Looking back on the way in which the name of this great man got mixed up

in some minds with matters so far beneath him, it seems worth while to

set forth exactly what were his relations at this time to Blackwood and

the Blackwood group. About 1816-1817 the two rival publishers Blackwood

and Constable, were hot competitors for Scott's favour, and Constable

had lately scored a point in the game in the matter of the _Tales of my

Landlord_. It became in the eyes of Blackwood and his associates a vital

matter to secure some kind of countenance from Scott for their new

venture. They knew they would never attach him as a partisan or secure a

monopoly of his favours, and the authors of the _Chaldee Manuscript_

divined his attitude wittily and shrewdly when they represented him as

giving precisely the same answer to each of the two publishers who

courted him, thus. (The man in plain apparel is Blackwood and the

Jordan is the Tweed):--

44. Then spake the man clothed in plain apparel to the great magician

who dwelleth in the old fastness, hard by the river Jordan, which is

by the Border. And the magician opened his mouth, and said, Lo! my

heart wisheth thy good, and let the thing prosper which is in thy

hands to do it.

45. But thou seest that my hands are full of working and my labour is

great. For lo I have to feed all the people of my land, and none

knoweth whence his food cometh, but each man openeth his mouth, and my

hand filleth it with pleasant things.

46. Moreover, thine adversary also is of my familiars.

47. The land is before thee, draw thou up thy hosts for the battle in

the place of Princes, over against thine adversary, which hath his

station near the mount of the Proclamation; quit ye as men, and let

favour be shewn unto him which is most valiant.

48. Yet be thou silent, peradventure will I help thee some little.

More shrewdly still, Blackwood bethought himself of the one and only way

of practically enlisting Scott, and that was by promising permanent work

on the magazine for his friend, tenant, and dependent, William Laidlaw,

whom he could never do enough to help. So it was arranged that Laidlaw

should regularly contribute a chronicle on agricultural and antiquarian

topics, and that Scott should touch it up and perhaps occasionally add a

paragraph or short article of his own. In point of fact the peccant

first number contains such an article, an entertaining enough little

skit 'On the alarming Increase of Depravity among Animals.' After the

number had appeared Scott wrote to Blackwood in tempered approval, but

saying that he must withdraw his support if satire like that of the

_Chaldee Manuscript_ was to continue. He had been pleased and tickled

with the prophetic picture of his own neutrality, but strongly

disapproved the sting and malice of much of the rest.

One cannot but wish he had put his foot down in like manner about the

'Cockney school' and other excesses: but home--that is

Edinburgh--affairs and personages interested him much more than those

of London. Lockhart he did not yet personally know. They first met eight

months later, in June 1818: the acquaintance ripened rapidly into firm

devotion on Lockhart's part--for this young satirist could love as

staunchly as he could stab unmercifully--a devotion requited with an

answering warmth of affection on the part of Scott. At an early stage of

their relations Scott, recognizing with regret that his young friend was

'as mischievous as a monkey,' got an offer for him of official work

which would have freed him of his ties to Blackwood. In like manner two

years later Scott threw himself heart and soul into the contest on

behalf of Wilson for the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy, not merely

as the Tory candidate, but in the hope--never fully realized--that the

office would tame his combative extravagances as well as give scope for

his serious talents. And when the battle was won and Lockhart, now

Scott's son-in-law, crowed over it in a set of verses which Scott

thought too vindictive, he remonstrated in a strain of admirable grave

and affectionate wisdom:--

I have hitherto avoided saying anything on this subject, though some

little turn towards personal satire is, I think, the only drawback to

your great and powerful talents, and I think I may have hinted as much

to you. But I wished to see how this matter of Wilson's would turn,

before making a clean breast upon this subject.... Now that he has

triumphed I think it would be bad taste to cry out--'Strike up our

drums--pursue the scattered stray.' Besides, the natural consequence

of his situation must be his relinquishing his share in these

compositions--at least, he will injure himself in the opinion of many

friends, and expose himself to a continuation of galling and vexatious

disputes to the embittering of his life, should he do otherwise. In

that case I really hope you will pause before you undertake to be the

Boaz of the Maga; I mean in the personal and satirical department,

when the Jachin has seceded.

Besides all other objections of personal enemies, personal quarrels,

constant obloquy, and all uncharitableness, such an occupation will

fritter away your talents, hurt your reputation both as a lawyer and a

literary man, and waste away your time in what at best will be but a

monthly wonder. What has been done in this department will be very

well as a frolic of young men, but let it suffice.... Remember it is

to the _personal_ satire I object, and to the horse-play of your

raillery.... Revere yourself, my dear boy, and think you were born to

do your country better service than in this species of warfare. I make

no apology (I am sure you will require none) for speaking plainly what

my anxious affection dictates.... I wish you to have the benefit of my

experience without purchasing it; and be assured, that the

consciousness of attaining complete superiority over your calumniators

and enemies by the force of your general character, is worth a dozen

of triumphs over them by the force of wit and raillery.

It took a longer time and harder lessons to cure Lockhart of the

scorpion habit and wean him from the seductions of the 'Mother of

Mischief,' as Scott in another place calls _Blackwood's Magazine_.

Meantime he had in the case of Keats done as much harm as he could. He

had not the excuse of entire ignorance. His intimate friend Christie

(afterwards principal in the John Scott duel) was working at the bar in

London and wrote to Lockhart in January 1818 that he had met Keats and

been favourably impressed by him. In reply Lockhart writes: 'What you

say of Keates (sic) is pleasing, and if you like to write a little

review of him, in admonition to leave his ways, etc., and in praise of

his natural genius, I shall be greatly obliged to you.' Later Benjamin

Bailey had the opportunity of speaking with Lockhart in Keats's behalf.

Bailey had by this time taken orders, and after publishing a friendly

notice of _Endymion_ in the _Oxford Herald_ for June, had left the

University and gone to settle in a curacy in Cumberland. In the course

of the summer he staid at Stirling, at the house of Bishop Gleig; whose

son, afterwards the well-known writer and chaplain-general to the

forces, was his friend, and whose daughter he soon afterwards married.

