a more helpless victim.[4]
By what stages the coils closed on him we can only guess. His own
account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he had written himself
her vassal within a week of their first meeting: which took place, we
know, some time during the period of watching by Tom's sick-bed. After
he went to live with Brown in December they must have met frequently.
Probably it was this new attraction, as well as his chronic throat
trouble and his concern over Haydon's affairs, which made him postpone a
promised visit to Dilke's relations in Hampshire from Christmas until
mid-January. He then carried out his promise, going to join Brown at
Bedhampton, the home of Dilke's brother-in-law Mr John Snook. He liked
his hosts and received pleasure from his visit, but was unwell and
during a stay of a fortnight only once went outside the garden. This was
to a gathering of country clergy reinforced by two bishops, at the
consecration of a chapel built by a great Jew-convertor, a Mr Way. The
ceremony got on his nerves and caused him to write afterwards to his
brother an entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and
physiognomy. He spent also a few days with Dilke's father in Chichester,
and went out twice to dowager card parties. These social pleasures were
naught to him, and his spirits, like his health, were low. But his
genius was never more active. We have seen in the midst of what worries
and interruptions he had worked before and during Christmas at
_Hyperion_, the fragment which in our language stands next in epic
quality to _Paradise Lost_. At Bedhampton in January, on some thin
sheets of thin paper brought down for the purpose, he wrote the _Eve of
St Agnes_, for its author merely 'a little poem,' for us a masterpiece
aglow in every line with the vital quintessence of romance.
No word of Keats's own or of his friends prepares us for this new
achievement or informs when he began first to think of the subject. It
must of course have been ripening in his mind some good while before he
thus suddenly and swiftly cast it into shape. When he wrote three months
earlier of having to seek relief beside the sick-bed of his brother by
'plunging into abstract images,' were they images of primeval Greek gods
and Titans only, or were these contrasted figures and colours of
mediæval romance beginning to occupy his imagination at the same time?
Had the subject perhaps come into his mind as long ago as the preceding
March, when Hunt and Reynolds and he were having the talks about
Boccaccio which resulted in Keats's _Isabella_ and Reynolds's _Garden of
Florence_ and _Ladye of Provence_? We shall see that Boccaccio counts
for something in Keats's treatment of the St Agnes' Eve story, so that
the supposition is at least plausible. Or may it even have been of this
story and not, as is commonly assumed, of _Hyperion_ that he was
thinking as far back as September 1817 when he wrote to Haydon from
Oxford of the 'new romance' he had in his mind? Woodhouse does not throw
much light on such questions when he tells us that 'the subject was
suggested by Mrs Jones.' This name, uncongenial to the muse (excepting
the muse of Wordsworth) is otherwise unknown in connexion with Keats.
Did the same lady also tell him of the tradition concerning St Mark's
day (April 25th), and so become the 'only begetter' of that remarkable
fragment _The Eve of St Mark_, which he wrote (Woodhouse again is the
authority for the dates) between the 13th and 17th of February after his
return to Hampstead? In connexion with Keats few stones have been left
unturned for further personal or critical research, but here is one.
Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of January and it must have been
very soon afterwards that he became the declared and accepted lover of
Fanny Brawne, savouring intensely thenceforward all the tantalising
sweets and bitters of that estate, though nothing was said to friends
about the engagement. From the first he suffered severely from the sense
of her freedom to enjoy pleasures and excitements for which neither his
health nor his social habits and inclinations fitted him. The tale of
the _Eve of St Mark_, begun and broken off just at this time, may
possibly, as Rossetti thought, have been designed to turn on the remorse
of a young girl for sufferings of a like kind inflicted on her lover and
ending in his death. However that may be, we have two direct cries from
his heart, one of pure love-yearning, the other of racking jealousy,
which were written, if I read the evidences aright, almost immediately
after the engagement and can be dated almost to a day. These are the
first version, which has only lately become known, of the 'Bright Star'
sonnet, and the ode _To Fanny_ published posthumously by Lord Houghton.
Both carry internal evidence of having been written before the winter
was out: the sonnet in the words which invoke the star as watching the
moving waters,
Or gazing at the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
the ode in the lines,
I come, I see thee as thou standest there,
Beckon me not into the wintry air.[5]
Now it happens that this year there was frost and rough weather late in
February, with snowfalls on the afternoon of the 24th and again the
following morning. I imagine both sonnet and ode to have been written
while the cold spell lasted, the sonnet probably before dawn on the
actual morning of the 25th.[6] As slightly changed in form a year and a
half later this sonnet has been long endeared to us all as one of the
most beautiful in the language: I shall defer its discussion till we
come to the date of this recast. The ode has flaws, for to make good or
even bearable poetry out of that humiliating and grotesque passion of
physical jealousy is a hard matter. It begins poorly, with a sense of
discord, in the first stanza, between the choking violence of feeling
expressed and the artificial form into which its expression is cast. But
if we leave out this stanza, and also the fifth and sixth, which are a
little common and unequal, we get an appeal as painful, indeed, as it is
passionate, yet lacking neither in courtesy nor dignity, and conveyed in
a strain of verse almost without fault:--
Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears,
And hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,--
To-night, if I may guess, thy beauty wears
A smile of such delight,
As brilliant and as bright,
As when with ravished, aching, vassal eyes,
Lost in soft amaze,
I gaze, I gaze!
Who now, with greedy looks, eats up my feast?
What stare outfaces now my silver moon?
Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least;
Let, let the amorous burn--
But, pr'ythee, do not turn
The current of your heart from me so soon.
O! save, in charity,
The quickest pulse for me.
Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe
Voluptuous visions into the warm air;
Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath,
Be like an April day,
Smiling and cold and gay,
A temperate lily, temperate as fair;
Then, Heaven! there will be
A warmer June for me.
Ah! if you prize my subdu'd soul above
The poor, the fading, brief pride of an hour;
Let none profane my Holy See of Love,
Or with a rude hand break
The sacramental cake:
Let none else touch the just new-budded flower:
If not--may my eyes close,
Love! on their last repose.
In both of these poems Keats soothes himself with thoughts of dying, and
they are doubtless among the things he had in mind when two or three
months later, in the ode _To a Nightingale_, he speaks of having invoked
Death by soft names 'in many a musèd rhyme.'
Fearing the intrusion of what in another sonnet of the time he calls
'The dragon-world and all its hundred eyes,' he was intensely jealous in
guarding his secret from friends and acquaintances; and in writing even
to those dearest to him he lets slip no word that might betray it. To
his brother he merely says, 'Miss Brawne and I have now and then a chat
and a tiff,' while to his young sister he writes on February 27th that
he wishes he could come to her at Walthamstow for a month or so,
packing off Mrs Abbey to town, and get her to teach him 'a few common
dancing steps,'--for what reason, to us too pathetically evident, he of
course gives no hint.
On February 14th, about a fortnight after his return from Hampshire, and
on the very day when according to Woodhouse he began _The Eve of St
Mark_, Keats had put pen to a new journal-letter for America. A straw
showing how the wind was blowing with him is his mention that the
Reynolds sisters, whose company used to be among his chief pleasures,
are staying at the Dilkes next door and that he finds them 'very dull.'
So, we may guess, will they on their parts have found him. His only
other correspondents in these weeks are Haydon and his young sister
Fanny. Early in March Haydon returned to the charge about the loan. 'My
dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised assistance.... Before
the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and manna and all the
blessings of gratified thirst.' Keats had intended for Haydon's relief
some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share in their
grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over to him
at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were raised,
and for some time after the new year he had the annoyance of finding
himself unable to do as he had hoped. When by-and-by Haydon writes, in
the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with his promise and his
failure to keep it, Keats replies without loss of temper, explaining
that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his hand,
but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting possession of
his money. Moreover he finds that much less remains of his small
inheritance than he had supposed, and even if all he had were laid on
the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live on
for two years. Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent sums to
various friends amounting in all to near £200, of which he expects the
repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats
contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds which he could very ill
spare.
To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are charming.
He lets her perceive nothing of his anxieties, and is full of brotherly
tenderness and careful advice; of interest in her preparation for her
approaching confirmation; of regrets that she is kept so much from him
by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey, with humorous admonitions to
patience under that lady's 'unfeeling and ignorant gabble'; and of plans
for coming over to see her when the weather and his throat allow or when
he is in cash to pay the coach fare. On one day he is serious, begging
her to lean on him in all things:--'We have been very little together:
but you have not the less been with me in thought. You have no one else
in the world besides me who would sacrifice anything for you--I feel
myself the only Protector you have. In all your little troubles think of
me with the thought that there is at least one person in England who if
he could would help you out of them--I live in hopes of being able to
make you happy.' Another day he is all playfulness, thinking of various
little presents to please her, a selection of Tassie's gems, flowers
from the Tottenham nursery garden, drawing materials--and here follows
the passage above quoted (p. 10) against keeping live birds or fishes:--
They are better in the trees and the water,--though I must confess
even now a partiality for a handsome globe of gold-fish--then I would
have it hold ten pails of water and be fed continually fresh through a
cool pipe with another pipe to let through the floor--well ventilated
they would preserve all their beautiful silver and crimson. Then I
would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round
with Myrtles and Japonicas. I should like the window to open on to the
Lake of Geneva--and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of
somebody reading.
[Illustration: PL. VIII
_From a posthumous portrait by Joseph Severn
in the National Portrait Gallery
Emery Walker ph &c._]
For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a
constant anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the
distant Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last
advices been bound. Pending such news, he keeps writing up his
journal for them, and for nearly four months it grew and grew. Still in
February, he promises to send in the next packet his '_Pot of Basil_,
_St Agnes' Eve_, and if I should have finished it, a little thing called
the _Eve of St Mark_. You see what fine Mother Radcliffe names I
have--it is not my fault--I do not search for them. I have not gone on
with _Hyperion_, for to tell the truth I have not been in great cue for
writing lately--I must wait for the spring to rouse me up a little!'
As it fell out, he never went on either with _Hyperion_ or with the _Eve
of St Mark_, the romance just so promisingly begun. For fully two months
after breaking off the latter fragment (February 17th or 18th) he was
quite out of cue for writing, and produced nothing except the ode _To
Fanny_ (if I am right as to its date) and a few personal sonnets. Many
causes, we can feel, were working together to check for the time being
the creative impulse within him: the mere disturbing influence of the
spring season for one thing; discouragement at the public reception of
his work for another, though this was a motive external and relatively
secondary; the results of a deliberate mental stock-taking of his own
powers and performances for a third; and more deep-seated and
compulsive, though unexpressed, than any of these, the love-passion by
which three-fourths of his soul and consciousness had come to be
absorbed. Here, from a letter to Haydon of March 8, is an example of
what I mean by his mental stock-taking. The resolution it expresses is
of course more a matter of mood than of fixed purpose:--
I have come to this resolution--never to write for the sake of writing
or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge or
experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me;
otherwise I will be dumb. What imagination I have I shall enjoy, and
greatly, for I have experienced the satisfaction of having great
conceptions without the trouble of sonnetteering. I will not spoil my
love of gloom by writing an Ode to Darkness.
With respect to my livelihood, I will not write for it,--for I will
not run with that most vulgar of all crowds, the literary. Such things
I ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental
weights, as it were. I am three and twenty, with little knowledge and
middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have
been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing.
Some five weeks later, about mid-April, we find that Haydon himself has
been a contributing cause to Keats's poetic inactivity by his behaviour
in regard to the loan which Keats had hoped but so far been unable to
make him. The failure he writes, has not been his fault:--
I am doubly hurt at the slightly reproachful tone of your note and at
the occasion of it,--for it must be some other disappointment; you
seem'd so sure of some important help when last I saw you--now you
have maimed me again; I was whole, I had begun reading again--when
your note came I was engaged in a Book. I dread as much as a Plague
the idle fever of two months more without any fruit. I will walk over
the first fine day: then see what aspect your affairs have taken, and
if they should continue gloomy walk into the City to Abbey and get his
consent for I am persuaded that to me alone he will not concede a jot.
In the journal-letter of these weeks to his brother and sister-in-law,
mentioning how he had been asked to join Woodhouse over a bottle of
claret at his coffee-house, he breaks into a rhapsody over the virtues
and wholesomeness of that beverage and adds 'this same claret is the
only palate-passion I have--I forgot game--I must plead guilty to the
breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the back-bone of a grouse,
the wing and side of a Pheasant, and a Woodcock _passim_.' Turning to
his own affairs, he says,--
I am in no despair about them--my poem has not at all succeeded; in
the course of a year or so I think I shall try the public again--in a
selfish point of view I should suffer my pride and my contempt of
public opinion to hold me silent--but for yours and Fanny's sake I
will pluck up a spirit and try again. I have no doubt of success in a
course of years if I persevere--but it must be patience--for the
Reviews have enervated and made indolent men's minds--few think for
themselves. These Reviews are getting more and more powerful,
especially the Quarterly--they are like a superstition which the more
it prostrates the Crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful
it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness. I was in
hopes that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and
iniquity of these Plagues they would scout them, but no, they are like
the spectators at the Westminster cock-pit--they like the battle--and
do not care who wins or who loses.
Among other matters he has a long story to tell about his friend
Bailey's fickleness in love. It appears that Bailey, after a first
unfortunate love-affair, had during the past year been paying his
addresses to Mariane Reynolds, begging that she would take time to
consider her answer, and that while her decision was still uncertain
Bailey, to the great indignation of all the Reynolds family and a little
to Keats's own, had engaged himself in Scotland to the sister of his
friend Gleig, afterwards well known as author of _The Subaltern_ and
Chaplain General to the Forces. Next Keats begins quoting with a natural
zest of admiration, almost in full, that incomparable piece of studied
and sustained invective, Hazlitt's _Letter to William Gifford Esqr._,
beside which Gifford's own controversial virulences seem relatively
blunt and boorish. Half way through Keats has to say he will copy the
rest tomorrow,--
for the candles are burnt down and I am using the wax taper--which has
a long snuff on it--the fire is at its last click--I am sitting with
my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other
with the heel a little elevated from the carpet--I am writing this on
the Maid's tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure.
Beside this volume of Beaumont and Fletcher--there are on the table
two volumes of Chaucer and a new work of Tom Moore's called _Tom
Cribb's Memorial to Congress_,--nothing in it. These are trifles but I
require nothing so much of you but that you will give me a like
description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to
me. Could I see that same thing done of any great Man long since dead
it would be a great delight: As to know in what position Shakespeare
sat when he began 'To be or not to be'--such things become interesting
from distance of time or place. I hope you are both now in that sweet
sleep which no two beings deserve more than you do--I must fancy you
so--and please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing
over you and your lives--God bless you--I whisper good night in your
ears and you will dream of me.
This is on the 13th of March. Six days later he gives another picture,
this time of his state of body rather than of mind:--
This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely
careless--I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's _Castle of
Indolence_--my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till
nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a
delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness.
If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it
languor, but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of
effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest
of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of
enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition,
nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they
seem rather like figures on a Greek vase--a Man and two women whom no
one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the
only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body
over-powering the Mind.
[Illustration: PL. IX
'Figures on a Greek vase: a man and two women'
FROM AN ETCHING IN PIRANESI'S VASI E CANDELABRI]
The criticism is foolish which sees in this passage the expression of a
languid, self-indulgent nature, and especially foolish considering the
footnote in which Keats observes that at the moment he has a black eye.
The black eye was no doubt the mark of the fight in which he had lately
well thrashed a young blackguard of a butcher whom he found tormenting a
kitten. That the said fight took place just about this time is clear by
the following evidences. Cowden Clarke, in his recollections
communicated privately to Lord Houghton, writes, 'The last time I saw
Keats was during his residence with Mr Brown. I spent the day with him;
and he read to me the poem he had last finished--_The Eve of St Agnes_.
Shortly after this I removed many miles from London, and was spared the
sorrow of beholding the progress of the disease that was to take him
from us. When I last saw him he was in fine health and spirits; and he
told me that he had, not long before our meeting, had an encounter with
a fellow who was tormenting a kitten, or puppy, and who was big enough
to have eaten him; that they fought for nearly an hour; and that his
opponent was led home.'[7] The reading of the _Eve of St Agnes_ fixes
the date of Clarke's visit as after Keats's return from Chichester at
the end of January, and a remark of Keats, writing to his brother
between February the 14th and 19th, that he has not seen Clarke 'for God
knows how long', further fixes it as after mid-February; while the
latest limit is set by the fact that by Easter Clarke had gone away to
live with his family at Ramsgate, where they had settled after his
father had given up the Enfield school. What the 'effeminacy' passage
really expresses is of course no more than a passing mood of lassitude,
gratefully welcomed as a relief from the strain of feelings habitually
more acute than nature could well bear. Ambition he was schooling, or
trying to school, himself to cherish in moderation, but it was not often
or for long that the stings either of poetry or of love abated for him
the least jot of their bitter-sweet intensity, or that anticipations of
poverty or the fever of incipient disease relaxed their grip.
Though Keats's letters to his brother and sister-in-law contain no
confidence on the subject, some of the verses he encloses betray in
abstract form the strain of passion under which he was living; notably
the fine weird sonnet on a dream which came to him after reading the
Paolo and Francesca passage in Dante, and the other sonnet beginning
'Why did I laugh to-night?' In copying this last, he adds careful and
considerate words of re-assurance lest his brother should take alarm
for his sake:
I am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for
the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that
reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet--but
Look over the two last pages and ask yourselves whether I have not
that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the
best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with
no Agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but
Knowledge when pushed to the point though the first steps to it were
through my human passions--and perhaps I must confess a little bit of
my heart--
Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell:
No God, no Demon of severe response
Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.--
Then to my human heart I turn at once--
Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone;
Say wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain!
O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan
To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain!
Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease;
My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads:
Yet could I on this very midnight cease
And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds.
Verse, fame and Beauty are intense indeed
But Death intenser--Death is Life's High meed.
I went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep. Sane I went to bed and
sane I arose.
This is yet another of those invocations to friendly Death to which he
himself refers in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ written a few weeks
later, and in its phrase 'on this very midnight cease' anticipates one
of the great lines of the ode itself.
No letter of Keats--or of any one--is richer than this of February to
May 1819 in variety of mood and theme and interest. It contains two of
the freshest and most luminous of his discursive passages of meditation
on life and on the nature of the soul and the meaning of things:
passages showing a native power of thought untrained indeed, but also
unhampered, by academic knowledge and study, and hardly to be surpassed
for their union of steady human common-sense with airy ease and play of
imaginative speculation. In one, starting from reflections on the
unforeseen way in which circumstances, like clouds, gather and burst,
reflections suggested by the expected death of the father of his friend
Haslam, he calls up a series of pictures of the instinctiveness with
which men, like animals,--the hawk, the robin, the stoat, the deer,--go
about their purposes; considers the rarity of the exceptional human
beings whose disinterestedness helps on the progress of the world; and
then turns his thoughts on himself with the comment,--
Even here, though I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as
the veriest human animal you can think of, I am, however young,
writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a
great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of
any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin? May there not
be superior beings, amused with any graceful, though instinctive,
attitude my mind may fall into as I am entertained with the alertness
of the Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer?
In the other passage he disposes of all Rousseau-Godwin theories of
human perfectibility by a consideration of the physical frame and order
of the world we live in, the flaws and violences which mar and jar it,
and which its human offspring are likely to derive from and share with
it until the end; and, provisionally accepting the doctrine of
immortality, he broaches of his own a scheme of the spiritual discipline
for the sake of which, as he suggests, the life of men on this so
imperfect earth may have been designed.
In marked, not always entirely pleasant contrast with these passages of
thought and beauty Keats sends his brother such things as a summary of a
satiric fairy story of Brown's and an impromptu comic tale of his own in
verse, much in Brown's manner, about a princess, a mule, and a dwarf:
both of them apparently to his mind amusing, but to us rather silly and
the former a little coarse: also some friendly satiric verses of his own
on Brown in the Spenserian stanza. He tells how he has been turning
over the love-letters palmed off by way of hoax upon his brother Tom by
Charles Wells in the character of a pretended 'Amena', and vows fiercely
to make Wells suffer for his heartlessness; gossips further of Dilke and
his overstrained parental anxiety about his boy at school; asks a string
of playful questions about his sister-in-law and her daily doings; and
in another place gives us, in the mention of a casual walk and talk with
Coleridge, the liveliest record we have of the astonishing variety of
matters and mysteries over which that philosopher was capable, in a
short hour's conversation, of ranging without pause or taking breath:--
Last Sunday I took a walk towards Highgate and in the lane that winds
by the side of Lord Mansfield's park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator
at Guy's[8] in conversation with Coleridge--I joined them, after
enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable--I walked with him
at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In
those two Miles he broached a thousand things--let me see if I can
give you a list--Nightingales, Poetry--on Poetical
Sensation--Metaphysics--Different genera and species of
Dreams--Nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single
and double touch--a dream related--First and second consciousness--the
difference explained between will and Volition--so say metaphysicians
from a want of smoking the second consciousness--Monsters--the
Kraken--Mermaids--Southey believes in them--Southey's belief too much
diluted--a Ghost story--Good morning--I heard his voice as he came
towards me--I heard it as he moved away--I had heard it all the
interval--if it may be called so. He was civil enough to ask me to
call on him at Highgate.
It is amusing to note how the time and distance covered by his own
encyclopædic volubility shrank afterwards in Coleridge's memory. In his
_Table Talk_ taken down thirteen years later his account of the meeting
is recorded as follows (with the name of his companion left blank: I
fill it in from Keats's letter): 'A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth
met Mr Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and
spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or
so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, "Let me
carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "There
is death in that hand," I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this
was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.' The
story of Coleridge's observation after the handshake is no doubt exact:
the 'not well-dressed' in his description of Keats may very well be so
too: but the 'loose' and 'slack' applied to his appearance must have
been drawn from the sage's inward eye, as all accounts are agreed as to
Keats's well-knit compactness of person. One cannot but regret that
Keats failed to follow up the introduction by going, as invited, to see
Coleridge at Highgate: but in all cases save those of Hunt and Haydon,
his contact with distinguished seniors seems thus to have stopped short
at kindly and respectful acquaintance and not to have been pushed to
intimacy.
Another, somewhat divergent, account of the meeting taken down, also
from Coleridge's lips, by Mr John Frere three years earlier has only
lately been published. Its inaccuracy in details is evident, but there
is much sense as well as kindness in Coleridge's remarks on the reviews
and their effect:--
_C._ Poor Keats, I saw him once. Mr Green, whom you have heard me
mention, and I were walking out in these parts, and we were overtaken
by a young man of a very striking countenance whom Mr Green recognised
and shook hands with, mentioning my name; I wish Mr Green had
introduced me, for I did not know who it was. He passed on, but in a
few moments sprung back and said, 'Mr Coleridge, allow me the honour
of shaking your hand.' I was struck by the energy of his manner, and
gave him my hand. He passed on and we stood still looking after him,
when Mr Green said, 'Do you know who that is? That is Keats, the
poet.' 'Heavens!' said I, 'when I shook him by the hand there was
death!' This was about two years before he died.
_F._ But what was it?
_C._ I cannot describe it. There was a heat and a dampness in the
hand. To say that his death was caused by the Review is absurd, but at
the same time it is impossible adequately to conceive the effect
which it must have had on his mind. It is very well for those who have
a place in the world and are independent to talk of these things, they
can bear such a blow, so can those who have a strong religious
principle; but all men are not born Philosophers, and all men have not
those advantages of birth and education. Poor Keats had not, and it is
impossible I say to conceive the effect which such a Review must have
had upon him, knowing as he did that he had his way to make in the
world by his own exertions, and conscious of the genius within him.[9]
In the Leigh Hunt circle it had always been the fashion to regard with
contempt, mingled with regret, Wordsworth's more childishly worded poems
and ballads of humble life such as _The Idiot Boy_ and _Alice Fell_. The
announcement of his forthcoming piece, _Peter Bell_, now drew from John
Hamilton Reynolds an anonymous skit in the shape of an adroit and rather
stinging anticipatory parody, which Taylor and Hessey published in the
course of this April despite a strong letter of protest addressed to
them by Coleridge when he heard of their intention: a protest greatly to
his credit considering his and Wordsworth's recent estrangement. Keats
copies for his brother the draft of a notice which at Reynolds's request
he has been writing of this skit for the _Examiner_, taking care to turn
it compatibly with due reverence for the sublimer works of the master
parodied. The thing is quite deftly and tactfully done, and seems to
show that Keats might have made himself, could he have bent his mind to
it, a skilled hand at newspaper criticism. 'You will call it a little
politic,' he says to his brother--'seeing I keep clear of all parties--I
say something for and against both parties--and suit it to the tone of
the _Examiner_--I mean to say I do not unsuit it--and I believe I think
what I say--I am sure I do--I and my conscience are in luck
to-day--which is an excellent thing.'
At intervals throughout these two months Keats asserts and re-asserts
the strength of the hold which idleness has laid upon him so far as
poetry is concerned. Thus on March 13 to his brother and
sister-in-law:--'I know not why poetry and I have been so distant
lately; I must make some advances or she will cut me entirely': and
again to the same on April 15, 'I am still at a standstill in
versifying, I cannot do it yet with any pleasure.' To his young sister
Fanny he had written two days earlier that his idleness had been growing
upon him of late, 'so that it will require a great shake to get rid of
it. I have written nothing and almost read nothing--but I must turn over
a new leaf.' Within the next two weeks the dormant impulse began to
re-awake in him with power. As we have seen, he had never quite stopped
writing personal sonnets. Towards the end of the month we find him
trying, not very successfully, to invent a new sonnet form, but soon
reverting to his accustomed Shakespearean type of three quatrains closed
by a couplet. Here is the better of two sonnets which he wrote on April
30 to express the present abatement of his former hot desire for fame:--
Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn,
Ye Artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.
The thought here is curiously anticipated in a passage of Browne's
_Britannia's Pastorals_, itself reminiscent of a well known line in
Theocritus. Is the coincidence a coincidence merely, or had the lines
from Browne been working unconsciously in Keats's mind?
True Fame is ever liken'd to our shade,
He sooneth misseth her, that most hath made
To overtake her; who so takes his wing,
Regardless of her, she'll be following:
Her true proprieties she thus discovers,
'Loves her contemners and contemns her Lovers.'[10]
Two days earlier Keats had copied out in his letter for America, side by
side with the words for a commonplace operatic chorus of the _Fairies of
the Four Elements_, and as though it were of no greater value, that
masterpiece of romantic and tragic symbolism on the wasting power of
Love, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. This title had already been haunting
Keats's imagination when he wrote the _Eve of St Agnes_. He calls by it
the air to which Porphyro touches his lute beside the sleeping Madeline.
It is the title of a cold allegoric dialogue of the old French court
poet Alan Chartier, which Keats knew in the translation traditionally
ascribed to Chaucer. But except the title, Keats's new poem has nothing
in common with the French or the Chaucerian _Belle Dame_. The form, the
poetic mould, he chooses is that of a ballad of the 'Thomas the Rhymer'
class, in which a mortal passes for a time into the abode and under the
power of a being from the elfin world. Into this mould Keats casts--with
suchlike imagery he invests--all the famine and fever of his private
passion, fusing and alchemising by his art a remembered echo from
William Browne, 'Let no bird sing,' and another from Wordsworth, 'Her
eyes are wild,' into twelve stanzas of a new ballad music vitally his
own and as weirdly ominous and haunting as the music of words can be.
The metrical secret lies in shortening the last line of each stanza from
four feet[11] to two, the two to take in reading the full time of four,
whereby the movement is made one of awed and bodeful slowness--but let
us shrink from the risk of laying an analytic finger upon the methods of
a magic that calls to be felt, not dissected. Known as it is by heart
to all lovers of poetry, I will print the piece again here, partly for
the reason that in some of the most accessible and authoritative recent
editions it is unfortunately given with changes which rob it of half its
magic:--
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing!
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too--
I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild--
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan--
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery's song--
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true--
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gazed and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed, ah woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall.'
I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Keats of course gives his brother no hint of what to us seems so
manifest, the application of these verses to his own predicament, and
only adds a light and laughing comment on one of the rime-words. Closing
his packet a few days later (May 3) he adds, as the last poem he has
written, the _Ode to Psyche_. He wrote, as is well known, four other
odes this spring, those _On Indolence_, _On a Grecian Urn_, _To a
Nightingale_ and _To Melancholy_. The _Ode to Psyche_ has commonly been
taken to be the latest of the five. I take it, on the contrary, to have
been the first. Had he been ready with any of the others when he
finished his letter, I think he would almost certainly have copied and
sent on one or more of them also. Coupled with his re-iterated assertion
of complete poetic idleness,--'the idle fever of two months without any
fruit,'--lasting from mid-February until well past mid-April, the
absence of all the four other odes from this packet must count as
evidence that the _Ode to Psyche_ represents the first wave of a new
tide of inspiration--inspiration this time not narrative and creative
but lyric and meditative--and that the rest of the odes followed and
were composed in the course of May. Personally I am convinced that this
was the case. I make no exception in regard to the ode _On Indolence_,
although, seeing that it embodies just such a relaxed mood of mind and
body as we have found recorded by Keats in his letter to his brother
under date March 19, and embodies it with the self-same imagery, it is
usually assumed to have been written at or very nearly about the same
date. But Keats in the ode itself expressly tells us otherwise, calling
his mood at the hour of writing one of 'summer indolence' and defining
the season as May-time, when the outdoor vines are newly bursting into
leaf. Of course, it may be answered, a poet writing in March may
perfectly well choose to advance the season to May by a poetic fiction.
But would Keats in this case have felt any need or impulse to do so? I
doubt it. Moreover a reference to the poem by Keats in a letter of early
June shows that phrases of it were still hanging freshly in his memory
and seems to imply that it was a thing then lately written. What
happened, I take it, was either that Keats let the March vision, with
its imagery of symbolic figures following one another as on a Greek
sculptured urn, ripen in his mind until he was ready to compose upon it,
and then attributed the vision itself to the season when he was actually
putting it into verse; or else that, having fallen some time in May into
a second mood of drowsiness and relaxation nearly repeating that of
March, the same imagery for its expression arose naturally again in his
mind.
The ode _On a Grecian Urn_ is obviously of kindred, and probably of
contemporary, inspiration with that _On Indolence_, and if the one
belongs to May so doubtless does the other. That this is true of the
Nightingale ode we know. Some time early in May, nightingales heard both
in the Wentworth Place garden and in the grove beside the Spaniards inn
at the upper end of the heath set Keats brooding on the contrast between
the age-long permanence of that bird-song, older than history, and the
fleeting lives of the generations of men that have listened to it; and
one morning he took his chair out under a plum-tree in the garden and
wrote down the immortal verses, in and out and back and forth on a
couple of loose sheets which Brown, two hours after seeing him go out,
found him folding away carelessly behind some books in his room. This
discovery, says Brown, made him search for more such neglected scraps;
and Keats acquiesced in the search, and moreover gave Brown leave to
make copies of anything he might find.[12] Haydon tells how Keats
recited the new ode to him, 'in his low, tremulous under-tone,' as they
walked together in the Hampstead meadows; and it was no doubt on
Haydon's suggestion that Keats let James Elmes, a subservient ally of
Haydon's in all his battles with the academic powers, have it for
publication in his periodical, the _Annals of the Fine Arts_, during the
following July. For the date of the _Ode on Melancholy_ the clues are
less definite. Burton's _Anatomy_ has clearly to do with inspiring it,
but of this, and especially of the sections on the cure of
Love-Melancholy, Keats's letters and some of his verses furnish evidence
that he had been much of a reader all the spring. Particular phrases,
however, in letters of May and early June expressing a very similar
strain of feeling to that of the ode, besides its general resemblance to
the rest of the group both as to form and mood, may be taken as
approximately dating it.
Following these so fruitful labours (if I am right as to the dates) of
May, came a month of strained indecision and anxiety during which Keats
again could do no work. Questions of his own fortune and future were
weighing heavily on his mind. For the time being he could not touch such
small remainder of his grandmother's legacy as was still unexpended. A
lawsuit threatened by the widow of his uncle Captain Jennings against
his guardian Mr Abbey, in connexion with the administration of the
trust, had had the effect for the time being of stopping his supplies
from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very gently asked Haydon to
make an effort to repay his recent loan; who not only made none--'he did
not,' says Keats, 'seem to care much about it, but let me go without my
money almost with nonchalance.' This was too much even for Keats's
patience, and he declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend
again. Nevertheless he by and by let old affection resume its sway, and
entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as
kindly as ever. Apart from Mrs Jennings's bequest, there was a not
inconsiderable sum which, as we know, had been left invested by Mr
Jennings for the direct benefit of his Keats grandchildren; but this sum
could not be divided until Fanny Keats came of age, and there seems to
have been no thought of John's anticipating his reversionary share.
Indeed it is doubtful if the very existence of these and other funds
lying by for them had not at this time been forgotten.[13]
In this predicament Keats began very seriously to entertain the idea,
which we have seen broached by him several times already, of seeking the
post of surgeon on an East Indiaman as at least a temporary means of
livelihood. He mentions the idea not only to George and to his young
sister, but he debates it with a new correspondent, one of the Miss
Jeffrey's of Teignmouth, whom he suddenly now addresses in terms of
confidence which show how warm must have been their temporary friendship
the year before:--
Your advice about the Indiaman is a very wise advice, because it just
suits me, though you are a little in the wrong concerning its
destroying the energies of Mind: on the contrary it would be the
finest thing in the world to strengthen them--to be thrown among
people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies forces
the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its
speculations of the differences of human character and to class them
with the calmness of a Botanist. An Indiaman is a little world. One of
the great reasons that the English have produced the finest writers in
the world is, that the English world has ill-treated them during their
lives and foster'd them after their deaths. They have in general been
trampled aside into the bye paths of life and seen the festerings of
Society. They have not been treated like the Raphaels of Italy. And
where is the Englishman and Poet who has given a magnificent
Entertainment at the christening of one of his Hero's Horses as
Boyardo did? He had a Castle in the Appenine. He was a noble Poet of
Romance; not a miserable and mighty Poet of the human heart. The
middle age of Shakespeare was all clouded over; his days were not more
happy than Hamlet's who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in
his common every day Life than any other of his Characters--Ben
Johnson was a common Soldier and in the Low Countries in the face of
two armies, fought a single combat with a French Trooper and slew
him--For all this I will not go on board an Indiaman, nor for
example's sake run my head into dark alleys: I daresay my discipline
is to come, and plenty of it too. I have been very idle lately, very
averse to writing; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets
and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a
Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying
Pet-lamb. I have put no more in Print or you should have had it. You
will judge of my 1819 temper when I tell you that the thing I have
most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence.
The reader will have noticed in the phrase about 'versifying Pet-lamb' a
repetition from this very ode _On Indolence_. Here is another confidence
imparted to the same correspondent concerning his present mood and
disposition:--
I have been always till now almost as careless of the world as a
fly--my troubles were all of the Imagination--My brother George always
stood between me and any dealings with the world. Now I find I must
buffet it--I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to
fight--I must choose between despair and Energy--I choose the latter
though the world has taken on a quakerish look with me, which I once
thought was impossible--
'Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass and glory in the flower.'
I once thought this a Melancholist's dream.
His immediate object in writing had been to ask, in case he should
decide against the Indiaman project and in favour of another attempt at
the literary life, for the address of a cheap lodging somewhere in the
Teign valley, the beauties of which, seen in glimpses through the rain,
he had sung in some doggrel stanzas the year before. Brown, more than
ever impressed during these last months with the power and promise of
his friend's genius, was dead against the Indiaman scheme and in the end
persuaded Keats to accept an advance of money for his present needs and
to devote the summer to work in the country. Part of such work was to be
upon a tragedy to be written by the two in collaboration and on a basis
of half profits. Brown had not less belief in Keats's future than
affection for his person, and it was the two combined that made him
ready and eager, as he frankly told Keats, to sail in the same boat with
him. In the end the Devonshire idea gave place to a new plan, that of
joining the invalid James Rice for a stay at Shanklin. 'I have given up
the idea of the Indiaman', Keats writes to his young sister on June 9;
'I cannot resolve to give up my favourite studies: so I propose to
retire once more. A friend of Mine who has an ill state of health called
on me yesterday and proposed to spend a little time with him at the back
of the Isle of Wight where he said we might live cheaply. I agreed to
his proposal.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Later occupants re-named the place Lawn Bank and threw the two
semi-detached houses into one, making alterations and additions the
exact nature of which were pointed out to me in 1885 by Mr William
Dilke, the then surviving brother of Keats's friend. This gentleman
also showed me a house across the road which he himself had built in
early life, occupied for a while, and then let on a sixty years'
lease: 'which lease,' he added, as though to outlive a sixty years'
agreement contracted at thirty were the most ordinary occurrence in
the world, 'fell in a year or two ago.' He died shortly afterwards,
aged 93. He and Mrs Procter, the widow of Barry Cornwall the
poet--staunchest, wittiest, and youngest-hearted defier of Time that
she was--were the only two persons I have known and spoken to who had
known and spoken to Keats.
[2] The only set of engravings existing in Keats's time after
pictures at Milan was the Raccolta, etc., of G. Zanconi (1813), which
gives only panels and canvases by masters of the full Renaissance in
private collections.
[3] The fullest and, it must be said, least favourable account we
have of her is in the retrospect of a cousin who had frequented her
mother's house as a young boy about 1819-20, and seventy years later
gave his impressions as follows (_New York Herald_, April 12, 1889).
'Miss Fanny Brawne was very fond of admiration. I do not think she
cared for Keats, although she was engaged to him. She was very much
affected when he died, because she had treated him so badly. She was
very fond of dancing, and of going to the opera and to balls and
parties. Miss Brawne's mother had an extensive acquaintance with
gentlemen, and the society in which they mingled was musical and
literary. Through the Dilkes, Miss Brawne was invited out a great
deal, and as Keats was not in robust health enough to take her out
himself (for he never went with her), she used to go with military
men to the Woolwich balls and to balls in Hampstead; and she used to
dance with these military officers a great deal more than Keats
liked. She did not seem to care much for him. Mr Dilke, the
grandfather of the present Sir Charles Dilke, admired her very much
in society, and although she was not a great beauty she was very
lively and agreeable. I remember that among those frequenting Mrs
Brawne's house in Hampstead were a number of foreign gentlemen. Keats
could not talk French as they could, and their conversation with his
fiancée in a language he could not understand was a source of
continual disagreement between them. Keats thought that she talked
and flirted and danced too much with them, but his remonstrances were
all unheeded by Miss Brawne.' Against these impressions should be set
Brown's testimony, contained in letters of the time to Severn and
others, to her signs of acute distress on the news coming from Italy
of the hopelessness of her lover's condition and finally of his
death: and stronger still, her own words written in later years to
Medwin, which seem to show a true, and even tender, understanding of
his character if not of his genius (see below p. 465).
[4]
[Greek: eros d' aute m' ho lysimelês donei
glykypikron amachanon orpeton.]--Sappho, Fr. 40.
[5] There is no autograph of this ode, only transcripts by friends,
and Mr Buxton Forman was most likely right in suggesting that the
true reading for 'not' should be 'out.'
[6] Keats was staying that night and two more at Mr Taylor's in
London: but there is nothing against my theory in this: he might have
composed the sonnet as well in Fleet Street as at Hampstead.
[7] In his printed account of the matter Clarke calls the victim
definitely a kitten, and says of Keats: 'He thought he should be
beaten, for the fellow was the taller and stronger; but like an
authentic pugilist, my young poet found that he had planted a blow
which "told" upon his antagonist; in every succeeding round therefore
(for they fought nearly an hour), he never failed of returning to the
weak point, and the contest ended in the hulk being led home.'
[8] Joseph Henry Green, afterwards F.R.S. and Professor of Anatomy to
the Royal Academy; distinguished alike as a teacher in his own
profession and as a disciple and interpreter of Coleridge's
philosophy.
[9] _Cornhill Magazine_, April 1917: 'A Talk with Coleridge,' edited
by Miss E. M. Green.
[10] [Greek: kai pheùgei philéonta kai où philéonta diôkei.] Theocr.
Idyll. vi. 27.
[11] I use the foot nomenclature for convenience, because to count by
stresses seems to make the point less immediately clear, while to
count by syllables would involve pointing out that in the last lines
of stanzas ii, iv, ix and xi the movement is varied by resolving the
light first syllable into two that take the time of one.
[12] Brown, writing many years after the events, must be a little out
here, seeing that already on April 30th Keats tells his brother that
Brown is busy 'rummaging out his Keats's old sins, that is to say
sonnets.' (Note that Keats mentions no odes). Brown is in like manner
wrong in remembering the draft of the Nightingale ode as written on
'four or five scraps' when it was in fact written on two, as became
apparent when it appeared in the market thirteen years ago (see
_Monthly Review_, March 1903). It is now in the collection of Lord
Crewe.
[13] When in 1823-4 their existence was disclosed and they were
divided on the order of the Court of Chancery between George Keats
and his sister, they amounted with accumulations of interest to a
little over £4500.
CHAPTER XII
JUNE 1819-JANUARY 1820: SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, HAMPSTEAD: TROUBLE AND
HEALTH FAILURE
Work on _Otho_ and _Lamia_--Letters to Fanny Brawne--Keats as
lover--An imagined future--Change to Winchester--Work and fine
weather--Ill news from George--A run to town--A talk with
Woodhouse--Woodhouse as critic--Alone at Winchester--Spirited letters:
to his brother--To Reynolds, Brown, and Dilke--Hopes and
resolutions--Will work for the press--Attempt and breakdown--Return to
Wentworth Place--Morning and evening tasks--Cries of passion--Signs of
despondency--Testimony of Brown--Haydon's exaggerations--Schemes and
doings--Visit of George Keats--Pleasantry and bitterness--Beginning of
the end.
By the last days of June Keats was settled with Rice in the village of
Shanklin, in a lodging above the cliff and a little way back from the
sea,[1] and forthwith got to work upon a new poetical romance, _Lamia_,
at which he seems to have made some beginning before he left Hampstead.
He found the subject, that of the enchantress of Corinth who under her
woman's guise was really a serpent, in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_,
a book in these days often in his hands, and for the form of his
narrative chose rimed heroics, only this time leaning on Dryden as his
model instead of the Elizabethans.
Rice's health was at this time worse than ever, and Keats himself was
far from well; his throat chronically sore, his nerves unstrung, his
heart, in despite of distance, knowing little rest from agitation
between the pains and joys of love. As long as Rice and he were alone
together at Shanklin, the two ailing and anxious men, fast friends as
they were, depressed and did each other harm. Things went better when
Brown with his settled good health and good spirits came to join them.
Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got to work
diligently at the joint task they had set themselves, that of writing a
tragedy suitable for the stage. What struggling man or woman of letters
has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated them, that
this way lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose opera
_Narensky_ had made a hit in its day, and brought him in a sum variously
stated at £300 or £500, was supposed to possess the requisite stage
experience. To him were assigned the plot and construction of the play,
for which he was to receive half profits in the event of success, while
Keats undertook to compose the dialogue. The subject was one taken from
the history of the Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat opposite
each other at the same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as Brown
sketched it out to him, in each case without enquiring what was to come
next. The collaboration of genius and mediocrity rarely succeeds, and it
seems hard to conceive a more unpromising mode of it than this. Besides
the work by means of which Keats thus hoped, at least in sanguine hours,
to find an escape from material difficulties, he was busily engaged
working by himself on _Lamia_. But a cloud of depression continued to
hang over him. The climate of Shanklin was against him: the quarter
where they lodged lay screened by hills except from the south-east,
whence, as he afterwards wrote, 'came the damps of the sea, which having
no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy
idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke.' After
a stay of some six weeks, Keats consequently made up his mind to move
with Brown to the more bracing air of Winchester.
From these weeks at Shanklin date the earliest of the preserved series
of Keats's love-letters to Fanny Brawne. More than any man, more
certainly than any other unripe youth fretting in the high fever of an
unhopeful love, Keats has had to pay the penalty of genius in the loss
of posthumous privacy for the most sacred and secret of his emotions. He
thought his name would be forgotten, but posterity in an excess of
remembrance has suffered no corner of his soul to escape the
searchlight. Once preserved and printed, these love-letters of his
cannot be ignored. Unselfish through and through, and naturally
well-conditioned in all thoughts and feelings over which he had control,
he strives hard in them to keep to a vein of considerate tenderness, and
the earlier letters of the series contain charming passages. But often,
more often indeed than not even from the first, they show him a prey,
despite his best efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an
uncontrollable intensity and fretfulness of passion. Now that experience
of love had come to him, it belied instead of confirming the view he had
expressed in _Isabella_ that too much pity has been spent on the sorrows
of lovers, and that
--for the general award of love
The little sweet doth kill much bitterness.
In his own passion there was from the first, and increasingly as time
went on, at least as much of bitterness as of sweet. An enraptured but
an untrustful lover, alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage
and passing through a hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an
hour, he finds in the fever of work and composition his only antidote
against the fever of his love-sickness. This is written soon after his
arrival at Shanklin:--
I am glad I had not an opportunity of sending off a Letter which I
wrote for you on Tuesday night--'twas too much like one out of
Rousseau's _Heloise_. I am more reasonable this morning. The morning
is the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful Girl whom I
love so much: for at night, when the lonely day has closed, and the
lonely, silent, unmusical Chamber is waiting to receive me as into a
Sepulchre, then believe me my passion gets entirely the sway, then I
would not have you see those Rhapsodies which I once thought it
impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed
at in another, for fear you should think me either too unhappy or
perhaps a little mad. I am now at a very pleasant Cottage window,
looking onto a beautiful hilly country, with a glimpse of the sea; the
morning is very fine. I do not know how elastic my spirit might be,
what pleasure I might have in living here and breathing and wandering
as free as a stag about this beautiful Coast if the remembrance of you
did not weigh so upon me. I have never known any unalloy'd Happiness
for many days together: the death or sickness of some one has always
spoilt my hours--and now when none such troubles oppress me, it is you
must confess very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me. Ask
yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so
entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom.
A fortnight later he manages to write a little more at ease of himself,
his moods, and his doings:--
Do not call it folly, when I tell you I took your letter last night to
bed with me. In the morning I found your name on the sealing wax
obliterated. I was startled at the bad omen till I recollected that it
must have happened in my dreams, and they you know fall out by
contraries. You must have found out by this time I am a little given
to bode ill like the raven; it is my misfortune not my fault; it has
proceeded from the general tenor of the circumstances of my life, and
rendered every event suspicious. However I will no more trouble either
you or myself with sad Prophecies; though so far I am pleased at it as
it has given me opportunity to love your disinterestedness towards me.
I cannot say when I shall get a volume ready. I have three or four
stories half done, but as I cannot write for the mere sake of the
press, I am obliged to let them progress or lie still as my fancy
chooses. By Christmas perhaps they may appear, but I am not yet sure
they ever will. 'Twill be no matter, for Poems are as common as
newspapers and I do not see why it is a greater crime in me than in
another to let the verses of an half-fledged brain tumble into the
reading-rooms and drawing-room windows.... To-morrow I shall, if my
health continues to improve during the night, take a look farther
about the country, and spy at the parties about here who come hunting
after the picturesque like beagles. It is astonishing how they raven
down scenery like children do sweetmeats. The wondrous Chine here is a
very great Lion: I wish I had as many guineas as there have been
spy-glasses in it.
Yet another fortnight, and we find him uttering aloud the same yearning
to attain the double goal of love and death together as he had often
uttered to himself in secret since he came under the spell. On another
day, letting his imagination comply with the longing for Alpine travel
and seclusion which since Rousseau had been one of the romantic fashions
of the time, he draws her a picture of an imagined future for herself
and him which, judging at least by her choice of pleasures until now,
would ill have stood the test of reality:--
You would delight very greatly in the walks about here; the Cliffs,
woods, hills, sands, rocks, etc., about here. They are however not so
fine but I shall give them a hearty goodbye to exchange them for my
Cathedral.--Yet again I am not so tired of Scenery as to hate
Switzerland. We might spend a pleasant year at Berne or Zurich--if it
should please Venus to hear my 'Beseech thee to hear us O Goddess.'
And if she should hear, God forbid we should what people call,
_settle_--turn into a pond, a stagnant Lethe--a vile crescent, row or
buildings. Better be imprudent moveables than prudent fixtures. Open
my Mouth at the Street door like the Lion's head at Venice to receive
hateful cards, letters, messages. Go out and wither at tea parties;
freeze at dinners; bake at dances; simmer at routs. No my love, trust
yourself to me and I will find you nobler amusements, fortune
favouring.
The most sanely self-revealing and pleasant passages in the
correspondence occur in a letter written in the second week after Keats
and Brown had settled at Winchester:--
I see you through a Mist: as I daresay you do me by this time. Believe
me in the first Letters I wrote you: I assure you I felt as I wrote--I
could not write so now. The thousand images I have had pass through my
brain--my uneasy spirits--my unguess'd fate--all spread as a veil
between me and you. Remember I have had no idle leisure to brood over
you.--'tis well perhaps I have not. I could not have endured the
throng of jealousies that used to haunt me before I had plunged so
deeply into imaginary interests. I would fain, as my sails are set,
sail on without an interruption for a Brace of Months longer--I am in
complete cue--in the fever; and shall in these four Months do an
immense deal. This Page as my eye skims over it I see is excessively
unloverlike and ungallant--I cannot help it--I am no officer in
yawning quarters; no Parson-romeo.... 'Tis harsh, harsh, I know it. My
heart seems now made of iron--I could not write a proper answer to an
invitation to Idalia.... This Winchester is a fine place: a beautiful
Cathedral and many other ancient buildings in the Environs. The little
coffin of a room at Shanklin is changed for a large room, where I can
promenade at my pleasure.... One of the pleasantest things I have seen
lately was at Cowes. The Regent in his Yatch (I think they spell it)
was anchored opposite--a beautiful vessel--and all the Yatchs and
boats on the coast were passing and repassing it; and circuiting and
tacking about it in every direction--I never beheld anything so
silent, light, and graceful.--As we pass'd over to Southampton, there
was nearly an accident. There came by a Boat, well mann'd, with two
naval officers at the stern. Our Bow-lines took the top of their
little mast and snapped it off close by the board. Had the mast been a
little stouter they would have been upset. In so trifling an event I
could not help admiring our seamen--neither officer nor man in the
whole Boat mov'd a muscle--they scarcely notic'd it even with words.
Forgive me for this flint-worded Letter, and believe and see that I
cannot think of you without some sort of energy--though mal à propos.
Even as I leave off it seems to me that a few more moments' thought of
you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. I must not give way to
it--but turn to my writing again--if I fail I shall die hard. O my
love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy--I must forget
them.
The old cathedral city of Winchester, with its peaceful closes breathing
antiquity, its hurrying limpid chalk-streams and beautiful elm-shadowed
meadow walks, and the tonic climate of its surrounding downs, 'where the
air,' he writes, 'is worth sixpence a pint,' exactly suited Keats, and
he quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days he spent here,
from the middle of August to the second week of October, were the last
good days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application,
he managed, as the last extract shows, to steel himself for the time
being against the importunity of his passion, although never without a
certain feverishness in the effort, and to keep the thought of money
troubles at bay by buoying himself up with the firm hope of a stage
success. His work continued to be chiefly on _Lamia_, with the
concluding part of _Otho_, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the
story of King Stephen. In the last act of _Otho_ and the opening scenes
(which are all he did) of _King Stephen_ he laboured alone, without
accepting help from Brown. On the 25th of August he writes to Reynolds,
as usual more gravely and openly than to any other correspondent, of his
present feelings in regard to life and literature.
The more I know what my diligence may in time probably effect, the
more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinacy[2]--I feel it in
my power to become a popular writer--I feel it in my power to refuse
the poisonous suffrage of a public. My own being which I know to be
becomes of more consequence to me than the crowds of Shadows in the
shape of men and women that inhabit a kingdom. The soul is a world of
itself, and has enough to do in its own home. Those whom I know
already, and who have grown as it were a part of myself, I could not
do without: but for the rest of mankind, they are as much a dream to
me as Milton's Hierarchies. I think if I had a free and healthy and
lasting organization of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox's, so as
to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation
without weariness, I could pass my life very nearly alone though it
should last eighty years. But I feel my body too weak to support me to
the height, I am obliged continually to check myself, and be nothing.
A letter to his young sister of three days later is in quite another
key, but one of wholesome and unforced high spirits:--
The delightful Weather we have had for two Months is the highest
gratification I could receive--no chill'd red noses--no
shivering--but fair atmosphere to think in--a clean towel mark'd with
the mangle and a basin of clear Water to drench one's face with ten
times a day: no need of much exercise--a Mile a day being quite
sufficient. My greatest regret is that I have not been well enough to
bathe though I have been two Months by the sea side and live now close
to delicious bathing--Still I enjoy the Weather--I adore fine Weather
as the greatest blessing I can have.... I should like now to promenade
round your Gardens--apple-tasting--pear-tasting--plum-judging--apricot
nibbling--peach-scrunching--nectarine-sucking and Melon-carving. I
have also a great feeling for antiquated cherries full of sugar
cracks--and a white currant tree kept for company. I admire lolling on
a lawn by a water lillied pond to eat white currants and see gold
fish: and go to the Fair in the Evening if I'm good. There is not hope
for that--one is sure to get into some mess before evening.
A week later (September 5) he discourses pleasantly to Taylor on the
virtues and drawbacks of different kinds of country air and on the
effects of field labour on the character; and by way of a specimen of
his work sends a passage of thirty lines from _Lamia_. By this time
Brown had gone off to visit friends at Bedhampton and elsewhere, and
Keats was left alone at Winchester. Presently came a disturbing letter
from George, established by this time at the then remote trading
settlement of Louisville, Ohio, and in difficulties from a heavy loss
incurred through a venture into which he had been led, dishonestly as he
believed, by the naturalist Audubon. He asks in consequence that Abbey
should be pressed to send him the share due to him from their brother
Tom's estate. This could only be done if their aunt Jennings could be
persuaded to free Abbey's hands by dropping her threatened Chancery
suit. Hurrying to London to try and put this business through, Keats
stayed there three days (Septr. 10-13), but dared not break his serenity
by sight or touch of his enchantress. In a note to her he writes, 'I
love you too much to venture to Hampstead, I feel it is not paying a
visit, but venturing into a fire.... I am a Coward, I cannot bear the
pain of being happy, 'tis out of the question; I must admit no thought
of it.' He found few of his friends in town; dined with the Wylies, the
family of his sister-in-law; and had much talk with Mr Abbey, who seemed
inclined to dangle before him some prospect of employment in the
hatter's business which he combined with his tea-dealing, and read to
him with approval a passage from _Don Juan_ ('Lord Byron's last flash
poem,' says Keats) against literary ambition. He went to see his sister
Fanny at Walthamstow, passed some time with Rice, and had a long six
hours' talk with Woodhouse: of this Keats's own letters make no mention,
but Woodhouse's account of it, written a week later to Taylor, has been
preserved and is curiously interesting.[3]
Keats, warm from the composition of _Lamia_, had had an impulse to
publish it immediately, together with the _Eve of St Agnes_, but the
publishers had thought the time inopportune. Woodhouse asked why not
_Isabella_ too? and Keats answered that he could not bear that poem now
and thought it mawkish. Whereupon Woodhouse makes the judicious comment:
'this certainly cannot be so, the feeling is very likely to come across
an author on review of a former work of his own, particularly when the
object of his present meditations is of a more sober and unimpassioned
character. The feeling of mawkishness seems to me that which comes upon
us when anything of great tenderness and simplicity is met with when we
are not in a sufficiently tender and simple frame of mind to hear it:
when we experience a sort of revulsion or resiliency (if there be such a
word) from the sentiment or expression.' Keats, full of _Lamia_, read it
out to his friend, who comments: 'I am much pleased with it. I can use
no other terms for you know how badly he reads his own poetry.' (Other
witnesses on the contrary tell of the thrilling effect of Keats's
reading--a reading which was half chanting, 'in a low, tremulous
undertone'--of his own work.) 'And you know,' continues Woodhouse, 'how
slow I am to catch the effect of poetry read by the best reader for the
first time.' Nevertheless he is able to give his correspondent a quite
accurate sketch of the plot, and adds, 'you may suppose all these events
have given K. scope for some beautiful poetry, which even in this
cursory hearing of it, came every now and then upon me and made me
"start, as tho' a sea-nymph quired."'
The talk turning to the _Eve of St Agnes_, Keats showed Woodhouse some
changes he had just made in recopying it. One of these introduced a
slight but disfiguring note of cynical realism or 'pettish disgust' into
the concluding lines telling of the deaths of old Angela and the
beadsman, and is the first sign we find of that inclination to mix a
worldly would-be Don Juanish vein with romance which was soon to appear
so disastrously in the _Cap and Bells_. The other change was to make it
clear that the melting of Porphyro into Madeline's dream, at the
enchanted climax of the poem, implied love's full fruition between them
then and there. At this point Woodhouse's prudery took alarm. He pleaded
against the change vehemently, and Keats to tease him still more
vehemently defended it, vowing that his own and his hero's character for
virility required the new reading, and that he did not write for misses.
The correct and excellent Woodhouse, scandalized though he somewhat was
by what he calls his friend's 'rhodomontade,' declares that they had a
delightful time together. He was leaving London the same afternoon for
Weymouth, and Keats came to the coach-office to see him off. At parting
they each promised to mend their ways in the matter of letter-writing,
Keats holding out the hope, which was not fulfilled, of a rimed epistle
to follow. Woodhouse tells how, being the only inside passenger in the
coach, he 'amused himself by diving into a deep reverie, and recalling
all that had passed during the six hours we were _tête à tête_.'
Such touches of over-sensitive prudery set aside, the more light we get
on this friend of Keats, Richard Woodhouse, the higher grows our esteem
both for his character and judgment. In other extant letters to Taylor
of this date, he comments with fine insight on Keats's own confessions
of secret pride and obstinacy, and on his vice ('for a vice in a poor
man it is') of lending more than he could afford to friends in need. And
what can be more sagacious than the following, from a letter of
Woodhouse to a lady cousin of his own?--
You were so flattered as to say the other day, you wished I had been
in a company where you were, to defend Keats.--In all places, and at
all times, and before all persons, I would express and as far as I am
able, support, my high opinion of his poetical merits--such a genius,
I verily believe, has not appeared since Shakspeare and Milton.... But
in our common conversation upon his merits, we should always bear in
mind that his fame may be more hurt by indiscriminate praise than by
wholesale censure. I would at once admit that he has great
faults--enough indeed to sink another writer. But they are more than
counter-balanced by his beauties: and this is the proper mode of
appreciating an original genius. His faults will wear away--his fire
will be chastened--and then eyes will do homage to his brilliancy. But
genius is wayward, trembling, easily daunted. And shall we not excuse
the errors, the luxuriancy of youth? Are we to expect that poets are
to be given to the world, as our first parents were, in a state of
maturity? Are they to have no season of childhood? are they to have no
room to try their wings before the steadiness and strength of their
flight are to be finally judged of?... Now, while Keats is unknown,
unheeded, despised of one of our arch-critics, neglected by the
rest--in the teeth of the world, and in the face of 'these curious
days,' I express my conviction, that Keats, during his life (if it
please God to spare him to the usual age of man, and the critics not
to drive him from the free air of the Poetic heaven before his Wings
are fully fledged) will rank on a level with the best of the last or
of the present generation: and after his death will take his place at
their head. But, while I think thus, I would make persons respect my
judgment by the discrimination of my praise, and by the freedom of my
censure where his writings are open to it. These are the Elements of
true criticism. It is easy, like Momus, to find fault with the
clattering of the slipper worn by the Goddess of beauty; but 'the
serious Gods' found better employment in admiration of her
unapproachable loveliness. A Poet ought to write for Posterity. But a
critic ought to do so too.
By September 14 Keats was back at Winchester, where during the next
three weeks he had a chance of testing his capacity for solitude. He
seems to have looked at _Hyperion_ again, but made up his mind to go no
farther with it, having got to feel its style too latinized and
Miltonic. A very few weeks before, in August, he had written to two
different correspondents that _Paradise Lost_ was becoming every day a
greater wonder to him. Now, in the third week of September he had come
to regard it, 'though so fine itself,' as a 'corruption of our
language,' a case of 'a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek
and Latin inversions and intonations;' and had convinced himself,
paradoxically, that the purest English was Chatterton's,--which is in
truth no right English at all, but the attempt of a brilliant
self-taught boy to forge himself a fifteenth-century style by gathering
miscellaneous half-understood archaisms out of dictionaries and
stringing them in fluent stanzas of Spenserian, or post-Spenserian,
rhythm and syntax. But it was probably not of Chatterton's vocabulary
that Keats was thinking, but rather of the unartificial, straightforward
flow of his verse in contrast with Milton's. The apparent suddenness of
Keats's change of mind on this matter is characteristic, like his quite
unjust return upon himself in regard to _Isabella_, of what Haydon calls
his lack of decisions and fixity of aim:--'One day he was full of an
epic poem; the next day epic poems were splendid impositions on the
world. Never for two days did he know his own intentions.' By these
words, to be taken with the usual discount, Haydon means the same thing
as Keats means himself when he speaks of his 'unsteady and vagarish
disposition'; let us rather say his sensitive and receptive openness of
mind to contradictory impressions, even on questions of that art of
which he had become so fine a master, and withal his habit of complete
surrender to whatever was the dominant impression of the moment.
With reference to his other occupations of the hour,--_Lamia_ he had
finished, and for the present he did no more to _King Stephen_.
Realizing the low repute into which critical derision had brought him as
a member of the Cockney School, he proposed to withhold his next volume
of poems in hope that the production of _Otho the Great_ at Drury Lane
in the autumn might, if successful, create a more favourable atmosphere
for its reception; and was in consequence seriously dashed when he
learnt that Kean was on the point of starting for America. One of his
chief present pursuits was studying Italian in the pages of Ariosto. The
wholesome brightness of an unusually fine season continuing to sustain
and soothe him, he wrote the last, most unclouded and serenely
accomplished of his meditative odes, that _To Autumn_. A sudden return
of the epistolary mood came upon him, and between September 17th and
27th he poured himself out to his brother and sister-in-law in a new
long journal-letter, full of confidences on every subject that dwelt in
or flitted through his mind except the one master-subject of the passion
he was striving to keep subdued by absence. 'I am inclined,' he says,
'to write a good deal; for there can be nothing so remembrancing and
enchaining as a good long letter, be it composed of what it may.'
