We have now reached the year 1817 and the month of May, when Keats was
in the twenty-second year of his age. He then wrote that he had
"forgotten all surgery," and was beginning at Margate his romantic epic
of "Endymion," reading and writing about eight hours a day. Keats had
previously been at Carisbrooke in the Isle of Wight, but had run away
from there, finding that the locality, while it charmed, also depressed
him. He had left London for the island, apparently with the view of
having greater leisure for study and composition. His brother Tom was
with him at Carisbrooke and at Margate. He was already provided with a
firm of publishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, willing to undertake the
risk of "Endymion," and they advanced him a sum sufficient for
continuing at work on it with comfort. In September he went with Mr.
Benjamin Bailey to Oxford: they made an excursion to Stratford-on-Avon,
and Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of the month. It would appear
that in Oxford Keats, in the heat of youthful blood, committed an
indiscretion of which we do not know the details, nor need we give them
if we knew them; for on the 8th of October he wrote to Bailey in these
terms: "The little mercury I have taken has corrected the poison and
improved my health,[3] though I feel, from my employment, that I shall
never again be secure in robustness." The residence of Keats and his
brother Tom in Hampstead, a first-floor lodging, was in Well Walk, No.
1, next to the Wells Tavern, which was then called the Green Man. The
reader who has a head for localities should bear this point well in
mind, should carefully discriminate the house in Well Walk from another
house, Wentworth Place, afterwards tenanted by Keats and others at
Hampstead, and, every time that the question occurs to his thought,
should pass a mental vote of thanks to Mr. Buxton Forman for the great
pains which he took to settle the point, and the lucid and pleasant
account which he has given of it. Keats was at Leatherhead in November;
finished the first draft of "Endymion" at Burford Bridge, near Dorking,
on the 28th of that month, and returned to Hampstead for the winter.
Two anecdotes which have often been repeated belong apparently to about
this date. One of them purports that Keats gave a sound drubbing in
Hampstead to a butcher, or a butcher's boy, who was ill-treating a small
boy, or else a cat. Hunt simply says that the butcher "had been
insolent,"--by implication, to Keats himself. The "butcher's boy" has
obtained traditional currency; but, according to George Keats, the
offender was "a scoundrel in livery," the locality "a blind alley at
Hampstead." Clarke says that the stand-up fight lasted nearly an hour.
Keats was an undersized man, in fact he was not far removed from the
dwarfish, being barely more than five feet high, and this small feat of
stubborn gallantry deserves to be appraised and praised accordingly. The
other anecdote is that Coleridge met Keats along with Leigh Hunt in a
lane near Highgate, "a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth," and after
shaking hands with Keats, he said aside to Hunt, "There is death in that
hand." Nothing is extant to show that at so early a date as this, or
even for some considerable while after, any of Keats's immediate friends
shared the ominous prevision of Coleridge.
In March 1818 Keats joined his brothers at Teignmouth in Devonshire, and
in April "Endymion" was published. In June he set off on a pedestrian
tour of some extent with a friend whose name will frequently recur from
this point forwards, Charles Armitage Brown. One is generally inclined
to get some idea of what a man was like; if one knows what he was
_un_like much the same purpose is served. In April 1819 Keats wrote
some bantering verses about Brown, which are understood to go mainly by
contraries we therefore infer Brown to have presented a physical and
moral aspect the reverse of the following--
"He is to meet a melancholy carle,
Thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair,
As hath the seeded thistle when a parle
It holds with Zephyr ere it sendeth fair
Its light balloons into the summer air.
Thereto his beard had not begun to bloom;
No brush had touched his chin, or razor sheer;
No care had touched his cheek with mortal doom,
But new he was and bright as scarf from Persian loom.
"Ne cared he for wine or half-and-half,
Ne cared he for fish or flesh or fowl,
And sauces held he worthless as the chaff;
He 'sdained the swine-head at the wassail bowl.
Ne with lewd ribalds sat he cheek by jowl,
Ne with sly lemans in the scorner's chair;
But after water-brooks this pilgrim's soul
Panted, and all his food was woodland air,
Though he would oft-times feast on gillyflowers rare.
"The slang of cities in no wise he knew;
'Tipping the wink' to him was heathen Greek.
He sipped no olden Tom or ruin blue,
Or Nantz or cherry-brandy, drank full meek
By many a damsel brave and rouge of cheek.
Nor did he know each aged watchman's beat;
Nor in obscured purlieus would he seek
For curled Jewesses with ankles neat,
Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet."
