LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS TO FANNY BRAWNE
Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies
In darkness?
[Illustration: by Joseph Severn 28 Jan^y 1821, 3 O’Clock morn^g]
London. Reeves & Turner 1878.
_LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS
TO FANNY BRAWNE
WRITTEN IN THE YEARS
MDCCCXIX AND MDCCCXX
AND NOW GIVEN FROM
THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS
WITH INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES BY
HARRY BUXTON FORMAN_
_LONDON REEVES & TURNER_
_196 STRAND MDCCCLXXVIII_
[_All rights reserved_]
NOTE.
There is good reason to think that the lady to whom the following letters
were addressed did not, towards the end of her life, regard their
ultimate publication as unlikely; and it is by her family that they have
been entrusted to the editor, to be arranged and prepared for the press.
The owners of these letters reserve to themselves all rights of
reproduction and translation.
_TO JOSEPH SEVERN, ROME._
_The happy circumstance that the fifty-seventh year since you watched at
the death-bed of Keats finds you still among us, makes it impossible to
inscribe any other name than yours in front of these letters, intimately
connected as they are with the decline of the poet’s life, concerning the
latter part of which you alone have full knowledge._
_It cannot be but that some of the letters will give you pain,—and
notably the three written when the poet’s face was already turned towards
that land whither you accompanied him, whence he knew there was no return
for him, and where you still live near the hallowed place of his burial.
All who love Keats’s memory must share such pain in the contemplation of
his agony of soul. But you who love him having known, and we who love
him unknown except by faith in what is written, must alike rejoice in
the good hap that has preserved, for our better knowledge of his heart,
these vivid and varied transcripts of his inner life during his latter
years,—must alike be content to take the knowledge with such alloy of
pain as the hapless turn of events rendered inevitable._
_On a memorable occasion it was said of you by a great poet and prophet
that, had he known of the circumstances of your unwearied attendance
at the death-bed, he should have been tempted to add his “tribute of
applause to the more solid recompense which the virtuous man finds in
the recollection of his own motives;” and he uttered the wish that the
“unextinguished Spirit” of Keats might “plead against Oblivion” for
your name. Were any such plea needed, the Spirit to prefer it, then
unextinguished, is now known for inextinguishable; and whithersoever the
name of “our Adonais” travels, there will yours also be found._
_This opportunity may not unfitly serve to record my gratitude for your
ready kindness in affording me information on various points concerning
your friend’s life and death, and also for the permission to engrave your
solemn portraiture of the beautiful countenance seen, as you only of all
men living saw it, in its final agony._
_H. B. F._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE v.
TO JOSEPH SEVERN, ROME vii.
INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xiii.
LETTERS TO FANNY BRAWNE:—
First Period, I to IX, Shanklin, Winchester, Westminster 3
Second Period, X to XXXII, Wentworth Place 43
Third Period, XXXIII to XXXVII, Kentish Town—Preparing for Italy 91
APPENDIX, THE LOCALITY OF WENTWORTH PLACE 111
INDEX 123
Transcriber’s Note: Despite the date on the title page, this is the 1888
edition (see date at end of introduction). The front matter from the
prior edition of 1878 seems to have been carried across to this one
without being fully checked and updated. This edition doesn’t have an
index, and the Appendix about Wentworth Place isn’t on page 111.
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PORTRAIT OF KEATS, DRAWN BY JOSEPH SEVERN AND ETCHED BY
W. B. SCOTT _Frontispiece._
SILHOUETTE OF FANNY BRAWNE, CUT BY EDOUART AND
PHOTO-LITHOGRAPHED BY G. F. TUPPER _Opposite page 3._
FAC-SIMILE OF LETTER XXVII, EXECUTED BY G. I. F.
TUPPER _Opposite page 76._
INTRODUCTION.
The sympathetic and discerning biographer of John Keats says, in the
memoir prefixed to Moxon’s edition of the Poems[1], “The publication of
three small volumes of verse, some earnest friendships, one profound
passion, and a premature death are the main incidents here to be
recorded.” These words have long become “household words,” at all events
in the household of those who make the lives and works of English poets
their special study; and nothing is likely to be discovered which shall
alter the fact thus set forth. But that documents illustrating the fact
should from time to time come to the surface, is to be expected; and the
present volume portrays the “one profound passion” as perfectly as it is
possible for such a passion to be portrayed without the revelation of
things too sacred for even the most reverent and worshipful public gaze,
while it gives considerable insight into the refinements of a nature only
too keenly sensitive to pain and injury and the inherent hardness of
things mundane.
