"The persuasion that I shall 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? If I had any chance
of recovery, this passion would kill me. Indeed, through the whole of my
illness, both at your house and at Kentish Town, this fever has never
ceased wearing me out."
The two friends went almost immediately from Naples to Rome, where Keats
was treated with great kindness by the distinguished physician, Dr.
(afterward Sir James) Clark.[389] But there was no hope from the first.
His disease was beyond remedy, as his heart was beyond comfort. The very
fact that life might be happy deepened his despair. He might not have
sunk so soon, but the waves in which he was struggling looked only the
blacker that they were shone upon by the signal-torch that promised
safety and love and rest.
It is good to know that one of Keats's last pleasures was in hearing
Severn read aloud from a volume of Jeremy Taylor. On first coming to
Rome, he had bought a copy of Alfieri, but, finding on the second page
these lines,
"Misera me! sollievo a me non resta
Altro che il pianto, ed il pianto é delitto,"
he laid down the book and opened it no more. On the 14th February, 1821,
Severn speaks of a change that had taken place in him toward greater
quietness and peace. He talked much, and fell at last into a sweet sleep,
in which he seemed to have happy dreams. Perhaps he heard the soft
footfall of the angel of Death, pacing to and fro under his window, to be
his Valentine. That night he asked to have this epitaph inscribed upon
his gravestone,--
"HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER."
On the 23d he died, without pain and as if falling asleep. His last words
were, "I am dying; I shall die easy; don't be frightened, be firm and
thank God it has come!"
He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome, in that part of it
which is now disused and secluded from the rest. A short time before his
death he told Severn that he thought his intensest pleasure in life had
been to watch the growth of flowers; and once, after lying peacefully
awhile, he said, "I feel the flowers growing over me." His grave is
marked by a little headstone on which are carved somewhat rudely his name
and age, and the epitaph dictated by himself. No tree or shrub has been
planted near it, but the daisies, faithful to their buried lover, crowd
his small mound with a galaxy of their innocent stars, more prosperous
than those under which he lived.[390] In person, Keats was below the
middle height, with a head small in proportion to the breadth of his
shoulders. His hair was brown and fine, falling in natural ringlets about
a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed. Every
feature was delicately cut; the chin was bold; and about the mouth
something of a pugnacious expression. His eyes were 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
trembled.[391] Haydon says that his eyes had an inward Delphian look that
was perfectly divine.
The faults of Keats's poetry are obvious enough, but it should be
remembered that he died at twenty-five, and that he offends by
superabundance and not poverty. That he was overlanguaged at first there
can be no doubt, and in this was implied the possibility of falling back
to the perfect mean of diction. It is only by the rich that the costly
plainness, which at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is
attainable.
Whether Keats was original or not, I do not think it useful to discuss
until it has been settled what originality is. Lord Houghton tells us
that this merit (whatever it is) has been denied to Keats, because his
poems take the color of the authors he happened to be reading at the time
he wrote them. But men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness
of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features
of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several generations. In the
parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the
past. It is true that Keats has the accent of the men from whom he
learned to speak, but this is to make originality a mere question of
externals, and in this sense the author of a dictionary might bring an
action of trover against every author who used his words. It is the man
behind the words that gives them value, and if Shakespeare help himself
to a verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have learned of him to
listen that we feel the harmony of the one, and it is the mass of his
intellect that makes the other weighty with meaning. Enough that we
recognize in Keats that indefinable newness and unexpectedness which we
call genius. The sunset is original every evening, though for thousands
of years it has built out of the same light and vapor its visionary
cities with domes and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains which night
shall utterly abase and destroy.
Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other,--Wordsworth, Keats,
and Byron,--were the great means of bringing back English poetry from the
sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance
of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion. Of these, Wordsworth was the
only conscious reformer, and his hostility to the existing formalism
injured his earlier poems by tingeing them with something of iconoclastic
extravagance. He was the deepest thinker, Keats the most essentially a
poet, and Byron the most keenly intellectual of the three. Keats had the
broadest mind, or at least his mind was open on more sides, and he was
able to understand Wordsworth and judge Byron, equally conscious, through
his artistic sense, of the greatnesses of the one and the many
littlenesses of the other, while Wordsworth was isolated in a feeling of
his prophetic character, and Byron had only an uneasy and jealous
instinct of contemporary merit. The poems of Wordsworth, as he was the
most individual, accordingly reflect the moods of his own nature; those
of Keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the moods of his own taste
and feeling; and those of Byron, who was impressible chiefly through the
understanding, the intellectual and moral wants of the time in which he
lived. Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets;
Keats, their forms; and Byron, interesting to men of imagination less for
his writings than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more in
poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague desires
not yet regulated by experience nor supplied with motives by the duties
of life.
Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination
which belongs to the poet, of that imagination which identifies itself
with the momentary object of its contemplation, than any man of these
later days. It is not merely that he has studied the Elizabethans and
caught their turn of thought, but that he really sees things with their
sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified senses. His
imagination was his bliss and bane. Was he cheerful, he "hops about the
gravel with the sparrows"; was he morbid, he "would reject a Petrarcal
coronation,--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers."