Accordingly he ranges as usual over all manner of miscellaneous themes,
discussing his own and his brother's situation and future; telling of
Haydon and his inconsiderate behaviour about the loan, and of Dilke's
political dogmatism and over-anxiety about his boy; giving accounts of
the several members of the Hampstead circle, mixed up with playful
messages to his sister-in-law, whom he represents as caring nothing for
these tiresome people and interrupting her husband's reading of the
letter to insist on prattling about her baby. He adds anecdotes of his
visit to her family in London, and à propos of babies tells of a thing
he had heard Charles Lamb say. 'A child in arms was passing by his chair
toward its mother, in the nurse's arms. Lamb took hold of the long
clothes, saying: "Where, God bless me, where does it leave off?"' With
an unexpressed shaft of inward mockery at his own plight, he describes
the ridiculous figure cut by a man in love, the victim in this case
being his friend Haslam; relates jokes practical and other which had
lately passed between Brown, Dilke, and himself, and after a very
sensible excursion into history and current politics, to which he was
never at all so indifferent as is commonly said, he dwells with a
kindly, humorous enjoyment on the sedate maiden-ladylike ways and
aspects of the cathedral town where he found the autumn quietude so
comforting. This sets him thinking of his fragment of a poem written
seven months earlier and breathing a similar spirit, the _Eve of St
Mark_; so he transcribes it for their benefit, and also, in odd
contrast, a long passage from Burton's _Anatomy_ which had tickled some
queer corner of his brain by its cumulative effect of exuberant and
grotesque disgustfulness, and which he declares he would love to hear
delivered by an actor across the footlights.
During the same days at Winchester Keats also wrote intimately and
purposefully to Reynolds, Brown, and Dilke. In all these letters we see
the well conditioned, wise and admirable Keats, the sane and healthy
partner in his so dual and divided nature, for the time being holding
firmly, or at any rate hopeful and confident of being able to hold
firmly, the upper hand. He resolves manfully to rally his moral powers,
to banish over-passionate and fretful feelings and to put himself on a
right footing with the world. Imaginary troubles, he declares, are what
prey upon a man: real troubles spur him to exertion, and exert himself
and fight against morbid imaginings he will. In reference to George's
money troubles, 'Rest in the confidence,' he says, 'that I will not omit
any exertion to benefit you by some means or other: if I cannot remit
you hundreds, I will tens, and if not that, ones:' a promise which we
shall find George taking only too literally later on. Of his brothers
and his own immediate prospect he writes with seriousness, nevertheless
more encouragingly than the occasion well warranted. He will not let
himself seem too much depressed even by the heavy check which his and
Brown's hopes about _Otho the Great_ had just received from the news of
Kean's intended departure for America.
We are certainly in a very low estate--I say we, for I am in such a
situation, that were it not for the assistance of Brown and Taylor, I
must be as badly off as a man can be. I could not raise any sum by the
promise of any poem, no, not by the mortgage of my intellect. We must
wait a little while. I really have hopes of success. I have finished a
tragedy, which if it succeeds will enable me to sell what I may have
in manuscript to a good advantage. I have passed my time in reading,
writing, and fretting, the last I intend to give up, and stick to the
other two. They are the only chances of benefit to us. Your wants will
be a fresh spur to me. I assure you you shall more than share what I
can get whilst I am still young. The time may come when age will make
me more selfish. I have not been well treated by the world, and yet I
have, capitally well. I do not know a person to whom so many
purse-strings would fly open as to me, if I could possibly take
advantage of them, which I cannot do, for none of the owners of these
purses are rich.... Mine, I am sure, is a tolerable tragedy; it would
have been a bank to me, if just as I had finished it, I had not heard
of Kean's resolution to go to America. That was the worst news I could
have had.... But be not cast down any more than I am; I feel I can
bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself
growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt,
brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly, and in fact
adonize as if I were going out. Then, all clean and comfortable, I sit
down to write. This I find the greatest relief.
And again, in still better heart:--
With my inconstant disposition it is no wonder that this morning, amid
all our bad times and misfortunes, I should feel so alert and
well-spirited. At this moment you are perhaps in a very different
state of mind. It is because my hopes are ever paramount to my
despair. I have been reading over a part of a short poem I have
composed lately, called _Lamia_, and I am certain there is that sort
of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way. Give them
either pleasant or unpleasant sensation--what they want is a sensation
of some sort. I wish I could pitch the key of your spirits as high as
mine is; but your organ-loft is beyond the reach of my voice.
To Dilke and Brown he writes at the same time of his own immediate
plans, telling them that he is determined to give up trusting to mere
hopes of ultimate success, whether from plays or poems, and to turn to
the natural resource of a man fit for nothing but literature and needing
to support himself by his pen; the resource, that is, of journalism and
reviewing. These are some of his words to Dilke:--
Wait for the issue of this Tragedy? No--there cannot be greater
uncertainties east, west, north, and south than concerning dramatic
composition. How many months must I wait! Had I not better begin to
look about me now? If better events supersede this necessity what harm
will be done? I have no trust whatever on Poetry. I don't wonder at
it--the marvel is to me how people read so much of it. I think you
will see the reasonableness of my plan. To forward it I purpose living
in a cheap Lodging in Town, that I may be in the reach of books and
information of which there is here a plentiful lack. If I can find any
place tolerably comfortable I will settle myself and fag till I can
afford to buy Pleasure--which if I never can afford I must go without.
He had been living since May on an advance from Taylor and a loan from
Brown to be repaid out of the eventual profits of their play, and was
uneasy at putting Brown to a present sacrifice. He writes to him
accordingly:--
I have not known yet what it is to be diligent. I purpose living in
town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for a beginning, to get the
theatricals of some paper. When I can afford to compose deliberate
poems, I will.... I had got into a habit of mind of looking towards
you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it as a duty I owe
myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my subsistence--make
no exertion. At the end of another year you shall applaud me, not for
verses, but for conduct.
Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found his friend
unshaken in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose him
for housemate and doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed,
respected his motives too much to contend against them. It was
accordingly settled that the two friends, after travelling up to London
together, should part company, Brown returning to his home at Hampstead,
while Keats went to live by himself and look out for employment on the
press. The Dilkes, who were living in Great Smith Street, Westminster,
at his desire engaged a lodging for him close by, at the corner of
College Street (no. 25), and thither he betook himself, it would seem on
the 7th or 8th of October.
College Street, as all Londoners or visitors to London know, is one of
sedately picturesque Queen Anne or early Georgian houses overlooking the
Abbey gardens. No corner of the town could have been more fitted to
soothe him with a sense of cathedral quietude resembling that which he
had just left. But the wise and purposeful Keats had reckoned without
his other self, the Keats distracted by uncontrollable love-cravings.
His blood proved traitor to his will, and the plan of life and literary
hackwork in London broke down at once on trial, or even before trial. On
the 10th he went up to Hampstead, and in a moment all his strength, to
borrow words of his own, was uncrystallized and dissolved. It was the
first time he had seen his mistress since June. He found her kind, and
from that hour was utterly passion's slave again. In the solitude of his
London lodging he found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his
thoughts. He writes to her three days later:--
This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot
proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and
see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so
short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else. The time is
passed when I had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising
morning of my Life. My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist
without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again--my
Life seems to stop there--I see no further. You have absorb'd me.
He seems to have spent the next week going backwards and forwards
between Hampstead and London, staying for three nights as a guest at
her mother's house ('my three days' dream,' he calls the visit) and for
one or two at the Dilkes' in Westminster, and finally about the 20th
settling back into his old quarters with Brown at Wentworth Place next
door to her. 'I shall be able to do nothing,' he writes.--and again
there comes the cry, 'I should like to cast the die for Love or death.'
It was for death that the die was cast, and three months later came the
seizure which made manifest the certainty of the issue. In the meantime
he lived outwardly through the autumn and early winter much the same
life as before among his own friends and Brown's. Some of them noticed
in him at times a loss of natural gaiety and an unaccustomed strain of
recklessness and moodiness. Severn, who had spent with him part of one
of his days at the College Street lodgings, hearing him read _Lamia_ and
tell of the change of mind about _Hyperion_ (to Severn as an ardent
Miltonian a sore disappointment), called there again a few days later
only to find him flown; and going to see him the next Sunday at
Hampstead was perturbed by the change in him. 'He seemed well neither in
mind nor in body, with little of the happy confidence and resolute
bearing of a week earlier: while alternating moods of apathetic
dejection and spasmodic gaiety rendered him a companion somewhat
difficult to humour.' His correspondence at the same time falls off, and
from mid-October until past Christmas we get only one letter to Severn,
one to Rice, one to Taylor the publisher, and three or four to his
sister Fanny. For other evidence we have the recollections, fairly full
but somewhat enigmatical withal, of his housemate Brown; some
blatancies, little to be trusted, of Haydon; and what is more revealing,
the tenor of his own attempts at new poetical work, as well as a few
private utterances in verse which the stress of passion forced from him.
For some weeks he was able to ply at Wentworth Place a double daily
task: one, that of writing each morning in the same sitting-room with
Brown, who copied as he wrote, some stanzas of a comic fairy poem which
they had devised together, to be called _The Cap and Bells, or The
Jealousies_, and to come out under the pseudonym of 'Lucy Vaughan
Lloyd': the other, carried on each evening in the seclusion of his own
room, that of remodelling _Hyperion_ into the form of a Dream or Vision,
in which parts of the poem as begun a year before should be incorporated
with certain changes of style and diction. At the former scheme Keats
worked with great fluency but little felicity: the mere, almost
mechanical act of spinning the verses of _The Cap and Bells_ seems to
have come all the easier to him in that they sprang from no vital or
inward part of his imaginative being, and the result is as nearly
worthless as anything written by such a man can be conceived to be. In
his solitary work on the recast of _Hyperion_ Keats wrote, on the other
hand, out of the truest--which had come, alas! also to be the
saddest--depths of himself; and the fragment needs to be studied with as
much care as the best of his earlier work by those who would understand
the ripening thoughts of this great, now stricken, spirit on the
destinies of poets and the relation of poetry to human life. To that
study we shall come by and by. For the present let it be only noted that
these twofold occupations seem to have been kept up by Keats through
November, and broken off soon afterwards 'owing to a circumstance
which,' says Brown, mysteriously, 'it is needless to mention.' But
judging by the rest of Brown's narrative, as well as by some of Keats's
own private outpourings, no special or external circumstance can have
been needed,--his inward sufferings were quite enough of themselves,--to
put a stop to his writing. The wasting of his vital powers by latent
disease was turning all his sensations and emotions into pain: at once
darkening the shadow of impending poverty, increasing the natural
importunity of ill-boding instincts at his heart, and exasperating into
agony the unsatisfied cravings of his passion. During his 'three days'
dream' under the same roof with his betrothed in October he had been
able to write peaceably at nightfall:--
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise--
Vanish'd unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday--or holinight
Of fragrant-curtain'd love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight;
But, as I've read love's missal through to-day,
He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.
But now the hunger is uncontrollable:--
Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all,
Withold no atom's atom or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall.
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life's purposes,--the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!
And again he cries, what can he do to recover his old liberty?--
When every fair one that I saw was fair,
Enough to catch me in but half a snare,
Not keep me there:
When, howe'er poor or particolour'd things,
My muse had wings,
And ever ready was to take her course
Whither I bent her force,
Unintellectual, yet divine to me;--
Divine, I say!--What sea-bird o'er the sea
Is a philosopher the while he goes
Winging along where the great water throes?
How shall I do
To get anew
Those moulted feathers, and so mount once more
Above, above
The reach of fluttering Love,
And make him cower lowly while I soar?
Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism,
A heresy and schism,
Foisted into the canon law of love;--
No,--wine is only sweet to happy men;
More dismal cares
Seize on me unawares,--
Where shall I learn to get my peace again?
To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,
Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand
Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life;
That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour,
Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,
Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods,
Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,
Ic'd in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;
Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,
Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbag'd meads
Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds;
There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,
And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.
With that image of the sea-bird winging untroubled its chosen way over
the waves, and as free as they, the poet sheds a real light on his own
psychology in happier days, while the later lines figure direfully the
obsession that now seems to make him think of even his friendships as
wrecked and darkened, and of love as a ghastly error in nature, no joy
but a scourge that blights and devastates. That he might win peace by
marriage with the object of his passion does not seem to have occurred
to Keats as possible at the present ebb-tide of his fortune. 'However
selfishly I feel,' he had written to her some months earlier, 'I am sure
I could never act selfishly.' The Brawnes on their part were comfortably
off, but what his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to
ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected to offer. As
the autumn wore into winter, he was not able to disguise his plight from
his affectionate companion Brown, though he shrank from speaking of its
causes. Looking back upon the time after ten years Brown records the
impression it left upon him thus:--
It was evident from the letters he had sent me, even in his
self-deceived assurance that he was 'as far from being unhappy as
possible,' that he was unhappy. I quickly perceived he was more so
than I had feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind,
and, frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great
uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do
no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding
that word however.
Brown then tells of his morning and evening work on _The Cap and Bells_
and the revised _Hyperion_ and, in the vague terms I have quoted, of its
cessation. And then, seeming to assign to money troubles an even greater
part than they really bore in causing Keats's distress of mind, Brown
goes on--
He could not resume his employment, and he became dreadfully unhappy.
His hopes of fame, and other more tender hopes were blighted. His
patrimony, though much consumed in a profession he was compelled to
relinquish, might have upheld him through the storm, had he not
imprudently lost a part of it in generous loans.... He possessed the
noble virtues of friendship and generosity to excess; and they, in
this world, may chance to spoil a man of independent feeling, till he
is destitute. Even the 'immediate cash,' of which he spoke in the
extracts I have given from his letters, was lent, with no hope of its
speedy repayment, and he was left worse than pennyless. All that a
friend could say, or offer, or urge was not enough to heal his many
wounds. He listened, and, in kindness, or soothed by kindness, showed
tranquillity, but nothing from a friend could relieve him, except on a
matter of inferior trouble. He was too thoughtful, or too unquiet; and
he began to be reckless of health. Among other proofs of recklessness,
he was secretly taking, at times, a few drops of laudanum to keep up
his spirits. It was discovered by accident, and, without delay,
revealed to me. He needed not to be warned of the danger of such a
habit; but I rejoiced at his promise never to take another drop
without my knowledge; for nothing could induce him to break his word,
when once given,--which was a difficulty. Still, at the very moment of
my being rejoiced, this was an additional proof of his rooted misery.
Where Brown hints of his being 'careless of health,' Haydon, referring
apparently to this time of his life in particular, declares roundly and
crudely as follows:--
Unable to bear the sneers of ignorance or the attacks of envy, not
having strength of mind enough to buckle himself together like a
porcupine, and present nothing but his prickles to his enemies, he
began to despond, and flew to dissipation as a relief, which after a
temporary elevation of spirits plunged him into deeper despondency
than ever. For six weeks he was scarcely sober, and--to show what a
man does to gratify his appetites, when once they get the better of
him--once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with
Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the 'delicious coldness of
claret in all its glory,'--his own expression.
If Keats really told Haydon that silly, and I should suppose impossible,
story about the claret and cayenne it was probably only a piece of such
'rhodomontade' as his friends describe, invented on the spur of the
moment to scandalize Haydon or under the provocation of one of his
preachments. That he may at moments during these unhappy months have
sought relief in dissipation of one kind or another, as Brown tells us
he did in drug-taking, is likely: that he was now or at any time
habitually given to drink is disproved by the explicit testimony of all
his friends as well as of Brown, his closest intimate. In his few
letters of the time his secret misery is betrayed only by a single
phrase. Early in December he writes arranging to go with Severn to see
the picture with which Severn was competing for, and eventually won, the
annual gold medal of the Academy for historical painting. The subject
was 'The Cave of Despair' from Spenser. Keats in making the appointment
adds parenthetically from his troubled heart, 'you had best put me into
your Cave of Despair.' A little later we hear of him flinging out in a
fit of angered loyalty from a company of elder artists, Hilton, De Wint
and others, where the deserts of the winner were disparaged and his
success put down to favouritism.
It would seem that as late as November 17th he was still, or had quite
lately been, going on with _The Cap and Bells_. He writes on that date
to Taylor depreciating what he has recently been about and indicating in
what direction his thoughts, when he could bend them seriously upon work
at all, were inclined to turn:--
As the marvellous is the most enticing and the surest guarantee of
harmonious numbers I have been endeavouring to persuade myself to
untether Fancy and to let her manage for herself. I and myself cannot
agree about this at all. Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at
home amongst Men and women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto.
The little dramatic skill I may as yet have however badly it might
show in a Drama would I think be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to
diffuse the colouring of St Agnes eve throughout a poem in which
Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or
three such Poems, if God should spare me, written in the course of the
next six years, would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I
mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine Plays--my
greatest ambition--when I do feel ambitious. I am sorry to say that is
very seldom. The subject we have once or twice talked of appears a
promising one, The Earl of Leicester's history. I am this morning
reading Holingshed's _Elizabeth_.
It does not seem clear whether his idea about Leicester was to use the
subject for a narrative poem or for a play. Scott's _Kenilworth_, be it
remembered, had not yet been written.
In December he writes to his sister Fanny of the trouble his throat
keeps giving him or threatening him with on exertion or cold, and says
that he has been ordering a thick great coat and thick shoes on the
advice of his doctor. He also mentions that he has begun to prepare a
volume of poems to come out in the spring, and that he is touching up
his and Brown's tragedy in order to brighten its interest. It had been
accepted, he tells her, by Drury Lane, but only with the promise of
coming out next season, and as that is not soon enough they intend
either to insist on its being brought out this season or else to
transfer it to Covent Gardens. He has been anxiously expecting, and has
just now received, news of George; and has promised to dine with Mrs
Dilke in London on Christmas day. Whether he was able to keep this
engagement we do not learn; but Brown at any rate was there, and between
him and Dilke there arose a challenge on which Keats among others was
called to adjudicate. The conversation, writes Mrs Dilke, 'turned on
fairy tales--Brown's forte--Dilke not liking them. Brown said he was
sure he could beat Dilke, and to let him try they betted a beefsteak
supper, and an allotted time was given. They had been read by the
persons fixed on--Keats, Reynolds, Rice, and Taylor--and the wager was
decided the night before last in favour of Dilke. Next Saturday night
the supper is to be given,--Beefsteaks and punch--the food of the
"Cockney School."'
So life went on for the friends, on the surface, pretty much as usual,
into the new year (1820). Early in January George Keats came for a short
visit to England to try and advance his affairs and get possession of
more capital for his business. He seems not to have realized at all
fully the true state of his brother's health or heart. He noticed,
indeed, a change, and looking back on the time some years afterwards
writes, 'he was not the same being; although his reception of me was as
warm as heart could wish, he did not speak with former openness and
unreserve, he had lost the reviving custom of venting his griefs.'
George was probably too full of his own affairs to enquire very closely
into John's, or he would never have allowed John, as he did, to strip
himself practically bare of future means of subsistence in fulfilment of
the brotherly promises of help conveyed, as we have seen, in his letter
from Winchester the previous September. 'It was not fair of him, was
it?' John is recorded to have said a little later from his sick-bed,
referring to George's action in so taking him at his word; and Brown
from this circumstance conceived of George a bitter bad opinion which
nothing afterwards would shake. Nevertheless there is ample evidence of
George's honourable and affectionate character, and it seems clear that
in striving for commercial success he had his brother's ultimate benefit
in view as much as his own, and that in the meantime he believed he had
reason to take for granted the willingness and ability of John's many
friends to keep him afloat.
On January 13th, a week after George's arrival, John took up his pen to
try and write to his sister-in-law a journal letter in the old chatty
affectionate style. If he had the means, he says, he would like to come
and pay them a visit in America for a few months. 'I should not think
much of the time, or my absence from my books; or I have no right to
think, for I am very idle. But then I ought to be diligent, or at least
to keep myself within reach of the materials for diligence. Diligence,
that I do not mean to say; I should say dreaming over my books, or
rather over other people's books.' He gossips about friends and
acquaintances, less good-naturedly than usual, as he seems to be aware
when he says, 'any third person would think I was addressing myself to a
lover of scandal. But we know we do not love scandal, but fun; and if
scandal happens to be fun, that is no fault of ours.' He tells how
George is making copies of his verses, including the ode to the
Nightingale; lets his inward embitterment show through for an instant
when he says, 'If you should have a boy, do not christen him John, and
persuade George not to let his partiality for me come across: 'tis a bad
name, and goes against a man;' describes a dance he has been to at the
Dilkes, and among a good deal of rather irritable and wry-mouthed social
satire, to which he tries to give a colour of pleasantry and
playfulness, strikes into sharp definition with the fewest possible
words the characters of some of his friends and acquaintances:--
I know three witty people, all distinct in their excellence--Rice,
Reynolds, and Richards. Rice is the wisest, Reynolds the playfullest,
Richards the out-o'-the-wayest. The first makes you laugh and think,
the second makes you laugh and not think, the third puzzles your head.
I admire the first, I enjoy the second, I stare at the third.... I
know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his
excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a
negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see
him at all though he were six feet high.--I bear the first, I forbear
the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel,
the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.
This was written on January 17th. Ten days later George started on his
return journey, and John, having forgotten to hand him for delivery at
home the budget he had been writing, was obliged to send it after him by
post. A week later again, on February 3rd, came the crash towards which,
as we can now see, Keats's physical constitution had been hastening ever
since the over exertion of his Scottish tour twenty months before. The
weather had been very variable, almost sultry in mid-January, then
bitter cold with frost and sleet, then a thaw, whereby Keats was tempted
to leave off his greatcoat. Coming from London to Hampstead outside the
stage coach on the night of Thursday February 3rd, the chill of the thaw
caught him. Everyone knows the words in which Brown relates the
sequel:--
At eleven o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like
fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible; it
therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, 'What is the
matter? you are fevered?' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was on the
outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,--but
now I don't feel it. Fevered!--of course, a little.' He mildly and
instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my
request that he should go to bed. I entered his chamber as he leapt
into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the
pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say,--'That is blood from
my mouth.' I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood
upon the sheet. 'Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this
blood.' After regarding it steadfastly he looked up in my face, with a
calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,--'I know
the colour of that blood;--it is arterial blood;--I cannot be deceived
in that colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--I must die.'
I ran for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning,
I left him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep.
Keats lived for twelve months longer, but it was only, in his own words,
a life in death. Before narrating the end, let us pause and consider his
work of the two preceding years, 1818 and 1819, on which his fame as a
great English poet is chiefly founded.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Local tradition, I am informed, used to identify the house as one
called Eglantine Villa, now demolished. The existing 'Keats Crescent'
was so named, not as indicating the special neighbourhood where the
poet lodged, but only by way of general commemoration of his sojourn.
[2]
--and now his heart
Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength
Glories--.
Milton, _Par. Lost_, i. 581.
[3] Morgan MSS.
CHAPTER XIII
WORK OF 1818, 1819.--I. THE ACHIEVEMENTS
Minor achievements--_Bards of Passion and of Mirth_--_Fancy_--The
tales--_Isabella_--Story and metre--Influence of Chaucer--Apostrophes
and invocations--Horror turned to beauty--The digging scene--Its
quality--_The Eve of St Agnes_--Variety of sources--Boccaccio's
_Filocolo_--Poetic scope and method--Examples--The unrobing scene--The
feast of fruits--A rounded close--_Lamia_--Sources: and a
comparison--Metre and quality--Beauties and faults--Perplexing
moral--The sage denounced: why?--Comments of Leigh Hunt--The odes: _To
Psyche_--Sources: Burton and Apuleius--Qualities: A questionable
claim--_On Indolence_--_On a Grecian Urn_--Sources: a
composite--Spheres of art and life contrasted--Play between the two
spheres--The Nightingale ode--_Ode on Melancholy_--A grand close--The
last of the odes--_To Autumn_.
The work of Keats's two mature years (if any poet or man in his
twenty-third and twenty-fourth years can be called mature) seems to
divide itself naturally into two main groups or classes. One class
consists of his finished achievements, things successfully carried
through in accordance with his first intention; the other of his
fragments and experiments, things begun and broken off either from
external causes or because in the execution the poet changed his mind or
his inspiration failed to sustain itself. I shall ask the reader to
consider the two classes separately, the achievements first: not because
there may not be even finer work in some of the fragments, but because a
thing incomplete, a torso, however splendid in power and promise, cannot
be judged on the same terms or with the same approach to finality as a
thing of which the whole is before us. One finished thing only, the
play of _Otho the Great_, I shall turn over to the second or
experimental class, seeing that an experiment it essentially was, and
one tried under conditions which made it impossible for Keats to be his
true self.
The class of achievements will include, then, besides a score of sonnets
and a few minor pieces of various form, the three completed tales in
verse, _Isabella or the Pot of Basil_, _The Eve of St Agnes_, and
_Lamia_; with the six odes, _To Psyche_, _On Indolence_ (not published
in Keats's lifetime), _On a Grecian Urn_, _To a Nightingale_, _To
Melancholy_, and _To Autumn_. Beginning with the minor things,--the
sonnets, being mostly occasional and autobiographical, have been
sufficiently touched on in our narrative chapters, and so have several
of the shorter lyrics, _In drear-nighted December_, _Meg Merrilies_, and
_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_. There remains chiefly the batch of pieces in
the seven-syllable couplet metre printed in the _Lamia_ volume between
the odes _To Psyche_ and _To Autumn_. Two of these, _Lines on the
Mermaid Tavern_ and _Robin Hood_, were written, as we have seen, at the
beginning of 1818, in the months when Keats was living alone in Well
Walk and resting after his labour on _Endymion_. Both are easy,
spirited, and intensely English in feeling; both, for all their gay
lightness of touch, are marked with that vivid imaginative life in
single phrases which almost from the first, amidst all the rawnesses of
his youth, stamps Keats for a poet of the great lineage. Already two
years earlier, in the valentine 'Hadst thou liv'd in days of old,' he
had shown a fair command of this metre, and now we can feel that he has
an ear well trained in its cadences by familiarity with the finest early
models, from Fletcher (in the _Faithful Shepherdess_) and Ben Jonson (in
the masque of _The Satyr_, the songs _To Celia_, and the _Charis_
lyrics) down to _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_.
The other two pieces in the same form, _Bards of Passion and of Mirth_
and _Fancy_, date from nearly a year later, when Keats had settled
under Brown's roof after Tom's death, and were copied by him for his
brother in a letter dated January 2nd 1819. In the _Mermaid Tavern_
lines he had followed in fancy the poet-guests of that hostelry to the
Elysian fields and asked them if they found there any finer
entertainment than in their old haunt. In _Bards of Passion and of
Mirth_, which he wrote on a blank page in Dilke's copy of Beaumont and
Fletcher, Keats singles out this particular pair of poet-partners to
follow beyond the grave, and in a strain somewhat more serious tells of
the double lives they lead,--their souls left here on earth in their
writings, and themselves--
Seated on Elysian lawns
Brows'd by none but Dian's fawns ...
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, trancèd thing,
But divine, melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
Tales and golden histories
Of heaven and its mysteries.
In the affirmation with which the piece concludes,--
Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
Ye have left your souls on Earth!
Ye have souls in heaven too,
Double-liv'd in regions new!--
in this affirmation it seems, as Mr Buxton Forman has pointed out, as
though Keats were gaily countering the view of Wordsworth in the
well-known stanzas where, declaring how the power of Burns survives
'deep in the general heart of men,' he goes on to ask what need has the
poet for any other kind of Elysian after-life.[1]
Following an eighteenth-century practice, Keats calls this set of
heptasyllabics an ode, a form which in strictness it no way resembles. A
higher place is taken in his work by the longest poem he sends his
brother in the same metre, _Fancy_. He calls it a rondeau, again rather
at random; but he had already called the Bacchus lyric in _Endymion_ a
roundelay, and seems to have thought that the name might apply to any
set of verses returning upon itself at the end with a repetition of its
beginning. In the present case he both opens and closes his poem with
the same idea as has been condensed by a later writer in the two-line
refrain--
But every poet, born to stray,
Still feeds upon the far-away.
The opening lines run,--
Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
O sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Summer's joys are spoilt by use,
And the enjoying of the Spring
Fades as does its blossoming;
Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too,
Blushing through the mist and dew,
Cloys with tasting: What do then?
The answer is that the thing to do is to sit by the chimney corner while
Fancy goes ranging abroad to find and bring home a harvest of
incompatible and contradictory delights; and after the evocation of a
number of such the poem comes round at the end to a slightly altered
repetition of its opening couplet,--
Let the winged Fancy roam
Pleasure never is at home.
I like to think that Keats may have drawn his impulse to writing this
poem from the fine passage in Fuller's _Holy State_ quoted by Lamb in
his brief 'Specimens' of that author[2]:--
_Fancy._--It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul
... it digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without wings,
builds without charges, fights without bloodshed; in a moment striding
from the centre to the circumference of the world; by a kind of
omnipotency creating and annihilating things in an instant; and things
divorced in Nature are married in Fancy as in a lawless place.
At any rate Keats's poem, in its best and central part, is a delightful
embroidery on the ideas here expressed. The notion, or vision, of a
lawless place where all manner of things divorced in nature abide
together and happily jostle, was one that often haunted him, as witness
his verse-epistle to Reynolds from Teignmouth, the fragment he calls
_The Castle Builder_, and again the piece beginning 'Welcome joy and
welcome sorrow,' to which there has been posthumously given the title _A
Song of Opposites_. The lines evoking such a vision in this poem,
_Fancy_, are almost his happiest in his lighter vein, and are written in
the true Elizabethan tradition: the predominant influence in the
handling of the measure being, to my ear, that of Ben Jonson, who is
wont to give it a certain weight and slowness of movement by the free
use of long syllables in the unaccented places; even so Keats, in the
passage quoted above, puts in such places words like 'sweet,' 'rain,'
'still,' 'cage,' 'dart,' 'lipp'd.'
Passing from the minor to the major achievements of the time, the
earliest, and to my mind the finest, of these is _Isabella or the Pot of
Basil_. During the writing of _Endymion_, Keats had intended his next
effort to be on the lofty classic and symbolic theme of the dethronement
of Hyperion and the Titans and the accession of Apollo and the
Olympians. But certain reading and talk in the Hunt circle having
diverted him from this purpose for a while, and made him take up the
idea of a volume of metrical tales from Boccaccio to be written jointly
by himself and Reynolds, he chose the tale of the Pot of Basil (the
fifth of the fourth day in the _Decameron_), made a sudden beginning at
it before he left Hampstead at the end of February, (1819), and
finished it at Teignmouth in the course of April. As an appropriate
vehicle for an Italian story he took the Italian _ottava rima_ or stanza
of eight. Several of the earlier English poets had used this metre:
Keats's main model for it was doubtless Edward Fairfax, who, following
other Elizabethan translators, had in his fine version from Tasso,
_Godfrey of Bulloigne_, done much more than any of his predecessors
towards suppling and perfecting its treatment in English. Since then it
had been little employed in our serious poetry, but had lately been
brilliantly revived for flippant and satiric uses, after later Italian
models, by Hookham Frere and Byron. Keats goes over the heads of these
direct to Fairfax, and in certain points at least, in variety of pause
and cadence and subtle adaptation of verbal music to emotional effect,
by a good deal outdoes even that excellent master.[3] Of course it is of
the essence of his treatment to avoid, in the closing couplet of the
stanza, the special effect of witty snap and suddenness which fits it so
well for the purpose of satire.
Every one knows the story: how a maiden of Messina (Keats chooses to
transfer the scene to Florence), living in the house of her merchant
brothers, in secret loves one of their clerks: how her brothers,
discovering her secret, take out her lover to the forest and there slay
and bury him: how his ghost appearing to her in a dream reveals his fate
and burial place: how she hastens thither with her nurse, digs till she
finds the corpse and having found it carries home the head and sets it
in a pot of basil, or sweet marjoram, which she cherishes and waters
with her tears until her brothers take it from her, whereupon she pines
away and dies.
Boccaccio tells this story with that admirable combination of
straightforward conciseness and finished grace which characterizes his
mature prose. Keats in his poem romantically amplifies and embroiders
it. In his way of doing so we can trace the influence of Chaucer, with
whose _Troilus and Criseyde_, that miracle of detailed, long-drawn, yet
ever human and rarely tedious narrative, he was by this time familiar.
Keats, while avoiding Chaucer's prolixity, diversifies his tale with
invocations to Love and to the Muses, with apostrophes to the reader and
ejaculatory comments on the events, entirely in Chaucer's manner: only
whereas Chaucer relegates the more part of such matter to the 'proems'
of his several books, Keats, having plunged into the thick of the story
in his first line, finds room for his apostrophes and invocations in the
course of the narrative itself. Most critics have taken the view that
this is evidence of weak or immature art. To my mind this is not so: the
pauses thus introduced are never long enough to hold up the flow and
interest of the narrative, while they afford welcome rests to the
attention, pleasant changes from a too sustained narrative construction,
with consequent beautiful and happy modulations in the movement of the
verse.
One of these invocations--invocation and apology together--is to
Boccaccio himself, disowning all idea of improving the tale and defining
the poet's attempt as made but to honour him,--
To stead thee as a verse in English tongue,
An echo of thee in the north-wind sung.
The definition is exact. The revived spirit of English romantic poetry
breathes in every line of the verse, and as in _Endymion_, so here, the
southern setting is conceived as though it were English. 'So the two
brothers and their murder'd man' (the force of the anticipatory epithet
has been celebrated by every critic since Lamb)--
So the two brothers and their murder'd man
Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream
Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan
Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
Keep head against the freshets.
Another such criticized 'digression' tells of the toilers yoked in all
quarters of the world to the service of these avaricious merchant
brothers. In calling up their sufferings Keats for a moment strikes an
unexpected verbal echo from the _Annus Mirabilis_ of Dryden.[4] Dryden,
telling of the monopolies of the Dutch in the East India trade, had
written,--
For them alone the Heav'ns had kindly heat,
In eastern quarries ripening precious dew:
For them the Idumean balm did sweat,
And in hot Ceilon spicy forests grew.
Keats writes of Isabella's brothers,--
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark,
For them his ears gush'd blood--
with more in the same strain, very vividly and humanly imagined, but
somewhat unevenly written. On the other hand the last of the rests or
interruptions in this poem is to my thinking one of its most original
and admirable beauties: I mean the invocation beginning 'O Melancholy,
linger here awhile,' repeated with lovely modulations in stanzas lv,
lvi, and lxi; the poet deliberately pausing to heighten his effect as it
were by an accompaniment of words chosen purely for their pathetic
melody and more musical than music itself.
Keats's way of imagining and telling the story is not less delicate than
it is intense. Flaws and false notes there are: phrases, as in
_Endymion_, too dulcet and cloying, like that which tells how the
lover's lips grew bold, 'And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:' a flat
line where it is most out of place--'And Isabella did not stamp or
rave:' a far-fetched rime, as where 'love' and 'grove' draw in after
them the alien idea of Lorenzo not being embalmed in 'Indian clove.' But
such flaws, abundant in _Endymion_, are in _Isabella_ rare and need to
be searched for. If we want an example of the staple tissue of the poem
we shall rather find it in a stanza like this:--
Parting they seem'd to tread upon the air,
Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart
Only to meet again more close, and share
The inward fragrance of each other's heart.
She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair
Sang of delicious love and honey'd dart;
He with light steps went up a western hill,
And bade the sun farewell, and joy'd his fill.
The image of love-happiness in the last couplet is as jocund and
uplifting as some radiant symbolic drawing by Blake, and poetry has few
things more perfect or easier in their perfection.
In a far more difficult kind, where Keats has to deal with the features
of the story that might easily make for the repulsive or the _macabre_,
he triumphs not by shirking but by sheer force of passionate
imagination. 'The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of
making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close
relationship with beauty and truth.' This dictum of Keats can scarcely
be better illustrated than by his own handling of the _Isabella_ story.
Take the vision of the murdered man appearing to the girl at night:--
Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake;
For there was striving, in its piteous tongue,
To speak as when on earth it was awake,
And Isabella on its music hung:
Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,
As in a palsied Druid's harp unstrung;
And through it moan'd a ghostly under-song,
Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among.
Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright
With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof
From the poor girl by magic of their light.
How wonderfully, in these touches, do we feel love prevailing over
horror and purging the apparition of all its charnel ghastliness. When
we come to the discovery and digging up of the body, Boccaccio turns
the difficulty which must inhere in any realistic treatment of the theme
by simply saying that it was uncorrupted; as though some kind of miracle
had kept it fresh. Keats on the other hand confronts the difficulty and
overcomes it. First he acknowledges how the imagination in dwelling on
the dead is prone to call up images of corruptibility:--
Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard,
And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
To see scull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr'd,
And filling it once more with human soul?
Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.
Then he compulsively leads away the mind from such images to think only
of the passionate absorption with which Isabella flings herself upon her
task:--
She gaz'd into the fresh-thrown mould, as though
One glance did fully all its secrets tell;
Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;
Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow,
Like to a native lilly of the dell:
Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
To dig more fervently than misers can.
Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon
Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies,
She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone,
And put it in her bosom, where it dries
And freezes utterly unto the bone
Those dainties made to still an infant's cries:
Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care,
But to throw back at times her veiling hair.
[Illustration: PL. X
PAGE FROM ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL
FROM AN AUTOGRAPH BY KEATS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM]
Is any scene in poetry written with more piercing, more unerring,
vision? The swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with too
dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third
and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at
the same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile
of the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the
impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden
solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action,
as she begins (with a fine implied commentary on the relative strength
of passions) to dig 'more fervently than misers can':--then the first
reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not ghastly, but beautiful
both in itself and for the tenderness of which it is a token: her
womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, while all the
woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us as blighted
by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and continuance of her
labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic truth as well as
grace:--to imagine and to write like this is the privilege of the best
poets only, and even the best have not often combined such concentrated
force and beauty of conception with such a limpid and flowing ease of
narrative.[5] Poetry had always come to Keats as naturally as leaves to
a tree. So he considered it ought to come, and now that it came of a
quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which his rash youth
had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers of the
school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true
imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school
seem thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms mechanical: nay,
those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two
kinds of writing comparable.
The final consignment by Isabella of her treasure to its casket is told
with the same genius for turning horror into beauty: note the third and
fourth lines of the following, with the magically cooling and soothing
effect of their open-vowelled sonority;--
Then in a silken scarf,--sweet with the dews
Of precious flowers pluck'd in Araby,
And divine liquids come with odorous ooze
Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,--
She wrapp'd it up; and for its tomb did choose
A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,
And cover'd it with mould, and o'er it set
Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.
And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.
In passages like these of _Isabella_ Keats, for one reader at least,
reaches his high-water mark in human feeling, and in felicity both
imaginative and executive. The next of his three poetic tales, _The Eve
of St Agnes_, does not strike so deep, though it is more nearly
faultless and lives as the most complete and enchanting English pure
romance-poem of its time. Little or none of the effect is due in this
case to elements of magic weirdness or supernatural terror such as
counted for so much in the general romantic poetry of the day, and had
been of the very essence of achievements so diverse as _The Ancient
Mariner_, _Christabel_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and _Isabella_
itself. The tale hinges on the popular belief that on St Agnes's Eve
(January the 20th) a maiden might win sight of her future husband in a
dream by going to bed supperless, silent and without looking behind her,
and sleeping on her back with her hands on the pillow above her head.
This belief is mentioned by two writers at least with whom Keats was
very familiar: by Ben Jonson in his masque _The Satyr_ and Robert Burton
in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_. An eighteenth century book of reference
which he may well have known also, Brand's _Popular Antiquities_, cites
the superstition and adds from a current chapbook a fuller account of
it, mentioning other and alternative rites. But one feature of the
promised vision which in Keats's mind was evidently essential, that the
lover should regale his mistress after her fasting dream with exquisite
viands and music, is not noted in any of these sources: Keats must
either have invented it or drawn it from some other authority which
criticism has not yet recognized.
It was an obvious and easy idea for Keats to weave into the St Agnes' Eve
motive the motive of a love-passion between the son and daughter of
hostile houses, and to bring the youth to a festival in the halls of his
enemies in a manner which reminds one both of Romeo and Juliet and of the
young Lochinvar in Scott's ballad. A remoter source has lately been
pointed out as probable for the subsequent incidents of the lover's
concealment by the old nurse in a closet next the maiden's chamber, his
coming in to her while she sleeps, the melting of his real self into her
dream of him, her momentary disenchantment and alarm on awakening, her
re-assurance and surrender and their ensuing happy union and flight. All
these circumstances, it has been shown, except the immediate flight of
the lovers, are closely paralleled in Boccaccio's early novel _Il
Filocolo_, and look as though they must have been derived from it. The
_Filocolo_ is an excessively tedious and occasionally coarse
amplification in prose, made by Boccaccio when his style was still
unformed, of the old French metrical romance, long popular throughout
Europe, of _Floire et Blancheflor_. The question is, how should Keats
have come to be acquainted with it? At this time he knew very little
Italian. He was accustomed to read his _Decameron_ in a translation,[6]
and eight months later we find him with difficulty making out Ariosto at
the rate of ten or a dozen stanzas a day. A French seventeenth-century
version of the _Filocolo_ indeed existed, but none in English. Can it be
that Hunt had told Keats the story, or at least those parts of it which
would serve him, in the course of talk about Boccaccio? One would not
have expected even Hunt's love of Italian reading to sustain him through
the tedium of this early and little known novel by the master: moreover
in criticizing _The Eve of St Agnes_ he gives no hint that Keats was
indebted to him for any of its incidents. But there the resemblances are,
too close to be easily explained as coincidences. The part played by the
old nurse Angela in Keats's poem echoes pretty closely the part played by
Glorizia in the _Filocolo_; the drama, dreaming and awake, played between
Madeline and Porphyro, repeats, though in a far finer strain, that
between Biancofiore and Florio; so that Keats's narrative reads truly
like a magically refined and enriched quintessence distilled from the
corresponding chapter in Boccaccio's tale.[7]
But the question of sources is one for the special student, and its
discussion may easily tire the lay reader. Passing to the poem and its
qualities, we have to note first that, fresh from treading, in his
_Hyperion_ attempt, in the path of Milton, Keats in _The Eve of St
Agnes_ went back, so far as his manner is derivative at all, to the
example of his first master, Spenser. He shows as perfect a command of
the Spenserian stanza, with its 'sweet-slipping movement,' as Spenser
himself, and as subtle a sense as his of the leisurely meditative pace
imposed upon the metre by the lingering Alexandrine at the close.
Narrating at this pace and in this mood, he is able at any moment with
the lightest of touches to launch the imagination to music on a voyage
beyond the beyonds, and to charge every line, every word almost, with a
richness and fullness of far-away suggestion that yet never clogs the
easy harmonious flow of the verse. At the same time he does not, in this
new poem, attempt anything like the depth of human passion and pathos
which he had touched in Isabella, and his personages appeal to us in the
manner strictly defined as 'romantic,' that is to say not so much
humanly and in themselves as by the circumstances, scenery, and
atmosphere amidst which they move.
In handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some
writers vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the
painter and sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies
everything he touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in
terms of life, movement, and feeling. From the opening stanza, which
makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us first of
its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and next
how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd
taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close,
where the lovers disappear into the night, the poetry throbs in every
line with the life of imagination and beauty. The monuments in the aisle
are brought before us, not by any effort of description, but solely
through our sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:--
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,
He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.
Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels supporting the
banquet-hall roof the poet strikes life:--
The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,
Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests,
With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts.[8]
The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out
their beauties in detail, he calls--
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--
a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the
colour-imagination of the reader, giving it at the same time a
sufficient clue by the simile drawn from a particular specimen of
nature's blazonry.[9] In the last line of the same stanza--
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings,
--the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind
is at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on
thoughts of her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe,
shows that moonlight has not the power to transmit the separate hues of
painted glass as Keats in this celebrated passage represents it, but
fuses them into a kind of neutral or indiscriminate opaline shimmer. Let
us be grateful for the error, if error it is, which has led him to
heighten, by these saintly splendours of colour, the sentiment of a
scene wherein a voluptuous glow is so exquisitely attempered with
chivalrous chastity and awe. If any reader wishes to realise how the
genius of Elizabethan romantic poetry re-awoke in Keats, and how much
enriched and enhanced, after two hundred years, let him compare all this
scene of Madeline's unrobing with the passage from Brown's _Britannia's
Pastorals_ which was probably in his memory when he wrote it (see above,
p. 98).
When Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on
their lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and
speaks straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very
life of the wearer,--'Her warmèd jewels.' When Porphyro spreads the
feast of dainties beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how
those ideal and rare sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not
only with their own natural richness, but with the associations and the
homage of all far countries whence they have been gathered--
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.
Concerning this sumptuous passage of the spread feast of fruits, not
unequally rivalling the famous one in Milton,[10] Leigh Hunt has some
interesting things to say in his _Autobiography_[11]:--
I remember Keats reading to me, with great relish and particularity,
conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper
and ending with the words,
And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.
Mr Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but
Keats knew where his vowels were _not_ to be varied. On the occasion
above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the
concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about
bees:--
The _singing_ masons _building_ roofs of gold.
This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats
thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with
the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare's negligence,
if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best
manner.
The reader will remember how Bailey records this subject of the musical
and emotional effect of vowel sounds, open and close, varied or iterated
as the case might be, as one on which Keats's talk had often run at
Oxford. Whatever his theories, he was by this time showing himself as
fine a master of such effects as any, even the greatest, of our poets.
This same passage, or interlude, of the feast of fruits has despite its
beauty been sometimes blamed as a 'digression.' A stanza which in
Keats's original draft stood near the beginning of the poem shows that
in his mind it was no mere ornament and no digression at all, but an
essential part of his scheme. In revision he dropped out this stanza,
doubtless as being not up to the mark poetically: pity that he did not
rather perfect it and let it keep its place: but even as it is the
provision of the dainties made beforehand by the old nurse at Porphyro's
request (stanza xx) proves the feast essential to the story.
While the unique charm of _The Eve of St Agnes_ lies thus in the
richness and vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the
actions and emotions of the personages are not less happily conceived as
far as they go. What can be better touched than the figures of the
beadsman and the old nurse Angela? How admirable in particular is the
debate held by Angela with Porphyro in her
little moonlight room
Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb.
Madeline, a figure necessarily in the main passive, is none the less
exquisite, whether in her gentle dealing with the nurse on the
staircase, or when closing her chamber door she pants with quenched
taper in the moonlight, and most of all when awakening she finds her
lover beside her, and contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:--
'Ah, Porphyro!' said she, 'but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How chang'd thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!
Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!'[12]
In all the doings and circumstances attending the departure of the
lovers for a destination left thrillingly vague in the words, 'For o'er
the southern moors I have a home for thee,'[13]--in the elfin storm sent
to cover their flight (the only touch of the supernatural in the story),
their darkling grope down the stairway, the hush that holds the house
and guest-chambers, the wind-shaken arras, the porter sprawling asleep
beside his empty flagon, the awakened bloodhound who recognizes his
mistress and is quiet--in Keats's telling of all these things a like
unflagging richness and felicity of imagination holds us spell-bound:
and with the deaths of the old nurse and beadsman, once the house has
lost its spirit of life and light in Madeline, the poet brings round the
tale, after all its glow of passionate colour and music, of trembling
anticipation and love-worship enraptured or in suspense, to a chill and
wintry close in subtlest harmony with its beginning:--
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,
With a huge empty flaggon by his side:
The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:
By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
And they are gone: aye, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old
Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.[14]
The last of the trio of Keats's tales in verse, _Lamia_, owed its
origin, and perhaps part of its temper, to his readings in Burton's
_Anatomy of Melancholy_. His own experiences under the stings of love
and jealousy had led him, during those spring months of 1819 when he
could write nothing, to pore much over the treatise of that prodigiously
read, satiric old commentator on the maladies of the human mind and
body, and especially over those sections of it which deal with the cause
and cure of love-melancholy. Entertainment in abundance, information in
cartloads, Keats could draw from the matter accumulated and glossed by
Burton, but little or nothing to gladden or soothe or fortify him. One
story, however, he found which struck his imagination so much that he
was moved to write upon it, and that was the old Greek story, quoted by
Burton from Philostratus, of _Lamia_ the serpent-lady, at once witch and
victim of witchcraft, who loved a youth of Corinth and lived with him in
a palace of delights built by her magic, until their happiness was
shattered by the scrutiny of intrusive and coldblooded wisdom.
In June 1819, soon after the inspiration which produced the Odes had
passed away, and before he left Hampstead for the Isle of Wight, Keats
made a beginning on this new task; continued it at intervals,
concurrently with his attempts in drama, at Shanklin and Winchester; and
finished it by the first week in September. It happened that Thomas Love
Peacock had published the year before a tale in verse on a nearly
similar theme,--that of the beautiful Thessalian enchantress
Rhododaphne: one wonders whether Keats may not have felt in Peacock's
attempt a challenge and stimulus to his own. Peacock's work, now unduly
neglected, is that of an accomplished scholar and craftsman sitting down
to tell an old Greek tale of magic in the form of narrative verse then
most fashionable, the mixed four-stressed couplet and ballad measure of
Scott and Byron, and telling it, for a poet not of genius, gracefully
and well. Whether Keats's _Lamia_ is a work of genius there is no need
to ask. No one can deny the truth of his own criticism of it when he
says, 'I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take
hold of people in some way--give them either pleasant or unpleasant
sensation.' But personally I cannot agree with the opinion of the late
Francis Turner Palgrave and other critics--I think they are the
majority--who give it the first place among the tales. On the contrary,
if an order of merit among them there must be, I should put it third and
lowest, for several reasons of detail as well as for one reason
affecting the whole design and composition.
As to the technical qualities of the poetry, let it be granted that
Keats's handling of the heroic couplet, modelled this time on the
example of Dryden and not of the Elizabethans, though retaining pleasant
traces of the Elizabethan usages of the over-run or _enjambement_ and
the varied pause,--let it be granted that his handling of this mode of
the metre is masterly. Let it be admitted also that there are passages
in the narrative imagined as intensely as any in _Isabella_ or _The Eve
of St Agnes_ and told quite as vividly in a style more rapid and
condensed. Such is the passage, in the introductory episode which fills
so large a relative place in the poem, where Mercury woos and wins his
wood-nymph after Lamia has lifted from her the spell of invisibility.
Such is the gorgeous, agonized transformation act of Lamia herself from
serpent to woman: such again the scene of her waylaying and ensnaring of
the youth on his way to Corinth. And such above all would be the whole
final scene of the banquet and its break-up, from 'Soft went the music
with soft air along' to the end, but for the perplexing apostrophe,
presently to be considered, which interrupts it. Still counting up the
things in the poem to be most praised, here is an example where the
poetry of Greek mythology is very eloquently woven into the rhetoric of
love:--
Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah! goddess, see
Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee!
For pity do not this sad heart belie--
Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.
Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay!
To thy far wishes will thy streams obey:
Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain,
Alone they can drink up the morning rain:
Though a descended Pleiad, will not one
Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune
Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?
And here a beautiful instance of power and justness in scenic
imagination:--
As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all,
Throughout her palaces imperial,
And all her populous streets and temples lewd,
Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd,
To the wide-spreaded night above her towers.
Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours,
Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white,
Companion'd or alone; while many a light
Flar'd here and there, from wealthy festivals,
And threw their moving shadows on the walls,
Or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade
Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade.
Turning now to the other side of the account: for one thing, we find
jarring and disappointing notes, such as had disappeared from Keats's
works since _Endymion_, of the old tasteless manner of the Hunt-taught
days: for instance the unpalatable passage in the first book beginning
'Let the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and worse still, with a
new note of idle cynicism added, the lines about love which open the
second book. Misplaced archaisms also reappear, such as 'unshent' and
the participle 'daft,' from the obsolete verb 'daff,' used as though it
meant to puzzle or daze; with bad verbal coinages like 'piazzian,'
'psalterian.' Moreover, though many things in the poem are potently
conceived, others are not so. The description of the magical palace-hall
is surely a failure, except for the one fine note in the lines,--
A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone
Supporters of the faery-roof, made moan
Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.
The details of the structure, with its pairs of palms and plantains
carved in cedar-wood, its walls lined with mirrors, its panels which
change magically from plain marble to jasper, its fifty censers and
'Twelve sphered tables, by twelve seats insphered,'--all this seems
feebly and even tastelessly invented in comparison with the impressive
dream-architecture in some of Keats's other poems: I will even go
farther, and say that it scarce holds its own against the not much
dissimilar magic hall in the sixth canto of _Rhododaphne_.
But the one fundamental flaw in _Lamia_ concerns its moral. The word is
crude: what I mean is the bewilderment in which it leaves us as to the
effect intended to be made on our imaginative sympathies. Lamia is a
serpent-woman, baleful and a witch, whose love for Lycius fills him with
momentary happiness but must, we are made aware, be fatal to him.
Apollonius is a philosopher who sees through her and by one steadfast
look withers up her magic semblance and destroys her, but in doing so
fails to save his pupil, who dies the moment his illusion vanishes. Are
these things a bitter parable, meaning that all love-joys are but
deception, and that at the touch of wisdom and experience they melt
away? If so, the tale might have been told either tragically or
satirically, in either case leaving the reader impartial as between the
sage and his victim. But Keats in this apostrophe, which I wish he had
left out, deliberately points a moral and expressly invites us to take
sides:--
What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
What for the sage, old Apollonius?
Upon her aching forehead be there hung
The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue;
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
These lines to my mind have not only the fault of breaking the story at
a critical point and anticipating its issue, but challenge the mind to
untimely questionings and reflections. The wreaths of ominous growth
distributed to each of the three personages may symbolize the general
tragedy: but why are we asked to take sides with the enchantress,
ignoring everything about her except her charm, and against the sage? If
she were indeed a thing of bale under a mask of beauty, was not the
friend and tutor bound to unmask her? and if the pupil could not survive
the loss of his illusion,--if he could not confront the facts of life
and build up for himself a new happiness on a surer foundation,--was it
not better that he should be let perish? Is there not in all this a
slackening of imaginative and intellectual grasp? And especially as to
the last lines, do we not feel that they are but a cheap and
unilluminating repetition of a rather superficial idea, the idea phrased
shortly in Campbell's _Rainbow_ and at length in several well-known
passages of Wordsworth's _Excursion_, particularly that in the fifth
book beginning--
Ambitious spirits!--
Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced
To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh
The planets in the hollow of their hand;
And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains
Have solved the elements, or analysed
The thinking principle--shall they in fact
Prove a degraded Race?
Wordsworth had fifteen years earlier written more wisely, 'Poetry is the
impassioned expression in the countenance of all science.' The
latter-day Wordsworth, and Keats after him, should have realised that
the discoveries of 'philosophy,' meaning science, create new mysteries
while they solve the old, and leave the world as full of poetry as they
found it: poetry, it may be, with its point of view shifted, poetry of a
new kind, but none the less poetical. Leigh Hunt, in his review of
_Lamia_ published on the appearance of the volume, has some remarks
partly justifying and partly impugning Keats's treatment of the story in
this respect:--
Mr Keats has departed as much from common-place in the character and
moral of this story, as he has in the poetry of it. He would see fair
play to the serpent, and makes the power of the philosopher an
ill-natured and disturbing thing. Lamia though liable to be turned
into painful shapes had a soul of humanity; and the poet does not see
why she should not have her pleasures accordingly, merely because a
philosopher saw that she was not a mathematical truth. This is fine
and good. It is vindicating the greater philosophy of poetry.
So far, this is a manifest piece of special pleading by Hunt on Lamia's
behalf. If she is nothing worse than a being with a soul of humanity
liable to be turned into painful shapes, why must Apollonius feel it his
duty to wither and destroy her for the safeguarding of his pupil, even
at the cost of that pupil's life? Her witchcraft must consist in
something much worse than not being a mathematical truth, else why is he
her so bitter enemy? Hunt proceeds, more to the purpose, to protest
against the poet's implication--
that modern experiment has done a deadly thing to poetry by
discovering the nature of the rainbow, the air, etc., that is to say,
that the knowledge of natural history and physics, by shewing us the
nature of things, does away with the imaginations that once adorned
them. This is a condescension to a learned vulgarism, which so
excellent a poet as Mr Keats ought not to have made. The world will
always have fine poetry, so long as it has events, passions,
affections, and a philosophy that sees deeper than this philosophy.
There will be a poetry of the heart, so long as there are tears and
smiles: there will be a poetry of the imagination, as long as the
first causes of things remain a mystery. A man who is no poet, may
think he is none, as soon as he finds out the physical cause of the
rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:--he was none before. The true
poet will go deeper. He will ask himself what is the cause of that
physical cause; whether truths to the senses are after all to be taken
as truths to the imagination; and whether there is not room and
mystery enough in the universe for the creation of infinite things,
when the poor matter-of-fact philosopher has come to the end of his
own vision.
In _Endymion_ Keats had impeded and confused his narrative by working
into it much incident and imagery symbolic of the cogitations and
aspirations, the upliftings and misgivings, of his own unripe spirit.
Three years later, writing to Shelley from his sickbed, he contrasts
that former state of his mind with its present state, saying that it was
then like a scattered pack of cards but is now sorted to a pip. The
three tales just discussed, written in the interval, show how quickly
the power of sorting and controlling his imaginations had matured itself
in him. In them he is already an artist standing outside of his own
conceptions, certain of his own aim in dealing with them (subject
perhaps to some reservation in the case of _Lamia_), and scarcely
letting his personal self intrude upon his narrative at all to
complicate or distract it.
For the expression of his private moods and meditations he had perfected
during the same interval a new and beautiful vehicle in the ode. He had
been accustomed to try his hand at odes, or what he called such, from
his earliest riming days: and odes also, to all intents and purposes,
are the two great lyrics in _Endymion_, the choral hymn to Pan and the
song of the Indian maiden to Sorrow. But those which he composed in
quick succession, as we have seen, in the late spring of 1819 are of a
reflective and meditative type, new in his work and highly personal.
That which I have shown reason for believing to be the earliest of the
group, the _Ode to Psyche_ written in the last days of April, differs
somewhat from the rest both in form and spirit. Its strophes are longer
and more irregular: its strain less inward and brooding, with more of
lyric ardour and exaltation. It tells of the poet's delight in that
late, exquisitely and spiritually symbolic product of the mythologic
spirit of expiring paganism, the story of Cupid and Psyche. What may
have especially turned his attention to this fable at that moment we
cannot tell. Possibly the mention of it in Burton's _Anatomy_ may have
set him on to reading the original source, the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius,
in Adlington's translation: there are passages in _Lamia_ which suggest
such a reading,[15] and the noble, rhythmical English of that
Elizabethan version, loose as it may be in point of scholarship, could
not fail to charm his ear. Or possibly recent study of the plates in the
_Musée Napoléon_ (as to which more by and by) may have brought freshly
to his memory the sculptured group in which the story is embodied. But
that he had always loved the story we know from the passage 'I stood
tip-toe' beginning--
So felt he, who first told how Psyche went
On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment,
as well as from his confession that in boyhood he used to admire its
languid and long-drawn romantic treatment in the poem of Mrs Tighe.
Cloying touches of languor, such as often disfigure his own earlier
work, are not wanting in the opening lines in which he tells how he came
upon the fabled couple in a dream, but are more than compensated by the
charm of the scene where he finds them reposing, 'Mid hush'd,
cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other poet has compressed into
a single line so much of the essential virtue of flowers, of their power
to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? Such
felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with Keats; and
of Spenser with his 'sea-shouldering whales' he is now more than the
equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden in _St Agnes' Eve_ is
matched in this ode by the 'soft-conchèd ear' of Psyche,--though the
compound is perhaps a little forced and odd, like the 'cirque-couchant'
snake in _Lamia_. The invocation in the third and fourth stanzas
expresses, with the fullest reach of Keats's felicity in style and a
singular freshness and fire of music in the verse, both his sense of the
meaning of Greek nature-religion and his delight in imagining the beauty
of its shrines and ritual. For the rest, there seems at first something
strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers
himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in
lieu of the worship of antiquity for which she came too late; and
especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth
stanza:--
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.
But in a moment we are carried beyond criticism by that incomparable
distillation of one, or many, of his impressions among the Lakes or in
Scotland,--
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.
For such a master-stroke of concentrated imaginative description no
praise, much as has been showered on it by Ruskin and lesser critics,
can be too great.
Keats declares to his brother that this is the first of his poems with
which he has taken even moderate pains. That being so, it is remarkable
that he should have let stand in it as many as three unrimed
line-endings: and what the poem truly bears in upon the reader is a
sense less of special care and finish than of special glow and ardour,
till he is left breathless and delighted at the threshold of the
sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his mind enthralled by the
imagery and his ear by the verse, with its swift, mounting music and
rich, vehemently iterated assonances towards the close:--
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
With breeding flowers, will never breed the same;
And thither will I bring all soft delights
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at nights,
To let the warm Love in!
The four remaining spring odes are slower-paced, as becomes their more
musing tenour, and are all written in a succession of stanzas repeated
uniformly or with slight variations. Throughout them all each stanza is
of ten lines and five rimes, the first and second rimes arranged in a
quatrain, the third, fourth and fifth in a sestet: the order of rimes in
the sestet varying in the different odes, and in one, the nightingale
ode, the third line from the end being shortened so as to have three
stresses instead of five.
Let us take first the two in which the imagery has been suggested to the
poet by works of Greek sculpture whether seen or imagined. In the _Ode
on Indolence_ Keats merely revives his memory of a special type of Greek
marble urn where draped figures of women, Seasons, it may be, or
priestesses, walk with joined hands behind a solemn Bacchus, or priest
in the god's guise (see Plate viii, p. 342),--he merely evokes this
memory in order to describe the way in which certain symbolic personages
have seemed in a day-dream to pass before him and re-pass and again
re-pass, appearing and disappearing as the embossed figures on such an
urn may be made to do by turning it round. From the 'man and two women'
of the March letter they are changed to three women, whom at first he
does not recognize; but seeing presently who they are, namely Love,
Ambition, and that 'maiden most unmeek,' his 'demon Poesy,' he for a
moment longs for wings to follow and overtake them. The longing passes,
and in his relaxed mood he feels that none of the three holds any joy
for him--
so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep'd in honey'd indolence.
They come by once more, and again, barely aroused from the sweets of
outdoor slumber and the spring afternoon, he will not so much as lift
his head from where he lies, but bids them farewell and sees them depart
without a tear.
Keats did not print this ode, thinking it perhaps not good enough or
else too intimately personal. But writing to Miss Jeffrey a few weeks
after it was composed, he tells her it is the thing he has most enjoyed
writing this year. It is indeed a pleasant, lovingly meditated revival
and casting into verse of the imagery which had come freshly into his
mind when he wrote to his brother of his fit of languor in the previous
March. It contains some powerful and many exquisite lines, but only one
perfect stanza, the fifth: and there are slacknesses--shall we say
lazinesses--in the execution, as where the need for rimes to 'noons' and
'indolence' prompts the all-too commonplace prayer--
That I may never know how change the moons,
Or hear the voice of busy common-sense;
or where, thinking contemptuously of the old 'intercoronation' days with
Leigh Hunt, he declines, in truly Cockney rime, to raise his head from
the flowery _grass_ in order to be fed with praise and become 'a
pet-lamb in a sentimental _farce_.'
