From finishing _Endymion_ at Burford Bridge Keats returned some time

before mid-December to his Hampstead lodging. The exact date is

uncertain; but it was in time to see Kean play _Richard III_ at Drury

Lane on the 15th--the actor's first performance after a break of some

weeks due to illness. J. H. Reynolds had gone to Exeter for a Christmas

holiday, and Keats, acting as his substitute, wrote four dramatic

criticisms for the _Champion_: the first, printed on December 21, on

Kean in general and his re-appearance as Richard III in particular; a

second on a hash of the three parts of Shakespeare's _Henry VI_ produced

under the title _Richard Duke of York_, with Kean in the name-part and

probably Kean also as compiler; a third on a tragedy of small account by

one Dillon, called _Retribution_, or the _Chieftain's Daughter_, in

which the young Macready played the part of the villain; and a fourth on

a pantomime of _Don Giovanni_. No one, least of all one living in

Keats's circle, could well attempt stage criticism at this time without

trying to write like Hazlitt. Keats acquits himself on the whole rather

youthfully and crudely. In one point he is cruder than one would have

expected, and that is where, after re-reading the three parts of _Henry

VI_ for his purpose, he retracts what he had begun to say about them and

declares that they are 'perfect works,' apparently without any suspicion

that Shakespeare's part in them is at most that of a beginner of genius

touching up the hackwork of others with a fine passage here and there.

It is only in the notice of Kean as Richard III that the genius in Keats

really kindles. Here his imagination teaches him phrases beyond the

reach of Hazlitt, to express (there is nothing more difficult) the

specific quality and very thrill of the actor's voice and utterance. The

whole passage is of special interest, both what is groping in it and

what is masterly, and alike for itself and for such points as its

familiar use of tags from the then recent _Christabel_ and _Siege of

Corinth_:--

A melodious passage in poetry is full of pleasures both sensual and

spiritual. The spiritual is felt when the very letters and points of

charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty; the

mysterious signs of our immortal free-masonry! 'A thing to dream of,

not to tell'! The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of

Kean and to one learned in Shakespearian hieroglyphics--learned in the

spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual

grandeur; his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left

them honeyless! There is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by

which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future

while speaking of the instant. When he says in _Othello_, 'Put up your

bright swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat

had commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk,

he speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation

of 'blood, blood, blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the deepest

degree; the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over

them, making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the

wild dog on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can

distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' In

Richard, 'Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!' comes

from him as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns....

Surely this intense power of anatomizing the passions of every

syllable, of taking to himself the airings of verse, is the means by

which he becomes a storm with such fiery decision; and by which, with

a still deeper charm, he does his spiriting gently. Other actors are

continually thinking of their sum-total effect throughout a play. Kean

delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a

thought about anything else. He feels his being as deeply as

Wordsworth, or any other of our intellectual monopolists. From all his

comrades he stands alone, reminding us of him, whom Dante has so

finely described in his Hell:

and sole apart retir'd the Soldan fierce.[1]

Although so many times he has lost the battle of Bosworth Field, we

can easily conceive him really expectant of victory, and a different

termination of the piece.

Keats was by this time left alone in Well Walk, having seen his brothers

off for Teignmouth, whither George carried the invalid Tom for change of

climate. His regular occupation for the next two months was revising and

copying out _Endymion_ for press. Regular also was his attendance at

Hazlitt's evening lectures on the English Poets at the Surrey

Institution. Of the lectures on Shakespeare which Coleridge was in the

same weeks delivering in Fetter Lane Keats makes no mention, and it is

clear that he made no effort to go and hear them, though the distance of

the lecture-hall from his Hampstead lodging was so much less. The reader

who would fain conjure up for himself the contrasted personalities and

styles in public discourse of these two master critics, the shy and

saturnine, yet vigorously straight-hitting and trenchantly effective

Hazlitt, and the ramblingly mellifluous, sometimes beautifully inspired

and sometimes painfully drug-beclouded Coleridge, can draw but a faint

and tantalized satisfaction from the diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson,

that assiduous friend and satellite of men of genius, who punctually

records his attendance at both courses, but lacked the touch that

should have made his record live.

Keats's letters to his brothers in these winter months, with a few more

to Bailey and Reynolds, give us lively glimpses of his social doings,

and others, interesting in the extreme, of the inward growth and

workings of his mind. He tells of a certain amount of common-place

conviviality: an absurd dance and rackety supper at one Redhall's; noisy

Saturday 'concerts' at his own rooms, which means that two or three

intimates came to early afternoon dinner and spent the rest of the day

drinking claret and keeping up a concerted racket, each in imitation of

some musical instrument (Keats himself of the bassoon); but of this

pastime he soon got tired and rather ashamed. His social relations began

to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought

consistent with proper industry. We find him dining with Shelley's

friend, the genial and admirable stockbroker and man of letters Horace

Smith, in company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he

reflects:--'They only served to convince me how superior humour is to

wit, in respect to enjoyment. These men say things which make one start,

without making one feel; they are all alike; they all know fashionables;

they have all a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere

handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low company. "Would I

were with that company instead of yours," said I to myself.' Sunday

evenings were for a while set apart for dining with Haydon, and here, on

the last Sunday of the year, Keats met Wordsworth for the first time.

Wordsworth was on one of his rare visits to London, and had been staying

since the beginning of December with his brother Christopher at Lambeth

rectory. According to Crabb Robinson, he seems to have been in these

weeks in one of his stiffest and most domineering moods of egotism, much

ruffled by the moderate strictures of Coleridge in _Biographia

Literaria_ on certain qualities in his work and not at all appeased by

the splendid praise which so much out-balanced them. One evening in

conversation he went so far as to treat that great helpless genius, his

old bosom-friend and inspirer, with a rudeness of contradiction which

even the devoted Robinson found it hard to forgive.[2] Near about the

same time, hearing that the next Waverley novel was to be about Rob Roy,

he took down his ballad so named, read it aloud, and said 'I do not know

what more Mr Scott can have to say on the subject.'[3] Keats promptly

had full experience of Wordsworth's egotism, but also saw more genial

aspects of his character. Quite coolly and briefly he mentions those

circumstances of their first meeting which Haydon, in a famous passage

of his autobiography, thrusts before us in the insistent colour and

illumination of a magic-lantern picture. 'I think,' writes Keats,

'Ritchie is going to Fezan in Africa; thence to proceed if possible like

Mungo Park. Then there was Wordsworth, Lamb, Monkhouse, Landseer, and

your humble servant. Lamb got tipsy and blew up Kingston--proceeding so

far as to take the candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show

us what a soft fellow he was.' It should be explained that Ritchie was a

young explorer whom Tom had met the summer before on his run to Paris,

and Kingston a thick-witted, thick-skinned, intrusive but kindly

gentleman of lion-hunting proclivities, who as Comptroller of Stamps had

had some correspondence with Wordsworth and on the strength of this

invited himself to join Haydon's party in the poet's honour. Now for

Haydon:--

On December 28th the immortal dinner came off in my painting-room,

with Jerusalem towering up behind us as a background. Wordsworth was

in fine cue, and we had a glorious set-to,--on Homer, Shakespeare,

Milton and Virgil. Lamb got exceedingly merry and exquisitely witty;

and his fun in the midst of Wordsworth's solemn intonations of oratory

was like the sarcasm and wit of the fool in the intervals of Lear's

passion. He made a speech and voted me absent, and made them drink my

health. 'Now,' said Lamb, 'you old lake poet, you rascally poet, why

do you call Voltaire dull?' We all defended Wordsworth, and affirmed

there was a state of mind when Voltaire would be dull. 'Well,' said

Lamb, 'here's to Voltaire--the Messiah of the French nation, and a

very proper one too.'

He then, in a strain of humour beyond description, abused me for

putting Newton's head into my picture,--'a fellow,' said he, 'who

believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a

triangle. And then he and Keats agreed he had destroyed all the poetry

of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. It was

impossible to resist him, and we all drank 'Newton's health, and

confusion to mathematics.' It was delightful to see the good-humour of

Wordsworth in giving in to all our frolics without affectation and

laughing as heartily as the best of us.

By this time other friends joined, amongst them poor Ritchie who was

going to penetrate by Fezzan to Timbuctoo. I introduced him to all as

'a gentleman going to Africa.' Lamb seemed to take no notice; but all

of a sudden he roared out, 'Which is the gentleman we are going to

lose?' We then drank the victim's health, in which Ritchie joined.

In the morning of this delightful day, a gentleman, a perfect

stranger, had called on me. He said he knew my friends, had an

enthusiasm for Wordsworth and begged I would procure him the happiness

of an introduction. He told me he was a comptroller of stamps, and

often had correspondence with the poet. I thought it a liberty; but

still, as he seemed a gentleman, I told him he might come.

When we retired to tea we found the comptroller. In introducing him to

Wordsworth I forgot to say who he was. After a little time the

comptroller looked down, looked up and said to Wordsworth, 'Don't you

think, sir, Milton was a great genius?' Keats looked at me, Wordsworth

looked at the comptroller. Lamb who was dozing by the fire turned

round and said, 'Pray, sir, did you say Milton was a great genius?'

'No, sir; I asked Mr Wordsworth if he were not.' 'Oh,' said Lamb,

'then you are a silly fellow.' 'Charles! my dear Charles!' said

Wordsworth; but Lamb, perfectly innocent of the confusion he had

created, was off again by the fire.

After an awful pause the comptroller said, 'Don't you think Newton a

great genius?' I could not stand it any longer; Keats put his head

into my books. Ritchie squeezed in a laugh. Wordsworth seemed asking

himself, 'Who is this?' Lamb got up, and taking a candle, said, 'Sir,

will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?' He then

turned his back on the poor man, and at every question of the

comptroller he chaunted--

Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John

Went to bed with his breeches on.

The man in office, finding Wordsworth did not know who he was, said in

a spasmodic and half-chuckling anticipation of assured victory, 'I

have had the honour of some correspondence with you, Mr Wordsworth.'

'With me, sir?' said Wordsworth, 'not that I remember.' 'Don't you,

sir? I am a comptroller of stamps.' There was a dead silence;--the

comptroller evidently thinking that was enough. While we were waiting

for Wordsworth's reply, Lamb sung out

Hey diddle diddle,

The cat and the fiddle.

'My dear Charles!' said Wordsworth,--

Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John,

chaunted Lamb, and then rising, exclaimed, 'Do let me have another

look at that gentleman's organs.' Keats and I hurried Lamb into the

painting-room, shut the door and gave way to inextinguishable

laughter. Monkhouse followed and tried to get Lamb away. We went back

but the comptroller was irreconcilable. We soothed and smiled and

asked him to supper. He stayed though his dignity was sorely affected.

However, being a good-natured man, we parted all in good humour, and

no ill effects followed.

All the while, until Monkhouse succeeded, we could hear Lamb

struggling in the painting-room and calling at intervals, 'Who is that

fellow? Allow me to see his organs once more.'

It was indeed an immortal evening. Wordsworth's fine intonation as he

quoted Milton and Virgil, Keats's eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint

sparkle of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation, that

in my life I never passed a more delightful time. All our fun was

within bounds. Not a word passed that an apostle might not have

listened to. It was a night worthy of the Elizabethan age, and my

solemn Jerusalem flashing up by the flame of the fire, with Christ

hanging over us like a vision, all made up a picture which will long

glow upon--

that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude.

Keats made Ritchie promise he would carry his _Endymion_ to the great

desert of Sahara and fling it in the midst.

To complete our impression of Wordsworth at this time of his winter

visit to London in his forty-eighth year, let us turn for a moment to

Leigh Hunt's recollections of his looks and ways about the same time.

Certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural.

They were like fires half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of

acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the end of two caverns. One

might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes.... He had a

dignified manner, with a deep roughish but not unpleasing voice, and

an exalted mode of speaking. He had a habit of keeping his left hand

in the bosom of his waistcoat; and in this attitude, except when he

turned round to take one of the subjects of his criticism from the

shelves, he was dealing forth his eloquent but hardly catholic

judgments.

Hazlitt, in words written a few years later, gives a nearly similar

portrait:--

He is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat

stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbein's heads,

grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour.... He has a

peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness and a

rugged harmony in the tones of his voice. His manner of reading his

own poetry is particularly imposing, and in his favourite passages his

eye beams with preternatural lustre, and the meaning labours slowly up

from his swelling breast.