The three final years of Keats’s life are in all respects the fullest
of vivid interest for those who, admiring the poet and loving the
memory of the man, would fain form some conception of the working of
those forces within him which went to the shaping of his greatest works
and his greatest woes. In those three years were produced most of the
compositions wherein the lover of poetry can discern the supreme hand of
a master, the ultimate and sovereign perfection beyond which, in point
of quality, the poet could never have gone had he lived a hundred years,
whatever he might have done in magnitude and variety; and in those years
sprang up and grew the one passion of his life, sweet to him as honey in
the intervals of brightness and unimpeded vigour which he enjoyed, bitter
as wormwood in those times of sickness and poverty and the deepening
shadow of death which we have learned to associate almost constantly with
our thoughts of him.
Of certain phases of his life during these final years we have long had
substantial and most fascinating records in the beautiful collection of
documents entrusted to Lord Houghton, and to what admirable purpose used,
all who name the name of Keats know too well to need reminding,—documents
published, it is true, under certain restrictions, and subject to the
depreciatory operation of asterisks and blanks of varying significance
and magnitude, proper enough, no doubt, thirty years ago, but surely now
a needless affliction. But of the all-important phases in the healthy and
morbid psychology of the poet connected with the over-mastering passion
of his latter days, the record was necessarily scanty,—a few hints
scattered through the letters written in moderately good health, and a
few agonized and burning utterances wrung from him, in the despair of his
soul, in those last three letters addressed to Charles Brown,—one during
the sea voyage and two after the arrival of Keats and Severn in Italy.
It was with the profoundest feeling of the sacredness as well as the
great importance of the record entrusted to me that I approached the
letters now at length laid before the public: after reading them through,
it seemed to me that I knew Keats to some extent as a different being
from the Keats I had known; the features of his mind took clearer form;
and certain mental and moral characteristics not before evident made
their appearance. It remained to consider whether this enhanced knowledge
of so noble a soul should be confined to two or three persons, or should
not rather be given to the world at large; and the decision arrived at
was that the world’s claim to participate in the gift of these letters
was good.
The office of editor was not an arduous one so far as the text is
concerned, for the letters are wholly free from anything which it
seems desirable to omit; they are legibly and, except in some minute
and trivial details, correctly written, leaving little to do beyond
the correction of a few obvious clerical errors, and such amendment of
punctuation as is invariably required by letters not written for the
press. The arrangement of the series in proper sequence, however, was
not nearly so simple a matter; for, except as regards the first nine,
the evidence in this behalf is almost wholly inferential and collateral;
and I have had to be content with strong probability in many cases in
which it is impossible to arrive at any absolute certainty. Of the whole
thirty-seven letters, not one bears the date of the year, except as
furnished in the postmarks of numbers I to IX; two only go so far as to
specify in writing the day of the month, or even the month itself; and
one of these two Keats has dated a day later than the date shewn by the
postmark. Those which passed through the post, numbers I to IX, are fully
addressed to “Miss Brawne, Wentworth Place, Hampstead,” the word “Middx.”
being added in the case of the six from the country, but not in that of
the three from London. Numbers X to XVII and XIX to XXXII are addressed
simply to “Miss Brawne”; while numbers XVIII, XXXIII, XXXIV, and XXXVI
are addressed to “Mrs. Brawne,” and numbers XXXV and XXXVII bear no
address whatever.
These material details are not without a psychological significance:
the total absence of interest in the progress of time (the sordid
current time) tallies with the profound worship of things so remote as
perfect beauty; and the addressing of four of the letters to Mrs. Brawne
instead of Miss Brawne indicates, to my mind, not mere accident, but a
sensitiveness to observation from any unaccustomed quarter: three of the
letters so addressed were certainly written at Kentish Town, and would
not be likely to be sent by the same hand usually employed to take those
written while the poet was next door to his betrothed; the other one was,
I have no doubt, sent only from one house to the other; but perhaps the
usual messenger may have chanced to be out of the way.
The letters fall naturally into three groups, namely (1) those written
during Keats’s sojourn with Charles Armitage Brown in the Isle of Wight,
and his brief stay in lodgings in Westminster in the Summer and Autumn
of 1819, (2) those written from Brown’s house in Wentworth Place during
Keats’s illness in the early part of 1820 and sent by hand to Mrs.
Brawne’s house, next door, and (3) those written after he was able to
leave Wentworth Place to stay with Leigh Hunt at Kentish Town, and before
his departure for Italy in September, 1820. Of the order of the first and
last groups there is no reasonable doubt; and, although there can be no
absolute certainty in regard to the whole series of the central group, I
do not think any important error will have been made in the arrangement
here adopted.