In bidding the phantoms of this day-dream adieu, Keats avows that there
are others yet haunting him, and while imagery drawn from the sculptures
on Greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse
himself to a stronger effort and produce a true masterpiece in his
famous _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. It is no single or actually existing
specimen of Attic handicraft that he celebrates in this ode, but a
composite conjured up instinctively in his mind out of several such
known to him in reality or from engravings. During and after those
hour-long silent reveries among the museum marbles of which Severn tells
us, the creative spirit within him will have been busy almost unaware
combining such images and re-combining them. Cricitism can plausibly
analyse this creation into its several elements. In calling the scene a
'leaf-fringed legend' Keats will have remembered that the necks and
shoulders of this kind of urn are regularly encircled by bands of
leaf-pattern ornament. The idea of a sacrifice and a Bacchic dance being
figured together in one frieze, a thing scarcely elsewhere to be found,
will have come to him from the well known vase of Sosibios (so called
from the name of the sculptor inscribed upon it), from the print of
which in the _Musée Napoléon_ there actually exists a tracing by his
hand.[16] But this is a serene and ceremonial composition: for the
tumult and 'wild ecstasy' of his imagined frieze, the 'pipes and
timbrels,' the 'mad pursuit,' he will have had store of visions ready in
his mind, from the Bacchanal pictures of Poussin, no doubt also from
Bacchic vases like that fine one in the Townley collection at the
British Museum and the nearly allied Borghese vase: while for the
--heifer lowing at the skies
And all her silken flanks in garlands drest,
as well as for the thought of the pious morn and the little town
emptied of its folk that old deep impression received from Claude's
'Sacrifice to Apollo' will have been reinforced by others from works of
sculpture easy to guess at: most of all, naturally, from the sacrificial
processions in the Parthenon frieze.
[Illustration: PL XI
THE SOSIBIOS VASE
PROFILE AND FRIEZE: FROM ENGRAVINGS IN THE MUSÉE NAPOLEON]
In the ode we read how the sculptured forms of such an imaginary
antique, visualized in full intensity before his mind's eye, have set
his thoughts to work, on the one hand asking himself what living, human
scenes of ancient custom and worship lay behind them, and on the other
hand speculating upon the abstract relations of plastic art to life. The
opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which flash
their own answer upon us--interrogatories which are at the same time
pictures,--'What men or gods are these, what maidens loth?' etc. The
second and third stanzas express with full felicity and insight the
differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of
reality by satiety and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains
in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined
experiences even richer than the real. The thought thrown by Leonardo da
Vinci into a single line--'Cosa bella mortal passa e non d'arte'--and
expanded by Wordsworth in his later days into the sonnet, 'Praised be
the art,' etc., finds here its most perfect utterance.
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Then the questioning begins again, and again conjures up a choice of
pictures,--
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
In the answering lines of the sestet--
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--
in these lines we find that the poet's imagination has suddenly and
lightly shifted its ground, and chooses to view the arrest of life as
though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely,
like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary
condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own
compensations. Finally, dropping such airy play of the mind backward and
forward between the two spheres, he consigns the work of ancient skill
to the future, to remain,--
in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--
thus re-asserting his old doctrine, 'What the imagination seizes as
beauty must be truth'; a doctrine which amidst the gropings of reason
and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of
Keats's temper--the one anchorage to which his soul can and needs must
cleave.
[Illustration: PL. XII
'What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy'
A. FROM THE TOWNLY VASE IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM
B. FROM THE BORGHESE VASE IN THE LOUVRE]
Let us turn now to the second pair--for as such I regard them--of odes
written in May-time, those _To a Nightingale_ and _On Melancholy_. Like
the _Ode on Indolence_, the nightingale ode begins with the confession
of a mood of 'drowsy numbness,' but this time one deeper and nearer to
pain and heartache. Then invoking the nightingale, the poet attributes
his mood not to envy of her song (perhaps, as Mr Bridges has suggested,
there may be here an under-reminiscence from William Browne[17]), but to
excess of happiness in it. Just as his Grecian urn was no single
specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the particular
nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that Keats thus
invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some far-off
scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow her:
first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he
makes us realize in lines redolent, as are none others in our language,
of the southern richness and joy which he had never known save in
dreams. Then follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's
tribulations which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid
of Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts
her power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be,
listening to the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in
the darkness all the secrets of the season and the night. While thus
rapt he remembers how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to
him, and feels that it would be more richly welcome now than ever. The
nightingale would not cease to sing--and by this time, though he calls
her 'immortal bird,' what he has truly in mind is not the song-bird at
all, but the bird-song, thought of as though it were a thing
self-existing and apart, imperishable through the ages. So thinking, he
contrasts its permanence with the transitoriness of human life, meaning
the life of the generations of individual men and women who have
listened to it. This last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he
brings back those memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary
romance in the stanza closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn':
and then, catching up his own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt
change of mood and meaning, he returns to daily consciousness, and with
the fading away of his forest dream the poem closes.
Throughout this ode Keats's genius is at its height. Imagination cannot
be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be
more absolute, than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the
draft of southern vintage, picturing the frailty and wretchedness of
man's estate on earth, and conjecturing in the 'embalmed darkness' the
divers odours of spring. To praise the art of a passage like that in the
fourth stanza where with a light, lingering pause the mind is carried
instantaneously away from the miseries of the world into the heart of
the imagined forest,--to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this
is to throw doubt on the reader's power to perceive it for himself. Let
him be trusted to cherish and know the poem, as every lover of English
poetry should, 'to its depths,' and let us go on to the last product, as
I take it to be, of this spring month of inspiration, and that is the
_Ode on Melancholy_.
The music of the word--its hundred associations derived from the early
seventeenth-century poetry in which his soul was steeped--foremost among
them no doubt Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, with the
beautiful song from Fletcher's _Nice Valour_ which inspired them--his
recent familiarity with Burton's _Anatomy_, including those pithy
stanzas of alternate praise and repudiation which preface it--all these
things will have worked together with Keats's own haunting and deepest
mood throughout these days to set him composing on this theme,
Melancholy. He had dallied with an idea of doing so as far back as early
in March, when being kept from writing both by physical disinclination
and a temporary phase of self-criticism, he had written to Haydon, 'I
will not spoil my gloom by writing an ode to Darkness.' Now that in May
the springs of inspiration were again unlocked in him, such negative
purpose fails to hold, and he adds this ode to the rest, throwing into
it some of his most splendid imagery and diction. Its temper is nearly
akin on the one hand to some of the gloomier passages in his letters to
Miss Jeffrey of May 31 and June 9, and on the other to the tragic third
stanza of the nightingale ode. Its main purport is to proclaim the
spiritual nearness, the all but inseparableness, of joy and pain in
human experience when either is present in its intensity. One of the
attributes, it will be remembered, which he assigns to his enchantress
_Lamia_ is--
a sciential brain
To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain.
In no nature have the sources of the two lain deeper or closer together
than in his own, and it is from the fullness of impassioned experience
that he writes. The real melancholy, he insists, is not that which
belongs to things sad or direful in themselves. Having written two
stanzas piling up gruesome images of such things, and discarded on
reflection the former and more gruesome of the two, he lets the second
stand, and goes on, evoking contrasted images of opulent beauty, to show
how the true, the utter melancholy is that which is inextricably coupled
with every joy and resides at the heart of every pleasure: ending
magnificently--
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
One more ode remains, written in a different key and after a lapse of
some four months, during which Keats had been away in the country,
quieted by absence from the object of his passion and working diligently
at _Otho the Great_ and _Lamia._ This is the ode _To Autumn_. He was
alone at Winchester, rejoicing in perfect September weather and in a
mood more serene and contented than he had known for long or was ever to
know again. 'How beautiful the season is now,' he writes to Reynolds,
'how fine the air--a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without
joking, chaste weather--Dian skies. I never liked stubble fields so much
as now--aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a
stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm.
This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.'
The vein in which he composed is one of simple objectivity, very
different from the passionate and complex phases of introspective
thought and feeling which inspired the spring odes. The result is the
most Greek thing, except the fragment _To Maia_, which Keats ever wrote.
It opens up no such far-reaching avenues to the mind and soul of the
reader as the odes _To a Grecian Urn_, _To a Nightingale_, or _To
Melancholy_, but in execution is more complete and faultless than any of
them. In the first stanza the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of
the time are expressed in words so transparent and direct that we almost
forget they are words at all, and nature herself and the season seem
speaking to us: while in the middle stanza the touches of literary art
and Greek personification have an exquisite congruity and ease. Keats
himself has hardly anywhere else written with so fine a subtlety of
nature-observation. Students of form will notice a slight deviation from
that of the spring odes, by which the second member of the stanza is now
a septet instead of a sestet, one of its rimes being repeated three
times instead of twice.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Had Keats been destined to know health and peace of mind, who can guess
how much more work in this vein and of this quality the world might have
owed to him?
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Thoughts suggested on the banks of Nith, near the poet's
residence_: the third poem in _Memorials of a Tour in Scotland_.
[2] First printed in Hunt's _Reflector_ and reprinted in the
two-volume edition of Lamb's works published in 1818.
[3] A copy of Fairfax's Tasso appears in the list of books left by
Keats at his death.
[4] This point has been made by Mr Buxton Forman, _Complete Works of
J.K._, ii. p. 41, footnote.
[5] I let this paragraph, somewhat officious and over-explanatory
though it now seems to me, stand as I wrote it thirty years ago, for
the sake of the pleasure I have since had in learning that the
identical passage was singled out by Charles Lamb, in a notice which
has only lately come to light, (see below, p. 471) as the pick of the
whole _Lamia_ volume.
[6] That published by Allen Awnmarsh, 5th ed. 1684, notes Woodhouse;
and a copy of the same is noted in the list of Keats's books.
[7] See article by H. Noble M'Cracken in _Philological Journal_ of
the Chicago University, 1908. The romance of _Floire and
Blancheflor_, which Boccaccio in the _Filocolo_ expands with
additions and inventions of his own, tells the story of a Moorish
prince in Spain and a Christian damsel, brought up together and
loving each other as children and thrown apart in maturity by adverse
influences and ill fortune. After many chivalric and fantastic
adventures both in West and East, of the kind usual in such romances,
judicial combats, captures by corsairs, warnings by a magic ring and
the like, Floire learns that Blancheflor is immured with other ladies
in an impregnable tower by the 'Admiral of Babylon,' who desires to
marry her. To Babylon Floire follows, cajoles the guardian of the
tower and one of her damsels to admit him to her chamber concealed in
a basket of roses: whence issuing, he and she are brought to one
another's arms in happiness; various other adventures ensuing before
they can be finally free and united. There exists a fragmentary
English medieval version of this romance, which might easily have
been known to Keats from the abstract and quotations given by George
Ellis in his _Specimens of Early English Metrical Romance_ (1806).
But unluckily neither this nor, apparently, any version of the
original French romance poem contains those incidents recounted in
the _Filocolo_ to which Keats's poem runs most closely parallel.
These we must accordingly suppose to be Boccaccio's own invention and
to have been known to Keats, directly or indirectly, from the
_Filocolo_ itself.
[8] In both the chapel monuments and the banquet-hall corbels there
may be a memory of the following passage from Cary's _Dante_ (quoted
by Mr Buxton Forman and Prof. de Sélincourt):--
As to support incumbent floor or roof,
For corbel is a figure sometimes seen
That crumples up its knees into its breast;
With the feign'd posture, stirring ruth unfeign'd
In the beholder's fancy; so I saw
These fashion'd--.
[9] It may be noted that in the corresponding scene in the _Filocolo_
a single special colour effect is got by describing the room as lit
up by two great pendent self-luminous carbuncles.
[10] _Paradise Lost_, v. 341-347.
[11] Ed. 1860, pp. 269, 270.
[12] The final couplet of this stanza, as Keats wrote it after
several attempts, is weak. Madeline continues,--
Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go.
In the alternative version, intended to leave no doubt of what had
happened, which he read to Woodhouse and Woodhouse disapproved,
Madeline's speech breaks off and the poet in his own name adds,--
See while she speaks his arms encroaching slow
Have zon'd her, heart to heart,--loud, loud, the dark winds blow.
[13] Keats, mentally placing his story in England and writing it at
Teignmouth, had at first turned this line otherwise,--'For o'er the
bleak Dartmoor I have a home for thee.'
[14] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the death of
the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the
exigencies of rime. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the
first: that of the beadsman in the lines,
But no--already had his death-bell rung;
The joys of all his life were said and sung;
that of Angela where she calls herself
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,
Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll.
The touch of flippant realism which Keats had, again to Woodhouse's
distress, proposed to throw into his story at this point was as
follows. For the four last lines of the last stanza Keats had
proposed to write,--
Angela went off
Twitch'd with the palsy: and with face deform
The beadsman stiffen'd, 'twixt a sigh and laugh
Ta'en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough.
In printing the poem Keats, probably at the instance of Taylor and
Woodhouse, reverted to the earlier and better version.
[15] May the following be counted evidence to the same effect? The
old woman in _Apuleius_, chap. xxi, just as she is about to tell her
daughter the story of Cupid and Psyche, says, 'as the visions of the
day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night do
often chance contrary.' Compare Keats at the end of the _Ode on
Indolence_:--
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store.
[16] The _Musée Napoléon_ is a set of four volumes illustrating with
outline engravings the works of classic art collected by Napoleon
Bonaparte as spoils of war and brought to Paris. Keats's original
tracing from the Sosibios vase was in the collection of Sir Charles
Dilke and is reproduced on the frontispiece of the Clarendon Press
edition of Keats's poems, 1906. The subject has been much discussed,
but only from the point of view of the classical archaeologist, which
ignores the part played by paintings as well as antiques in
stimulating Keats's imagination. From that point of view the nearest
approach, as I hold, to a right solution is set out in a paper by
Paul Wolters, in _Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen_, Band
xx, Heft 1/2: Braunschweig; though I think he is too positive in
ruling out Roman representations of the _Suovetaurilia_ such as the
fine urn at Holland House suggested as Keats's source by the late Mr
A. S. Murray and reproduced in _The Odes of Keats_, by A. C. Downer,
M.A. (Oxford, 1897).
[17]
Sweet Philomela (then he heard her sing)
I do not envy thy sweet carolling,
But do admire thee each even and morrow
Canst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow.
CHAPTER XIV
WORK OF 1818, 1819.--II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS
Snatches expressive of moods--_Ode to Maia_--_Hyperion_: its scheme
and scale--Sources: Homer and Hesiod--Pierre
Ronsard--Miltonisms--Voices of the Titans--A match and no match for
Milton--A great beginning--Question as to sequel--Difficulties and a
suggestion--The scheme abandoned--_The Eve of St Mark_--Chaucer and
Morris--Judgement of Rossetti--Dissent of W. B. Scott--The
solution--Keats as dramatist--_Otho_ and _King Stephen_--_The Cap and
Bells_--Why a failure--Flashes of Beauty--Recast of _Hyperion_--Its
leading ideas--Their history in Keats's mind--Preamble: another feast
of fruits--The sanctuary--The admonition--The monitress--The attempt
breaks off.
Much of our clearest insight into Keats's mind and genius is gained from
the class of his fragments which do not represent any definite poetical
purpose or plan, and were never meant to be more than mere snatches and
momentary outpourings. Such, though they only express a passing mood,
are the lines in his letter to Reynolds of February 1818, translating
the early song of the thrush into a warning not to fret after knowledge.
Such is the contrasted passage of shifting, perplexed meditation on the
problems of life, and the failure of the imagination to solve them
alone, in the rimed epistle to the same friend six weeks later. Such,
very especially, is the cry declaring that the true poet is the soul
sympathetic with every form and mode of life and ready to merge its
identity in that of any and every sentient creature: compare the passage
in one of his letters where he tells how his own can enter into that of
a sparrow picking about the gravel:--
Where's the Poet? show him! show him,
Muses nine! that I may know him.
'Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan,
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be'twixt ape and Plato;
'Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren, or Eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The Lion's roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the Tiger's yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother-tongue.
Such again are the several passages in which he expressed a mood that
frequently beset him, that of being rapt in spirit too high above earth
to breathe, too far above his body not to feel an awful intoxication and
fear of coming madness:--
It is an awful mission,
A terrible division;
And leaves a gulph austere
To be fill'd with worldly fear.
Aye, when the soul is fled
Too high above our head,
Affrighted do we gaze
After its airy maze,
As doth a mother wild,
When her young infant child
Is in eagle's claws--
And is not this the cause
Of madness?--God of Song,
Thou bearest me along
Through sights I scarce can bear;
O let me, let me share
With the hot lyre and thee,
The staid Philosophy.
Temper my lonely hours,
And let me see thy bowers
More unalarm'd!
But our main business in this chapter must be not with illuminating
snatches such as these, but with things begun of set purpose and not
carried through.
When Keats, drawing near the end of his work on _Endymion_, was
meditating what he meant to be his second long and arduous poem,
_Hyperion_, he still thought and spoke of it as a 'romance.' But a
phrase he uses elsewhere shows him conscious that its style would have
to be more 'naked and Grecian' than that of _Endymion_. Was he trying an
experiment in the naked and Grecian style when on May day 1818 he wrote
at Teignmouth the beginning of an ode on Maia? He never went on with it,
and the fragment as it stands is of fourteen lines only; but these are
in a more truly Greek manner than anything else he wrote, not even
excepting, as I have just said, the _Ode to Autumn_. The words figuring
what Greek poets were and did for Greek communities, and expressing the
aspiration to be even as they, bear the true, the classic, mint-mark of
absolute economy and simplicity in absolute rightness. Considering how
meagre are the hints antiquity has left us concerning Maia, the eldest
of the Pleiades and mother of Hermes, and her late identification with
the Roman divinity to whom sacrifice was paid on the first of May, and
hence how little material for development the theme seems to
offer,--considering these things, perhaps it is as well that Keats,
despite his promise to finish it 'all in good time,' should have
tantalized posterity by breaking off this beautiful thing where he did.
The next fragment we come to is colossal,--it is _Hyperion_ itself. From
the poem as far as it was written no reader could guess either that it
was taken up as a 'feverous relief' from tendance on his dying brother,
or that in continuing it later under Brown's roof he had to put force
upon himself against the intrusion of private cares and affections upon
his thoughts, as well as against a reaction from his own mode of
conceiving and handling the task itself. The impression _Hyperion_ makes
is one, as Woodhouse on first reading it justly noted, of serene
mastery by the poet both over himself and over his art:--'It has an air
of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power': and
again,--'the above lines give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur
and quiet power which characterize the poem.' Woodhouse goes on to tell
what he knew of the scheme of the work as Keats had first conceived
it:--
The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of
Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo,--and incidentally of
those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the
war of the giants for Saturn's reestablishment-- with other events, of
which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece
and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the
Poet's brain.
The statement inserted by the publishers at the head of the volume in
which the poem appeared in 1820, that _Hyperion_ was intended to be as
long as _Endymion_, is probably also due to Woodhouse, their right-hand
man (Keats, we know, had nothing to do with it), and may represent what
he had gathered in conversation to have been the poet's original idea.
Mr de Sélincourt has shown grounds for inferring that when Keats came to
actual grips with the subject he decided to treat it much more briefly
and partially. Clearly the essential meaning of the story was for him
symbolical; it meant the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by
one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held
a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers. Into this
story the poet plunges, not even in the middle but near the close. When
his poem opens, the younger gods, the Olympians, have won their victory,
and the Titans, all except Hyperion, are already overthrown. In their
debate whether to fight again general despondency prevails, and only one
of the fallen, Enceladus, strikes a note of defiance; so that it seems
as if there were nothing left to tell except the coming defeat or
abdication of Hyperion in favour of Apollo. Hyperion, it is true, has
not yet spoken when we are called away from the council, and Keats
might have made him side with Enceladus and rouse his brethren to a
temporary renewal of the strife. Or leaving the Titans conquered, he
might, as Woodhouse suggests, have gone on to narrate the second
warfare, that waged against the Olympians not by them but later by the
Giants in revolt. In either case we should have seen the poet try his
hand, hitherto untested in such themes, on scenes of superhuman battle
and violence.
Woodhouse is right at any rate in saying that the hints for handling the
theme to be found in the ancient poets are few and uncertain, leaving a
modern writer free to invent most of his incidents for himself. Beyond
the bald notices in his classical dictionaries, Chapman's _Iliad_ would
have given Keats a picture of the dethroned Saturn: Chapman's Homer's
hymn to Apollo might have filled his imagination, even to overflowing,
with visions of the youth of that god in Delos,--'Chief isle of the
embowered Cyclades': Hesiod's _Theogony_ (which he had doubtless read in
the translation of Pope's butt and enemy, Thomas Cooke) would have
taught him more, but very confusedly, about the warfare of Gods, Titans,
and Giants in general, besides inspiring his vision of the den where the
Titans lie vanquished; while he would have gleaned other stray matters
from Sandys's notes on certain passages of Ovid. As far as his beloved
English poets are concerned, brief allusions occur in the _Faerie
Queene_ and in _Paradise Lost_, where Milton includes the fallen Titans
among the rebel hosts that flock to the standard of Satan in hell. But I
think the source freshest in his mind at the moment when he began to
write is one which has not hitherto been suggested, the ode of the
famous French Renaissance poet Ronsard to his friend Michel de
l'Hôpital. We know by his translation of the sonnet _Nature ornant
Cassandre_ that Keats had the works of Ronsard in his hands--lent, it
would seem, by Mr Taylor--exactly about this time. The ode in question,
partly founded on Hesiod, partly on Horace,[1] but largely on Ronsard's
own invention, relates the birth of the Muses, their training by their
mother Mémoire (= Mnemosyne), their desire as young girls to visit their
father Jupiter, their mother's consent, their undersea journey to the
palace of Oceanus where Jupiter is present at a high festival, their
choral singing before him, first of the strife of Neptune and Pallas for
the soil of Attica, and then of the battle of the gods and giants:--
Après sur la plus grosse corde
D'un bruit qui tonnait jusqu'aux cieux,
Le pouce des Muses accorde
L'assaut des Géants et des Dieux.
Keats, although he writes of the battle of the Gods not against the
Giants but against the earlier Titans, yet when he rolls out rebel names
like this,--
Coeus, and Gyges, and Briareus;
Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion
Were pent in regions of laborious breath
Dungeon'd in opaque elements,--
Keats, when he rolls out these rebel names, has surely been haunted by
the strophes of Ronsard:--
Styx d'un noir halecret rempare
Ses bras, ses jambes, et son sein,
Sa fille amenant par la main
Contre Cotte, Gyge, et Briare.[2]
Neptune à la fourche estofée
De trois crampons vint se mesler
Par la troupe contre Typhée
Qui rouoit une fonde en l'air:
Ici Phoebus d'un trait qu'il jette
Fit Encelade trébucher,
Là Porphyre lui fit broncher
Hors des poings l'arc et la sagette.
For such an epic theme Keats felt instinctively, when he set to work,
that an epic and not a romance treatment was necessary; and for an
English poet the obvious epic model is Milton. Ever since his visit to
Bailey at Oxford, and especially during his stay at Teignmouth the next
year, Keats had been absorbing Milton and taking him into his being, as
formerly he had taken Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, and now he can
utter his own thoughts and imaginations almost with Milton's voice.
Speaking generally of the blank verse of _Hyperion_, its rhythms are
almost as full and sonorous as Milton's own, but simpler; its march more
straightforward, with less of what De Quincey calls 'solemn planetary
wheelings'; its periods do not sweep through such complex evolutions to
so stately and far foreseen a close. The Miltonisms in _Hyperion_ are
rather matters of diction and construction--construction almost always
derived from the Latin--than of rhythm: sometimes also they are matters
of direct verbal echo and reminiscence. To take a single instance out of
many:--
For as among us mortals omens drear
Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he.
It is only in _Hyperion_ that Keats habitually thus puts the noun
Latin-wise before the adjective: and the omens that 'perplex' are
derived from the eclipse which in _Paradise Lost_ 'with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.' Throughout the fragment Keats uses frequently and
with fine effect the Miltonic figure of the 'turn' or rhetorical
iteration of identical words to a fresh purport, as in that noble phrase
which seems to have inspired one of the finest passages in Shelley's
_Defence of Poesy_[3]:
How beautiful, if Sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
It has been said, and justly, that Keats has done nothing greater than
the debate of the fallen Titans in their cave of exile, modelled frankly
in its main outlines on that of the rebel angels in _Paradise Lost_, but
with the personages and utterances nevertheless entirely his own. In
creating and animating these colossal figures between the elemental and
the human, what masterly imaginative instinct does he show--to take one
point only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast
inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realise
their voices. Thus of the murmuring of the assembled gods when Saturn is
about to speak:--
There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a God gives sign,
With hushing finger, how he means to load
His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,
With thunder, and with music, and with pomp:
Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines.
This is not a whit the less Keats for his use of the Miltonic 'turn' in
rounding the period by a repetition in the last line of the 'bleak-grown
pines' from the first. Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:--
So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea,
Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,
But cogitation in his watery shades,
Arose, with locks not oozy, and began,
In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue
Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.
Here the affirmation by negation in the second and fourth lines is a
Latin usage already employed by Keats in the _Pot of Basil_[4]: the
'locks not oozy' are a reminiscence from _Lycidas_ and the
'first-endeavouring tongue' from _The Vacation Exercise_. But into what
a vitally apt and beautiful new music of his own has Keats moulded and
converted all such echoes. Once more, of Clymene following Enceladus in
debate:--
So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook
That, lingering along a pebbled coast,
Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met,
And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice
Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath:
The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves
In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,
Came booming thus.
In this last example the sublimity owes nothing to Milton except in the
single case of the repetition in the third line. Even the scoffing Byron
recognized after Keats's death the authentic 'large utterance of the
early gods' in passages like these, though Keats in his modesty had
himself refused to recognize it.
Further to compare Keats with Milton,--the poet of _Hyperion_ is
naturally no match for Milton in passages where the elder master has
been inspired by life-long impassioned meditation on his readings of
history and romance, like that famous one ending with
What resounds
In fable or romance of Uther's son.
Begirt with British and Armoric knights
Or all who since, baptized or infidel
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebizond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarrabia--
On the other hand Milton, even in the sweetness and the nearness to
nature of _Comus_ and his other early work, is scarce a match for Keats
when it comes to the evocation, even in a mode relatively simple, of
nature's secret sources of delight,--as thus:
throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retired cave
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess:
while comparison is scarcely possible in the case of the nature images
most characteristically Keats's own, for instance:--
As when, upon a tranced summer night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir--.
Neither to the Greek nor the Miltonic, but essentially to the modern,
the romantic, sentiment of nature does it belong to try and express, by
such a concourse of metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to
the most fugitive, which a forest scene by starlight can have upon the
mind: the pre-eminence of the oaks among the other trees--their
quasi-human venerableness--their verdure, unseen in the darkness--the
sense of their preternatural stillness and suspended life in an
atmosphere that seems to vibrate with mysterious influences communicated
between earth and sky.
All good poems, it has been said, begin well. None begins better than
_Hyperion_, with its 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' and its
grand mournful dialogue between the discrowned Saturn and the Titaness
Thea, his would-be comforter. Then, with a rich contrast from this scene
of despondency, comes the scene, dazzling and resplendent for all its
ominousness, of the mingled wrath and terror of the threatened sun-god
in his flaming palace. The second book, relating the council of the
dethroned Titans, has neither the contrasted sublimities of the first
nor the intensity, rising almost to fever-point, of the unfinished
third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the
afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his
godhead. But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which
place it, to my mind, fully on a level with the other two. And it is in
this book, in the speech of Oceanus, that Keats sets forth the whole
symbolical purport and meaning of the myth as he had conceived it:--
Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain;
O folly! for to bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!
As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
In form and shape compact and beautiful,
In will, in action free, companionship,
And thousand other signs of purer life;
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness: nor are we
Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule
Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil
Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed,
And feedeth still, more comely than itself?
Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?
Or shall the tree be envious of the dove
Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings
To wander wherewithal and find its joys?
We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs
Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves,
But eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower
Above us in their beauty, and must reign
In right thereof; for 'tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might:
That difficulty, to which we have referred, of surmising how there could
have remained material to fill out a poem on the Titanomachia which had
begun with the Titans, all but one, dethroned already, seems to increase
when we consider the above speech of Oceanus, setting forth with
resigned prophetic wisdom the fated necessity of their fall. It
increases still further when Clymene, following on the same side as
Oceanus, tells how she has heard the strains of a new and ravishing
music from the lyre of Apollo which have made her cast away in despair
the instrument of her own formless music, the sea-shell; and still
further again when in the next book we witness the meeting of Apollo
with the Titaness Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, who for his sake has
'forsaken old and sacred thrones,' and when we hear him proclaim how in
the inspiration of her presence,
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.
Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
And deify me, as if some blithe wine
Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,
And so become immortal.
Before the glory of this new-deified Apollo, what could long have
delayed the defeat or abdication of the elder sun-god Hyperion?--what
could have remained for Keats to invent that should have much enriched
or lengthened out his poem? The sense of the difficulty of sustaining
the battle of the primeval powers against these new and nobler
successors may well have been one of the things (even had he not had
Milton's comparative failure with the warfare in heaven to warn him)
that hindered his going on with his poem. To the reader there occurs
another and even greater difficulty: and that is that Keats had already
given to his fallen elder gods or Titans so much not only of majesty but
of nobleness and goodness that it is hard to see wherein he could have
shown their successors excelling them. He had represented Saturn as
wroth, indeed, at his downfall, but chiefly because it leaves him
--smother'd up,
And buried from all godlike exercise
Of influence benign on planets pale,
Of admonition to the winds and seas,
Of peaceful sway above man's harvesting,
And all those acts which Deity supreme
Doth ease its heart of love in.
Increase of knowledge, of skill in the arts of life and of beauty, the
gods of the new dynasty might indeed extend to mankind, but what
increase of love and beneficence? Even the relations of Saturn to his
father Coelus (the Greek Uranus), which in the ancient cosmogony are of
the crudest barbarity, Keats in _Hyperion_ makes benignant and
sympathetic.
Such inherent difficulties as these might well have made Keats diffident
of his power to complete his poem as a rounded or satisfying whole had
its intended scope been what we are told. But I am sometimes tempted to
conjecture that his root idea had been other than what his friends
attributed to him,--that battle, and the victory of the Olympians over
the Titans or Giants or both, would not in fact have been his main
theme, but that he intended to present to us Apollo, enthroned after
the abdication of Hyperion, in the character of a prophet and to have
put into his mouth revelations of things to come, a great monitory
vision of the world's future. To such a supposition some colour is
surely lent by the speech of Apollo above quoted on the 'knowledge
enormous' just poured into his brain by Mnemosyne. On the other hand it
has to be remembered that Keats himself, in a forecast of his work made
ten months before it was written, shows clearly that he then meant his
Apollo to be above all things a god of action.
Keats himself, writing some eight months later, when he had finally
decided to give up his epic attempt, cites as his chief reason a
re-action of his critical judgment against the Miltonic style, at least
as a style suitable for him, Keats, to work in:--
I have given up _Hyperion_--there were too many Miltonic inversions in
it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather,
artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English
ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some
lines from _Hyperion_, and put a mark * to the false beauty proceeding
from art, and one to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul 'twas
imagination--I cannot make the distinction--Every now and then there
is a Miltonic intonation--But I cannot make the division properly.
And again: 'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to
him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the
verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.' This
re-action was certainly not fully conscious or formulated in Keats's
mind by the previous winter. But it would seem none the less to have
been working in him instinctively: for the moment he had turned, in _The
Eve of St Agnes_, to a romance in the flowing, straightforward,
Spenserian-Chattertonian manner of narration, he had been able to carry
his task through with felicity and ease.
This was on his excursion to Hampshire in the latter half of January.
Within three weeks of his return he was at work again on a kindred
theme of popular and traditional belief, _The Eve of St Mark_. The
belief was that a person standing in the church porch of any town or
village on the evening before St Mark's day (April 24th) might thereby
gain a vision of all the inhabitants fated to die or fall grievously
sick within the year. Those destined to die would be seen passing in but
not returning, those who were to be in peril and recover would go in and
after a while come out. The heroine of the poem, to whom this vision
would appear, was to be a maiden of Canterbury named Bertha, no doubt
after the first Christian queen of Kent, the Frankish wife of Ethelbert;
the scene, Canterbury itself, memories of the poet's stay there in 1817
mingling apparently with impressions of his recent visit to Chichester.
Keats never got on with this poem after his first three or four days'
work (February 14th-17th 1819), and it remains a mere fragment,
tantalizing and singular, of a hundred and twenty lines' length. Why?
Perhaps merely because it was begun almost at the very hour when he
became the accepted lover of Fanny Brawne. We have seen how various
causes, but chiefly the obsession of that passion, paralysed his power
of work for the next two months, and what were the thoughts and tasks
that held him fully occupied afterwards. It has been suggested by the
late Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Keats meant to give the story a turn
applicable to himself and his mistress, and that the present fragment
would have served as the opening of a poem which afterwards, in
sickness, he mentioned to her as being in his mind:--'I would show some
one in love, as I am, with a person living in such Liberty as you do.' I
can find no sure evidence, internal or external, either to refute the
suggestion or confirm it.
The fragment of _The Eve of St Mark_ is Keats's only attempt at
narrative writing in the eight-syllabled four-stress couplet. Its pace
and movement are nearer to Chaucer in _The Romaunt of the Rose_ or _The
House of Fame_ than to Coleridge or Scott or any other model of Keats's
own time. That he was writing with Chaucer in his mind is proved by some
lines in which he tries in Rowley fashion to reproduce Chaucer's actual
style and vocabulary, thus:--
Gif ye wol stonden hardie wight--
Amiddes of the blacke night--
Righte in the churche porch, pardie
Ye wol behold a companie
Approchen thee full dolourouse
For sooth to sain from everich house
Be it in city or village
Wol come the Phantom and image
Of ilka gent and ilka carle
Who coldè Deathè hath in parle
And wol some day that very year
Touchen with foulè venime spear
And sadly do them all to die--
Hem all shalt thou see verilie--
And everichon shall by thee pass
All who must die that year, Alas.
These lines give us a sure key to the main motive of the story which was
to follow. With some others in the same style, they are quoted by the
poet as composing a gloss written in minute script on the margin of a
wonderful illuminated book over which the damsel is found poring and
which is to have some mysterious influence on her destiny. More
noticeable and interesting than their somewhat random Rowleyism is the
way in which some of the descriptive lines in the body of the poem
anticipate the very cadences of Chaucer's great latter-day disciple,
William Morris. The first eight or ten lines of the following might have
come straight from _The Man born to be King_ or _The Land East of the
Sun_, and provide, as it were, in the history of our poetry a direct
stepping-stone between Chaucer and Morris:--
The city streets were clean and fair
From wholesome drench of April rains;
And, on the western window panes,
The chilly sunset faintly told
Of unmatur'd green vallies cold,
Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,
Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,
Of primroses by shelter'd rills,
And daisies on the aguish hills.
Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell:
The silent streets were crowded well
With staid and pious companies,
Warm from their fire-side orat'ries;
And moving, with demurest air,
To even-song, and vesper prayer.
Each arched porch, and entry low,
Was fill'd with patient folk and slow,
With whispers hush, and shuffling feet,
While play'd the organ loud and sweet.
The relation of this fragment to the Pre-Raphaelites of the mid
nineteenth century and their work is altogether curious and interesting.
It was natural that it should appeal to them by the pure and living
freshness of English nature-description with which it opens, by the
perfectly imagined scene of hushed movement in the twilight streets that
follows, perhaps most of all by the insistent delight in vivid colour,
and in minuteness of animated and suggestive detail, which marks the
final indoor scene of the maiden Bertha over her book by firelight. But
what is strange is that Rossetti should not only have coupled the
fragment with _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ as 'the chastest and choicest
example of Keats's maturing manner,' an opinion which may well pass, but
that he should have claimed it as showing 'astonishingly real
mediævalism for one not bred an artist,' and even as the finest picture
of the Middle Age period ever done. The truth is that the description of
the Sabbath streets and the maiden's chamber are not mediæval at all and
probably not intended to be, while the one thing so intended, the
illuminated manuscript from which she reads, is a quite impossible
invention jumbling fantastically together things that never could have
figured in the same manuscript, things from the Golden Legend, from the
book of Exodus, the book of Revelation, with others from no possible
manuscript source at all. Keats evidently took some interest in
mediæval illuminations, for in speculating on the old skulls of supposed
monks at Beauly Abbey he had apostrophized one of them,--
Poor Skull, thy fingers set ablaze
With silver saint in golden rays,
The holy Missal: thou didst craze
Mid bead and spangle,
While others pass'd their idle days
In coil and wrangle.
But he can have seen few and made no study of them, and his imagined
mystically illuminated book in _The Eve of St Mark_ is invented with no
such fine instinctive tact or likelihood as his imagined Grecian urn of
the ode.
An elder member of the Rossetti circle, that shrewd and caustic, very
originally minded if only half accomplished Scottish poet and painter,
William Bell Scott, was much exercised over his friend's misconception
in this matter. I will give his comment, certainly in some points just,
as written to me in 1885. 'On reading the fragment it seems to me
impossible to resist the conclusion that the scene represented is of the
present day. The dull and quiet Sunday evening represented is of our
time in any cathedral town in England, not the Sunday evening of old
when morning Mass was the religious observance, and the evening was
spent in long-bow and popinjay games and practice. The weary girl sits
at a coal fire with a screen behind her, a Japanese screen apparently,'
[Japanese or old English lacquer imitating Oriental the screen certainly
is]. 'Every item of the description is modern. But alas! what shall we
say to the ancient illuminated MS. she has in hand, with the pictures of
early martyrs dying by fire, the Inquisition punishment of heretics, and
the writing annotated, the notes referred to modern printers' signs? As
he describes a mediæval MS. book so badly, it may be said he intended
the scene of the poem to be mediæval, but did the description also so
badly. But no, the description of the dreariness of Sunday evening,
utterly silent but for the passing of the people going to evening
sermon, is admirable.' By 'badly' my old friend meant inexactly. But
Keats never was nor tried to be exact in his antiquarianism. If we take
_The Eve of St Agnes_ as intended to be a faithful picture from the
Middle Ages, it simply goes to pieces in the line--
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.
Probably neither _The Eve of St Agnes_ nor _St Mark's Eve_ were dated
with any definiteness in the poet's mind at all. A reference he makes to
the last-named piece in a letter from Winchester the following autumn
lends no definite support either to the modern or the mediæval
interpretation:--'Some time since I began a poem called _The Eve of St
Mark_, quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you
the sensation of walking about an old country town on a coolish
evening.' The impression of mediævalism which the two poems convey is
not by any evidence of antiquarian knowledge or accuracy but by the
intense spirit of romance that is in them,--by that impassioned delight
in vivid colour and beautiful, imaginative detail which we have noted.
After his four days' start on this poem in February came the spell of
two months' idleness which towards its close yielded _La Belle Dame sans
Merci_ and came to an end with the _Ode to Psyche_, followed in the
course of May by the four other odes. The choral _Song of the Four
Fairies_, for some inchoate opera, sent by Keats to his brother together
with _La Belle Dame_, is not worth pausing upon, and we may pass to
Keats's main work of the ensuing July and August, _Otho the Great_. This
is no fragment, having been duly finished to the last scene of the last
act; but it is very much of an experiment. The question whether Keats,
had he lived, might have become a great dramatic poet and creator is one
of the most interesting possible. His intense and growing interest in
humankind, together with his recorded and avowed liability to receive
('like putty,' as modern criticism has conjectured of Shakespeare) the
impression of any character he might come in contact with, has led many
students to believe that he had in him the stuff of a great creative
playwright. _Otho the Great_ does nothing to solve the question. The
plot and construction, as we have said, were entirely Brown's, building
with quite arbitrary freedom on certain bald historical facts of the
rebellion raised against Otho, in the course of his Hungarian wars, by
his son Ludolf and the Red Duke Conrad of Lorraine, whom the emperor
subsequently forgave. Creation demands fore-knowledge, premeditation on
the characters you desire to create and the situations in which they are
to be placed, and Keats, Brown tells us, only foreknew what was coming
in any scene after they had sat down at the table to work on it. His
business was to supply the words, and what the result shows is only the
surprising facility with which he could by this time improvise poetry to
order. The speeches in Otho are much more than passably poetical, they
are often quite brilliant and touched with Keats's unique genius for
felicity in lines and phrases. But they affect us as put into the mouths
of puppet speakers, not as coming out of the hearts and passions of men
and women.
In rhythm they are vital and varied enough, in style extremely
high-pitched, and they resemble much Elizabethan work of the second
order in smothering action and passion under a redundance and feverish
excess of poetry. There is violence amounting to hysteria alike in the
villainy of Conrad and of his sister Auranthe, the remorse of Albert,
and the mixture of filial devotion and lover's blindness in Ludolf, with
his vengeful frenzy when he finds how he has been gulled. Keats, it is
recorded, had in his eye the special gift of Edmund Kean for enacting
frantic extremes and long-drawn agonies of passion; and it is possible
that as played by him the last act, of which Keats took the conduct as
well as the writing into his own hands, might have proved effective on
the stage. It shows the maddened Conrad bent on executing vengeance on
the traitress Auranthe, and insanely stabbing empty air while he
imagines he is stabbing his victim, until curtains drawn aside disclose
an inner apartment where she has at the very moment fallen self-slain.
But it is doubtful whether any acting could carry off a plot so
ultra-romantically extravagant and in places so obscure, or characters
so incommensurably more eloquent than they are alive. Nor do lovers of
Keats commonly care to read the play twice, for all its bursts and
coruscations of fine poetry, feeling that these do not spring from the
poet's own inner self and imagination, but are rather as fireworks
fitted by a man of genius on to a frame which another man, barely of
talent, has put together.
The case is different when we come to _King Stephen_, the brief dramatic
fragment on which Keats wrought alone after _Otho the Great_ was
finished. This teaches us one thing at any rate about Keats, that he
could at will call away his imagination from matters luxurious or
refreshing to the spirit, from themes broodingly meditative or
tragically tender, to deal in a manner of fiery energy with the clash of
war. He is still enough a child of the Renaissance to make his
twelfth-century knights and princes quote Homer in their taunts and
counter-taunts; but in the three-and-a-half scenes which he wrote he
makes us feel his Stephen, defiant in defeat, a real elemental force and
not a mere mouther of valiant rhetoric, fine and concentrated as the
rhetoric sometimes is, as for instance when an enemy taunts him with
being disarmed and helpless and he cries back, 'What weapons has the
lion but himself?'
In persuading Keats to work with him on a tragedy for the stage, Brown
had had the entirely laudable motive of putting his friend in the way of
earning money for them both. But what would we not have given that the
time and labour thus, as it turned out, thrown away should have yielded
us from Keats's self another _Isabella_ or _Eve of St Agnes_, or a
finished _Eve of St Mark_, or even another _Lamia_? Brown's next piece
of suggestion and would-be help was far more unfortunate still. We have
seen how in the unhappy weeks after Keats's return from Winchester in
October, he spent his mornings in Brown's company spinning the verses of
a comic and satiric fairy tale the scheme of which they had concocted
together,--_The Cap and Bells_ or _The Jealousies_. The idea of the
friends in this was no doubt to throw a challenge to Byron, the first
cantos of whose _Don Juan_ had lately been launched upon a dazzled and
scandalized world. Byron's genius, the spirit, that is, of brilliant
devilry and worldly mockery which was the sincerest part of his genius,
with his rich experiences of life, travel and society, of passion and
dissipation and the extremes of fame and obloquy, and his incomparable
address and versatility in playing tricks of legerdemain with ideas and
language, had here all found their perfect opportunity for display.
Attempts at worldly banter and satire by the tender-hearted, intensely
loving and imagining Keats, with his narrow and in the main rather
second-rate social experience, were never more than wry-mouthed as I
have called them, ineffectual, and essentially against the grain.
His collaborator Brown imagined he had a gift for satiric fairy tales,
but his recorded efforts in that kind are silly and dull as well as
inclining to coarseness. What happier result could be expected from
their new joint work than that which posterity deplores in _The Cap and
Bells_? The story is of an Indian Faery emperor Elfinan,--a name
suggested by Spenser,--enamoured of an English maiden Bertha Pearl,--the
very Bertha of _The Eve of St Mark_, resuscitated to our amazement,--but
having for political reasons to seek in marriage a Faery princess
Bellanaine, who herself is in love with an English youth named Hubert.
The eighty-eight stanzas which Keats wrote on those autumn mornings in
Brown's room carry the tale no farther than Elfinan's despatching his
chancellor Crafticanto on an embassy to fetch Bellanaine on an aerial
journey from her home in Imaus, his consultation with his magician Hum
as to the means of escaping the marriage and conveying himself secretly
to England, his departure, and the arrival of Bellanaine and her escort
to find the palace empty and the emperor flown. How the seriously,
perhaps tragically, conceived Bertha of _St Mark's Eve_, with the mystic
book fated to have influence on her life, could have been worked, as
they were evidently meant to be worked, into this new ridiculous
narrative, we cannot guess, nor how the relations of Bellanaine with her
mortal lover would have been managed.
Before Keats's deepening despondency and recklessness caused him to drop
writing altogether, which apparently happened early in December, he was
evidently out of conceit with _The Cap and Bells_.[5] One of the most
unfortunate things about the attempt is the choice of the Spenserian
stanza for its metre. Keats had probably wished to avoid seeming merely
to imitate Byron, as he might have seemed to do had he written in the
_ottava rima_ of Don Juan, the one perfectly fit measure for such a
blend of fantasy and satire as he was attempting. But not even Keats's
power over the Spenserian stanza could make it a fit vehicle for his
purpose. Thomson and Shenstone had used it in work of mild and leisurely
playfulness, but to bite in satire or sting in epigram it cannot
effectively be bent. To my sense the precedent most in Keats's mind was
not these, but the before-mentioned translation of Wieland's _Oberon_ by
Sotheby. Sotheby had invented a modified form of the Spenserian stanza
riming _abbaccddc_ instead of _abcbbdbdd_ and keeping the final
alexandrine. Much of the machinery and spirit of _The Cap and
Bells_--the magic journeys through the air--the comic atmosphere and
adventures of the courts--are closely akin to the jocular parts of this
_Oberon_. Some of the passages of mere fun and playfulness are pleasant
enough, like that description of a dilapidated hackney coach (much
resembling the four-wheeler of our youth) which Hunt selected to publish
in the _Indicator_ while Keats was lying sick in his house the next
year: but the attempts at social satire are almost always feeble and
tiresome, and still more so those at political satire, turning for the
most part rather obscurely on the scandals, then at their height,
attending the relations of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In the
faery narrative itself there break forth momentary flashes from the true
genius of the poet, such as might delight the reader if he could lose
his sense of irritation at the rubbish from amidst which they gleam. As
thus, of the princess's flight through the air (was Keats thinking, in
the first line, of the children carried heavenward by angels in
Orcagna's _Triumph of Death_?)
As in old pictures tender cherubim
A child's soul thro' the sapphir'd canvas bear,
So, thro' a real heaven, on they swim
With the sweet princess on her plumag'd lair,
Speed giving to the winds her lustrous hair.
Or this, telling how Bertha of Canterbury, in Keats's queer new
conception of her, was really a changeling born in the jungle:--
She is a changeling of my management;
She was born at midnight in an Indian wild;
Her mother's screams with the striped tiger's blent,
While the torch-bearing slaves a halloo sent
Into the jungles.
Or again, some of the stanzas describing the welcome prepared in
Elfinan's capital for the faery princess after her flight: note in the
last the persistence with which Keats carries into these incongruous
climates his passion for the English spring flowers:--
The morn is full of holiday; loud bells
With rival clamours ring from every spire;
Cunningly-station'd music dies and swells
In echoing places; when the winds respire,
Light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire;
A metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm,
Comes from the northern suburbs; rich attire
Freckles with red and gold the moving swarm;
While here and there clear trumpets blow a keen alarm.
And again:--
As flowers turn their faces to the sun,
So on our flight with hungry eyes they gaze,
And, as we shap'd our course, this, that way run,
With mad-cap pleasure, or hand-clasp'd amaze;
Sweet in the air a mild-ton'd music plays,
And progresses through its own labyrinth;
Buds gather'd from the green spring's middle-days,
They scatter'd,--daisy, primrose, hyacinth,--
Or round white columns wreath'd from capital to plinth.
After his mornings spent in Brown's company over the strained
frivolities of _The Cap and Bells_, Keats was in the same weeks
striving, alone with himself of an evening, to utter the new thoughts on
life and poetry which he found taking shape in the depths of his being.
He took up again the abandoned _Hyperion_, and began rewriting it no
longer as a direct narrative, but as a vision shewn and interpreted by a
supernatural monitress acting to him somewhat the same part as Virgil
acts to Dante. In altering the form and structure of the poem Keats also
takes pains to alter its style, de-Miltonizing and de-latinizing,
sometimes terribly to their disadvantage, the passages which he takes
over from the earlier version. It is not in these, it is in the two
hundred and seventy lines of its wholly new pre-amble or introduction
that the value of the altered poem lies.
The reader remembers how Keats had broken off his work on the original
_Hyperion_ at the point where Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory and mother of
the Muses, is enkindling the brain of Apollo by mysteriously imparting
to him her ancient wisdom and all-embracing knowledge. Following a clue
which he had found in a Latin book of mythology he had lately bought,[6]
he now identifies this Greek Mnemosyne with the Roman Moneta, goddess of
warning or admonition; and being possibly also aware that the temple of
Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome was not far from that of Saturn,
makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess and guardian of Saturn's
temple. His vision takes him first into a grove or garden of trees and
flowers and fountains, with a feast of summer fruits spread on the moss
before an embowered arbour. The events that follow, and the converse
held between the poet and the priestess, are in their ethical and
allegoric meanings at many points obscure, and capable, like all symbols
that are truly symbolic, of various interpretations. But the leading
ideas they embody can be recognised clearly enough.
They are primarily the same ideas, developed in a deeper and more sombre
spirit, as had been present in Keats's mind almost from the beginning:
the idea that in the simple delights of nature and of art as
unreflectingly felt in youth there is no abiding place for the poetic
spirit, that from the enjoyment of such delights it must rise to
thoughts higher and more austere and prompting to more arduous tasks:
the further idea that to fit it for such tasks two things above all are
necessary, growth in human sympathy through the putting down of self,
and growth in knowledge and wisdom through strenuous study and
meditation. Such ideas had already been thrown out by Keats in _Sleep
and Poetry_; they had been developed with much more fullness, though in
a manner made obscure from redundance of imagery, in _Endymion_,
especially in the third book: they had been expressed with a difference
under the new and clearer symbolism of the Two Chambers of Thought in
Keats's letter to Reynolds from Teignmouth. About the same hour, the
hour, as I think, of the finest achievement of Keats's genius as well as
of its highest promise,--there had appeared in his letters and some of
his verses the quite new idea, which would have been inconceivable to
him a year earlier, of questioning whether poetry was a worthy pursuit
at all in a world full of pain and destruction. Musing beside the sea on
a calm evening of April, he anticipates the Tennysonian vision of
'nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine.' In letters written during
the next few weeks he insists over and over again alike upon the
acuteness of his new sense that the world is 'full of Misery and
Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression,' and upon the poet's need of
knowledge, and again knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to take away
the heat and fever and ease 'the Burden of the Mystery.' The first
passage that shows the dawn of a desire in his mind to do good to a
suffering world by means possibly other than his art is that well-known
and deeply significant one:--
I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment
in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no
worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do
it with their society--some with their wit--some with their
benevolence--some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good
humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the
command of great Nature--there is but one way for me. The road lies
through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.
The next time he expresses such an idea, it comes struck from him in a
darker mood and in phrases of greater poignancy:--'were it in my choice,
I would reject a Petrarcal coronation,--on account of my dying day, and
because women have cancers ... I am never alone without rejoicing that
there is such a thing as death--without placing my ultimate in the glory
of dying for a great human purpose.'
The pressure of the sense of human misery, the hunger of the soul for
knowledge and vision to lighten it, though they naturally do not colour
his impersonal work of the next year and a half, nevertheless set their
mark, the former strain in especial, upon his most deeply felt
meditative verse, as in the odes to the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn,
and reappear occasionally in his private confessions to his friends.
Now, after intense experience both of personal sorrow and of poetic
toil, and under the strain of incipient disease and consuming passion,
it is borne in upon his solitary hours that such poetry as he has
written, the irresponsible poetry of beauty and romance, has been mere
idle dreaming, a refuge of the spirit from its prime duty of sharing and
striving to alleviate the troubles of the world. It seems to him that
every ordinary man and woman is worth more to mankind than such a
dreamer. If poetry is to be worth anything to the world, it must be a
different kind of poetry from this: the true poet is something the very
opposite of the mere dreamer: he is one who has prepared himself through
self-renunciation and arduous effort and extreme probation of the spirit
to receive and impart the highest wisdom, the wisdom that comes from
full knowledge of the past and foresight into the future. Of such wisdom
_The Fall of Hyperion_ in its amended form, as revealed and commented by
Mnemosyne-Moneta, the great priestess and prophetess, remembrancer and
admonisher in one, was meant to be a sample,--or such an attempt at a
sample as Keats at the present stage of his mental growth could supply.
But the attempt soon proved beyond his strength and was abandoned.
The preamble, or induction, he had finished; and this, if we leave out
the futile eighteen lines with which it begins, contains much lofty
thought conveyed in noble imagery and in a style of blank verse quite
his own and independent of all models. Take the feast of fruits,
symbolic of the poet's early unreflecting joys, and the new thirst for
some finer and more inspiring elixir which follows it:--
On a mound
Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits,
Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal
By angel tasted or our Mother Eve;
For empty shells were scattered on the grass,
And grape-stalks but half bare, and remnants more
Sweet-smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know.
Still was more plenty than the fabled horn
Thrice emptied could pour forth at banqueting,
For Proserpine return'd to her own fields,
Where the white heifers low. And appetite,
More yearning than on earth I ever felt,
Growing within, I ate deliciously,--
And, after not long, thirsted; for thereby
Stood a cool vessel of transparent juice
Sipp'd by the wander'd bee, the which I took,
And pledging all the mortals of the world,
And all the dead whose names are in our lips,
Drank. That full draught is parent of my theme.
The draught plunges him into a profound sleep, from which he awakens a
changed being among utterly changed surroundings. The world in which he
finds himself is no longer a delicious garden but an ancient and august
temple,--the noblest and most nobly described architectural vision in
all Keats's writings:--
I look'd around upon the curved sides
Of an old sanctuary, with roof august,
Builded so high, it seemed that filmed clouds
Might spread beneath as o'er the stars of heaven.
So old the place was, I remember'd none
The like upon the earth: what I had seen
Of grey cathedrals, buttress'd walls, rent towers,
The superannuations of sunk realms,
Or Nature's rocks toil'd hard in waves and winds,
Seem'd but the faulture of decrepit things
To that eternal domed monument.
The sights the poet sees and the experiences which befall him within
this temple; the black gates closed against the east,--which must
symbolize the forgotten past of the world; the stupendous image
enthroned aloft in the west, with the altar at its foot, approachable
only by an interminable flight of steps; the wreaths of incense veiling
the altar and spreading a mysterious sense of happiness; the voice of
one ministering at the altar and shrouded in the incense--a voice at
once of invitation and menace, bidding the dreamer climb to the summit
of the steps by a given moment or he will perish utterly; the sense of
icy numbness and death which comes upon him before he can reach even the
lowest step; the new life that pours into him as he touches the step;
his accosting of the mysterious veiled priestess who stands on the
altar platform when he has climbed to it; all these phases of the poet's
ordeal are impressively told, but are hard to interpret otherwise than
dubiously and vaguely. Matters become more definite a moment afterwards,
when in answer to the poet's questions the priestess tells him that none
can climb to the altar beside which he stands,--the altar, we must
suppose, of historic and prophetic knowledge where alone, after due
sacrifice of himself, the poet can find true inspiration,--except those
to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery and will not let them rest.
The poet pleads that there are thousands of ordinary men and women who
feel the sorrows of the world and do their best to mitigate them, and is
answered,--
'Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries'
Rejoin'd that voice; 'they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human face,
No music but a happy-noted voice:
They come not here, they have no thought to come;
And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself: think of the earth;
What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?
What haven? every creature hath its home,
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low--
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.
What a pilgrimage has the soul of Keats gone through, when he utters
this heartrending cry, from the day, barely three years before, when he
was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of the
poetic life and of the end that awaits it:--
These are the living pleasures of the bard,
But richer far posterity's award.
What shall he murmur with his latest breath,
When his proud eye looks through the film of death?
The truth is that, in all this, Keats in his depression of mind and body
has become fiercely unjust to his own achievements and their value: for
if posterity were asked, would it not reply that the things of sheer
beauty his youth has left us, draughts drawn from the inmost wells of
nature and antiquity and romance, are of greater solace and refreshment
to his kind than anything he could have been likely to achieve by
deliberate effort in defiance of his natural genius or in premature
anticipation of its maturity?
At this point there follows a fretful passage, ill-written or rather
only roughly drafted, and therefore not included in the transcripts of
the fragments by his friends, in which his monitress affirms
contemptuously the gulf that separates the romantic dreamer from the
true poet. He accepts the reproof and the threatened punishment, the
more willingly if they are to extend to certain 'hectorers in proud bad
verse' (he means Byron) who have aroused his spleen. Reverting to a
loftier strain, and acknowledging the grace she has so far shown him,
the poet asks his monitress to reveal herself. He had probably long
before been impressed by engravings of the well-known ancient statue of
the seated Mnemosyne sitting forward with her chin resting on her hand,
her arm and shoulder heavily swathed in drapery: but his vision of her
here seems wholly independent, and is noble and mystically haunting.
When she has signified to him in a softened voice that the gigantic
image above the altar is that of Saturn, and that the scenes of the
world's past she is about to evoke before him are those of the fall of
Saturn, the poet relates:--
As near as an immortal's sphered words
Could to a mother's soften were these last:
And yet I had a terror of her robes,
And chiefly of the veils that from her brow
Hung pale, and curtain'd her in mysteries,
That made my heart too small to hold its blood.
This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand
Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face,
Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
It works a constant change, which happy death
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage; it had past
The lilly and the snow; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face.
But for her eyes I should have fled away;
They held me back with a benignant light,
Soft, mitigated by divinest lids
Half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd
Of all external things; they saw me not,
But in blank splendour beam'd, like the mild moon,
Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
What eyes are upward cast.
The aspirant now adoringly entreats her to disclose the tragedy that he
perceives to be working in her brain: she consents, and from this point
begins the original _Hyperion_ re-cast and narrated as a vision within
the main vision, with comments put into the mouth of the prophetess. But
the scheme, which under no circumstances, one would say, could have been
a prosperous one, was soon abandoned, and this, the last of Keats's
great fragments, breaks off near the beginning of the second book.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Carm._ iii. 4, which probably Keats knew also at first hand.
[2] The daughter of Styx is Victory, and 'halecret' is a corslet.
[3] The passage ending, 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter
than the pleasure of pleasure itself.'
[4]
With duller steel than the Persèan sword
They cut away no formless monster's head.
[5] See the letter to Taylor quoted above, pp. 380, 381.
[6] _Auctores Mythographi Latini_, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742.
Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after
his death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon
Bailey (Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in
Keats's mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus.
CHAPTER XV
FEBRUARY-AUGUST 1820: HAMPSTEAD AND KENTISH TOWN: PUBLICATION OF _LAMIA_
VOLUME.
Letters from the sick-bed--To Fanny Brawne--To James Rice--Barry
Cornwall--Hopes of returning health--Haydon's private
view--Improvement not maintained--Summer at Kentish Town--Kindness of
Leigh Hunt--Misery and jealousy--Severn and Mrs Gisborne--Invitation
from Shelley--Keats on _The Cenci_--_La Belle Dame_ published--A
disfigured version--The _Lamia_ volume published--Charles Lamb's
appreciation--The _New Monthly_--Other favourable reviews--Taylor and
Blackwood--A skirmish--Impenitence--And impertinence--Jeffrey in the
_Edinburgh_--Appreciation full though tardy--Fury of Byron--Shelley on
_Hyperion_--And on Keats in general--Impressions of Crabb Robinson.
Such and so gloomy, although with no ignoble gloom, had been Keats's
deeper thoughts on poetry and life, and such the imagery under which he
figured them, during the last weeks when the state of his health enabled
his mind to work with anything approaching its natural power. From the
night of his seizure on February 3rd 1820, which was three months after
his twenty-fourth birthday, he never wrote verse again: unless indeed
the lines found on the margin of his manuscript of _The Cap and Bells_
were written from his sick-bed and in a moment of bitterness addressed
in his mind to Fanny Brawne: but from a certain pitch and formality of
style in them, I should take them rather to be meant for putting into
the mouth of one of the characters in some such historical play as he
had been meditating in the weeks before Christmas:--
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.
For several days after the hæmorrhage he was kept to his room and his
bed, and for nearly two months had to lead a strictly invalid life. At
first he could bear no one in the room except the doctor and Brown.
'While I waited on him day and night,' testifies Brown, 'his instinctive
generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance of his eye, a
motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely
nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment.' (How often have these
words come home to the heart of the present writer in days when he used
to be busy about the mute sick-bed of another of these shining ones!)
Severn, nursing Keats later under conditions even more trying and
hopeless, bears similar testimony to his unabated charm and sweetness in
suffering. Almost from the first he was able to write little letters to
his sister Fanny, and is careful to give them a cheering and re-assuring
turn. When after some days he is down on a sofa-bed made up for him in
the front parlour he tells her what an improvement it is:--
Besides I see all that passes-for instance now, this morning--if I had
been in my own room I should not have seen the coals brought in. On
Sunday between the hours of twelve and one I descried a Pot boy. I
conjectured it might be the one o'clock beer--Old women with bobbins
and red cloaks and unpresuming bonnets I see creeping about the heath.
Gipseys after hare skins and silver spoons. Then goes by a fellow with
a wooden clock under his arm that strikes a hundred and more. Then
comes the old French emigrant (who has been very well to do in France)
with his hands joined behind on his hips, and his face full of
political schemes. Then passes Mr David Lewis, a very good-natured,
good-looking old gentleman who has been very kind to Tom and George
and me. As for those fellows the Brick-makers they are always passing
to and fro. I mustn't forget the two old maiden Ladies in Well Walk
who have a Lap dog between them that they are very anxious about. It
is a corpulent Little beast whom it is necessary to coax along with an
ivory-tipp'd cane. Carlo our Neighbour Mrs Brawne's dog and it meet
sometimes. Lappy thinks Carlo a devil of a fellow and so do his
Mistresses.