Although the great man could praise or care for no contemporary poetry

save his own, and had none of the sympathetic or encouraging criticism

to bestow on Keats which to that ardent young spirit would have meant so

much, he nevertheless showed him no little personal kindness, receiving

him when he called and inviting him several times to dine or sup. On his

first visit Keats was kept waiting till the poet bustled in, full

dressed in stiff stock and knee breeches, in haste to keep a dinner

appointment with one of his official chiefs. This experience proved no

check to their acquaintance: neither did Wordsworth's chilling comment

when Keats was induced to read to him the hymn to Pan from _Endymion_.

'A very pretty piece of Paganism,' he remarked and that was all. Severn

was present at the gathering in Haydon's studio where this reading took

place. The evening's talk, he relates, ran much on the virtues of a

vegetable diet, which was for the moment, through the vehement advocacy

of Shelley, so much in vogue in Leigh Hunt's circle that even the ruddy

and robust Haydon gave himself out for a proselyte like the rest, until

friends one day caught him coming privily smacking his lips out of a

chop-house. Wordsworth was in a jocular mood, and asked his herbivorous

friends whether they did not welcome such a succulent morsel of animal

food as a chance caterpillar in their cabbage. Was it on the same

occasion that the sage and seer condescended to a pun, telling Haydon

that if he ever took the name of another artist, as some of the old

masters used to do, it should be Teniers, seeing that he had been ten

years working on his great picture, still unfinished, of Christ's Entry

into Jerusalem, in which Wordsworth and other leading personages of the

time were to figure among the crowd of lookers on?

A fortnight after their first meeting Keats re-affirms to his brother

the view he had formerly expressed to Haydon that 'If there were three

things superior in the modern world they were _The Excursion_, Haydon's

Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste.' About the same time, that is in

the course of January, he writes of having 'seen Wordsworth frequently':

and again 'I have seen a good deal of Wordsworth.' A later allusion

implies that he has seen him 'with his beautiful wife and his enchanting

sister.' At one meeting Keats must have heard talk or reading that

delighted him, for Severn tells how while he was toiling late one night

over his miniature painting, Keats burst into his lodging fresh from

Wordsworth's company and in a state of eager elation over his

experience. It is hard to refrain from conjecture as to what had

happened. What one would like to think is that Wordsworth had been

reading Keats some of those great passages in the _Prelude_ without

which the master cannot truly be more than half known and which

remained unpublished until the year of his death. Or may we possibly

trace a clue to the evening's enjoyment in this further note of

Hazlitt's on a phase of Wordsworth's conversation?--

It is fine to hear him talk of the way in which certain subjects

should have been treated by eminent poets, according to his notions of

the art. Thus he finds fault with Dryden's description of Bacchus in

the _Alexander's Feast_, as if he were a mere good-looking youth, or

boon companion

Flushed with a purple grace,

He shows his honest face--

Instead of representing the god returning from the conquest of India,

crowned with vine-leaves, and drawn by panthers, and followed by

troops of satyrs, of wild men and animals that he had tamed. You would

think, in hearing him speak on this subject, that you saw Titian's

picture of the meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne--so classic were his

conceptions, so glowing his style.[4]

It is tempting to seek some kind of connexion between Keats in his great

Bacchic ode in _Endymion_ and Wordsworth in this vein of talk. Had we

not known that _Endymion_ was finished before the elder and the younger

poet met, we might have been inclined to attribute to Wordsworth's

eloquence some part of Keats's inspiration. And even as it is such

possibility remains open, for it must be remembered that Keats carefully

re-copied the several cantos of his poem during the spring, the fourth

canto not until March, at Teignmouth, and it is conceivable, though

unlikely, that the triumph of Bacchus might have been an addition made

in re-copying.

It was most likely a result of the interest taken by Wordsworth in Keats

that the young poet received at this time a friendly call, of which he

makes passing mention, from Crabb Robinson.

But the more Keats saw of Wordsworth himself, the more critically, as

his letters show, he came gradually to look upon him. He disliked the

idea of a man so revered dining with the foolish Kingston, and refused

to dine and meet him there. He regrets, after Wordsworth has gone, that

he has 'left a bad impression wherever he has visited in town by his

egotism, Vanity, and bigotry;' adding, 'yet he is a great poet if not a

philosopher.' The fullest expression of this critical attitude occurs in

a letter written to Reynolds at the beginning of February. Keats is for

the moment out of conceit with the poets of his own time; particularly

with Wordsworth, whom he had always devoutly reverenced from a distance,

and with Hunt, next to Cowden Clarke his earliest encourager and

sympathiser, whom to his disappointment he had lately found more ready

to carp than praise when he read him the early books of _Endymion_. It

seems Hunt would have liked the talk of Endymion and Peona to come

nearer his own key of simpering triviality in _Rimini_. 'He says,'

writes Keats 'the conversation is unnatural and too high-flown for

Brother and Sister--says it should be simple, forgetting do ye mind that

they are both overshadowed by a supernatural Power and perforce could

not talk like Francesca in the _Rimini_. He must first prove that

Caliban's poetry is unnatural. This with me completely overturns his

objections.' In revising _Endymion_ for press Keats proved his wise

adherence to his own point of view by cutting out some of the passages

most infected with the taint of Hunt's familiar tea-party manner. The

words in which he expresses his impatience of the several dogmatisms of

Wordsworth and Hunt are vital in relation to his own conception of

poetry and of its right aim and working:--

It may be said that we ought to read our contemporaries, that

Wordsworth etc., should have their due from us. But, for the sake of a

few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a

certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist? Every man

has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over

them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. Many a man

can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to

put down his half-seeing. Sancho will invent a Journey heavenward as

well as anybody. We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us,

and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches

pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters

into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself, but

with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would

they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying

out, 'Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!' Modern

poets differ from the Elizabethans in this: each of the moderns like

an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, and knows how many

straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions, and

has a continual itching that all the Housewives should have their

coppers well scoured. The ancients were Emperors of vast Provinces,

they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit

them. I will cut all this--I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt

in particular.... I don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and

Hunt's merit, but I mean to say we need not be teazed with grandeur

and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive.

These winter letters of Keats are full of similar first fruits of young

reflection, thoughts forming or half-forming themselves in absolute

sincerity as he writes, intuitions of his first-endeavouring mind on the

search for vital truths of art and nature and humanity. Imperfect,

half-wrought phrases often come from him which prove, when you have

lived with them, to be more sufficient as well as more suggestive than

if they had been chiselled into precision by longer study and a more

confident mind. For instance: 'the excellence of every art is its

intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their

being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth': a sentence worth

whole treatises and fit, sketchy as it is, to serve as text to all that

can justly be discoursed concerning problems of art in its relation to

nature,--of realism, romance, and the rest. Or this:--

Brown and Dilke walked with me and back to the Christmas pantomime. I

had not a dispute, but a disquisition, with Dilke upon various

subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck

me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in

literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean

_Negative Capability_, that is, when a man is capable of being in

uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching

after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine

isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from

being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued

through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with

a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration,

or rather obliterates all consideration.

Or this:--

In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from

their centre.

1st. I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by

singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own

highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

2nd. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making

the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the

setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine

over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in

the luxury of twilight.

But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it. And

this leads me to another axiom--That if poetry comes not as naturally

as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. However it may

be with me, I cannot help looking into new countries with 'O for a

muse of Fire to ascend!' If _Endymion_ serves me as a pioneer, perhaps

I ought to be content--I have great reason to be content, for thank

God I can read, and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths; and

I have I am sure many friends, who, if I fail will attribute any

change in my life and temper to humbleness rather than pride--to a

cowering under the wings of great poets, rather than to a bitterness

that I am not appreciated.

Cogitations of this cast, not less fresh than deep, and often throwing a

clear retrospective light on the moods and aims which governed him in

writing _Endymion_, are interspersed at the beginning of the year with

regrets at dissensions rife among his friends. The strain between Haydon

and Hunt had increased since the autumn, and now, over a sordid matter

of money borrowed by Mrs Hunt--by all accounts the most unabashed of

petty spongers--and not repaid, grew into an active quarrel. Another

still fiercer quarrel broke out between Haydon and Reynolds, who with

all his fine qualities seems to have been quick and touchy, and whom we

find later in open breach with his admirable brother-in-law Thomas Hood.

Keats was not involved. With his distinguished good sense and good heart

in matters of friendship, he knew how to keep in close and affectionate

touch with what was loveable or likeable in each of the disputants

severally. His comments are the best key to the best part of himself,

and show him as the true great spirit, by character not less than by

gift, among the group.

Things have happened lately of great perplexity--you must have heard

of them--Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting

for ever--the same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is

unfortunate--Men should bear with each other: there lives not the Man

who may not be cut up, aye lashed to pieces on his weakest side. The

best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual

yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by

which a Man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with

Circumstance. The sure way, Bailey, is first to know a Man's and then

be passive--if after that he insensibly draws you towards him then you

have no power to break the link. Before I felt interested in either

Reynolds or Haydon, I was well read in their faults; yet, knowing

them, I have been cementing gradually with both. I have an affection

for them both, for reasons almost opposite--and to both must I of

necessity cling, supported always by the hope that, when a little

time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully in their esteem, I

may be able to bring them together. The time must come, because they

have both hearts and they will recollect the best parts of each other,

when this gust is overblown.

Of Haydon himself and of his powers as a painter Keats continued to

think as highly as ever, seeing in his pictures, as the friends and

companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt to

see, not so much the actual performance as the idea he had pre-conceived

of it in the light of his friend's enthusiastic ambition and eloquence.

Severn repeatedly insists on Keats's remarkably keen natural instinct

for and understanding of the arts both of music and painting. Cowden

Clarke's piano-playing had been one of the chief pleasures of his

school-days: as to the capacity he felt in himself for judging the works

of painting, here is his own scrupulously modest and sincere estimate

expressed to Haydon a little later:

Believe me Haydon your picture is part of myself--I have ever been too

sensible of the labyrinthian path to eminence in Art (judging from

Poetry) ever to think I understood the emphasis of painting. The

innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between

the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that

trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of beauty. I know not

your many havens of intenseness--nor ever can know them: but for this

I hope nought you achieve is lost upon me: for when a Schoolboy the

abstract idea I had of an heroic painting--was what I cannot describe.

I saw it somewhat sideways, large, prominent, round, and colour'd with

magnificence--somewhat like the feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra.

Or of Alcibiades leaning on his Crimson Couch in his Galley, his broad

shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the Sea.

With Hunt also, in spite of the momentary causes of annoyance we have

seen, Keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds his

intimacy grew daily closer. At Hunt's he again saw something of Shelley.

'The Wednesday before last Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on

the river Nile,' he tells his brothers on the 16th of February, 1818.

The sonnets are preserved. They were to be written, it was agreed, in a

quarter of an hour. Shelley and Keats were up to time, but Hunt had to

sit up half the night to finish his. It was worth the pains, and with it

for once the small poet outdid the two great. 'I have been writing,'

continues Keats, 'at intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be

at Teignmouth to read them over to you.' With the help of his

manuscripts or of the transcripts made from them by his friends, it is

possible to retrace the actual order of many of these fugitive pieces.

On the 16th of January was written the sonnet on Mrs Reynolds's cat,

perhaps Keats's best thing in the humorous vein; on the 21st, after

seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's,

the address to that poet beginning 'Chief of organic numbers!' which he

sends to the prime Milton enthusiast among his friends, Benjamin Bailey,

with the comment, 'This I did at Hunt's, at his request,--perhaps I

should have done something better alone and at home.' The first two

lines,--

Chief of organic numbers,

Old scholar of the spheres!

read like an anticipation in the rough of the first stanza of Tennyson's

masterly set of alcaics already referred to, beginning 'O mighty-mouthed

inventor of harmonies.' To the 22nd belongs the sonnet, 'O golden

tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which Keats bids himself lay aside

(apparently) his Spenser,[5] in order to read again the more rousing and

human-passionate pages of _Lear_. This is one of the last of his sonnets

written in the Petrarchan form as followed by Milton and Wordsworth, and

from henceforth he follows the Shakespearean form almost exclusively. On

the 31st he writes to Reynolds in a rollicking mood, and sends him the

lines to Apollo beginning 'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' part rant

(the word is his own) pure and simple, part rant touched with genius,

and giving words to a very frequent and intense phase of feeling in

himself:--

Aye, when the soul is fled

Too high above our head,

Affrighted do we gaze

After its airy maze,

As doth a mother wild,

When her young infant child

Is in an eagle's claws--

And is not this the cause

Of madness?--God of Song,

Thou bearest me along

Through, sights I scarce can bear:

O let me, let me share

With the hot lyre and thee,

The staid Philosophy.