The slight service to be done beside this of arranging the letters,
involving a great deal of minute investigation, was simply to elucidate
as far as possible by brief foot-notes references that were not
self-explanatory, to give such attainable particulars of the principal
persons and places concerned as are desirable by way of illustration,
and to fix as nearly as may be the chronology of that part of Keats’s
life at the time represented by these letters,—especially the two
important dates involved. The first date is that of the passion which
Keats conceived for Miss Brawne,—the second that of the rupture of a
blood-vessel, marking distinctly the poet’s graveward tendency,—two
events probably connected with some intimacy, and concerning which it
is not unnoteworthy that we should have to be making guesses at all. If
these and other conjectural conclusions turn out to be inaccurate (which
I do not think will be the case), they can only be proved so by the
production of more documents; and if documents be produced confuting my
conclusions, my aim will have been attained by two steps instead of one.
The lady to whom these letters were addressed was born on the 9th of
August in the year 1800, and baptized Frances, though, as usual with
bearers of that name, she was habitually called Fanny. Her father, Mr.
Samuel Brawne, a gentleman of independent means, died while she was
still a child; and Mrs. Brawne then went to reside at Hampstead, with
her three children, Fanny, Samuel, and Margaret. Samuel, being next in
age to Fanny, was a youth going to school in 1819; and Margaret was many
years younger than her sister, being in fact a child at the time of the
engagement to Keats, which event took place certainly between the Autumn
of 1818 and the Summer of 1819, and probably, as I find good reason to
suppose, quite early in the year 1819. In the Summer of 1818 Mrs. Brawne
and her children occupied the house of Charles Armitage Brown next
to that of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wentworth Dilke, in Wentworth Place,
Hampstead, which is not now known by that name. On Brown’s return from
Scotland, the Brawne’s moved to another house in the neighbourhood; but
they afterwards returned to Wentworth Place, occupying the house of
Mr. Dilke. Mr. Severn remembered that when he visited Keats during the
residence of the poet with Brown, Keats used to take his visitor “next
door” to call upon the Brawne family. “The house was double,” wrote Mr.
Severn, “and had side entrances.”
It is said to have been at the house of Mr. Dilke, who was the
grandfather of the present Baronet of that name, that Keats first met
Miss Brawne. Mr. Dilke eventually gave up possession of his residence in
Wentworth Place, and took quarters in Great Smith Street, Westminster,
where he and Mrs. Dilke went to live in order that their only child,
bearing his father’s name, and afterwards the first Baronet, might be
educated at Westminster School.
Keats’s well known weakness in regard to the statement of dates leaves
us without such assistance as might be expected from his general
correspondence in fixing the date of this first meeting with Miss
Brawne. I learn from members of her family that it was certainly in 1818;
and, as far as I can judge, it must have been in the last quarter of that
year; for it seems pretty evident that he had not conceived the passion,
which was his “pleasure and torment,” up to the end of October, and had
conceived it before Tom’s death “early in December”; and, as he says in
Letter III of the present series, “the very first week I knew you I wrote
myself your vassal,” we must perforce regard the date of first meeting as
between the end of October and the beginning of December, 1818.
In conducting the reader to this conclusion it will be necessary to
remove a misapprehension which has been current for nearly thirty years
in regard to a passage in the letter that yields us our starting-point.
This is the long letter to George Keats, dated the 29th of October, 1818,
given in Lord Houghton’s _Life, Letters, &c._,[2] and commencing at page
227 of Vol. I, wherein is the following passage:
“The Misses —— are very kind to me, but they have lately
displeased me much, and in this way:—now I am coming the
Richardson!—On my return, the first day I called, they were
in a sort of taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs, who,
having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner, was
invited by Mrs. —— to take asylum in her house. She is an
East-Indian, and ought to be her grandfather’s heir. At the
time I called, Mrs. —— was in conference with her up stairs,
and the young ladies were warm in her praise down stairs,
calling her genteel, interesting, and a thousand other pretty
things, to which I gave no heed, not being partial to nine
days’ wonders. Now all is completely changed: they hate her,
and, from what I hear, she is not without faults of a real
kind; but she has others, which are more apt to make women of
inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at
least, a Charmian: she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine
eyes, and fine manners. When she comes into the room she makes
the same impression 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 in 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
any 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 life 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 Misses —— on the look out. They think I don’t
admire her because I don’t 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; they
do not know what a woman is. I believe, though, she has faults,
the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet she
is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are
two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things—the
worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly,
spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron,
and this Charmian, hold the first place in our minds; in the
latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child’s cradle,
and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man
of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal
being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me,
and I should like you to save me.