Very soon his betrothed was allowed to pay him little visits from next
door, and he was able to take pleasure in these and in a constant
interchange of notes with her. He tells her of his thoughts and some of
his words (which are not quite the same as Brown puts in his mouth) at
the moment of his seizure:--
You must believe--you shall, you will--that I can do nothing, say
nothing, think nothing of you but what has its spring in the Love
which has so long been my pleasure and torment. On the night I was
taken ill--when so violent a rush of blood came to my Lungs that I
felt nearly suffocated--I assure you I felt it possible I might not
survive, and at that moment thought of nothing but you. When I said to
Brown 'this is unfortunate' I thought of you. 'Tis true that since the
first two or three days other subjects have entered my head.
On the whole his love-thoughts keep peaceable and contented, and his
jealousies are for the moment at rest. But he has to struggle with the
sense that considering his health and circumstances he is bound in
fairness to release her from her engagement: an idea which to her credit
she seems steadily to have refused to entertain.
My greatest torment since I have known you has been the fear of you
being a little inclined to the Cressid; but that suspicion I dismiss
utterly and remain happy in the surety of your Love, which I assure
you is as much a wonder to me as a delight. Send me the words 'Good
night' to put under my pillow....
You know our situation--what hope is there if I should be recovered
ever so soon--my very health will not suffer me to make any great
exertion. I am recommended not even to read poetry, much less write
it. I wish I had even a little hope. I cannot say forget me--but I
would mention that there are impossibilities in the world. No more of
this. I am not strong enough to be weaned--take no notice of it in
your good night.
The healthier and more tranquil tenor of his thoughts and feelings for
the time is beautifully expressed in the often quoted letter written to
James Rice a fortnight after his attack:--
I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not passed
a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering
under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify, that
acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had
lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that
illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my
mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive
things in a truer light),--how astonishingly does the chance of
leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us!
Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble', I think of green fields;
I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from
my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just
created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected
with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I
have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature,
but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring
are what I want to see again.
Some time in the month he owns to his beloved that the thoughts of what
he had hoped to do in poetry mingle with his thoughts of her:--
How illness stands as a barrier betwixt me and you! Even if I was
well--I must make myself as good a Philosopher as possible. Now I have
had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found
other thoughts intrude upon me. 'If I should die,' said I to myself,
'I have left no immortal work behind me--nothing to make my friends
proud of my memory--but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all
things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.'
Thoughts like these came very feebly whilst I was in health and every
pulse beat for you--now you divide with this (may I say it?) 'last
infirmity of noble minds' all my reflection.
Presently we learn from his letters that Reynolds, Dilke, and one or two
other friends have been dropping in to see him. He expresses himself
touched by the courtesy of a new poetical acquaintance of much more
prosperous worldly connexions than his own, Mr Bryan Waller Procter
('Barry Cornwall') in sending him copies of his volumes lately
published. Keats does not mention that one of these contains a version,
_The Sicilian Story_, of the same tale from Boccaccio as his own as yet
unpublished _Isabella_: but he cannot quite conceal his perception of
those qualities in Barry Cornwall's work, its prevailing strain of
fluent imitative common-place, its affectations and exaggerations of
Hunt's and his own leanings towards over-lusciousness, which Shelley, as
we shall see, found so exasperating. 'However,' he adds, 'that is
nothing--I think he likes poetry for its own sake not his.'[1] Before
the end of the month we find him taking pleasure, as in earlier
Februaries, in the song of the thrush, which portends, he hopes, an end
of the north-east wind. The month of March brings signs of gradually
returning strength. Brown, he says, declares he is getting stout; and
having in the first weeks of his illness avowed that he was so feeble he
could be flattered into a hope in which faith had no part, he now begins
really to believe in his own recovery and to let his thoughts run again
on fame and poetry. He writes to Fanny Brawne the most trustful and
least agitated of all his love letters:--
You uttered a half complaint once that I only lov'd your Beauty. Have
I nothing else then to love in you but that? Do not I see a heart
naturally furnish'd with wings imprison itself with me? No ill
prospect has been able to turn your thoughts a moment from me. This
perhaps should be as much a subject of sorrow as joy--but I will not
talk of that. Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire
devotion to you: how much more deeply then must I feel for you knowing
you love me. My Mind has been the most discontented and restless one
that ever was put into a body too small for it. I never felt my Mind
repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment--upon no
person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of
window: you always concentrate my whole senses. The anxiety shown
about our Loves in your last note is an immense pleasure to me:
however you must not suffer such speculations to molest you any more:
nor will I any more believe you can have the least pique against me.
And again: 'let me have another opportunity of years and I will not die
without being remember'd. Take care of yourself dear that we may both be
well in the summer.'
He began to get about again, and by the 25th of March was well enough to
go into town to the private view of Haydon's huge picture, finished at
last, of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. This was the occasion which
Haydon in his autobiography describes in language so vivid and with a
self-congratulation so boisterous and contagious that it is impossible
in reading not to share his sense of the day's triumph. As in the case
of the Elgin marbles three years earlier, he had achieved his object in
the face of a thousand difficulties and enmities, living the while on
the bounty of friends, some of them rich, others, as we know, the
reverse, whom his ardour and importunity had whipped up to his help. At
the last moment he had contrived to scrape together money enough to stop
the mouths of his creditors and to pay the cost of hiring the Egyptian
Hall and hanging up his gigantic canvas there, with the help of three
gigantic guardsmen, his models and assistants; and the world of taste
and fashion, realising how Haydon had been right and the established
dilettanti wrong in regard to the Elgin marbles, were determined to be
on the safe side this time in case he should turn out to be right also
about the merits of his own work.
Some exalted and many distinguished personages had been to see the
picture in his studio, and now, on the opening day, the hall was
thronged in answer to his invitations. 'All the ministers and their
ladies, all the foreign ambassadors, all the bishops, all the beauties
in high life, all the geniuses in town, and everybody of any note, were
invited and came.... The room was full. Keats and Hazlitt were up in a
corner, really rejoicing.' Hazlitt expressed in the _Edinburgh Review_
for the following August a tempered, far from undiscriminating
admiration of certain qualities in the painting. Keats himself merely
mentions to his sister Fanny, without comment, the fact of his having
been there. One wonders whether he witnessed the scene which Haydon goes
on in his effective way to narrate.
He had tried to treat the head of Christ unconventionally, had painted
and repainted it, and was nervous and dissatisfied over the result. The
crowd seemed doubtful too. 'Everybody seemed afraid, when in walked,
with all the dignity of her majestic presence, Mrs Siddons, like a Ceres
or a Juno. The whole room remained dead silent, and allowed her to
think. After a few minutes Sir George Beaumont, who was extremely
anxious, said in a very delicate manner, "How do you like the Christ?"
Everybody listened for her reply. After a moment, in a deep, loud,
tragic tone she said, "It is completely successful." I was then
presented with all the ceremonies of a levee, and she invited me to her
house in an awful tone.'... I think it is not recorded whether
Northcote's acid comment in a different sense, 'Mr Haydon, your ass is
the Saviour of your picture', was made on this famous occasion or
privately. Certainly the ass, judging by photographs of the picture as
it now hangs in a wrecked condition at Cincinnati, is the object that
first takes the eye with its black ears and shoulders strongly relieved
against the white drapery of Christ, and what looks like the realistic
treatment of the creature in contrast with the 'ideal,' that is the
vapidly pompous and pretentious, portraiture of geniuses past and
present, Newton, Voltaire, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Keats, introduced among
the crowd in the foreground.[2]
In the course of April the improvement in Keats's health failed to
maintain itself. We find him complaining much of nervous irritability
and general weakness. He is recommended, one would like to know by whom,
to avoid the excitement of writing or even reading poetry and turn to
the study of geometry--of all things!--as a sedative. He has no strength
for the walk to Walthamstow to see his young sister, and even shrinks
from the fatigue of going by coach. Brown having arranged to let his
house again and go for another tramp through Scotland--not, one would
have said under the circumstances, the course of a very considerate or
solicitous friend, but he was probably misled by Keats's apparent
improvement the month before--Brown having made this arrangement, Keats,
also on the recommendation of the doctors, thinks of sailing with him on
the packet and returning alone, in hopes of getting strength from the
sea-trip to Scotland and back. This plan, when it came to the point, he
gave up, and only accompanied his friend down the river as far as
Gravesend. Having to turn out of Wentworth Place in favour of Brown's
summer tenants, he thought of taking a lodging a few doors from the
house where Leigh Hunt was then living in Kentish Town, then still a
village on the way between London and Hampstead. Almost at the same time
he writes to Dilke in regard to his future course of life, 'My mind has
been at work all over the world to find out what to do. I have my choice
of three things, or at least two, South America, or surgeon to an
Indiaman; which last, I think, will be my fate.' For the present he
moved as he had proposed to Kentish Town (2 Wesleyan Place). Here he
stayed for six or seven weeks (approximately May 6-June 23), and then,
having suffered a set-back in the shape of two slight returns of
hæmorrhage from the lung, moved for the sake of better nursing into the
household of the ever kind and affectionate, but not less ever feckless
and ill-managing, Leigh Hunts at 13 Mortimer Terrace. With them he
remained for another period of about seven weeks, ending on August 12th.
Those three months in Kentish Town were to Keats a time of distressing
weakness and for the most part of terrible inward fretfulness and
despondency. Early in the time he speaks of intending soon to begin
(meaning begin again) on _The Cap and Bells_. When we read those vivid
stanzas quoted above (p. 446) describing the welcome by the crowd of
princess Bellanaine after her aerial journey, we are inevitably reminded
of an event--the triumphal approach and entry of Queen Caroline into
London from Dover--which happened on the 9th of June this same year. It
would be tempting to suppose that Keats may have witnessed the event and
been thereby inspired to his description. But he was too ill for such
outings, and moreover the earlier of the two stanzas comes well back in
the poem (sixty-fourth out of eighty-eight) and it is impossible to
suppose that in his then state he could have added so much to the
fragment as that would imply. So we must credit the stanzas to
imagination only, and take it as certain that his only real occupation
with poetry in these days was in passing through the press the new
volume of poems (_Lamia_, _Isabella_, etc.,) which his friends had at
last persuaded him to put forward. Even on this task his hold must have
been loose, seeing that the publishers put in without his knowledge a
note which he afterwards sharply disowned, to the effect that his reason
for dropping _Hyperion_ had been the ill reception of _Endymion_ by the
critics.
His only outing, so far as we hear, was to an exhibition of English
historical portraits at the British Institution, of which he writes to
Brown with some interest and vividness. He tells at the same time of an
invitation, which he was not well enough to accept, to meet Wordsworth,
Southey, Lamb, Haydon, and some others at supper. Leigh Hunt, despite
his engrossing literary and editorial occupations and a recent trying
illness of his own, did his best, while Keats was his inmate, to keep
him interested and amused. Keats in writing to his sister gratefully
acknowledges as much. 'Mr Hunt does everything in his power to make the
time pass as agreeably with me as possible. I read the greatest part of
the day and generally take two half-hour walks a day up and down the
terrace which is very much pester'd with cries, ballad singers, and
street music.' But the obsession of his passion, its consuming jealousy
and hopelessness, gave him little respite. He would keep his eyes fixed
all day, as he afterwards avowed, on Hampstead; and once when, at Hunt's
suggestion, they took a drive as far as the Heath, he burst into a flood
of unwonted tears and declared his heart was breaking.
His letters to his beloved in these same months are too agonizing to
read. He is so little himself in them, so merely and utterly, to borrow
words of his own, 'a fever of himself,' that many of us could not
endure, when they were first published, the thought of this
Keats-that-is-no-Keats being exposed before a hastily reading and
carelessly judging after-world, and even now cannot but regret it. All
the morbid self-torturing elements of his nature, which in health it had
been a main part of the battle of his life to subdue, and of which he
never suffered those about him to see a sign, now burst from control and
flamed out against the girl he loved and the friends he loved next best
to her. Once only, at the beginning of the time, he could write
contentedly, telling her that he is marking for her the most beautiful
passages in Spenser, 'comforting myself in being somewhat occupied to
give you however small a pleasure. It has lightened my time very much.
God bless you.' His other letters are in a tortured, almost frenzied,
strain of jealous suspicion and reproach against her and against those
of his intimates who had, as he imagined, disapproved their attachment,
or pried into or made light of it, or else had shown her too marked
attentions. Among the former were Reynolds and his sisters, from whom
for the time being he was tacitly estranged. Among the latter he
includes Brown and Dilke, with especial bitterness against Brown.
Between them all they had made, he vows, a football of his heart, and
again, 'Hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is when he cried
to Ophelia, "Go to a Nunnery, go, go!".' That these were but the
half-delirious promptings of his fevered blood is clear from the fact
that a very few weeks both before and after such outbreaks he wrote to
Brown as though counting him as much a friend as ever. As for his
betrothed, wound as his reproaches might at the time, we know from her
own words that they left no lasting impression of unkindness on her
memory. Writing in riper years to Medwin, who had asked her whether the
accounts current in Rome of Keats's violence of nature were true, she
says:--
That his sensibility was most acute, is true, and his passions were
very strong, but not violent, if by that term, violence of temper is
implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to
turn on himself than on others, and in moments of greatest irritation,
it was only by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved
and wounded his friends. Violence such as the letter describes, was
quite foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before
quitting England, I saw him every day, often witnessed his sufferings,
both mental and bodily, and I do not hesitate to say, that he never
could have addressed an unkind expression, much less a violent one, to
any human being.[3]
These words of Fanny Brawne, then Mrs Lindon, to Medwin are not well
known, and it is only fair to quote them as proving that if in youth the
lady had not been willing to sacrifice her gaieties and her pleasure in
admiration for the sake of her lover's peace of mind, she showed at any
rate in after life a true and loyal understanding of his character.
While Keats was staying in Kentish Town Severn went often to see him,
and in the second week of July writes to Haslam struggling to keep up
his hopes for their friend in spite of appearances and of Keats's own
conviction:--'It will give you pleasure to say I trust he will still
recover. His appearance is shocking and now reminds me of poor Tom and I
have been inclined to think him in the same way. For himself--he makes
sure of it--and seems prepossessed that he cannot recover--now I seem
more than ever _not_ to think so and I know you will agree with me when
you see him--are you aware another volume of Poems was published last
week--in which is "Lovely Isabel--poor simple Isabel"? I have been
delighted with this volume and think it will even please the million.'
During the same period Shelley's friends the Gisbornes twice met him at
Leigh Hunt's. The first time was on June 23. Mrs Gisborne writes in her
journal that having lately been ill he spoke little and in a low tone:
'the _Endymion_ was not mentioned, this person might not be its author;
but on observing his countenance and eyes I persuaded myself that he was
the very person.' It is always Keats's eyes that strangers thus notice
first: the late Mrs Procter, who met him only once, at a lecture of
Hazlitt's, remembered them to the end of her long life as like those of
one 'who had been looking at some glorious sight.' This first time Keats
and Mrs Gisborne had some talk about music and singing, but some three
weeks later, on July 12th, the same lady notes, 'drank tea at Mr Hunt's;
I was much pained by the sight of poor Keats, under sentence of death
from Dr Lamb. He never spoke and looks emaciated.'
Doubtless it was under the impression of this last meeting that Mr
Gisborne sent Shelley the account of Keats's state of health which moved
Shelley to write in his own and his wife's name urging that Keats should
come to Italy to avoid the English winter and take up his quarters with
or near them at Pisa. Shelley repeats nearly the same kind and just
opinion of _Endymion_ as he had previously expressed in writing to the
Olliers; saying he has lately read it again, 'and ever with a new sense
of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth
with indistinct profusion. This people in general will not endure, and
that is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold.
I feel persuaded that you are capable of the greatest things, so you but
will.' At the same time Shelley sends Keats a copy of his _Cenci_.
Keats's answer shows him touched and grateful for the kindness offered,
but nevertheless, as always where Shelley is in question, in some degree
embarrassed and ungracious. He says nothing of the invitation to Pisa,
though he was already considering the possibility of going to winter in
Italy. As to _Endymion_, he says he would willingly unwrite it did he
care so much as once about reputation, and as to _The Cenci_, and _The
Prometheus_ announced as forthcoming, he makes the well-known, rather
obscurely worded criticism of which the main drift is that to his mind
Shelley pours out new poems too quickly and does not concentrate enough
upon the purely artistic aims and qualities of his work. These, Keats
goes on, are 'by many spirits nowadays considered the Mammon. A modern
work, it is said, must have a purpose which may be the God. An artist
must serve Mammon; he must have 'self-concentration'--selfishness,
perhaps. You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that
you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every
rift of your subject with ore.'
Keats in these admonitions was no doubt remembering views of Shelley's
such as are expressed in his words 'I consider poetry very subordinate
to moral and political science.' Judging by them, his mind would seem to
have veered back from the convictions which inspired the pre-amble to
the revised _Hyperion_ the autumn before, insisting, in language which
might almost seem borrowed from the preface to _Alastor_, on the doom
that awaits poets who play their art in selfishness instead of making it
their paramount aim to 'pour balm' upon the miseries of mankind. With
reference to the promised _Prometheus_ he adds, 'could I have my own
wish effected, you would have it still in manuscript, or be but now
putting an end to the second act. I remember your advising me not to
publish my first blights, on Hampstead Heath. I am returning advice upon
your hands.' Finally, mentioning that he is sending out a copy of his
lately published _Lamia_ volume, he says that most of its contents have
been written above two years (a slip of memory, the statement being only
true of _Isabella_ and of one or two minor pieces) and would never have
been published now but for hope of gain.
Shelley's letter was written from Pisa on the 27th of July and received
by Keats on the 13th of August. On the previous day he had fled suddenly
from under the Leigh Hunts' roof, having been thrown into a fit of
uncontrollable nervous agitation by the act of a discharged servant, who
kept back a letter to him from Fanny Brawne and on quitting the house
left it to be delivered, opened and two days late, by one of the
children. His first impulse on leaving the Hunts' was to go back to his
old lodging with Bentley the postman, but this Mrs Brawne would not hear
of, and took him into her own house, where she and her daughter for the
next few weeks nursed him and did all they could for his comfort.
During those unhappy months at Kentish Town Keats's best work was given
to the world. First, in Leigh Hunt's _Indicator_ for May 20, _La Belle
Dame sans Merci_, signed, obviously in bitterness, 'Caviare' (Hamlet's
'caviare to the general'), and unluckily enfeebled by changes for which
we find no warrant either in Keats's autograph or in extant copies made
by his friends Woodhouse and Brown. Keats's judgment in revising his own
work had evidently by this time become unsure. We have seen how in
recasting _Hyperion_ the previous autumn he changed some of the finest
of his original lines for the worse: and it is conceivable that in the
case of _La Belle Dame_ he may have done so again of his own motion, but
much more likely, I should say, that the changes, which are all in the
direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt's
suggestion and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference, or
perhaps even from that very sense of lack of sympathy in most readers
which made him sign 'Caviare.' Hunt introduced the piece with some
commendatory words, showing that he at all events felt nothing amiss
with it in its new shape, and added a short account of the old French
poem by Alain Chartier from which the title was taken. It is to be
deplored that in some recent and what should be standard editions of
Keats the poem stands as thus printed in the _Indicator_, instead of in
the original form rightly given by Lord Houghton from Brown's
transcript, in which it had become a classic of the language.[4]
It is surely a perversion in textual criticism to perpetuate the worse
version merely because it happens to be the one printed in Keats's
lifetime. No sensitive reader but must feel that 'wretched wight' is a
vague and vapid substitute for the clear image of the 'knight-at-arms,'
while 'sigh'd full sore' is ill replaced by 'sighed deep,' and 'wild
wild eyes' still worse by 'wild sad eyes': that the whimsical
particularity of the 'kisses four,' removed in the new version, gives
the poem an essential part of its savour (Keats was fond of these
fanciful numberings, compare the damsels who stand 'by fives and sevens'
in the Induction to Calidore, and the 'four laurell'd spirits' in the
Epistle to George Felton Matthew): and again, that the loose broken
construction--'So kissed to sleep' is quite uncharacteristic of the
poet: and yet again, that the phrase 'And there we slumbered on the
moss,' is what any amateur rimester might write about any pair of
afternoon picknickers, while the phrase which was cancelled for it, 'And
there she lulled me asleep,' falls with exactly the mystic cadence and
hushing weight upon the spirit which was required. The reader may be
interested to hear the effect which these changes had upon the late
William Morris, than whom no man had a better right to speak. Mr Sydney
Cockerell writes me:--
In February 1894 the last sheets of the Kelmscott Press Keats, edited
by F. S. Ellis, were being printed. A specimen of each sheet of every
book was brought in to Morris as soon as it came off the press. I was
with him when he happened to open the sheet on which _La Belle Dame
sans Merci_ was printed. He began to read it and was suddenly aware of
unfamiliar words, 'wretched wight' for 'knight at arms,' verses 4 and
5 transposed, and several changes in verse 7. Great was his
indignation. He swiftly altered the words and then read the poem to
me, remarking that it was the germ from which all the poetry of his
group had sprung--The sheet was reprinted and the earlier and better
version restored--I still have the cancelled sheet with his
corrections.
Six weeks later, in the first days of July, appeared the volume _Lamia,
Isabella, and other Poems_ in right of which Keats's name is immortal.
_La Belle Dame_ was not in it, nor _In drear-nighted December_, nor any
sonnets, nor any of the verses composed on the Scotch tour, nor the
fragment of _The Eve of St Mark_, nor, happily, _The Cap and Bells_: but
it included all the odes except that on Indolence and the fragment _To
Maia_, as well as nearly all the other minor pieces of any account
written since _Endymion_, such as _Fancy_, the _Mermaid Tavern_ and
_Robin Hood_ lines, with the three finished Tales, _Isabella_, _The Eve
of St Agnes_, and _Lamia_, and the great fragment of _Hyperion_ in its
original, not its recast, form. Keats was too far gone in illness and
the hopelessness of passion to be much moved by the success or failure
of his new venture. But the story of its first reception is part of his
biography, and shall be briefly told in this place.
The first critic in the field was the best: no less a master than
Charles Lamb, who within a fortnight of the appearance of the volume
contributed to the _New Times_ a brief notice, anonymous but marked with
all the charm and authority of his genius.[5] He begins by quoting the
four famous stanzas picturing Madeline at her prayers in the moonlit
chamber, and comments--'Like the radiance, which comes from those old
windows upon the limbs and garments of the damsel, is the almost
Chaucer-like painting, with which this poet illumes every subject he
touches. We have scarcely anything like it in modern description. It
brings us back to ancient days and "Beauty making-beautiful old
rhymes."' 'The finest thing,' Lamb continues, 'in the volume is _The Pot
of Basil_.' Noting how the anticipation of the assassination is
wonderfully conceived in the one epithet of 'the _murder'd_ man,' he
goes on to quote the stanzas telling the discovery of and digging for
the corpse, 'than which,' he says. 'there is nothing more awfully simple
in diction, more nakedly grand and moving in sentiment, in Dante, in
Chaucer or in Spenser.' It is to be noted that Lamb, who loved things
Gothic better than things Grecian, ignores _Hyperion_, which most
critics in praising the volume pitched on to the neglect of the rest,
and proceeds to tell of _Lamia_, winding up with a return to _The Pot of
Basil_:--
More exuberantly rich in imagery and painting is the story of the
_Lamia_. It is of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of.
Her first appearance in serpentine form--
--A beauteous wreath with melancholy eyes--
her dialogue with Hermes, the _Star of Lethe_, as he is called by one
of these prodigal phrases which Mr Keats abounds in, which are each a
poem in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once,
like a picture, all the dim regions and their inhabitants, and the
sudden coming of a celestial among them; the charming of her into
woman's shape again by the God; her marriage with the beautiful
Lycius; her magic palace, which those who knew the street, and
remembered it complete from childhood, never remembered to have seen
before; the few Persian mutes, her attendants,
--who that same year
Were seen about the markets: none knew where
They could inhabit;--
the high-wrought splendours of the nuptial bower, with the fading of
the whole pageantry, Lamia, and all, away, before the glance of
Apollonius,--are all that fairy land can do for us. They are for
younger impressibilities. To _us_ an ounce of feeling is worth a pound
of fancy; and therefore we recur again, with a warmer gratitude, to
the story of Isabella and the pot of basil, and those never-cloying
stanzas which we have cited, and which we think should disarm
criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it would not deny to
honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light to the stars in
Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies, rather than
acknowledge she is fair.
Leigh Hunt, who during all this time was in all ways loyally doing his
best for Keats's encouragement and comfort, and had just dedicated his
translation of Tasso's _Aminta_ to him as to one 'equally pestered by
the critical and admired by the poetical,'--Leigh Hunt within a month of
the appearance of the volume reviewed and quoted from it with full
appreciation in two numbers of the _Indicator_. His notice contained
those judicious remarks which we have already cited on the philosophical
weakness of _Lamia_, praising at the same time the gorgeousness of the
snake description, and saying, of the lines on the music being the sole
support of the magical palace-roof, 'this is the very quintessence of
the romantic.' 'When Mr Keats errs in his poetry,' says Hunt in regard
to the _Pot of Basil_, 'it is from the ill-management of a good
thing--exuberance of ideas'; and, comparing the contents of this volume
with his earlier work, concludes as follows:--
The author's versification is now perfected, the exuberances of his
imagination restrained, and a calm power, the surest and loftiest of
all power, takes place of the impatient workings of the younger god
within him. The character of his genius is that of energy and
voluptuousness, each able at will to take leave of the other, and
possessing, in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to
the best authors who can less combine them. Mr Keats undoubtedly takes
his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets.
But Leigh Hunt's praise of one of his own supposed disciples of the
Cockney School would carry little weight outside the circle of special
sympathizers. A better index to the way the wind was beginning to blow
was the treatment of the volume in Colburn's _New Monthly Magazine_, of
which the poet Thomas Campbell had lately been appointed editor, with
the excellent Cyrus Redding as acting editor under him:--'These poems
are very far superior', declares the critic, 'to any which the author
has previously committed to the press. They have nothing showy, or
extravagant, or eccentric about them; but are pieces of calm beauty, or
of lone and self-supported grandeur.' In _Lamia_, 'there is a mingling
of Greek majesty with fairy luxuriance which we have not elsewhere
seen.' _Isabella_ is compared with Barry Cornwall's _Sicilian Story_:
'the poem of Mr Keats has not the luxury of description, nor the rich
love-scenes, of Mr Cornwall; but he tells the tale with a naked and
affecting simplicity which goes irresistibly to the heart. _The Eve of
St Agnes_ is 'a piece of consecrated fancy', in which 'a soft religious
light is shed over the whole story.' In _Hyperion_ 'the picture of the
vast abode of Cybele and the Titans is 'in the sublimest style of
Æschylus': and in conclusion the critic takes leave of Mr Keats 'with
wonder at the gigantic stride which he has taken, and with the good
hope that if he proceeds in the high and pure style which he has now
chosen, he will attain an exalted and a lasting station among English
poets.' Of the other chief literary reviews in England, the
old-established _Monthly_ begins in a strain scarcely less laudatory,
but wavers and becomes admonitory before the end, while Keats's dismal
monitor of three years before, the sententious _Eclectic Review_,
acknowledging in him 'a young man possessed of an elegant fancy, a warm
and lively imagination, and something above the average talents of
persons who take to writing poetry', proceeds to warn him against
regarding imagination as the proper organ of poetry, to lecture him on
his choice of subjects, his addiction to the Greek mythology, and to
poetry for poetry's sake ('poetry, after all, if pursued as an end, is
but child's play'). The _British Critic_, more contemptuous even than
Blackwood or the Quarterly in its handling of _Endymion_, this time
prints a kind of palinode, admitting that 'Mr Keats is a person of no
ordinary genius', and prophesying that if he will take Spenser and
Milton for models instead of Leigh Hunt he 'need not despair of
attaining to a very high and enviable place in the public esteem'.
Writing to Brown from Hampstead in the latter half of August, Keats
seems aware that the critics are being kinder to him than before. 'My
book,' he says, 'has had good success among the literary people, and I
believe has a moderate sale;' and again, 'the sale of my book has been
very slow, but it has been very highly rated.' The great guns of
Scottish criticism had not yet spoken. Constable's _Edinburgh_ (formerly
the _Scots_) _Magazine_, which never either hit or bit hard, and whose
managers had preferred the ways of prudence when Bailey urged them two
years before boldly to denounce the outrages of the 'Z' gang in
Blackwood, in due course praised Keats's new volume, but cautiously,
saying that 'it must and ought to attract attention, for it displays the
ore of true poetic genius, though mingled with a large portion of
dross.... He is continually shocking our ideas of poetical decorum, at
the very time when we are acknowledging the hand of genius. In thus
boldly running counter to old opinions, however, we cannot conceive that
Mr Keats merits bitter contempt or ridicule; the weapons which are too
frequently employed when liberal discussion and argument would be
unsuccessful.' As to _Blackwood's Magazine_ itself, we are fortunate in
having an amusing first-hand narrative of an encounter of its owner and
manager with Keats's publisher which preceded the appearance of Keats's
new volume. The excellent Taylor, staunch to his injured young friend
and client even at some risk, as in his last words he shows himself
aware, to his own interests, writes from Fleet Street on the last day of
August to his partner Hessey:--
I have had this day a call from Mr Blackwood. We shook hands and went
into the Back Shop. After asking him what was new at Edinburgh, and
talking about Clare, the _Magazine_, Baldwin, Peter Corcoran and a few
other subjects,[6] I observed that we had published another Volume of
Keats's Poems on which his Editors would have another opportunity of
being witty at his expense. He said they were disposed to speak
favourably of Mr K. this time--and he expected that the article would
have appeared in this month's mag.
'But can they be so inconsistent?' 'There is no inconsistency in
praising him if they think he deserves it.' 'After what has been said
of his talents I should think it very inconsistent.' 'Certainly they
found fault with his former Poems but that was because they thought
they deserved it.' 'But why did they attack him personally?' 'They did
not do so.'
'No? Did not they speak of him in ridicule as Johnny Keats, describe
his appearance while addressing a Sonnet to Ailsa Crag, and compare
him as a (?) hen to Shelley as a Bird of Paradise, besides, what can
you say to that cold blooded passage when they say they will take
care he shall never get £50 again for a vol. of his Poems--what had he
done to deserve such attacks as these?'
'Oh, it was all a joke, the writer meant nothing more than to be
witty. He certainly thought there was much affectation in his Poetry,
and he expressed his opinion only--It was done in the fair spirit of
criticism.'
'It was done in the Spirit of the Devil, Mr Blackwood. So if a young
man is guilty of affectation while he is walking the streets it is
fair in another Person because he dislikes it to come and knock him
down.'
'No,' says B., 'but a poet challenges public opinion by printing his
book, but I suppose you would have them not criticized at all?'
'I certainly think they are punished enough by neglect and by the
failure of their hopes and to me it seems very cruel to abuse a man
merely because he cannot give us as much pleasure as he wishes. But
you go even beyond his ...(?) you strike a man when he is down. He
gets a violent blow from the Quarterly--and then you begin.'
'I beg your pardon,' says B., 'we were the first.'
'I think not, but if you were the first, you continued it after, for
that truly diabolical thrust about the £50 appeared after the critique
in the Quarterly.'
'You mistake that altogether,' said B., 'the writer does not like the
Cockney School, so he went on joking Mr K. about it.'
'Why should not the manners of gentlemen continue to regulate their
conduct when they are writing of each other as much as when they are
in conversation? No man would insult Mr Keats in this manner in his
company, and what is the difference between writing and speaking of a
person except that the written attack is the more base from being made
anonymously and therefore at no personal risk.--I feel regard for Mr
Keats as a man of real Genius, a Gentleman, nay more, one of the
gentlest of Human Beings. He does not resent these things himself, he
merely says of his Opponents "They don't know me." Now this
mildness(?) his friends feel the more severely when they see him ill
used. But this feeling is not confined to them. I am happy to say that
the Public Interest is awakened to the sense of the Injustice which
has been done him and the attempts to ruin him will have in the end a
contrary effect.' Here I turned the conversation to another subject by
asking B. if he read the _Abbot_, and in about 10 minutes more he made
his Exit with a formal Bow and a Good Morning.
The above is the Substance and as clearly as possible the words, I
made use of. His replies were a little more copious than I have
stated but to the same effect. I have written this conversation down
on the day it took place because I suspect some allusion may hereafter
be made to it in the Mag. and I fully expect that whatever Books we
publish will be received with reference to the feeling it is
calculated to excite in the bosoms of these freebooting....[7]
In the upshot, the Blackwood critics took no direct notice of the
_Lamia_ volume at all, but made occasion during the autumn to say their
new say about Keats in a review of Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_. This
time the hand is unmistakably that of Wilson. For the last year or more
Wilson, following a hint given him by De Quincey, had chosen to take
Shelley boisterously under his patronage as a poet of true genius, for
whom scarcely any praise would be too high could he only be weaned from
his impious opinions. Now, after rebutting a current and really
gratuitous charge that the magazine praised Shelley from the knowledge
that he was a man of means and family, and denounced Hunt and Keats
because they were poor and struggling, the critic blusters
characteristically on, in a strain half apologetic in one breath and in
the next as odiously insolent as ever:--
As for Mr Keats, we are informed that he is in a very bad state of
health, and that his friends attribute a great deal of it to the pain
he has suffered from the critical castigation his _Endymion_ drew down
on him in this magazine. If it be so, we are most heartily sorry for
it, and have no hesitation in saying, that had we suspected that young
author, of being so delicately nerved, we should have administered our
reproof in a much more lenient shape and style. The truth is, we from
the beginning saw marks of feeling and power in Mr Keats's verses,
which made us think it very likely, he might become a real poet in
England, provided he could be persuaded to give up all the tricks of
Cockneyism, and forswear for ever the thin potations of Mr Leigh Hunt.
We, therefore, rated him as roundly as we decently could do, for the
flagrant affectations of those early productions of his. In the last
volume he has published we find more beauties than in the former, both
of language and of thought, but we are sorry to say, we find abundance
of the same absurd affectations also, and superficial conceits, which
first displeased us in his writings;--and which we are again very
sorry to say, must in our opinion, if persisted in, utterly and
entirely prevent Mr Keats from ever taking his place among the pure
and classical poets of his mother tongue. It is quite ridiculous to
see how the vanity of these Cockneys makes them overrate their own
importance, even in the eyes of us, that have always expressed such
plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all, a
contempt too calm and profound, to admit of any admixture of anything
like anger or personal spleen. We should just as soon think of being
wroth with vermin, independently of their coming into our apartment,
as we should of having any feelings at all about any of these people,
other than what are excited by seeing them in the shape of authors.
Many of them, considered in any other character than that of authors,
are, we have no doubt, entitled to be considered as very worthy people
in their own way. Mr Hunt is said to be a very amiable man in his own
sphere, and we believe him to be so willingly. Mr Keats we have often
heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and we have no doubt his
manners and feelings are calculated to make his friends love him. But
what has all this to do with our opinion of their poetry? What, in the
name of wonder, does it concern us, whether these men sit among
themselves, with mild or with sulky faces, eating their mutton steaks,
and drinking their porter at Highgate, Hampstead, or Lisson Green?...
Last of all, what should forbid us to announce our opinion, that Mr
Shelley, as a man of genius, is not merely superior, either to Mr
Hunt, or to Mr Keats, but altogether out of their sphere, and totally
incapable of ever being brought into the most distant comparison with
either of them.
The critical utterance on Keats's side likely to tell most with general
readers was that of Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh Review_. A year earlier
Keats had written from Winchester expressing impatience at what he
thought the cowardice of the Edinburgh in keeping silence as to
_Endymion_ in face of the Quarterly attack. 'They do not know what to
make of it, and they will not praise it for fear. They are as shy of it
as I should be of wearing a Quaker's hat. The fact is they have no real
taste. They dare not compromise their judgments on so puzzling a
question. If on my next publication they should praise me, and so lug in
_Endymion_, I will address them in a manner they will not at all relish.
The cowardliness of the Edinburgh is more than the abuse of the
Quarterly'. Exactly what Keats had anticipated now took place. Jeffrey's
natural taste in poetry was conservative, and favoured the correct, the
classical and traditional: but in this case, whether from genuine and
personal opinion, or to please influential well-wishers of Keats on his
own side in politics and criticism like Sir James Mackintosh, he on the
appearance of the new volume took occasion to print, now when Keats was
far past caring about it, an article on his work which was mainly in
eulogy of _Endymion_: eulogy not unmixed with reasonable criticism, but
in a strain, on the whole, gushing almost to excess:--
We had never happened to see either of these volumes till very
lately--and have been exceedingly struck with the genius they display,
and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their
extravagance. That imitation of our older writers, and especially of
our older dramatists, to which we cannot help flattering ourselves
that we have somewhat contributed, has brought on, as it were, a
second spring in our poetry;--and few of its blossoms are either more
profuse of sweetness or richer in promise than this which is now
before us. Mr Keats, we understand, is still a very young man; and his
whole works, indeed, bear evidence enough of the fact. They are full
of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality,
interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. They manifestly
require, therefore, all the indulgence that can be claimed for a first
attempt: but we think it no less plain that they deserve it; for they
are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured
and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and
bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the
intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the
enchantments they so lavishly present. The models upon which he has
formed himself, in the _Endymion_, the earliest and by much the most
considerable of his poems, are obviously the _Faithful Shepherdess_ of
Fletcher, and the _Sad Shepherd_ of Ben Jonson;--the exquisite metres
and inspired diction of which he has copied, with great boldness and
fidelity--and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart
to the whole piece that true rural and poetical air which breathes
only in them and in Theocritus--which is at once homely and majestic,
luxurious and rude, and sets before us the genuine sights and sounds
and smells of the country, with all the magic and grace of Elysium.
Then, after acknowledgment of the confusedness of the narrative and the
fantastic wilfulness of some of the incidents and style, the critic goes
on:--
There is no work, accordingly, from which a malicious critic could
cull more matter for ridicule, or select more obscure, unnatural, or
absurd passages. But we do not take _that_ to be our office:--and just
beg leave, on the contrary, to say, that any one who, on this account,
would represent the whole poem as despicable, must either have no
notion of poetry, or no regard to truth. It is, in truth, at least is
full of genius as of absurdity; and he who does not find a great deal
in it to admire and to give delight, cannot in his heart see much
beauty in the two exquisite dramas to which we have already alluded,
or find any great pleasure in some of the finest creations of Milton
and Shakespeare. There are many such persons, we verily believe, even
among the reading and judicious part of the community--correct
scholars we have no doubt many of them, and, it may be, very classical
composers in prose and in verse--but utterly ignorant of the true
genius of English poetry, and incapable of estimating its appropriate
and most exquisite beauties. With that spirit we have no hesitation in
saying that Mr K. is deeply imbued--and of those beauties he has
presented us with many striking examples. We are very much inclined
indeed to add, that we do not know any book which we would sooner
employ as a test to ascertain whether anyone had in him a native
relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm.
One immediate result of the Edinburgh criticism was to provoke an almost
incredible outburst of jealous fury on the part of the personage then
most conspicuous on the stage of England's, nay of the world's, poetry,
Lord Byron. Byron, with next to no real critical power, could bring
dazzling resources of wit and rhetoric to the support of any random
opinion, traditional or revolutionary, he might happen by whim or habit
to entertain. In these days he was just entering the lists as a
self-appointed champion of Pope, the artificial school, and eighteenth
century critical tradition in general, against Pope's latest editor and
depreciator, the clerical sonneteer William Lisle Bowles. Ever since the
Pope-Boileau passage in Keats's _Sleep and Poetry_ it had been Byron's
pleasure to regard Keats with gratuitous contempt and aversion. When
Murray sent him the _Lamia_ volume with a parcel of other books to
Ravenna, he wrote back, 'Pray send me _no more_ poetry but what is rare
and decidedly good. There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my
tables that I am ashamed to look at them.... No more Keats, I
entreat;--flay him alive; if some of you don't I must skin him myself;
there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.' A month
later, evidently not having read a word of Keats's book, he comes across
Jeffrey's praise of it in the _Edinburgh Review_, and thereupon falls
into a fit of anger so foul-mouthed and outrageous that his latest, far
from squeamish editors have had to mask its grossness under a cloud of
asterisks. A little later he repeats the same disgusting obscenities in
cool blood: his only quotable remark on the subject being as
follows:--'Of the praises of that little dirty blackguard Keates in the
Edinburgh, I shall observe as Johnson did when Sheridan the actor got a
_pension_: "What, has he got a pension? Then it is time I should give up
_mine_." Nobody could be prouder of the praises of the Edinburgh than I
was, or more alive to their censure. At present all the men they have
ever praised are degraded by that insane article.' By and by he
proceeded to administer his own castigation to 'Mr John Ketch' in a
second letter written for the Pope-Bowles controversy: but Keats having
died meanwhile he withheld this from publication, and a little later,
perhaps at the prompting of his own better mind, but more probably
through the good influence of Shelley, took in _Don Juan_ the altered
tone about Keats which all the world knows, and having been at first
thus savagely bent on hunting with the hounds, turned and chose to run
part of the way, as far as suited him, with the hare.
Shelley, of course, judged for himself; was incapable of a thought
towards a brother poet that was not generous; and had moreover a feeling
of true and particular kindness towards Keats. We have seen how wisely
and fairly he judged _Endymion_. Were we to take merely his own words
written at the time, we might think that he failed to do justice to the
new volume as a whole. His first impression of it, coupled with a wildly
overdrawn picture which had reached him of Keats's sufferings under the
stings of the reviewers, apparently determined him to sit down and draft
that indignant letter to Gifford, never completed or delivered, pleading
against the repetition of any such treatment of his new volume as
_Endymion_ had received from the _Quarterly_. In this Shelley speaks of
_Hyperion_ as though it were the one thing he admired in the book: and
writing about the same time to Peacock, he says 'Among modern things
which have reached me is a volume of poems by Keats; in other respects
insignificant enough, but containing the fragment of a poem called
_Hyperion_. I dare say you have not time to read it; but it certainly is
an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats
which I confess I had not before.' And again, 'Among your anathemas of
modern poetry, do you include Keats's _Hyperion_? I think it very fine.
His other poems are worth little; but if the _Hyperion_ be not grand
poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.' In considering
these utterances we should remember that they were addressed to
correspondents bound to be unsympathetic. Gifford would be so as a
matter of course: while Peacock had from old Marlow days been a
disbeliever in Keats and his poetry, and had lately adopted a public
attitude of disbelief in modern poetry altogether. We must also remember
that Shelley had himself been wrought into a mood of unwonted
intolerance of certain fashions in poetry by some of Barry Cornwall's
recent performances, which he held to be an out-Hunting of Hunt and
out-Byroning of Byron.[8] There is a statement of Medwin's which, if
Medwin were ever a witness much to be trusted, we would rather take as
representing Shelley's ripened and permanent opinion of the contents of
the _Lamia_ volume than his own words to Gifford or Peacock. 'He
perceived', says Medwin, 'in every one of these productions a marked and
continually progressing improvement, and hailed with delight his release
from his leading strings, his emancipation from what he called a
"perverse and limited school". _The Pot of Basil_ and _The Eve of St
Agnes_ he read and re-read with ever new delight, and looked upon
_Hyperion_ as almost faultless, grieving that it was but a fragment and
that Keats had not been encouraged to complete a work worthy of Milton.'
At all events Shelley, apart from the immortal tribute of _Adonais_, has
left other words of his own which may content us, addressed to a
different correspondent, as to what he felt about Keats and his work and
promise on the whole, without reference to one poem rather than another.
I mean those in which he expresses to Mrs Leigh Hunt his hope to see and
take care of Keats in Italy:--'I consider his a most valuable life, and
I am deeply interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician both
of his body and of his soul, to keep the one warm, and to teach the
other Greek and Spanish. I am aware, indeed, in part, that I am
nourishing a rival who will far surpass me; and this is an additional
motive, and will be an added pleasure.'
The opinions of neither of these two famous men, Byron and Shelley, will
have had any immediate effect in England. Murray could not possibly
disseminate Byron's private obscenities, and Byron's own intended public
castigation of Keats in a second letter to Bowles was, as we have seen,
withheld. On the other side Shelley made no public use of the draft of
his indignant letter to Gifford, and Peacock would not be by way of
saying much about his private expressions of enthusiasm for _Hyperion_.
But we can gather the impression current in sympathetic circles about
Keats's future from a couple of entries in the December diaries of Crabb
Robinson. He tells how he has been reading out some of the new volume,
first _Hyperion_ and then _The Pot of Basil_, to his friends the Aders',
and adds,--'There is a force, wildness, and originality in the works of
this young poet which, if his perilous journey to Italy does not destroy
him, promise to place him at the head of our next generation of poets.
Lamb places him next to Wordsworth--not meaning any comparison, for they
are dissimilar' ... and again, 'I am greatly mistaken if Keats do not
soon take a high place among our poets. Great feeling and a powerful
imagination are shown in this little volume.' Had his health held out,
such recognition would have been all and more than all Keats asked for
or would have thought he had yet earned. But praise and dispraise were
all one to him before now, and we must go back and follow the tragedy of
his personal history to its close.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A letter of Procter's to Keats shows that he had been among
Keats's visitors during the weeks that followed his attack of
hæmorrhage (see Buxton Forman, _Complete Works_, v. 163). Whether
they had been much or at all acquainted before then seems uncertain,
but Procter's impressions of Keats recorded almost half a century
later read as though he had known him while still in health:--
'I saw him only two or three times before his departure for Italy.
I was introduced to him by Leigh Hunt, and found him very
pleasant, and free from all affectation in manner and opinion.
Indeed, it would be difficult to discover a man with a more bright
and open countenance. He was always ready to hear and to reply; to
discuss, to reason, to admit; and to join in serious talk or
common gossip. It has been said that his poetry was affected and
effeminate. I can only say that I never encountered a more manly
and simple young man. In person he was short, and had eyes large
and wonderfully luminous, and a resolute bearing; not defiant, but
well sustained.'
[2] As against this judgment, formed from photographs of the wrecked
picture and from the general character of Haydon's work, let it be
remembered that Hazlitt, no mean judge, declares that the head of
Wordsworth is of all his portraits 'the most like his drooping weight
of thought and expression.' Lamb's complimentary punning address, _In
tabulam eximii pictoris_, with its English translation, may be taken
as exercises in friendly congratulation rather than in criticism. The
picture in its present state is reproduced and discussed by Mr Louis
A. Holman in the New York _Bookman_, Feb. 1913, pp. 608 _sqq._
[3] Medwin's carelessness of statement and workmanship are well
known: he is perfectly casual in the use of quotation marks and the
like, and in the original edition of his untrustworthy _Life of
Shelley_ it was difficult to be sure that these words were quoted as
textually Mrs Lindon's own. But in re-editing the book from its
author's revised and expanded copy, Mr Buxton Forman has left no
doubt on the matter.
[4] I allude to the various editions issued in recent years by the
Delegates of the Oxford University Press, to whom I would hereby
appeal to let the piece be cancelled on the plates and the earlier
text re-established.
[5] The recognition of this review and its inclusion in the canon of
Lamb's works is one of the many services for which thanks are due to
his never-enough-to-be-praised editor, Mr E. V. Lucas (_The Works of
Charles and Mary Lamb_, Vol. I, pp. 200, 470).
[6] Clare is John Clare, the distressed peasant poet, in whom many
kindly people fancied they had discovered an English Burns, and on
whose behalf, at the same time as on Keats's, Taylor was exerting
himself to raise a fund. 'Peter Corcoran' refers to a brilliant
medley called _The Fancy_ lately published anonymously by John
Hamilton Reynolds, and purporting to tell the fortunes and sample the
poetical remains of an ill-starred youth so-named, lured away from
fair prospects in love and literature by a passion for the prize
ring. The gaps and queries in this letter, the MS. of which is in
America, indicate places which its friendly transcriber found
illegible.
[7] Morgan MSS. Some words at the end have baffled the transcriber.
[8] _Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley_, ed. Ingpen, vol. ii, p. 839.
CHAPTER XVI
AUGUST 1820-FEBRUARY 1821: VOYAGE TO ITALY: LAST DAYS AND DEATH AT ROME
Resolve to winter in Italy--Severn as companion--The 'Maria
Crowther'--Fellow passengers--Storm in the Channel--Held up in the
Solent--Landing near Lulworth--The 'Bright Star' sonnets--The voyage
resumed--A meditated poem--Incidents at sea--Quarantine at
Naples--Letters from Keats and Haslam--Lady passengers described--A
cry of agony--Neapolitan impressions--On the road to Rome--Life at
Rome--Apparent improvement--Relapse and despair--Severn's
ministrations--His letters from the sickroom--The same
continued--Tranquil last days--Choice of epitaph--Spirit of charm and
pleasantness--The end.
In telling of the critical reception of Keats's _Lamia_ volume I have
anticipated by three or four months the course of time. Returning to his
personal condition and doings, we find that by or before the date of his
move from Kentish Town to be under the care of the Brawne ladies at
Wentworth Place, that is by mid-August, he had accepted the verdict of
the doctors that a winter in Italy would be the only thing to give him a
chance of recovery. He determined accordingly, not without sore
gain-giving and agitation of mind, to make the attempt. In his letter to
Shelley acknowledging receipt of _The Cenci_ and answering Shelley's
invitation to Pisa, he writes:--'there is no doubt that an English
winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering, hateful,
manner. Therefore, I must either voyage or journey to Italy, as a
soldier marches up to a battery'. And again, using the same phrase, he
writes to Taylor on August 14th:--'This journey to Italy wakes me at
daylight every morning, and haunts me horribly. I shall endeavour to
go, though it will be with the sensation of marching against a battery.
The first step towards it is to know the expense of a journey and a
year's residence, which if you will ascertain for me, and let me know
early, you will greatly serve me.' The next day he sends Taylor a note
of his wish that in case of his death his books should be divided among
his friends and that any assets arising or to arise from the sale of his
poems should be devoted to paying his debts--those to Brown and to
Taylor himself ranking first. The good publisher promptly bestirred
himself to enquire about sailings and make provision for ways and means.
For the latter purpose he bought the copyright of _Endymion_ for £100,
furnished Keats at starting with a bill on London for £120, and procured
promises of eventual help to the extent of £100 more by subscription
among persons interested in the poet's fate; James Rice and the painters
Hilton and De Wint being among guarantors of £10 each and Lord
Fitzwilliam closing the list with a promise of £50.
The vessel chosen for the voyage was a merchant brigantine, the 'Maria
Crowther,' having berth accommodation for a few passengers and due to
sail from London about the middle of September. The four intervening
weeks were spent by the invalid in comparative respite from suffering
and distress under the eye and tendance of his beloved. By his desire
Haydon came one day to see him, and has told, with a painter's touch,
how he found him 'lying in a white bed, with white quilt, and white
sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic flush of his cheeks.'
Haydon's vehement, self-confident and self-righteous manner of
admonition to friends in trouble seems to have had an effect the reverse
of consolatory, and elsewhere he amplifies this account of his last
sight of Keats, saying, 'He seemed to be going out of life with a
contempt for this world and no hopes of the other. I told him to be
calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he would
destroy himself. I tried to reason against such violence, but it was no
use; he grew angry, and I went away deeply affected.' Writing about the
same time to his young sister, Keats shows himself, as ever, thoughtful
and wise on her behalf and does his best to be re-assuring on his own:--
Now you are better, keep so. Do not suffer your Mind to dwell on
unpleasant reflexions--that sort of thing has been the destruction of
my health. Nothing is so bad as want of health--it makes one envy
scavengers and cinder sifters. There are enough real distresses and
evils in wait for every one to try the most vigorous health. Not that
I would say yours are not real--but they are such as to tempt you to
employ your imagination on them, rather than endeavour to dismiss them
entirely. Do not diet your mind with grief, it destroys the
constitution; but let your chief care be of your health, and with that
you will meet your share of Pleasure in the world--do not doubt it. If
I return well from Italy I will turn over a new leaf for you. I have
been improving lately, and have very good hopes of 'turning a Neuk'
and cheating the consumption.
For a companion on his journey, Keats's first thoughts turned to Brown,
who was still away on his second tramp through the Highlands. But the
letter he wrote asking whether Brown could go with him missed its
destination, and he was left with the prospect of having either to give
up his journey or venture on it alone, a thing hardly to be thought of
in his state of health. At this juncture Haslam, always the most useful
of friends in an emergency, betook himself to Severn, whose prospects in
London, in spite of the practice he had found as a miniature-painter and
of his success in winning the gold medal of the Academy the previous
December, seemed far from bright, and urged him to go out with Keats to
Rome. Severn at once consented, his immediate impulse of devotion to his
friend being strengthened, on reflection, both by the lure of Rome
itself and by the idea that he might be able while there to work for,
and perhaps win, the travelling studentship of the Royal Academy. He
made his arrangements on the shortest possible notice, while Haslam
undertook the business of procuring passports and the like. A weird
incident marked Severn's departure from his home. His father,
passionately attached to him but resenting his resolve to go to Italy
now as fiercely as he had before resented his change of profession, on
being asked to lend a hand in moving his trunk, in an uncontrollable fit
of anger struck and felled him. How and with what rending of the heart
Keats took his own farewell from the home of his joy and torment at
Hampstead--of this we hear, and may be thankful to hear, nothing. He
spent his last days in England with Taylor in Fleet Street, having gone
thither on Wednesday September 13th to be at hand for the day and hour
when the 'Maria Crowther' might be ready to sail. On the evening of
Sunday the 17th of September he and Severn went on board at the London
docks. Here the kind Taylor and the serviceable Haslam took leave of
them, and their ship weighed anchor and slipped down tide as far as
Gravesend, where she came to moorings for the night. Moored close by her
was a smack from Dundee, and on board this smack, by one of the minor
perversities of fate, who should be a passenger but Charles Brown? He
had caught this means of conveyance as the first available when he at
last got news of Keats's plans, and had hoped to reach London in time to
bid him farewell. But it was all unknowingly that the friends lay that
night within earshot of one another.
One lady passenger, a Miss Pidgeon, had come aboard at the docks: a
pleasing person, the friends thought at first, but found reason to
change their minds later. At Gravesend early the next morning there came
another, a pretty and gentle Miss Cotterell, as far gone in consumption
as Keats himself. Keats was in lively spirits and exerted himself with
Severn to welcome and amuse the new comer. In the course of the day
Severn went ashore to buy medicines and other needments for the voyage,
and among them, at Keats's special request, a bottle of laudanum. The
captain, by name Thomas Walsh, was kind and attentive and did his best,
unsuccessfully, to find a goat for the supply of goat's milk to the
invalids while on board ship. That evening they put to sea, and Keats's
health and spirits seemed to rise with the first excitements of the
voyage. The events of the next days are best told in the words of the
journal-letter written at the time by Severn to Haslam; vagueness of
memory having made much less trustworthy the several accounts of the
voyage which he wrote and rewrote in after years. Severn was innocent of
all stops save dashes, and I print exactly as he wrote:--
19th Sept. Tuesday, off Dover Castle, etc.
I arose at day break to see the glorious eastern gate--Keats slept
till 7--Miss C. was rather ill this morning I prevailed on her to walk
the deck with me at half past 6 she recovered much--Keats was still
better this morning and Mrs Pidgeon looked and was the picture of
health--but poor me! I began to feel a waltzing on my stomach at
breakfast when I wrote the note to you I was going it most
soundly--Miss Cotterell followed me--then Keats who did it in the most
gentlemanly manner--and then the saucy Mrs Pidgeon who had been
laughing at us--four faces bequeathing to the mighty deep their
breakfasts--here I must change to a minor key Miss C. fainted--we soon
recovered her--I was very ill nothing but lying down would do for me.
Keats ascended his bed--from which he dictated surgically like
Esculapius of old in basso-relievo through him Miss C. was recovered
we had a cup of tea each and no more went to bed and slept until it
was time to go to bed--we could not get up again--and slept in our
clothes all night--Keats the King--not even looking pale.
20th Sept. Wednesday off Brighton. Beautiful morning--we all
breakfasted on deck and recovered as we were could enjoy it--about 10
Keats said a storm was hatching--he was right--the rain came on and we
retired to our cabin--it abated and once more we came on deck--at 2
storm came on furiously--we retired to our beds. The rolling of the
ship was death to us--towards 4 it increased and our situation was
alarming--the trunks rolled across the cabin--the water poured in from
the sky-light and we were tumbled from one side to the other of our
beds--my curiosity was raised to see the storm--and my anxiety to see
Keats for I could only speak to him when in bed--I got up and fell
down on the floor from my weakness and the rolling of the ship. Keats
was very calm--the ladies were much frightened and would scarce
speak--when I got up to the deck I was astounded--the waves were in
mountains and washed the ship--the watery horizon was like a
mountainous country--but the ship's motion was beautifully to the sea
falling from one wave to the other in a very lovely manner--the sea
each time crossing the deck and one side of the ship being level with
the water--this when I understood gave me perfect ease--I communicated
below and it did the same--but when the dusk came the sea began to
rush in from the side of our cabin from an opening in the planks--this
made us rather long faced--for it came by pail-fulls--again I got out
and said to Keats 'here's pretty music for you'--with the greatest
calmness he answered me only by 'Water parted from the sea.'[1] I
staggered up again and the storm was awful--the Captain and Mate soon
came down--for our things were squashing about in the dark--they
struck a light and I succeeded in getting my desk off the ground--with
clothes and books, etc. The Captain finding it could not be
stopped--tacked about from our voyage--and the sea ceased to dash
against the cabin for we were sailing against wind and tide--but the
horrible agitation continued in the ship lengthways--here were the
pumps working--the sails squalling the confused voices of the
sailors--the things rattling about in every direction and us poor
devils pinn'd up in our beds like ghosts by daylight--except Keats he
was himself all the time--the ladies suffered the most--but I was out
of bed a dozen times to wait on them and tell them there was no
danger--my sickness made me get into bed very soon each time--but
Keats this morning brags of my sailorship--he says could I have kept
on my legs in the water cabin I should have been a standing miracle.
20th Sept.
I caught a sight of the moon about 3 o'clock this morning--and ran
down to tell the glad tidings--but the surly rolling of the sea was
worse than the storm--the ship trembled to it--and the sea was
scarcely calmed by daylight--so that we were kept from 2 o'clock
yesterday until 6 this morning without anything--well it has done us
good, we are like a Quartett of fighting cocks this morning. The
morning is serene we are now back again some 20 miles--waiting for a
wind--but full of spirits--Keats is without even complaining and Miss
Cottrell has a colour in her face--the sea has done his worst upon us.
I am better than I have been for years. Farewell my dear fellow.
J. SEVERN--show this to my family with my love to them.
When you read this you will excuse the manner--I am quite beside
myself--and have written the whole this morning Thursday on the deck
after a sleepless night and with a head full of care--you shall have a
better the next time.
The storm had driven them back from off Brighton more than half way to
the Downs, and then abated enough to let them land for a scramble on the
shingles at Dungeness, where they excited the suspicions of the coast
guard, and to get the above letter posted from Romney. After this calms
and contrary airs kept them beating about the channel for many more days
yet. At Portsmouth they were held up again, and to pass the time Keats
landed and went to call on Dilke's sister Mrs Snook at Bedhampton; again
by ill chance barely missing Brown, whom he supposed to be still in
Scotland but who was actually only ten miles away, having run down to
stay with Dilke's father at Chichester. The next day, while the ship was
still hanging in the Solent off Yarmouth, Keats wrote unbosoming himself
to Brown of his inward agony more fully than he had ever done in
speech:--
I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much--there is
one I must mention and have done with it. Even if my body would
recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want
to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help
it. Who can help it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how
can I bear it in my state? I dare say you will be able to guess on
what subject I am harping--you know what was my greatest pain during
the first part of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day
and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away,
for death would destroy even those pains which are better than
nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but
death is the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought
has passed through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is
passed. I often wish for you that you might flatter me with the best.
I think without my mentioning it for my sake you would be a friend to
Miss Brawne when I am dead. You think she has many faults--but, for my
sake, think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her
by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a state at present in
which woman merely as woman can have no more power over me than
stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with
respect to Miss Brawne and my sister is amazing. The one seems to
absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother
and sister in America. The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond
everything horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me--I eternally
see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the
habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my
ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?
There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
That night, (September 28) adds Keats, they expected to put into
Portland Roads; but calms again held them up, and again they were
allowed to land, having made only some few miles' headway down the
Dorsetshire coast. The day of this landing was for Keats one of
transitory calm and lightening of the spirit. The weather was fine, and
'for a moment,' says Severn, 'he became like his former self. He was in
a part that he already knew, and showed me the splendid caverns and
grottoes with a poet's pride, as though they had been his birthright.'
These are vivid phrases, that about the caverns and grottoes certainly a
little over-coloured for the scene, which was Lulworth Cove and the
remarkable, but scarcely splendid, rock tunnels and fissures of Stair
Hole and Durdle Door. When Severn says that Keats knew the ground, one
half wonders whether the Dorsetshire Keatses may really have been
kindred of his to whom he had at some time paid an unrecorded visit: or
otherwise, whether in travelling to and from Teignmouth in 1818, taking,
as we know he did, the southern route from Salisbury by Bridport and
Axminster, he may have broken the journey at Dorchester and visited the
curiosities of the coast. But in truth, to understand and possess
beauties of nature as a birthright, Keats needed not to have seen them
before. On board ship the same night Keats borrowed the copy of
Shakespeare's Poems which he had given Severn a few days before, and
wrote out fair and neatly for him, on the blank page opposite the
heading _A Lover's Complaint_, the beautiful sonnet which every lover
of English knows so well:--
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
Severn in later life clearly cherished the impression that the sonnet
had been actually composed for him on the day of the Dorsetshire
landing. Lord Houghton in his _Life and Literary Remains_ distinctly
asserts as much, and it had seemed to us all a beautiful and consolatory
circumstance, in the tragedy of Keats's closing days, that his last
inspiration in poetry should have come in a strain of such unfevered
beauty and tenderness, and with images of such a refreshing and solemn
purity. But in point of fact the sonnet was work of an earlier date, and
the autograph given to Severn is on the face of it no draught but a fair
copy. Its original form had been this--
Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art!
Not in lone splendour hung amid the night;
Not watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's devout sleepless Eremite,
The morning waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores;
Or, gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:--
No;--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Cheek-pillow'd on my Love's white ripening breast,
To touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell,
Awake, for ever, in a sweet unrest;
To hear, to feel her tender-taken breath,
Half passionless, and so swoon on to death.