Mr. Brown, son of a London stockbroker from Scotland, was a man several
years older than Keats, born in 1786. He was a Russia merchant retired
from business, of much culture and instinctive sympathy with genius, and
he enjoyed assisting the efforts of young men of promise. He had
produced the libretto of an opera, "Narensky," and he eventually
published a book on the Sonnets of Shakespeare. From the date we have
now reached, the summer of 1818, which was more than a year following
their first introduction, Brown may be regarded as the most intimate of
all Keats's friends, Dilke coming next to him.
The pedestrian tour with Brown was the sequel of a family leave-taking
at Liverpool. George Keats, finding in himself no vocation for trade,
with its smug compliances and sleek assiduities (and John agreed with
him in these views), had determined to emigrate to America, and rough it
in a new settlement for a living, perhaps for fortune; and, as a
preliminary step, he had married Miss Georgiana Augusta Wylie, a girl of
sixteen, daughter of a deceased naval officer. The sonnet "Nymph of the
downward smile" &c. was addressed to her. John Keats and Brown,
therefore, accompanied George and his bride to Liverpool, and saw them
off. They then started as pedestrians into the Lake country, the land of
Burns, Belfast, and the Western Highlands. Before starting on the trip
Keats had often been in such a state of health as to make it prudent
that he should not hazard exposure to night air; but in his excursion he
seems to have acted like a man of sound and rather hardy physique,
walking from day to day about twenty miles, and sometimes more, and his
various records of the trip have nothing of a morbid or invaliding tone.
This was not, however, to last long; the Isle of Mull proved too much
for him. On the 23rd of July, writing to his brother Tom, he describes
the expedition thus: "The road through the island, or rather track, is
the most dreary you can think of; between dreary mountains, over bog and
rock and river, with our breeches tucked up and our stockings in
hand.... We had a most wretched walk of thirty-seven miles across the
island of Mull, and then we crossed to Iona." In another letter he says:
"Walked up to my knees in bog; got a sore throat; gone to see Icolmkill
and Staffa." From this time forward the mention of the sore throat
occurs again and again; sometimes it is subsiding, or as good as gone;
at other times it has returned, and causes more or less inconvenience.
Brown wrote of it as "a violent cold and ulcerated throat." The latest
reference to it comes in December 1819, only two months preceding the
final and alarming break-down in the young poet's health. In Scotland,
at any rate, amid the exposure and exertion of the walking tour, the
sore throat was not to be staved off; so, having got as far as
Inverness, Keats, under medical advice, reluctantly cut his journey
short, parted from Brown, and went on board the smack from Cromarty. A
nine days' passage brought him to London Bridge, and on the 18th of
August he presented himself to the rather dismayed eyes of Mrs. Dilke.
"John Keats," she wrote, "arrived here last night, as brown and as
shabby as you can imagine: 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." More ought to be said here of the details of
Keats's Scottish and Irish trip; but such details, not being of
essential importance as incidents in his life, could only be given
satisfactorily in the form of copious extracts from his letters, and for
these--readable and picturesque as they are--I have not adequate space.
He preferred, on the whole, the Scotch people to the little which he saw
of the Irish. Just as Keats was leaving Scotland, because of his own
ailments, he had been summoned away thence on account of the more
visibly grave malady of his brother Tom, who was in an advanced stage of
consumption; but it appears that the letter did not reach his hands at
the time.
The next three months were passed by Keats along with Tom at their
Hampstead lodgings. Anxiety and affection--warm affection, deep
anxiety--were of no avail. Tom died at the beginning of December, aged
just twenty, and was buried on the 7th of that month. The words in "King
Lear," "Poor Tom," remain underlined by the surviving brother.
John Keats was now solitary in the world. Tom was dead, George and his
bride in America, Fanny, his girlish sister, a permanent inmate of the
household of Mr. and Mrs. Abbey at Walthamstow. In December he quitted
his lodgings at Hampstead, and set up house along with Mr. Brown in what
was then called Wentworth Place, Hampstead, now Lawn Bank; Brown being
rightly the tenant, and Keats a paying resident with Brown. Wentworth
Place consisted of only two houses. One of them was thus inhabited by
Brown and Keats, the other by the Dilkes. In the first of these houses,
when Brown and Keats were away, and afterwards in the second, there was
also a well-to-do family of the name of Brawne,--a mother, with a son
and two daughters. Lawn Bank is the penultimate house on the right of
John Street, next to Wentworth House: Dr. Sharpey passed some of his
later years in it. This is, beyond all others, the dwelling which
remains permanently linked with the memory of Keats.
While Tom was still lingering out the days of his brief life, Keats made
the acquaintance of two young ladies. He has left us a description of
both of them. His portraiture of the first, Miss Jane Cox, is written in
a tone which might seem the preliminary to a _grande passion_; but this
did not prove so; she rapidly passed out of his existence and out of his
memory. His portraiture of the second, Miss Fanny Brawne, does not
suggest anything beyond a tepid liking which might perhaps merge into a
definite antipathy; this also was delusive, for he was from the first
smitten with Miss Brawne, and soon profoundly in love with her--I might
say desperately in love, for indeed desperation, which became despair,
was the main ingredient in his passion, in all but its earliest stages.