‘I am free from men of pleasure’s cares,
By dint of feelings far more deep than theirs.’
This is ‘Lord Byron,’ and is one of the finest things he has
said.”
Now it is clear from this passage that a lady had made a certain
impression on Keats; and Lord Houghton in his latest publication states
explicitly what is only indicated in general terms in the Memoirs
published in 1848 and 1867,—that the lady here described was Miss Brawne.
In the earlier Memoirs, three letters to Rice, Woodhouse, and Reynolds
follow the long letter to George Keats; then comes the statement that
“the lady alluded to in the above pages inspired Keats with the passion
that only ceased with his existence”; and, as the letter to Reynolds
contains references to a lady, it might have been possible to regard Lord
Houghton’s expression as an allusion to that letter only. But in the
brief and masterly Memoir prefixed to the Aldine Edition of Keats[3],
his Lordship cites the passage from the letter of the 29th of October as
descriptive of Miss Brawne,—thus confirming by explicit statement what
has all along passed current as tradition in literary circles.
When Lord Houghton’s inestimable volumes of 1848 were given to the world
there might have been indelicacy in making too close a scrutiny into the
bearings of these passages; but the time has now come when such cannot be
the case; and I am enabled to give the grounds on which it is absolutely
certain that the allusion here was not to Miss Brawne. As Lord Houghton
has elsewhere recorded, Keats met Miss Brawne at the house of Mr. and
Mrs. Dilke, who had no daughters, while the relationship of “the Misses
——” and “Mrs. ——” of the passage in question is clearly that of mother
and daughters. Mrs. Brawne had already been settled with her children at
Hampstead for several years at this time, whereas this cousin of “the
Misses ——” had just arrived when Keats returned there from Teignmouth.
The “Charmian” of this anecdote was an East-Indian, having a grandfather
to quarrel with; while Miss Brawne never had a grandfather living during
her life, and her family had not the remotest connexion with the East
Indies. Moreover, Keats’s sister, who is still happily alive, assures me
positively that the reference is not to Miss Brawne. In regard to the
blank for a surname, I had judged from various considerations internal
and external that it should be filled by that of Reynolds; and, on asking
Mr. Severn (without expressing any view whatever) whether he knew to whom
the story related, he wrote to me that he knew the story well from Keats,
and that the reference is to the Misses Reynolds, the sisters of John
Hamilton Reynolds. Mr. Severn does not know the name of the cousin of
these ladies.
It is clear then that the lady who had impressed Keats some little time
before the 29th of October, 1818, and was still fresh in his mind, was
not Fanny Brawne. That the impression was not lasting the event shewed;
and we may safely assume that it was really limited in the way which
Keats himself averred,—that he was not “in love with her.” But it is
incredible, almost, that, in his affectionate frankness with his brother,
he would ever have written thus of another woman, had he been already
enamoured of Fanny Brawne. This view is strengthened by reading the
letter to the end: in such a perusal we come upon the following passage:
“Notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendations, 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, and the curtains of the morning
clouds, the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet’s down, the
food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on
Winandermere, I should not feel, or rather my happiness should
not be, so fine; my solitude is sublime—for, 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 my
window-panes are my children; the mighty abstract Idea of
Beauty in all things, I have, stifles the more divided and
minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I
contemplate as 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 scepter’d 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 throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating
those lines, ‘I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank,
staying for waftage,’ I melt into the air with a voluptuousness
so delicate, that I am content to be alone. Those things,
combined with the opinion I have formed 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. I have written this that you might see
that I have my share of the highest pleasures of life, and
that though I may choose to pass my days alone, I shall be no
solitary; you see there is nothing splenetic in all this. The
only thing that can ever affect me personally for more than one
short passing day, is any doubt about my powers of poetry: I
seldom have any, and I look with hope to the nighing time when
I shall have none.”[4]
There is but little after this in the letter, and apparently no break
between the time at which he thus expressed himself and that at which
he signed the letter and added—“This is my birthday.” If therefore my
conclusion as to the negative value of this and the “Charmian” passage be
correct, we may say that he was certainly not enamoured of Miss Brawne
up to the 29th of October, 1818, although it is tolerably clear, from
the evidence of Mr. Dilke, that Keats first met her about October or
November. Again, in a highly interesting and important letter to Keats’s
most intimate friend John Hamilton Reynolds, a letter which Lord Houghton
placed immediately after one to Woodhouse dated the 18th of December,
1818, we read the following ominous passage suggesting a doom not long to
be deferred:—
“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.