The sonnet is copied in this form by Charles Brown, under date 1819, in
the collection of transcripts from Keats's fugitive verses which from
the spring of that year he regularly made as soon after they were
written as he could lay hands on them. His dates I have found always
trustworthy, and I have shown reason (above, p. 334) for holding the
sonnet to have been written in the last week of February, 1819, and the
first days of Keats's engagement to Fanny Brawne. All that Keats can
actually have done during that evening of tranquillity off Lulworth was
to return to it in thought and recopy it for Severn with changes which
in the second line heightened the remoteness of the star; in the fourth
made an inverted metrical stress normal by substituting 'patient' for
'devout'; in the fifth changed the word 'morning' into 'moving,'[2] in
the tenth cancelled one of his defining and arresting compound
participles in favour of a simpler phrase; and in the four concluding
lines varied a little the mood and temperature of the longing expressed,
calling for death not as the sequel to his longing's fulfilment, but as
the alternative for it. In Severn's first mention of the subject, which
is in a letter written from Rome a few weeks after Keats's death, he
shows himself aware that Brown might be in possession already of a
version of the sonnet, which of course could only have been the case if
it had been composed before Keats left Hampstead. 'Do you know,' he
writes, 'the sonnet beginning Bright Star etc., he wrote this down in
the ship--it is one of his most beautiful things. I will send it, if you
have it not.'
The rest of the voyage, after getting clear of the English Channel, was
quick but uncomfortable, the weather variable and often squally. Signs
of improvement in Keats's health alternated with alarming returns of
hæmorrhage, and the painful symptoms of his fellow-traveller Miss
Cotterell preyed sometimes severely on his nerves and spirits. At other
times his thoughts ran pleasantly on poems yet to be written, and
especially on one he had planned on the story of Sabrina. 'He mentioned
to me many times in our voyage', writes Severn within a few weeks of the
poet's death, 'his desire to write this story and to connect it with
some points in the English history and character. He would sometimes
brood over it with immense enthusiasm, and recite the story from
Milton's _Comus_ in a manner that I will remember to the end of my
days.' It is good to think of Keats being thus able to occupy and soothe
his fevered spirit with the lovely cadences that tell how Nereus pitied
the rescued nymph,
And gave her to his daughters to imbathe
In nectar'd lavers strew'd with Asphodel,
or with those that invoke her in the prayer,--
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,--
it is good to think of this and to try and conceive what Keats while he
was in health might have made of this English theme which haunted his
imagination now and afterwards at Rome, when the power to shape and
almost the power to live and breathe had left him.
Severn took during the voyage an opportunity to make a new drawing of
Keats as he lay propped and resting on his berth. Such a drawing would
have been an invaluable addition to our memorials of the poet: it
remained long in the possession first of one and then of another of
Severn's sons, but has of late years unluckily disappeared: stolen,
thinks its latest owner, Mr Arthur Severn: let us hope that this mention
may perhaps lead to its recognition and recovery. During some rough
weather in the Bay of Biscay Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of
_Don Juan_, but presently found its reckless and cynic brilliancy
intolerable, and flung the volume from him in disgust. Perhaps something
of his real feelings, but certainly nothing of his way of expressing
them, is preserved in Severn's account of the matter written
five-and-twenty years later:--
Keats threw down the book and exclaimed: 'this gives me the most
horrid idea of human nature, that a man like Byron should have
exhausted all the pleasures of the world so completely that there was
nothing left for him but to laugh and gloat over the most solemn and
heart-rending scenes of human misery, this storm of his is one of the
most diabolical attempts ever made upon our sympathies, and I have no
doubt it will fascinate thousands into extreme obduracy of heart--the
tendency of Bryon's poetry is based on a paltry originality, that of
being new by making solemn things gay and gay things solemn.'
In a calm off Cape St Vincent, Keats was delighted with the play of
silken colours on the sea, and interested in watching the movement of a
whale. The next day there came an alarm: a shot was fired over the bows
of the 'Maria Crowther' from one of two Portuguese men of war becalmed
close by; but drifting within hail one of the Portuguese captains
explained that there were supposed to be privateers in those waters and
that he only wanted to learn whether the Englishman had sighted any
such.
On October 21, thirty-four days out from London, the 'Maria Crowther'
reached Naples harbour and was promptly put in quarantine. In that
predicament her passengers sweltered and fumed for ten full days, their
number having been increased by the addition of a lieutenant and six
seamen, who were despatched from an English man-of-war in the harbour to
enquire as to the vessel's name and status, and having thoughtlessly
gone on board her were forbidden by the port authorities to go off
again. The friends found some alleviation from the tedium of the time
through the kindness of Miss Cotterell's brother, a banker in Naples,
who kept them supplied with all manner of dainties and luxuries, and
especially with abundance of fruit and flowers. 'Keats', says Severn,
'was never tired of admiring (not to speak of eating) the beautiful
clusters of grapes and other fruits, and was scarce less enthusiastic
over the autumn flowers, though I remember his saying once that he would
gladly give them all for a wayside dog-rose bush covered with pink
blooms.' The time of detention passed with a good deal of merriment,
songs from the man-of-war's men on board, songs, laughter, and gibes
from the Neapolitan boatmen swarming round. In all this Keats would
join, feverishly enough it is evident, and declared afterwards that he
had made more puns in the course of those ten days than in any whole
year of his life beside. Once he flashed into a characteristic heat of
righteous wrath, when the seamen took to trolling obscene catches in
full hearing of the ladies. On the fourth day of their detention he
wrote to Mrs Brawne, (to Fanny he dared not write, nor suffer his
thoughts to dwell on her at all), saying what he thought of his own
state:--
We have to remain in the vessel ten days and are at present shut in a
tier of ships. The sea air has been beneficial to me about to as great
extent as squally weather and bad accommodations and provisions has
done harm. So I am about as I was. Give my love to Fanny and tell her,
if I were well there is enough in this Port of Naples to fill a quire
of Paper--but it looks like a dream--every man who can row his boat
and walk and talk seems a different being from myself. I do not feel
in the world.
It is impossible to describe exactly in what state of health I am--at
this moment I am suffering from indigestion very much, which makes
such stuff of this Letter. I would always wish you to think me a
little worse than I really am; not being of a sanguine disposition I
am likely to succeed. If I do not recover your regret will be
softened--if I do your pleasure will be doubled. I dare not fix my
Mind upon Fanny, I have not dared to think of her. The only comfort I
have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having
the knife she gave me put in a silver-case--the hair in a Locket--and
the Pocket Book in a gold net. Show her this. I dare say no more. Yet
you must not believe I am so ill as this Letter may look, for if ever
there was a person born without the faculty of hoping I am he. Severn
is writing to Haslam, and I have just asked him to request Haslam to
send you his account of my health. O what an account I could give you
of the Bay of Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of
this world--I feel a spirit in my Brain would lay it forth
pleasantly--O what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints!
Once released from quarantine and landed at Naples Severn wrote to
Haslam fully his impressions of the voyage and of its effects on his
friend.
Naples, Nov. 1 1820.
My dear Haslam,
We are just released from the loathsome misery of quarantine--foul
weather and foul air for the whole 10 days kept us to the small
cabin--surrounded by about 2,000 ships in a wretched hole not
sufficient for half the number, yet Keats is still living--may I not
have hopes of him? He has passed what I must have thought would kill
myself. Now that we are on shore and feel the fresh air, I am horror
struck at his sufferings on this voyage, all that could be fatal to
him in air and diet--with the want of medicine and conveniences he has
weather'd it, if I may call his poor shattered frame and broken heart
weathering it. For myself I have stood it firmly until this morning
when in a moment my spirits dropt at the sight of his suffering--a
plentiful shower of tears (which he did not see) has relieved me
somewhat--what he passed still unnerves me. But now we are breathing
in a large room with Vesuvius in our view--Keats has become calm and
thinks favourably of this place for we are meeting with much kind
treatment on every side--more particularly from an English gentleman
here (brother to Miss Cottrell one of our lady passengers) who has
shown unusually humane treatment to Keats--unasked--these with very
good accommodation at our Inn (Villa de Londra) have kept him up
through dinner--but on the other hand Dr Milner is at Rome (whither
Keats is proposing to go) the weather is now cold wet and foggy, and
we find ourselves on the wrong side for his hope for recovery (for the
present I will talk to him--he is disposed to it. I will talk him to
sleep for he has suffered much fatigue).
Nov. 2.
Keats went to bed much recovered--I took every means to remove from
him a heavy grief that may tend more than anything to be fatal--he
told me much--very much--and I don't know whether it was more painful
for me or himself--but it had the effect of much relieving him--he
went very calm to bed.
Poor fellow! he is still sleeping at half past nine, if I can but ease
his mind I will bring him back to England _well_--but I fear it never
can be done in this world--the grand scenery here affects him a
little--but he is too infirm to enjoy it--his gloom deadens his sight
to everything--and but for intervals of something like ease he must
soon end it--
You will like to know how I have managed in respect to self. I have
had a most severe task full of contrarieties what I did one way was
undone another. The lady passenger though in the same state as
Keats--yet differing in constitution required almost everything the
opposite to him--for instance if the cabin windows were not open she
would faint and remain entirely insensible 5 or 6 hours together--if
the windows were open poor Keats would be taken with a cough (a
violent one--caught from this cause) and sometimes spitting of blood,
now I had this to manage continually for our other passenger is a most
consumate brute--she would see Miss Cottrell stiffened like a
corpse--I have sometimes thought her dead--nor ever lend the least
aid--full a dozen times I have recovered this lady and put her to
bed--sometimes she would faint 4 times in a day yet at intervals would
seem quite well--and was full of spirits--she is both young and
lively--and but for her we should have had more heaviness--though much
less trouble. She has benefited by Keats's advice--I used to act under
him--and reduced the fainting each time--she has recovered very much
and gratefully ascribes it to us--her brother the same.
The Captain has behaved with great kindness to us all--but more
particularly Keats--everything that could be got or done--was at his
service without asking--he is a good-natured man to his own
injury--strange for a captain I won't say so much for his ship--it's a
black hole--5 sleeping in one cabin--the one you saw--the only
one--during the voyage I have been frequently sea-sick--sometimes
severely--2 days together. We have had only one real fright on the
seas--not to mention continued squalls--and a storm. 'All's well that
ends well,' and these ended well. Our fright was from two Portugese
ships of war--they brought us to with a shot--which passed close under
our stern--this was not pleasant for us you will allow--nor was it
decreased when they came up--for a more infernal set I never could
imagine--after some trifling questions they allowed us to go on to our
no small delight--our captain was afraid they would plunder the
ship--this was in the Bay of Biscay--over which we were carried by a
good wind.
Keats has written to Brown--and in quarantine another to Mrs
Brawne--he requests you will tell Mrs Brawne what I think of him--for
he is too bad to judge of himself--this morning he is still very much
better. We are in good spirits and I may say hopeful fellows--at least
I may say as much for Keats--he made an Italian pun to-day--the rain
is coming down in torrents.
The confession Keats had made to Severn was of course that of the
effects of the passion which had so long been racking and wasting him,
and the violence of which he had shrunk till now from disclosing to
friend or brother. Writing on the same day to Brown, he could not
control or disguise the anguish of his heart.
Naples, 1 November 1820.
My dear Brown,
Yesterday we were let out of Quarantine, during which my health
suffered more from bad air and the stifled cabin than it had done the
whole voyage. The fresh air revived me a little, and I hope I am well
enough this morning to write to you a short calm letter;--if that can
be called one, in which I am afraid to speak of what I would fainest
dwell upon. As I have gone thus far into it, I must go on a little;
perhaps it may relieve the load of WRETCHEDNESS which presses upon me.
The persuasion that I will see her no more will kill me. My dear
Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have
remained well. I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her. O, God!
God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes
through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap
scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see
her--I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest
to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I was in
England; I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a
prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all
day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again--Now!--O that I
could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her--to
receive a letter from her--to see her handwriting would break my
heart--even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be
more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? Where can I look
for consolation or ease?
I cannot say a word about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in
the thousand novelties around me. I am afraid to write to her--I
should like her to know that I do not forget her. Oh, Brown, I have
coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart is
capable of containing and bearing so much misery. Was I born for this
end? God bless her, and her mother, and my sister, and George, and
his wife, and you, and all!
During the four days they remained at Naples Keats received a second
invitation in the kindest possible terms from Shelley to come and settle
near him in Pisa, but determined to carry out his original plan of
wintering at Rome, where he was to place Taylor's bill to his credit at
Torlonia's and whither he carried a special introduction to Dr
(afterwards Sir James) Clark. Severn was also the bearer of one from Sir
Thomas Lawrence to Canova. Keats attempted to amuse himself reading
_Clarissa Harlowe_, and also seeing some of the sights of Naples. After
almost a century there has lately come to light a record, set down at
second-hand and probably touched up in the telling, of some things
noticed and words spoken by the stricken poet in drives about the city
and suburbs in the friendly company of Mr Charles Cotterell, the brother
of his invalid fellow-passenger. Keats was driving, says the narrator,
Mr Charles Macfarlane,--
--he was driving with Charles Cottrell from the Bourbon Museum, up the
beautiful open road which leads up to Capo di Monte and the Ponte
Rossi. On the way, in front of a villa or cottage, he was struck and
moved by the sight of some rose trees in full bearing. Thinking to
gratify the invalid, Cottrell, a ci-devant officer in the British
Navy, jumped out of the carriage, spoke to somebody about the house or
garden, and was back in a trice with a bouquet of roses. 'How late in
the year! What an exquisite climate!' said the Poet; but on putting
them to his nose, he threw the flowers down on the opposite seat, and
exclaimed: 'Humbugs! they have no scent! What is a rose without its
fragrance? I hate and abhor all humbug, whether in a flower or in a
man or woman!' And having worked himself strongly up in the
anti-humbug humour, he cast the bouquet out on the road. I suppose
that the flowers were China roses, which have little odour at any
time, and hardly any at the approach of winter.
Returning from that drive, he had intense enjoyment in halting close
to the Capuan Gate, and in watching a group of lazzaroni or labouring
men, as, at a stall with fire and cauldron by the roadside in the open
air, they were disposing of an incredible quantity of macaroni,
introducing it in long unbroken strings into their capacious mouths,
without the intermediary of anything but their hands. 'I like this,'
said he; 'these hearty fellows scorn the humbug of knives and forks.
Fingers were invented first. Give them some _carlini_ that they may
eat more! Glorious sight! How they take it in!'[3]
But the political state and servile temper of the Neapolitan
people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms
imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous
summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and misinterpreting at the
theatre the sight of a couple of armed sentries posted (as was the
custom of the time and country) on the stage, he broke into a fit of
anger and determined suddenly to leave the place. Accordingly on the 4th
or 5th of November the friends set out for Rome in a small hired
carriage, which jogged so loiteringly on the road that Severn was able
to walk beside it almost all the way. Keats suffered seriously at the
stopping-places from bad quarters and bad food, and was for the most
part listless and dispirited, but would become animated 'when an
unusually fine prospect opened before us, or the breeze bore to us
exquisite hill fragrances or breaths from the distant blue seas, and
particularly when I literally filled the little carriage with flowers.
He never tired of these, and they gave him a singular and almost
fantastic pleasure which was at times almost akin to a strange joy.'
Entering Rome by the Lateran gate they settled at once in lodgings which
Dr Clark, to whom Keats had written from Naples, had already secured
for them, in the first house on the right going up the steps from the
Piazza di Spagna to Sta Trinità dei Monti. Here, according to the manner
of those days in Italy, they were left pretty much to shift for
themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and at first they were ill
served by the trattorìa from which they got their meals, until Keats,
having bidden Severn see how he would mend matters, one day coolly
emptied all the dishes out of the window, and handed them back to the
porter: a hint, says Severn, which was quickly taken. For a while the
patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of
seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit
these alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the
Pincian close by.
The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the air, says
Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. Clark gave Severn an
introduction to Gibson, the then famous American sculptor, and Keats
insisted on his delivering it at once and losing no opportunity of
making acquaintances in Rome that might be useful to him, and no time in
getting to work on his projected competition picture, 'The Death of
Alcibiades.' In Severn's absence Keats had a companion he liked in an
invalid Lieutenant Elton. In their walks on the Pincian these two often
met the famous beauty Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms
were by this time failing--but not for lack of exercise; and her melting
glances at his companion, who was tall and handsome, presently affected
Keats's nerves, and made them change the direction of their walks.
Sometimes, instead of walking, they would take short invalid rides, on
hired mounts suited to their respective statures, about the Pincian or
outside the Porta del Popolo, while Severn was working among the ruins.
The mitigation of Keats's sufferings lasted for some five weeks, and
filled the anxious heart of Severn with hope. Nevertheless he could not
but be aware of the deep-seated dejection in his friend which found
expression now and again in word or act, as when he began reading a
volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the lines, too sadly applicable to
himself:--
Misera me! sollievo a me non resta
Altro che 'l pianto, ed il pianto è delitto.
Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more placid.
Severn had hired a piano for their lodgings, and the patient often
allowed himself to be soothed with music. His thoughts even turned
towards verse, and he again meditated and spoke of his proposed poem on
the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and
on November 30 Keats himself wrote to Brown in a strain far from
cheerful, indeed, but much less desperate than before.
I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I
am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have
been--but it appears to me--however, I will not speak of that subject.
I must have been at Bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to
me from Chichester--how unfortunate--and to pass on the river too!
There was my star predominant! I cannot answer anything in your
letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to
look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the
sight of any handwriting of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I
ride the little horse, and, at my worst, even in quarantine, summoned
up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year
of my life. There is one thought enough to kill me; I have been well,
healthy, alert, etc., walking with her, and now the knowledge of
contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive
sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of the
stomach. There, you rogue, I put you to the torture; but you must
bring your philosophy to bear, as I do mine, really, or how should I
be able to live? Dr Clark is very attentive to me; he says there is
very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very
bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George, for it
runs in my head we shall all die young. I have not written to Reynolds
yet, which he must think neglectful; being anxious to send him a good
account of my health, I have delayed it from week to week. If I
recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made
during sickness; and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven.
Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember
me to all friends, and tell Haslam I should not have left London
without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind.
Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as
far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister--who walks about my
imagination like a ghost--she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you
good-bye, even in a letter. I always make an awkward bow.
God bless you!
But on the glimmering hopes of these first weeks at Rome there suddenly
followed despair. On Dec. 10, 'when he was going on in good spirits,
quite merrily,' says Severn, came a relapse which left no doubt of the
issue. Hæmorrhage followed hæmorrhage on successive days, and then came
a period of violent fever, with scenes the most piteous and distressing.
To put an end to his misery, Keats with agonies of entreaty begged to
have the bottle of laudanum which Severn had by his desire bought at
Gravesend: and on Severn's refusal, 'his tender appeal turned to
despair, with all the power of his ardent imagination and bursting
heart.' It was no unmanly fear of pain in Keats, Severn again and again
insists, that prompted this appeal, but above all his acute sympathetic
sense of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend. 'He
explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual dissolution,
enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger to my
life and certainly to my fortune of my continued attendance on him.'
Severn gently holding firm, Keats for a while fiercely refused his
friend's ministrations, until presently the example of that friend's
patience and his own better mind made him ashamed.
From these relapses until the end Severn had no respite from his devoted
ministrations. Writing to Mrs Brawne a week after the crisis, he says
'Not a moment can I be from him. I sit by his bed and read all day, and
at night I humour him in all his wanderings. He has just fallen asleep,
the first sleep for eight nights, and now from mere exhaustion.' By
degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great,
partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of
the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to
combat it. His diet was at one time reduced to one anchovy and a small
piece of toast a day, so that he endured cruel pangs of actual hunger.
Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then were in
Italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous kindness of
Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr Ewing. The
devotion and resource of Severn were infinite, and had their reward.
Occasionally there came times of delirium or half-delirium, when the
dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and his ruined hopes, and of
all that he would have done in poetry had life and the fruition of his
love been granted him, till his companion was almost exhausted with
'beating about in the tempest of his mind'; and once and again some
fresh remembrance of his betrothed, or the sight of her handwriting in a
letter, would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally,
after the first days of storm, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a
white cornelian, one of the little tokens she had given him at starting,
while his companion soothed him with reading or music. The virulence of
the reviewers, which most of his friends supposed to be what was killing
him, was a matter, Severn declares, scarcely ever on his lips or in his
mind at all. Gradually he seemed to mend and gather a little strength
again, till Severn actually began to dream that he might even yet
recover, though he himself would admit no such hope. 'He says the
continued stretch of his imagination has already killed him. He will not
hear of his good friends in England, except for what they have done; and
this is another load; but of their high hopes of him, his certain
success, his experience, he will not hear a word. Then the want of some
kind of hope to feed his voracious imagination'--This is from a letter
to Mr Taylor which Severn began on Christmas Eve and never finished. On
the 11th January, in one conveying to Mrs Brawne the reviving hopes he
was beginning on the slenderest grounds to cherish, Severn writes:--
Now he has changed to calmness and quietude, as singular as productive
of good, for his mind was most certainly killing him. He has now given
up all thoughts, hopes, or even wish for recovery. His mind is in a
state of peace from the final leave he has taken of this world and all
its future hopes; this has been an immense weight for him to rise
from. He remains quiet and submissive under his heavy fate. Now, if
anything will recover him, it is this absence of himself. I have
perceived for the last three days symptoms of recovery. Dr Clark even
thinks so. Nature again revives in him--I mean where art was used
before; yesterday he permitted me to carry him from his bedroom to our
sitting-room--to put clean things on him--and to talk about my
painting to him. This is my good news--don't think it otherwise, my
dear madam, for I have been in such a state of anxiety and
discomfiture in this barbarous place, that the least hope of my
friend's recovery is a heaven to me.
For three weeks I have never left him--I have sat up all night--I have
read to him nearly all day, and even in the night--I light the
fire--make his breakfast, and sometimes am obliged to cook--make his
bed, and even sweep the room. I can have these things done, but never
at the time when they must and ought to be done--so that you will see
my alternative; what enrages me most is making a fire--I blow--blow
for an hour--the smoke comes fuming out--my kettle falls over on the
burning sticks--no stove--Keats calling me to be with him--the fire
catching my hands and the door-bell ringing: all these to one quite
unused and not at all capable--with the want of even proper
material--come not a little galling. But to my great surprise I am not
ill--or even restless--nor have I been all the time; there is nothing
but what I will do for him--there is no alternative but what I think
and provide myself against--except his death--not the loss of him--I
am prepared to bear that--but the inhumanity, the barbarism of these
Italians....
O! I would my unfortunate friend had never left your Wentworth
Place--for the hopeless advantages of this comfortless Italy. He has
many, many times talked over 'the few happy days at your house, the
only time when his mind was at ease.' I hope still to see him with you
again. Farewell, my dear madam. One more thing I must say--poor Keats
cannot see any letters, at least he will not--they affect him so much
and increase his danger. The two last I repented giving, he made me
put them into his box--unread.
The complaint about the barbarity of Rome and of Italian law was due to
a warning Severn had received that on the death of his friend every
stick and shred of furniture in the house would have to be burnt. Within
a few days the last thread of hope was snapped by fresh returns of
hæmorrhage and utter prostration, with renewed feverish agitations of
the tortured spirit. Writing to Haslam on January the 15th, Severn shows
himself almost broken down by the imminence of money difficulties about
to add themselves to his other cares:--
Poor Keats has just fallen asleep--I have watched him and read to
him--to his very last wink--he has been saying to me 'Severn I can see
under your quiet look--immense twisting and contending--you don't know
what you are reading--you are enduring for me more than I'd have
you--O that my last hour was come--what is it puzzles you now--what is
it happens--' I tell him that 'nothing happens--nothing worries me
beyond his seeing--that it has been the dull day.' Getting from myself
to his recovery--and then my painting--and then England--and then--but
they are all lies--my heart almost leaps to deny them--for I have the
veriest load of care--that ever came upon these shoulders of mine. For
Keats is sinking daily--perhaps another three weeks may lose me him
for ever--this alone would break down the most gallant spirit--I had
made sure of his recovery when I set out. I was selfish and thought of
his value to me--and made a point of my future success depend on his
candor to me--this is not all--I have prepared myself to bear this
now--now that I must and should have seen it before--but Torlonias the
bankers have refused any more money--the bill is returned
unaccepted--'no effects' and I tomorrow must--aye must--pay the last
solitary crown for this cursed lodging place--yet more should our
unfortunate friend die--all the furniture will be burnt--bed
sheets--curtains and even the walls must be scraped--and these devils
will come upon me for £100 or £150--the making good--but above all
this noble fellow lying on the bed is dying in horror--no kind hope
smoothing down his suffering--no philosophy--no religion to support
him--yet with all the most gnawing desire for it--yet without the
possibility of receiving it....
Now Haslam what do you think of my situation--for I know not what may
come with tomorrow--I am hedg'd in every way that you look at me--if I
could leave Keats for a while every day I could soon raise money by my
face painting--but he will not let me out of his sight--he cannot bear
the face of a stranger--he has made me go out twice and leave him
solus. I'd rather cut my tongue out than tell him that money I must
get--that would kill him at a word--I will not do anything that may
add to his misery--for I have tried on every point to leave for a few
hours in the day but he wont unless he is left alone--this won't
do--nor shall not for another minute whilst he is John Keats.
Yet will I not bend down under these--I will not give myself a jot of
credit unless I stand firm--and will too--you'd be rejoiced to see how
I am kept up--not a flinch yet--I read, cook, make the beds--and do
all the menial offices--for no soul comes near Keats except the doctor
and myself--yet I do all this with a cheerful heart--for I thank God
my little but honest religion stays me up all through these trials.
I'll pray to God tonight that He may look down with mercy on my poor
friend and myself. I feel no dread of what more I am to bear but look
to it with confidence.
In religion Keats had been neither a believer nor by any means (except
in the earliest days of his enthusiasm for Leigh Hunt) a scoffer;
respecting Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by
turns clinging to and drifting from the doctrine of human immortality.
Now, on his death-bed, says Severn, among the most haunting and
embittering of his distresses was the thought that not for him were
those ready consolations of orthodoxy which were within the reach of
every knave and fool. After a time, contrasting the steadfast behaviour
of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the power of
the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to him from
Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Dying and Holy Living_, strove to pass the
remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy.
The danger of money trouble must have been due to a pure
misunderstanding, as the credit at Torlonia's was in fact not exhausted,
and a fresh communication from Mr Taylor removed all anxiety on that
score. One day Keats was seized with a desire for books and was able
for a time to take pleasure in reading those which Severn procured for
him. Another and continual pleasure was Severn's playing on the piano,
and especially his playing of Haydn's sonatas. 'With all his suffering
and consciousness of approaching death,' wrote Severn in after years,
'he never quite lost the play of his cheerful and elastic mind, yet
these happier moments were but slight snatches from his misery, like the
flickering rays of the sun in a smothering storm. Real rays of sunshine
they were, all the same, such as would have done honour to the brightest
health and the happiest mind: yet the storm of sickness and death was
always going on, and I have often thought that these bursts of wit and
cheerfulness were called up of set purpose--were, in fact, a great
effort on my account.'
Neither patient nor watcher thought any more of recovery. For a few days
Severn had the help of an English nurse. It was doubtless then that
Keats made his friend go and see the place chosen for his burial. 'He
expressed pleasure at my description of the locality of the Pyramid of
Caius Cestius, about the grass and the many flowers, particularly the
innumerable violets--also about a flock of goats and sheep and a young
shepherd--all these intensely interested him. Violets were his favourite
flowers, and he joyed to hear how they overspread the graves. He assured
me that he seemed already to feel the flowers growing over him': and it
seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he gave for his
epitaph the words, partly taken from a phrase in Beaumont and Fletcher's
_Philaster_,[4]--'here lies one whose name was writ in water.' Ever
since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to speak of
himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual question to
the doctor when he came in was, 'Doctor, when will this posthumous life
of mine come to an end?'. As he turned to ask it neither physician nor
friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at all times of
extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing unearthly
brightness in his wasted cheeks. Once or twice he was torn again by too
sharp a reminder of vanished joys and hopes. Severn handed him a letter
which he supposed to be from Mrs Brawne, but which was really from her
daughter. 'The glance of that letter tore him to pieces. The effects
were on him for many days--he did not read it--he could not, but
requested me to place it in his coffin together with a purse and a
letter (unopened) of his sister's--since which time he has requested me
not to place _that letter_, but only his sister's purse and letter with
some hair.' Loveable and considerate to the last, 'his generous concern
for me,' reiterates Severn, 'in my isolated position at Rome was one of
his greatest cares.' His response to kindness was irresistibly winning,
and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with him to the end.
Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to fall asleep, and
awakening, find they were in the dark. 'To remedy this one night I tried
the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a lighted candle to
the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be conducted, all
which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found the first
candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while doubting
suddenly cried out, "Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy lamp-lighter
actually lit up the other candle."' And again: 'Poor Keats has me ever
by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens his
eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close
gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep.'
Life held out for six weeks after the second relapse, but from the first
days of February the end was visibly drawing near. On one of his nights
of vigil Severn occupied himself in making that infinitely touching
death-bed drawing in black and white of his friend with which all
readers are familiar. Between the 14th and 22nd of February Severn wrote
letters to Brown, to Mrs Brawne, and to Haslam to prepare them for the
worst and to tell them of the reconciled and tranquil state into which
the dying man had fallen. Death came very peacefully at last. On the
23rd of that month, writes Severn, 'about four, the approaches of death
came on. 'Severn--I--lift me up--I am dying--I shall die easy; don't be
frightened--be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my
arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until
eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still
thought he slept.' Three days later his body was carried, attended by
several of the English in Rome who had heard his story, to its grave in
that retired and verdant cemetery which for his sake and Shelley's has
become a place of pilgrimage to the English-speaking world for ever.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A long-popular song from Arne's opera _Artaxerxes_.
[2] Unless Brown had transcribed 'morning' for 'moving' in error; and
this was probably the case, though there is a tempting sonority in
the juxtaposition of the nearly identical broad vowel sounds in his
version.
[3] _Reminiscences of a Literary Life_, by Charles Macfarlane:
London, John Murray, 1917, pp. 12-15.--Keats in his letters is apt
enough to talk of cant and flummery, but not of humbug, and I suspect
the word, though not the thought, is put into his mouth. With
reference to Mr Macfarlane's account of Keats generally as 'one of
the most cheery and plucky little fellows I ever knew,' and as a man
to have stood with composure a whole broadside of Blackwood and
Quarterly articles, and to have faced a battery by the side of any
friend, it is difficult to conjecture at what date the writer can
have seen enough of Keats to form these impressions. From January
1816, when he was in his seventeenth year, to 1827, young Macfarlane
seems to have lived entirely at Naples, except for some excursions to
the Levant and a short visit to England in 1820, when Keats was a
consumptive patient already starting or started for Italy.
[4] Act v, Sc. iii. See Harrison S. Morris in _Bulletin and Review of
the Keats-Shelley Memorial_, 1913, p. 30.
CHAPTER XVII
EPILOGUE
Hopes and fears at home--Fanny Brawne: Leigh Hunt--Supposed effect of
reviews--Shelley misled and inspired--_Adonais_--A _Blackwood_
Parody--False impressions confirmed--Death of Shelley--Hazlitt and
Severn--Brown at Florence--Inscription for Keats's grave--Severn and
Walter Scott--Slow growth of Keats's fame--Its beginnings at
Cambridge--Opinion in the early 'forties--Would-be biographers at
odds--Taylor and Brown: Brown and Dilke--A solution: Monckton
Milnes--The old circle: Hunt and Haydon--John Hamilton
Reynolds--Haslam, Severn, Bailey--Flaws and slips in Milnes's
work--Its merit and timeliness--Its reception--The
Pre-Raphaelites--Rossetti and Morris--The battle won: Later
critics--Keats and Shelley--Pitfalls and prejudices--Arnold and
Palgrave--Mr. Buxton Forman and others--Latest eulogists--Risks to
permanence of fame--His will conquer--Youth and its storms--The
might-have-been--Guesses and a certainty.
The friends of Keats at home had in their love for him tried hard after
his departure to nurse some sparks of hope for his recovery. John
Hamilton Reynolds, answering from Exmouth a letter in which Taylor told
him of the poet's having sailed, wrote, 'I am _very_ much pleased at
what you tell me. I cannot now but hold a hope of his refreshed health,
which I confess his residence in England greatly discouraged.... Keats,
then, by this is at sea fairly--with England and one or two sincere
friends behind him,--and with a warm clime before his face! If ever I
wished well to Man, I wish well to him!' Haslam in a like strain of
feeling wrote in December to Severn at Rome:--'The climate, however,
will, I trust, avail him. Keep him quiet, get the winter through; an
opening year in Italy will perfect everything. Ere this reaches you, I
trust Doctor Clark will have confirmed the most sanguine hopes of his
friends in England; and to you, my friend, I hope he will have given
what you stand much in need of--a confidence amounting to a faith....
Keats must get himself well again, Severn, if but for us. I, for one,
cannot afford to lose him. If I know what it is to love, I truly love
John Keats.' The letters written by Severn to this faithful friend
during the voyage and from beside the sick-bed were handed round and
eagerly scanned among the circle. Brown, when they came into his hands,
used to read passages from them at his discretion to the Brawne ladies
next door, keeping the darkest from the daughter by her mother's wish.
Mrs Brawne, evidently believing her child's heart to be deeply engaged,
dealt in the same manner with Severn's letters to herself. The girl
seems to have divined none the less that her lover's condition was past
hope, and her demeanour, according to Brown's account as follows, to
have been human and natural. Keats, writes Brown in a broken style,--
Keats is present to me everywhere and at all times--he now seems
sitting by my side and looking hard in my face, though I have taken
the opportunity of writing this in company--for I scarcely believe I
could do it alone. Much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely
he was wound about my heart. Mrs Brawne was greatly agitated when I
told her of--and her daughter--I don't know how--for I was not
present--yet she bears it with great firmness, mournfully but without
affectation. I understand she says to her mother, 'I believe he must
soon die, and when you hear of his death, tell me immediately. I am
not a fool!'
As the news grew worse, it seems to have been more and more kept back
from her, injudiciously as Brown thought, and in a mutilated letter he
gives glimpses of moods in her, apparently hysterical, of alternate
forced gaiety and frozen silence. A letter or two which she had written
to her dying lover were withheld from him, as we have seen, by reason of
the terrible agitation into which the mere sight of her handwriting
threw him. We hear in the meantime of her being in close correspondence
with his young sister at Walthamstow. When the news of the end came,
Brown writes,--'I felt at the moment utterly unprepared for it. Then
_she_--she was to have it told her, and the worst had been concealed
from her knowledge ever since your December letter. It is now five days
since she heard it. I shall not speak of the first shock, nor of the
following days,--it is enough she is now pretty well,--and thro'out she
has shown a firmness of mind which I little expected from one so young,
and under such a load of grief.'
Leigh Hunt had written in these days a letter to Severn which did not
reach Rome until after Keats's death. I must quote it as showing yet
again the strength of the hold which Keats had on the hearts of his
friends, and how he, in a second degree only to Shelley, had struck on
something much deeper in Hunt's nature than the sunny, kindly,
easy-going affectionateness which was all that in most relations he had
to bestow:--
Judge how often I thought of Keats, and with what feelings. Mr Brown
tells me he is comparatively calm now. If he can bear to hear of us,
pray tell him; but he knows it all already, and can put it in better
language than any man. I hear he does not like to be told that he may
get better, nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm
persuasion that he shall not thrive. But if this persuasion should
happen no longer to be so strong upon him, or if he can now put up
with such attempts to console him, remind him of what I have said a
thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour I swear) think
always, that I have seen too many cases of recovery from apparently
desperate cases of consumption, not to indulge in hope to the very
last. If he still cannot bear this, tell him--tell that great poet and
noble-hearted man that we shall all bear his memory in the most
precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads
to it as our loves do. Or if this will trouble his spirit, tell him
that we shall never cease to remember and love him, and that Christian
or Infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high
things that nature puts into our heads, to think that all who are of
one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and the same place,
and shall meet somehow or other again, face to face, mutually
conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only before us on the
road, as he was in everything else; or whether you tell him the latter
or no, tell him the former, and add, that we shall never forget that
he was so, and that we are coming after him. The tears are again in my
eyes, and I must not afford to shed them.
During Keats's year of illness and dejection at home, and until the end
and after it, the general impression among his friends and acquaintances
was that the cause of all his troubles was the agony of mind into which
the hostile reviews had thrown him. Severn in the course of his tendance
discovered, as we have seen, that this was not so, and learnt the full
share which was due to the pangs of unsatisfied, and in a worldly sense
hopeless, passion in a consumptive constitution. Brown on his part,
although he knew the secret of the heart which Keats so jealously
guarded, yet attributed the chief part of his friend's distress to the
fear of impending poverty--truly another contributing cause--and
conceived a fierce and obstinate indignation against George for having,
as he quite falsely imagined, deliberately fleeced his brother, as well
as against other friends who had borrowed money from the poet and failed
to pay it back. But most of those who knew Keats less intimately, seeing
his sudden fall from robustness and high spirits,--having never thought
of him as a possible consumptive subject,--and being themselves
white-hot with anger against _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_,--inferred
the poet's feelings from their own, and at the same time added fuel to
their wrath against the critics, by taking it for granted that it was
their cruelty which was killing him.
To no one was this impression conveyed in a more extravagant form than
to Shelley, presumably through his friends the Gisbornes. In that letter
of remonstrance to Gifford, as editor of the _Quarterly_, which he
drafted in the autumn of 1820 but never sent, Shelley writes:--
Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review,
which I am, persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing
the effect, to which it has, at least, greatly contributed, of
embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are
now but faint hopes of his recovery. The first effects are described
to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching
that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony
of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in
the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun.
In the preface to _Adonais_, composed at San Giuliano, near Pisa, in the
June following Keats's death in the next year, Shelley repeats the same
delusion in different words, adding the still less justified
statement,--probably founded by his informant, Colonel Finch, on
expressions used by Brown to Severn about George Keats and other
borrowers,--that Keats's misery had been 'exasperated by the bitter
sense of unrequited benefits:--the poor fellow seems to have been hooted
from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the
promise of his genius, than those on whom he had lavished his fortune
and his care.' Of the critical attacks upon Keats, Shelley seems not to
have known the _Blackwood_ lampoons, and to have put down all the
mischief (as did Byron following him) to the _Quarterly_ alone. With his
heart and soul full of passionate poetic regret for what the world had
lost in the death of the author of _Hyperion_, and of passionate human
indignation against the supposed agents of his undoing, Shelley wrote
that lament for Keats which is the best of his longer poems and next to
_Lycidas_ the noblest of its class in the language. Like Milton, Shelley
chose to conform to a consecrated convention and link his work to a long
tradition by going back to the precedent of the Sicilian pastoral
elegies, those beautiful examples of a form even in its own day
conventional and literary. He took two masterpieces of that school, the
dirge or ritual chant of Bion on the death of Adonis and the elegy of
Moschus on the death of Bion, and into strains directly caught and
blended from both of these wove inseparably a new strain of imagery and
emotion entirely personal and his own.
The human characteristics of the lamented person, the flesh and blood
realities of life, are not touched or thought upon. A rushing train of
abstractions, such as were at all times to Shelley more inspiring and
more intensely realized than persons and things,--a rushing train of
beautiful and sorrowful abstractions sweeps by, in _Adonais_, to a
strain of music so entrancing that at a first, or even at a twentieth,
reading it is perhaps more to the music of the poem than to its imagery
that the spiritual sense of the reader attends. Nevertheless he will
find at last that the imagery, all unsubstantial as it is, has been
floated along the music into his mental being to haunt and live with
him: he will be conscious of a possession for ever in that invocation of
the celestial Muse to awake and weep for the youngest of her sons,--that
pageant of the dead poet's own dreams and imaginations conceived as
gathering 'like mist over an autumnal stream' to attend upon his
corpse,--the voice of Echo silenced (again a direct adaptation from the
Greek) since she has no longer words of his to repeat and awaken the
spring withal,--the vision of the coming of Urania to the death
chamber,--her lament, with its side-shafts of indignation against the
wolves and ravens who have made her youngest-born their prey--the
approach and homage of the other 'mountain shepherds,' Byron, Shelley
himself, Moore, Leigh Hunt, all figured, especially Shelley, in a guise
purely abstract and mythologic and yet after its own fashion
passionately true,--the bitter ironic application to the reviewers of
the verses from Moschus used as a motto to the poem,--
Our Adonais has drunk poison--oh!
What deaf and viperous murderer could crown
Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?--
the swift change to a consolatory strain exhorting the mourners to cease
their grief and recognise that the lost poet is made one with Nature and
that it is Death who is dead, not he,--the invitation to the beautiful
burial-place at Rome,--the high strain of Platonic meditation on the
transcendental permanence of the One while the Many change and
pass,--the final vision by the rapt spirit of Shelley of the soul of
his brother poet beckoning like a star from the abode of the Eternals.
Looking upon his own work in his modest and unsanguine way, Shelley
could not suppress the hope that this time he had written something that
should not be utterly neglected. He had the poem printed at Pisa, whence
a small number of copies only were sent to England. One immediate effect
was to instigate the last and silliest--happily, perhaps, also the least
remembered--of the _Blackwood_ blackguardries. Not even the tragic
experiences of the preceding winter had cured the conductors of that
journal of their taste for savage ribaldry. John Scott, the keen-witted
and warm-hearted editor, formerly of the _Champion_ and latterly of
Taylor's and Hessey's _London Magazine_, had denounced the 'Z' papers,
and demanded a disclosure of Lockhart's share in them and in the
management of the magazine, in terms so peremptory and scathing that the
threat of a challenge from Lockhart followed as an inevitable
consequence. The clumsy, well meant intromission of third parties had
only the effect of substituting Lockhart's friend Christie in the broil
for Lockhart himself. The duel was fought on January 16, 1821, exactly a
week before Keats's death, and Scott was killed. None the less, when
late in the summer of the same year copies of _Adonais_ reached England,
remarks on it outdoing all previous outbreaks in folly and insolence
were contributed to _Blackwood_ by a comparatively new recruit, the
learned and drunken young Dublin scholar William Maginn. Professing
absurdly to regard the cockney school as a continuation of the 'Della
Cruscan' school laughed out of existence by Gifford some five-and-twenty
years earlier, the writer includes Shelley of all men (forgetting former
laudations of him) among the cockneys, flings up a heel at the memory of
Keats as 'a young man who had left a decent calling for the melancholy
trade of cockney-poetry and has lately died of a consumption after
having written two or three little books of verse much neglected by the
public'; and proceeds to give a comic analysis of _Adonais_, with some
specimens of parody upon it, which were afterwards re-published without
shame under Maginn's name.
Eight years later, as we shall see, it was on the enthusiasm of a band
of young Cambridge men for _Adonais_ that the fame of Keats began to be
spread abroad among our younger generation in England. In the meantime
the chief effect of the poem was to confirm in the minds of the few
readers whom it reached the sentimental view of Keats as an
over-sensitive weakling whom the breath of hostile criticism had
withered up. And when two years later Byron printed in the eleventh
canto of _Don Juan_ his patronizing semi-palinode, part laudatory part
contemptuous, on Keats, his closing couplet,
Strange that the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article,
stamped that impression for good on the minds of men in far wider
circles, until the publication of Monckton Milnes's memoir after
five-and-twenty years brought evidence to modify if not to efface it.
None of Keats's friends at home did anything in the days following his
death to counteract such impression. Some of them, as we have said,
fully shared and helped to propagate it. Haydon, writing to Miss Mitford
soon after the news of the death reached England, says 'Keats was a
victim of personal abuse and want of nerve to bear it. Ought he to have
sunk in that way because a few quizzers told him he was an apothecary's
apprentice?... Fiery, impetuous, ungovernable and undecided, he expected
the world to bow at once to his talents as his friends had done, and he
had not patience to bear the natural irritation of envy at the undoubted
proof he gave of strength.' In his private journal Haydon treats the
events in the same spirit, not forgetting to imply a contrast between
Keats's weakness and his own power of stubbornly presenting his prickles
to his enemies. Reynolds, it would seem, had more excuse than others
for adopting the same view, inasmuch as Keats had said to him on his
sick-bed, in one of his extremely rare allusions to the subject,--'If I
die, you must ruin Lockhart.' In the summer following Keats's death,
Reynolds published a little volume of verse dedicated to the young bride
at whose bidding he was abandoning literature for law, and included in
it the two versified tales from Boccaccio which he had originally
planned for printing together with Keats's _Isabella_: as to which
pieces he says,--
They were to have been associated with tales from the same source,
intended to have been written by a friend, but illness on his part,
and distracting engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing
our plan at the time; and Death now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated
it for ever! He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I
possessed, and yet he was not kinder perhaps to me, than to others.
His intense mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have
done the world some service, had his life been spared--but he was of
too sensitive a nature--and thus he was destroyed!
Later in the same summer, 1822, befell the tragedy of Shelley's own
death, such a tragedy of a poet's death as a poet might have loved to
invent with all its circumstances,--the disappearance of the boat in a
squall; the recovery of the body with the volume of Keats's poems in the
coat-pocket; its consumption on a funeral pyre by the Tuscan shore in
the presence of Leigh Hunt, newly come to Italy on Shelley's invitation,
of Byron, and of the Cornish sea-rover and social rebel Trelawny, a
personage who might well have been a creation of Byron's brain; the
snatching of the heart from the flames; the removal of the ashes to
Rome, and their deposit in a new Protestant burial-ground adjacent to
the old, where the remains of Trelawny were to be laid beside them after
the lapse of nearly sixty years.
Two years later again, when Byron had himself died during the struggle
for the liberation of Greece, Hazlitt took occasion to criticize
Shelley's posthumous poems in the _Edinburgh Review_, and having his own
bitter grounds of quarrel with the _Blackwood_ gang, strained the bonds
of prose in an outburst of half-lyric indignation on behalf of Keats as
follows:--
Mr Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr Keats's poetry grasped
with one hand in his bosom! These are two out of four poets, patriots
and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years, both of whom
have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. Keats died young; and
'yet his infelicity had years too many.' A canker had blighted the
tender bloom that o'erspread a face in which youth and genius strove
with beauty; the shaft was sped--venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove
him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and
followed him to his grave. And yet there are those who could trample
on the faded flower--men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of
merriment--who laugh loud over the silent urn of Genius, and play out
their game of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of their
victims!
Severn, living on at Rome in the halo of sympathy and regard with which
the story of his friend's death and his own devotion had justly
surrounded him, seems to have done nothing to remove from the minds of
the English colony through successive years an impression which he knew
to have been only in a very partial measure true. And even Brown, when
in the year after Keats's death he came out with his natural son, a
child of a few years, to make his home in Italy, in his turn let himself
fall in with the view of Keats's sufferings and of their origin which
had taken such strong hold on the minds of most persons interested and
commended itself so naturally to the tender-hearted and the righteously
indignant. Brown did not come to Rome, but established himself first at
Pisa and afterwards at Florence. At Pisa he saw something both of
Trelawny and of Byron, who took to him kindly; and made several
contributions to the _Liberal_ during the brief period while Hunt
continued to conduct that journal at Pisa after Shelley's death and
before his final rupture with Byron and departure from Italy. The Greek
adventure having in 1823 carried off Trelawny for a season and Byron
never to return, Brown settled at Florence and became for some years a
popular member of the lettered English colony in Tuscany, living in
intimacy with Seymour Kirkup, the artist and man of fortune who was for
many years the centre of that circle, and before long admitted to the
regard and hospitality of Walter Savage Landor in his beautiful Fiesolan
villa. Landor, as readers will hardly need to be reminded, was an early,
firm, and just admirer of Keats's poetry.
It was not until some five years after Byron's death in Greece that
Trelawny came back to settle for a while again in Tuscany. Then, in
1829, he and Brown being at the time housemates, Brown helped him in
preparing for the press his autobiographical romance, _The Adventures of
a Younger Son_, and especially by supplying mottoes in verse for its
chapter-headings, chiefly from the unpublished poems of Keats in his
possession. One day Trelawny said to him that 'Brown' was no right
distinguishing name for a man, or even for a family, but merely the name
of a tribe: whereupon and whenceforward, adding to his own Christian
name one that had been borne by a deceased brother, he took to styling
himself, not always in familiar but regularly in formal signatures,
Charles Armitage Brown. It is both anachronism and pedantry to give him
these names, as is often done, in writing of him in connexion with
Keats, to whom he was never anything but plain Charles Brown.
Of Keats Brown's thoughts had in the meantime remained full. From his
first arrival in Italy he had been in close communication with Severn as
to the memorial stone and inscription to be placed over the poet's grave
at Rome and as to the biography to be written of him. He let the wish
expressed by Keats that his epitaph should be 'here lies one whose name
was writ in water' stand for him as an absolute command, and studied how
to combine those words with others explaining their choice as due to the
poet's sense of neglect by his countrymen. In the end the result agreed
on between him and Severn was that which, despite much after-regret on
Severn's and some on Brown's part and many proposals of change, still
stands, having been carefully re-cut and put in order more than half a
century after the poet's death:--namely a design of a lyre with only two
of its strings strung, and an inscription perpetuating the idea of the
poet having been a victim to the malice of his enemies:--
THIS GRAVE
CONTAINS ALL THAT WAS MORTAL
OF A
YOUNG ENGLISH POET
WHO
ON HIS DEATH BED,
IN THE BITTERNESS OF HIS HEART,
AT THE MALICIOUS POWER OF HIS ENEMIES,
DESIRED
THESE WORDS TO BE ENGRAVEN ON HIS TOMB STONE
"HERE LIES ONE
WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER."
February 24th, 1821.
Severn in his correspondence with Brown at Florence, and with Haslam and
other friends at home, shows himself always loyally anxious to attribute
to his connexion with Keats the social acceptance and artistic success
which he found himself enjoying from the first at Rome, and to which in
fact his own actively amiable nature, his winning manners and facile,
suave pictorial talent, in a great measure contributed. Though the
general feeling towards the memory of Keats among English residents and
visitors was sympathetic, there were not lacking voices to repeat the
stock gibe,--'"his name was writ in water"; yes, and his poetry in milk
and water.' Severn eagerly notes any signs of increasing appreciation of
his friend's poetry, or of changed opinion on the part of scoffers, that
came under his notice. One touching incident he recorded in later life
as having happened in the spring of 1832, the eleventh year after
Keats's death. Sir Walter Scott, stricken with premature decrepitude
from the labour and strain of mind undergone in his six years' colossal
effort to clear himself of debt after the Constable crash, had come
abroad with his daughter Anne in the hope of regaining some measure of
health and strength from rest and southern air.[1] He spent a spring
month at Rome, surrounded with attentions and capable of some
sight-seeing, but could not shake off his grief for what he had lost in
the death there two years earlier of his beloved Lady Northampton, whose
beauty and charm and gift for verse and song (her singing portrait by
Raeburn is one of the most beautiful in the world) had endeared her to
him from childhood in her island home in Mull. Scott's distress in
thinking of her was pitiable, and he found some relief in pouring
himself out to the sympathetic Severn, who had known her well.
By Scott's desire Severn went every morning to see him, generally
bringing some picture or sketch to amuse him. One morning Severn having
innocently shown him the portrait of Keats reproduced at page 338 of
this book, and said something about his genius and fate, observed Anne
Scott turn away flushed and embarrassed, while Scott took Severn's hand
to close the interview, and said falteringly, 'yes, yes, the world finds
out these things for itself at last.' The story has been commonly, but
without reason, scouted as though it implied a guilty conscience in
Scott himself as to the _Blackwood_ lampoons. It implies nothing of the
kind. Scott had indeed had nothing to do with these matters: but one of
his nearest and dearest had. The current belief that the death of Keats
had been caused or hastened by Lockhart's attack in _Blackwood_, with
the tragic circumstances of the Christie-Scott duel, however little he
may have said about them, will assuredly have left in a heart so great
and tender an abiding regret and pain, and his manner and words on being
reminded of them, as recorded by Severn, are perfectly in character.
By degrees the signs of admiration for Keats's work noted by Severn
become more frequent. Young Mr Gladstone, coming fresh from Oxford to
Rome in this same year 1832, seeks him out because of his friendship for
the poet. Another year a group of gentlemen and ladies in the English
colony propose to give an amateur performance of the unpublished _Otto
the Great_, a proposal never, it would seem, carried out. But despite
the loyal enthusiasm of special English circles abroad and the untiring
tributes of Leigh Hunt and other friends and admirers at home, his
repute among the reading public in general was of extraordinarily slow
growth. In the interval of some score of years between the death of
Byron and the establishment--itself slow and contested--of Tennyson's
position, Byron and Scott held with most even of open-minded judges an
uncontested sovereignty among recent English poets; while among a
growing minority the fame of Wordsworth steadily grew, and the popular
and sentimental suffrage was given to writers of the calibre of Felicia
Hemans and Letitia Landon, feminine talents and temperaments truly not
to be despised, however ephemeral has proved their fame.
So small was the demand for Keats's poetry that the remaining stock of
his original three volumes sufficed throughout nearly this score of
years to supply it. The yeast was nevertheless working. We know of one
famous instance, so far back as 1825, when a gift of the original
volumes of Keats and Shelley inspired the recipient--the lad Robert
Browning, then aged fourteen--with a fervent and wholly new conception,
as he used afterwards to declare, of the scope and power of poetry.
Young John Sterling, writing in 1828 in the _Athenaeum_, of which his
friend and senior Frederick Denison Maurice was for the time being
editor, showed which way the wind was beginning to blow at Cambridge
when he said, 'Keats, whose memory they (the _Blackwood_ group)
persevered only a few months back in spitting upon, was, as everyone
knows who has read him, among the most intense and delightful English
poets of our day.'[2] But no reprint of Keats's poems was published
until 1829, and then only by the Paris house of Galignani, who printed
for the continental market, in a single tall volume with double columns,
a collective edition of the poems of Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats.[3]
The same year saw the reprint of _Adonais_ on the initiative of Arthur
Hallam and his group of undergraduate friends at Cambridge, and the
visit of three of the group, Hallam himself, Monckton Milnes, and
Sunderland, to uphold in debate at Oxford the opinion that Shelley was a
greater poet than Byron. Their enthusiasm for _Adonais_ implied
enthusiasm for its subject, Keats, as a matter of course.
Alfred Tennyson was a close associate of this group; and from the first,
among recent influences, it was that of Keats which did most to colour
his style in poetry and make him strive to 'load every rift of a subject
with ore.' His friend Edward FitzGerald shared the same admiration to
the full. But these young pioneer spirits still stood, except for the
surviving band of Keats's early friends, almost alone. Wilson, it is
true, with whom consistency counted for nothing, had by this time shown
signs of wavering, and in his character as Christopher North speaks of
Keats's 'genius' being shown to best advantage in _Lamia_ and
_Isabella_,--but does so, we feel, less for the sake of praising Keats
than of getting in a dig at Jeffrey for having praised him tardily and
indiscriminately.[4] The _Quarterly_ remained quite impenitent, and in a
review of Tennyson's second volume of 1832 writes of him with viciously
laboured irony as 'a new prodigy of genius--another and brighter star of
a galaxy or _milky way_ of poetry, of which the lamented Keats was the
harbinger'; and then follows a gibing testimony, to be read in the same
inverted sense, of the vast popularity which _Endymion_ has notoriously
attained.[5] So far as popularity was concerned, the _Quarterly_ gibe
remained justified. It was not until 1840 that there appeared in England
the first separate reprint of Keats's collected poems:[6] what is sad to
relate is that even this edition found a scanty sale, and that before
long 'remainder' copies of it were being bound up by the booksellers
with the 'remainders' of another unsuccessful issue of the day, the
series of _Bells and Pomegranates_ by Robert Browning.
After an interval of thirteen years, John Sterling must still, in 1841,
write to Julius Hare as follows:--
Lately I have been reading again some of Alfred Tennyson's second
volumes, and with profound admiration of his truly lyric and idyllic
genius. There seems to me to have been more epic power in Keats, that
fiery beautiful meteor; but they are two most true and great poets.
When one thinks of the amount of recognition they have received, one
may well bless God that poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether
it be crowned by all mankind or left alone in its own magic
hermitage.[7]
So late as 1844, Jeffrey, who in spite of the justice he had been
induced to do to Keats in his lifetime, had no real belief in the new
poetry and was an instinctive partisan of the conventional
eighteenth-century style, could write that the 'rich melodies' of Keats
and Shelley were passing out of public memory, and that the poets of
their age destined to enduring fame were Campbell and Rogers. De Quincey
in 1845 could grotesquely insult the memory and belittle the work of
Keats in a passage pouring scorn on _Endymion_, treating _Hyperion_ as
his only achievement that counted, and ending,--'Upon this mother
tongue, upon this English language has Keats trampled as with the hoofs
of a buffalo. With its syntax, with its prosody, with its idiom, he has
played such fantastic tricks as could only enter the heart of a
barbarian, and for which only the anarchy of Chaos could furnish a
forgiving audience. Verily it required _Hyperion_ to weigh against the
deep treason of these unparalleled offences.'[8]
In the meantime none of Keats's friends had succeeded in doing anything
to strengthen his reputation or make his true character known by the
publication either of a personal memoir or of his poetry that remained
in manuscript. Several of them had fully desired and intended to do both
these things. But mutual jealousies and dislikes, such as are but too
apt to break out among the surviving intimates of a man of genius, had
prevented any such purpose taking effect. Taylor and Woodhouse had been
first in the field, collecting what material for a memorial volume they
could, including the transcripts zealously made by Woodhouse from
Keats's papers while he was alive, and others, both verse and
correspondence, which they had borrowed from Reynolds. But help both
from Brown and from George Keats would have been necessary to give
anything like completeness to their work; and Brown, who himself desired
to be his friend's biographer, looked askance at them and their project.
As for information or material from George Keats, Brown on his part was
debarred from seeking it by his obstinate conviction, reiterated in all
companies and on all occasions and naturally resented by its subject,
that George was a traitor, cheat, and villain. When Fanny Keats came of
age in 1824, the duty devolved on Dilke of going into the family
accounts and putting pressure on Abbey, who had proved a muddler both of
his wards' affairs and of his own, to make over the residue of the
estate which he held in trust. In the discharge of this duty Dilke
satisfied himself, as a practical man of business, that George's conduct
had been strictly upright and his motives honourable. But Brown refused
to let his prejudices be shaken; and he and Dilke, though they met both
in Italy and later in England, were never again on their old terms of
friendship and mutual regard. Brown, criticizing Dilke in his
influential position as editor of the _Athenaeum_ after 1830 and as a
learned and recognized authority on various problems of literary
history, declares that he has become dogmatic and arrogant from success.
Dilke, writing confidentially of Brown, scouts the notion which had got
abroad of his having been a 'generous benefactor' to Keats, and insists
that he had always expected to profit by a literary partnership with the
poet, and after his death had demanded and received from the estate
payment in full, with interest, of all advances made by him.
So much--and the reader may hold it more than enough--in order to
explain why no sufficient memoir of Keats or collection of his remains
could be published by his surviving friends. Brown, indeed, wrote some
ten years after Keats's death the brief memoir of which I have freely
made use in these pages, and tried some editors with it, but in vain.
Destiny had provided otherwise and better. One of the Cambridge group of
Shelley-Keats enthusiasts of 1830, Richard Monckton Milnes, being in
Italy with his family not long after his degree, visited Rome and
Florence in 1833 and 1834, and with his genius for knowing, liking, and
being liked by everybody, made immediate friends with Severn at Rome,
and at Florence soon found his way to Landor's home at the Villa
Gherardesca, and there met and was quickly on good terms with Brown.
Some two or three years later Brown left Tuscany for good and
established himself at Laira Green, near Plymouth, where he lived the
life of amateur in letters, a busy local lecturer and contributor to
local journals, and published his very ingenious interpretation of
Shakespeare's sonnets as a cryptic autobiography of the poet,
continuing the while to nurse the hope and desire of being Keats's
biographer. He had all but concluded an arrangement for the publication
of his memoir in the _Monthly Chronicle_, when one day near the end of
1840, having heard a lecture on the prospects of the then young colony
of New Zealand, he determined suddenly to emigrate thither with his son,
who had been in training as a civil engineer; and before he left
designated Monckton Milnes, with whom he had not ceased to keep in
touch, as the fit man to do justice to Keats's memory, and handed to him
all his own cherished material.
Within a year Brown had died in New Zealand of an apoplectic stroke.
Monckton Milnes was faithful to his trust, but not swift or prompt in
fulfilling it. That was more than could well have been expected of a man
of so many interests and pursuits and so eager in them all,--poet,
politician, orator, wit, entertainer, athirst and full of relish for
every varied cup of experience and every social or intellectual pleasure
or activity, or opportunity for help or kindness, that life had to offer
him. It was not until the fifth year after Brown's departure that he
buckled to his task. He began by collecting, with some measure of
secretarial help from Coventry Patmore, further information and material
from all the surviving friends of Keats whom he could hear of. George
Keats had died at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1842, leaving an honoured
memory among his fellow citizens; and his widow had taken a second
husband, a Mr Jeffrey, who on Milnes's request sent him among other
material copies, unluckily very imperfect, of Keats's incomparable
journal-letters to George and to herself. From Cowden Clarke, the
happiest of all Keats's friends in after-life, happy in a perfect
marriage, the sunniest of dispositions, and a sustained success in the
congenial occupation of a public reader in and lecturer on Shakespeare
and other poets,--from Cowden Clarke and from Keats's younger school
friend Edward Holmes, Milnes drew the information about Keats's school
days which I have quoted above almost in full. Leigh Hunt, the friend
whom Keats owed to Clarke and who had had the most decisive influence on
his life, had passed with advancing years, not indeed out of his
lifelong, lightly borne condition of debt and poverty and embarrassment
and household worry, but out of the old atmosphere of obloquy and
contention into one of peace, and of affectionate regard all but
universal as the most genial and companionable, the most versatile,
industrious and sweet-natured of literary veterans, praised and admired,
to a pitch almost of generous passion, even by the growler Carlyle, who
had nothing but a gibe of contempt to bestow upon the weaknesses of a
Lamb or a Keats. In regard to Keats, Hunt had said his say, personal and
critical, long ago, in the unwise but in its day grossly over-reviled
book _Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries_ (1828), as well as in
many incidental notes and observations through thirty years, and
especially in that masterpiece in his own vein of criticism,
_Imagination and Fancy_ (1844). Accordingly he had now little that was
fresh to tell the biographer. As for Haydon, the destiny he had in the
old days been used to prophesy for Hunt,--even such a destiny, and
worse, had in the irony of things befallen himself. That tragic gulf
which existed in him between ambition and endowment, between temperament
and faculty, had led him through ever fiercer contentions and deeper and
more desperate difficulties to the goal of suicide. This had happened in
the days when the biographer of Keats was just setting hand to his task;
hence such accounts of the poet as I have quoted from Haydon were not at
Milnes's disposal, but are drawn from later posthumous publications of
the painter's journals and correspondence. By way of farewell to this
ill-starred overweening half-genius, I add here the facsimile of a page
from a letter he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett in 1834, describing a scene
of rather squalid tragi-comedy which he and Keats had witnessed at
Hunt's Hampstead cottage seventeen years before, and adding from memory
a sketch of Keats's profile, with an answer to his correspondent's
conjecture that the poet's expression had been 'too subtle for the
brush.'