Here Bailey met Lockhart, and anxious to save Keats from the sort of

treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took the opportunity

of telling him in a friendly way Keats's circumstances and history,

explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt was

personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an

object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any

rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his

disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be

so used by _him_. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to

all appearance, and to Bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he

had thus confidentially communicated.[1]

'That amiable but infatuated bardling, Mister John Keats,' had received

a certain amount of attention from 'Z' already, both in the quotation

from Cornelius Webb prefixed to the Cockney school articles, and in

allusion to Hunt's pair of sonnets on the intercoronation scene which he

had printed in his volume, _Foliage_, since the 'Z' series began. When

now Keats's own turn came, in the fourth article of the series, his

treatment was almost mild in comparison with that of his supposed

leader. 'This young man appears to have received from nature talents of

an excellent, perhaps even of a superior, order--talents which, devoted

to the purposes of any useful profession, must have rendered him a

respectable, if not an eminent citizen.' But, says the critic, he has

unfortunately fallen a victim to the _metromania_ of the hour; the

wavering apprentice has been confirmed in his desire to quit the

gallipots by his admiration for 'the most worthless and affected of all

the versifiers of our time.' 'Mr Hunt is a small poet, but he is a

clever man, Mr Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of

pretty abilities which he has done everything in his power to spoil.'

And so on; and so on; not of course omitting to put a finger on real

weaknesses, as lack of scholarship, the use of Cockney rimes like

_higher_, _Thalia_; _ear_, _Cytherea_; _thorn_, _fawn_; deriding the

Boileau passage in _Sleep and Poetry_, and perceiving nothing but laxity

and nervelessness in the treatment of the metre. In the conceit of

academic talent and training, the critic shows himself open-eyed to all

the faults and stone-blind to all the beauty and genius and promise, and

ends with a vulgarity of supercilious patronage beside which all the

silly venial faults of taste in Leigh Hunt seem like good breeding

itself.

And now, good-morrow to 'the Muses' son of Promise;' as for 'the feats

he yet may do,' as we do not pretend to say like himself, 'Muse of my

native land am I inspired,' we shall adhere to the safe old rule of

_pauca verba_. We venture to make one small prophecy, that his

bookseller will not a second time venture L50 upon any thing he can

write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary

than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to 'plasters,

pills, and ointment boxes,' etc. But, for Heaven's sake, young

Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in

your practice than you have been in your poetry.

There is a lesson in these things. I remember the late Mr Andrew Lang,

one of the most variously gifted and richly equipped critical minds of

our time, and under a surface vein of flippancy essentially

kind-hearted,--I remember Mr Andrew Lang, in a candid mood of

conversation, wondering whether in like circumstances he might not have

himself committed a like offence, and with no _Hyperion_ or _St Agnes'

Eve_ or _Odes_ yet written and only the 1817 volume and _Endymion_

before him, have dismissed Keats fastidiously and scoffingly. Who

knows?--and let us all take warning. But now-a-days the errors of

criticism are perhaps rather of an opposite kind, and any rashness and

rawness of undisciplined novelty is apt to find itself indulged and

fostered rather than repressed. What should at any time have saved

_Endymion_ from harsh judgment, if the quality of the poetry could not

save it, was the quality of the preface. How could either carelessness

or rancour not recognize, not augur the best from, its fine spirit of

manliness and modesty and self-knowledge?

The responsibility for the gallipots article, as for so many others in

the Blackwood of the time, may have been in some sort collective. But

that Lockhart had the chief share in it is certain. According to Dilke,

he in later life owned as much. To those who know his hand, he stands

confessed not only in the general gist and style but in particular

phrases. One is the use of Sangrado for doctor, a use which both Scott

and Lockhart had caught from _Gil Blas_.[2] Others are the allusions to

the _Metromanie_ of Piron and the _Endymion_ of Wieland, particularly

the latter. Wieland's _Oberon_, as we have seen, had made its mark in

England through Sotheby's translation, but no other member of the

Blackwood group is the least likely to have had any acquaintance with

his untranslated minor works except Lockhart, whose stay at Weimar had

given him a familiar knowledge of contemporary German literature. In the

_Mad Banker of Amsterdam_, a comic poem in the vein of Frere's

_Whistlecraft_ and Byron's _Beppo_, contributed by him at this time to

Blackwood under one of his Protean pseudonyms, as 'William Wastle Esq.,'

Lockhart sketches his own likeness as follows:--

Then touched I off friend Lockhart (Gibson John),

So fond of jabbering about Tieck and Schlegel,

Klopstock and _Wieland_, Kant and Mendelssohn,

All High Dutch quacks, like Spurzheim or Feinagle--

Him the Chaldee yclept the Scorpion.--

The claws, but not the pinions, of the eagle,

Are Jack's, but though I do not mean to flatter,

Undoubtedly he has strong powers of satire.

Bailey to the end of his life never forgave Lockhart for what he held to

be a base breach of faith after their conversation above mentioned, and

his indignation communicated itself to the Keats circle and afterwards,

as we shall see, to Keats himself. Mr Andrew Lang, in his excellent

_Life_ of Lockhart, making such defence as is candidly possible for his

hero's share in the Blackwood scandals, urges justly enough that the

only matter of fact divulged about Keats by 'Z' is that of his having

been apprenticed to a surgeon ('Z' prefers to say an apothecary) and

that thus much Lockhart could not well help knowing independently,

either from his own friend Christie or from Bailey's friend and future

brother-in-law Gleig, then living at Edinburgh and about to become one

of Blackwood's chief supporters. When in farther defence of 'Z's'

attacks on Hunt Mr Lang quotes from Keats's letters phrases in dispraise

of Hunt almost as strong as those used by 'Z' himself, he forgets the

world of difference there is between the confidential criticism, in a

passing mood or whim of impatience, of a friend by a friend to a friend

and the gross and re-iterated public defamation of a political and

literary opponent.

Lockhart in after life pleaded the rawness of youth, and also that in

the random and incoherent violences of the early years of Blackwood

there had been less of real and settled malice than in the _Quarterly

Review_ as at that time conducted. The plea may be partly admitted, but

to forgive him we need all the gratitude which is his due for his filial

devotion to and immortal biography of Scott, as well as all the

allowance to be made for a dangerous gift and bias of nature.

The Quarterly article on _Endymion_ followed in the last week of

September (in the number dated April,--such in those days was editorial

punctuality). It is now known to have been the work of John Wilson

Croker, a man of many sterling gifts and honourable loyalties, unjustly

blackened in the eyes of posterity by Macaulay's rancorous dislike and

Disraeli's masterly caricature, but in literature as in politics the

narrowest and stiffest of conservative partisans. Like his editor

Gifford, he was trained in strict allegiance to eighteenth century

tradition and the school of Pope. His brief review of _Endymion_ is that

of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable of judging

it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the pain he

gives. He professes to have been unable to read beyond the first canto,

or to make head or tail of that, and what is worse, turns the frank

avowals of Keats's preface foolishly and unfairly against him. At the

same time, like Lockhart, he does not fail to point out and exaggerate

real weaknesses of Keats's early manner, and the following, from the

point of view of a critic who sees no salvation outside the closed

couplet, is not unreasonable criticism:--

He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the

thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_ with

which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a

complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to

another, from the association, not of ideas but of sounds, and the

work is composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced

themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on

which they turn.