“Poor Tom—that woman and poetry were ringing changes in my
senses. Now I am, in comparison, happy.”[5]
There is no date to this letter; and, although it was most reasonable to
suppose that the fervid expressions used pointed to the real heroine of
the poet’s tragedy,—that he wrote in one of those moments of mastery of
the intellect over the emotions such as he experienced when writing the
extraordinary fifth Letter of the present series,—the fact is that the
reference is to “Charmian,” and that the letter was misplaced by Lord
Houghton. It really belongs to September 1818, and should precede instead
of following this “Charmian” letter.
When Keats wrote the next letter in Lord Houghton’s series (also undated)
to George and his wife, Tom was dead; and there is another clue to the
date in the fact that he transcribes a letter from Miss Jane Porter dated
the 4th of December, 1818. After making this transcript he proceeds to
draw the following verbal portrait of a young lady:
“Shall I give you Miss ——? She is about my height, with a
fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort; she wants
sentiment in every feature; she manages to make her hair look
well; her nostrils are very 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, from no 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. She had a friend
to visit her lately; you have known plenty such—she plays the
music, but without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at
her fingers; she is a downright Miss, without one set-off.
We hated her, and smoked her, and baited her, and, I think,
drove her away. Miss ——, thinks her a paragon of fashion,
and says she is the only woman in the world she would change
persons with. What a stupe,—she is as superior as a rose to a
dandelion.”[6]
There is nothing explicit as to the date of this passage; but there is no
longer any doubt that this sketch has reference to Miss Brawne, and that
Keats had now found that most dangerous of objects a woman “alternating
attraction and repulsion.”
The lady’s children assured me that the description answered to the facts
in every particular except that of age: the correct expression would
be “not nineteen”; but Keats was not infallible on such a point; and
the holograph letter in which he wrote “Miss Brawne” in full shews that
he made a mistake as to her age. When he wrote this passage, he was, I
should judge, feeling a certain resentment analogous to what found a
much more tender expression in the first letter of the present series,
when the circumstances made increased tenderness a matter of course,—a
resentment of the feeling that he was becoming enslaved.
There is no announcement of his engagement in the original letter to
his brother and sister-in-law, which I have read; and it would seem
improbable that he was engaged when he wrote it. But of the journal
letter begun on the 14th of February, 1819, and finished on the 3rd of
May, only a part of the holograph is accessible; and there may possibly
have been such an announcement in the missing part, while, under some
date between the 19th of March and the 15th of April, Keats writes the
following paragraph and sonnet, from which it might be inferred that the
engagement had been announced in an unpublished letter.
“I am afraid that your anxiety for me leads 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 yourself if 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 but that of knowledge, when pushed to the point; though
the first steps to it were through my human passions, they went
away, and I wrote with my mind, 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;
I say, why 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 would 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.”[7]
Again in the same letter, on the 15th of April, Keats says “Brown,
this morning, is writing some Spenserian stanzas against Miss B —— and
me,”—a reference, doubtless, to Miss Brawne, probably indicative of the
engagement being an understood thing; and, seemingly on the same date, he
writes as follows:
“The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more; it is that
one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca. I had passed
many days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of
them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was
one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life; I
floated about the wheeling atmosphere, as it is described, with
a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed
for an age; and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I
was warm; ever-flowery tree-tops sprung up, and we rested on
them, sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind
blew us away again. I tried a Sonnet on it: there are fourteen
lines in it, but nothing of what I felt. Oh! that I could dream
it every night.
As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept,
So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright,
So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes,
And seeing it asleep, so fled away,
Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,
Nor unto Tempe, where Jove grieved a day,
But to that second circle of sad Hell,
Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows,—pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.”[8]
The meaning of this dream is sufficiently clear without any light from
the fact that the sonnet itself was written in a little volume given by
Keats to Miss Brawne, a volume of Taylor & Hessey’s miniature edition of
Cary’s Dante, which had remained up to the year 1877 in the possession
of that lady’s family.[9]
Although the present citation of extant documents does not avail to fix
the date of Keats’s passion more nearly than to shew that it almost
certainly lies somewhere between the 29th of October and beginning of
December, 1818, there can be little doubt that, if a competent person
should be permitted to examine all the original documents concerned,
the date might be ascertained much more nearly;—that is to say that
the particular “first week” of acquaintance in which Keats “wrote
himself the vassal” of Miss Brawne, as he says (see page 13), might be
identified. But in any case it must be well to bring into juxtaposition
these passages bearing upon the subject of the letters now made public.