[Illustration: PL. XIII
PAGE FROM A LETTER OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON TO ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1834]
Among Keats's other intimate friends and associates, Mr Taylor let
Monckton Milnes have the loan of the notes and transcripts bequeathed
him by Woodhouse, who had died in 1834. Reynolds heard by accident of
the intended biography, and never having quite abandoned his own purpose
in the matter, wrote at first complainingly, resenting that use should
be made of those letters of Keats to himself which he had allowed
Woodhouse to copy. But a gracious answer quickly won him over, and he
made the new biographer welcome to all his material. His own career had
been a rather melancholy failure. He had never quite given up literature
in accordance with the purpose he had declared on marriage. Indeed it
was not until six years after that declaration, in 1825, that his best
piece of work was done, in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Thomas
Hood: I mean the anonymous volume of humorous poems, not inferior to
_Rejected Addresses_, called _Odes and Addresses to Great People_, which
Coleridge confidently declared to be the work of Lamb. In later years
Reynolds was a not infrequent contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_ and
to the _Athenaeum_ under the editorship of Dilke. For some unspecified
reason he did not prosper in the place which his friend Rice had found
for him with the eminent firm of solicitors, the Fladgates; and in later
life he was glad to accept a small piece of patronage as deputy clerk of
the County Court at Newport in the Isle of Wight. Here, if the latest
mention of him is to be trusted, he fell into self-neglecting habits and
consequent disrepute.[9] In one of his letters to Milnes he speaks about
'that poor, obscure, baffled thing, myself': in another he declares his
entire confidence in his correspondent, and his unfading admiration and
affection for his lost friend, as follows:--
All the papers I possess--all the information I can render--whatever I
can do to aid your kind and judiciously intended work--are at your
service! But a word or two on the great subject of our correspondence.
He was hunted in his youth, before he had strength to escape his
ban-dogs. He had the greatest power of poetry in him, of any one since
Shakespeare! He was the sincerest friend, the most lovable associate,
the deepest listener to the griefs and disappointments of all around
him 'that ever lived in the tide of times.' Your expressed intentions
as to the Life are so clear and good; that I seem to have the weight
of an undone work taken from me.
Haslam in like manner lends all the help he can, and from his office as
a solicitor in Copthall Court writes somewhat dispiritedly about
himself, and declares that this correspondence 'has been a clean taking
me back to a separate state of existence that I had more than thirty
years ago, a state that has long appeared to me almost as a dream. The
realities of life have intervened, but God be praised they have but been
laid upon the surface--have but hidden, not effaced those happy happy
days.' He sends a number of letters from Severn, including those written
on the voyage to Naples and quoted in full above. But as to letters from
Keats himself says he has found none,--'they probably were so well or
intended to be so well taken care of, that every endeavour to lay my
hands on them has proved unavailing.' One wonders whether they may not
be lurking yet, a forgotten bundle, in the dust of some unexplored
corner of a safe in that same office. Severn was at this time living in
London, and some correspondence passed between him and Milnes about the
biography, Severn's chief point being to insist that not the malice of
the critics, but the 'death-stricken' marriage project, was the trouble
preying upon Keats in his dying days, and that the outcries of his
delirium ran constantly upon his unfulfilled love and unwritten poems
together.
As to yet another of Keats's closest friends, Benjamin Bailey, Milnes
had somehow been misinformed, and believed and positively stated him to
be dead. He had in fact risen to colonial preferment in the Church, and
was alive and well as archdeacon of Colombo in Ceylon. Thence on the
appearance of Milnes's book he wrote to declare his survival, and
forwarded to the biographer, for use in future editions, those memoranda
of old days spent in Keats's company upon which I have above (in Chapter
V) so fully drawn.
There are a few other points upon which Milnes's information was less
accurate than might have been expected. He assumes that the _fiancée_ of
Keats's tragic passion was identical with the rich-complexioned Charmian
described in his autumn letters of 1819, and ignores the existence of
Fanny Brawne and of her family. One would have supposed that he must
have heard the real story both from Brown and from Dilke, whom Mrs
Brawne had appointed trustee for her children, and who had not since
lost sight of them. That kind lady herself met an unhappy fate, burned
to death upon her own doorstep. Her daughter Fanny, ten years after her
poet-lover's death, married a Mr Lindo, who afterwards changed his name
to Lindon, and of whom we know little except that he was at one time
drawn into the meshes of Spanish politics and was afterwards one of the
Commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Not long before her
marriage, Mrs Lindon is recorded to have said of Keats that the kindest
thing to his memory would be to let it die. Little wonder, perhaps, that
she should have felt thus, when she remembered the tortured, the
terrifying vehemence of his passion for herself and when, being probably
incapable of independent literary judgment, she saw his name and work
still made customary objects of critical derision. It is harder to
forgive her when some time later we find her parting with her lover's
miniature, under pressure of some momentary money difficulty, to Dilke.
Neither does the biographer seem to have made any attempt to get into
touch with Keats's young sister, who had been married long before this
to an accomplished Spanish man of letters, Señor Valentine Llanos. He
also was at various times involved in the political troubles of his
country. Of his and his wife's children, one attained distinction as an
artist and assumed the name of Keats y Llanos. Keats had written to his
sister once as a child gaily prophesying that they all, her brothers and
herself, would live to have 'tripple chins and stubby thumbs.' She in
fact fully attained the predicted length of days, and having lived to be
well assured of the full and final triumph of her brother's fame died
less than thirty years ago at eighty-six. In mature life she had come
into touch with one at least of her brother's surviving familiars, that
is with Severn at Rome, and with more than one of his admirers in a
younger generation. Of these a good friend to her was Mr Buxton Forman,
through whose initiative a Civil List pension was awarded her by Lord
Beaconsfield. A subtle observer, the poet and humorist, Frederick
Locker-Lampson, has left a rather disappointing though not unkindly
impression of her as follows:--
Whilst I was in Rome Mr Severn introduced me to M. and Mme. Valentine
de Llanos, a kindly couple. He was a Spaniard, lean, silent, dusky,
and literary, the author of _Don Esteban_ and _Sandoval_. She was fat,
blonde, and lymphatic, and both were elderly. _She was John Keats's
sister!_ I had a good deal of talk with her, or rather _at_ her, for
she was not very responsive. I was disappointed, for I remember that
my sprightliness made her yawn; she seemed inert and had nothing to
tell me of her wizard brother of whom she spoke as of a mystery--with
a vague admiration but a genuine affection. She was simple and
natural--I believe she is a very worthy woman.
Gaps and errors there thus were not a few in Monckton Milnes's book when
it appeared in two volumes in 1848. But it served its purpose admirably
for the time being, and with some measure of revision for long
afterwards. Distinguished in style and perfect in temper, the preface
and introduction struck with full confidence the right note in
challenging for Keats the character of 'the Marcellus of the Empire of
English song'; while the body of the book, giving to the world a
considerable, though far from complete, series of those familiar
letters, to his friends in which his genius shines almost as vividly as
in his verse, established on full evidence the essential manliness of
his character against the conception of him as a blighted weakling which
both his friends and enemies had contrived to let prevail. Among the
posthumous poems printed for the first time, the two longest, _Otho_ and
the _Cap and Bells_ were not of his best, but masterpieces like _La
Belle Dame_ and _The Eve of St Mark_, with many miscellaneous things of
high interest, were included. The reception of the book, though not, of
course, unmixed, was in all quarters respectful, and the old tone of
flippant contempt hardly made itself heard at all. I shall quote only
one critical dictum on its appearance, and that is the letter in which
the veteran Landor, in his highest style of urbanity and authority,
acknowledged a copy sent him by the author:--
Dear Milnes,
On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, I find
your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an
editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets,
excepting Shakespeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of
the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity.... There is an
effluence of power and light pervading all his works, and a freshness
such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.
The book appeared just at the right moment, when the mounting enthusiasm
of the young generation for the once derided poet was either gradually
carrying the elders along with it or leaving them bewildered behind. Do
readers remember how the simple soul of Colonel Newcome was perplexed by
the talk of his son Clive and of Clive's friends?--
He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him: he heard that Byron
was no great poet, though a very clever man ... that his favourite,
Doctor Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English; that
young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young
Raphael; and that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately
published two volumes of verses might take rank with the greatest
poets of all. Doctor Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of
the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second
order! Mr Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr
Keats and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern
poetic literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington
delivered with a puff of tobacco smoke; to which Mr. Honeyman blandly
assented, and Clive listened with pleasure?
Thackeray's sketch of Clive and his companions scarcely suggests, nor
was it meant to suggest, the characteristics of the special group of
young artists in whom, almost contemporaneously with the appearance of
Milnes's book, the enthusiasm for Keats had begun to burn at its whitest
heat. I refer of course to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Of the three
leaders of that movement, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, it is hard
to say which, in the late 'forties and early 'fifties, declared himself
first or most ardent in Keats-worship.[10] Of Hunt's exhibited pictures,
one of the earliest showed the lovers in the _Eve of St Agnes_ stealing
past the sprawling porter and the sleeping bloodhound into the night;
and of Millais's earliest, one is from _Isabella or the Pot of Basil_,
showing the merchant brothers and their sister and her lover at a meal
in company (the well-known work, so queerly designed and executed with
so much grip and character, now in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool).
Rossetti had in these early days much less technical skill and training
than either of his two associates. But from the first he was poet as
well as painter, and instinctively and spiritually stood, we can well
discern, much nearer to Keats than they did for all their enthusiasm.
Combining Italian blood and temperament with British upbringing,
Rossetti added to his inherited and paternally inculcated knowledge and
love of Dante a no less intense love and knowledge of English romance
poetry, both that of the old ballads and that of the revival of 1800 and
onwards. In boyhood and early youth waves of enthusiasm for different
recent poets had swept over him one after another, first Shelley, then
Keats, then Browning; but Keats, and next to Keats Coleridge, kept the
strongest and deepest hold on him. When his first associates Hunt and
Millais had parted from him on their several, widely divergent paths of
public success and distinction, Rossetti became, in the comparative
seclusion in which he chose to live, a powerful focus of romantic
inspiration to younger men who came about him. He is reported to have
urged upon William Morris that he should become a painter and not a
poet, seeing that Keats had already done all there was to be done in
poetry. Of all Keats's poems, it was _La belle dame sans Merci_ and _The
Eve of St Mark_ which most aroused the enthusiasm of Rossetti and his
group. We have already seen how the latter fragment stands in our
nineteenth-century poetry as a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between
Chaucer and Morris. It was the task and destiny of Morris as a writer to
give, by his abounding fertility and brooding delight in the telling of
Greek and mediæval stories in verse, the most profuse and for the
present perhaps the last expression to the pure romantic spirit in
English narrative poetry: and to this effort Keats had given him the
immediate impulse, though Chaucer was his ultimate great exemplar.
Answering a congratulatory letter addressed to him by the veteran Cowden
Clarke on the publication of the first volume of the _Earthly Paradise_,
Morris speaks of 'Keats for whom I have such a boundless admiration, and
whom I venture to call one of my masters.' I have quoted above (page
470) his emphatic later words to a like effect.
While the leaven was thus intensely working among a special group in
England, an English poetess of quite other training and associations,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, paid in _Aurora Leigh_ (1857) her well-known
tribute to Keats in lines that are neither good as poetry nor accurate
as fact, but in their chaotic way none the less passionately felt and
haunting:--
By Keats's soul, the man who never stepped
In gradual progress like another man,
But, turning grandly on his central self,
Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years
And died, not young, (the life of a long life
Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear
Upon the world's cold cheek to make it burn
For ever;) by that strong accepted soul,
I count it strange and hard to understand
That nearly all young poets should write old.
Thus, between the effects of Monckton Milnes's book and the enthusiasm
of various groups of university men and poets and artists, the
previously current contempt for Keats was from soon after the
mid-century practically silenced and the battle for his fame, at least
among the younger generation, won. He has counted for the last sixty
years and more, alike in England and in America, as an uncontested great
poet, whose works, collected or single, have been in demand in edition
after edition. One of the earliest new issues was that edited in 1850 by
Monckton Milnes, who continued nearly until the end, under his new style
as Lord Houghton, to further by fresh editions and revisions the good
work he had begun. Not only every professed critic and historian of our
poetry, but nearly all our chief poets themselves, as Aubrey de Vere,
James Russell Lowell, Matthew Arnold, Coventry Patmore, Swinburne, and
latterly the present poet laureate, have been in various tones public
commentators on Keats. All such comments have shed light upon his work
in their degree. I can here only touch on a few special points and
mention in their order a few of the contributions to the knowledge or
appreciation of the poet which I think have helped the most.
One point to be remarked is that very few judges have seemed able to
care equally for Keats and Shelley. A special devotion to Shelley, the
poet who wedded himself in youth to a set of ready-made beliefs from
Godwin, of which the chief was that all the miseries of the world were
due to laws and institutions and could be cured by their abolition, who
clothed these abstract beliefs in imagery of clouds and winds and
ocean-streams, of meteor and rainbow and sunset and all things radiant
and evanescent, and sang them to strains of music inimitably swift and
passionate, seems incompatible with complete delight in the work of that
other young poet who could hold fast no dogma spiritual or social, but
found truth wherever his imagination could divine or create living and
concrete beauty, and who, as to the sorrows of the world, was convinced
that they were inherent in its very fabric and being, and yearned for
knowledge and wisdom to assuage them but died before he had attained
clearness or found his way. As between these two, Tennyson's final and
calm opinion is quoted by his son as follows:--'Keats would have become
one of the very greatest of all poets had he lived. At the time of his
death there was apparently no sign of exhaustion or having written
himself out; his keen poetical instinct was in full process of
development at the time. Each new effort was a steady advance on that
which had gone before. With all Shelley's splendid imagery and colour, I
find a sort of _tenuity_ in his poetry.' FitzGerald was much stronger on
the same side, counting Shelley, to use his own words, as not worth
Keats's little finger. Matthew Arnold, who has said some memorably fine
and just things about Keats, belittles the poetry of Shelley and even
paradoxically prefers the prose of his essays and letters to his verse.
With ardent Shelley-worshippers on the other hand full appreciation of
Keats is rare. Swinburne, for one, has done little for Keats's memory by
the torrent of hyperbolical adjectives of alternate praise and blame
which he has poured upon it. Mr William Rossetti, for whom Shelley is
'one of the ultimate glories of our race and planet,' has in his
monograph on Keats, as I think, been icily unjust to his subject. And I
can remember my admirable friend and colleague, Mr Richard Garnett of
the British Museum, taking me roundly to task for the opinion, which I
still stoutly hold, that the letters of Keats, with all their every-day
humanity and fun and gossip, are in their wonderful sudden gleams and
intuitions more vitally the letters of a poet than Shelley's. But such
preferences between two such contrasted geniuses and creators of beauty
are perhaps inevitable, and have at any rate not prevented the equal
and brotherly association of the two in the memorial house--the house in
which Keats died--lately acquired and consecrated to their joint fame by
representative English and Americans at Rome.
One great snare in judging of Keats is his variability of mood and
opinion. The critic is apt to seize upon the expression of some one
phase or attitude of mind that strikes him, and to theorize and draw
conclusions from it as though it were permanent and dominant. The very
excellence of what was best both in his poetry and himself is a second
snare, tempting us to forget that after all he was but a lad, a genius
and character not made but in the making. A third is the obvious and
frankly avowed intensity of the sensuous elements in his nature. But the
critic who casts these up against him should remember that it took the
same capacity for sense-delights that inspired the rhapsodies on
claret-drinking and nectarine-sucking in the letters, to inspire also,
being spiritualized into imaginative emotion, the 'blushful Hippocrene'
passage in the Nightingale ode or the feast of fruits, in all its
pureness, of the revised _Hyperion_; and also that Keats, with his clear
and sane self-consciousness, has rarely any doubt that the master bent
within him was not his 'exquisite sense of the luxurious' but his love
for the high things and thoughts which he calls 'philosophy.'
It is a pity that the author of the one full and recent history of our
poetry, the late Mr W.J. Courthope, should have been debarred from just
appreciation of this poet alike by adopted dogma and by natural taste.
Both led him to hold that the true power of poetry, the true test by
which posterity must judge it, lies in the direct relations which it
bears to the social and political activities of its period. That the
re-awakening of the Western mind and imagination to nature and romance
in the days of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars was a spiritual
phenomenon not less important in human history than the wars themselves
would have been a conception that his mind was incapable of
entertaining. He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or
politics. But of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the
secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that
those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a
disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one great
overshadowing tyranny had but ended in re-instating a number of ancient
and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. To that
which lies behind and above politics and history, to the general
destinies and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not
indifferent but only too acutely and tragically sensitive.
Turning to the chief real contributions to our appreciation and
knowledge of Keats, I should give the first place to Matthew Arnold's
well-known essay[11] of 1880. With his cunning art in the minting and
throwing into circulation of phrases that cannot be forgotten, Arnold
balanced the weaknesses against the strength of Keats's work and
character, blaming the gushing admirers who injured his memory by their
'pawing and fondness,' insisting on the veins of 'flint and iron' in his
nature, insisting on his clear-sightedness, his lucidity, his perception
of the vital connexion of beauty with truth and of both with joy,
declaring that 'no one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in
expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of
loveliness,' and clenching all, with reference to Keats's own saying, 'I
think I shall be among the English poets after my death,' by the
comment, 'he is, he is with Shakespeare.[11] Almost simultaneously with
Matthew Arnold's essay, there appeared the very thoughtful and original
study of Mrs F.M. Owen, in which were laid the foundations of a true
understanding of _Endymion_ as a parable of the experiences of a poet's
soul in its quest after Beauty.
The years 1883 and 1884 were great Keats years. In them there appeared
the edition of the poems by the late W.T. Arnold, the first which
contained a scholar's investigations into the special sources of Keats's
poetic style and vocabulary: also the edition for the Golden Treasury
Series by Francis Turner Palgrave, with a studiously collated text and a
preface of more glowing and scarcely less just critical admiration than
Matthew Arnold's, only flawed, as I think, by a revival of that obsolete
heresy of the 'deadness' of the Grecian mythology: and thirdly, the
first issue of the late Mr Buxton Forman's edition of the poetry and
prose works together. All students know the results of this editor's
devoted and unremitting industry, maintained through a full quarter of a
century, in the textual criticism of his author and in the publication
and re-publication of editions containing every variant reading and
every scrap of scattered prose or verse that could be recovered. To the
same worker is due the unearthing and giving to the world of two groups
of the poet's letters which had been unknown to Monckton Milnes, the
wholly admirable and delightful series addressed to his young sister,
and the series, in great part distressing and deplorable, to Fanny
Brawne. About 1887, I was myself able to put straight two matters that
needed it by publishing the true text of the letters to America and by
rectifying the current notion that the revised _Hyperion_ had been a
first draft. Before long came the essay of Mr Robert Bridges, passing
the whole of Keats's poetry under review, and dealing out judgments in a
terse authoritative style to which, as one poet estimating another, he
was fully entitled, and which at all moments commands interest and
respect if it sometimes challenges contradiction. On some matters, and
especially on the relations of Keats's early poetry to Wordsworth, Mr
Bridges has thrown a light too clear and convincing to be questioned.
When in 1892 the late Mr William Sharp compiled his _Life of Joseph
Severn_ from the vast, almost unmanageable mass of papers in the
possession of the artist's family (I had had them previously through my
hands and can realize the difficulty of the task), he furnished valuable
new material for our knowledge both of the life of Keats and of his
after life in the opinions of men. Coming down to more recent years, we
have the admirable editorial work of Professor de Sélincourt, as good, I
think, as has been bestowed on any English poet, carrying out to the
farthest point the researches initiated by W.T. Arnold, and illuminating
the text throughout with the comments and illustrations of a keen
scholar in classical and English literature. Nor can I leave unmentioned
the several lectures by two successive Oxford professors of poetry, that
of Mr A.C. Bradley on Keats's letters and that of Mr. J.W. Mackail on
his poetry. From these two minds, ripened in daily familiarity with the
best literatures of the world, we have, after a hundred years, praise of
Keats which almost makes Shelley's seating of him among 'Inheritors of
unfulfilled renown' seem like an irony,--praise more splendid than he
would have hoped for had he lived to fulfil even the most daring of his
ambitions. A special point in Mr Mackail's work is to make clear how
strong had been upon Keats the influence of the _Divine Comedy_, his
pocket companion on his Scottish tour, and how in _Hyperion_, written in
the next months after his return, there appears here and there, amid the
general Miltonic strain of the verse, a quality of thought and vision
drawn straight from and almost matching Dante. Lastly, there has
recently come from America a tribute of quite another kind, showing how
for purposes of systematic study Keats has been thought worthy of an
apparatus hitherto only bestowed on the great classics of literature: I
refer to the elaborate and monumental _Concordance_ to his poems lately
issued from Cornell University.
And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats's memory
and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and
biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all
poems ought to be understood without any comment,--must it not by this
time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of
smothering, Keats himself and his poetry? Naturally in the course of my
own work I have asked myself this question with qualms, bethinking
myself of Tennyson's phrase about swamping the sacred poets with
themselves. The answer is,--No, such a poet can carry any weight we may
choose to lay upon him, and more: he can never be smothered, inasmuch as
he has both given the world something it can nevermore cease to want and
suggested the existence within him of a power, quenched before its time,
to give it something much more and greater yet. If the result of all our
commentaries should be to provoke a reaction among readers, and to make
them crave for a naked text both of the poems and letters and insist
upon being left alone with that and their own meditations upon
it,--well, so much the better. Every reader of the English tongue that
has the works of Keats often enough in his hands, with or without
comment, will find his life enriched with much of the best that poetry
can do for human life, with achievements, very near to perfection, of
that faculty which is the essential organ of poetry,--to which all
others, spiritual and intellectual, are in poetry subordinate,--the
faculty of imagination transfusing the vital beauty and magic and secret
rhythm of things into the other magic and beauty and rhythm of words.
Over and above this, he will find himself living in the familiarity of a
great and lovable spirit, dowered at birth with capacities for joy and
misery more intense almost than any of which we have record, and
retaining its lovableness to the last in spite of circumstances that
gave misery too cruelly the upper hand.
But, again the objector may ask, is it so certain that in the coming
time the desire of readers for what Keats has to give them will survive
without abatement? Have not the last three years been an utterly
unprecedented, overwhelming and transforming experience for mankind?
Will not the new world after the war be a new world indeed, on the one
hand filled, nay, gorged, with recollections of doing and undergoing, of
endurance and adventure, of daring and suffering and horror, of
hellishness and heroism, beside which all the dreams of bygone romance
must forever seem tame and vapid; and on the other hand straining with a
hungry forecast towards a future of peace and justice such as mankind
has not known before, which it will be its tremendous task to try and
establish? Will not this world of so prodigiously intensified
experiences and enlarged hopes and besetting anxieties require and
produce new poets and a new poetry of its own that shall deal with the
realities it has gone through and those it is striving for, and put away
and cease to care for the old dreams and thrills and glamours of
romance? Have we not in fact witnessed the first-fruits of this new
tremendous stimulus in the cloud of young poets who have appeared--too
many of them alas! only to perish--since the war began?
And again the answer is, No. However changed the world, work like that
of Keats is not what it will ever let perish. The thrills and glamours
which pass away are only those of the second-rate and the second-hand
sort that come in and go out with literary fashion; not those which have
sprung from and struck deep into the innermost places of the spirit.
Doubtless there will arise and is arising a new poetry which will be
very different from any phase of poetry produced by the romantic
revolution and the generations that followed and nourished themselves on
it. The new poetry may not be able fully to share Keats's inspiring
conviction of the sovereign, the transcendental truth of whatsoever
ideas the imagination seizes as beauty. It may perhaps even abjure the
direct search for beauty as its primary aim and impulse. But no matter:
provided that its organ be the imagination, working with intensity on
whatever themes the genius of the age may dictate, it cannot but achieve
some phase, some incarnation, of beauty by the way. But gains like those
which were made for the human spirit by the poetry of which Keats was
one of the chief masters will never be lost again. Those who care for
poetry at all must always care for those refreshing and inspiring
draughts, as I have called them, from the innermost wells of antiquity,
of nature, and of romance, those meditations of mingled joy and sorrow
that search into the soul of things. Moreover they will never cease to
interest themselves in the question,--If only this great spirit had
survived, what would have been those unwritten poems of which he saw in
the sky the cloudy symbols, of which he felt the pressure and prescience
forcing the blood into his brain or bringing about his heart an awful
warmth 'like a load of immortality,' and the perishing of which unborn
within him was one of the two great haunting distresses of his dying
days?
In letting speculation wander in this field, we are brought up by many
problems as to what kind of manhood could have followed a youth like
that of Keats, had he had better fortune and had the conditions and
accidents of his life been such as to fortify his bodily constitution
instead of sapping it. Youth, especially half-trained youth, is always
subject to such storms and strains as those which Keats experienced with
a violence proportionate to the fervour of his being. To the sane and
sweet, the manly and courageous, elements in his character we have found
his friends bear unanimous evidence, amply supported by the
self-revelation of his letters. But self-revealed also we see the
morbid, the corroding elements which lay beneath these, just as beneath
his vigorous frame and gallant bearing there lay the bodily
susceptibilities that with ill-luck enabled lung disease to fasten on
and kill him. What must under any conditions have made life hard for him
was the habitual inner contention and disquiet of his instincts and
emotions in regard to that most momentous of human matters, love. When
he lets his mind dwell on the opposed extremes of human impulse and
experience, from the vilest to the most exalted, which the
word-of-all-work, love, is used to cover, he is more savagely perplexed
and out of conceit with life than from any other cause or thought
whatever.[12] The ruling power in himself, as he declares over and over
again, was the abstract passion for beauty, the love of the principle of
beauty in all things. But even in the poem specially designed to embody
and celebrate that passion, in _Endymion_, we find his conception of
realized and sexual human love to be mawkish and unworthy. When the
actual experience befalls himself, he falls utterly and almost
ignominiously a slave, at once enraptured and desperately resentful, to
the jealous cravings which absorb and paralyse all his other faculties.
Would ripened manhood or a happier experience have been able to bring
health and peace to his spirit on this supremely vital matter and to
turn him into a poet of love, love both human and transcendental, such
as at the outset he had longed and striven to be?
Again, along with his admirable capacity for loyal devotion and sympathy
in friendship, we find in him capacities of quite another kind,
capacities for disillusionment and for seeing through and chafing at
human and social shams and pretensions and absurdities; and we ask
ourselves, would this strain in him, which we find expressed with a
degree of pettish and premature cynicism, for instance in the _Cap and
Bells_ and in some of his later letters, have matured with time into a
power either of virile satire or genial, reconciling comedy?
And once more, would that haunting, that irrepressible sense of the
miseries of the world which we find breaking through from time to time
amid the beauty of the odes, or the playfulness and affectionate
confidences of the letters, or dictating that tragical return against
himself and his achievements in the revised _Hyperion_,--could it and
would it with experience have mellowed into such compassionate wisdom as
might have made him one of the rare great healers and sages among the
poets of the world?
Such speculations are as vain as they are inevitable. Let us indulge
ourselves at any rate by remembering that it is the greatest among his
successors who have held the most sanguine view as to the powers that
were in him. Here are more words of Tennyson's,--'Keats, with his high
spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us.
There is something magic and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost
everything which he wrote.' Leaving with these words the question of
what he might have done, and looking only at what he did, it is enough
for any man's glory. The days of the years of his life were few and
evil, but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship
shines eternally.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Everyone knows Wordsworth's beautiful sonnet of God-speed to him.
Haydon went to call on the great man, who had always been kind to
him, as he passed through London, and except for two unfortunately
chosen words, is at his very best in this picture of their
parting:--'After a quarter of an hour I took my leave, and as I arose
he got up, took his stick, with that sidelong look of his, and then
burst forth that beautiful smile of heart and feeling, geniality of
soul, manly courage and tenderness of mien, which neither painter nor
sculptor has ever touched. It was the smile of a superior creature
who would have gathered humanity under the shelter of its wings and
while he was amused at its follies would have saved it from sorrow
and sheltered it from pain.' (_Life of B. R. Haydon_, ed. Taylor, ii,
321.)
[2] John Sterling, _Essays and Tales_, ii, 53.
[3] Carefully edited, it is believed by Cyrus Redding, formerly an
employé of the house.
[4] _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, ii, 146: from _Blackwood_ for December,
1828.
[5] _Quarterly Review_, April 1833, page 81. The article was long
supposed to be by Lockhart himself, but Mr Prothero has proved that
it was by Croker.
[6] In W. Smith's _Standard Library_, exactly reprinted from the
Galignani edition. America had in this matter been in advance of
England, an edition of the poet's works having appeared at Buffalo in
1834.
[7] _Essays and Tales_, p. clxviii.
[8] _Notes on Gilfillan's Literary Portraits_: Collected Works, xi,
393. It is fair to add that twelve years later De Quincey went a good
way in recantation of this outburst.
[9] See _Byron's Collected Works_, Prose, iii, 46, note.
[10] See particularly Chaps. iv and v of Holman Hunt's
_Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_.
[11] First published in T.H. Ward's _Selections from the English
poets_, and re-printed in the second series of _Essays in Criticism_
(1892). To this essay I possess a curious postscript in a note of
Arnold's written a few years later to myself. I had thought his
treatment of _Endymion_ too slighting. His answer shows how
fastidiousness could prevail in him over judgment. 'If Keats,' he
writes, 'had left nothing but _Endymion_, it would have alone shown
his remarkable power and have been worth preserving on that account:
but when he has left plenty which shows it much better I cannot but
wish _Endymion_ away from his volume.'
[12] See the bitter comment on a passage in Burton's _Anatomy_ quoted
in Mr Buxton Forman's _Complete Works of J. K._ iii, 268, where Keats
runs his head against the problem with which Plato had tried to deal
in his myth of the two Aphrodites, Pandêmos and Urania. 'The
word-of-all-work, love,' is a phrase of George Eliot's.
APPENDIX
I. _The Alexander fragment_ (page 33). Here is the text:--
Whenne Alexandre the Conqueroure was wayfayringe in y^e londe of Inde,
there mette hym a damoselle of marveillouse beautie slepynge uponne
the herbys and flourys. He colde ne loke uponne her withouten grete
plesance, and he was welle nighe loste in wondrement. Her forme was
everyche whytte lyke y^e fayrest carvynge of Quene Cythere, onlie
thatte y^t was swellyd and blushyd wyth warmthe and lyffe wythalle.
Her forhed was as whytte as ys the snowe whyche y^e talle hed of a
Norwegian pyne stelythe from y^e northerne wynde. One of her fayre
hondes was yplaced thereonne, and thus whytte wyth whytte was ymyngld
as y^e gode Arthure saythe, lyke whytest lylys yspredde on whyttest
snowe; and her bryght eyne whenne she them oped, sparklyd lyke
Hesperus through an evenynge cloude.
Theye were yclosyd yn slepe, save that two slauntynge raies shotte to
her mouthe, and were theyre bathyd yn sweetenesse, as whenne by
chaunce y^e moone fyndeth a banke of violettes and droppethe thereonne
y^e silverie dewe.
The authoure was goynge onne withouthen descrybynge y^e ladye's
breste, whenne lo, a genyus appearyd--'Cuthberte,' sayeth he, 'an thou
canst not descrybe y^e ladye's breste, and fynde a simile thereunto, I
forbyde thee to proceede yn thy romaunt.' Thys, I kennd fulle welle,
far surpassyd my feble powres, and forthwythe I was fayne to droppe my
quille.
This queer youthful passage in a would-be Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde
spelling seems scarcely worth taking trouble about, but I thought it
worth while to try and trace what reading Keats must have been fresh
from when he wrote it, and consulted both Prof. Israel Gollancz and Mr
Henry Bradley, with the result stated briefly in the text. At first I
had thought Keats must have drawn his idea from some one of the many
versions of the great mediæval Alexander romance--especially
considering that in all forms of that romance a flight into the skies
and a trip under the sea are regular incidents, and might later have
suggested the parallel incidents in _Endymion_. But neither in the
version which Keats is most likely to have known, the English
_Alisaunder_ as published in Weber's collection of metrical romances,
1810, nor indeed, I believe, in any other, is there any incident closely
parallel to this of the Indian maiden; although love and marriage
generally come into the story towards the close. In the English version
there is a beautiful Candace who declares her passion for the hero: he
puts her off for the time being, but goes disguised as an ambassador to
her court, where he is recognized and imprisoned. Among things derived
from the main mediæval cycle, the nearest approach to such an idea as
Keats was working on is to be found in the _Orlando Innamorato_ of
Boiardo, book ii, canto i, stanzas 6, 21-29; but here the beauty is a
lady of Egypt whom Boiardo calls Elidonia. His description of the great
painted hall of the giant Agramante at Biserta, adorned with pictures of
the life and deeds of Alexander, closes with the following:--
In somma, ogni sua guerra ivi è dipinta
Con gran richezza e bella a riguardare.
Poscia che fu la terra da lui vinta,
A due grifon nel ciel si fè portare,
Col scudo in braccia e con la spada cinta;
Poi dentro un vetro si cala nel mare,
E vede le balene e ogni gran pesce
E campa e ancor quivi di fuor n'esce.
Da poi che vinto egli ha ben ogni cosa,
Vedesi lui che vinto è dall' amore,
Perchè Elidonia, quella graziosa,
Co' suoi begli occhi gli ha passato il core--
And then ensues the history of their loves and of the hero's death.
But Keats in his hospital days knew no Italian, and could only have
heard of such a passage in Boiardo through Leigh Hunt. So I think the
derivation of his fragment from any of the regular Alexander romances
must be given up, and the source indicated in the text be accepted,
namely the popular _fabliau_ of the _Lai d'Aristote_ (probably in Way's
rimed version), where the thing happens exactly as Keats tells it, and
whence the idea of the sudden encounter with an Indian maiden probably
lingered in his mind till he revived it in _Endymion_. As for the
sources of the attempt at voluptuous description, it is a little
surprising to find Milton's 'tallest pine hewn on Norwegian hills'
remembered in such a connexion: other things are an easily recognizable
farrago from _Cymbeline_,--
'Cytherea,
How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets!'
from _Venus and Adonis_,--
'A lily prison'd in a gaol of snow;'
'Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white;'
from _Lucrece_,--
--'the morning's silver-melting dew;'
from _Twelfth Night_,
--'like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets;'
and so forth. Prof. Gollancz suggests that 'Cuthberte' as the name of
the author is a reminiscence from the 'Cuddie' of Spenser's _Shepheard's
Calendar_, and that the 'good Arthure' may also be some kind of
Spenserian reference: but I suspect 'Arthure' here to be a
mis-transcription (we have no autograph) for 'authoure.'
II. _Verses written by Brown and Keats after visiting Beauly Abbey_ (p.
295).--The text, of which there exist two separate transcripts, is as
follows. I have printed in italics the lines which Keats, as he told
Woodhouse, contributed to the joint work.
ON SOME SKULLS IN BEAULY ABBEY, NEAR INVERNESS
I shed no tears;
Deep thought or awful vision, I had none
By thousand petty fancies I was crossed.
_Wordsworth._
And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.
_Shakspeare._
1
_In silent barren Synod met
Within these roofless walls_, where yet
The shafted arch and carved fret
Cling to the Ruin
The Brethren's Skulls mourn, dewy wet,
Their Creed's undoing.
2
_The mitred ones of Nice and Trent
Were not so tongue-tied,--no, they went
Hot to their Councils, scarce content
With Orthodoxy
But ye, poor tongueless things, were meant
To speak by proxy._
3
Your Chronicles no more exist
Since Knox, the Revolutionist
Destroy'd the work of every fist
That scrawl'd black letter
Well! I'm a Craniologist
And may do better.
4
This skull-cap won the cowl from sloth
Or discontent, perhaps from both
And yet one day, against his oath
He tried escaping
For men, tho' idle may be loth
To live on gaping.
5
A Toper this! he plied his glass
More strictly than he said the Mass
And lov'd to see a tempting lass
Come to Confession
Letting her absolution pass
O'er fresh transgression.
6
This crawl'd thro' life in feebleness
Boasting he never knew excess
Cursing those crimes he scarce could guess
Or feel but faintly
With prayer that Heaven would cease to bless
Men so unsaintly.
7
Here's a true Churchman! he'd affect
Much charity and ne'r neglect
To pray for Mercy on th' elect
But thought no evil
In sending Heathen, Turk and Scot
All to the Devil!
8
_Poor Skull! Thy fingers set ablaze,
With silver saint in golden rays,
The Holy Missal, thou didst craze
'Mid bead and spangle
While others passed their idle days
In coil and wrangle._
9
Long time this sconce a helmet wore,
But sickness smites the conscience sore,
He broke his sword and hither bore
His gear and plunder
Took to the cowl--then rav'd and swore
At his damn'd blunder!
10
_This lily-coloured skull with all
The teeth complete, so white and small
Belonged to one whose early pall
A lover shaded.
He died ere Superstition's gall
His heart invaded._
11
Ha! here is 'undivulged crime!'
Despair forbad his soul to climb
Beyond this world, this mortal time
Of fever'd badness
Until this Monkish Pantomime
Dazzled his madness!
12
A younger brother this! a man
Aspiring as a Tartar Khan
But, curb'd and baffl'd he began
The trade of frightening
It smack'd of power! and how he ran
To deal Heaven's lightning!
13
This idiot-skull belonged to one,
A buried miser's only son
Who, penitent ere he'd begun
To taste of pleasure
And hoping Heaven's dread wrath to shun
Gave Hell his treasure.
14
Here is the forehead of an Ape
A robber's mask--and near the nape
That bone--fie on't, bears just the shape
Of carnal passion
Ah! he was one for theft and rape
In Monkish fashion!
15
This was the Porter!--he could sing
Or dance, or play--do anything
And what the Friars bade him bring
They ne'er were balked of;
Matters not worth remembering
And seldom talk'd of.
16
Enough! why need I further pore?
This corner holds at least a score,
And yonder twice as many more
Of Reverend Brothers,
'Tis the same story o'er and o'er
They're like the others!
III. _List of Books in Keats's Library compiled by Richard
Woodhouse._--This list, of great interest to all students of Keats, is
in the possession of Mr J.P. Morgan, to whom I am much indebted for
allowing it to be transcribed for my use. I give it _verbatim_, without
attempting (though it would be an attractive bibliographical exercise)
to identify particular editions.
Wordsworth's Poems 8vo 2 Vol.
Fairfax's Tasso 5 " 1 " bound
Petrarch's Sonnets and Odes " 1 "
Hazlitt's Principles of Human action " 1 "
Drayton's Poems (Edn. Jno. Smethwick) " 1 "
Chaucer's Poems 12mo 7 "
Hunt's Descent of Liberty 8vo 1 "
Dante's Inferno by Carey " 2 " bound
Herrick's Poems " 1 "
Burton's Anat. of Melancholy " 2 " bound
Aikin's History of the year 12mo 1 " bound
Potter's Grecian Antiqs 8vo 2 "
Adam's Roman L " 1 "
Davies' Celtic Researches " 1 "
Spelman's Xenophon " 1 " bound
Vertot's Roman Revolutions (F) " 3 " bound
Lady Russell's Letters 12mo 2 "
Bacon's Essays " 1 "
Boyle's Reflections " 1 "
Cowley's Essays " 1 "
Locke's Conduct " 1 "
Clarendon's Essays 12mo 1 "
Bacon's Essays 8vo 1 " bound
French Prayer Book 18mo 1 " bound
Erasmus' Moriae Encomium 36mo 1 " bound
French Rabelais 12mo 1 " bound
Ovid's Metamorphoses 18mo 1 "
Ariosto da Boschino " 6 "
Coleridge, Lamb and Lloyd 8vo 1 " bound
Prayer Book folio 1 " bound
Southwell's Bible " 1 " bound
Chaucer (black Letter) " 1 "
Levy's Roman History (1686) " 1 " bound
Auctores Mythographi Latini 4to 1 " bound
Siècle de Louis XIV (Voltaire) 12mo 5 "
Raleigh's Hist. of the World folio 1 " bound
Guzman d'Alfarache " 1 " bound
Les Oeuvres d'Amboise " 1 " bound
Ciceronis Orationes 8vo 1 " bound
Lemprière's Class. Dict. " 1 "
An Atlas " 1 " bound
Ben Johnson & Beaumont & Fletcher " 4 "
Rime di Petrarcha 12mo 1 " bound
Ainsworth's Dict. 8vo 1 " bound
Z. Jackson's Illus. of Shakespeare " 1 "
Carew, Suckling, Prior, Congreve, Blackmore,
Fenton, Granville and Malden " 1 " bound
Ovidii Metamorphoseon " 1 " bound
Bailey's Dictionary " 1 " bound
Hunt's Juvenilia " 1 " bound
Fencing familiarized " 1 " bound
Aminta di Tasso 12mo 1 " bound
Burton (abridged) 8vo 1 "
Poetae minores Graeci " 1 " bound
Greek Grammar " 1 " bound
Terentii Comedia " 1 " bound
Bishop Beveridge's Works " 1 " bound
Old Plays (5th Vol. with Reynolds) " 6 "
Bible 12mo 1 " bound
Conducteur à Paris " 1 "
Horatii Opera " 1 " bound
Burns's Poems 18mo 1 " bound
Mickle's Lusiad " 1 " bound
Palmerin of England 8vo 4 " bound
Vocabulaire Italien Franc " 1 " bound
Baldwin's Pantheon " 1 " bound
Oeuvres de Molière 12mo 6 "
Dict. Phil. de Voltaire " 14 "
Essai sur les Moeurs de do. " 8 "
Nouv. Héloise (Rousseau) " 4 "
Emile (Rousseau) " 3 "
Description des Antiques 8vo 1 "
Spectator (1st lost) 8vo 7 " bound
Shakespeare (6th lost) 12mo 7 "
Marmontel's Incas (3rd lost) " 2 " bound
Hist. of K. Arthur (2nd lost) 18mo 1 "
Odd Vol. of Spencer--damaged
Names of friends to whom Keats had either given or lent certain works.
1 Mr B. Bailey 10 Miss Keats
2 Mrs Brawne 11 Mrs Jones
3 Mr S. Brawne 12 " Mancur
4 " Browne 13 " Reynolds
5 " Clark 14 " Rice
6 " Dilke 15 " Richards
7 " Haslam 16 " Severn
8 " Hessey 17 " Taylor
9 " Hunt 18 " Woodhouse
INDEX
Abbey, Mrs Richard, in charge of Fanny Keats, 147, 337, 338
Abbey, Richard, trustee for the Keats family, 16, 83, 147, 338, 340,
354, 365, 529 on Mrs T. Keats, 6-7
_Abbot, The_ (Scott), 476
Achilles, Homeric character of, Keats's admiration for, 147
_Acis and Galatea_ (Handel's libretto), Song in, compared with passage
in _Endymion_, 225
Adam's Dreams (_Paradise Lost_), Keats's debt to, 154-5
Aders family, 483
_Adonais_ (Shelley), _Blackwood_ parody on, 519
Enthusiasm for at Cambridge (1829), 520, 527
Poetic form of, 517
Preface to, on the effect of hostile reviews on Keats, 517
Reprint of (1829), 527
Tribute of to Keats, 483, 517-19
Adonis, Awakening of, in _Endymion_, 185
_Address to Hope_ (Keats), style and form of, 86
Adlington's translation of the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, Keats's
possible reading of, 412 _& n._
Admonition, the, in _Hyperion_, 452
_Adventures of a Younger Son_ (Trelawny), Brown's aid in, 523
_Aeneid_, Keats's prose version of, 18
_After Dark Vapours_, sonnet (Keats), 91
Ailsa Craig, Keats on, 283-4
_Alastor_ (Shelley), Allegoric theme of, 171-2, 234-6, 468
Date of publication, 234
Hunt's praise of, 69, 234
Influence of on Keats, 73, 234-6
_Alexander_ fragment (Keats) in prose, 33, 551-2
_Alexander's Feast_ (Dryden), Wordsworth on, 251
Alfieri, lines by, applicable to Keats, 504
_Alfred, The_, Reynolds's article in, on Keats's work, 312
Allegory, in
_Alastor_, 171-2, 234-6, 468
_Endymion_, 171-2 _et alibi_
_Allegro, L'_ (Milton), metre of, 386
_Alice Fell_ (Wordsworth), 348
Alps, the, impression made by on Shelley, 237
Alsager, T.M., lender of Chapman's Homer to Clarke, 39
Ambleside, Keats at, 274, 277
America, tribute from, to the value of Keats's poems, 545
American edition of Keats's poems, date of the first, 528 _n._ 2
_Aminta_ (Tasso), Hunt's translation dedicated to Keats, 472
_Anatomy of Melancholy_ (Burton), Keats's inspirations from, 354, 358,
371, 396-7, 404-5, 412, 549 _n._
_Ancient Mariner_ (Coleridge), 121, 396
Angela, in the _Eve of St Agnes_, 402-4 _& n._
_Annals of the Fine Arts, Ode to a Nightingale_ published in, 354
_Annus Mirabilis_ (Dryden), echoed by Keats, 392 _& n._
_Antiquary_ (Scott), Keats's attitude to, 279
Apollo in Delos, 428
Hymn to, _see_ Hymn
Apollo's speech in _Hyperion_, 435, 437
Apuleius, _The Golden Ass_ of, Keats's possible reading of, 412 _& n._
_Arabian Nights_, influence of, seen in _Endymion_, 175, 184, 190,
191, 195
_Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen_ (Wolters) cited, 416
_n._
Arethusa myth, in Ovid, and Keats's and Shelley's poems, 187
_Arethusa_ (Shelley), 187-8, 241
Ariosto, Keats's studies in, 370, 398
Arne's opera _Artaxerxes_, a song in, quoted by Keats, 490 _& n._
Arnold, Matthew, on the works of Keats and of Shelley, 540, 541, 543
_& n._
Arnold, W. T., researches of, on Keats's style, &c., and edition of
his poems issued by, 544, 545
_Artaxerxes_, opera (Arne), Keats's quotation from, 490 _& n._
Arts, the, excellence of, Keats on, 253
_Asclepiad, The_, cited on Keats as medical student, 30 _& n._
_As from the darkening gloom a silver dove_, sonnet (Keats, 1816), 91
_As late I rambled in the happy fields_, sonnet (Keats), 90
_Astronomy_ (Bonnycastle), Keats's prize-book (1811), 16 _n._
_Athenaeum_, Dilke's editorship of, 530, 533; Maurice's editorship,
526
Reynolds's Contributions to, 533
Sterling's praise of Keats in (1828), 326-7
_A Thing of beauty is a joy for Ever_ (Keats), composition of, 176 _&
n._
_Auctores Mythographi Latini_, ed. Van Staveren; owned and used by
Keats, 447 _& n._
Audubon, and George Keats, 365
'Augustan' poets, Keats's dislike of, 18
_Aurora Leigh_, Mrs Browning's tribute in, to Keats, 539-40
_Autobiographical Fragment, An_ (Procter), 47 _n._
_Autobiography_ (Hunt), 401
Autumnal Scenes in Keats's poems, 159, 161-2
Awnmarsh, Allan, translation of the _Decameron_ published by, 397 _&
n._
Bacchic lyric in _Endymion_: inspiration of, 230 _et sqq._, possible
influence on, of Wordsworth, 251
Keats's term for, 388
Bacchus, in _Alexander's Feast_, Wordsworth on, 251
Triumph of, figured on sarcophaguses, 231 _& n._
'Bacchus and Ariadne,' Titian's picture of, as inspiration for Keats,
231
Bailey, Archdeacon Benjamin, friend of Keats, 133-4, 151, 262, 295
Criticism of _Endymion_ by, 189, 211, 270.
Impression made on, by _Poems_, 134
Keats's visit to, at Oxford, 142, in his own words, 143 _et sqq._
Letters to, from Keats, 150-2 _et sqq._, 245, 255, 257, 262, 270-1,
288-9
and Lockhart and the Reviews, 306-7, 309, 474
Memoranda of, on Keats, 534-5
Milton enthusiasm of, 257
Suitor to Mariane Reynolds, 134; the withdrawal, 341
Support of, to Keats in the battle of the critics, 306-7, 309,
311-12, 474
on Keats's Theory of Vowel Sounds, 147, 402
on Keats when Reading Aloud, 144, 190 _n._
Baldwin's _Pantheon_, Keats's debt to, 228, 231
_Bards of Passion_, Ode (Keats), form, metre, hints of belief in
Immortality in, 386-7
'Barry Cornwall,' _see_ Procter
Beaconsfield, Earl of, 536
Beadsman, the, in _Eve of St Agnes_, 399, 400, 402-4 _& n._
Beattie, James, poems of, 19
Beauly Abbey, Skulls in, Verses on by Brown and Keats, 295, 440, 553-6
Beaumont and Fletcher, references by to the Endymion myth, 168
Beaumont, Sir George, and Haydon, 62, and Mrs Siddons, 461
Beaumont, Sir John, on the rime-beat in the heroic measure, 101, 102
Beauty, in Art and in Poetry, Keats's views on, 253, 254, 418
Essential, Striving for communion with, the true subject of
_Endymion_, 167 _et passim_.
Over-comment on, and the loss of bloom, Keats on, 263
Bebr Salim, Arabian tale of, 195
Beckford's _Vathek_ familiar to Keats, 184
Bedford, Duke of, carved sarcophaguses owned by, 231 _n._
Bedhampton, Keats's visits to, 333, 491
_Eve of St Agnes_ written at, 333
Belfast, Keats's flying visit to, 281
_Bells and Pomegranates_ (Browning), 528
Ben Nevis, Keats on his climb up, 293-4
_Ben Nevis, Sonnet written upon the Top of_ (Keats), 294
Bentham, Jeremy, and Hunt, 43
Bentley, Keats's postman landlord, 141, 322
Mrs, kindness of, 322
_Beppo_ (Byron), 309
Bertha in _Eve of St Mark_, 437, 439, and in _Cap and Bells_, 444-6
_Bertram_, a play (Maturin), Coleridge and, 303
Bideford, a Keats as rector of, 4
_Biographia Literaria_ (Coleridge), criticism of, in _Blackwood's_,
300
on the Poetic Revolution, 119
on Wordsworth's poems, 245-6
Bion's Dirge on Adonis, Shelley's use of, 517
Blackwood, William, and the _Edinburgh Magazine_, 297 _et sqq._;
Scott's countenance sought by, 303-4; Taylor's encounter with, over
the criticism on Keats, 475-7
_Blackwood's (Edinburgh) Magazine_
Critical savagery of, and attitude to Coleridge, Hunt, Keats and
others, 45, 76, 137, 151-2, 299-300; first article of the 'Cockney
School Series' in, attacking Hunt, 152; attacks in, on Keats, 297;
details of the policy of the magazine, its editors, &c., _297 et
sqq._; "Z" articles in, 301-3, 307-8, 474, 527; fatal duel due to,
519; indignation of Keats's friends, 309 _et sqq._, 516 _et sqq._,
522; Scott's attitude, 305-6, 525-6
Hazlitt's quarrel with, 521, and accusation of, as to the death of
Keats, 522
Impenitence, and further berating of Keats by, 477-8
Blake, William, drawings of, 393
Poems of, new note in, 107-8
Blank verse, corruption of, 17th century, 100
Blundell's School, Tiverton, 4
Boccaccio, influence of, on Keats, 259-60, 333-4, 389, 397 _& n._ 1,
400 _n._ 2
Boiardo, 552
Keats's reference to, 356
Bolton-le-Sands, Keats at, 271
_Bookman, The_, of New York, Haydon's 'Christ's entry into Jerusalem'
reproduced and discussed in, 462 _n._
Books in Keats's Library, 228 _n._, 390 _n._, 397 _n._, 447 _n._ 1
List of, compiled by Woodhouse, 556-8
Borghese, Princess (Pauline Bonaparte), and Severn, 503
Borghese Vase, the, 416
Borghese Zodiac, picture of, as inspiration to Keats, 200
Borrowers, Keats's difficulties due to, 323-4, 327-8, 516, 517
Bowles, William Lisle, editor of Pope, 480; Byron's controversy with,
120
Bowness, view of Windermere from, 273
Bradley, A. C., lectures by, on Keats's letters, 545
on the Influence of _Alastor_ on _Endymion_, 234
Bradley, Henry, 551
Brawne, Fanny, appearance and character of, 329, 330 _& n._
Keats's love-affair with, and its effects on him, 329 _et sqq._,
437, 455, 488, 491-2, 494, 497, 516, 535
Keats's love-letters to, 360 _et sqq._, 365, 374, 375, 457-8,
459-60, 464-5, 544
Letters of, to Keats at Rome, effect of on him, 508, 511, 514
Marriage of, 535
Milnes's error as to, 535
on Keats's memory, 535
on her love and fears for Keats, 514
on the strength and expression of Keats's passions, 465-6
Brawne, Mrs, 329, 330, 331, 514
Keats's stay with, 375, 376-7, 485
Letters to, from
Keats, in quarantine, 497-8
Severn, on Keats's state in Rome, 505-6, 507-8
Tragic fate of, 535
Bridal night lines, in _Sleep and Poetry_, tenderness of, 124
Bridges, Robert, on
Keats's poetry, 540
and its relation to Wordsworth, 126-9, 544-5
on _Endymion_
Parallel between and Moore's _Epicurean_, 186 _n._
Structure of the poem, 173
_Bright Star_, sonnet (Keats), a cry of the heart, 334-5; two forms
of, 493-4
_Britannia's Pastorals_ (Browne), as model to Keats, 21, 93, 98,
109-10, 124
Double-endings in, 98, 109-10, 207
Echoes of, in Keats's poems, 93, 109-10, 349, 350, 401, 418
Lines in, on
Devon, 261
Endymion, 167-8 _& n._
_British Critic_, on _Endymion_, and on the _Lamia_ volume, 474
British Institution, pictures seen by Keats at, 78, 231, 464
British Museum, art treasures in, Keats's knowledge of, and
inspiration from, 66, 78, 231-2, 416
Broadmayne, Dorset, the Keatses of, 4
Brougham, Lord, challenge of, to the Lowthers, 272
Support given by, to Hunt, 43
Brown, Charles, attitude of, to George Keats, 529, 530
and Dilke, relations between, 381-2, 530
Fairy tales, satiric, by, 381-2, 444
Friendship of with Keats, 141, 142, 159, 535
Biographical designs of, 529, 530
Scottish walking tour with Keats, 268, 271, 272 _et sqq._; _Diaries_
of, _cited_, 273 _& n._
Keats's life with, 320 _et sqq._
Collaboration in writing, 295, 357, 359, 364, 376, 440 _et sqq._,
553-6
Keats's (temporary) indignation against, 465
Loan by, to Keats, 357, 373
Second tour of in Scotland, 462; leading to absence at Keats's
departure for Italy, 487, 488, 491
Letters to, from Keats, 371 _et sqq._, 464, 491-2, 500, 504-5
Satiric verses on, by Keats, 345
Keats's poems transcribed by, 494 _n._, 496 _& n._
Later life in Italy, and death in New Zealand, 522-31
on Fanny Brawne and her love for Keats, 514; and on her grief at his
death, 515
on the cause of Keats's illness, 516, 517, 522
on the influence of the _Faerie Queene_ on Keats, 20
on the Ireby dancing-school, 277
on Keats's first sight of Windermere, 273-4
on Keats's state of mind and health (Oct. 1819), 375 _et sqq._; on
the fatal chill, 284; on Keats as invalid, 456
on the writing of the _Ode to a Nightingale_, 353-4 _& n._
Browne, William, of Tavistock, works of (_see also_ Britannia's
Pastoral), Keats's familiarity with, 21; as affecting his style, 93,
109, 124
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, tribute of to Keats, 539-40
Browning, Robert, inspiration derived by from gift of poems of Keats
and Shelley, 526
Rossetti's enthusiasm for, 538
Slow sale of his _Bells and Pomegranates_ series, 528
_Bulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial_ (Morris), 510 _n._
Burford Bridge Inn, Keats's stay at, 152-3, 158, 162, 242
_Endymion_ finished at, 158, 161-3
Burnet's _History of his Own Time_, influence of, on Keats, 14
Burney, Fanny, 159 _n._
Burns, Robert, an English, _see_ Clare Keats on, 282, 283-4
Burton, Robert (_see Anatomy of Melancholy_), and the legend of St
Agnes' Eve, 396-7
Burton-in-Kendal, Keats at, 272
Byron, Lord
Allusion to, in _Hyperion_, 453
Attitude of, to
Keats, 432, 480-1, 517, 520
Hunt, 43, 47 _n._, 49
and the Elgin marbles, 60
Poems of (_see also under_ names), 49, 518
Early Influences on, and sources of inspiration, 2, 268
Keats's appreciation of, 31, and sonnet on, 91
Monetary gains of, 82
Verse forms used by, 108, 390
Reynolds's poem dedicated to, 74
Sovereignty of, as poet, 526, 537
at Shelley's cremation, 521
on the effect of the Reviews on Keats, 517, 520 _& see_ 315
on _Hyperion_, 432
on Leigh Hunt, 47 _n._, and on his _Story of Rimini_, 49
Departure for Italy, 522
Death of, 521
_Byron's Collected Works_, Prose, on Reynolds in later life, 533 _&
n._
_Calidore_ (Keats), and its _Induction_, 34, sentiments, form and
metre of, 111, 122, 470
Callington, the Keatses of, 5
Cambridge Students, enthusiasm of for _Adonais_, and for Keats, 520,
527, 530
Campbell, John, of Islay, on the Goylen story, 291 _n._
Campbell, Thomas, poet, as editor, 473
Poems of
Heroic couplet used in, 108
Jeffrey on, 528
Hunt on, 44
Camelford, the Keatses around, 5
Camperdown, sea fight of, Keats's uncle in, 5
Canterbury, effect of on Keats, 140
Canova, Severn's introduction to, 501
_Cap and Bells, The; or, The Jealousies_ (Keats), written with Brown,
140, 380, 470
Copying of, 376, 379
Echoes in, 87 _& n._
First printed, 537
Idea inspiring, story, metre, tone, &c., 367, 444, 447, 549
Keats's discontent with, 380, 381, 445 _& n._
Lines on margin of, 455
Stanzas in, suggestive of Queen Caroline's arrival, 463
Carisbrooke, _Endymion_ begun at, 135, 161, 176 _n._
Carlyle, Thomas, on Hunt, Lamb and Keats, 532
Caroline, Queen, at Dover, 463
Caroline poetry, an instance of Keats's interest in, 150
Cary's _Dante_, echoes of, by Keats 400 _n._ 1
_Castle Builder, The_ (Keats), a fragment, 389
_Castle of Indolence, The_ (Thomson), 28, 342
'Cave of Despair,' Severn's competition picture, 380
Cave of Quietude, in _Endymion_, 154
_Cenci, The_ (Shelley) gift of by Shelley to Keats, 467, 485
_Chaldee MS., the_, 301-3; Scott on, 304
Chamberlayne, William, misuse of the Heroic Couplet by, 100-1, 209 _n._
_Champion, The_, 519; Stage criticisms in, by Keats, 242-4
Chapman, George, _see also_ Homer, Hymn to Apollo, Hymn to Pan, Iliad,
Odyssey
Heroic couplet used by, 98; lines illustrating, 99
Metre used by, fault in, 209
Strained rimes of, 211
Translation of Homer by, as influencing Keats, 38 _et sqq._, 124,
206, 428
Character in men of Power, and its absence in men of Genius, Keats on,
154
Charioteer theme, in _Sleep and Poetry_, 117-18, 119, 198-9
_Charis_ lyrics (Jonson), metre of, 386
'Charmian,' an East-Indian, 318-19, 330; Milnes's error on, 535
Charles II., Scott's handling of, 45
Chartier, Alain, and _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, 350, 469
Chatterton, and the Rowley forgeries, 106-7; English of, and
verse-flow, 369; Keats's admiration for, 146-7, and sonnet on, 23, 91
Chaucer, Geoffrey, poems of, 186
Echoes of, in _Eve of St Mark_, 437-8, 539
Heroic couplet as used in, lines illustrating, 93-4
Influence on Keats, 391
Keats's studies in, 341, & _see_ 75 _& n._
Landor on, 537
Morris' exemplar, 539
Verse of, as 'translated' by Dryden, 103-4
Cheapside, No. 76, lodging of the Keats brothers, 28, 134
Chichester, Keats at, 333
_Chief of organic numbers_ (Keats), origin of, 257
_Childe Harold_ (Byron), 21
_Christabel_ (Coleridge), 121; criticism of, in the _Edinburgh
Review_, 299, 300; tags from, used by Keats, 243
Christie, J. H., 310, 311; duel of, with Scott, over the 'Z' papers,
519, 526
'Christopher North,' _see_ Wilson
'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' Haydon's picture, 60, 248, 250; Keats
on, 256; private view of, Keats at, various comments; Keats's head
painted in, 460-2
Christ's Hospital, Reynolds's father's post at, 74
Church Street, Edmonton, Keats's home at, 9
Circe, in _Endymion_, 191 _et sqq._
Clare, John, 475 _& n._
Clarendon Press edition of Keats's poems 1906, frontispiece of, 416
_n._
Claret, and Game, Keats on his liking for, 340
Clark, Sir James, Keats's doctor in Rome, 501, 502, 503, 504, 514;
kindness of, with his wife, to Keats, 506
Clarke, Charles Cowden, 252, 539; Keats' sonnet on when asleep over
Chaucer, 75 _& n._
_Epistle_ to (Keats), 37-8, 113
and Hunt, in prison, 43-4
Relations with Keats, 8, 12, 18, 19, 20 _et sqq._, 34-5, 36, 64;
introduction by, to Hunt, 36, and to Homer's poems, 38 _et sqq._
Keats's letter to, in Dean St. days, 34
recollections, on Keats at a bear-baiting, 81-2; on Keats's fight
with a butcher boy, 343; on Keats at school, 13, 531-2, and his
successes, 14; on Keats's introduction to Leigh Hunt, 34-5; on
Keats's power of Self-expression, 81; on Keats's reading Poetry,
225-6; on Keats as surgeon's apprentice, 17 _et sqq._, and medical
student, 28; on Keats's verse-writing to a given subject, 55; on
last sight of Keats, 342; on the publication of _Poems_, 130, 131
on T. Keats senior, 6
Clarke, John, Keats's schoolmaster, 7, 8, 17, 343
Clarke, Mrs. Charles Cowden, on Keats at her father's house, 328
Claude, pictures by, inspiring Keats, 264, 291 _n._, 417
Clive Newcome and his friends on the Victorian poets, 536-7
Closed or Stopped Couplet system, the, 95 _et sqq._
Avoidance of, by Keats, 207, 209 _n._
Croker's attitude to, 311
Clowes, Messrs., and Webb, 76-7
Cockerell, Sydney, on Morris and the changes in _La Belle Dame sans
Merci_, 470
'Cockney School,' articles on, in _Blackwood's_, 45, 76, 137, 152,
299-300 _et sqq._, 477-8; effect of, 313, 370, 516 _et sqq._
Shelley included in, by Maginn, 519
Cockneyism, verses by Keats charged with, 109 _n._
Colburn's _New Monthly Magazine_, _see New Monthly_
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Anatomical studies of, 29
Critical style of, 46
Friend of Haydon, 62
Lack of negative capability in, Keats on, 254
Lectures by, on Shakespeare, 244
Poems of, 21, 121
Disuse by, of the older verse form, 108, 118, 119, 207
Echo of, in _Endymion_, 230
Galignani's edition of, 150 _n._, 527
Hazlitt's criticism on, 299, 300
Hunt's verdict on, 44
Rossetti's enthusiasm for, 538
Political change of view of, 45
Relations with Wordsworth, 45, 108, 207; strained, 245-6
on the Poetic revolution, 119; on the Reviews and Keats's death,
347; on his walk with Keats ('There is Death in that hand'), 346-8;
on Wordsworth's poems, 245-6
College St., Westminster, Keats's stay in, 374-5
Collins, William, poems of, 19
'_Come hither, all sweet maidens_,' _see On a Picture of Leander_
Commonwealth and Restoration Poets, use of the heroic couplet by, with
illustrations, 102 _et sqq._
Complete Works of John Keats, edited by H. Buxton Forman, referred to,
262, 335 _n._ 1, 392 _n._, 400 _n._ 1, 459 _n._, 549 _n._
Compound Epithets, Keats's felicity in, 412-13
_Comus_ (Milton), 19, 432; Echoes of, in _Endymion_, 195; Keats's
recitations from, 495
_Concordance_ to Keats's Poems, published by Cornell University, 545
Constable, Archibald, owner of the _Edinburgh Review_, 297, 311-12
Relations with Scott, 303, 524-5
Cooke, Thomas, translator of Hesiod, 428
Coolness and Refreshment in Nature, preferred in Keats's imagery,
217-18
Cooper, George, 30
Cooper, Sir Astley, and Keats, 30, 31
Copthall Court, possible treasures in, 534
Cornell, _see_ Concordance.