Temper my lonely hours,

And let me see thy bowers

More unalarm'd!

By way of a sober conclusion to the same letter, he adds the very fine

and profoundly felt sonnet in the Shakespearean form beginning 'When I

have fears that I may cease to be,' which be calls his last. On the 3rd

of February he sends two spirited sets of verses in the favourite

four-beat measure, heptasyllable varied with octosyllable, of the later

Elizabethans and the youthful Milton, namely those to Robin Hood

(suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest) and those

on the Mermaid Tavern. On the 4th comes another Shakespearean sonnet,

that beginning 'Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in

which he recalls the memory of an old, persistent, haunting love-fancy.

The two sonnets of January 31 and February 4 should be read strictly

together:--

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,

Hold like full garners the full-ripen'd grain;

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Time's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb;

Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand;

Since I was tangled in thy beauty's web,

And snared by the ungloving of thine hand.

And yet I never look on midnight sky,

But I behold thine eyes' well memoried light;

I cannot look upon the rose's dye,

But to thy cheek my soul doth take its flight;

I cannot look on any budding flower,

But my fond ear, in fancy at thy lips,

And hearkening for a love-sound, doth devour

Its sweets in the wrong sense:--Thou dost eclipse

Every delight with sweet remembering,

And grief unto my darling joys dost bring.

The former is far the richer in contents, and in the light of the

tragedy to come its two first quatrains now seem to thrill with

prophetic meaning. But what is singular is that in the third quatrain

should be recalled, in the same high strain of emotion, the vision of a

beauty seen but not even accosted three-and-a-half years earlier (not

really five) in the public gardens at Vauxhall, and then (August, 1814)

addressed in what are almost the earliest of Keats's dated verses, those

in which he calls for a 'brimming bowl,'--

From my despairing heart to charm

The Image of the fairest form

That e'er my reveling eyes beheld,

That e'er my wandering fancy spell'd....[6]

Such, Woodhouse assures us, is the case, and the same memory fills the

second sonnet: but this it might be possible to take rather as a fine

Shakespearean exercise than as an expression of profound feeling. On the

5th, Keats sends another sonnet postponing compliance for the present

with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's to compose something in honour, or in

emulation, of Spenser; and on the 8th, the sonnet in praise of the

colour blue composed by way of protest against one of Reynolds

preferring black, at least in the colouring of feminine eyes. About the

same time he agreed with Reynolds that they should each write some

metrical tales from Boccaccio, and publish them in a joint volume; and

began at once for his own part with the first few stanzas of _Isabella_

or the _Pot of Basil_. A little later in this so prolific month of

February we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird,

and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the

influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly

in a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of

mind, translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of

subtle and haunting cadence, in which, disowning for the nonce his

habitual doctrine of the poet's paramount need of knowledge, he makes

the thrush say,

O fret not after knowledge--I have none,

And yet my song comes native with the warmth,

O fret not after knowledge--I have none,

And yet the evening listens.

In the course of the next fortnight we find him in correspondence with

Taylor about the corrections to _Endymion_; and soon afterwards making a

clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing to flit. His

brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at Teignmouth since

December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a scheme of marriage

and emigration; and Tom's health having made a momentary rally, Keats

was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and determined to join

him there. He started in the second week of March, and stayed almost two

months. It was an unlucky season for weather,--the soft-buffeting sheets

and misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing themselves wave on wave, in

the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, throughout almost

the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more than occasional

tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the scenery, the

walks, and flowers. His letters are full of whimsical objurgations not

only against the climate, but against the male inhabitants, whose fibre

he chooses to conceive relaxed by it:--

You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a

splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod

county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em--the

primroses are out, but then you are in--the Cliffs are of a fine deep

colour, but then the Clouds are continually vieing with them--the

women like your London people in a sort of negative way--because the

native men are the poorest creatures in England--because Government

never have thought it worth while to send a recruiting party among

them. When I think of Wordsworth's Sonnet, 'Vanguard of Liberty! ye

men of Kent!' the degenerated race about me are Pulvis ipecac.

simplex--a strong dose. Were I a corsair, I'd make a descent on the

south coast of Devon; if I did not run the chance of having Cowardice

imputed to me. As for the men, they'd run away into the Methodist

meeting-houses, and the women would be glad of it.... Such a quelling

Power have these thoughts over me that I fancy the very air of a

deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, all precocious, have an

Acrasian spell about them--I feel able to beat off the Devonshire

waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the honour of Britain that

Julius Caesar did not first land in this County. A Devonshirer

standing on his native hills is not a distinct object--he does not

show against the light--a wolf or two would dispossess him.

A man of west-country descent should have known better. Why did not the

ghost of William Browne of Tavistock arise and check Keats's hand, and

recite for his rebuke the burst in praise of Devon from _Britannia's

Pastorals_, with its happy echo of the Virgilian _Salve magna parens_

and _Haec genus acre virum_?--

Hail thou my native soil: thou blessed plot

Whose equal all the world affordeth not!

Shew me who can so many christall rills,

Such sweet-clothed vallies, or aspiring hills,

Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines,

Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines:

And if the earth can shew the like again;

Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men.

Time never can produce men to o'er-take

The fames of Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake,

Or worthy Hawkins or of thousands more

That by their power made the Devonian shore

Mock the proud Tagus.

Of the Devonshire girls Keats thought better than of their menkind, and

writes and rimes on them with a certain skittishness of admiration. With

one local family, a Mrs Jeffrey and her daughters, he and his brothers

were on terms of warm friendship, as is shown by his correspondence with

them a year later. One of the daughters married afterwards a Mr Prowse,

and published two volumes of very tolerable sentimental verse: some of

their contents, as interpreted (says Mr Buxton Forman) by Teignmouth

tradition, would indicate that her heart had been very deeply touched by

the young poet during his stay: but of responsive feelings on his own

part his letters give no hint, and it was only a few weeks later that he

wrote how his love for his brothers had hitherto stifled any impression

that a woman might have made on him.

Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering the invalid

Tom, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during

these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of

_Endymion_. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he

had begun at Hampstead, the whole of _Isabella_ or _The Pot of Basil_,

the first of his longer poems written with real maturity of art and

certainty of touch. At the same time, no doubt with his great intended

effort, _Hyperion_, in mind, he was studying and appreciating Milton as

he had never done before. He had been steeped since boyhood in the charm

of the minor poems, from the _Vacation Exercise_ to _Lycidas_, and had

read but not greatly cared for _Paradise Lost_, until first Severn, and

then more energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to

him: and he now threw himself upon that poem, and penetrated with the

grasp and swiftness of genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the

very essence of its power and beauty. His correspondence with his

friends, particularly Bailey and Reynolds, is during this same time

unusually sustained and full. Sometimes his vein is light and titterly

(to use a word of his own) as I have indicated, and sometimes he masks

an anxious heart beneath a lively manner, as thus:--

But ah Coward! to talk at this rate to a sick man, or, I hope, to one

that was sick--for I hope by this you stand on your right foot. If you

are not--that's all,--I intend to cut all sick people if they do not

make up their minds to cut Sickness--a fellow to whom I have a

complete aversion, and who strange to say is harboured and

countenanced in several houses where I visit--he is sitting now quite

impudent between me and Tom--he insults me at poor Jem Rice's--and you

have seated him before now between us at the Theatre, when I thought

he looked with a longing eye at poor Kean. I shall say, once for all,

to my friends, generally and severally, cut that fellow, or I cut you.

On another day he recurs to the mood of half real half mock impatience

against those who rub the bloom off things of beauty by over-commenting

and over-interpreting them, a mood natural to a spirit dwelling so

habitually and intuitively at the heart of beauty as his:--

It has as yet been a Mystery to me how and where Wordsworth went. I

can't help thinking he has returned to his Shell--with his beautiful

Wife and his enchanting Sister. It is a great Pity that People should

by associating themselves with the finest things, spoil them. Hunt has

damned Hampstead and masks and sonnets and Italian tales. Wordsworth

has damned the lakes. Milman has damned the old drama--West has damned

wholesale. Peacock has damned satire--Ollier has damn'd Music--Hazlitt

has damned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the Man? he

is your only good damner, and if ever I am damn'd--damn me if I

shouldn't like him to damn me.

Once, writing to Reynolds, he resumes his habit of a year and a half

earlier, and casts his fancies and reflections into rime. Beginning

playfully, he tells of an odd jumble of incongruous images that had

crossed his brain, a kind of experience expressed by him elsewhere in

various strains of verse, _e.g._ the finished poem _Fancy_ and the

careless lines beginning 'Welcome Joy, and welcome Sorrow.' He supposes

that some people are not subject to such freaks of the mind's eye, but

have it consistently haunted by fine things such as he next proceeds to

conjure up from memory,--

Some Titian colours touch'd into real life,--

The sacrifice goes on; the pontiff knife

Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows,

The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows;

A white sail shows above the green-head cliff,

Moves round the point, and throws her anchor stiff;

The mariners join hymn with those on land.

There exists no such picture of a sacrifice by Titian, and what Keats

was thinking of, I feel sure, was the noble 'Sacrifice to Apollo' by

Claude from the Leigh Court collection, which he had seen at the British

Institution in 1816 (hung, as it happened, next to Titian's Europa from

Cobham Hall), and which evidently worked deeply on his mind. To memory

of it is probably due that magic vision of a little town emptied of its

folk on a morning of sacrifice, which he evoked a year later in the ode

on a Grecian Urn. It shows to the right an altar in front of a temple of

Apollo, and about the altar a group including king and priest and a

young man holding down a victim ox by the horns; people with baskets and

offerings coming up from behind the temple; and to the left tall trees

with a priest leading in another victim by the horns, and a woman with a

jar bringing in libation; a little back, two herdsmen with their goats;

a river spanned by a bridge and winding towards a sea-bay partly

encircled by mountains which close the view, and on the edge of the bay

the tower and roofs of a little town indistinctly seen. Recollection of

this Claude leads Keats on quickly to that of another, the famous

'Enchanted Castle,' which he partly mixes up with it, and partly

transforms by fantasy into something quite different from what it really

is. He forgets the one human figure in the foreground, describes figures

and features of the landscape which are not there, and remembering that

the architecture combines ancient Roman with mediaeval castellated and

later Palladian elements, invents for it far-fetched origins and

associations which in a more careless fashion almost remind one of those

invented by Pope for his Temple of Fame. (A year later, all this

effervescence of the imagination about the picture had subsided, and

the distilled and concentrated essence of its romance was expressed--so

at least I conceive--in the famous 'magic casement' phrase at the end of

the Nightingale ode).[7]

[Illustration: PL. VI

A SACRIFICE TO APOLLO

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY VIVARES AND WOOLLETT AFTER CLAUDE]

From this play of fancy about two half-remembered pictures Keats turns

suddenly to reflections, which he would like to banish but cannot, on

the 'eternal fierce destruction' which is part of nature's law:--

But I saw too distinct into the core

Of an eternal fierce destruction,

And so from happiness I far was gone.

Still am I sick of it, and tho', to-day,

I've gathered young spring-leaves, and flowers gay

Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,

Still do I that most fierce destruction see,

The Shark at savage prey,--the Hawk at pounce,--

The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,

Ravening a worm,--Away, ye horrid moods!

Moods of one's mind!

The letters of this date should be read and re-read by all who want to

get to the centre of Keats's mind or to hold a key to the understanding

of his deepest poetry. The richest of them all is that in which he sends

the fragments of an ode to Maia written on May day with the (alas!

unfulfilled) promise to finish it 'in good time.' The same letter

contains the re-assertion of a purpose declared in a letter of a week

before to Mr Taylor in the phrases, 'I find I can have no enjoyment in

the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no

worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world.... There is

but one way for me. The road lies through application, study and

thought. I will pursue it.' The mood of the verses interpreting the song

of the thrush a few weeks earlier has passed, the reader will note,

clean out of the poet's mind. To Reynolds his words are:--

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people--it takes away

the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the

Burden of the Mystery, a thing which I begin to understand a little,

and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in

your letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without

knowledge appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling

continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again,

without wings, and with all [the] horror of a bare-shouldered

creature--in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go

through the same air and space without fear.

Let it never be forgotten that 'sensations' contrasted with 'thoughts'

mean for Keats not pleasures and experiences of the senses as opposed to

those of the mind, but direct intuitions of the imagination as opposed

to deliberate processes of the understanding; and that by 'philosophy'

he does not mean metaphysics but knowledge and the fruits of reading

generally.