The natural inference from all we know of the matter in hand is that
after his brother Tom’s death, Keats’s passion had more time and more
temptation to feed upon itself; and that, as an unoccupied man living
in the same village with the object of that passion, an avowal followed
pretty speedily. It is not surprising that there are no letters to shew
for the first half of the year 1819, during which Keats and Miss Brawne
probably saw each other constantly, and to judge from the expressions in
Letter XI, were in the habit of walking out together.
The tone of Letter I is unsuggestive of more than a few weeks’
engagement; but it is impossible, on this alone, to found safely any
conclusion whatever. From the date of that letter, the 3rd of July,
1819, we have plainer sailing for awhile: Keats appears to have remained
in the Isle of Wight till the 11th or 12th of August, when he and Brown
crossed from Cowes to Southampton and proceeded to Winchester. At page
19 we read under the date “9 August,” “This day week we shall move to
Winchester”; but in the letter bearing the postmark of the 16th (though
dated the 17th) Keats says he has been in Winchester four days; so that
the patience of the friends with Shanklin did not hold out for anything
like a week.
At Winchester the poet remained till the 11th of September, when bad
news from George Keats hurried him up to Town for a few days: he meant
to have returned on the 15th, and was certainly there again by the 22nd,
remaining until some day between the 1st and 10th of October, by which
date he seems to have taken up his abode at lodgings in College Street,
Westminster. Here he cannot have remained long; for on the 19th he was
already proposing to return to Hampstead; and it must have been very soon
after this that he accepted the invitation of Brown to “domesticate with”
him again at Wentworth Place; and on the 19th of the next month he was
writing from that place to his friend and publisher, Taylor.[10]
This brings us to the fatal winter of 1819-20, during which, until the
date of Keats’s first bad illness, we should not expect any more letters
to Miss Brawne, because, in the natural course of things, he would be
seeing her daily.
The absence of any current record as to the exact date whereon he was
struck down with that particular phase of his malady which he himself
felt from the first to be fatal, must have seemed peculiarly regretworthy
to Keats’s lovers; but it is not impossible to deduce from the various
materials at command the day to which Lord Houghton’s account refers.
This well-known passage leaves us in no doubt as to the place wherein the
beginning of the end came upon the poet,—the house of Charles Brown; but
the day we must seek for ourselves.
Passing over such premonitions of disease as that recorded in the letter
to George Keats and his wife dated the 14th of February, 1819, and
printed at page 257 of the first volume of the _Life_, namely that he had
“kept in doors lately, resolved, if possible, to rid” himself of “sore
throat,”—the first date important to bear in mind is Thursday, the 13th
of January, 1820, which is given at the head of a somewhat remarkable
version of a well-known letter addressed to Mrs. George Keats. This
letter first appeared without date in the _Life_; but, on the 25th of
June, 1877, it was printed in the New York _World_, with many striking
variations from the previous text, and with several additions, including
the date already quoted, the genuineness of which I can see no reason
for doubting. The letter begins thus in the _Life, Letters, &c._—
“My dear Sister,
By the time you receive this your troubles will be over, and
George have returned to you.”
In _The World_ it opens thus—
“My dear Sis.: By the time that you receive this your troubles
will be over. I wish you knew that they were half over; I mean
that George is safe in England, and in good health.”
It is not my part to account here for the _verbal_ inconsistency between
these two versions; but the inconsistency as regards _fact_, which has
been charged against them, is surely not real. Both versions alike
indicate that Keats was writing with the knowledge that his letter would
not reach Mrs. George Keats till after the return of her husband from
his sudden and short visit to England; and, assuming the genuineness of
another document, this was certainly the case.
In _The Philobiblion_[11] for August, 1862, was printed a fragment
purporting to be from a letter of Keats’s, which seems to me, on internal
evidence alone, of indubitable authenticity; and, if it is Keats’s, it
must belong to the particular letter now under consideration. It is
headed _Friday 27th_, is written in higher spirits, if anything, than the
rest of this brilliant letter, giving a ludicrous string of comparisons
for Mrs. George Keats’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Henry Wylie, which, together
with a final joke, were apparently deemed unripe for publication in 1848,
being represented by asterisks in the _Life, Letters, &c._ (Vol. II, p.