_Cornhill Magazine_ for April, 1917, _cited_ on Coleridge's talk with
Keats, 347-8 _& n._
Cornish origin of Keats's father, Fanny Keats on, 3
_Corsair, The_ (Byron), form used in, 108
Cotterell, Charles, kindness of, to Keats, 496, 498, 501
Cotterell, Miss, 488, 489, 490, 495, 496, 498
Country Ballads, Wordsworth's, Strained simplicity of, 121, 348
Couplet, Closed, _versus_ Free System, 95 _et sqq._
Courthope, W. J., judgment of, on Keats, 542-3
Cowley, Abraham, use of the heroic couplet by, 103
Crabbe, George, use of the heroic couplet by, 108
Craven St., City Road, Keats's home at, 3
Crewe, Earl of, owner of MS. of the _Ode to a Nightingale_, 354 _n._
Cripps, ----, Haydon, and Keats, 151
Criticism, early 19th century
Amenities of, 137-8
Destructive, Jeffrey on, 480
Personalities in, Scott on, 305-6
Croker, John Wilson, criticisms by, on
Endymion, 310-11
Tennyson's and Keats's Poems, 528 _n._ 1
'_Crown, A, of Ivy_,' sonnet (Hunt), occasion of, 56
Cupid and Psyche myth, sources of, open to Keats, 412
_Curse, The, of Kehama_ (Southey), 121
_Curse, The, of Minerva_ (Byron), 60
Cybele, passage on, in Sandys's Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, compared with
that in _Endymion_, 223-4
Cynthia and Endymion story, Keats's love for, 164, 166
Dancing, country school of, at Ireby, described by Brown, and by
Keats, 277-8
Dante, 244
Poems of
Eagle in, 186
Influence of, on Keats, 400 _n._ 1, 544, 545
Keats's travelling book, 272, 545
Rossetti's love for, 538
Sonnet-beginnings used by, 92
_Davideis, The_ (Cowley), metre of, 103
Dean St., No. 8, Borough, Keats's first independent abode, 28
'Death of Alcibiades,' Severn's picture for competition, 503
Death and Dying, Keats's allusions to, in his poems, 112, 203, 336, 344
Deathbed feelings of a Poet, Keats on, in the _Epistle to George
Keats_, 112
Decay of Pagan Beauty, Keats's sonnet on, _see To Leigh Hunt_
_Decameron_, influence of, on Keats, _see_ Boccaccio
Decasyllabic Couplet, _see_ Heroic Couplet
Defence of Poesy (Shelley), Miltonian passage in, 430 & _n._
Delight, the spirit animating Keats's poetry, 83-4
'Della Cruscan' school, 519
'Dentatus,' picture by Haydon, 60
De Quincey, Thomas, as critic, 46, 430
on Keats, and his poetry, 213, 528 and Shelley's poetry, 477
_Descent, The, of Liberty, A Masque_ (Hunt), 44
de Sélincourt, Professor E., Editorial work of, on Keats's poems, 545
on _Endymion_
'Four Elements' theory, 173
'Moon' passage in, 215
on _Eve of St Agnes_
'Corbels' passage in, 400 _n._ 1
on _Hyperion_, the scale of, 427
Destructiveness of Nature, Keats's lines on, 265
de Vere, Aubrey, 540
Devonshire, Keats's visit to, 260 _et sqq._; second visit planned, 357
the Keats of, 4, 5
De Wint, P., 380
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, friendship of, with Keats and Brown, 141-2,
308, 321, 332-3, 346, 370, 458, 465, 491, 530
George Keats exonerated by, 530
House of, 321
Letters to, from Keats, 371
on supporting himself by his pen, 373
on Tom Keats's illness, 316
Literary tastes and work of, 141-2, 167
Editorship of the _Athenaeum_, 530, 533
Relations of, with the Brawnes, 535
on James Rice, 76
Views of, on Keats's attachment to Fanny Brawne, 330 _n._, 331
Dilke, Mrs C. W., 321; on the Fairy tales competition, 381; on Keats,
on his return from Scotland, 296
Dilke, Sir Charles, Keats collection given by, to Hampstead Public
Library, 16 _n._, 33 _n._ 2
Owner of Keats's Sosibio Vase tracing, 416 _n._
Dilke, William, 321 _n._
_Divine Comedy_ (Dante), influence of, on Keats, 545
Dodsley, James, 'Old Plays' by, Dilke's continuation of, 142
_Don Estehan_ (Llanos), 536
_Don Giovanni_, pantomime on, Keats's criticism on, 242
_Don Juan_ (Byron), 444
Keats on, 366, 496
Metre of, 445
Reference in, to Keats, 481, as killed by the Reviews, 520
Donne, Dr. John, Methods of, with the Heroic Couplet, 100
Downer, A. C., _The Odes of Keats_ by, Urn illustrated in, 416 _n._
Dragon-world and its hundred eyes, Keats on, 336
_Dramatic Specimens_ (Lamb), 142
Fuller's words on Fancy, quoted in 388-9
'_Draught, A, of Sunshine_' ('_Hence Burgundy_,' &c.) (Keats), lines
in, on the Madness of Song, 257
Drayton, Michael, influence of, on Keats, seen in
_Endymion_, 206, 216
_Epistle to Reynolds_, 21
_Hyperion_, 175
Sprightly lines by, 109 _n._
Two poetic versions by, of the Endymion theme, echoes of, in Keats's
poem, 168 _et sqq._
Use by, of Heroic Couplet, 97-8
_Dream, A, after reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and Francesca_,
Sonnet (Keats), 343
Drummond of Hawthornden, William, references of, to Endymion in his
sonnets, 168
Dryden, John
Influence of, on Keats, seen in _Drear-Nighted December_, 160
_Isabella_, 392
Use by, of Heroic Couplet, 103
'Duchess of Dunghill,' Keats on, 283
Duncan, Admiral, 5
Durdle Door, 492
Duverger's French Grammar owned by Keats, 16 _n._
Eagle, the, in _Endymion_ and other poems, 186
_Earthly Paradise, The_ (Morris), 539
_Eclectic Review, The_, Reviews by, of Keats's poems
_Lamia_, 474
_Poems_, 132
_Eden, The, of Imagination_ (Reynolds), 74
Edgeworth, Maria, and Hunt, 43
_Edinburgh Magazine_ on the _Lamia_ volume, 474-5
_Edinburgh Monthly Magazine_, _see Blackwood's_
_Edinburgh Review_, politics, publisher and rival of, 297
Critical ferocity in, 299
Hazlitt in, on Keats as killed by the Reviews, 521-2
Influence of, 316
Jeffrey's article in, on _Endymion_, and on the _Lamia_ volume,
479-80
Reynolds's contributions to, 533
Edmonton, third home at, of Keats, 9, 39, 113
Eglantine Villa, Shanklin, 358 _n._
_Election of a Poet Laureate_ (Duke of Buckingham), 44
Election contest, Keats's contact with, 277, 274
Elgin, Earl of, 231 _n._; and the Parthenon Marbles, 59-60
Elgin Marbles, the, Haydon's defence of the removal of, 59-60, 460
Hunt's sonnet on, 63
Keats's reveries among, 416
Keats's sonnets on, 66-7
Eliot, George, phrase of, on the word Love, 549 _n._
Elizabethan Poets and Poetry, Keats's introduction to, 19
Influence of, on Keats's poems, 124, 168 _et sqq._, 171, 206, 207,
209, 223 _et sqq._, 389, 442, 479
Keats's studies of, 430
Spirit of, reborn in Keats, 171
Use in, of the Couplet, Closed and Free Systems, 95, illustrations,
96 _et sqq._, 207
Elizabethan versions of the Endymion story, 167 _et sqq._
Ellis, George, and the legend of St. Agnes' Eve, 398 _n._
Elmes, James, and the _Ode to a Nightingale_, 354
"Enchanted Castle," by Claude, inspiration of, to Keats, 264, 291 _&
n._; owner of 265 _n._
_Endimion_ (Gombauld), parallels to, in Keats's poem, 175 _& n._
_Endimion_ (Lyly), edited by Dilke, 167; allegory in, 168 _n._
_Endimion and Phoebe_ (Drayton), 169; echoed by Keats, 216
Endings of Lines
Closed, Keats's avoidance of, 207
Double, Keats's relinquishment of, 207
End Moor, the toper at, 273, 277
End rime-syllables
Chaucerian, 94-5
Elizabethan, 95 _et sqq._
Endymion, the Greek myth of, 166 _& n._
Browne's reference to, 167-8 _& n._
in Elizabethan poetry, 167 _et sqq._
in _Sleep and Poetry_, 123
_Endymion_ (Keats), 257 _n._, 386, 389, 467, 470
Affinities of lines in, with those in other poems, 176 _n._, 207 _et
sqq._, 236
Allegorical strain in, 171 _et sqq._
Analysis of, 164 _et sqq._
Reason for undertaking, 204-5
Ascending scale in, 181-2
Autumnal scene in, 161
Bailey's praise, and Keats's apathy, 270
Beauties in, mixed with the faults, 214 _et sqq._
Begun at Carisbrooke, 135, 161, 176 _& n._; opening lines of, 161,
partly written at Oxford, 142-3, 147; progress of, 140, 141, Keats's
depression during, 150, and letters on to friend whilst writing,
150, 151, 153, study of, helpful to understanding the poem, 154
Brought to a close at Burford Bridge, 158-9, 161; last lines of,
161-2; copying of, by Keats, 244, 251; revision and correction of,
for press, 244; Keats's letters on to Taylor, 260; seen through the
press, 262
Book I., 175
Book II., 182
Book III., 189
Book IV., 197
Characters in, 166, 177 _et alibi_
Contemporary influences seen in, 233 _et sqq._
Date of publication, 163
Deeper speculative and symbolic meanings of, and of Keats's other
poems, key to, 153-4
Dramatic promise of, 222
Elizabethan influence seen in, 124, 138 _et sqq._, 206-7, 223 _et
sqq._
English spirit in, 391
Exordium of, famous line in, 176 _& n._
Faults and flaws in, 207 _et sqq._, 392, 407, 411
Spiritual, 213 _et sqq._, 392
Technical, 211 _et sqq._
Inseparable from its Beauties, 214
First title of, 73
Germs of, 57-8, 259 _n._
Hunt's views on, 150-1, 252-3, 312
Ideas in, 448
in Embryo, 259 _n._
Ironic power, promise of, in, 222 as Keats's test of his own
poet-hood, 165; his own judgment on the poem, 269
Long meditated, 135
Love as treated in, 181, 183, 213, 222, 549
Lyrics in, compared with their sources, 224 _et sqq._
Models for, Jeffrey on, 479
Moods and aims governing the writing of, 254
New sympathies awakened, 188
Pioneer work, Keats on, 254
Poetic melody of, 147
Poetry of, qualities, affinities and defects of, 207 _et sqq._
Preface to, 269, modesty of, 308
Reference in, to the Pymmes brook, 10
Reviews on, 307 _et sqq._, 463, 474, 477-8, 479-80, 528 _& n._ 1,
529, 543 _n._
Keats on, 314-15
Source of the Indian Maiden in Book IV., 33
Sources of Inspiration, 165 _et sqq._
Study on, by Mrs F. M. Owen, 544
Subject: Analysis of, 164, Keats on, 148
Symbolism of, 172 _et sqq._, 312, 411; the Four Elements theory,
173-4, error of, 175
Taylor's purchase of copyright of, 486
True meaning of, 544
Endymion sarcophagus, from Italy, at Woburn, 231 _n._
Enfield, Clarke's school at, 7 _et sqq._; Keats's attachment to, 17
_et sqq._, and lines on, 37, 113
Enfield Chase, beauties of, 22
Englefield, Sir Henry, and the _Story of Rimini_, 49
English character of Keats's poems, Jeffrey on, 480
English Heroic Metre, Leigh Hunt's effort to revive, 47-9
English Historical Portraits, Show of Keats at, 464
English Literature, Hunt's predilections in, 47
English Poetry, History of, lines on, in _Sleep and Poetry_, 118-19
English Poets, Keats's attendance at Hazlitt's lectures on, 244, 300
English Romance poetry, Rossetti's love for, 538
English Spring flowers, Keats's delight in, 497
English Writers, Why so fine? Keats on, 355-6
_Enid_ (Tennyson), a Keats reminiscence in, 123
Epic poetry, the obvious model for, 429
_Epicurean, The_ (Moore), model for, 186 _n._
_Epipsychidion_ (Shelley), possible echoes in, of _Endymion_, 240, 241
_Epistle to Charles Cowden Clarke_ (Keats), 37-8, 113
_Epistle to George Felton Mathew_ (Keats), 93, 109 _& n._, 110, 470
_Epistle to Henry Reynolds_ (Drayton), sprightly lines from, 109
_Epistle to Maria Gisborne_ (Shelley), versification in, 241
_Epistle to my brother George_ (Keats), 37, 111-13
_Epistles_ (Keats) group of (_see_ the foregoing), in _Poems_, metre
and form of, 93
_Epithalamion_ (Spenser), lines in, on Endymion, 167; lyric effect in,
122
Epping Forest, 22; reminiscences of in Keats's poems, 90
_Essays in Criticism_, Arnold's Essay on Keats reprinted in, 543 _n._
_Essays and Studies_ (Suddard), 157 _n._
_Essays and Tales_ (Sterling), praise in, of Keats, 527 _& n._ I, 528
_n._ 3
Ethereal Musings, Keats on, 155
Eton, famous headmaster of, 4 _n._
Woodhouse at, 134
Eve of St Agnes, legend of, Jonson on, 396
_Eve, The, of St Agnes_ (Keats), 308, 350, 406, 443; an achievement,
386, 396; written at Bedhampton, 333-4; read to Cowden Clarke,
342, 343
Feast of Fruits in, Miltonic parallel to, 401
Hunt's picture from, 538
Lines in, reminiscent of Wieland's _Oberon_, 87 _n._
Poetic scope and method of, 399 _et sqq._
Place of, in English poetry, 386, 396
Publication plans, 366
Shelley's delight in, 483
Some changes made in, 367
Sources, story, form, beauties, and metre of, 396 _et sqq._, 436
_Eve, The, of St Mark_ (Keats), 140, 444, 445, 470
Bridge between Chaucer and Morris, 539
Date of, 334, 337, 437
Incomplete, 339
Included in Milnes's Book, 537
Sent to George Keats, 371
Subject, metre, form; echoes in, relation of, to the P.R.B., and
Keats's own words on, 437-41
Evocation, and Exposition, the genius of Keats and of Wordsworth seen
in, 128-9, 234, 267-8
Ewing, Mr, kindness of, to Keats, 506
_Examiner, The_, founded by John Hunt, 42, 46
Edited from prison by Leigh Hunt, 44
Influence of, on Keats, 14
Keats's critique in, on Reynolds's skit on _Peter Bell_, 348
Poems published in, by
Keats, 35 _& n._, 36, 38, 54, 66-7, 73
Reynolds, 73-4
Shelley, 73
Reynolds' _Endymion_ article reissued in, 312
Shelley's _Alastor_ praised in, 234
on the New Movement in Poetry as shown in 'Poems,' 131-2
_Excursion, The_ (Wordsworth), 21, 128
Effect of, on Shelley, and on Keats, 233-4
Passage in, on Greek Mythology, Keats on, 125, 146, 250
Exordium to Book III. of _Endymion_, 189
_Fabliaux ou Contes_, by Le Grand; Way's translation of, 33 _& n._ 1
'_Faded the flower_,' lines on Fanny Brawne, date and self-expression
in, 377-8
_Faerie Queene_ (Spenser, _q.v._), influence of, on Keats, 19-21, 31,
177, 185, 428
Fairfax, Edward, Italian stanza form used by, 390
_Fairies of the Four Elements_ (Keats), words for operatic chorus,
350, 441
_Faithful Shepherdess_ (Fletcher), the Endymion passage in, 168
Influence of, on Keats, 168, 206, 386, 479
Metre of, 386
Falmouth district, the name Jennings common in, 5
'_Fame like a Wayward Girl_,' sonnet (Keats), echoes in, 349-50
_Fancy_ (Keats), 263, date, 386-7
Metre, form, subject and Inspiration of, 327, 387-9
Published in the _Lamia_ volume, 470
_Fancy, The_, a medley (Reynolds), 475 _n._
_Faust_ (Goethe), opening chorus of, 217
Feast of Fruits, in
_Eve of St Agnes_, Miltonic parallel to, 401
_Hyperion_, 450-1, 542
_Feast of the Poets_ (Hunt), earlier skits on which modelled, 44
Keats's allusion to, 113
Treatment in, of Scott, 45, 303
'Feel,' as used in '_In drear-nighted December_,' 159 _n._
Fetter Lane, Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare in, 244
_Filocolo, Il_ (Boccaccio), compared with _The Eve of St Agnes_, 397-8
_& n._ 2
Finch, Colonel, 517
Finsbury, earliest home of Keats in, 3
Fingal's Cave, Keats on, in prose and verse, 292
FitzGerald, Edward, admiration of, for Keats, 527
on the poetry of Keats and Shelley, 541
Fitzwilliam, Earl, help from, to Keats, 486
Fladgate firm of solicitors, Reynolds with, 533
Fletcher, John, Endymion passage by, 168
Influence seen in Keats' Poems, 386
in _Endymion_, 206
in _Sleep and Poetry_, 125
Metre used by, 386
Faults in, 209
_Floire et Blancheflor_, metrical romance on, in relation to
_Isabella_, 397-8
Florence, Artists and Literati at, 522-3, 530
Milnes's meeting at, with Brown, 530
_Floure, The, and the Lefe_ (Pseudo-Chaucer),
Echoes of, in Keats's poems, 115, 177
Keats's sonnet on, 75 _& n._
Flowers, English Spring, Keats's lines on, 446-7
_Foliage, 'Laureation'_ Sonnets published in, 307
Foot measure of Stanzas, 350 _& n._
Forest Scene and Festival, in _Endymion_, 177 _et sqq._
Forman, H. Buxton, _Complete Works of John Keats_ edited by,
references to, 544, 549 _n. & see footnotes_
Help of, to Señora Llanos (_née_ Keats), 536
on the '_Bright Star_' sonnet, 335 _n._ 1
on the Corbels, in _Eve of St Agnes_, 400 _n._ 1
on an Echo of Dryden by Keats, 392 _n._
on Mrs Lindon's letter on Keats, 465 _n._
on a reading in the _Ode to Fanny_, 335 _n._
on a _tendresse_ felt for Keats, 262
French literature, the less well-known, Keats's reading in, 175 _n._
Frere, Hookham, 49;
use by, of the _ottava rima_, 390
Frere, John, and Coleridge's meeting with Keats in 1819, 347-8
Fuller, on Fancy, 388-9
Galignani's edition of the Poems of Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats
(1829), 527
'_In Drear-nighted December_,' printed in, 159 _n._
'Gallipots' article, in _Blackwood's_, 307-8
Galloway, Keats in, 279 _et sqq._
_Garden of Proserpine_ (Swinburne), metre of, 161
_Garden of Florence_ (Reynolds), 333
Garnett, Richard, on Shelley's letters and those of Keats, 541
_Gem, The, 'In a Drearnighted December_' printed in, 159 _n._
George, Prince-Regent, "baited" in _The Twopenny Post_, 43
George III., poetry of his period, 207
Gibson, John, the Sculptor, and Severn, 503
Gifford, William, editor of the _Quarterly Review_, 299
Critical ferocity of, 137
Hazlitt's _Letter to_, 341
Shelley's letter of remonstrance to (unsent) on the hostile criticism
on Keats, 482, 516-17
_Gil Blas_ (Le Sage), and the word 'Sangrado,' 309 _& n._
_Gipsies, The_ (Wordsworth), Keats on, 151
Gisborne, Mr. & Mrs., and Keats, 466-7, 516
'_Give me a golden pen_,' sonnet (Keats), in _Poems_, 90
'_Give me women, wine and snuff_,' couplets (Keats), 32
Gladstone, Rt Hon. W. E., and Severn, 526
Glaucus, in _Endymion_, 140; magic robe of, possible source of,
170, 190 _et sqq._
Gleig, Bishop, 306
Gleig, Chaplain-general, 306, 310, 341
Glencroe and Loch Awe, Keats on, 289 _& n._, 290
'_Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away_,' sonnet to Leigh Hunt
(Keats), 83, 90
'_God of the golden bow_,' in _Hymn to Apollo_ (Keats), 58
_Godfrey of Bulloigne_ (Tasso, trs. Fairfax), metre of, 390
Godwin, Mary (Mrs Shelley), 70
Godwin, William, influence of, on Shelley, 540
Primer of Mythology by, 228 _n._, 231
on Keats's poems, 41
Goethe Circle, at Weimar, Lockhart's intimacy with, 298, 309
_Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, as possible inspiration to Keats, 412 _& n._
_Golden Treasury_ Series edition of Keats's poems, 544
Goldsmith's _Greek History_, Haydon's gift of, to Keats, 65
Gollancz, Prof. Israel, 551, 553
Goylen, ruins and legend of, 291
Gray, Thomas, poems of, 19; influence of, on Keats, 23
Verse-forms used by, 108
Great Smith St., the Dilkes in, 374
'_Great Spirits now on Earth are Sojourning_,' sonnet to Haydon
(Keats), 65, 120; echoes of, in _Endymion_, 120; included in _Poems_,
91
_Greek History_ (Goldsmith), given by Haydon to Keats, 65
Greek Liberation, Byron, and Trelawny, 521, 522
Mythology, the Endymion legend in, 166 _n._
Keats's delight in 2, 81, 114, and poetical use of, 218-19, 224
_et sqq._, 264-5, 414, 418, 426; Sources of his knowledge of, 14,
126, 171; his Talk on, 78; its Vitality to him, 110
Revitalization of, in Europe, 219-20
Religion, and its evolution, Wordsworth on, 125-6, 220
Sculpture, _see_ Elgin Marbles
Influence of, on Keats, 231 _n._, 414 _et sqq._
Style in poetry, Keats on, 426
Green, Joseph Henry, 346 _& n._, 347
Green, Miss E. M., _A Talk with Coleridge_, edited by _Cornhill
Magazine_, (April 1917), _cited_, 347-8 _& n._
_Guy Mannering_ (Scott), 279
Guy's Hospital, Keats's student days at, 16 _& n._
'_Had I a Man's fair form_,' sonnet (Keats), included in _Poems_, 89
Hadrian, age of, Parthenon sculptures assigned to by the dilettanti,
60
'_Hadst thou lived in days of old_' (Keats), Valentine for Miss Wylie,
metre of, 34, 269, 386
Halecret, meaning of, 429 _& n._
Hallam, Arthur, and the poems of Shelley and Keats, 527
Hammond, Thomas, surgeon, Keats's apprenticeship to, 16 _& n._ 2, 26
_n._, 30
Hampstead, Hunt's home at, Keats's pleasure at, 35-7
Keats's life at, 141, 244, 245 _et sqq._, 322
Hampstead Public Library, the Dilke Keats collection at, 16 _n._, 33 _n._
_Handful of Pleasant Delites_ (Robinson), Keats's possible knowledge
of, 158 _& n._
Happiness, Keats on, 154
_Happy is England_, sonnet (Keats), 34; included in _Poems_, 89
_Happy Warrior, The_ (Wordsworth), form of, 108
Hare, Julius, Sterling's letter to, on the Poems of Tennyson & Keats,
528
Haslam, William, the "oak friend" of Keats, 77, 141, 345, 487
in love, Keats's mockery on, 371
Letters to, from Severn, on Keats's health in 1820, 466; on the
voyage to Italy, 489 _et sqq._, and Keats's life there, 498 _et
sqq._; on money troubles in Rome, 508-9
and the Milnes Biography, 534
on his love for Keats, 513-14
Haydon, Benjamin, 135, 347
Appearance, 62
as Artist, Controversialist, Writer, 59-62, 67
Characteristics, 59, 60 _et sqq._, 532 and the Elgin marbles, 59-61,
63
Friends of, and his quarrels with them, 62, 71, 153, 254
Friendship with Keats, beginning and course of, 64 _et sqq._, 135,
136, 141, 255, 347
Keats's Sunday Evenings with, and meeting with Wordsworth during,
245 _et sqq._
in Great Marlborough St., 150, 151
Letters from, to Keats, on their friendship, 67-8; on Prayer, 62,
138-9
Letters to, from Keats, on dissatisfaction with _Endymion_, 150; on
Haydon's painting, 256; on a new Romance in his mind, 334
Letters to and from Keats, on a Loan, 323-4, 337-8, 339-40, 354-5;
_see also_ 370
and the _Ode to a Nightingale_, 354
Pictures by, 60
"Christ's Entry into Jerusalem," heads of his friends in, 60, 250,
462
Exhibition of, Keats at, 460
Keats's estimation of, 256
Pseudo-vegetarianism of, 250
and Shelley, a heated dessert-talk between, 71
Sonnets addressed to, by
Keats, 65, 66, 67, 91, 120
Reynolds, 65
Wordsworth, 65
Sources of his accounts of Keats used in present volume, 532
on the dinner when Keats met Wordsworth, Lamb and Kingston, &c., 246
_et sqq._;
on Keats as a child, 7
on Keats's eyes, 79
on Keats, as killed by the Reviews, 520
on Keats's lack of decision, 369
on Keats's plunge into dissipation, 379-80
on his last sight of Keats, 486-7
on reading Shakespeare with Keats, 66
on _Sleep and Poetry_, 130
on Scott's beautiful smile, 525 _n._
Suicide of, 532
'_Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak_,' sonnet (Keats), on the
Elgin Marbles, 67
Hazlitt, William, 133
Appearance and conversation of, 69
Attitude to, of _Blackwood_, 300
as Critic, 119, 151, 263; ferocity of, 137, 299, 300; style of, 243,
244
Friendship of, with
Haydon, 62
Keats, 68, 77
Invective of, against Gifford, 341
Lectures by, on English Poets, 244, 300; Keats at, 244
Taste of, Keats on, 68, 250
Wrath of, on the _Blackwood_ Reviews, 311, 314
on Haydon's "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem," 461, 462 _n._
on Keats, as killed by the Reviews, 521-2
on Keats's verses, 41
on Shelley, 70
on Wordsworth, _aet._ 48, 249
on Wordsworth's conversation on poetic subjects, 251
Heine, Heinrich, 229
_Heliconia_ (ed. Park), 158 _n._
Hemans, Felicia, verse of, 526
'_Hence Burgundy, Claret and Port,' see Draught of Sunshine_
_Henry VI._ (Shakespeare), as played by Kean, Keats's criticism on,
242, 243
Hercules, triumphs of, figured on sarcophaguses, 231 _& n._
_Hero and Leander_ (Marlowe), Heroic Couplet as used in, 169
Metre of, 96
'Heroic' Couplet, the, history of 93 _et sqq._
Keats's use of, 93, 207 _et sqq._, 406
Hessey, --, _see also_ Taylor and Hessey
Indignation of, at the _Blackwood_ Reviews, 311
Letters to, from
Keats, on the criticisms on _Endymion_, and the defence by his
friends, 311
Taylor, on his joust with W. Blackwood, over Keats's poems, 475-7
Hesiod's _Theogony_, the Titans in, 428
Hilton, --, 380; help from, for Keats, 486
Holman, Louis A., and Haydon's "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem," 462
_n._
on the source of the P.R.B., 325
Holmes, Edward, on Keats as a boy, 11-12
_Holy Living and Dying_ (Jeremy Taylor), Keats soothed by, in Rome,
509
_Holy State_ (Fuller), on Fancy, 388-9
Homer, Chapman's Translation of, Keats's delight in, and sonnet on, 38
_et sqq._; influence seen in _Endymion_, 206
on the Hyperion story, 428
Homeric _Hymn to Pan_ in Chapman's Translation, lines from, 225-6
Hood, Mrs. Thomas (_née_ Reynolds), 55
Hood, Thomas, 159 _n._, 255; Parodies written by, with Reynolds, 533
Hope, lines on, in _Endymion_, 182
Horace, influence of, on Keats, 428 _& n._
Horne, Richard Hengist. schoolfellow of Keats, 77; on Keats while with
Mr Hammond, 18
Houghton, Lord (_see also_ Milnes), 342
Poems by Keats, posthumously published by, 334-5 _& nn._
_La Belle Dame_ given from Brown's transcript, 469
Houghton MSS., referred to, 12 _n._, 30 _n._, 56 _n._, 92 _n._, 147
_n._, 307 _n._, _et alibi_
_House of Fame_ (Chaucer), the Eagle in, 186; influence seen in _The
Eve of St Mark_, 437-8
_'How many bards gild the lapses of time_,' sonnet (Keats), 88
Date and Text of, 88
Echoes in, 89
Technique of, 88
Human Life, Keats's reflections on, 267
Human Nature, Keats's increasing interest in, 276 _et sqq._
Humour and Wit, Keats on, 245
_Humphrey Clinker_ (Smollett), preferred by Keats to _The Antiquary_
(Scott), 279
_Hungarian Brothers, The_ (Porter), 325
Hunt, James Henry Leigh, 139 & _n._, 347
Appearance and charm of, 45-6
Attacks on, in _Blackwood's_, 45, 151-2, 300-3, 477
Attitude of, to
_Blackwood's_, 45, 314
Scott's poems, 21, 45, 303
Wordsworths 'Simple life' poems, 348
Champion of poetic revolution, 47, 49, 119, 207
Classical translations by, 52
Contrasts in his Diction and Breeding, 46, 47 & _n._ 1
as Critic, 44-5, 46, 48, 299
Criticisms on, by Keats, 263, 324, 328-9
Faults of Style, 46, 47 & _n._, 459, 477
Financial ineptitude of, 46 _et alibi_
Friendship of, with
Cowden Clarke, 35 _et sqq._
Haydon, 63;
quarrels of, 254
Keats, and influence on him, 14, 18, 35 _et sqq._, 41, 51 _et
sqq._, 109, 111, 125, 141, 214, 509, 532
Haydon's caution on, and Keats's reply, 138-40
Keats's changed attitude to, 252-3
Kindness to Keats in his illness (1820), 462, 464, 466; and
renewed friendliness, 472
Intercoronation episode, and his verses thereon, 54-6, 307
Shelley, 69 _et sqq._, and influence on him, 241; present at his
cremation, 521
Imprisonment of, 23, 42, 43
Keats's sonnet on his release, 23
Keats's first published work dedicated to, 83, 90, 130-1
in Later life, 532
Letter from, to Severn at Rome, on the love of Keats's friends for
him, 515-16
Letter to, from Keats, of criticism, 137
Life at Hampstead, 35 _et sqq._, 50 _et sqq._
Lines from _Cap and Bells_ published by, 445
Literary industry of, and writings, 34, 46
Memories of Keats in his writings, 532
at Novello's, 327, 328
Papers edited by, _see Examiner, Indicator, Reflector_
as Poet, 518
Poems by (_see under their_ Titles), 44, 63, 130-1, 138
Anapaestic verses by, to friends, 50, 51
Praise by, of _Alastor_, in _The Examiner_, 234
Religious views of, 51
Review by, of
_Lamia_ volume, 410-11, 472-3
_Poems_, 131-2
Sketch of his origin, life and career, 41 _et sqq._
and _The Eve of St Agnes_, 398
Tributes of, to Keats, 41, 526
Views of, on _Endymion_, and vexation caused thereby, 150-1, 252-3,
312
Young Poets, promise of, noted in article of that title, 54, 69
on the Feast in _St Agnes' Eve_, 401-2
on _Hyperion_, 73
on _Isabella_; _or_, _the Pot of Basil_, 473
on Keats's attitude to Shelley, 70-1, 72
on Keats's eyes, 79
on Keats and his poetry, 36
on _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, 469
on _Sleep and Poetry_, 130 _et sqq._
on Wordsworth at 48, 249
Hunt, John, and the _Examiner_, 42
Hunt, Mrs Leigh (_née_ Kent), 43, 254
Hunt, W. Holman, a Keats worshipper, 538
_Huon of Bordeaux_, source of Shakespeare's Oberon and Titania, 87
_n._
Hyginus, notes to, in _Auctores Mythographi_, on Moneta, 447 & _n._
_Hymn, A_, _to Apollo_ (Keats), 56 _n._, 58
_Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_ (Shelley), influence of, on Keats, 73
Inspirations of, 237
Publication of, 234
_Hymn to Pan_ (Chapman), 124, 225-6
_Hymn to Pan_ (_Endymion_), quality and affinities of, 225 _et sqq._
Ode-form of, 411
Wordsworth on, 237, 249
_Hymn to Pan_ (Shelley), 243
_Hymns of Homer_ (Chapman's version), influence seen in _Endymion_, 206
_Hyperion_ (Keats), 308, 517; attitude to, of the critics, 471
Blank verse of, 317
Dante's influence seen in, 545
De Quincey's criticism on (1845), 528-9 & _n._
Designed as a romance, its scheme and scale, subject, sources, model,
lines from, fine start, difficulties, and abandonment, 426 _et
sqq._
Epic quality of, 333
Feast of Fruits in, 450-1, 542
Fire referred to, in, 175
First intimations of, 202, 262, 334; first draft work on, 322, 323,
327, 333
Germ of lines in, 276
Keats's change of mind on, 369, 375
Miltonism of, 399, 545
Mistake on, set right, 544
Never finished, 339
Remodelling of, 376, 379, 447-54; errors made in, 469; the Induction,
450 _et sqq._; leading Ideas in, 447 _et sqq._
Shelley on, 482
Transcendental cosmopolities of, Hunt on, 73
_Idiot Boy, The_ (Wordsworth), 348
'_I had a dove_,' lines for music (Keats), 327
_Iliad, The_, 177
Chapman's, Keats's delight in, and Sonnet on, 38, 40 & _n._, 41, 54,
87, 88, 133; echoes of, in other poems, 177, 428
Metre of, 86
Strained rimes of, 211
_Imagination and Fancy_ (Hunt), Keats memories in, 532
Imagination and Truth, relation between, elucidated by Adam's dreams
in _Paradise Lost_, 154, 155
_Imagines_, of Philostratus, 190 _n._
_Imitation of Spenser_ (Keats), 20; published in _Poems_, 86
Immortality, Keats's attitude to, 345, 387, 492, 509
Indiaman surgeoncy, Keats's plan concerning, 355-6, 462
Indian Maiden, in _Endymion_, 197 _et sqq._; lines _cited_, 229-30;
echoes in, and inspiration for, 33, 230 _et sqq._
_Indicator, The_, 46
Lines from _Cap and Bells_ published in, 445
_La Belle Dame_ published in, 468-9
'_In drear-nighted December_,' an achievement, 386
Date and association of, 158 _et sqq._
Model of, 158, 160
Text, 159
Versions, 159 _n._ 2
Induction to
_Calidore_, 34, 111, 122, 470
_Endymion_, the intended, 122, 164
_Hyperion_, 450 _et sqq._
Ingpen, Roger, his edition of the _Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley_
cited, 482 & _n._
Invention and Imagination as the prime endowments of a Poet, Keats's
insistence on, 165
Inverary, woods at, Keats on, 288
Iona, Keats's visit to, 291
Ireby, Keats at, 274
Brown's account of the dancing, school at, and Keats's of the same,
277 & _n._, 278
_Irish Melodies_ (Moore), money-worth to the poet, 82
_Isabella_; _or_, _the Pot of Basil_. _A Story from Boccaccio_
(Keats), 339, 386, 396, 406, 443; an achievement, 399
Apostrophes and Invocations in, 391-2
Beauties of, 389, 392-3, and horror turned to beauty, 393 _et sqq._,
471
Date of, 260, 262, 390
Digging scene in, 394
Lamb on, 471
Dryden echoes in, 392
Included in the _Lamia_ volume, 470, 471
Keats's distaste for, 366, 369
Latin usage in, 431
Lines in, on the bitter-sweet of love, 360
Metre of, 393
Millais' picture from, 538
Reynolds's Boccaccio tales intended for issue with, 259-60, 387, 521
Procter's poem on the same subject, 459
Shelley's delight in, 483
Story of, 390
Lamb on, 471
Reynolds on, 312-13
Wilson on (1828), 527
_Isle of Palms, The_ (Wilson), 298
Isle of Wight, Keats's visits to, 135-6, 164, 357 _et sqq._, 405
'_I stood tip-toe upon a little hill_' (Keats), Cupid and Psyche
reference in, 412
Date of, 115, 122, 164
Included in _Poems_, 115
Influence on, of a passage in _The Excursion_, 126
Metre, diction and subject of, 114-15
Planned as Induction to _Endymion_, 122, 164
References in, to the Moon, 123, 166
Scene described in, 36
Italian attitude to the Sick, 506
Literature, Hunt's preferences in, 47
Keats's studies in, 370, 398
Primitives, Keats's appreciation of, 325
Italy, winter in, planned for Keats, 467, 484, and undertaken, 485,
journey to, illness and death of Keats, 486 _et sqq._
_It is an awful mission_ (Keats), lines quoted, 425
'_It is a lofty feeling_,' sonnet (Hunt), occasion of, 56
Jacobean poetry, influence of, seen in _Endymion_, 206, 207, 209 _n._
James I., 101
Jasmine Bower scene in _Endymion_, a flaw in the poem, 186-7
Jeffrey, Francis, editor of the _Edinburgh Review_, 297;
as critic, 299, 528
on Keats's poems, 478-80, 481, 528
on Shelley's poems, 528
Jeffrey, Miss, letters to, from Keats, on going as Ship's doctor, 355-6;
on writing the _Ode to Indolence_, 415
Jeffrey, Mrs, and her daughters, Keats's friendship with, 262
Jeffrey, Mrs (Mrs G. Keats), and the letters of Keats to his brother,
531
Jennings, a common name in Cornwall, 5
Jennings, Captain Midgley John, of the Royal Marines, uncle of the
poet, 5, 7, 12
Jennings, Frances (Mrs T. Keats, _q.v._, later Mrs Rawlings), mother
of the Poet, 3
Jennings, John, grandfather of the poet, 3, 5
Will and bequests of, 9, 355 & _n._
Jennings, John, of Penryn, 5
Jennings, Mrs John, grandmother of Keats, 9
Character of, 6
Legacy of, to Keats, 354, 355 & _n._
Trustees appointed by, for the Keats children, 15-16
Death of, 16 & _n._ 1.
Jennings, Mrs Midgley John, lawsuit by, as affecting Keats, 354, 365
Johnson, Dr Samuel, 537;
Tour of, in the Highlands, 282
on Greek mythology, 220
on Sheridan's pension, 481
Jones, Mrs, the mysterious, 334
Jonson, Ben, poems of, Influence of on Keats, 206, 225, 396, 479
Life of, Keats on, 356
Metre used by, 389; faults in, 209
Use by, of the Heroic Couplet, 100
_Joseph and his Brethren_ (Wells), enthusiasm for, of Swinburne and
Rossetti, 77
'Judgment of Solomon,' picture by Haydon, 60
_Julian and Maddalo_ (Shelley), 241
Junius, Taylor an authority on, 133
'Junkets,' Keats's nickname, 83
Kean, Edmund, 245, 263
Departure to America, 370, 372
Dramatic powers of, 442
in Shakespearean parts, Keats's criticisms on, 242-4
Keast, Thomas, of St Agnes' parish, Cornwall, 5
Keate, Catherine, 5
Keate, Dr., Headmaster of Eton, 4 _n._
Keats, Edward, 3
Keats family of Dorsetshire, 4, 5, 492
Keats family (the poet's)
Brotherly affection in, 3, 11, 13, 24, 25, 31-2, 133, 135, 145, 262,
271, 323, 324
Keats, Frances Mary (Fanny), sister of the poet (later Llanos, _q.v._),
3, 505
Inheritance of, 355 & _n._, 529
Keats's affection for, 145
Letters to, from Keats, charm of, 338; on being friends, and on the
story of _Endymion_, 147-9; on dancing, 336-7; on fine weather,
364-5; on going to the Isle of Wight, 357; on going as a Ship's
Doctor, 355; on his health and on _Otho the Great_, 381; on his
idleness, 347; in illness, 456; on keeping well, 487; on the Scotch
tour, 290
Marriage of, 535
Verses addressed to, by Keats, 9-10
Visit to, by Keats, 366
Keats, George, brother of the poet, 3, 25, 58, 77, 162;
at school, 8
Biographical references to, in order of date
Business life of, 24; Money troubles of, 139-40; and the Publishers
of the _Poems_, 133; at Teignmouth, with Tom, 244; Marriage and
Emigration of, 24, 260, 269-72; Business troubles of, 365; Keats's
generosity to, 371; Visit of, to England, and Keats's further
generosity, 382-4; Good news from, 504; Inheritance of, 355 _n._;
Death of, 531
Brotherly devotion of, to Keats, 11, 24, 25, 82-3, 133; Keats on,
356
Brown's indignation with, 516, 517, 529; proved unjust, 530
Character of, 11, 382
Letters to, from Keats, and Keats's Journal letters to him and his
wife, 322-3, 327, 337, 339; on becoming a Ship's surgeon, 355; on
being a Poet, and on _Endymion_ as the test of this, 164-5; on his
Defenders, 315; on the Hostile Reviews and on his Reading, and
Idleness, 340 _et sqq._; on his Brotherly love, 322, 323, 324; on
Miss Brawne, 336; on Sea passage to London, 295
Value of, 317 _et sqq._
Wealth of topics in (1819), 344 _et sqq._, 37
on his Brother as a boy, 11
on his Grandfather and Mother, 6
on Keats's temper, 145
Keats, John, the poet
Acquaintance of, with Chaucer, 75 _n._, and with the Elizabethans
(_q.v._), 19
Appearance of, at different dates, 6, 12, 24, 25, 35, 79, 80, 143,
287, 296, 328, 346, 347, 459 _n._, 486
Eyes, 143, 459 _n._, 466, 511
Height, 31, 79, 80
Portraits of, by
Haydon, 462
Severn, 328, 495, 511, 535
Appreciation by, of Wordsworth's poems, 125, 145-6
Attitude of, to
Criticism, 311 _et sqq._, 321
Love, 181, 183, 213, 224, 262, 318-20, 330 _et sqq._, _passim_,
393, 549 & _n._
Scenery, 153, 274 _et sqq._
Scott's writings, 279
Women, 81, 89-90, 262, 271, 288, 318-20
Biographical projects of friends, 529-31
Biographies, appreciation and Collections of his works, 531 _et
sqq._
Memoir of, by Monckton Milnes, 520
Biographical references in order of date
1795-1817
Parentage, birth and family, 2, 3 _et sqq._; school days, 7 _et
sqq._; boyish amusements, his lines on, 9, 10; industry, 13, and
successes, 14; apprenticeship to Mr Hammond, surgeon, 16 & _n._
2 _et sqq._, silence of, on this period, 17; beginnings of
poetry-writing, 17, 18, influences, 14, 18 _et sqq._, vocation
first felt, 12, 21
1815-17
Life as medical student, 17, 26 & _n._, 27, 28 _et sqq._; the
doctor's life abandoned, 28, 83; notebook of, 33 & _n._ 2;
Friendships made and renewed, (_see also_ Friends, _infra_),
with Cowden Clarke, 34; with Leigh Hunt, 35-6 _et sqq._, _et
alibi_, effect of the friendship with Hunt on his career, 41, 51
_et sqq._, friendships, formed through Hunt, 59 _et sqq._; the
laurel crown episode and his verses thereon then, and later, 55,
57-8, 415; verse-writing on a given subject, with Hunt, 55 _et
sqq._; at Margate, the _Epistles_ written from, 37; first
reading of Chapman's Homer, the great sonnet written on it, 38
_et sqq._; walk of, to the Poultry, 40 _n._; Haydon's
acquaintance made, 59; other new friendships, 68 _et sqq._;
social surroundings, 78-9; social surroundings, _aet._ 21, 78-9;
at a Bear fight, 81-2; growing passion for the poetic life, 83
1817
First book, _Poems_ (_q.v._), published, 83 _et sqq._, 130 _et
sqq._; new publishers found, and new friends gained, 133 _et
sqq._; stay in the Isle of Wight, Shakespeare studies and work
on _Endymion_, during, 135 _et sqq._; visit to Canterbury,
effect of, 140; visit to Bailey at Oxford, described by the
latter, 143 _et sqq._; stay at Burford Bridge, 152, _Endymion_
finished at, 161, 162; end of first phase of mind and art of,
163
Dec. 1817-June 1818
Dramatic criticism undertaken, 242 _et sqq._, life at Hampstead,
242, meeting with Wordsworth, 246; stay at Teignmouth, 260 _et
sqq._, 429; marriage and emigration of his brother George, 268
_et sqq._
June 1818-June 1819
the Scottish tour with Brown, 272 _et sqq._, and its effect on
his health, 293 _et sqq._, 384, 545; the attacks on him in
_Blackwood_, and the _Quarterly Review_, 297 _et sqq._; the
defence by his friends, 238, 311 _et sqq._, 516 _et sqq._;
effects of, 311 _et sqq._, 315, 316, 506, 515, 524, 534; the
nursing of Tom Keats till his death, 316-20; the attraction of
'Charmian,' 318-19; life with Brown at Wentworth Place, 320 _et
sqq._; work on _Hyperion_, 322, 323, 327; harassed by borrowers,
323, 337 _et sqq._, 354-5; gift to, from an unknown admirer,
325; meeting with Fanny Brawne and his love for her, 329 _et
sqq._, _passim_, 510, 534, 549; financial position of, 337-8,
354-5, lightened by Brown, 357; fight of, with a butcher-boy,
342-3 & _n._; idleness, and work, 342 _et sqq._, meeting with
Coleridge, 346-8, unsettlement in health and plans, 355 _et
sqq._
June 1819-Feb. 1821
Stay at Shanklin and work on _Lamia_ and _King Otho_, 358 _et
sqq._; love letters from, to Fanny Brawne, 360 _et sqq._; stay
at Winchester, 362, 369; letters from, 370 _et sqq._;
determination to work for the Press, 373; his financial
position, 373; attempted parting from Brown, stay with the
Dilkes and return to Brown at Hampstead, 374-6; collaboration
with Brown, 375 _et sqq._, 387; fluctuating spirits of, before
his seizure, 375; hard work, 375-6, 379; inward sufferings, 376
_et sqq._; laudanum--taking by (1819), 379, 380, 505 _et
sqq._; financial position, at this time, 379; trouble and health
failure, 375 _et sqq.;_ work of this period, 436 _et sqq.;_ the
fatal chill, 384, 455; invalid life, 456 _et sqq._; letters from
his sick bed, 455; slight improvement, 460; relapses, 462; at
Kentish Town, 463, 466, 468; Shelley's invitation to Italy,
467-8; work published while at Kentish Town, 268-9; the _Lamia_
volume issued, 470 _et sqq._, the Reviews again severe, 473 _et
sqq._; stay with the Brawnes, 468, 485; wintering in Italy
decided on, with Severn as companion, 485-7; the voyage, 486 _et
sqq._; life in Naples, 496 _et sqq._, and in Rome, 503; his
'posthumous existence' 384, 504, 510; the last days, 505 _et
sqq._; choice by, of his own epitaph, 510, 523-4; death, 512,
and after, 513 _et sqq._; burial place and memorial stone, 510,
523-4; the 'might-have been' had he lived, 548 _et sqq._;
posthumous attacks on, in, and by _Blackwood_, 519-20, De
Quincey, 528-9 & _n._, and _Quarterly Review_, 527-8; rare
allusion by, to the Reviews, 521; Shelley's lament for, in
_Adonais_, 517-19
Character and characteristics
Admiration of, for Chatterton, 146-7
Artistic tastes of, 66, 92, 255-6, 325
in Boyhood, 9 _et sqq._; in Young Manhood, 24, 25
Brotherly affection of, 3, 11, 13, 24, 262, 268, 271, 371, 382-4,
_see also_ Keats, Fanny, George, and Tom
Contrasted with Shelley, 72-3
Conversation of, 145-7, 459 _n._
Devotion of, to his Mother, 7, 14-15
Duality of, 15, 318
Early tendency to rhyming, 7
Feeling of, for the poetry of the past, 38
Genius of, 128-9, 234, 267-8, 484, 550
His own statements on, 153, 200-1, 223, 269, 368, 497
Indecision, Indefiniteness and Variableness of, 128-9, 142, 173,
223, 269, 270, 314, 315-16, 545
Interest of, in history and politics, 371
Keenness of perception, 52
Late awakening of literary proclivities, 12
Limitations due to social setting, 444
Love of
English spring flowers, 446-7
Liberty, foundations of, 14
the Moon, 22, 123-4, 153, 215-16 _et sqq._
Nature, and its expression in his poems, 21, 22, 36, 79-80, 84,
90, 113, 114, 122-3, 128, 144, 149, 152-3, 159 _et sqq._, 216
_et sqq._, 226, 232
as Lover, seen in his letters, 360 _et sqq._
Loyalty to his given word, 379
Manner, 143
Manners, 31, 32, 81 459 _n._
as Mimic, 81-2
Modesty, 269, 313, 314
Morbidity of Temperament, 11, 12, 15, 80, 139, 464-5
Morals, 32
Naturalness and simplicity, 143
Perceptiveness, 441-2
Pride, 15, 31, 313
Pugnacity as schoolboy, 10 _et sqq._, 17, in later years, 17
Reading, and Reading gifts of, 81, 366
Wide range of, 88
Religious indefiniteness, 51, 71, 509
Reserve and inward bitterness (1820), 382, 383
Sensitiveness as to his origin, 71-2
Skill of, in friendship, 255
Social qualities, powers and taste, 81-2
as Sportsman, 326
Temper of, 145
Tender-heartedness &c., 444
Thirst for knowledge, 260, 265, 269
'Vein of flint and iron' in, 15, 315
Voice, 81, 145
Chief agent in revitalization of Greek mythology, 220 _et sqq._
Critics and commentators of, 540
as Dramatist, 441 _et sqq._
Epitaph of, chosen by himself, 510, effect of, on public opinion on
his Poems, 523-4
Eulogists of, 544-5
Fame of, slow growth and spread of, 520, 526 _et sqq._; triumph of,
536, 540; forecasts on its disability, 546-8
Favourite flowers of, 510
Friends and Friendships of, _see also_ Names of Friends
Estrangement from, in illness, 465
Indignation of, at the Reviews, 309 _et sqq._, 516 _et sqq._, 522
Love of his friends, 513 _et sqq._, 521
Loyalty of, long surviving, 527
Heir of the Elizabethans, 171
Italian Studies of, 370, 398
Letters from, and to, _see_, chiefly, _under_ Names of
Correspondents, _and Epistles_
Bradley's lectures on, 545
Compared with Shelley's, 541
Dr. Garnett on, 541
on _Endymion_, 150, 151, 153, value of, in the study of the poem,
154
Journal-letters from, to George Keats, value of, 317 _et sqq._
Riches of, 262 _et sqq._
Self-revelation in, 153-4, 371
Library of
Books in, 228 _n._, 390 _n._, 379 _n._ 1, 447 _n._
List of, 556 _et sqq._
Poems and Verses by, _see also, and chiefly, under_ Names
Achievements, 385 _et sqq._
Beauties in, 368
Charm of, 119-20
Cockneyism charged against (_see also_ Cockney School), 109 _n._
Collected
Editions of
First English, 520
Forman's, 544, 549, & _see_ footnotes
Galignani's, 159 _n._, 527
Milnes's, 520, 531 _et sqq._
Concordance to, published by Cornell University, 575
Copy of, carried about by Shelley, 521, 522
Couplet as used in, 93 _et sqq._, 113-14, 207 _et sqq._, 209 _n._
Criticism of, easy, 119-20
Echoes in, of earlier poets, 89, 90 _et passim_
Early writings, 22-3
Elizabethan influence on, 389, 479
Essential principle of versification, 208
Faults avoided in, 209
Faults existing in, 50, 186, 187, 207 _et sqq._, 211, 212, 213,
214-15, 221, 307, 368, 459
Felicitous compound epithets in, 412-13
Flippant note in, 404
Fragments and experiments, 385, 417 _et sqq._
Insight into Keats's mind and genius from, 424 _et sqq._
Fugitive pieces, 256-7
Genius in, Evocative not Expository, 128-9, 234, 267-8
Gift of, to Browning and the effect, 526
Growing appreciation of, 520, 526 _et sqq._
Inspiration of, from
Art, 54, 92, 117, 122, 200, 219, 231 _n._, 264, 414-16 & _n._,
417, 446
Nature, 21-2, 122-3
Sources, nature of, 165-6
Last lines written by, 435
Latest Eulogists of, 545
Lectures on, of Mackail, 545
Lyric experiments, 157 _et sqq._, 386
Mental experiences worked into, 173
Method of composition, 143-4
Metres and Styles used in, 109-10, 210-11, 258, 286 _n._, 287, 345,
349, 350 & _n._ 2, 386, 387, 414
Models of, _see_ Echoes, _supra_, _see also_ Elizabethan, & Hunt
Naturalness of, 395
Nature of, 541
Nature Poems, _see Endymion_
Odes written in 1819, 352 _et sqq._
Opinions on, in the early '40's, 528
_Poems_, published, 85 _et sqq._
Poor sale of, 526, 528
Posthumous, two printed in Milnes's book, 537
in progress and written in early 1819, 339
Promise in, of Dramatic and Ironic power, 222
Publishing schemes (1819), 366
Referring to his love for Fanny Brawne, 334 _et sqq._
Revision of, uncertainty and un-wisdom shewn in, 469
Rimes used by, 119, 210-11, 307
Self-expression in, 222-3, 411
Snatches expressive of Moods, 424-5
Speculative and symbolic meanings underlying, the key to, 153-4
Sterling's appreciation of, 528
Technique of, _see also_ Metre, Rime, &c., 88
Thackeray's allusion to, 538
Unquenchable by literary work done on them, 546
Unwritten, his distress over, 534, 548
Value of, to the reader, 546, 548
as Poet, Milnes's words on, 536
Poetic impulses, causes checking, in 1819, 339, 340, 437
Political interests and views of, 14, 25, 371
Portraits of, by Haydon, 462, Severn, 328, 495, 511, 533
Reflections by, ethical and cosmic, 344-5
Spirit of poetry and pleasantness retained by, to the end, 511
Sayings on Abandoning _Hyperion_, and on its Miltonisms, 436; on
Beauty and Truth, 418; on Brotherly affection, 271; on Brown's
regular habits, 281; on Bailey's appetite for books, 133-4; on the
_Blackwood_ article on Hunt, 152; on Fanny Brawne's appearance &c.,
329; on Brown's rummaging out his old sonnets, 352 _n._; on
Devonshire weather and folk, 260-1, 262; on the Effect of the
Reviews on the public, 340-1; on _Endymion_, his aims in, 165, 237,
his dissatisfaction with it, 150, and its defence by his friends,
314-15, on its theme, 148; on Endymion's confession, 180; on George
Keats's money troubles, 371; on Hazlitt's Shakespearean Lectures,
68; on his ambitions as Poet, 324; on his feelings on life and
literature, 364; on his own attitude to women, 288; on his own
capacity for judging paintings, 256; on his own character, 153-4,
200-1, 223, 497, as poet, 269, 314-15; on his own need of Poetry,
136; on his own place in Poetry, 543; on his plans for _Hyperion_,
426; on his own pride &c., 368; on his poetry, and determination
never to write for writing's sake or for a livelihood, 339-40; on
his poetry-writing idleness, (1819), 342, 348, 349, 352, 353; on his
'posthumous existence,' 505-6, 510; on his sensations in ordinary
society, 326; on his own skill as operator, 29; on his state of mind
in 1819, 356, 380, 491-2; on his unwritten poems, 534, 548; on his
wishes as to future work (Nov. 1819), 380-1; on his work on the _Ode
to Psyche_, 413-14; on the Ireby dancing-school, 277 & _n._, 278; on
the Lasinio engravings, 325; on a mawkish popularity, 313; on his
Nile sonnet and other writings (1818), 256; on the quarrels of his
friends, 255; on the _Quarterly's_ attack and its good results, 326;
on his reading, and on his mental state (1819), 341, 342; on the
Scotch tour, 289; on Sickness, in the lighter vein, 263; on some
friction with Hunt and others, 150-1; on street quarrels, 81; on
three witty friends, 383; on Winchester ways, 371; on Wordsworth in
1817, 250, on his dogmatism and Hunt's, 252-3, on his genius and
Milton's, 266
Keats, Mrs George (_née_ Wylie, _q.v._, later Mrs. Jeffrey), 323, 365
Keats's pleasant relations with, 270, 271
Letter to, from Keats, 383
Remarriage of, 531
Keats, Mrs Thomas (_née_ Jennings), mother of the Poet, 3
Appearance and character of, 6-7
Devotion to, of Keats, 7, 14, 15
Second marriage of, 8-9
Death of, 14, 15
Keats, Sir Richard Godwin, of the 'Superb,' 4
Keats, Thomas, father of the poet, 2-3, 5
Characteristics of, 6
Death of, 8
Origin of, Señora Llanos on, 3
Keats, Thomas (Tom), brother of the poet, 3, 135, 137, 280, 466, 505
Ill-health of, Keats's devotion during, 15, 162, 244, 262, 269, 295,
316 _et sqq._, 333, 426
Letters to, from Keats, on Fingal's cave, 292, and on his health,
293; on the Lake District, 275-6; on Scottish Society, Economics and
Racial character, 281-3
Wells's hoax of, 77, 346
Death of, 15, 320, 322, 387
Keats, D.J. Llanos y, artist, son of Fanny Keats, 535-6
Keats Crescent, Shanklin, 358 _n._
Keats, the name, its variants and locales, 3-5
Keats-Shelley Memorial at Rome, 542; _Bulletin_ of, 16 _n._, 510 _n._
'_Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there_,' sonnet (Keats),
52, included in _Poems_, 90
Kelmscott Press edition of Keats, and the restoration of the text of
_La Belle Dame_, 470
Kendal, Keats at, 273
Kent, Miss (Mrs Leigh Hunt), 43
Kentish Town, Keats stay in, and health during, 463
Ker, Prof. W.P., suggestion of, on source of Keats's 'Magic casements'
lines, 291 & _n._
Kerrera, and the Goylen legend, 291
Kete, meaning of, 4
_King Lear_, words from, used by Keats, 285 & _n._
_King Stephen_, dramatic fragment (Keats), 364, 370, 443
Kingston, ----, and Wordsworth, 246-7, 251
Kirkmen, the, Keats on, 282-3
Kirkup, Seymour, at Florence, 523
_Knight's Tale_ (Chaucer), metre of, 94
_Kubla Khan_ (Coleridge), 288
Echo of, in _Endymion_, 230
_La Belle Dame sans Merci_ (Keats), an achievement, 350
Date of, 370, 441
Included in Milnes's Book, 537
Morris, William, on, 470
Publication of, alterations in, and notices of, 468-70
Rossetti on, 439
Subject, perfection, and metre of, 350 & _n._
Transcript of, by Brown, 469 & _n._
True version, given in full, 351-2
_Lai d'Aristote_, 33
_Ladye, The, of Provence_ (Reynolds), 333
Laidlaw, William, Scott, and _Blackwood_, 304
Laira Green, Brown's life at, 530
Lake District, places visited in, by Keats with Brown, 272-3 _et sqq._
Lake School Poets, morbidity asscribed to, by Hunt, 121
_Lalla Rookh_ (Moore), price paid for, 82; popularity of, 313
Lamb, Charles, 388
Appearance, conversation and habits of, 69, 246 _et sqq._, 327
and the Baby, 370-1
Champion of the Poetic Revolution, 119
and the Enfield stiles, 18
Friendship of, with
Haydon, 62
Hunt, 43
Keats, 69
Parties of, given with Mary, 68
Publishers of, 131
Verse-letters to, from Hunt, 51
Works of, two volume ed. of 1818, Fuller's _Holy State_ quoted in
_Specimens_, 388 & _n._
on the Digging Scene in _Isabella_, 395, 471
on Keats's place in poetry, 484
on the _Lamia_ volume poems, 471; the pick of, 395 _n._
on Shelley, 70
Lamb, Dr, 466
Lamb, Mary, 43, 68
Lambeth, Brown's birthplace, 142
_Lamia_ (Keats), 239, 370, 386, 405, 421
Keats on, after re-reading, 372
Keats's reading of, 366
Keats's wish for instant publication of, 366
Place of, in the volume of 1820, 115 _n._
Publication of, with other poems, 463
Full title and contents, 470-1
Reception of, and criticisms on, 471 _et sqq._, 481
Subject, source, metre and form of, 358, 404-10
Hunt on, 404-10
Lamb on, and other critics, 471 _et sqq._
Wilson on (1828), 527
_Lamia, Isabella, and other Poems_, Keats's immortality secured by, 470
Byron's fury over, 481
Gift of, by Keats to Shelley, 468
Passage singled out from, by Lamb, 395 _n._
Publication of, 463, 470-1
Publishers' note in, disowned by Keats, 463
Lancaster, Keats at, 271
_Land, The, East of the Sun_ (Morris), 438
Landon, Letitia, verse of, 526
Landor, Walter Savage, 530; admirer of Keats's poems, 523
on Milnes's book, 537
Landseer, Sir Edwin Henry, at Haydon's, 246
Land's End, Keats's father said to have come from, 3
Lang, Andrew, on errors in Criticism, 308
on the 'gallipots' article, 308, 309-10
Lanteglos, the Keats of, 5
_Laon and Cythna_ (Shelley), 73
_Lara_ (Byron), form used in, 108
Lasinio, engravings by, Keats's delight in, 325
Laureation or Intercoronation affair, reference to, in the _Ode to
Indolence_ (Keats), 415
Sonnets on, by
Hunt, 56
Keats, 57, 91, 307
Amplification of, in _Endymion_, 57-8, 189
Law Life Insurance Society, Woodhouse's connection with, 134.