The same letter, again, contains an interesting meditation on the

relative qualities of genius in Milton and Wordsworth as affected by the

relative stages of history at which they lived, and on the further

question whether Wordsworth was a greater or less poet than Milton by

virtue of being more taken up with human passions and problems. This

speculation leads on to one of Keats's finest passages of life-wisdom:--

And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether

Milton's apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing

further or not than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth

epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region

of his song. In regard to his genius alone--we find what he says true

as far as we have experienced and we can judge no further but by

larger experience--for axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they

are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel them

to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.--I know

this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when I say that

now I shall relish _Hamlet_ more than I have ever done--Or,

better--you are sensible no man can set down Venery as a bestial or

joyless thing until he is sick of it, and therefore all philosophising

on it would be mere wording. Until we are sick, we understand not; in

fine, as Byron says, 'Knowledge is sorrow'; and I go on to say that

'Sorrow is wisdom'--and further for aught we can know for certainty

'Wisdom is folly.'

[Illustration: PL. VII

THE ENCHANTED CASTLE

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY VIVARES AND WOOLLETT AFTER CLAUDE]

Presently follows the famous chain of images by which Keats, searching

and probing for himself along pathways of the spirit parallel to those

followed by Wordsworth in the _Lines composed a few miles above Tintern

Abbey_, renders account to himself of the stage of development to which

his mind has now reached:--

Well--I compare human life to a large Mansion of many apartments, two

of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut

upon me. The first we step into we call the Infant, or Thoughtless

Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think. We remain

there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second

Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to

hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the

awakening of the thinking principle within us--we no sooner get into

the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought,

than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see

nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in

delight. However among the effects this breathing is father of is that

tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of

Man--of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of Misery and

Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness, and oppression--whereby this Chamber of

Maiden Thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on

all sides of it, many doors are set open--but all dark--all leading to

dark passages. We see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a

mist, _we_ are now in that state, we feel the 'Burden of the Mystery.'

To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he

wrote _Tintern Abbey_, and it seems to me that his genius is

explorative of those dark Passages. Now if we live, and go on

thinking, we too shall explore them.

Here is a typical case of the method of evocation as against the method

of exposition. Wordsworth's lines are written with a high, almost an

inspired, power of describing and putting into direct words the

successive moods of a spirit gradually ripening and deepening in the

power of communion with nature, and through nature, with all life. But

Keats, fully as he has pondered them, cannot be satisfied that they fit

his own case until he has called up the history of his similar

experiences in the form natural to him, the form, that is, of concrete

similitudes or visions of the imagination--the Thoughtless Chamber, the

Chamber of Maiden Thought with its gradual darkening and its many

outlets standing open to be explored. It is significant that such

visions should still be of architecture, of halls and chambers in an

imagined mysterious building.

Apart from his growing sense of the darker sides of human existence and

of the mysteries of good and evil, Keats was suffering at this time from

the pain of a family break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his

mind to emigrate to America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as

he could get possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push

his own fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's part was the

desire to be in a position as quickly as possible to help or if need be

support, his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long

been attached, Miss Georgiana Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was

settled that they were to be married and sail early in the summer. Some

of Keats's letters during the last weeks of his stay at Teignmouth are

taken up with his plans for the time immediately following this change.

He wavered for a while between two incompatible purposes. One was to go

for a summer's walking tour through Scotland with Charles Brown. 'I have

many reasons,' he writes to Reynolds, 'for going wonder-ways; to make my

winter chair free from spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape

disquisitions on poetry, and Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion

and economize shoe-leather.' (How 'economize,' one wonders?) 'I'll have

leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, "over the hills we

go." If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in

turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.' Here we

find Keats in his turn caught by the romance of wild lands and of travel

which had in various ways been so much of an inspiration to Byron and

Shelley before him. A fortnight later we find him inclining to give up

this purpose under an overmastering sense of the inadequacy of his own

attainments, and of the necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more

knowledge, to sustain the flight of poetry.

The habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most

natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so

in Keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in

his strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested

friend might judge. He is inclined, when not on the defensive against

what he felt to be foolish criticism, to under-rate rather than to

overrate his own work, and in his correspondence of the previous year we

have found him perfectly aware that in writing _Endymion_ he has rather

been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than producing a sound

or satisfying work of poetry. And when the time comes to write a preface

to the poem, he in a first draft makes confession to the public of his

'non-opinion of himself' in terms both a little too intimate and too

fidgeting and uneasy. Reynolds seeing the draft at once recognised that

it would not do, and in criticizing it to Keats seems to have told him

that it was too much in the manner of Leigh Hunt. In deference to his

judgment Keats at once abandoned it, and a second attempt says briefly,

with perfect dignity and taste, all that can justly be said in dispraise

of his work. He warns the reader to expect 'great inexperience,

immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a

deed accomplished,' and adds most unboastfully:--'it is just that this

youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope

that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for

verses fit to live.'

Keats and Tom, the latter for the moment easier in health, were back at

Hampstead in the last week of May, in time for the marriage of their

brother George with Miss Georgiana Wylie. This was the young lady to

whom Keats had rimed a valentine for his brother two years earlier (the

lines beginning 'Hadst thou liv'd in days of old') and to whom he had

also on his own account addressed the charming sonnet, 'Nymph of the

downward smile and sidelong glance.' With no other woman or girl friend

was he ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy. The wedding took

place 'a week ago,' writes Keats on June 4, and about the same date, in

order that he may not miss seeing as much of the young couple as

possible before their departure, he declines a warm invitation from

Bailey to visit him again at Oxford. Writing, as usual to this

correspondent, with absolute openness, Keats shows that he is suffering

from one of his moods of overmastering depression. First it takes the

form of apathy. Bailey had written eagerly and judiciously in praise of

_Endymion_ in the _Oxford Herald_. Keats replies on June 1:--

My intellect must be in a degenerating state--it must be--for when I

should be writing about--God knows what--I am troubling you with moods

of my own mind, or rather body, for mind there is none. I am in that

temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come up to

the top--I know very well 'tis all nonsense. In a short time I hope I

shall be in a temper to feel sensibly your mention of my book. In vain

have I waited till Monday to have any Interest in that, or anything

else. I feel no spur at my Brother's going to America, and am almost

stony-hearted about his wedding. All this will blow over. All I am

sorry for is having to write to you in such a time--but I cannot force

my letters in a hotbed. I could not feel comfortable in making

sentences for you.

Nine days later the mood has deepened to one of positive despondency,

but it is the despondency of a great and generous spirit:--

Were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation--on

account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. I should not

by right speak in this tone to you for it is an incendiary spirit that

would do so. Yet I am not old enough or magnanimous enough to

annihilate self--and it would perhaps be paying you an ill compliment.

I was in hopes some little time back to be able to relieve your

dulness by my spirits--to point out things in the world worth your

enjoyment--and now I am never alone without rejoicing that there is

such a thing as death--without placing my ultimate in the glory of

dying for a great human purpose. Perhaps if my affairs were in a

different state, I should not have written the above--you shall judge:

I have two brothers; one is driven, by The 'burden of Society,' to

America; the other, with an exquisite love of life, is in a lingering

state. My love for my Brothers, from the early loss of our parents,

and even from earlier misfortunes, has grown into an affection

'passing the love of women.' I have been ill-tempered with them--I

have vexed them--but the thought of them has always stifled the

impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon me. I have a

sister too, and may not follow them either to America or to the grave.

Life must be undergone, and I certainly derive some consolation from

the thought of writing one or two more poems before it ceases.

Meanwhile his fluctuations of purpose between a plunge into a life of

solitude and study and an excursion in Brown's company to Scotland had

been decided in favour of the Scottish tour. George and his bride having

to set out for Liverpool on June 22, it was arranged that Keats and

Brown should accompany them so far on their way to the north. The coach

started from the Swan and two Necks in Lad Lane, and on the first day

stopped for dinner at Redbourne near St Albans, where Keats's friend of

medical student days, Mr Stephens, was in practice. He came to shake

hands with the travelling party at the poet's request, and many years

afterwards wrote an account of the interview, the chief point of which

is a description of Mrs George Keats. 'Rather short, not what might be

called strictly handsome, but looked like a being whom any man of

moderate sensibility might easily love. She had the imaginative poetical

cast. Somewhat singular and girlish in her attire.... There was

something original about her, and John seemed to regard her as a being

whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her with evident

satisfaction.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cary's Dante: _Inferno_, iv, 126.

[2] _Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson_, as quoted by W. Knight, _Life of

Wordsworth_, ii. 228-9.

[3] C.C. Clarke, _Recollections of Writers_, pp. 149-50.

[4] Hazlitt, _The Spirit of the Age_: Collected Works, iv, 276.

[5] Woodhouse suggests that the romance which he lays aside is his

own _Endymion_, meaning his task of seeing it through the press: but

this must surely be a mistake.

[6] Woodhouse Transcripts (Poetry II) in Crewe MS. These verses are

only to be found in the latest editions of Keats. They are not good,

but interesting as containing in embryo ideas which afterwards grew

into great poetry in the nightingale ode, the first book of

_Endymion_, and the _Ode to Melancholy_.

[7] The 'Enchanted Castle,' which Keats explicitly names, belonged at

this date to Mr Wells of Redleaf, and was not exhibited until 1819,

so that he probably knew it only through the engraving by Vivares and

Woollett.

CHAPTER IX

JUNE-AUGUST 1818: THE SCOTTISH TOUR

First sight of Windermere--Ambleside, Rydal, Keswick--Attitude towards

scenery--Ascent of Skiddaw--A country dancing-school--Dumfries--The

Galloway coast--Meg Merrilies--Flying visit to Belfast--Contrasts and

reflections--The Duchess of Dunghill--The Ayrshire coast--In Burns's

cottage--Lines on his pilgrimage--Through Glasgow to Loch Lomond--A

confession--Loch Awe to the coast--Hardships--Kerre a and

Mull--Staffa--A sea cathedral--Ben Nevis--Tour cut short--Return to

Hampstead.

The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went on by coach to

Lancaster, thence to begin their tour on foot. Keats took for his

reading one book only, the miniature three-volume edition of Cary's

Dante. Brown, it would appear, carried a pocket Milton. They found the

town of Lancaster in an uproar with the preparations for a contested

election and were glad to leave it. Rising at four in the morning (June

25th) to make a start before breakfast, they were detained by a

downpour, during which Brown preached patience from _Samson Agonistes_;

at seven they set out in a still dripping mist; breakfasted at

Bolton-le-Sands; stopped to dine at the village of Burton-in-Kendal, and

found the inns crowded, to their hosts' distraction, with soldiers

summoned by the Lowther interest to keep order at the election. This was

the famous contest where Brougham had the effrontery, as his opponents

considered it, to go down and challenge for the first time the power of

that great family in their own country. The same state of things

prevailed farther down the road. Hearing that they could not hope to

find a bed at Kendal, they slept in a mean roadside inn at End Moor,

taking interested note of a sad old dog of a drunkard, fallen from

better days, whom they found there; and the next morning walked on,

passing Kendal on their way, as far as Bowness on Windermere. As they

dropped down the hill and came in sight of the lake the weather yielded

fine effects of clearance after rain; and Brown, in the account compiled

twenty years later from his diaries written at the time,[1] expatiates

in full romantic vein on the joy and amazement with which Keats and he

drank in the beauties of the varied and shifting scene before them:--

On the next morning, after reaching Kendal, we had our first really

joyous walk of nine miles towards the lake of Windermere. The country

was mild and romantic, the weather fine, though not sunny, while the

fresh mountain air, and many larks about us, gave us unbounded

delight. As we approached the lake the scenery became more and more

grand and beautiful, and from time to time we stayed our steps, gazing

intently on it. Hitherto, Keats had witnessed nothing superior to

Devonshire; but, beautiful as that is, he was now tempted to speak of

it with indifference. At the first turn from the road, before

descending to the hamlet of Bowness, we both simultaneously came to a

full stop. The lake lay before us. His bright eyes darted on a

mountain-peak, beneath which was gently floating on a silver cloud;

thence to a very small island, adorned with the foliage of trees, that

lay beneath us, and surrounded by water of ? glorious hue, when he

exclaimed--'How can I believe in that a--surely it cannot be!' He

warmly asserted that no view in the world could equal this--that it

must beat all Italy--yet, having moved onward but a hundred

yards--catching the further extremity of the lake, he thought it 'more

and more wonderfully beautiful!' The trees far and near, the grass

immediately around us, the fern and the furze in their most luxuriant

growth, all added to the charm. Not a mist, but an imperceptible

vapour bestowed a mellow, softened tint over the immense mountains on

the opposite side and at the further end of the lake.