So impressible was he as to say that he "had no nature," meaning
character. But he knew what the faculty was worth, and says finely, "The
imagination may be compared to Adam's dream: he awoke and found it
truth." He had an unerring instinct for the poetic uses of things, and
for him they had no other use. We are apt to talk of the classic
_renaissance_ as of a phenomenon long past, nor ever to be renewed, and
to think the Greeks and Romans alone had the mighty magic to work such a
miracle. To me one of the most interesting aspects of Keats is that in
him we have an example of the _renaissance_ going on almost under our own
eyes, and that the intellectual ferment was in him kindled by a purely
English leaven. He had properly no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare
had, but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever could serve his
purpose. His delicate senses absorbed culture at every pore. Of the
self-denial to which he trained himself (unexampled in one so young) the
second draft of Hyperion as compared with the first is a conclusive
proof. And far indeed is his "Lamia" from the lavish indiscrimination of
"Endymion." In his Odes he showed a sense of form and proportion which we
seek vainly in almost any other English poet, and some of his sonnets
(taking all qualities into consideration) are the most perfect in our
language. No doubt there is something tropical and of strange overgrowth
in his sudden maturity, but it _was_ maturity nevertheless. Happy the
young poet who has the saving fault of exuberance, if he have also the
shaping faculty that sooner or later will amend it!
As every young person goes through all the world-old experiences,
fancying them something peculiar and personal to himself, so it is with
every new generation, whose youth always finds its representatives in its
poets. Keats rediscovered the delight and wonder that lay enchanted in
the dictionary. Wordsworth revolted at the poetic diction which he found
in vogue, but his own language rarely rises above it, except when it is
upborne by the thought. Keats had an instinct for fine words, which are
in themselves pictures and ideas, and had more of the power of poetic
expression than any modern English poet. And by poetic expression I do
not mean merely a vividness in particulars, but the right feeling which
heightens or subdues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone, and
gives entireness to the effect. There is a great deal more than is
commonly supposed in this choice of words. Men's thoughts and opinions
are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or
reapplies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times
repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. This power of language
is veiled in the old legends which make the invisible powers the servants
of some word. As soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or
sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. We reward the
discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body and make him member of all the
societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect into the
small academy of the immortals.
The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English poetry; for, however often we
may find traces of it in others, in them found its most unconscious
expression that reaction against the barrel-organ style which had been
reigning by a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century. The lowest
point was indicated when there was such an utter confounding of the
common and the uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wrote verse and Burke
prose. The most profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing was good
poetry that could not be translated into good prose, as if one should say
that the test of sufficient moonlight was that tallow-candles could be
made of it. We find Keats at first going to the other extreme, and
endeavoring to extract green cucumbers from the rays of tallow; but we
see also incontestable proof of the greatness and purity of his poetic
gift in the constant return toward equilibrium and repose in his later
poems. And it is a repose always lofty and clear-aired, like that of the
eagle balanced in incommunicable sunshine. In him a vigorous
understanding developed itself in equal measure with the divine faculty;
thought emancipated itself from expression without becoming its tyrant;
and music and meaning floated together, accordant as swan and shadow, on
the smooth element of his verse. Without losing its sensuousness, his
poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and the sensational was
elevated into the typical by the control of that finer sense which
underlies the senses and is the spirit of them.
Footnotes:
[384] Hunt's Autobiography (Am. ed.), Vol. II. p. 36.
[385] Haydon tells the story differently, but I think Lord Houghton's
version the best.
[386] There is always some one willing to make himself a sort of
accessary after the fact in any success; always an old woman or two,
ready to remember omens of all quantities and qualities in the
childhood of persons who have become distinguished. Accordingly, a
certain "Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury," assures Mr. George
Keats, when he tells her that John is determined to be a poet, "that
this was very odd, because when he could just speak, instead of
answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the
last word people said, and then laugh." The early histories of
heroes, like those of nations, are always more or less mythical, and
I give the story for what it is worth. Doubtless there is a gleam of
intelligence in it, for the old lady pronounces it odd that any one
should _determine_ to be a poet, and seems to have wished to hint
that the matter was determined earlier and by a higher disposing
power. There are few children who do not soon discover the charm of
rhyme, and perhaps fewer who can resist making fun of the Mrs.
Graftys, of Craven Street, Finsbury, when they have the chance. See
Haydon's Autobiography, Vol I. p.361.
[387] "I never saw the poet Keats but once, but he then read some
lines from (I think) the 'Bristowe Tragedy' with an enthusiasm of
admiration such as could be felt only by a poet, and which true
poetry only could have excited."--J. H. C., in Notes & Queries, 4th
s. x. 157.
[388] Haydon (Autobiography, Vol. I. p.379) says that he "strongly
suspects" Terry to have written the articles in Blackwood.
[389] The lodging of Keats was on the Piazza di Spagna, in the first
house on the right hand in going up the Scalinata. Mr. Severn's
Studio is said to have been in the Cancello over the garden gate of
the Villa Negroni, pleasantly familiar to all Americans as the Roman
home of their countryman Crawford.
[390] Written in 1856. O irony of Time! Ten years after the poet's
death the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend Mr. Dilke, that
"the kindest act would be to let him rest forever in the obscurity to
which circumstances had condemned him"! (Papers of a Critic, I. 11.)
O Time the atoner! In 1874 I found the grave planted with shrubs and
flowers, the pious homage of the daughter of our most eminent
American sculptor.
[391] Leigh Hunt's Autobiography, II. 43.