We have now reached the close of a melancholy history--that of the
extinction, in a space of less than twenty-six years, of a bright life
foredoomed by inherited disease. We turn to another subject--the
intellectual development and the writings of Keats, what they were, and
how they were treated. Here again there are some sombre tints.
A minute anecdote, apparently quite authentic, shows that a certain
propensity to the jingle of rhyme was innate in Keats: Haydon is our
informant. "An old lady (Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury) told
his brother George--when, in reply to her question what John was doing,
he told her he had determined to become 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." This, however, is the only rhyming-anecdote that we hear of
Keats's childhood or mere boyhood: there is nothing to show that at
school he made the faintest attempt at verse-spinning. The earliest
known experiment of his is the "Imitation of Spenser"--four Spenserian
stanzas, beginning--
"Now Morning from her orient chamber came,"
and very poor stanzas they are. This Imitation was written while he was
living at Edmonton, in his nineteenth year, and thus there was nothing
singularly precocious in Keats, either in the age at which he began
versifying, or in the skill with which he first addressed himself to the
task. I might say more of other verses, juvenile in the amplest sense of
the term, but such remarks would belong more properly to a later section
of this volume. I will therefore only observe here that the earliest
poems of his in which I can discern anything even distantly approaching
to poetic merit or to his own characteristic style (and these distantly
indeed) are the lines "To ----"
"Hadst thou lived in days of old,"
and "Calidore, a Fragment,"
"Young Calidore is paddling o'er the lake."
The dates of these two compositions are not stated, but they were
probably later than the opening of 1815, and if so Keats would have been
nearly or quite twenty when he wrote them--and this is far remote from
precocity. Let us say then, once for all, that, whatever may be the
praise and homage due to Keats for ranking as one of the immortals when
he died aged twenty-five, no sort of encomium can be awarded to him on
the ground that, when he first began, he began early and well. All his
rawest attempts, be it added to his credit, appear to have been kept to
himself; for Cowden Clarke, who was certainly his chief literary
confidant in those tentative days, says that until Keats produced to him
his sonnet "written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison" the
youth's attempts at verse-writing were to him unknown. The 3rd of
February 1815 was the day of Hunt's liberation, so that the endeavour
had by this time been going on in silence for something like a year or
more.
It was not till 1816--or let us say when he was just of age--that Keats
produced a truly excellent thing. This is the sonnet "On first looking
into Chapman's Homer." A copy of Chapman's translation had been lent to
Cowden Clarke; he and Keats sat up till daylight reading it, the young
poet shouting with delight, and by ten o'clock on the following morning
Keats sent the sonnet to Clarke. It was therefore a sudden immediate
inspiration, a little rill of lava flowing out of a poetic volcano,
solidified at once. This is not only the first excellent thing written
by Keats--it is the _only_ excellent thing contained in his first volume
of verse.
This volume came out (as already mentioned) in the early spring of 1817.
The sonnet dedicating the book to Leigh Hunt, written off at a moment's
notice "when the last proof-sheet was brought from the printer," was
evidently composed in winter-time. The title of the volume is "Poems by
John Keats." The motto on its title-page is from Spenser--
"What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?"
--a motto embodying with considerable completeness the feeling which is
predominant in the volume, and generally in Keats's poetic works. We
always feel "delight" to be his true element, whatever may be the
undertone of pathos opposed to it by poetic development and treatment,
and by adverse fate. "Liberty" also--a free flight of the faculties, a
rejection of conventional trammels, whether in life or in verse--was
highly characteristic of him; and perhaps the youthful friend of Hunt
intended the word "liberty" to be understood by his readers as having a
certain political flavour as well. In addition to some writings just
specified, the volume contained "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill"; the
three epistles "To George Felton Mathew" (who was a gentleman of
literary habits, afterwards employed in administering the Poor Law), "To
my brother George," and "To Charles Cowden Clarke"; sixteen sonnets; and
"Sleep and Poetry." The question of the poetic deservings of these
compositions belongs more properly to our final chapter. I shall here
give only a few details bearing upon the circumstances of their
production. The poem "I stood tiptoe" &c. was written beside a gate near
Caen Wood, Highgate. It must have been begun in a summer, no doubt that
of 1816, and was still uncompleted in the middle of December of that
year. "The Epistle to Mathew," dated November 1815, testifies to the
early admiration of Keats for Thomas Chatterton; though the dedication
of "Endymion," "Inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton," was but
poorly forestalled by such lines as the following--
"Where we may soft humanity put on,
And sit and rhyme, and think on Chatterton,
And that warm-hearted Shakspeare sent to meet him
Four laurelled spirits heavenward to entreat him."