After a bathe and a midday meal at Bowness the friends walked on with

ever increasing delight to Ambleside. Spending the night there they

scrambled about the neighbouring waterfalls, and endured as patiently as

they could the advances of a youth lately from Oxford, touring knapsack

on back like themselves but painfully bent on showing himself off for a

scholar and buck about town, airing his pedigree and connexions while

affecting to make light of them. The next day they went on by Grasmere

to Rydal, where they paused that Keats might call and pay his respects

to Wordsworth. But the poet was away at Lowther Castle electioneering

(he had been exerting himself vigorously in the Tory and Lowther

interest since the spring in prospect of this contest). Complete want of

sympathy with the cause of his absence made Keats's disappointment the

keener; and finding none of the family at home he could do no more than

leave a note of regret. The same afternoon the travellers reached the

hamlet of Wythburn and slept there as well as fleas would allow,

intending to climb Helvellyn the next morning. Heavy rain interfering,

they pursued their way by Thirlmere to Keswick, made the circuit of

Derwentwater, visited the Druids' Circle and the Falls of Lodore, and

set out at four the next morning to climb Skiddaw. A cloud-cap settling

down compelled them to stop a little short of the summit, and they

resumed their tramp by Bassenthwaite into the relatively commonplace

country lying between the lakes and Carlisle, making their next night's

resting-place at the old market town of Ireby.

I have shown by a specimen how Brown, working from his diaries of the

tour, expatiates on his and his companion's enthusiasm over the romantic

scenes they visited. Keats in his own letters says comparatively little

about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, not at all with

the descriptive enthusiasm of the picturesque tourist: hardly indeed

with so much of that quality as the sedate and fastidious Gray had shown

in his itineraries fifty years before. Partly, no doubt, a certain

instinctive reticence, a restraining touch of the Greek [Greek: aidios],

keeps him from fluent words on the beauties that most deeply moved him:

his way rather is to let them work silently in his being until at the

right moment, if the right moment comes, their essence and vital power

shall distil themselves for him into a phrase of poetry. Partly, also,

the truth is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like

his hardly needs the stimulus of nature's beauties for long or at their

highest power, but on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply

for itself spirit sunsets, and glories of dream lake and mountain,

richer and more varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery can

witness and register in memory during a lifetime of travel and pursuit.

In this respect Keats's letters written on his northern tour seem more

essentially the letters of a poet than Shelley's from Switzerland and

Italy. Shelley pours out long, set, detailed descriptions, written as

any cultivated and enthusiastic observer visiting such scenes for the

first time might write, only with more beauty and resource of language,

rather than as one made by imagination a born partner and co-creator

with nature herself, free by birthright of her glories and knowing them

all, as it were, beforehand. Keats's way of telling about his travels is

quite familiar and unstrained. Here is a paragraph from his first letter

to his brother Tom, written at Keswick after walking round Derwentwater

and climbing Skiddaw:--

I had an easy climb among the streams, about the fragments of Rocks,

and should have got I think to the summit, but unfortunately I was

damped by slipping one leg into a squashy hole. There is no great body

of water, but the accompaniment is delightful; for it oozes out from a

cleft in perpendicular Rocks, all fledged with ash and other beautiful

trees. It is a strange thing how they got there. At the south end of

the Lake the Mountains of Borrowdale are perhaps as fine as anything

we have seen. On our return from this circuit, we ordered dinner, and

set forth about a mile and a half on the Penrith road, to see the

Druid temple. We had a fag up hill, rather too near dinner-time, which

was rendered void by the gratification of seeing those aged stones on

a gentle rise in the midst of the Mountains, which at that time

darkened all around, except at the fresh opening of the Vale of St.

John. We went to bed rather fatigued, but not so much so as to hinder

us getting up this morning to mount Skiddaw. It promised all along to

be fair, and we had fagged and tugged nearly to the top, when, at

half-past six, there came a Mist upon us, and shut out the view. We

did not, however, lose anything by it: we were high enough without

mist to see the coast of Scotland--the Irish Sea--the hills beyond

Lancaster--and nearly all the large ones of Cumberland and

Westmoreland, particularly Helvelleyn and Scawfell. It grew colder and

colder as we ascended, and we were glad, at about three parts of the

way, to taste a little rum which the Guide brought with him, mixed,

mind ye, with Mountain water. I took two glasses going and one

returning. It is about six miles from where I am writing to the top.

So we have walked ten miles before Breakfast to-day. We went up with

two others, very good sort of fellows. All felt, on arising into the

cold air, that same elevation which a cold bath gives one--I felt as

if I were going to a Tournament.

For an instant only, the poet in Keats speaks vividly in the tournament

touch; and farther back, illustrating what I have said about his

instinct for distillation rather than description, will be found the

germs of two famous passages in his later verse, the 'dark-clustered

trees' that

Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep

in the _Ode to Psyche_, and the lines in _Hyperion_ about the

dismal cirque

Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor

When the chill rain begins at shut of eve,

In dull November, and their chancel vault,

The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.

A change, it should be added, was coming over Keats's thoughts and

feelings whereby natural scenery in general was beginning to interest

him less and his fellow creatures more. In the acuteness of childish and

boyish sensation, among the suburban fields or on seaside holidays, he

had instinctively, as if by actual partnership with and self-absorption

into nature, gained enough delighted knowledge of her ways and doings

for his faculties to work on through a lifetime of poetry; and now, in

his second chamber of Maiden-thought, the appeal of nature, even at its

most thrilling, yields in his mind to that of humanity. 'Scenery is

fine,' he had already written from Devonshire in the spring, 'but human

nature is finer.' So far as concerns shrewd and interested observation

of human types encountered by the way, he had a sympathetic companion in

Brown, whose diary sets effectively before us alike the sodden,

wheedling old toper, staggering with hanging arms like a bear on its

hind feet, in the inn at End Moor, and the vulgar, uneasy gentlemanhood

of the flash Oxford man at Ambleside. Here is Brown's account of what

they saw at Ireby:--

It is a dull, beggarly looking place. Our inn was remarkably clean and

neat, and the old host and hostess were very civil and

prepossessing--but, heyday! what were those obstreperous doings

overhead? It was a dancing school under the tuition of a travelling

master! Folks here were as partial to dancing as their neighbours, the

Scotch; and every little farmer sent his young ones to take lessons.

We went upstairs to witness the skill of these rustic boys and

girls--fine, healthy, clean-dressed, and withal perfectly orderly, as

well as serious in their endeavours. We noticed some among them quite

handsome, but the attention of none was drawn aside to notice us. The

instant the fiddle struck up, the slouch in the gait was lost, the

feet moved, and gracefully, with complete conformity to the notes; and

they wove the figure, sometimes extremely complicated to my

inexperienced eyes, without an error, or the slightest pause. There

was no sauntering, half-asleep country dance among them; all were

inspired.

And here is the same scene as touched by Keats:--

We were greatly amused by a country dancing-school holden at the Tun,

it was indeed 'no new cotillon fresh from France.' No, they kickit and

jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and whiskit, and friskit, and toed

it and go'd it, and twirl'd it, and whirl'd it, and stamped it, and

sweated it, tattooing the floor like mad.[2] The difference between

our country dances and these Scottish figures is about the same as

leisurely stirring a cup o' Tea and beating up a batter-pudding. I

was extremely gratified to think that, if I had pleasures they knew

nothing of, they had also some into which I could not possibly enter.

I hope I shall not return without having got the Highland fling. There

was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw; some beautiful

faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of

Patriotism, the glory of making by any means a country happier. This

is what I like better than scenery.

From Ireby the friends walked by way of Wigton to Carlisle, arriving

there on the last day of June. From Carlisle they took coach to

Dumfries, having heard that the intervening country was not interesting:

neither did Keats much admire what he saw of it. Besides the familiar

beauties of the home counties of England, two ideals of landscape had

haunted and allured his imagination almost equally, that of the classic

south, harmonious and sunned and gay, and that of the shadowed, romantic

and adventurous north; and the Scottish border, with its bleak and

moorish rain-swept distances, its 'huddle of cold old grey hills' (the

phrase is Stevenson's) struck him somehow as answering to neither. 'I

know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem

anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish.'

So writes Keats from Dumfries, where they visited the tomb of Burns and

the ruins of Lincluden College, and where Keats expressed his sense of

foreignness and dreamlike discomfort in a sonnet interesting as the

record of a mood but of small merit poetically. Brown also, a Scotsman

from the outer Hebrides, as he believed, by descent, but by habit and

education purely English, felt himself at first an alien in the Scottish

Lowlands. On this stage of the walk they were both unpleasurably struck

by the laughterless gravity and cold greetings of the people, ('more

serious and solidly inanimated than necessary' Brown calls them) and by

the lack of anything like the English picturesque and gardened snugness

in villages and houses: Brown also by the barefoot habit of the girls

and women, but this Keats liked, expatiating to his friend on the beauty

of a lassie's natural uncramped foot and its colour against the grass.

From Dumfries they started on July 2 south-westward for Galloway, a

region not overmuch frequented even now, and then hardly at all, by

tourists: even Wordsworth on his several Scottish trips passed it by

unexplored. Our travellers broke the journey first at Dalbeattie: thence

on to Kirkcudbright, with a long morning pause for breakfast and

letter-writing by the wayside near Auchencairn. Approaching the

Kirkcudbrightshire coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its

embosomed inlets and rocky tufted headlands, its high craggy moors

towering inland, and its backward views over the glimmering Solway to

the Cumberland fells or the hazier hills of Man, they began to enjoy

themselves to the full. Brown bethought him that this was Guy

Mannering's country, and fell talking to Keats about Meg Merrilies.

Keats, who according to the fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for

Scott's poetry, and of the Waverley novels, at this time guessed but not

known to be Scott's, had read _The Antiquary_ (to which he whimsically

preferred Smollett's _Humphrey Clinker_) but not _Guy Mannering_, was

much struck by what he heard.

I enjoyed the recollection of the events [writes Brown] as I described

them in their own scenes. There was a little spot, close to our

pathway, where, without a shadow of doubt, old Meg Merrilies had often

boiled her kettle, and, haply, cooked a chicken. It was among

fragments of rock, and brambles, and broom, and most tastefully

ornamented with a profusion of honeysuckle, wild roses, and fox-glove,

all in the very blush and fullness of blossom. While finishing

breakfast, and both employed in writing, I could not avoid noticing

that Keats's letter was not running in regular prose. He told me he

was writing to his little sister, and giving a ballad on old Meg for

her amusement. Though he called it too much a trifle to be copied, I

soon inserted it in my journal. It struck me as a good description of

that mystic link between mortality and the weird sisters; and, at the

same time, in appropriate language to the person addressed.

Old Meg she was a Gipsy,

And liv'd upon the Moors:

Her bed it was the brown heath turf

And her house was out of doors.

Her apples were swart blackberries,

Her currants pods o' broom;

Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,

Her book a churchyard tomb.

Her Brothers were the craggy hills,

Her Sisters larchen trees--

Alone with her great family

She liv'd as she did please.

No breakfast had she many a morn,

No dinner many a noon,

And 'stead of supper she would stare

Full hard against the Moon.

But every morn of woodbine fresh

She made her garlanding,

And every night the dark glen Yew

She wove, and she would sing.

And with her fingers old and brown

She plaited Mats o' Rushes,

And gave them to the Cottagers

She met among the Bushes.

Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen

And tall as Amazon:

An old red blanket cloak she wore;

A chip hat had she on.

God rest her aged bones somewhere--

She died full long agone!

Keats had in this 'trifle,' using the ballad form for the first time,

handled it with faultless tact, and though leaving out the tragic

features of Scott's creation, had been able to evoke of his own an

instantaneous vision of her in vitally conceived spiritual relation with

her surroundings.[3] He copied the piece out in letters written in

pauses of their walk both to his young sister and to his brother Tom.

The letter to Fanny Keats is full of fun and nonsense, with a touch or

two which shows that he was fully sensitive to the charm of the

Galloway coast scenery. 'Since I scribbled the Meg Merrilies song we

have walked through a beautiful country to Kirkcudbright--at which place

I will write you a song about myself.' Then follows the set of gay

doggrel stanzas telling of various escapades of himself as a child and

since,--'There was a naughty boy;' and then the excuse for them,--'My

dear Fanny, I am ashamed of writing you such stuff, nor would I if it

were not for being tired after my day's walking, and ready to tumble

into bed so fatigued that when I am in bed you might sew my nose to my

great toe and trundle me round the town, like a Hoop, without waking

me.' It was his way on his tour, and indeed always, thus to keep by him

the letters he was writing and add scraps to them as the fancy took him.