Lawn Bank, Hampstead, 321 _n._
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 501.
_Lay Sermons_ (Coleridge), 134
_Lay, The, of the Last Minstrel_ (Scott), 396
Leander, sonnet on (Keats), _see On a Picture of Leander_
Leander gems of Tassie, 92 _& n. 2_
Lea Valley, in Keats's day, 21-2
Leicester, Earl of, Keats's notion of, writing about, 381
Lelant, the name Jennings at, 5
Le Sage, name 'Sangrado' borrowed from, 309 _n._
_Letter to William Gifford, Esq._ (Hazlitt), 341
_Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley_, ed. Ingpen, 482 _n._
_Liberal, The,_ Brown's contributions to, 522
'Libertas,' Hunt's sobriquet, 44
L.S.A. degree, obtained by Keats, 27
_Life of, Dryden_ (Scott), 45
_Life of Joseph Severn_ (Sharp), new knowledge of Keats given in, 545
_Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats_, edited by Richard
Monckton Milnes (1848), 520, 531 _et sqq._
_Life of Scott_, by Lockhart, 310
Lindo, ---- (later Lindon, ----), husband of Fanny Brawne, 535
Lindon, Mrs, _see_ Brawne, Fanny.
Line endings of couplets
Closed or open, varieties of usage, 94 _et sqq._
Double, objections to, and usual employment of, 103; illustrated, 104
_Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey_ (Wordsworth), Keats on,
267
_Lines on the Mermaid Tavern_ (Keats), 258; date and metre of, 327,
386; hints on immortality in 387; included in the _Lamia_ volume, 470
_Lines written in the Highlands after a Visit to Burns's Country_
(Keats), 285; metre and interest of, 286 _& n._
Lisbon, Keats scheme of a visit to, 151, _abandoned_, 162
List of Books in Keats's Library, 390 _n._, 397 _n._, 556 _et sqq._
Literary Criticism, cruelty of, early 19th century, 299 _et sqq._
Literary ladies and 'the Matchless Orinda,' 150
_Literary Pocket Book_ (Hunt), 324
Little Britain, the Reynolds's House in, 74, 288
Littlehampton, the Reynolds' at, 147
Live Pets, Keats on keeping, 10, 338
Llanos, Fanny (_née_ Keats), 535
Civil List pension secured for, by Forman, 536
Death of, in ripe years, 536
on the Cornish origin of her father, 3
Llanos, Valentine, husband of Fanny Keats, 535
Loch Awe, Keats on the first sight of, 289
Loch Fyne, doggerel verses on (Keats), 288
Loch Lomond, Keats on, 287-8
Locker-Lampson, Frederick, on Señora Llanos and her husband, 536
Lockharts, the, Scotch tour of, 290-1
Lockhart, John Gibson, co-editor of _Blackwood_, partisan excesses of,
298, 525-6, and later regrets, 299, 310
Article attributed to, in error, 528 _n._ 1
Challenge of, to John Scott, 519
and the Death of Keats, current belief as to, 525-6
Keats's death-bed saying on, 521
at Weimar, 298, 309
_London Magazine, The_, and its editor-publisher, 133, 311, 519
_Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries_, (Hunt, 1828), Keats
memories in, 36, 532
Louisville, Kentucky, George Keats's death at, 531
Love, effect of, on Keats, 332, 334 _et sqq._
Keats's conception and treatment of, 181, 183, 213, 221, 393, 549 _&
n._
Love and Death, Keats's double goal, 112, 336, 344, 362, 375
Love and Marriage, Keats's early fears of, and attitude to, 262,
318-20, justified, 330 _et sqq. passim_
Love and War, Poetry of, 221
_Lover's complaint, A_, sonnet (Keats), when written, 492-4
Lowell, James Russell, 540
Lowther family, and the Election of 1818, 272, 274
Lucas, ----, surgeon, described by South, 29; Keats as dresser to, 27
Lucas, E.V., debt to, as concerning Charles Lamb, 471 _n._
Lucy, Wordsworth's poem on, Keats on, 146
Lulworth Cove, landing at, 492, 494
_Lycidas_ (Milton), 19, 262
Adonais compared with, 517
Echoed by Keats, 111, 431
Lyric effects in, 122
Lyly, John, prose comedy of _Endimion_, by, 167, allegorical nature
of, 168 _n._
_Lyrical Ballads_ of Coleridge and Wordsworth, 21, poetical revolution
introduced by, 108, 118, 119, 207
Lyrical effect attempted by Keats in _I stood tip-toe_, and elsewhere,
122
Lyrics, in _Endymion_, in relation to the Classics and Elizabethan
poets, 224 _et sqq._
'Macbeth,' picture by Haydon, 60
Macfarlane, Charles, on Keats and the scentless roses, 501, and on the
macaroni eaters, 502 _& n._
Mackail, J.W., Lectures of, on Keats' poetry, 545; on the Mystic Shell
in _Endymion_ & in _The Prelude_, 196 _& n._
Mackereth, George Wilson, fellow-student of Keats, 30, 176
Mackintosh, Sir James, and _Endymion_, 313
Macpherson, James, and the pseudo-_Ossian_ poems, 107
M'Cracken, H. Noble, article by, referred to, 398 _n._
Macready, William Charles, in _Retribution_, Keats's criticism on, 242
_Mad Banker of Amsterdam_, comic poem (Lockhart), 309
Madeline, in the _Eve of St Agnes_, 401 _et sqq._, _et alibi_
_Mad Mother, The_ (Wordsworth), 121
Madness, from ecstasy, Keats on, 257
Keats's fear of, lines on, 425
'Magic casements' phrase, possible sources of, 264-5, 291
Maginn, William, critical ferocity of, 137; insolent article and
parody by, on _Adonais_, 519-20
_Maid's Tragedy_ (Beaumont and Fletcher), 341; _Endymion_ references
in, 168
Man, relations of to Nature, Wordsworth's exposition of, 128, 129
_Man, The, Born to be King_ (Morris), 438
_Man, The, in the Moone_ (Drayton), echoes from, in _Endymion_, 169
_et sqq._
_Manfred_ (Byron), 302
_Margaret_ (Wordsworth), 121
Margate, letters from, by Keats, to, various friends, 137 _et sqq._
_Maria Crowther_, ship which took Keats to Italy, 486, 488,
fellow-passengers on, 488-9, 490, 495, 496, 498
Marlowe, Christopher, poems by, 169, _Endymion_ lines in, 67; use in,
of the Heroic couplet, 96-7
Marvell, Andrew, use by, of the Heroic couplet, 102
Mathew, Ann, and Caroline, 24; Keats's verses to, 23, 24, 86
Mathew, George Felton, _Epistle_ to, by Keats, 93, 109 _& n._, 110,
470
on Keats in early manhood, 24-5, and on his appearance, 25
Maurice, Rev. Frederick Denison, editor of _The Athenæum_, 52
_Measure for Measure_, words from, used in _Endymion_, 201
Mediæval Mythology, vitality of, to Keats, 110
Mediævalism of Keats, 439-41
Medwin, T., Letter to, from Fanny Brawne, on Keats and his passions,
330 _n._, 465 _& n._
on Shelley's views on the poems in the _Lamia_ volume, 482-3
_Meg Merrilees, Ballad of_ (Keats), 279-80, 386
Melody in verse, and the Vowel sounds, Keats's ideas on, 147, 209,
401-2
_Memorials of a Tour in Scotland_, poems (Wordsworth), 387 _& n._
'_Me rather all that bowery loneliness_' alcaics (Tennyson), 38
_Mermaid Tavern_, verses on, _see_ '_Lines on the Mermaid Tavern_'
_Metamorphoses_ (Ovid), in Sandys' translation, source of Keats's
mythological knowledge, 171, 174 _n._, influence of in _Endymion_,
190, 195, 201, 206
Metre, decay of, 100
Metres employed by Keats, 86; Keats's revolutionary treatment of, 207
_et sqq._
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, 86; source of Oberon &c. in, 87 _n._
Milanese pictures, engravings of, 325 _& n._
"Milky Way" of poetry, _Quarterly's_ phrase on Keats's work, 528
Mill, James, and Hunt, 43
Millais, Sir John Everett, the Italian Primitives and the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 325; a Keats worshipper, 538
Milman, H. H., 263
Milnes, Monckton (Lord Houghton, _q.v._), Memoir of Keats by, 520,
sources, 531 _et sqq._, merit and timeliness, gaps and errors in, and
reception of, 336 _et sqq._
Milton, John, and the _Faithful Shepherdess_, 168
Genius of, relative to that of Wordsworth, Keats on, 266;
Keats compared with, by Landor, 537
Hair of, Lines on, by Keats, 257
Poems of, Brown's travelling book, 272
Influence of, on Keats, and Keats's study of, 195, 262, 386, 399,
428, 429, 430-6, 545
Model for English epic poetry, 429
Sprightly lines in, 109 _n._
Use in, of the
Heroic couplet, 101-2
Sicilian pastoral elegy form, 517
_'Minutes are flying,' see On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh
Hunt_
_Minstrel, The_ (Beattie), 19
Mitford, Mary Russell, friend of Haydon, 62, his letter to her, on
Keats's death, 521
Mnemosyne, in _Hyperion_, 429, 433 _et sqq._, _passim_
Mole river, in Keats's poem, 159
Moneta, in _Hyperion_, 447 _& n._, 450
Montagu, Basil, on Keats's poems, 41
Monitress, the, in _Hyperion_, 453-4
Monkhouse, Cosmo, 246
_Monthly Chronicle, The_, 53
_Monthly Review_, 354 _n._; on the _Lamia_ volume, 474
Moods, Keats on, 265, 269, 270-1, 344, 348; his sufferings from, 359
_et sqq._, _passim_
Moon, the, Keats's attitude to, 123, 166-7, 189 fine lines on, in
_Endymion_, 215-16
Moore, Thomas, 86, 518
Poems of, Hunt's verdict on, 44 Lines on the Hunts in prison, 43
Popularity of _Lalla Rookh_, 313 Sums received for, 82
Prose works, _see Epicurean, & Tom Cribb's Memorial_
Verse-letter to, from Hunt, 50-1
Morgan MSS., 366 _n._, 477 _n._
_Morning Chronicle_, attitude of, to _Endymion_, 311
Morris, Harrison S., on Keats's choice of epitaph, 510 _n._
Morris, William, anticipations of, by Keats, 438-9
True text of _La Belle Dame_, restored by, 470
Poems of, inspiration and model for, 539
on Keats's poetry, 470, 539
Moschus, his elegy on the death of Bion, 517, 518
_Mother Hubbard's Tale_ (Spenser), Heroic couplet used in, 96
Mountain Scenery as Inspiration for a Poet, Keats's rare phrase on,
284
Mull, Keats's expedition to, 291, and the first failure of his health,
293
Murray, A. S., on the inspiration of the _Ode to a Grecian Urn_, 416
_n._
Murray, John, and Blackwood, 302; and the _Quarterly Review_, 27
Muse of his Native Land, address to, in _Endymion_, 197
_Musée Napoleon, The_, classic prints in, Keats's tracing from, 416 _&
n._
'_My spirit is too weak,' see On Seeing the Elgin Marbles_
Mythology, Greek and Mediæval, vitality of, to Keats, 110
_Naiad, The_ (Reynolds), 74
Napoleon I., 416 _& n._; aggressions of, effect on the Lake poets, 45
Art collection of, 416 _& n._
Naples, Keats in quarantine at, 496 ill-effects of, 498
_Narensky_, opera (Brown), 359
Nature, attitude to, of Keats, and its influences as seen in his
poems, 21-2, 79-80, 114, 122-3, 189, 215-16 _et alibi_
'Nature, red in tooth and claw' (Tennyson), Keats's anticipation of,
448-9
Negative capability, Keats on, 253-4
Nelson, Admiral Lord, 4
Newcome, Colonel in _The Newcomes_, and his son's views on Keats, 537
Newmarch, ----, and Keats, 32
_New Monthly Magazine_, Colburn's, review in, of the _Lamia_ volume,
473-4
Newport, Isle of Wight, Reynolds's County Court post at, 533
_New Times_, Lamb's critique in, of the _Lamia_ volume, 471-2
Newton, Sir Isaac, in Haydon's picture, 247, 462
_New York Herald_, 1889, Recollections of Fanny Brawne, by a cousin,
published in, 330 _n._
New Zealand, Brown's death in, 531
Nile, the, sonnets on, by Shelley, Keats, and Hunt, 256
_Noctes Ambrosianæ_ (Wilson), on Keats's poems (1828), 527 _n._ 3
Wordsworth, 300
Northampton, Countess of, death of, Scott's grief at, 525
Northcote, James, on the ass in Haydon's painting, 461
'_Not Aladdin Magian_' (Keats), referring to Fingal's Cave, 292-3
_Notes on Gilfillan's Literary Portraits_ (De Quincey), outburst in,
against Keats, 528-9 _& n._
Novello, Mary Victoria, _see_ Clarke, Mrs Charles Cowden
Novello, Vincent, musical parties of, Keats at, 327, 328
'_Nymph of the Downward smile_,' sonnet (Keats), addressed to Miss
Wylie, and included in _Poems_, 89, 270
_Nymphs, The_ (Hunt), 138
Oberon (Wieland), Sotheby's translation of, 86-7 & _n._, 309
Modified Spenserian stanza in, 445
Oberon and Titania, Keats's lines on, and possible sources, 86, 87 & _n._
Ocean floor theme, in _Endymion_, in relation to Shakespeare and
Shelley, 189, 239
Oceanus (_Hyperion_), speech of, 433-4
_Ode to Apollo_ (Keats), 23
_Ode to Autumn_ (Keats), 386; date of, 370, 421; form, perfections, and
lines from, 421-3
Greek influence seen in, 426
_Ode to Fanny_ (Keats), as a cry of the heart, 334; date of, 334, 339;
lines from, quoted, 335-6
_Ode on a Grecian Urn_ (Keats), 153, 386, 422, a masterpiece;
inspiration, sources, subject, &c., 232, 264, 415, 416 & _n._, 417-18
Date of, 352, 353
_Ode to Hope_ (Keats), 23
_Ode on Intimations of Immortality_ (Wordsworth), Keats's comment on,
145-6, 159 _n._
_Ode on Indolence_ (Keats), 386; date of, 352, 353
Echo from, 356
Greek influence seen in, 414
Keats's pleasure in writing, 415
Lines on Visions in, probable source of, 412 _n._
Not included in the _Lamia_ volume, 470
_Ode to Maia_ (Keats), unfinished, 265; Greek influence seen in, 426;
included in the _Lamia_ volume, 470
_Ode on Melancholy_ (Keats), 386; date of, 352, 354, 419
Embryo ideas of, 259 _n._
Subject and splendours of, 419-21
_Ode to a Nightingale_ (Keats), 203, 383, 422
Date of, 352, 353-4, 418
Echoes in, 344, 418
Embryo ideas of, 259 _n._
Hippocrene passage in, 542
Keats's genius at its height in, 419
Inspirations of, 264-5
Line in, anticipated, 344
Publication of, 354
_Ode to Psyche_ (Keats), 386; date, 352, 411, 441
Germ of lines in, 276
Sources, qualities, faults and beauties, 411, 412 & _n._, 413-14
_Odes and Addresses by Eminent Hands_ (Hood and Reynolds), 533
Odes (Keats), in _Lamia_ volume, 470
Odes, the six (Keats), 308
Dates of, 411 _et sqq._, 441
Metre and form of, 411-13, 414-15
_Odes, The, of Keats_ (Downer), Urn illustrated in, 416 _n._
_Odyssey_ (Chapman's version), influence seen in _Endymion_, 206
Use in, of the Heroic couplet, 99
'_O fret not after knowledge--I have none_,' lines by Keats, 260, 424
'_O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute_,' sonnet (Keats), date
and subject of, 257
_Old Plays_ (Dodsley), Dilke's continuation of, 142
Ollier Brothers, publishers for Shelley, Keats and others, 83, 263;
and the unsuccess of _Poems_, 131, 133
Ollier, Charles, sonnet by, on _Poems_, 131
Ollier, James, on the public attitude to _Poems_, 133
'_O Melancholy, linger here awhile_,' Invocation in _Isabella_,
beauties of, 392
'_O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies_' (Tennyson), a Keats
anticipation of, 237
_On first looking into Chapman's Homer_ sonnet (Keats), 38, 40 & _n._,
41, 54
Full text of, 88
Included in _Poems_, 133
Technical perfection of, 87
_On the Grasshopper and Cricket_, sonnet (Keats), 55; included in
_Poems_, 91
_On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour_, sonnet (Keats), 90
_On Leigh Hunt's Poem_ '_The Story of Rimini_,' sonnet (Keats), 91
_On the Peace of Paris_ (1814), sonnet (Keats), 23, 44, 91
_On [an engraved Gem of] Leander_, sonnet (Keats), 92 & _nn._ 1 & 2
_On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt_, sonnet (Keats), 57
_On Receiving a Curious Shell and a Copy of Verses_ [_from some
Ladies_], stanza (Keats), metre of, 86
_On the Sea_, sonnet (Keats), written at Carisbrooke, 135
_On seeing the Elgin Marbles_, sonnet (Keats), 66
_On sitting down to read King Lear once again_, sonnet (Keats), 257
_Opposites, A Song of_ (Keats) 263, 389
Optics and the Poet, 400-1
Orcagna, picture by, possibly inspiring Keats, 446
_Orlando Innamorato_ (Boiardo), 552
'_O Solitude! if I with thee must dwell_,' sonnet (Keats), 35 & _n._;
included in _Poems_, 90
_Othello_ (Shakespeare), Kean's voice in, Keats on, 243
_Otho the Great_, a tragedy by Keats and Brown, 357, 359, 364, 421, an
experiment, 386, 441
Admiration for, at Rome, 526
First printed, 537
Plot, construction and poetry of, 442-3
Production of, difficulties on, 370, 372, 381
_Ottava rima_, used by Byron, 390
Ovid, Arethusa myth as told by, 187
Cosmology of, 174 & _n._
Echoes of, in _Endymion_, 168, 171, 174 & _n._, 185, 187, 201
_Metamorphoses_ of, in Sandys' translation, value of, to Keats, 171,
174 _n._; influence seen in _Endymion_, 190, 195, 201, 206
Oxford, Keats's visit to, 142, 429; his own words on, 143 _et sqq._
_Endymion_ partly written at, 143-4, 147
_Oxford Herald, Endymion_ praised in, by Bailey, 270
Oxford University Press, Delegates of, edition issued by, of _La Belle
Dame_, 469 & _n._
Owen, Mrs F.M., Study by, on _Endymion_, 544
_Pain, The, of Memory_, a variant of _In drear-nighted December_,
third stanza of, 158 _n._
Palgrave, F.T., admiration of, for the sonnet _Woman, when I behold
thee flippant, vain_, 89; place given by, to _Lamia_, 406
on Keats's _Poems_ (_Golden Treasury Series_), 544
Pan, _see_ Hymn to
_Pan's Anniversary_ (Jonson), 225, lines from, 226
_Paradise Lost_ (Milton), compared with _Hyperion_, 333
Echoes of, in Keats's poems, 90, 154, 155, 401, and in Shelley's,
430
Feast of Fruits in, 401
Keats's notes to, 152
Keats's study of, and criticisms on, 262, 369
Titans in, 428
_Parisina_ (Byron), 302
Park, Mungo, 246
Park, Thomas, editor of _Heliconia_, 157 _n._
_Parnaso Italiano_, Hunt's reading of, 44
Parsons, Keats on, 335
Parthenon Marbles, _see_ Elgin Marbles
Pastoral spirit of the Elizabethans blent with love of Country
Pleasures, and Renaissance delight in Classic Poetry, re-emergence
in Keats's poetry, 226
Patmore, Coventry, 300; and Milnes's _Life_ of Keats, 531, 540, 542
Pause, the, in metre, 94-5
Peacock, Thomas Love, Keats on, 263
Letter to, from Shelley, on _Hyperion_, 482
Poem by, metre of, and similarity of subject to _Lamia_, 405
_Penseroso, Il_ (Milton), metre of, 386
Peona, in _Endymion_, 177, 202, 203, 204; the confession to, 178, her
expostulation, 179, and his defence, 180 _et sqq._
Percy's _Reliques_, 107
'Peter Corcoran,' in Reynolds's _The Fancy_, 475 & _n._
_Peter Bell_ (Wordsworth), skit on, by Reynolds: notice of the latter
by Keats, 348
Petersburg, Brown's connection with, 142
'Pet lamb' phrase, in _the Ode to Indolence_, 415
_Pharonnida_, (Chamberlayne), character of the verse of in, 100-1
_Philaster_ (Beaumont and Fletcher), phrase from, adapted by Keats in
his epitaph, 510
Philips, Katherine (Orinda), poems of, Keats on, 150; use by, of the
Heroic couplet, 103
_Philological Journal_ of Chicago University, article in, on Keats,
398 _n._
_Philosophy_, Keats's use of the word, 266
Pidgeon, Miss, Keats's fellow-passenger, 488, 489, 499
Piron, allusions to, by Lockhart, 309
Pisa, 517, 522
_Adonais_ printed at, 519
Plato, and the myths of the Aphrodites, Pandêmos and Urania, 549 _n._ 1
Shelley's enthusiasm for; Keats's indirect knowledge of, 237
Plays, Keats's ambition to write, 381
_Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal_, Brown's touring diary
published in, 273 _n._
_Poems_, Keats's first book, its spirit and contents, 85 _et sqq._;
publication of, 164; public reception of, and Reviews on, 130-3,
311
Sonnet dedicating it to Hunt, 83, 90, and the reply, 130-1
Poems, long, Hunt's adverse view on; contraverted by Keats, 165
Poet, the, Death-bed feelings of, Keats on, in the _Epistle to George
Keats_, 112
Prime endowments of, Keats on, 165
Wordsworth's doctrine on, 233-4, endorsed by Keats and by Shelley,
234 _et sqq._
_Poet, The_, a fragment (Keats), 425
Poetic license revived by Keats, 207
Revolution, the captains of, 108, 118, 119, 207
Style, Hunt's views on, 47, 49
_Poetical Sketches_ (Blake), on the older style of verse, 107
Poetry, Keats on
Axioms, 254
Conception of, 252-3
His own need of, 136
Polar Star of, 165
New, arising from the world war, 547-8
Renaissance of, in England, 1, 21, 82
Romantic, 19th century, Morris's perhaps the last of, 539
Weirdness and terror in the early period, 396
Technique of, Keats's insight into, 38
_Polymetis_ (Spence), picture in, 200, possibly inspiring Keats, 200,
231
Polyphemus and Galatea story; Ovid's version, and Keats's, 201, 204
Pope, Alexander, 428
Poems of (and of his school), Byron's championship of, 480
Early Victorian depreciation of, 537
Keats's dislike of, 18, 31, 139, 393
Use by, of the heroic couplet, long ascendancy of his method, 104,
106-7; illustration and contrast with Shakespeare, 105-6
on 'our rustic vein' in poetry, 207
Pope-Boileau passage in _Sleep and Poetry_, _Blackwood_ on, 307;
Byron's rage at, 480-1
_Popular Antiquities_ (Brand), on the legend of St Agnes' Eve 397
_Popular Tales of the West Highlands_ (Campbell), on the Goylen story,
291 _n._
Porphyro, in _Eve of St Agnes_, 401 _et sqq._
Porter, Jane, and Anna Maria, works of, and encouragement by, of
Keats, 325
Pen portraits by the former, 326
Portsmouth, Keats's landing at, 491
Poultry, The, home at, of the Keats brothers, 28, 38, 40 _n._, 135
Poussin, Nicholas, picture by, inspiration of, to Keats, 198, 219, 416
Prayer, Haydon's letter on, to Keats, 62, 138-9
Pre-Raphaelitism, evoking cause, 325
_Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_ (Morris), 538
_n._
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, enthusiasm of, for Keats, as shown by its
paintings, 538
and _The Eve of St Mark_, 439
_Prelude, The_ (Wordsworth), 128; the last published passages in,
250-1; the Mystic Shell in, Mackail on, 196 _n._
Prince Regent, the, and _The Examiner_, 42; Moore's skits on, 43
Pride in his work, Keats on, 364 _& see n._ 1
Prior, Matthew, metre of his day, 86
Procter, Bryan Walter (Barry Cornwall), 21 _n._; kindness of, to Keats,
459
Poem by, on the same subject as _Isabella_, 459
Style of, Shelley's disgust at, 482
on Keats's manner, conversation and appearance, 459 _n._
on the Lambs' evening parties, 68
on Leigh Hunt, 47 _n._
Procter, Mrs, 321 _n._; on Keats's eyes, 466
_Prometheus Unbound_ (Shelley), 89; Keats echoes in, 239; lines
_cited_, 240
Keats on, in advance, 467
Review of, in _Blackwood_, 477-8
Proper Wooing Song, A, echo of, by Keats, 157-8
Prothero, George, 528 _n._ 1
Prowse, Mrs, and Keats, 262
_Psyche_ (Tighe), 19, 412
Punning, 327
_Purgatory_, (Dante), the Eagle in, 186
Pymmes Brook, the, Keats's allusions to, 10
_Quarterly Review, The_, 77
Harsh criticisms in, 299
on _Endymion_, 137, 310-11, 476, 527-8
Influence of, 316, Keats on, 341
Keats's illness ascribed to, by his friends, 516 _et sqq._
Politics, publisher and rivals of, 297
Review in, of Tennyson's poems, 527-8
Queen Lab, oriental counterpart of Circe, 195
_Raccolta_ of Prints by Zanconi, 325 _n._
Raeburn, Sir Henry, portrait by, of the Countess of Northampton
singing, 525
_Rainbow, The_ (Campbell), echoed by Keats, 408-9
Rawlings, Mrs, _see_ Keats, Mrs Thomas
Rawlings, William, stepfather of Keats, 8-9
Rawlings _v._ Jennings, 15 _n._
'_Read Me a Lesson, Muse,' see Ben Nevis_, sonnet
_Recollections of Writers_ (Cowden Clarke), 13 _n._
Redding, Cyrus, 473, and Galignani's edition of Keats's and other
poems, 527 _n._ 2
_Redgauntlet_ (Scott), the dancing dame in, 277 _n._
_Reflector_, edited by Hunt, 46
Lamb's _Specimens_ printed in, 388 _n._
Regalities, Keats on, in _Endymion_, 189
_Rejected Addresses_, 533
_Reminiscences of a Literary Life_ (Macfarlane), 502 _n._
Restoration Poets, compared with Georgian, 207
_Retribution, or The Chieftain's Daughter_ (Dillon), Macready in,
Keats's criticism on, 242
Reviews, effect of, on the public, Keats on, 340-1
Hostile to Keats, and their effect, _see_ Coleridge, Severn and
others on, _see also Blackwood's_, 'Cockney School,' _Quarterly
Review_, Severn, Shelley, Taylor, 'Z' articles
_Revolt of Islam_ (Shelley), first title for, 73
Reynolds, Charlotte, 55, 76
Reynolds family, 74; Keats's estrangement from, 465
Reynolds, Jane (later Mrs Thomas Hood), 55
Keats's verses in her album, 76
Letter to, from Keats, on gay and grave, 149
on the date of '_In a drear-nighted December_,' 158
Reynolds, John Hamilton, friendship of, with Keats, 65, 73-6, 141, 151,
242, 504, 529
Bailey's friendship with, and with his family, 134, 341
_Epistle to_, from Keats, 389
Latter days of, 533
as Lawyer, 75, 76, 533
Letters to, from Keats, on Autumn weather, 421-2; on being Haunted
by a Woman's shape and voice, 316-17; on Confused and Clear Mental
Images, 263-5; on _Endymion_, and on Shakespeare's sonnets, 153,
on the intended preface to _Endymion_, 269; on his feelings on
Life and Literature (1819), 364; on the genius of Wordsworth and
Milton, 266; on Human life, 267; on _Isabella_, or, _The Pot of
Basil_, 312-13; on leaving town, 135, and one from Carisbrooke,
135-6; at Oxford, 149; on Social doings, 245; on his Thirst for
Knowledge, 265-6; on Thrush music, 260, 424; on the two Chambers
of Thought, 267, 448; on the Visit to Burns's cottage, 284, 285;
with lines to Apollo, 257; from Winchester, 371 _et sqq._; on
Wordsworth's dogmatism and on Hunt's, 252-3
Literary work of, 65, 74, 75, 348, 475 _n._, 521, 533
and Milnes's _Biography_, 533-4
Medley by (_The Fancy_), 475 _n._
Poems, 521, 533
Letters on, from Byron and from Wordsworth, 74
Models of, 74
Inspired by Boccaccio, 259-60, 333, 389
Parodies, 74
Skit by, on _Peter Bell_ (Wordsworth), 348
Sonnet to Keats (_Thy thoughts, dear Keats_), 75
Sonnet to Haydon, 65
Quarrels of, 254-5
Wit of, Keats on, 383
on _Endymion_, 312-13, and on the preface thereto, 269
on Fanny Brawne, 331; on hopes for Keats's recovery, 513; on
_Isabella_, 312-13; on Keats, as killed by the Reviews, 521
Reynolds, Mariane, 55, 76
Bailey's attachment to, 134, end of, 341
Reynolds, Misses
Keats's letter to, from Oxford, 147
Keats's changed feelings for, 337
Reynolds, Mr and Mrs, friends and home of, 74
_Rhododaphne_, poem (Peacock), resemblance of, to _Lamia_, 406, 408
Rice, James, friend of Reynolds and of Keats, 76, 135, 141, 263, 366,
533
Help from, to Keats, 486
Keats's stay with, at Shanklin, 357-9
Letter to, from Keats, during his illness, 458
Wit of, Keats on, 383
_Richard, Duke of York_, and Kean's acting in, Keats's criticism on,
242-3
_Richard III._ (Shakespeare), Keats's criticism of, and of Kean's
acting in, 242-4
Undersea lines in, Keats's challenging passage in _Endymion_, 239,
Jeffrey's praise of, and Shelley's assimilation of, 239-40
Richards, ----. wit of, Keats on, 383
Richardson, Sir B.W., on the composition of the line 'A Thing of
Beauty,' 176 _n._
Rime, Keats's faults in use of, 211-12
Rimed couplet, Shelley's use of, 241
Ritchie, Joseph, the explorer, 246 _et sqq._, 324
_Robin Hood_, poem (Keats), 258; date of, 386; included in the _Lamia_
volume, 470
Robinson, Clement, echo of, in Keats, 158 & _n._
Robinson, Henry Crabb, 244-5; friendly to Keats, 251
on poems in the _Lamia_ volume, 483
on Wordsworth at the time of Keats's meeting with him, 245 _et sqq._
_Rob Roy_ (Scott), Wordsworth's advance criticism on, 246
_Rob Roy_ (Wordsworth's ballad), the writer's estimate of, 246
Rogers, Samuel, poems of, Jeffrey on, 528
Use by, of the Heroic couplet, 108
Roman laws on Infectious Disease, 508
Romantic poetry of the 19th century, Morris's perhaps the last of, 539
Weirdness and Terror of, in early period, 390
_Romaunt of the Rose_ (Chaucer), 437
Rome, Keats's journey to, and death in, 498, 501, 502 _et sqq._, 512
_et sqq._
Keats-Shelley Memorial at, 542
Severn at, after Keats's death, 522, 530
Shelley's burial place at, 521
Rondeau, the, Keats's view on, 388
Ronsard, Pierre, Ode of, to Michel de l'Hôpital, on the Titans, 428-9
Ross, Sir John, and the search for the North-West passage, 324
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, enthusiasms of, and high tribute to Keats,
538, 539
Evocation in, of Pre-Raphaelitism, 325
on _The Eve of St Mark_, 437, 439-40
Rossetti, William, on the poetry of Shelley and of Keats, 541
'Rowleyism' of _The Eve of St Mark_, 438
Rune-inscribed Shell, in _Endymion_, 196 & _n._
Ruskin, John, and others, praises by, of the _Ode to Psyche_, 413
_Ruth_ (Wordsworth), 121
Rydal, Keats's visit to, in Wordsworth's absence, 274
Sabrina, Keats's poem planned on, 495, 504
'Sacrifice to Apollo,' picture by Claude, as inspiration to Keats, 264
_Sad Shepherd, The_ (Fletcher), 206
'Sad stories of the deaths of Kings,' Shelley's outburst with, 138 &
_n._
_Safie_ (Reynolds), 74
St Columb Major, the Keats of, 5
St Paul's School, Reynolds at, 74
Saintsbury, Professor, and the debt of _Endymion_ to the _Pharonnida_
of Chamberlayne, 209 _n._
St. Stephen's, Colman Street burial-place of Keats's grandmother, 16
_n._ 1
St Thomas's Street, Keats's "chummery" at, 28, 30
_Samson Agonistes_ (Milton), 272
St. Teath, the Keats' of, 4 _n._, 5
Sanctuary, the, in _Hyperion_, 451-2
Sandell, Rowland, 16
_Sandoval_ (Llanos), 536
Sandys, George, translation by, of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, Keats' use
of, 171
Echoes of, in Keats's poems, 206, 224, 428
Use in, of the heroic couplet, 99-100
San Giuliano, _Adonais_ composed at, 517
Sangrado, Dr., origin of the name, 309 & _n._
Sappho, lines from, on Love, the limb-loosener, 332 & _n._
Poem of, on the Endymion legend, 166 _n._
Sarcophagus reliefs, as inspiration of Keats's Bacchic lines, 231, &
_n._, 232
_Satyr, The_, masque (Jonson), and the legend of St. Agnes' Eve, 396
Metre of, 386
Scenery, Keats's attitude to, 153, 174 _et sqq._
Science and Poetry, views on, of Hunt, Keats and Wordsworth, 408-11
Scotland, Keats's comments on, 278, 282 _et sqq._
Scott, Anne, 525
Scott, John, the 'Z' papers denounced by, 311; duel over, resulting in
death of, 519, 526
Scott, Sir Walter, friend of Haydon, 62
Letter from, to Lockhart, on his method of criticism, 305-6
Poems of, 21, 49, 108, 537
Attitude to, of Hunt, 21, 45, 303
Environment as affecting, 1
Commercial success of, 82
Position of, as poet, 526
and his Publishers, 303
Relations of, with the _Blackwood_ group and Lockhart, 303-6
in Rome, 525
Smile of, Haydon on, 525 _n._
Wordsworth's sonnet to, 525 _n._
on the _Chaldee Manuscript_, 304
on Criticism, 305-6
on Keats, 525
Scott, William Bell, on _The Eve of St Mark_, 440-1
_Scottish Chiefs, The_ (Porter), 325
Scottish Lowlands, Keats's tour in, 278
_Scots and Edinburgh Magazine_, Review in of 'Poems,' 132, 311 & _n._
Scylla, in _Endymion_, 190 _et sqq._
Sea, the, Keats on, 149
Sonnet on (Keats), 135
_Selections from the English Poets_ (Ward), Arnold's essay on Keats
in, 543 _n._
Selene, Artemis, Diana, and the Endymion myth, 116 _n._
Sensations, Keats's use of the term, 155-6, 266
Sentence-structure, Keats's aptitude for, 209
That of _Endymion_ and of _Pharonnida_ compared, 209 _n._
_Session of the Poets_ (Suckling),
_Sethos_, old French romance, imitations of, 186 _n._
Severn, James, father of Joseph, 78; wrath at Severn's going to Italy
with Keats, 488
Severn, Arthur, and the lost drawing of Keats, 495
Severn, Joseph, artistic gifts of, 78
Account by, of the voyage with Keats to Italy, 489 _et sqq._
and _A Lover's Complaint_, 492-4
Attitude of, to Fanny Brawne, 33 & _n._, 331
Drawings by, of Keats in his Berth at sea, 495 (lost); in his Bed
in Rome, 511; at Novello's (lost), 328; a miniature once owned
by Fanny Brawne, 533
Friendship of, with Keats, 77-8, 141, 262
Keats's companion in Italy, 487 _et sqq._; devotion shown by to
the end, 504 _et sqq._; and the effect of the Reviews on Keats,
516, 522; loyalty to Keats, 324; a touching incident recorded by,
524-5
Letters from, to various friends on the journey to Italy and
Keats's last days there, 489 _et sqq._, _passim_
Letters to, from Keats's friends, while in Rome, 513 _et sqq._
Life of, in Rome, 530, 536
Parents of, 78
Pictures by, 380, 487
Religious views of, 71
Sharp's _Life_ of, new knowledge of Keats derived from, 545
on Fanny Brawne, 330: on Keats's artistic instincts, 255-6; on
Keats's eyes, 79; on Keats' elation over a meeting with
Wordsworth, 250; on Keats as invalid, 456; on Keats's Museum
reveries, 416; on the True cause of Keats's distress in his
illness, 534
Shakespeare, William, birth-place of, Keats's visit to, 144
Coleridge's Lectures on, 244
Influence seen in _Endymion_, 185, 189, 206, 217, 239
Keats compared with, 537, 543
Keats's study of, 135-6, 430
Keats on his understanding of, 254
Line by, criticised by Wordsworth, 402
Lines of, on Endymion, 167
Middle age of, Keats on, 356
Negative capability of, 253
Plays of, _see under_ Names
Sonnets of, Brown's book on, 530-1; Keats' appreciation of, 153
Use by, of the couplet compared with Pope's, 105
Shakespearean quality of certain lines in _Endymion_, 217, 239
Shanklin, Keats's stay at, and writings while there, 357 _et sqq._,
405
Sharp, William, new knowledge of Keats furnished by his _Life of
Severn_, 545
on Keats at 21, 79
Shelley, Harriet, death of, 70
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 245
Anatomical studies of, 29
Appearance, voice and manner of, 70, 71
Challenge to, in _Endymion_, 189, 239
Characteristics, contrasted with those of Keats, 72-3
Debt of, to _Endymion_, 238, 239-40
Derivation and nature of the beliefs sung by, 220, 540-1
Devotion to, apparently incompatible with full justice to Keats,
540-1
Domestic difficulties of, and generosity during that time to Hunt,
69-70
Eccentricities of, 138 & _n._
Exasperation of, with certain verse, 459
Friendship of, with Hunt, 69 _et sqq._, 515
Impression made on, by
the Alps, 237
Wordsworth's _Excursion_, 233-4
Influence of, seen in _Endymion_, 235 _et sqq._
and Keats, relations between, 69, 70, 71-3, 256, 481, 483
Keats's fear of being influenced by, 236
Letter drafted by, to the _Quarterly Review_ after the attack on
Keats, 238
Letters from, to Keats, inviting him to Italy, 467, 501
from Switzerland, &c., compared with those of Keats, from the
Lakes, &c., 275
to Mrs Leigh Hunt on his desire to take care of Keats in Italy, 483
Letters to, from Keats, on the invitation to Italy, 405; on his own
unripe mentality, 411
Poems of, _see under_ Names
Allegoric theme of _Alastor_, 171-2
Beauty of rhythm used by, 241
Cambridge enthusiasm for, 520, 527, 530
Echoes in, of Milton, 430
Freedom of, from faults, 50
Galignani's edition of, 159 _n._ 2, 527 & _n._ 2
Gift of, to
Browning, effect of, 526
Keats, the reception of, 467
Influences moulding, 241
Lyrics in, 241
Posthumous, Hazlitt's criticism of, 521-2
Rossetti's enthusiasm for, 536
Referred to by Hunt in _Young Poets_, 54, 69
Use by, of rimed couplet, 241
Publishers of, 83, 131
Views of, on the _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ Reviews on Keats's
poems, 238, 315, 516
Death of (1822), 521, 522
on _Endymion_, 238, 467, 481; on Keats's place among the Poets, 545;
on the _Lamia_ volume, 481-3; on study of the great Poets, 89
Shenstone, W., poems of, 19 Use by, of Spenserian stanza, 445
_Shepheard's Calendar, The_, 19
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, pension of, 481
_Sicilian Story, The_ (Procter), identical in subject with _Isabella_,
459
Sickness, Keats on, 263
Siddons, Mrs. on the Head of Christ in Haydon's painting, 461
Sidmouth, Reynolds's love of, 74
_Siege of Corinth_ (Byron), tag from, used by Keats, 243
Skiddaw, Keats's climb on, 274, 275-6
Sleep, invocations to, in Keats's poems, 177
_Sleep and Poetry_ (Keats), 53, 58, 75 _n._, 122
Adverse criticism on, 132
Affinities with lines in _Endymion_, 176 _n._, 198-9
Analysis of, with quotations, 115 _et sqq._
Date discussed, 115
Echoes in, of the '_Great Spirits_' sonnet, 121
Haydon on, 130
Ideas in, 448
Invocation in, to Sleep, 177
Metre, diction and subject of, 114-15, 124, 125
Pope-Boileau passage in, derided by _Blackwood_, 307; wrath of Byron
on, 480-1
Published in _Poems_, 114, place of in the volume, 115
References in, to the intimacy with Hunt, 53-4
Relation of, to contemporaries, 125, and to the Elizabethans, 124-5
Use in, of the couplet, 124-5
'_Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals_' (_To My
Brothers_) sonnet (Keats) 53
Included in _Poems_, 90
Smith, Horace, friend of Haydon, 62
Keats's acquaintance with, 245
Smith's _Standard Library_, first separate collected edition of
Keats's poems issued in, 528 _n._ 2
Snook, John and Mrs, Keats's visits to, 333, 491
Soames, William, 82
Solitude wrong for the Poet, Wordsworth's doctrine on, endorsed by
Keats and Shelley, 234 _et sqq._
'_Some Titian colours touched into real life_' (Keats), from Epistle
to Reynolds, 264
Somerset, the Keates of, 4 _n._
_Song of the Four Fairies_ (Keats), 350, 441
Song of the Indian Maiden in _Endymion_, fine quality of, 225; in
style an Ode, 411
_Song, A, about Myself_ (Keats), ('_There was a naughty boy_'), 9-10
_Song, A, of Opposites_ (Keats), 263, 389
Sonnet-beginnings of Dante, and of Keats, 92 _& n._ 1
Sonnet-forms employed by Keats, 86, 257
Sonnet on _Poems_ (Hunt), 130-1
Sonnets by Keats, _see under_ First Lines, and Titles
in _Poems_
Character of, 87
Classes or Groups
Autumn group, 90-1
Exceptions
Chapman sonnet, 87-8
Kosciusko sonnet, 91
Margate sonnet, 91
Leigh Hunt group, 90
Occasional, 87;
the great exception, 87-8
Sex-chivalry group, 89
Forms employed, 86
Haydon pair, the, 91
Problems of selection, 91-2
Sonnet, written at the end of _The Floure and the Lefe_ (Keats), 75
Sonnets on the Nile by Hunt, Keats, and Shelley, 256
Sonnets showing strain of Keats's love affair, 343-4
_So reaching back to boyhood: make me ships_, lines in _Endymion_, 10
Sosibios, Vase of, Keats's tracing of, 416 _& n._
Sotheby, W., translator of Wieland's Oberon, 86-7 _& n._, 309
Stanza invented by, 445
South, John Flint, on Lucas, 29
Southey, Robert, as Critic, 299
Poems by, 121
Political change of view of, 45
Hazlitt's fierce criticism on, 137
Spaniards Inn, Nightingales near, as inspiration to Keats, 353
_Spanish Fryar_ (Dryden), as model for _In a drear-nighted December_,
160
_Specimens of Early English Metrical Romance_ (Ellis), the St Agnes
Eve legend in, 398 _n._
Spence's _Polymetis_, picture in, as inspiration to Keats, 200, 231
Spenser, Edmund, Compound epithets of, equalled by Keats, 413
Keats's delight in, 19-21, and influence of, seen in the poems, 20-1,
22, 23, 31, 85, 86, 132, 136, 171, 177, 185, 206, 209, 399
Lines of, on the Endymion story, 167
Platonism in the _Hymns_ of, 237
Sonnet on, or in imitation of, by Keats, postponed, 259
Use by of the heroic couplet, 96
Spenserian Stanza unfit for satire, 445
Used by Chatterton, 369
_Spirit, The, of the Age_ (Hazlitt), 251 _n._
_Spirit, The, of Man_ (ed. Bridges), Keats's _Meg Merrilees_ ballad
included in, 280 n.
_Staffa_ (Keats), on Fingal's Cave, 292-3
Staffa, visited by Keats, 291-2
Stair Hole, 494
Stephens, Henry, fellow-student of Keats, 28
on the composition of 'A thing of Beauty,' 176 _& n._
on the date at which Keats entered Guy's, 26 _n._
on Keats as Medical Student, 30-2
on Mrs George Keats, 271
Sterling, John, on Keats and his poems (1828), 526-7
on the poems of Tennyson and of Keats, 528
_Story, The, of Rimini_, poem (Hunt), 34, 44
Aims of, 47-9, 108-9
Criticism of, in _Blackwood_, 301-3
Haydon on, 64
Keats's allusion to, 113
Lines quoted illustrative of the style, 48
_Stranger, The_, performed to bagpipes, Keats on, 288
Stratford-on-Avon, Keats's visit to, 144
Styx, the, 429 _n._
_Subaltern, The_ (Gleig), 341
Suddard, Mary, critic, on Keats's _Unfelt, Unheard, Unseen_, 157 _&
n._
_Suovetaurilia_ Urn, at Holland House, as possible inspiration to
Keats, 416 _n._
_Superb_, H.M.S., and its Keats captain, 4
Surrey Institution, Hazlitt's lectures at, 244, 300
Swan and Hoop Stables, birth-place of Keats, 3
'_Sweet Philomela_,' lines by Browne, echoed by Keats, 418 _n._
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, metrical magic of, and use by, of the
Heroic measure, 161
on Keats's poetry, 540, 541
Symbolism in Keats's poems, 153-4; Wordsworth's influence shown in, 233
_Table Talk_ (Coleridge), on the meeting with Keats in 1819, 346-7
Tales, his own, and Brown's, sent by Keats to his brother, 345
_Tales of my Landlord_ (Scott), 303
Talfourd, Sergeant, 68
_Talk, A, with Coleridge_, in _Cornhill_ for April, 1917, ed. Miss E.
M. Green, _cited_, 347-8 _& n._
Tassie, James, paste reproductions by, of antique gems, 92, 338
Taylor, John, Keats's publisher, 7 _n._, 335 _n._, 513
Copyright of _Endymion_ bought by, 486; further financial help from,
509
Letters to, from
Keats, on _Cap and Bells_, 380, 38, 445 & n.; corrections to
_Endymion_, 260; Endymion's confession, 180; on the journey to
Italy, 485-6; on his thirst for knowledge, 265; on plans for
work, 380-1, 445 _n._
Woodhouse, on Keats's pride, &c., 368
Severn (unfinished), on Keats's condition in Rome, 506-8
Literary standing of, 133
Memorial volume on Keats projected, with Woodhouse, 529; the
Woodhouse transcripts lent by, to Milnes, 533
on _Endymion_, 313
Taylor and Hessey, Messrs, Keats's second publishers, 133, 348, 519
Keats's applications to, for advances on _Endymion_, 140, 141
Notice appended by, to _Hyperion_, 427
Steadfast loyalty of, 313
Teignmouth, George and Tom Keats at, 244, Keats's letters to, 245 _et
sqq._; Keats's stay at, 266 _et sqq._, 429
Teniers, Wordsworth's pun on, 250
Tennyson, Alfred, fame of, 537, 538, slow growth of, 526
Poems by
Alcaics, 38, 257
Influence on, of Keats, 527
_Quarterly's_ criticism on (1832), 527-8
Reminiscence of Keats, in _Enid_, 123
Thackeray's allusion to, 537-8
Sterling's appreciation of, 528
on the poetry of Keats, 550, and of Shelley, 541
Terror, the, effect of, on the Lake Poets, 45
Textual criticism, perversion in, 469
_Thaddeus of Warsaw_ (Porter), 325
Theocritus, Echoes of, in _Endymion_, 201, and in the sonnet on
_Fame_, 349-50 _& n._ 1
Endymion passage from, paraphrased by Fletcher, 168
_Theogony_ of Hesiod, Cooke's translation of, 428
'_There is a charm in footing slow_,' _see Lines written in the
Highlands_
'_There was a naughty boy_,' _see Song about Myself_
'_Think not of it, sweet one, so_,' love-lyric (Keats), 157
'_This pleasant tale is like a little copse_,' sonnet on _Floure and
Lefe_ (Keats), 75
Thomson, James, poems of, 19
Influence of, on Keats, 23
Verse forms used in, 108, 445
'Thought appalling,' in one version of _In drear-nighted December_,
possible source of, 160
_Thoughts suggested on the banks of Nith ..._ (Wordsworth), 387 _& n._
Thrush, song of, Keats's pleasure in, 321, 459, and lines on, 260
'_Thus have I thought: and days on days have flown_,' _Epistle to
Cowden Clarke_ (Keats), 37
'_Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves_,' sonnet
by Reynolds, on Keats's sonnet on _The Floure and the Lefe_, 75
Tighe, Mrs, poem of, on Cupid and Psyche, 19, 412
_Times, The_, 39
'_Time's sea_,' sonnet, _see To a Lady seen for a few moments at
Vauxhall_
_Tintern Abbey_ (Wordsworth), ideas in paralleled in _Sleep and
Poetry_, Bridges on, 126 _et sqq._
Passage in, discussed by Keats, 146
'Tion,' or 'shion' termination, as used by Keats, 208
Titans, the, in _Hyperion_, sources of, 428 _et sqq._
Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne picture, as inspiration for Keats, 231
Tiverton, the name Keat at, 4 _& n._, 5
_To Ailsa Rock_, sonnet (Keats), 284
_To Byron_, sonnet (Keats), 23, 91
_To a Cat_, sonnet (Keats), 256
_To Celia_ (Jonson), metre of, 386
_To Chatterton_, sonnet (Keats), 23, 91
_To G. A. W._, sonnet (Keats), 89, 270
_To Haydon_, sonnet (Keats), ('_Great Spirits_'), 65; echoes of, in
_Sleep and Poetry_, 120; included in _Poems_, 91
_To Haydon_ (sonnet), _With a sonnet written on seeing the Elgin
Marbles_ (Keats), 66-7
_To Kosciusko_, sonnet (Keats), 91
_To a Lady seen for a few moments at Vauxhall_, sonnet (Keats), 23,
and the allied sonnet, 258-9
_To the Ladies who saw me crowned_, sonnet (Keats), 57
_To Leigh Hunt, Esq._, Dedication of _Poems_, sonnet (Keats), 83-90,
130-1
_To M. A, at Parting_, verses (Katherine Philips), Keats's pleasure
in, 150
_Tom Cribb's Memorial to Congress_ (Moore), 341
_To my Brothers_, sonnet (Keats), _see Keen fitful gusts; Small,
busy flames; To one who has been long in city pent_
_To the Nile_, sonnet (Keats), 256
_To one who has been long in city pent_, sonnet (Keats), in _Poems_,
90
Tory critics, ferocity of, matched by Hazlitt and others, 137
_To some Ladies_, verses (Keats), metre of, 86
Townley (Bacchic) Vase, 416
_Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript_, satire, in
_Blackwood_, 301, 302, 303, Scott on, 304
Trelawny, Edward John, 142; relations of, with Brown, 522, 523, and
with Shelley, 521
'Triumph of Death,' picture by Orcagna, 446
_Troilus and Criseyde_ (Chaucer), 391
Two Chambers of Thought, Keats on, 267, 448
_Twopenny Post Bag, The_ (Moore), and the Prince-Regent, 43
'Ugly Clubs,' in _Sleep and Poetry_, 120-1 _& n._
Underground journey theme in _Endymion_, 186 _& n._
Undying Art, the great poets on, 417
'_Unfelt, unheard, unseen_,' stanzas (Keats), 157 _& n._
Unknown beloved, the, in _Endymion_, 186, 187
'Unseam,' used by Keats and by Shakespeare, 218 _& n._
Unwritten poems, Keats' distress over, 534, 548
_Vacation Exercise_ (Milton), echoed by Keats, 431; Keats's knowledge
of, 262; sprightly lines from, 109 _n._; versification of, 101-2
Valentine, by Keats, for Miss Wylie, _see_ '_Hadst thou lived in days
of old_'
Valleys, Keats's love of, and notes on, 152
Van Staveren's edition of _Auctores Mythographi Latini_, Keats's copy
of, 447 _& n._
_Vathek_ (Beckford), echoes of, in _Endymion_, 184
Vegetable Diet, in Hunt's circle, Wordsworth on, 250
_Venus and Adonis_ (Shakespeare), beauties of, Keats on, 153
Verses written during Medical lecture (Keats), 33
'Versifying Pet-Lamb,' phrase of Keats, 356
Victorian poets, _The Newcomes_ cited on, 537-8
Victory, parentage of, 429 _n._
Villa Aldobrandini, sarcophagus from, 231 _n._
Villa Gherardesca, Landor's Florentine home, 530
Visconti, ----, and the Elgin Marbles, 59
_Vita Nuova_ (Dante), sonnet-beginnings in, 92 _& n._ 1
Vivarès, ----, engraver of the "Enchanted Castle," 265 _n._
Voltaire, called dull, by Wordsworth, 247
Head of, in Haydon's picture, 462
Vowel sounds, Keats's use of, 147, 209, 401-2
_Voyage d'Anténor_, parallel in, to passage in _Endymion_, 186 _n._
Wade, Keats's school-fellow, pranks of, 12
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Millais' "Isabella" picture in, 538
Waller, Edmund, mythological poetry of, Jonson on, 220
Use by, of the heroic couplet, 102
Walsh, Captain Thomas, of the 'Maria Crowther,' kindness of, to Keats,
488-9, 499
Walthamstow, Fanny Keats at school at, 147, 337, 462
War, the world's, as stimulus to Poetry, 547-8
Ward, T. H., Book by, containing Arnold's measured judgment on Keats,
543 _n._
Warton, Joseph, protest of, against moral essays in verse, 106, echoed
by Keats, 165
Use by, of the Heroic couplet, 107
Warton, Thomas, Poet Laureate, pioneer of change in spirit of poetry,
106, 107
Warwickshire, the Keytes of, 4
Waverley novels, authorship unknown (1818), 279
Way, Mr, a great Jew-converter, 333
Way, G.L., translation by, of Le Grand's _Fabliaux_, 33 _& n._ 1, 552
Webb, Cornelius, verses by, gibes at, in _Blackwood_, 76, 152, 301,
307
Weirdness and Terror, in Romantic poetry, early 19th century, 396
'_Welcome Joy, and Welcome Sorrow_,' _see Song of Opposites_
Well Walk, Hampstead, home in, of the Keats brothers, 141, friends
frequenting and frequented, 141, 167
Keats's life at (1817-18), 244; described by himself, 245 _et sqq._
Wells, ----, of Redleaf, owner of Claude's 'Enchanted Castle,' 265 _n._
Wells, Charles, author of _Joseph and his Brethren_, association of,
with Keats, 77
Hoax by, on Tom Keats, 77, 346
Wentworth Place, Hampstead, Keats's life at, with Brown, 320 _et sqq._
Wesleyan Place, No. 2, Kentish Town, Keats at, 463
West, ----, 263
'_What is there in the universal earth_' (Intercoronation sonnet by
Keats), 57
_What the Thrush said_ (Keats), 260, 424
'_When I have fears that I may cease to be_,' sonnet (Keats), date,
subject and pendant of, 258-9
'_Where's the Poet_,' fragment (Keats), 425
_Whistlecraft, Orlando_ (J. H. Frere), 309
White Hart Hotel, Bath, 134
'_Who loves to peer_,' sonnet (Keats), _see On Leigh Hunt's Poem
'The Story of Rimini'_
'_Why did I laugh to-night_,' sonnet (Keats), 343, text of, 344
Wieland, _Endymion_ by, 309
_Oberon_ by, translation of, by Sotheby, 86-7 _& n._, 309
Stanza used in, 445
Wilkie, Sir David, and Hunt, 43
Letter to, from Haydon, on Hunt and his _Story of Rimini_, 63-4
Wilson, Dr. John ('Christopher North') ferocious criticism by, 137,
298-9, 300, 301; on _Lamia_ and _Isabella_, &c., 477-8, 527; on
Shelley's _Prometheus_, 477-8
Winchester, Keats and Brown at (1819), 360, 405; last good days spent
there, 363-4, work done during the stay, 364
'Wind, across the barley,' Keats's delight in, 80
Windermere, Keats's first sight of, 273
Woburn, carven sarcophaguses at, 231 _n._
Wolters, Paul, on Keats's inspirations from the antique, 416 _n._
'_Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain_,' sonnet (Keats), 34;
published in _Poems_, 89
Women, Keats's attitude to, and idealisation of, 81, 89-90, 262, 271,
288, 318-20, 549; _see also_ Brawne, Fanny
Woodhouse, Richard, friend of Taylor and of Keats, 134, 159, 160, 257
_n._, 340; loyalty of, 313
Letters of, to Taylor and another, on Keats, 368
List of Books in Keats's Library, compiled by, 556-8
Memorial volume on Keats, planned by, with Taylor, 529, _see_
Woodhouse Transcripts
Sonnet by, on 'Poems,' 131
on the Date of _In a drear-nighted December_, 158
on the Inspiration of the two sonnets _When I have Fears_, and
_Time's Sea_, and the lines _From my despairing heart_, 259 _&
n._
on _Hyperion_, 426-7; on _Isabella_, on Keats's reading aloud and on
the changes in _Eve of St Agnes_, 366-7; on Keats's character and
poetry, 368; on a Long talk with Keats (1819), 366 _et sqq._
Woodhouse Transcripts in Crewe MSS., 259 _n._
Lent by Taylor to Milnes, 533
Woollett, W., engraver of 'The Enchanted Castle,' 265 _n._
'Word-of-all-work, Love,' phrase of George Eliot, 549 _n._
Words, lax use of, and free modification of, in _Endymion_, 212-13
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 250, 290
Wordsworth, Mrs, 250
Wordsworth, Rev. Christopher, 245
Wordsworth, William, 244; absent on Keats's visit to Rydal, 274
Appearance, voice, manner and mannerisms of, 79, 249
Bailey's acquaintance with, 133
Characteristics of, 246, 249, 315
Conversation of, Hazlitt on, 251
Fame of, steady growth of, 526
Friendship of, with Haydon, 62, 462 _& n._
Genius of, compared with that of Keats, 234, 267-8, 484; Bridges and
the author on, 128-9
in relation to that of Milton, Keats on, 266
and Greek mythology, 125-6, 220
Head of, in Haydon's picture, 462 _& n._
Hunt's verdict on, 44
Keats's meeting with and relations with, 245 _et sqq._
and Kingston, 246 _et sqq._, 251
Letter from, to Reynolds on his poem _The Naiad_, 64
Poetry of, 21, 196 _n._
Disuse in, of the older verseforms, 108, 119
Influence of, on Keats, seen in
_Endymion_, 125, 126, 233-4
_La Belle Dame_, 350
Keats's appreciation of, 145-6, and critical judgments on, 251-2,
263, 267
Local influences on, 2
Poems of humble life, attitude to, of the Hunt circle, 121, 348
Poems of tragic life, 121
Stanzas on Burns, countered by Keats in '_Bards of Passion_,' 387
Political change of view of, 45
Reminiscence of, in the _Solitude_ sonnet by Keats, 90
Sonnets
of God-speed to Scott, 525 _n._
to Haydon, three, 65
Scotch tour of, with his sister, 290
Wilson's attitude to, in _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, 300
on Keats's _Hymn to Pan_, 227, 249; on the Poetic Revolution, 119;
on the Sources of poetic Inspiration, 89; on Vowel-variation,
401-2
World-sadness, Keats on, and on the duty of relieving it, 448-9 _et
sqq._
_Written on the day that Mr Leigh Hunt left Prison_, sonnet (Keats),
23
_Written in disgust of Vulgar Superstition_, sonnet (Keats), 91
Wylie, Georgiana Augusta (afterwards Mrs George Keats, and later Mrs
Jeffrey), 141; engagement of, to George Keats, 24, 34
Keats's poems written for, 34, 86, 89, 269, 270
Marriage of, 268, 269, 271; second marriage, 331; hereafter _see_
Jeffrey, Mrs, _and_ Keats, George and his wife
Wylie family, 366
_Young Poets_, essay (Hunt)
Beginners of promise referred to, 54, 69
Keats's Chapman Sonnet printed in, 54
'_You say you love, but with a voice_,' love-plaint by Keats,
Elizabethan echo in, 157-8
'Z' Papers in _Blackwood_, gibes of at Hunt and Keats, 301-3, 307-8,
474; fatal duel fought over, 519
'Zack,' 4
Zanconi, Milanese prints by, 325 _n._
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