In another of the established reviews, _The British Critic_, a third

censor came out with a notice even more contemptuous than those of

Blackwood and the Quarterly. For a moment Keats's pride winced, as any

man's might, under the personal insults of the critics, and dining in

the company of Hazlitt and Woodhouse with Mr Hessey, the publisher, he

seems to have declared in Woodhouse's hearing that he would write no

more. But he quickly recovered his balance, and in a letter to Dilke of

a few days later, speaking of Hazlitt's wrath against the Blackwood

scribes, is silent as to their treatment of himself. Meantime some of

his friends and more than one stranger were actively sympathetic and

indignant on his behalf. A just and vigorous expostulation appeared in

the _Morning Chronicle_ under the initials J.S.,--those in all

likelihood of John Scott, then editor of the _London Magazine_, not long

afterwards killed by Lockhart's friend Christie in a needless and

blundering duel arising out of these very Blackwood brawls. Bailey,

being in Edinburgh, had an interview with Blackwood and pleaded to be

allowed to contribute a reply to his magazine; and this being refused,

sought out Constable, who besides the _Edinburgh Review_ conducted the

monthly periodical which had been kind to Keats's first volume,[3] and

proposed to publish in it an attack on Blackwood and the 'Z' articles:

but Constable would not take the risk. Reynolds published in a

west-country paper, the _Alfred_, a warm rejoinder to the _Quarterly_

reviewer, containing a judicious criticism in brief of Keats's work,

with remarks very much to the point on the contrast between his and the

egotistical (meaning Wordsworth's) attitude to nature. This Leigh Hunt

reprinted with some introductory words in the _Examiner_, and later in

life regretted that he had not done more. But he could not have done

more to any purpose. He was not himself an enthusiastic admirer of

_Endymion_, had plainly said so to Keats and to his friends, and would

have got out of his depth if he had tried to appreciate the intensity

and complexity of symbolic and spiritual meaning which made that poem so

different from his own shallow, self-pleasing metrical versions of

classic or Italian tales. Reynolds's piece, which he re-printed, was

quite effective and to the point as far as it went; and moreover any

formal defence of Keats by Hunt would only have increased the virulence

of his enemies, as they both perfectly well knew. Privately at the same

time Reynolds, who had just been reading _The Pot of Basil_ in

manuscript, wrote to his friend with affectionate wisdom as follows:--

As to the poem, I am of all things anxious that you should publish it,

for its completeness will be a full answer to all the ignorant

malevolence of cold, lying Scotchmen and stupid Englishmen. The

overweening struggle to oppress you only shows the world that so much

of endeavour cannot be directed to nothing. Men do not set their

muscles and strain their sinews to break a straw. I am confident,

Keats, that the 'Pot of Basil' hath that simplicity and quiet pathos

which are of a sure sovereignty over all hearts. I must say that it

would delight me to have you prove yourself to the world what we know

you to be--to have you annul _The Quarterly Review_ by the best of all

answers. One or two of your sonnets you might print, I am sure. And I

know that I may suggest to you which, because you can decide as you

like afterward. You will remember that we were to print together. I

give over all intention, and you ought to be alone. I can never write

anything now--my mind is taken the other way. But I shall set my

heart on having you high, as you ought to be. Do _you_ get Fame, and I

shall have it in being your affectionate and steady friend.

Woodhouse, in a correspondence with the unceasingly kind and loyal

publishers Taylor and Hessey, shows himself as deeply moved as anyone,

and Taylor in the course of the autumn sought to enlist on behalf of the

victim the private sympathies of one of the most cultivated and

influential Liberal thinkers and publicists of the time, Sir James

Mackintosh. Sending him a copy of _Endymion_, Taylor writes:--'Its

faults are numberless, but there are redeeming features in my opinion,

and the faults are those of real Genius. Whatever this work is, its

Author is a true poet.' After a few words as to Keats's family and

circumstances he adds, 'These are odd particulars to give, when I am

introducing the work and not the man to you,--but if you knew him, you

would also feel that strange personal interest in all that concerns

him.--Mr Gifford forgot his own early life when he tried to bear down

this young man. Happily, it will not succeed. If he lives, Keats will be

the brightest ornament of this Age.' In concluding Taylor recommends

particularly to his correspondent's attention the hymn to Pan, the

Glaucus episode, and above all the triumph of Bacchus.

Proud in the extreme, Keats had no irritable vanity; and aiming in his

art, if not always steadily, yet always at the highest, he rather

despised than courted such successes as he saw some of his

contemporaries--Thomas Moore, for instance, with _Lalla Rookh_--enjoy.

'I hate,' he says, 'a mawkish popularity.' Wise recognition and

encouragement would no doubt have helped and cheered him, but even in

the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly cherished, there was

nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was conscious of perceiving his

own shortcomings at least as clearly as his critics. Accordingly he took

his treatment at their hands more coolly than older and more experienced

men had taken the like. Hunt, as we have seen, had replied indignantly

to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn, and he and

Hazlitt were both at first red-hot to have the law of them. Keats after

the first sting with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance

as one merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When early in

October Mr Hessey sent for his encouragement the extracts from the

papers in which he had been defended, he wrote:--

I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part.

As for the rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my own

strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on

the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic

on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without

comparison beyond what 'Blackwood' or the 'Quarterly' could possibly

inflict--and also when I feel I am right, no external praise can give

me such a glow as my own solitary re-perception and ratification of

what is fine. J. S. is perfectly right in regard to the slip-shod

_Endymion_. That it is so is no fault of mine. No!--though it may

sound a little paradoxical. It is as good as I had power to make

it--by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and

with that view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would

not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble--I will

write independently.--I have written independently _without Judgment_.

I may write independently, and _with Judgment_, hereafter. The Genius

of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be

matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in

itself. That which is creative must create itself. In _Endymion_ I

leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better

acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if

I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took

tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would

sooner fail than not be among the greatest. But I am nigh getting into

a rant.