The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote regularly and uniformly

in the evenings. 'He affronts my indolence and luxury,' says Keats, 'by

pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; secondly his pens; and

last, his ink. Now I would not care, if he would change a little. I say

now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But I might as well tell

a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead of afterwards.'

From Kirkcudbright they walked on July 5,--taking the beautiful coast

road from Gatehouse of Fleet and passing where Cairnsmore heaves a huge

heathered shoulder above the fertile farmlands of the Cree valley,--as

far as Newton Stewart: thence across the low-rolling Wigtownshire

country by Glenluce to Stranraer and Portpatrick. Here they took the

packet for Donaghadee on the opposite coast of Ireland, with the

intention of seeing the Giant's Causeway, but finding the distances and

expense much exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk

to Belfast, and crossed back again to Portpatrick on the third day. In a

letter to his brother Tom written during and immediately after this

excursion, Keats has some striking passages of human observation and

reflection. The change of spirit between one generation and another is

forcibly brought home to us when we think of Johnson, setting forth on

his Scottish tour forty-five years earlier with the study of men,

manners and social conditions in his mind as the one aim worthy of a

serious traveller, (he had spoken scoffingly, not long before, of the

'prodigious noble wild prospects' which Scotland, he understood, shared

with Lapland), yet forced now and again by the power of scenery to

break, as it were half ashamedly, into stiff but striking phrases of

descriptive admiration; and when now we find Keats, carried northward by

the romantic passion and fashion of a later day for nature and scenery,

compelled in his turn by his innate human instincts to forget the

landscape and observe and speculate upon problems of society and

economics and racial character:--

These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women; old

men, young men; old women, young women; boys, girls; and all infants

careful; so that they are formed into regular Phalanges of savers and

gainers. Such a thrifty army cannot fail to enrich their Country, and

give it a greater appearance of comfort than that of their poor rash

neighbourhood [meaning Ireland]. These Kirk-men have done Scotland

harm; they have banished puns, and laughing, and kissing, etc.,

(except in cases where the very danger and crime must make it very

gustful). I shall make a full stop at kissing, ... and go on to remind

you of the fate of Burns poor, unfortunate fellow! his disposition was

Southern! How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged, in

self-defence, to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity and in things

attainable, that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that

are not!... I have not sufficient reasoning faculty to settle the

doctrine of thrift, as it is consistent with the dignity of human

Society--with the happiness of Cottagers. All I can do is by plump

contrasts; were the fingers made to squeeze a guinea or a white

hand?--were the lips made to hold a pen or a kiss? and yet in Cities

man is shut out from his fellows if he is poor--the cottager must be

very dirty, and very wretched, if she be not thrifty--the present

state of society demands this, and this convinces me that the world is

very young, and in a very ignorant state. We live in a barbarous

age--I would sooner be a wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of

the Kirk; and I would sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a

poor Creature's penance before those execrable elders.

Here is an impression received in Ireland, followed by a promise, which

was fulfilled a few days later with remarkable shrewdness and insight,

of further considerations on the contrasts between the Irish character

and the Scottish:--

On our return from Belfast we met a sedan--the Duchess of Dunghill. It

was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you ever

saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a wretched

thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved from a

scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, with a

pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded

inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head: squat

and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two ragged, tattered

girls carried her along. What a thing would be a history of her life

and sensations; I shall endeavour when I have thought a little more,

to give you my idea of the difference between the Scotch and Irish.

From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking

along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald and Maybole (the same

walk that Stevenson took the reverse way in the winter of 1876) to Ayr.

Brown grows especially lyrical, and Keats more enthusiastic than usual,

over the beauty of the first day's walk from Stranraer by Cairn Ryan and

Glen App, with Ailsa Craig suddenly looming up through showers after

they topped the pass:--

When we left Cairn [writes Keats] our Road lay half way up the sides

of a green mountainous shore, full of clefts of verdure and eternally

varying--sometimes up sometimes down, and over little Bridges going

across green chasms of moss, rock and trees--winding about everywhere.

After two or three Miles of this we turned suddenly into a magnificent

glen finely wooded in Parts--seven Miles long--with a Mountain stream

winding down the Midst--full of cottages in the most happy

situations--the sides of the Hills covered with sheep--the effect of

cattle lowing I never had so finely. At the end we had a gradual

ascent and got among the tops of the Mountains whence in a little time

I descried in the Sea Ailsa Rock 940 feet high--it was 15 Miles

distant and seemed close upon us. The effect of Ailsa with the

peculiar perspective of the Sea in connection with the ground we stood

on, and the misty rain then falling gave me a complete Idea of a

deluge. Ailsa struck me very suddenly--really I was a little alarmed.

Less vivid than the above is the invocatory sonnet, apparently showing

acquaintance with the geological theory of volcanic upheaval, which

Keats was presently moved to address _To Ailsa Rock_. Coming down into

Ballantrae in blustering weather, the friends met a country wedding

party on horseback, and Keats tried a song about it in the Burns

dialect, for Brown to palm off on Dilke as an original: 'but it won't

do,' he rightly decides. From Maybole he writes to Reynolds with pleased

anticipation of the visit to be paid the next day to Burns's cottage.

'One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a

shrine as the cottage of Burns--we need not think of his misery--that is

all gone--bad luck to it--I shall look upon it all with unmixed

pleasure, as I do upon my Stratford-on-Avon day with Bailey.' On the

walk from Maybole to Ayr Keats has almost the only phrase which escapes

him during the whole tour to indicate a sense of special inspiring power

in mountain scenery for a poet:--'The approach to it [Ayr] is extremely

fine--quite outwent my expectations--richly meadowed, wooded, heathed,

and rivuleted--with a Grand Sea view terminated by the black mountains

of the Isle of Arran. As soon as I saw them so nearly I said to myself,

"How is it they did not beckon Burns to some grand attempt at an Epic."'

Nearing Kirk Alloway, Keats had been delighted to find the first home of

Burns in a landscape so charming. 'I endeavoured to drink in the

Prospect, that I might spin it out to you, as the Silkworm makes silk

from Mulberry leaves--I cannot recollect it.' But his anticipations were

deceived, the whole scene disenchanted, and thoughts of Burns's misery

forced on him in his own despite, by the presence and chatter of the man

in charge of the poet's birthplace:--

The Man at the Cottage was a great Bore with his Anecdotes--I hate the

rascal--his life consists in fuz, fuzzy, fuzziest. He drinks glasses

five for the Quarter and twelve for the hour--he is a mahogany-faced

old Jackass who knew Burns. He ought to have been kicked for having

spoken to him. He calls himself 'a curious old Bitch'--but he is a

flat old dog--I should like to employ Caliph Vathek to kick him. O the

flummery of a birthplace! Cant! cant! cant! It is enough to give a

spirit the guts-ache. Many a true word, they say, is spoken in

jest--this may be because his gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog

made me write a flat sonnet. My dear Reynolds--I cannot write about

scenery and visitings--Fancy is indeed less than a present palpable

reality, but it is greater than remembrance--you would lift your eyes

from _Homer_ only to see close before you the real Isle of

Tenedos--you would rather read _Homer_ afterwards than remember

yourself. One song of Burns's is of more worth to you than all I could

think for a whole year in his native country. His Misery is a dead

weight upon the nimbleness of one's quill--I tried to forget it--to

drink Toddy without any Care--to write a merry sonnet--it won't do--he

talked with Bitches--he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. We

can see horribly clear, in the works of such a Man his whole life, as

if we were God's spies.[4] What were his addresses to Jean in the

latter part of his life?

A little farther back Keats had written, 'my head is sometimes in such a

whirl in considering the million likings and antipathies of our Moments

that I can get into no settled strain in my Letters.' But their

straggling, careless tissue is threaded with such strands of genius and

fresh human wisdom that one often wonders whether they are not legacies

of this rare young spirit equally precious with the poems themselves.

Certainly their prose is better than most of the verse which he had

strength or leisure to write during this Scottish tour. As the two

friends tramped among the Highland mountains some days later Keats

composed with considerable pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the

lines beginning 'There is a charm in footing slow across a silent

plain,' intended to express the temper in which his pilgrimage through

and beyond the Burns country had been made. They are written in the

long iambic fourteeners of Chapman's _Iliad_, a metre not touched by

Keats elsewhere, and perhaps chosen to convey a sense of the sustained

continuous trudge of his wayfaring. They are very interesting as an

attempt to capture and fix in words certain singular, fluctuating

intensities of the poet's mood--the pressure of a great and tragic

memory absorbing his whole consciousness and deadening all sense of

outward things as he nears the place of pilgrimage--and afterwards his

momentary panic lest the spell of mighty scenery and associations may be

too overpowering and drag his soul adrift from its moorings of every-day

habit and affection--from the ties of 'the sweet and bitter world'--'of

Brother's eyes, of Sister's brow.' In some of the lines expressing these

obscure disturbances of the soul there is a deep smouldering fire, but

hardly ever that touch of absolute felicity which is the note of Keats's

work when he is quite himself. The best, technically speaking, are those

which tell of the pilgrim's absorbed mood of expectant approach to his

goal:--

Light heather-bells may tremble then but they are far away;

Wood-lark may sing from sandy fern,--the Sun may hear his lay;

Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear,

But their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear;

Blood-red the Sun may set behind black mountain peaks;

Blue tides may sluice and drench their time in caves and weedy creeks;

Eagles may seem to sleep wing-wide upon the air;

Ring-doves may fly convuls'd across to some high-cedar'd lair;

But the forgotten eye is still fast lidded to the ground,

As Palmer's, that with weariness, mid-desert shrine hath found.

At such a time the soul's a child, in childhood is the brain;

Forgotten is the worldly heart--alone, it beats in vain.--[5]

Keats makes it clear that he did not write these lines until some days

after he had left Burns's country and was well on into the heart of the

Highlands, and we get what reads like the prose of some of them in a

letter written to Tom on the last stage of his walk before reaching

Oban. Meantime the friends had passed through Glasgow, of which they had

nothing to say except that they were taken, not for the first time, for

pedlars by reason of their knapsacks, and Brown in particular for a

spectacle-seller by reason of his glasses, and that the whole population

seemed to have turned out to stare at them. A drunken man in the street,

accosting Keats with true Glaswegian lack of ceremony, vowed he had seen

all kinds of foreigners but never the like o' _him_: a remark perhaps

not to be wondered at when we recall Mrs Dilke's description of Keats's

appearance when he came home (see the end of this chapter) and Brown's

account of his own weird toggery as follows:--'a thick stick in my hand,

the knapsack on my back, "with spectacles on nose," a white hat, a

tartan coat and trousers and a Highland plaid thrown over my shoulders.'

From Glasgow they walked by Dumbarton through the Loch Lomond country,

round the head of Loch Fyne to Inverary, thence down the side and round

the south-west end of Loch Awe and so past the head of Loch Craignish to

the coast. At his approach to the lower end of Loch Lomond Keats had

thought the scene 'precious good;' but his sense of romance was

disturbed by finding it so frequented. 'Steamboats on Loch Lomond and

Barouches on its sides take a little from the pleasure of such romantic

chaps as Brown and I.' If the scene were to be peopled he would prefer

that it were by another kind of denizen. 'The Evening was beautiful

nothing could surpass our fortune in the weather--yet was I worldly

enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry Barges with Trumpets and Banners

just to die away before me into that blue place among the

mountains'--and here follows a little sketch of the narrow upper end of

the lake from near Tarbet, just to show where the blue place was. At

Inverary Keats has a word about the woods which reminds one of

Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_--'the woods seem old enough to remember two or

three changes in the Crags above them'--and then goes on to tell how he

has been amused and exasperated by a performance of _The Stranger_ to an

accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the next morning,

he got horribly bitten by gad-flies, and vented his smart in a set of

doggrel rhymes. Of all these matters he gossips gaily for the

entertainment of the invalid Tom. Turning on the same day to write to

Benjamin Bailey, the most serious-minded of his friends, he proceeds in

a strain of considerate self-knowledge to confess and define some of the

morbid elements in his own nature. That Bailey may be warned against

taking any future complainings of his too seriously, 'I carry all

matters,' he says, 'to an extreme--so that when I have any little

vexation, it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles.' And then

by way of accounting for his having failed of late to see much of the

Reynolds sisters in Little Britain, he lays bare his reasons for

thinking himself unfit for ordinary society and especially for the

society of women:--

I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women--at this moment

I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they

fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I

thought a fair woman a pure Goddess, my mind was a soft nest in which

some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to

expect more than their reality--I thought them ethereal above men--I

find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small. Insult may

be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of

being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. I do

not like to think insults in a lady's company--I commit a crime with

her which absence would not have known.... I must absolutely get over

this--but how? the only way is to find the root of the evil, and so

cure it 'with backward mutters of dissevering power'--that is a

difficult thing; for an obstinate Prejudice can seldom be produced but

from a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to

unravel, and care to keep unravelled.