I shall here extract these two passages, for both of them are of
exceptional importance for our biography--one as acquainting us with
Keats's general range of feeling in relation to women, and the other as
introducing the most serious and absorbing sentiment of the last two
years of his life. On October 29, 1818, he wrote as follows to his
brother George and his wife in America:--
"The Misses Reynolds are very kind to me.... On my return, the
first day I called [this was probably towards the 20th of
September], they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a
cousin of theirs, Miss Cox, who, having fallen out with her
grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. Reynolds to
take asylum in her house. She is an East Indian, and ought to be
her grandfather's heir.... 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 lips[4] 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 time had much talk
with her. No such thing; there are the Misses Reynolds 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 to 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 mind; 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."
So much for Miss Cox, the Charmian whom Keats was not in love with. This
is not absolutely the sole mention of her in his letters, but it is the
only one of importance. We now turn to Miss Brawne, the young lady with
whom he had fallen very much in love at a date even preceding that to
which the present description must belong. The description comes from a
letter to George and Georgiana Keats, written probably towards the
middle of December 1818. It is true that the name Brawne does not appear
in the printed version of the letter, but the "very positive
conviction" expressed by Mr. Forman that that name really does stand in
the MS., a conviction "shared by members of her family," may safely be
adopted by all my readers. I therefore insert the name where a blank had
heretofore appeared in print.
"Perhaps, as you are fond of giving me sketches of characters,
you may like a little picnic of scandal, even across the
Atlantic. Shall I give you Miss Brawne? 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 [Keats, if he really wrote 'not
seventeen,' was wrong here; 'not nineteen' would have been
correct, as she was born on August 9, 1800.] 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 ["We" would apparently be Keats, Brown, and the Dilkes], and
smoked her, and baited her, and I think drove her away. Miss
Brawne 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."
At the time when Keats wrote these words he had known Miss Brawne for a
couple of months, more or less, having first seen her in October or
November at the house of the Dilkes. It might seem that he was about
this time in a state of feeling propense to love. _Some_ woman was
required to fill the void in his heart. The woman might have been Miss
Cox, whom he met in September. As the event turned out, it was not she,
but it _was_ Miss Brawne, whom he met in October or November. Fanny
Brawne was the elder daughter of a gentleman of independent means, who
died while she was still a child; he left another daughter and a son
with their mother; and the whole family, as already mentioned, lived at
times in the same house which the Dilkes occupied in Wentworth-place,
Hampstead, and at other times in the adjoining house, while not tenanted
by Brown and Keats. Miss Brawne (I quote here from Mr. Forman) "had much
natural pride and buoyancy, and was quite capable of affecting higher
spirits and less concern than she really felt. But, as to the
genuineness of her attachment to Keats, some of those who knew her
personally have no doubt whatever."[5] If so--or indeed whether so or
not--it is a pity that she was wont, after Keats's death, to speak of
him (as has been averred) as "that foolish young poet who was in love
with me." That Keats was a poet and a young poet is abundantly true; but
that he was a foolish one had even before his death, and especially very
soon after it, been found out to be a gross delusion by a large number
of people, and might just as well have been found out by his betrothed
bride in addition. I know of only one portrait of Miss Brawne; it is a
silhouette by Edouart, engraved in two of Mr. Forman's publications. A
silhouette is one of the least indicative forms of portraiture for
enabling one to judge whether the sitter was handsome or not. This
likeness shows a very profuse mass of hair, a tall, rather sloping,
forehead, a long and prominent aquiline nose, a mouth and chin of the
_petite_ kind, a very well-developed throat, and a figure somewhat small
in proportion to the head. The face is not of the sort which I should
suppose to have ever been beautiful in an artist's eyes, or in a poet's
either; and indeed Keats's description of Miss Brawne, which I have just
cited, is qualified, chilly, and critical, with regard to beauty.
Nevertheless, his love-letters to Miss Brawne, most of which have been
preserved and published, speak of her beauty very emphatically. "The
very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal;" "I cannot
conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you, but beauty;" "all
I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty." It seems
probable that Keats was the declared lover of Miss Brawne in April 1819
at the latest--more probably in February; and when his first published
letter to her was written, July 1819, he and she must certainly have
been already engaged, or all but engaged, to marry. This was contrary to
Mrs. Brawne's liking. They appear to have contemplated--anything but
willingly on the poet's part--a tolerably long engagement; for he was a
young man of twenty-three, with stinted means, no regular profession,
and no occupation save that of producing verse derided in the high
places of criticism. He spoke indeed of re-studying in Edinburgh for the
medical profession: this was a vague notion, with which no practical
beginning was made. An early marriage, followed by a year or so of
pleasuring and of intellectual advancement in some such place as Rome or
Zurich, was what Keats really longed for.