Two or three weeks later, in answer to a similar encouraging letter from

Woodhouse, he explains, in sentences luminous with self-knowledge, what

he calls his own chameleon character as a poet, and the variable and

impressionable temperament such a character implies. 'Where then,' he

adds, 'is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I

not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of

Saturn and Ops?... I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I

hope enough to make you see that no dependence is to be placed on what I

said that day.' And again about the same time to his brother and

sister-in-law:--

There have been two letters in my defence in the 'Chronicle,' and one

in the 'Examiner,' copied from the Exeter paper, and written by

Reynolds. I don't know who wrote those in the 'Chronicle.' This is a

mere matter of the moment: I think I shall be among the English Poets

after my death. Even as a matter of present interest, the attempt to

crush me in the 'Quarterly' has only brought me more into notice, and

it is a common expression among bookmen, 'I wonder the "Quarterly"

should cut its own throat.'

It does me not the least harm in Society to make me appear little and

ridiculous: I know when a man is superior to me and give him all due

respect--he will be the last to laugh at me and as for the rest I feel

that I make an impression upon them which ensures me personal respect

while I am in sight whatever they may say when my back is turned.

Since these firm expressions of indifference to critical attack have

been before the world, it has been too confidently assumed that Shelley

and Byron were totally misled and wide of the mark when they believed

that _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_ had killed Keats or even much hurt

him. But the truth is that not they, but their consequences, did in

their degree help to kill him. It must not be supposed that such words

of wisdom and composure, manifestly sincere as they are, represent the

whole of Keats, or anything like the whole. They represent, indeed, the

admirably sound and manly elements which were a part of him: they show

us the veins of what Matthew Arnold calls flint and iron in his nature

uppermost. But he was no Wordsworth, to remain all flint and iron in

indifference to derision and in the scorn of scorn. He had not only in a

tenfold degree the ordinary acuteness of a poet's feelings: he had the

variable and chameleon temperament of which he warns Woodhouse while in

the very act of re-assuring him: he had along with the flint and iron a

strong congenital tendency, against which he was always fighting but not

always successfully, to fits of depression and self-torment. Moreover

the reviews of those days, especially the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_,

had a real power of barring the acceptance and checking the sale of an

author's work. What actually happened was that when a year or so later

Keats began to realise the harm which the reviews had done and were

doing to his material prospects, these consequences in his darker hours

preyed on him severely and conspired with the forces of disease and

passion to his undoing.

For the present and during the first stress of the _Blackwood_ and

_Quarterly_ storms, he was really living under the pressure of another

and far more heartfelt trouble. His friends the Dilkes, before they

heard of his intended return from Scotland, had felt reluctantly bound

to write and summon him home on account of the alarming condition of his

brother Tom, whom he had left behind in their lodgings at Well Walk. In

fact the case was desperate, and for the next three months Keats's chief

occupation was the harrowing one of watching and ministering to this

dying brother. In a letter written to Dilke in the third week of

September, he speaks thus of his feelings and occupations:--

I wish I could say Tom was better. His identity presses upon me so all

day that I am obliged to go out--and although I had intended to have

given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and plunge into

abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, and

feebleness--so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be

poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine 'the hateful siege of

contraries'--if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me,

and yet I must do so or suffer.'

And again about the same time to Reynolds:--

I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a Woman has haunted me

these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverish relief of

poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has conquered--I

have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life--I feel

escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am

thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load

of immortality.

What he calls the abstractions into which he had plunged for relief were

the conceptions of the fallen Titans, 'the characters of Saturn and Ops'

at the beginning of _Hyperion_. Those conceptions were just beginning to

clothe themselves in his mind in the verses which every English reader

knows, verses of a cadence as majestic and pathetic almost as any in the

language, yet scarcely more charged with high emotion or more pregnant

with the sense and pressure of destiny than some of the prose of his

familiar letters written about the same time. His only other attempt in

poetry during those weeks was a translation from a sonnet of Ronsard,

whose works Taylor had lent him and from whom he got some hints for the

names and characters of his Titans. As the autumn wore on the task of

the watcher grew ever more sorrowful and absorbing, he was obliged to

desist from poetry for the time. But his correspondence shows no

flagging. Towards the middle of October he began, marking it as A, the

first of the series of journal-letters to his brother and sister in

America, which give us during the next fifteen months a picture of his

outward and inward being fuller and richer than we possess from any

other poet, and except in one single particular absolutely unreserved.

Despatching the packet on his birthday, that is October 29 or 31, he

explains why it is not longer (it is over 7,000 words): 'Tom is rather

more easy than he has been: but is still so nervous that I cannot speak

to him of these Matters--indeed it is the care I have had to keep his

mind aloof from feelings too acute that has made this letter so short a

one--I did not like to write before him a letter he knew was to reach

your hands--I cannot even now ask him for any Message--his heart speaks

to you. Be as happy as you can.' Keats had begun by warning George and

his wife, in language of beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to

prepare their minds for the worst, and assuring them of the comfort he

took in the thoughts of them:--'I have Fanny and I have you--three

people whose Happiness to me is sacred--and it does annul that selfish

sorrow which I should otherwise fall into, living as I do with poor Tom

who looks upon me as his only comfort--the tears will come into your

Eyes--let them--and embrace each other--thank heaven for what happiness

you have, and after thinking a moment or two that you suffer in common

with all Mankind hold it not a sin to regain your cheerfulness.' Between

the opening and the closing note of tenderness, the letter runs through

a wide range of subject and feeling; gossip about the Dilkes and other

acquaintances; an account of the humours of his sea-passage from

Inverness to London; the unruffled allusion to the Tory reviews from

which we have already quoted; two long and curious sex-haunted passages,

one expressing his admiration of the same East Indian cousin of the

Reynoldses, 'not a Cleopatra, but at least a Charmian,' whom we have

found mentioned already in a letter to Reynolds, the other telling what

promised to be an equivocal adventure, but turned out quite

conventionally and politely, with a mysterious lady acquaintance met

once before at Hastings; a rambling discussion on the state of home and

foreign politics; a rhapsody, or as he would have called it rant, in a

mounting strain of verse which rings like a boy's voice singing in alt,

prophesying that the child to be born to George and his wife shall be

the first American poet; then more babble about friends and

acquaintances; then, as if he knew that the invincible thing, the

love-god whose spell he had always at once dreaded and longed for, were

hovering and about to swoop, he tries to re-assure himself by calling up

the reasons why marriage and the life domestic are not for him. The

Charmian passage and the passage in which he seeks to stave off the

approach of love are among the best known in his letters, but

nevertheless the most necessary to quote:--

She has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When

she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty

of a Leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to

repulse any Man who may address her--from habit she thinks that

nothing _particular_. I always find myself more at ease with such a

woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation

which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such

times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or on a tremble. I

forget myself entirely because I live in her. You will by this time

think I am in love with her; so before I go further I will tell you I

am not--she kept me awake one Night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I

speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement than which I can feel

none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman the very 'yes'

and 'no' of whose Lips is to me a Banquet. I don't cry to take the

Moon home with me in my Pocket nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I

like her and her like because one has no _sensations_--what we both

are is taken for granted. You will suppose I have by this had much

talk with her--no such thing--there are the Miss Reynoldses on the

look out. They think I don't admire her because I did not stare at

her. They call her a flirt to me. What a want of knowledge! She walks

across a room in such a Manner that a Man is drawn towards her with a

magnetic Power. This they call flirting! They do not know things.