Moreover, the first of his youthful sonnets is addressed to
Chatterton. The "Epistle to George," August 1816, opens with a reference
to "many a dreary hour" which John Keats has passed, fearing he would
never be able to write good poetry, however much he might gaze on sky,
honey-bees, and the beauty of woman. The "Epistle to Clarke," September
1816, pays ample tribute to the guidance which he had afforded to Keats
into the realms of poetry, and contains a couplet which has of late been
very often quoted--
"Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly
Up to its climax, and then dying proudly?"
The sonnet--
"O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell,"
is the first thing that Keats ever published. It had previously appeared
in _The Examiner_ for May 5, 1816, and is clearly one of the best of
these early sonnets. The sonnet which begins with the unmetrical line--
"How many bards gild the lapses of time"
was included in the very first batch of verses by Keats which Cowden
Clarke showed to Leigh Hunt. Hunt expressed "unhesitating and prompt
admiration" of some other one among the compositions; and Horace Smith,
who was present, reading out the sonnet now before us, praised as "a
well-condensed expression" the contorted and inefficient line--
"That distance of recognizance bereaves,"
_i.e._ [sounds] which distance bereaves of recognizance, or, in plain
English, which are too distant to be recognized. Two other sonnets are
addressed to Haydon in a tone of glowing laudation.
"Sleep and Poetry" is (if we except the sonnet upon Chapman's Homer) by
far the most important poem in the volume. It was written partly in
Leigh Hunt's cottage at Hampstead, in the library-room, where a sofa-bed
had on one occasion been made up for Keats's convenience, and the latter
lines in the poem refer to objects of art which were kept in the room.
Apart from the impressive line which all readers remember, saying of
poetry--
"'Tis might half-slumbering on its own right arm,"
there are several passages interesting as showing Keats's enthusiasm for
the art in which he was now a beginner, soon to be an adept--
"Oh for ten years that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy!"
also
"The great end
Of poesy, that it should be a friend
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man;"
and again
"They shall be accounted poet-kings
Who simply tell the most heart-easing things"--
both of these being definitions in which we might imagine Leigh Hunt to
have borne his part, or at least notified his concurrence. The
following well-known diatribe is also important, and should be kept in
mind when we come to speak of the reception accorded to Keats by
established critics, more or less of the old school. He has been
dilating on the splendours of British poetry of the great era, say
Spenser to Milton, and then proceeds--
"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 swayed about upon a rocking-horse,
And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal-souled!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled
Its gathering waves--ye felt it not; the blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer-night 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 taught a school
Of dolts to smoothe, inlay, and chip, 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 decrepit standard out
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau."
Zeal is generally pardonable. Keats's was manifestly honest zeal, and
flaming forth in the right direction. Yet it would have been well for
him to remember and indicate that amid his "school of dolts," bearing
the flag of Boileau, there had been some very strong and capable men,
notably Dryden and Pope, who could do several things besides inlaying
and clipping; nor could it be said that the beauty of the world had been
wholly blinked by so pre-eminently descriptive a poet as Thomson; and,
if we were to read Boileau--which few of us do now-a-days, and I daresay
Keats was not one of the few--we should probably find that his "mottoes"
were much less concerned with inlaying and clipping than with solid
meaning and studious congruity--qualities not totally contemptible, but
(be it acknowledged) very largely contemned by Keats in that first
slender performance of his adolescence named "Poems, 1817."
It has been said that this volume hardly went beyond the circle of
Keats's personal friends; nor do I think this statement can be far
wrong, although one inquirer avers that the book was "constantly alluded
to in the prominent periodicals." The dictum of Keats himself stands
thus: "It was read by some dozen of my friends, who liked it; and some
dozen whom I was unacquainted with, who did not." Shelley cannot have
been among the friends who liked the volume, for he had recommended
Keats not to give it to the press. At any rate the publishers, Messrs.
Ollier, would after a very short while sell it no more. Their letter to
George Keats--who seems to have been acting for John during the absence
of the latter in the Isle of Wight or at Margate--is too amusing to be
omitted:--
"We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his
book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to
acquiesce in undertaking it. We are, however, much obliged to you
for relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any
further connexion with it, which we must have done, as we think
the curiosity is satisfied and the sale has dropped. 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 the book back rather than be annoyed with
the ridicule which has time after time been showered upon it. In
fact, it was only on Sunday 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.' These are unpleasant imputations for any
one in business to labour under; but we should have borne them
and concealed their existence from you had not the style of your
note shown us that such delicacy would be quite thrown away. We
shall take means without delay for ascertaining the number of
copies on hand, and you shall be informed accordingly.
"3 Welbeck Street, 29th April 1817."
I do not find that the after-fate of the "Poems" is recorded: probably
they were handed over to Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who undertook the
publication of "Endymion."