49). The fragment closes with the promise of “a close written sheet on
the first of next month,” varying in phrase, just as the _World_ version
of the whole letter varies, from Lord Houghton’s.[12]
Keats explains, under the inaccurate and unexplicit date _Friday 27th_,
that he has been writing a letter for George to take back to his wife,
has unfortunately forgotten to bring it to town, and will have to send
it on to Liverpool, whither George has departed that morning “by the
coach,” at six o’clock. The 27th of January, 1820, was a Thursday, not a
Friday; and there can be hardly any doubt that George Keats left London
on the 28th of January, 1820, because John, who professed to know nothing
of the days of the month, seems generally to have known the days of
the week; and this Friday cannot have been in any other month: it was
after the 13th of January, and before the 16th of February, on which day
Keats wrote to Rice, referring to his illness.[13] But whether the date
at the head of the fragment should be _Thursday 27th_ or _Friday 28th_
is immaterial for our present purpose, because the Thursday after that
date would be the same day in either case; and it was on the Thursday
after George left London that Keats was taken ill. This appears from
the following passage extracted by Sir Charles Dilke from a letter of
George Keats’s to John, and communicated to _The Athenæum_ of the 4th of
August, 1877:
“Louisville, June 18th, 1820.
My dear John,
Where will our miseries end? So soon as the Thursday after I
left London you were attacked with a dangerous illness, an hour
after I left this for England my little girl became so ill as
to approach the grave, dragging our dear George after her.
You are recovered (thank [_sic_] I hear the bad and good news
together), they are recovered, and yet....”
Thus, it was on Thursday, the 3rd of February, 1820, that Keats, as
recounted by Lord Houghton (Vol. II, pp. 53-4), returned home at about
eleven o’clock, “in a state of strange physical excitement,” and told
Brown he had received a severe chill outside the stage-coach,—that he
coughed up some blood on getting into bed, and read in its colour his
death-warrant. Mr. Severn tells me that Keats left his bed-room within a
week of his being taken ill: within a fortnight, as we have seen, he was
so far better as to be writing (dismally enough, it is true) to Rice;
but, that he was confined to the house for some months, is evident. The
whole of the letters forming the second division of the series, Numbers X
to XXXII, seem to me to have been written during this confinement; and I
should doubt whether Keats did much better, if any, than realize his hope
of getting out for a walk on the 1st of May.
At that time he was not sufficiently recovered to accompany Brown on his
second tour in Scotland; and was yet well enough by the 7th to be at
Gravesend with his friend for the final parting. I understand from the
_Life, Letters, &c._ (Vol. II, p. 60), that Keats then went at once to
Kentish Town: Lord Houghton says “to lodge at Kentish Town, to be near
his friend Leigh Hunt”; but Hunt says in his _Autobiography_ (1850),
Vol. II, p. 207, “On Brown’s leaving home a second time, ... Keats, who
was too ill to accompany him, came to reside with me, when his last and
best volume of poems appeared....”[14] These accounts are not necessarily
contradictory; for Keats may have tried lodgings _near_ Hunt first,
and moved under the same roof with his friend when the lodgings became
intolerable, as those in College Street had done before. He was reading
the proofs of _Lamia, Isabella, &c._ on the 11th of June, as shown by a
letter to Taylor of that date;[15] and, on the 28th, appeared in _The
Indicator_, beside the Sonnet
“As Hermes once took to his feathers light....”
the paper entitled “A Now,” at the composition of which Keats is said to
have been not only present but assisting;[16] and, as Hunt wrote pretty
much “from hand to mouth” for _The Indicator_, we may safely assume that
Keats was with him, at all events till just the end of June. On a second
attack of spitting of blood, he returned to Wentworth Place to be nursed
by Mrs. and Miss Brawne; and he was writing from there to Taylor on the
14th of August.
Between these two attacks he would seem to have written the letters
forming the third series, Numbers XXXIII to XXXVII. I suspect the
desperate tone of Number XXXVII had some weight in bringing about the
return to Wentworth Place; and that this was the last letter Keats
ever wrote to Fanny Brawne; for Mr. Severn tells me that his friend was
absolutely unable to write to her either on the voyage or in Italy.