In the next passage, almost as the young priest Ion in the Greek play

clings to his ministration in the temple of Apollo, so we find Keats

cleaving exultingly to his high vocation and to the idea of a life

dedicated to poetry alone. But a great spiritual flaw in his nature--or

was it only a lack of fortunate experience?--betrays itself in his

conception of the alternative from which he shrinks. The imagery under

which he figures marriage joys gives no hint of their power to

discipline and inspire and sustain, and is trivially sensuous and

material.

Notwithstanding your Happiness and your recommendation I hope I shall

never marry. Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at

the end of a Journey or a Walk; though the Carpet were of Silk, the

Curtains of the morning Clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with

Cygnet's down; the food Manna, the Wine beyond Claret, the Window

opening on Windermere, I should not feel--or rather my Happiness would

not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have

described there is a sublimity to welcome me home. The roaring of the

wind is my wife and the Stars through the windowpane are my Children.

The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the

more divided and minute domestic happiness--an amiable wife and sweet

Children I contemplate as a part of that Beauty, but I must have a

thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more

and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live

in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone

than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my

Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard--then

'Tragedy with sceptered pall comes sweeping by.' According to my state

of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with

Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into

Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost Soul upon

the Stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a

voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone. These

things, combined with the opinion I have of the generality of

women--who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a

sugar Plum than my time, form a barrier against Matrimony which I

rejoice in.

Throughout November Keats was so fully absorbed in attendance on his

dying brother as to be unfit for poetry or correspondence. On the night

of December 1 the end came. 'Early the next morning,' writes Brown, 'I

was awakened in bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, who came to

tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we both

remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, my

thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,--"Have nothing

more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! Had you not better live

with me?" He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied, "I think it

would be better." From that moment he was my inmate.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Houghton MSS.

[2] The source is the Spanish _sangrador_, blood-letter; which Le

Sage in _Gil Blas_ converts into a proper name, Sangrado.

[3] The old _Scots Magazine_ lately re-started under a new name; see

above, p. 132.

CHAPTER XI

DECEMBER 1818-JUNE 1819: KEATS AND BROWN HOUSEMATES: FANNY BRAWNE: WORK

AND IDLENESS

Removal to Wentworth Place--Work on _Hyperion_--The insatiable

Haydon--The Misses Porter--A mingled yarn--Charles Lamb and

punning--Hunt and his satellites--Fanny Brawne--A sudden

enslavement--Severn's impressions--Visit to Hampshire--_The Eve of St.

Agnes_--Return and engagement--Ode to Fanny--Love and jealousy--Haydon

again--Letters to Fanny Keats--Two months' idleness--Praise of

claret--Bailey's love-affairs--Fit of languor--Fight with a

butcher--Sonnet-confessions--Reflections ethical and cosmic--Meeting

with Coleridge--The same according to the sage--A tactful

review--Sonnets on fame--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--The right version

quoted--The five Odes--Their date and order--A fruitful

May--Indecision and anxiety--A confidential letter--Departure for

Shanklin.

Dilke and Brown, as has been said already, had built for themselves a

joint block of two houses in a garden near the bottom of John Street,

Hampstead, and had called the property Wentworth Place, after a name

hereditary in the Dilke family. Dilke and his wife occupied the larger

of the two houses forming the block, and Brown, who was a bachelor, the

smaller house, standing to the west.[1] The accommodation in Brown's

quarters included a front and back sitting-room on the ground floor,

with a front and back bedroom over them, and a small spare bedroom or

'crib' where a bachelor guest could be put up for the night. The

arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses,

occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. His

move to his new quarters does not seem to have been quite so immediate

as Brown represents it. Beginning a new journal-letter to his brother

and sister-in-law a week or two after Tom's death, Keats writes, 'With

Dilke and Brown I am quite thick--with Brown indeed I am going to

domesticate, that is, we shall keep house together. I shall have the

front parlour and he the back one, by which I shall be able to avoid the

noise of Bentley's Children--and be better able to go on with my

studies--which have been greatly interrupted lately, so that I have not

a shadow of an idea for books in my head, and my pen seems to have grown

gouty for verse.'

This phase of poetical stagnation, which had naturally set in as his

cares for his dying brother grew more engrossing towards the end, passed

away quickly. By about the middle of December Keats was settled at

Wentworth Place, whither his ex-landlord, Bentley the postman, we are

told, carried down his little library of some hundred and fifty books in

a clothes-basket from Well Walk. In spite of the noisy children Keats

parted not without regret from the Bentleys, and speaks feelingly of Mrs

Bentley's kindness and attention during his late trouble. As soon,

relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in some

measure softened his grief, he plunged once more into poetry, his

special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had already begun to work

before his brother died. But he never got into a quite happy or

uninterrupted flow of work on it. Once and again we find him moved to

lay it aside for a bout of brotherly gossip with George and Georgiana

in America. 'Just now I took out my poem to go on with it--but the

thought of my writing so little to you came upon me and I could not get

on--so I have begun at random and I have not a word to say--and yet my

thoughts are so full of you that I can do nothing else.' And again: 'I

have no thought pervading me so constantly and frequently as that of

you--my Poem cannot frequently drive it away--you will retard it much

more than you could by taking up my time if you were in England. I never

forget you except after seeing now and then some beautiful woman--but

that is a fever--the thought of you both is a passion with me, but for

the most part a calm one.'