And then, as to his present doings and impressions:--

I should not have consented to myself these four months tramping in

the highlands, but that I thought it would give me more experience,

rub off more prejudice, use me to more hardships, identify finer

scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach

in Poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though I

should reach _Homer_. By this time I am comparatively a Mountaineer. I

have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about

their grandeur. I have fed upon oat-cake--not long enough to be very

much attached to it.--The first mountains I saw, though not so large

as some I have since seen, weighed very solemnly upon me. The effect

is wearing away--yet I like them mainly.

The word 'identify' in the above is noticeable, as seeming to imply that

the fruit of his travel was not discovery, but only the recognition of

scenes already fully preconceived in his imagination. Resuming his

letter to Tom at a later stage, he tells of things that have impressed

him: how in Glencroe[6] they had been pleased with the noise of

shepherds' sheep and dogs in the misty heights close above them, but

could see none of them for some time, till two came in sight 'creeping

among the crags like Emmets,' yet their voices plainly audible: how

solemn was the first sight of Loch Awe as they approached it 'along a

complete mountain road' (that is by way of Glen Aray) 'where if one

listened there was not a sound but that of mountain streams'; how they

tramped twenty miles by the loch side and how the next day they had

reached the coast within view of Long Island (that is Luing; the spot

was probably Kilmelfort). It is at this point we get the prose of some

of the lines quoted above from the verses expressing the temper of his

pilgrimage:--

Our walk was of this description--the near Hills were not very lofty

but many of them steep, beautifully wooded--the distant Mountains in

the Hebrides very grand, the Saltwater Lakes coming up between Crags

and Islands full tide and scarcely ruffled--sometimes appearing as one

large Lake sometimes as three distinct ones in different directions.

At one point we saw afar off a rocky opening into the main sea.--We

have also seen an Eagle or two. They move about without the least

motion of Wings when in an indolent fit.

At the same point occur for the first time complaints, slight at first,

of fatigue and discomfort. At the beginning of his tour Keats had

written to his sister of its effects upon his appetite: 'I get so hungry

a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to me.... I

can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do bull's eyes.' Some days

later he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty

miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now, in the remoter parts

of the Highlands, the hard accommodation and monotonous diet and rough

journeys and frequent drenchings begin to tell upon both him and

Brown:--

Last night poor Brown with his feet blistered and scarcely able to

walk, after a trudge of 20 Miles down the side of Loch Awe had no

supper but Eggs and oat Cake--we have lost the sight of white bread

entirely--Now we had eaten nothing but eggs all day--about 10 a piece

and they had become sickening--To-day we have fared rather better--but

no oat Cake wanting--we had a small chicken and even a good bottle of

Port but altogether the fare is too coarse--I feel it a little.

Our travellers seem to have felt the hardships of the Highlands more

than either Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy when they visited the same

scenes just fifteen years earlier, or Lockhart and his brother in their

expedition, only three years before, to the loneliest wilds of Lochaber.

But then the Wordsworth party only walked when they wished, and drove

much of the way in their ramshackle jaunting-car; and the Lockharts,

being fishermen, had their rods, and had besides brought portable soup

with them and a horse to carry their kit. Lockhart's account of his

experience is in curious contrast with those of Keats and Brown:--

We had a horse with us for the convenience of carrying baggage--but

contemning the paths of civilized man, we dared the deepest glens in

search of trout. There is something abundantly delightful in the

warmheartedness of the Highland people. Bating the article of

inquisitiveness, they are as polite as courtiers. The moment we

entered a cottage the wife began to bake her cakes--and having

portable soup with us, our fare was really excellent. What think you

of porritch and cream for breakfast? trout, pike, and herrings for

dinner, and right peat-reek whisky?

Arrived at Oban by way of the Melfort pass and Glen Euchar, the friends

undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for Keats's

strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and Iona

too expensive for their frugal scheme of travel, they were persuaded to

take the ferry to the isle of Kerrera and thence on to the hither shore

of Mull. Did Keats in crossing Kerrera hear of--he would scarcely have

travelled out of his way to visit--the ruins of the castle of Goylen on

its precipice above the sea, with its legend of the girl-child,

unaccountably puny as was thought, who turned out to be really the fairy

mistress of a gentleman of Ireland, and being detected as such threw

herself headlong from the window into the waves? and was this scene with

its story in his mind when he wrote of forlorn fairy lands where castle

casements open on the foam of perilous seas?[7] From the landing place

in Mull they had to take a guide and traverse on foot the whole width of

the island to the extreme point of the Ross of Mull opposite Iona: a

wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some thirty-seven miles, over

difficult ground and in the very roughest weather, broken by one night's

rest in a shepherd's hut at a spot he calls Dun an Cullen,--perhaps for

Derrynacullen. Having crossed the narrow channel to Iona and admired the

antiquities of that illustrious island (the epithet is Johnson's), they

chartered a fresh boat for the trip to Staffa and thence up Loch na

Keal, so landing on the return journey in the heart of Mull and

shortening their walk back across the island by more than half. By the

power of the past and its associations among the monastic ruins of Iona,

and of nature's architecture in building and scooping the basaltic

columns of Fingal's Cave, Keats shows himself naturally impressed. In

this instance, and once or twice afterwards, he exerts himself to write

a full and precise description for the benefit of his brother Tom. In

doing so he uses a phrase which indicates a running of his thoughts upon

his projected poem, _Hyperion_:--

The finest thing is Fingal's cave--it is entirely a hollowing out of

Basalt Pillars. Suppose now the Giants who rebelled against Jove had

taken a whole Mass of black Columns and bound them together like

bunches of matches--and then with immense Axes had made a cavern in

the body of these Columns--of course the roof and floor must be

composed of the broken ends of the Columns--such is Fingal's cave

except that the Sea has done the work of excavations and is

continually dashing there--so that we walk along the sides of the cave

on the pillars which are left as if for convenient stairs--the roof is

arched somewhat gothic-wise and the length of some of the entire

side-pillars is 50 feet.... The colour of the columns is a sort of

black with a lurking gloom of purple therein. For solemnity and

grandeur it far surpasses the finest Cathedral.

More characteristically than this description, some verses he sends at

the same time tell how Fingal's cave and its profanation by the race of

tourists affected him: I mean those beginning 'Not Aladdin Magian,'

written in the seven-syllable metre which he handled almost as well as

his sixteenth and seventeenth century masters, from Fletcher and Ben

Jonson to the youthful Milton. Avoiding word-painting and description,

like the born poet he is, he begins by calling up for comparison visions

of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, bethinking himself

of Milton's cry to Lycidas,

where'er thy bones are hurl'd,

Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides--

he imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean

and put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his

priestly character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion

of the place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and then dives

suddenly from view. In the six lines which tell of the scene's

profanation the style sinks with the theme into flat triviality:--

So for ever will I leave

Such a taint and soon unweave

All the magic of the place,

Tis now free to stupid face,

To cutters and to Fashion boats,

To cravats and to Petticoats:--

The great sea shall war it down,

For its fame shall not be blown

At each farthing Quadrille dance.

So saying with a Spirit glance

He dived--.

Keats evidently, and no wonder, did not like those six lines from 'Tis

now free' to 'dance': in transcripts by his friends they are dropped out

or inserted only in pencil: but he apparently did not see his way to

mend them, and Brown tells us he could never persuade him to finish or

resume the poem. In the broken close as he left it there is after all an

appropriate abruptness which may content us.

From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scottish tour,

and especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first

distinct and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, which by

reason of his muscular vigour had to his friends hitherto seemed so

robust, and of the development of his hereditary tendency to

consumption. In the same letter to his brother Tom which contains the

transcript of the Fingal poem he speaks of a 'slight sore

throat,'--Brown calls it a violent cold,--which compelled him to rest

for a day or two at Oban. Thence they pushed on in broken weather by

Ballachulish and the shore of Loch Linnhe to Fort William, and from

thence groped and struggled up Ben Nevis, a toilsome climb at best, in a

dissolving mist. Once again Keats makes an exceptional endeavour to

realise the scene in words for his brother's benefit, telling of the

continual shifting and opening and closing and re-opening of the cloud

veils about them; and to clench his effect adds, 'There is not a more

fickle thing than the top of a Mountain--what would a Lady give to

change her headdress as often and with as little trouble?' Seated, so

Brown tells us, almost on the edge of a precipice of fifteen hundred

feet drop, Keats composed a sonnet, above his worst but much below his

best, turning the experience of the hour into a simple enough symbol of

his own mental state in face of the great mysteries of things:--

Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud

Upon the top of Nevis, blind in mist!

I look into the chasms, and a shroud

Vap'rous doth hide them,--just so much I wist

Mankind do know of hell; I look o'erhead,

And there is sullen mist,--even so much

Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread

Before the earth, beneath me,--even such,

Even so vague is man's sight of himself!

Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet,--

Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf,

I tread on them,--that all my eye doth meet

Is mist and crag, not only on this height,

But in the world of thought and mental might!

Hearing of a previous ascent by a Mrs Cameron, 'the fattest woman in all

Invernesshire,' he had the energy to compose also for Tom's amusement a

comic dialogue in verse between the mountain and the lady, much more in

Brown's vein than in his own. By the 6th of August the travellers had

reached Inverness, having tramped, as Brown calculates, six hundred and

forty-two miles since leaving Lancaster.

Keats's throat had for some time been getting worse: the ascent, and

especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, shaken and

tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at

Inverness thought his condition seriously threatening, and forbad him to

continue his tour. Accordingly he gave up the purpose with which he had

set out of footing it southward by a different route, seeing Edinburgh,

and on his way home visiting Bailey at his curacy in Cumberland, and

decided to take passage at once for London by the next packet from

Cromarty. Dilke had in the meantime felt compelled to write and recall

him on account of a sudden change for the worse in the condition of the

invalid Tom, so that his tour with Brown would have been cut short in

any case. On their way round the head of Beauly Firth to Cromarty the

friends did not miss the opportunity of visiting the ruins of Beauly

Abbey. The interior was then and for long afterwards used as a burial

place and receptacle for miscellaneous rubbish. Their attention being

drawn to a heap of skulls which they took, probably on the information

of some local guide, for skulls of ancient monks of the Abbey, they

jointly composed upon them a set of verses in Burns's favourite measure

(but without, this time, any attempt at his dialect). Unluckily Brown

wrote the lion's share of the piece and set the tone of the whole. To

the sixteen stanzas Keats contributed, as he afterwards informed

Woodhouse, only the first line-and-a-half of the first stanza, with

three of the later stanzas entire. As the piece has never been published

and is a new document in the history of the tour, it seems to call for

insertion here: but in view of its length and lack of quality (for it

has nowhere a touch of Keats's true magic) I choose rather to relegate

it to an appendix.

It was on the eighth or ninth of August that the smack for London put

out from Cromarty with Keats on board, and Brown, having bidden him

goodbye, was left to finish the tour alone--'much lamenting,' says he,

'the loss of his beloved companionship at my side.' Keats in some degree

picked up strength during a nine days' sea passage, the humours of which

he afterwards described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George.

But his throat trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or

for any length of time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he

arrived at Hampstead, and made his appearance among his friends the next

day, 'as brown and as shabby as you can imagine,' writes Mrs Dilke,

'scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a

great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell what he looked like.' When

he found himself seated, for the first time after his hardships, in a

comfortable stuffed chair, we are told how he expressed a comic

enjoyment of the sensation, quoting at himself the words in which Quince

the carpenter congratulates his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This account was published in _The Plymouth and Devonport Weekly

Journal_, beginning October 1, 1840, but was unluckily stopped after

the fourth number and carries us no farther than to Ballantrae on the

Ayrshire coast. I believe this is the first time that it has been

used or quoted.

[2] Does the reader remember how in a similar scene from the other

side of the Solway, in Scott's _Redgauntlet_, Dame Martin, leading

the dance, 'frisked like a kid, snapped her fingers like castanets,

whooped like a Bacchanal, and bounded from the floor like a tennis

ball'?