We must now go back a little--to December 1818. Haydon was then still
engaged upon his picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, and found his
progress impeded by want of funds, and by a bad attack, from which he
frequently suffered, of weakness of eyesight. On the 22nd of the month,
Keats, with conspicuous generosity--and although he had already lent
nearly L200 to various friends--tendered him any money-aid which might
be in his power; asking merely that his friend would claim the
fulfilment of his promise only in the last resort. On January 7, 1819,
Haydon definitely accepted his offer; and Keats wrote back, hoping to
comply, and refusing to take any interest. His own money affairs were,
however, at this time almost at a deadlock, controlled by lawyers and by
his ex-guardian Mr. Abbey; and the amount which he had expected to
command as coming to him after his brother Tom's death was not
available. He had to explain as much in April 1819 to Haydon, who wrote
with some urgency. Eventually he did make a small loan to the
painter--L30; but very shortly afterwards (June 17th) was compelled to
ask for a reimbursement--"do borrow or beg somehow what you can for me."
There was a chancery-suit of old standing, begun soon after the death of
Mr. Jennings in 1805, and it continued to obstruct Keats in his money
affairs. The precise facts of these were also but ill-known to the poet,
who had potentially at his disposal certain funds which remained _perdu_
and unused until two years after his death. On September 20, 1819, he
wrote to his brother George in America that Haydon had been unable to
make the repayment; and he added, "He did not seem to care much about
it, and let me go without my money with almost nonchalance, when he
ought to have sold his drawings to supply me. I shall perhaps still be
acquainted with him, but, for friendship, that is at an end." And in
fact the hitherto very ardent cordiality between the poet and the
painter does seem to have been materially damped after this date; Keats
being somewhat reserved towards Haydon, and Haydon finding more to
censure than to extol in the conduct of Keats. We can feel with both of
them; and, while we pronounce Keats blameless and even praiseworthy
throughout, may infer Haydon to have been not greatly blameable.
Towards the end of June 1819 Keats went to Shanklin; his first
companion there being an invalid but witty and cheerful friend, James
Rice, a solicitor, and his second, Brown, who co-operated at this time
with the poet in producing the drama "Otho the Great." Next, the two
friends went to Winchester, "chiefly," wrote Keats to his sister Fanny,
"for the purpose of being near a tolerable library, which after all is
not to be found in this place. However, we like it very much; it is the
pleasantest town I ever was in, and has the most recommendations of
any." One of his letters from here (September 21) speaks of his being
now almost as well acquainted with Italian as with French, and he adds,
"I shall set myself to get complete in Latin, and there my learning must
stop. I do not think of venturing upon Greek." It is stated that he
learned Italian with uncommon quickness.
Early in the winter which closed 1819 George Keats came over for a short
while from America, his main object being to receive his share of the
money accruing from the decease of his brother Tom, to the cost of whose
illness he had largely contributed. He had been in Cincinnati, and had
engaged in business, but as yet without any success. In some lines which
John Keats addressed to Miss Brawne in October there is an energetic and
no doubt consciously overloaded denunciation of "that most hateful land,
dungeoner of my friends, that monstrous region," &c., &c. John, it
appears, concealed from George, during his English visit, the fact that
he himself was then much embarrassed in money-matters, and almost wholly
dependent upon his friends for a subsistence meanwhile; and George left
England again without doing anything for his brother's relief or
convenience. He took with him L700, some substantial part of which
appears to have been the property of John, absolutely or contingently;
and he undertook to remit shortly to his brother L200, to be raised by
the sale of a boat which he owned in America; but months passed, and the
L200 never came, no purchaser for the boat being procurable. Out of the
L1,100 which Tom Keats had left, George received L440, John hardly more
than L200, George thus repaying himself some money which had been
previously advanced for John's professional education. For all this he
has been very severely censured, Mr. Brown being among his sternest and
most persistent assailants. It must seemingly have been to George Keats,
and yet not to him exclusively, that Colonel Finch referred in the
letter which reached Shelley's eyes, saying that John had been
"infamously treated by the very persons whom his generosity had rescued
from want and woe;" and Shelley re-enforced this accusation in his
preface to "Adonais"--"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." From these painful charges
George Keats eventually vindicated himself with warmth of feeling, and
with so much solidity of demonstration as availed to convince Mr. Dilke,
and also Mr. Abbey. Who were the other offenders glanced at by Colonel
Finch, as also in one of Severn's letters, I have no distinct idea.