This letter, covering some three weeks from mid-December to January 4,

enables us, like others to the same correspondents, to lay our finger on

almost every strand in the 'mingled yarn' of Keats's life and doings. Of

one tiresome interruption which befell him about Christmas he tells

nothing, doubtless in order to spare his brother anxiety. This was a

request for money from the insatiable Haydon. The correspondence on the

matter cannot be read without anger against the elder man and admiring

affection for the generous lad--yet not foolishly or recklessly

generous--on whom he sponged. Haydon's only excuses are a recent

eye-trouble which had hindered his work, and his inflated belief, which

had so far successfully imposed both upon himself and his friends, in

his own huge importance to art and to his country. Keats writes, showing

incidentally how last year's critical rebuffs had changed, more or less

permanently, his attitude in regard to the public and public

recognition:--

Believe me Haydon I have that sort of fire in my heart that would

sacrifice everything I have to your service--I speak without any

reserve--I know you would do so for me--I open my heart to you in a

few words. I will do this sooner than you shall be distressed: but let

me be the last stay--Ask the rich lovers of Art first--I'll tell you

why--I have a little money which may enable me to study, and to

travel for three or four years. I never expect to get anything by my

Books: and moreover I wish to avoid publishing--I admire Human Nature

but I do not like _Men_. I should like to compose things honourable to

Man--but not fingerable over by Men. So I am anxious to exist without

troubling the printer's devil or drawing upon Men's or Women's

admiration--in which great solitude I hope God will give me strength

to rejoice. Try the long purses--but do not sell your drawings or I

shall consider it a breach of friendship.

Haydon answers in a gush of grandiloquent gratitude, promising to try

every corner first, but intimating pretty clearly that he knew his

wealthier habitual helpers were for the present tired out with him. One

of his phrases is a treasure. 'Ah Keats, this is sad work for one of my

soul and Ambition. The truest thing you ever said of mortal was that I

had a touch of Alexander in me! I have, I know it, and the World shall

know it, but this is a purgative drug I must first take.' 'This' means

his own perpetual need and habit of living on other people. In the next

letter Haydon of course accepts Keats's offer, and in the Christmas

weeks, when he should have been wholly engrossed in _Hyperion_, Keats

had much and for some time fruitless ado with bankers, lawyers, and

guardian in endeavouring to fulfil his promise. To his brother he only

says he has been dining with Haydon and otherwise seeing much of him;

mentions the painter's eye-trouble; and quotes him as describing vividly

at second hand the sufferings of Captain (afterwards Sir John) Ross and

his party on their voyage in search of the North-West passage.

From Ross in Baffin's Bay the same letter rambles to Ritchie in the

deserts of Morocco, and thence to gossip about the best way of keeping

his own and George's brotherly intimacy unbroken across the ocean; about

the 'sickening stuff' printed in Hunt's new _Literary Pocket Book_ (it

was when he was seeing most of Haydon that Keats was always most

inclined to harsh criticism of Hunt); about Mrs Dilke's cats, and about

Godwin's novels and Hazlitt's opinion of them, and the rare pleasure he

has had at Haydon's in looking through a book of engravings after early

Italian frescoes in a church at Milan. 'Milan' must be a mistake, for

there are no such engravings,[2] and what Keats saw must certainly have

been the fine series by Lasinio, published in 1814, after the frescoes

of Orcagna, Benozzo Gozzoli, and the rest in the Campo Santo at Pisa. 'I

do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare. Full of

romance and the most tender feeling--magnificence of draperies beyond

everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael's. But Grotesque to a

curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole--even finer to me than

more accomplished works--as there was left so much room for

Imagination.' It is interesting to find Keats thus vividly awake, as

very few yet were either by instinct or fashion, to the charm of the

Italian primitives, and to remember how it was a copy of this same book

of prints, in the possession of young John Everett Millais thirty years

later, which first aroused the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm in him and his

associates Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt (the last-named is our

witness for the fact).

Keats tells moreover how an unknown admirer from the west country had

sent him a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a

further tribute in the shape of a L25 note; how he had been both pleased

and displeased,--'if I had refused it I should have behaved in a very

braggadocio dunderheaded manner, and yet the present galls me a little';

and again how he has received through Woodhouse a glowing letter of

sympathy and encouragement from Miss Jane Porter, the then famous

authoress of _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and _The Scottish Chiefs_, who desires

his acquaintance on her own behalf and that of her sister Anna Maria,

almost equally popular at the hour by her romance of _The Hungarian

Brothers_. By all this, says Keats, he feels more obliged than

flattered--'so obliged that I will not at present give you an

extravaganza of a Lady Romancer. I will be introduced to them if it be

merely for the pleasure of writing to you about it--I shall certainly

see a new race of People.' Pity he failed to carry out his purpose:

pen-portraits satirical and other are not lacking of these admired

sisters, the tall and tragical Jane, the blonde and laughing Anna Maria,

'La Penserosa' and 'L'Allegra,' but a sketch by Keats would have been an

interesting addition to them. Still in the same letter, he complains of

the sore throat which he finds it hard to shake off, and tells how he

has given up or all but given up taking snuff (nearly everybody in that

generation snuffed), and how he has been shooting with Dilke on

Hampstead Heath and shot a tomtit,--a feat which for a moment calls up

this divine poet to our minds in the guise of one of the cockney

sportsmen of Seymour's caricatures. Never mind: he can afford it.

From an enquiry about the expected baby in America,--'will the little

bairn have made his entrance before you have this? Kiss it for me, and

when it can first know a cheese from a Caterpillar show it my picture

twice a week,'--from this he passes to the re-assuring statement that

the attack upon him in the Quarterly has in some quarters done him

actual service. He tells how constrained and out of his element he feels

in ordinary society; a common experience of genius, and part of the

price it pays for living at a different level and temperature of thought

and feeling from the herd. 'I am passing a Quiet day--which I have not

done for a long while--and if I do continue so, I feel I must again

begin with my poetry--for if I am not in action of mind or Body I am in

pain--and from that I suffer greatly by going into parties where from

the rules of society and a natural pride I am obliged to smother my

Spirit and look like an Idiot--because I feel my impulses given way to

would too much amaze them--I live under an everlasting restraint--never

relieved except when I am composing--so I will write away.' And

resuming apparently on Christmas Day:--'I think you knew before you

left England, that my next subject would be "the fall of Hyperion." I

went on a little with it last night, but it will take some time to get

into the vein again. I will not give you any extracts, because I wish

the whole to make an impression. I have however a few Poems which you

will like, and I will copy out on the next sheet.' Nearly a week later

he adds, 'I will insert any little pieces I may write--though I will not

give any extracts from my large poem which is scarce began.' The phrase

about _Hyperion_ must be taken as indicating on how great a scale he had

conceived the poem rather than how little he had yet written of it. In

point of fact all we have of this mighty fragment must have been written

either by his brother's bedside in September-October 1818 (but then

certainly only a little) or else in these Christmas weeks from

mid-December to mid-January 1818-19. The short poems he sends are the

spirited sets of heptasyllabics, _Fancy_, and _Lines on the Mermaid

Tavern_, the former one of the best things in the second and lighter

class of his work: and with them the fragment written for music, 'I had

a dove.' In relation to these he says 'It is my intention to wait a few

years before I publish any minor poems--and then I hope to have a volume

of some worth--and which those people will relish who cannot bear the

burthen of a long poem.'