[3] It is interesting to note that the present poet laureate has

found something in this piece entitling it to a place in his severely

sifted anthology, _The Spirit of Man_.

[4] The words are King Lear's (act v, sc. iii).

[5] This metre is essentially the same as the 'common' measure, eight

and six, of the hymn-books, only printed out in single lines to be

spoken without--or with only very slight--pause. At the point quoted

Keats varies it, whether carelessly or on purpose, and the first

lines of three successive couplets, beginning from 'Runnels,' etc.,

are not in fourteeners but in twelves or Alexandrines (='short

measure,' six and six, printed out). A similar variation is frequent

in early examples of the metre.

[6] Printed in error 'Glenside' in all the editions: but the MS. is

quite clear, and even were it not so topography would require

Glencroe.

[7] See John Campbell of Islay, _Popular Tales of the West Highlands_

(1860), vol. ii, p. 52. I owe the suggestion and the reference to my

friend Prof. W. P. Ker. Personally I have always associated the magic

casements with the Enchanted Castle of Claude's picture representing

a very different scene. But the poet's mind is a crucible made for

extracting from ingredients no matter how heterogeneous the

quintessence, the elixir, which it needs.

CHAPTER X

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1818: _BLACKWOOD_ AND THE _QUARTERLY_

_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_--Partisan excesses--Wild

inconsistency--Virulences of first number--The 'Z' papers and Leigh

Hunt--Blackwood and Walter Scott--_The Chaldee Manuscript_--Scott's

warning to Lockhart--Lockhart and Keats--'Z' on _Endymion_--A lesson

to critics--Marks of Lockhart's hand--The Quarterly on

_Endymion_--Indignant friends: Bailey--Reynolds--Woodhouse and

Taylor--Keats's composure under attack--Subsequent effects--Tom Keats

_in extremis_--Three months by the sick-bed--First Journal-letter to

America--Dread of love and marriage--Death of Tom Keats.

On the first of September, within a fortnight of Keats's return from the

North, appeared the threatened attack on him in Blackwood's _Edinburgh

Magazine_. Much as has been said and written on the history and effect

of the 'Cockney School' articles, my task requires that the story should

be retold, as accurately and fairly as may be, in the light of our

present knowledge.

The Whig party in politics and letters had held full ascendency for half

a generation in the periodical literature of Scotland by means of the

_Edinburgh Review_, published by Archibald Constable and edited at this

time by Jeffrey. The Tory rival, the _Quarterly_, was owned and

published also by a Scotsman, but a Scotsman migrated to London, John

Murray. Early in 1817 William Blackwood, an able Tory bookseller in

Edinburgh, projected a new monthly review which should be a thorn in the

side of his astute and ambitious trade rival, Constable, and at the same

time should hold up the party flag against the blue and yellow Whig

colours in the North, and show a livelier and lustier fighting temper

than the Quarterly. The first number appeared in March under the title

of _The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine_. The first editors were two

insignificant men who proved neither competent nor loyal, and flat

failure threatening the enterprise, Blackwood after six months got rid

of the editors and determined to make a fresh start. He added his own

name to the title of the magazine and called to his aid two brilliant

young men who had been occasional contributors, John Wilson and John

Gibson Lockhart, both sound Oxford scholars and Lockhart moreover a

well-read modern linguist, both penmen of extraordinary facility and

power of work, both at this period of their lives given, in a spirit

partly of furious partisanship partly of reckless frolic, to a degree of

licence in controversy and satire inconceivable to-day. Wilson, by birth

the son of a rich Glasgow manufacturer but now reduced in fortune, was

in person a magnificent, florid, blue-eyed athlete of thirty, and in

literature the bully and Berserker of the pair. Lockhart, the scion of

an ancient Lanarkshire house, a dark, proud, handsome and graceful youth

of twenty-three, pensive and sardonically reserved, had a deadly gift of

satire and caricature and a lust for exercising it which was for a time

uncontrollable like a disease. Wilson had lived on Windermere in the

intimacy of Wordsworth and his circle, and already made a certain mark

in literature with his poem _The Isle of Palms_. Lockhart had made a few

firm friends at Oxford and after his degree had frequented the Goethe

circle at Weimar, but was otherwise without social or literary

experience. Blackwood was the eager employer and unflinching backer of

both. The trio were determined to push the magazine into notoriety by

fair means or foul. Its management was informally divided between them,

so that no one person could be held responsible. Of Wilson and Lockhart,

each was at one time supposed to be editor, but neither ever admitted as

much or received separate payment for editorial work. They were really

chief contributors and trusted and insistent chief advisers, but

Blackwood never let go his own control, and took upon himself, now with

effrontery, now with evasion, occasionally with compromise made and

satisfaction given, all the risks and rancours which the threefold

management chose to incur.

Wilson's obstreperousness, even when he had in some degree sobered down

as a university professor, was at all times irresponsible and

irrepressible, but for some of the excesses of those days he expressed

regret and tried to make atonement; while Lockhart, the vitriol

gradually working out of his nature in the sunshine of domestic

happiness and of Scott's genial and paternal influence, sincerely

repented them when it was too late. But they lasted long enough to

furnish one of the most deplorable chapters in our literary history. The

fury of political party spirit, infesting the whole field of letters,

accounts for, without excusing much. It was a rough unscrupulous time,

the literary as well as the political atmosphere thick, as we have seen,

with the mud and stones of controversy, flung often very much at random.

The _Quarterly_, as conducted by the acrid and deformed pedant Gifford,

had no mercy for opponents: and one of the harshest of its contributors

was the virtuous Southey. On the other side the Edinburgh, under the

more urbane and temperate Jeffrey, could sneer spitefully at all times

and abuse savagely enough on occasion, especially when its contributor

was Hazlitt. If a notorious Edinburgh attack on Coleridge's _Christabel_

volume was really by Hazlitt, as Coleridge always believed and Hazlitt

never denied, he in that instance added unpardonable personal

ingratitude to a degree of critical blindness amazing in such a man.

Even Leigh Hunt, in private life one of the most amiable of hearts,

could in controversy on the liberal side be almost as good a damner (to

use Keats's phrase) as his ally, the same Hazlitt himself. But nowhere

else were such felon strokes dealt in pure wantonness of heart as in the

early numbers of Blackwood. The notorious first number opened with an

article on Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_ even more furiously

insulting than the aforesaid Edinburgh article on _Christabel_

attributed to Hazlitt. But for Hazlitt Coleridge was in politics an

apostate not to be pardoned, while for the Blackwood group he was no

enemy but an ally. Why treat him thus unless it were merely for the

purpose of attracting a scandalized attention? More amazing even than

the virulence of Blackwood was its waywardness and inconsistency. Will

it be believed that less than three years later the same Coleridge was

being praised and solicited--and what is more, successfully

solicited--for contributions? Again, nothing is so much to the credit of

Wilson and Lockhart in those days as their admiration for Wordsworth.

The sins of their first number are half redeemed by the article in

Wordsworth's praise, a really fine, eloquent piece of work in Wilson's

boisterous but not undiscriminating manner of laudation. But not even

Wordsworth could long escape the random swash of Wilson's bludgeon, and

a very few years later his friends were astonished to read a ferocious

outbreak against him in one of the _Noctes_ by the same hand. In regard

even to the detested Hazlitt the magazine blew in some degree hot and

cold, printing through several numbers a series of respectful summaries,

supplied from London by Patmore, of his Surrey Institution lectures; in

another number a courteous enough estimate of his and Jeffrey's

comparative powers in criticism; and a little later taking him to task

on one page rudely, but not quite unjustly, for his capricious treatment

of Shakespeare's minor poems and on another page addressing to him an

insulting catechism full of the vilest personal imputations.

The only contemporary whose treatment by the Blackwood trio is truly

consistent was Leigh Hunt, and of him it was consistently blackguardly.

To return to the first number of the new series, three articles were

counted on to create an uproar. First, the aforesaid emptying of the

critical slop-pail on Coleridge. Second, the _Translation from an

ancient Chaldee Manuscript_, being a biting personal satire, in language

parodied from the Bible, on noted Edinburgh characters, including the

Blackwood group themselves, disguised under transparent nicknames that

stuck, Blackwood as Ebony, Wilson as the Leopard, Lockhart as the

Scorpion that delighteth to sting the faces of men. Third, the article

on the Cockney School of Poetry, numbered as the first of the series,

headed with a quotation from Cornelius Webb, and signed with the initial

'Z.' As a thing to hang gibes on, the quotation from the unlucky Webb is

aptly enough chosen:--

Our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on)

Of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron,

(Our England's Dante)--Wordsworth, Hunt, and Keats,

The Muses' son of promise, and what feats

He yet may do--

Nor are the gibes themselves quite unjustified so far as they touch

merely the underbred insipidities of Leigh Hunt's tea-party manner in

_Rimini_. But they are as outrageously absurd as they are gross and

libellous when they go on to assail both poem and author on the score of

immorality.

The extreme moral depravity of the Cockney School is another thing

which is for ever thrusting itself upon the public attention, and

convincing every man of sense who looks into their productions, that

they who sport such sentiments can never be great poets. How could any

man of high original genius ever stoop publicly, at the present day,

to dip his fingers in the least of those glittering and rancid

obscenities which float on the surface of Mr Hunt's _Hippocrene_? His

poetry is that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. He

talks indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner girl. Some excuse for

him there might have been, had he been hurried away by imagination or

passion. But with him indecency is a disease, as he speaks unclean

things from perfect inanition. The very concubine of so impure a

wretch as Leigh Hunt would be to be pitied, but alas! for the wife of

such a husband! For him there is no charm in simple seduction; and he

gloats over it only when accompanied with adultery and incest.

Such is the manner in which these censors set about showing their

superior breeding and scholarship. 'Z' was in most cases probably a

composite and not a single personality, but the respective shares of

Wilson and Lockhart can often be confidently enough disentangled by

those who know their styles.

The scandal created by the first number exceeded what its authors had

hoped or expected. All Edinburgh was in a turmoil about the _Chaldee

Manuscript_, the victims writhing, their enemies chuckling, law-suits

threatening right and left. In London the commotion was scarcely less.

The London agents for the sale of the Magazine protested strongly, and

Blackwood had to use some hard lying in order to pacify them. Murray,

who had a share in the magazine, soon began remonstrating against its

scurrilities, and on their continuance withdrew his capital. Leigh Hunt

in the _Examiner_ retorted upon 'Z' with natural indignation and a

peremptory demand for the disclosure of his name. The libellers hugged

their anonymity, and at first showed some slight movement of panic. In a

second edition of the first number the _Chaldee Manuscript_ was omitted

and the assault on Hunt made a little less gross and personal. For a

while Hunt vigorously threatened legal proceedings, but after some time

desisted, whether from lack of funds or doubt of a verdict or inability

to identify his assailant we do not know, and declared, and stuck to the

declaration, that he would take no farther notice. The attacks were soon

renewed more savagely than ever. The second of the 'Z' papers alone is

scholarly and relatively reasonable. Its phrase, 'the genteel comedy of

incest,' fitly enough labels _Rimini_ in contrast with the tragic

treatment of kindred themes by real masters, as Sophocles, Dante, Ford,

Alfieri, Schiller, even Byron in _Manfred_ and _Parisina_. The third

article, and two other attacks in the form of letters addressed directly

to Hunt with the same signature, are merely rabid and outrageous.

Correspondents having urged in protest that Hunt's domestic life was

blameless, the assailant says in effect, so much the greater his

offence for writing a profligate and demoralizing poem; and to this

preposterous charge against one of the mildest pieces of milk-and-water

sentimentality in all literature he returns (or they return) with

furious iteration.

The reasons for this special savagery against Hunt have never been made

fully clear. He and his circle used to think it was partly due to his

slighting treatment of Scott in the _Feast of the Poets_: nay, they even

idly imagined for a moment that Scott himself had been the

writer,--Scott, than whom no man was ever more magnanimously and

humorously indifferent to harsh criticism or less capable of lifting a

finger to resent it. But some of Scott's friends and idolaters in

Edinburgh were sensitive on his behalf as he never was on his own. Even

for the Blackwood assault on Coleridge one rumoured reason was that

Coleridge had rudely denounced a play, the _Bertram_ of Maturin, admired

and recommended to Drury Lane by Scott; and it is, as a matter of fact,

conceivable that a similar excess of loyalty may have had something to

do with the rancour of the 'Z' articles.