There are certain passages in the letters, taking exception to Miss
Brawne’s behaviour, particularly with Charles Armitage Brown, which
should not, I think, be read without making good allowance for the
extreme sensitiveness natural to Keats, and exaggerated to the last
degree by terrible misfortunes. Keats was himself endowed with such
an exquisite refinement of nature, and, without being in any degree a
prophet or propagandist like Shelley, was so intensely in earnest both in
art and in life, that anything that smacked of trifling with the sacred
passion of love must have been to him more horrible and appalling than to
most persons of refinement and culture. Add to this that, for the greater
part of the time during which his good or evil hap cast him near the
object of his affection, his robust spirit of endurance was disarmed by
the advancing operations of disease, and his discomfiture in this behalf
aggravated by material difficulties of the most galling kind; and we need
not be surprised to find things that might otherwise have been deemed
of small account making a violent impression upon him. In a memoir[17]
of his friend Dilke, written by that gentleman’s grandson, there is an
extract from some letter or journal, emanating from whom, and at what
date, we are not told, but probably from Mr. or Mrs. Dilke, and which is
significant enough: it is at page 11:
“It is quite a settled thing between Keats and Miss ——. God
help them. It’s a bad thing for them. The mother says she
cannot prevent it, and that her only hope is that it will go
off. He don’t like anyone to look at her or to speak to her.”
This indicates, at all events, a morbid susceptibility on the part
of Keats as to the relations of his betrothed with the rest of the
world, and must be taken into account in weighing his own words in this
connexion. That things went uncomfortably enough to attract the attention
of others is indicated again in an extract which Sir Charles Dilke has
published on the same page with the foregoing, from a letter written to
Mrs. Dilke by Miss Reynolds:
“I hear that Keats is going to Rome, which must please all his
friends on every account. I sincerely hope it will benefit his
health, poor fellow! His mind and spirits must be bettered
by it; and absence may probably weaken, if not break off, a
connexion that has been a most unhappy one for him.”
Unhappy, the connexion doubtless was, as the connexion of a doomed man
with the whole world is likely to be; but it would be unfair to assume
that the engagement to Miss Brawne took a more unfortunate turn than any
engagement would probably take for a man circumstanced as Keats was,—a
man without independent means, and debarred by ill-health from earning an
independence. Above all, it would be both unsafe and extremely unfair to
conclude that either Miss Brawne or Keats’s amiable and admirable true
friend Charles Brown was guilty of any real levity.
That Keats’s passion was the cause of his death is an assumption which
also should be looked at with reserve. Shelley’s immortal Elegy and
Byron’s ribald stanzas have been yoked together to draw down the track
of years the false notion that adverse criticism killed him; and now
that that form of murder has been shewn not to have been committed,
there seems to be a reluctance to admit that there was no killing in the
matter. Sir Charles Dilke says, at page 7 of the Memoir already cited,
that Keats “‘gave in’ to a passion which killed him as surely as ever any
man was killed by love.” This may be perfectly true; for perhaps love
never did kill any man; but surely it must be superfluous to assume any
such dire agency in the decease of a man who had hereditary consumption.
Coleridge’s often-quoted verdict, “There is death in that hand,” does
not stand alone; and the careful reader of Keats’s Life and Letters
will find ample evidence of a state of health likely to lead but to one
result,—such as the passage already cited in regard to his staying at
home determined to rid himself of sore throat, the account of his return,
invalided, from the tour in Scotland, which his friends agreed he ought
never to have undertaken, and his own statement to Mr. Dilke, printed in
the _Life, Letters, &c._ (Vol. II, p. 7), that he “was not in very good
health” when at Shanklin.
Lord Houghton’s fine perception of character and implied fact sufficed
to prevent his giving any colour to the supposition that Keats was not
sufficiently cherished and considered in his latter days: the reproaches
that occur in some of the present letters do not lead me to alter the
impression conveyed to me on this subject by his Lordship’s memoirs;
nor do I doubt that others will make the necessary allowance for the
fevered condition of the poet’s mind and the harassed state of body and
spirit. Mr. Severn tells me that Mrs. and Miss Brawne felt the keenest
regret that they had not followed him and Keats to Rome; and, indeed, I
understand that there was some talk of a marriage taking place before
the departure. Even twenty years after Keats’s death, when Mr. Severn
returned to England, the bereaved lady was unable to receive him on
account of the extreme painfulness of the associations connected with him.
In Sir Charles Dilke’s Memoir of his grandfather, there is a strange
passage wherein he quotes from a letter of Miss Brawne’s written ten
years after Keats’s death,—a passage which might lead to an inference
very far from the truth:
“Keats died admired only by his personal friends, and by
Shelley; and even ten years after his death, when the first
memoir was proposed, the woman he had loved had so little
belief in his poetic reputation, that she wrote to Mr. Dilke,
‘The kindest act would be to let him rest for ever in the
obscurity to which circumstances have condemned him.’”