Presently Charles Lamb comes for a moment upon the scene. 'I have seen

Lamb lately--Brown and I were taken by Hunt to Novello's--there we were

devastated and excruciated with bad and repeated puns--Brown don't want

to go again.' Punning, like snuffing, was the all but universal fashion

of that age, as those of us can best realize who are old enough to

remember grandfathers that belonged to it; and judging by the specimens

Brown and Keats have themselves left, puns too bad for them are scarce

imaginable. Novello is of course the distinguished organist, composer

and music-publisher, Vincent Novello, whose Sunday evening musical

parties were frequented by all the Lamb and Hunt circle, and whose

eldest daughter, Mary Victoria, was married some ten years later to

Cowden Clarke. At this time she was but a child of ten, but writing many

years afterwards she has left a vivid reminiscence of Keats at her

father's house, 'with his picturesque head, leaning against the

instruments, one foot raised on his knee and smoothed beneath his hands'

(an attitude said to have been perpetuated in a lost portrait by

Severn). Is the above a memory of the one evening only which Keats

himself mentions, or of others when his love of music may have drawn him

to the Novellos' house in spite of the puns and of company for the

moment not much to his taste? For the ways of Hunt and some of his

circle, their mutual flatteries, their habit of trivial, chirping

ecstasy over the things they liked, their superfluity of glib,

complacent comment rubbing the bloom off sacred beauties of art and

poetry and nature, were jarring on Keats's nerves just now; and though

perfectly aware of Hunt's essential virtues of kind-heartedness and good

comradeship, he writes with some irritability of impatience:--

Hunt has asked me to meet Tom Moore some day so you shall hear of him.

The night we went to Novello's there was a complete set-to of Mozart

and punning. I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow

my own inclinations I should never meet any one of that set again, not

even Hunt who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are

with him--but in reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in

matters of taste and in morals. He understands many a beautiful thing;

but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of

perception as he himself professes--he begins an explanation in such a

curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually.

Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things

hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white

Busts--and many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a

nothing. This distorts one's mind--makes one's thoughts

bizarre--perplexes one in the standard of Beauty.

A little later he improvises a sample, not more than mildly satirical,

from a comedy he professes to be planning on the ways and manners of

Hunt and his satellites.

In the same letter a new personage makes her momentous entry on the

scene. 'Mrs Brawne who took Brown's house for the summer still resides

at Hampstead--she is a very nice woman--and her daughter senior is I

think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and

strange--we have a little tiff now and then, and she behaves better, or

I must have sheered off.' This Mrs Brawne was a widow lady of West

Indian connexions and some little fortune, with a daughter, Fanny, just

grown up and two younger children. She had rented Brown's house while he

and Keats were away in Scotland, and had naturally become acquainted

with the Dilkes living next door and sharing a common garden. After

Brown's return Mrs Brawne moved with her family to a house in Downshire

Street close by. The acquaintance with the Dilkes was kept up, and it

was through them, not long after he came back from Scotland, that Keats

first met Fanny Brawne. His next words about her are these:--

Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height with a fine style

of countenance of the lengthened sort--she manages to make her hair

look well--her nostrils are fine--though a little painful--her mouth

is bad and good--her Profile is better than her full-face which indeed

is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone. Her shape is

very graceful and so are her movements--her Arms are good, her hands

bad-ish her feet tolerable--she is not seventeen--but she is

ignorant--monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions,

calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the

term _Minx_--this is I think not from any innate vice but from a

penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am however tired of such

style and shall decline any more of it.

An attraction which has begun by repulsion is ever the most dangerous of

all. The heightened emotional strain of his weeks of tendance on his

dying brother had laid Keats open to both influences at their fullest

power; he was ripe, as several passages from his letters have made us

feel, for the tremendous adventure of love; and the 'new, strange, and

threatening sorrow' from which he had with relief declared himself

escaped when the momentary lure of the East-Indian Charmian left him

fancy-free, was about to fall on him in good earnest now. Before many

weeks he was hopelessly enslaved, and passion teaching him a sensitive

secretiveness and reserve, he says to brother and sister no word more of

his enslaver except by way of the lightest passing allusion. From his

first semi-sarcastic account of her above quoted, as well as from

Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in Titian's

picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length silhouette

of her that has been preserved, it is possible to realise something of

her aspect and presence.

A brisk and blooming young beauty of a little over eighteen (Keats's

'not seventeen' is a mistake) with blonde hair and vivid palish

colouring, a somewhat sharply cut aquiline cast of features, a slight,

shapely figure rather short than tall, a liveliness of manner bordering

on the boisterous, and no doubt some taking air and effluence of youth

and vitality and sex,--such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her

character we have scant means of judging. Neither she nor her mother can

have been worldly-minded, or they would never have encouraged the

attentions of a youth like Keats, whose prospects were problematical or

null. It is clear that, though certainly high-spirited, inexperienced,

and self-confident, she was kind and in essentials constant to her

lover, and patient and unresentful under his occasional wild outbursts

of jealousy and suspicion. But it seems equally clear that she did not

half realise what manner of man he was, nor how high and privileged was

the charge committed to her. She had no objection to the prospect of a

long engagement, and despite her lover's remonstrances held herself free

in the meantime to enjoy to the full the pleasures of her age and the

admiration of other men.[3] One day early in the new year Keats took

the devoted Severn to call on his new friends. Severn was much pleased

with the mother, who seems to have been in truth a cultivated kind and

gentle person; but he did not take to the daughter or even much admire

her looks, and though perceiving her attraction for Keats did not then

or till long afterwards realise the fatal strength of its hold upon him.

'That poor idle Thing of Womankind to whom he has so unaccountably

attached himself'--so she is styled by Reynolds in a letter to Taylor a

year and a half later. Brown, who knew her much better, and whose

friendship with her sometimes showed itself in gallantries at which

Keats writhed in secret, writes of her always in terms of kindness and

respect, but never very explicitly. The very few of Keats's friends who

came to be in his confidence, including Dilke and his wife, seem to have

been agreed, although they bore her no ill will, in regarding the

attachment as a misfortune for him.

So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any

passion for a woman have been. Blow on blow had in truth begun to fall

on Keats, as though in fulfilment of the constitutional misgivings to

which he was so often secretly a prey. First the departure of his

brother George had deprived him of his closest friend, to whom alone he

had from boyhood been accustomed to confide those obsessions of his

darker hours and in confiding to find relief from them. Next the

exertions of his Scottish tour had proved too much for his strength, and

laid him open to the attacks of his hereditary enemy, consumption.

Coming back, he had found his brother Tom almost at his last gasp in the

clutch of that enemy, and in nursing him had both lived in spirit

through all his pains and breathed for many weeks a close atmosphere of

infection. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little as they

might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and

carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his

practical hopes from literature. Now were to be added the pangs of

love,--love requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of

fruition: and even love disdained might have made him suffer less. The

passion took him, as it often takes consumptives, in its fiercest form:

Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there

is no withstanding, never harried a more helpless victim.[4]

By what stages the coils closed on him we can only guess. His own

account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he had written himself

her vassal within a week of their first meeting: which took place, we

know, some time during the period of watching by Tom's sick-bed. After

he went to live with Brown in December they must have met frequently.

Probably it was this new attraction, as well as his chronic throat

trouble and his concern over Haydon's affairs, which made him postpone a

promised visit to Dilke's relations in Hampshire from Christmas until

mid-January. He then carried out his promise, going to join Brown at

Bedhampton, the home of Dilke's brother-in-law Mr John Snook. He liked

his hosts and received pleasure from his visit, but was unwell and

during a stay of a fortnight only once went outside the garden. This was

to a gathering of country clergy reinforced by two bishops, at the

consecration of a chapel built by a great Jew-convertor, a Mr Way. The

ceremony got on his nerves and caused him to write afterwards to his

brother an entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and

physiognomy. He spent also a few days with Dilke's father in Chichester,

and went out twice to dowager card parties. These social pleasures were

naught to him, and his spirits, like his health, were low. But his

genius was never more active. We have seen in the midst of what worries

and interruptions he had worked before and during Christmas at

_Hyperion_, the fragment which in our language stands next in epic

quality to _Paradise Lost_. At Bedhampton in January, on some thin

sheets of thin paper brought down for the purpose, he wrote the _Eve of

St Agnes_, for its author merely 'a little poem,' for us a masterpiece

aglow in every line with the vital quintessence of romance.

No word of Keats's own or of his friends prepares us for this new

achievement or informs when he began first to think of the subject. It

must of course have been ripening in his mind some good while before he

thus suddenly and swiftly cast it into shape. When he wrote three months

earlier of having to seek relief beside the sick-bed of his brother by

'plunging into abstract images,' were they images of primeval Greek gods

and Titans only, or were these contrasted figures and colours of

mediaeval romance beginning to occupy his imagination at the same time?

Had the subject perhaps come into his mind as long ago as the preceding

March, when Hunt and Reynolds and he were having the talks about

Boccaccio which resulted in Keats's _Isabella_ and Reynolds's _Garden of

Florence_ and _Ladye of Provence_? We shall see that Boccaccio counts

for something in Keats's treatment of the St Agnes' Eve story, so that

the supposition is at least plausible. Or may it even have been of this

story and not, as is commonly assumed, of _Hyperion_ that he was

thinking as far back as September 1817 when he wrote to Haydon from

Oxford of the 'new romance' he had in his mind? Woodhouse does not throw

much light on such questions when he tells us that 'the subject was

suggested by Mrs Jones.' This name, uncongenial to the muse (excepting

the muse of Wordsworth) is otherwise unknown in connexion with Keats.

Did the same lady also tell him of the tradition concerning St Mark's

day (April 25th), and so become the 'only begetter' of that remarkable

fragment _The Eve of St Mark_, which he wrote (Woodhouse again is the

authority for the dates) between the 13th and 17th of February after his

return to Hampstead? In connexion with Keats few stones have been left

unturned for further personal or critical research, but here is one.

Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of January and it must have been

very soon afterwards that he became the declared and accepted lover of

Fanny Brawne, savouring intensely thenceforward all the tantalising

sweets and bitters of that estate, though nothing was said to friends

about the engagement. From the first he suffered severely from the sense

of her freedom to enjoy pleasures and excitements for which neither his

health nor his social habits and inclinations fitted him. The tale of

the _Eve of St Mark_, begun and broken off just at this time, may

possibly, as Rossetti thought, have been designed to turn on the remorse

of a young girl for sufferings of a like kind inflicted on her lover and

ending in his death. However that may be, we have two direct cries from

his heart, one of pure love-yearning, the other of racking jealousy,

which were written, if I read the evidences aright, almost immediately

after the engagement and can be dated almost to a day. These are the

first version, which has only lately become known, of the 'Bright Star'

sonnet, and the ode _To Fanny_ published posthumously by Lord Houghton.

Both carry internal evidence of having been written before the winter

was out: the sonnet in the words which invoke the star as watching the

moving waters,

Or gazing at the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;

the ode in the lines,

I come, I see thee as thou standest there,

Beckon me not into the wintry air.[5]

Now it happens that this year there was frost and rough weather late in

February, with snowfalls on the afternoon of the 24th and again the

following morning. I imagine both sonnet and ode to have been written

while the cold spell lasted, the sonnet probably before dawn on the

actual morning of the 25th.[6] As slightly changed in form a year and a

half later this sonnet has been long endeared to us all as one of the

most beautiful in the language: I shall defer its discussion till we

come to the date of this recast. The ode has flaws, for to make good or

even bearable poetry out of that humiliating and grotesque passion of

physical jealousy is a hard matter. It begins poorly, with a sense of

discord, in the first stanza, between the choking violence of feeling

expressed and the artificial form into which its expression is cast. But

if we leave out this stanza, and also the fifth and sixth, which are a

little common and unequal, we get an appeal as painful, indeed, as it is

passionate, yet lacking neither in courtesy nor dignity, and conveyed in

a strain of verse almost without fault:--

Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears,

And hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,--

To-night, if I may guess, thy beauty wears

A smile of such delight,

As brilliant and as bright,

As when with ravished, aching, vassal eyes,

Lost in soft amaze,

I gaze, I gaze!

Who now, with greedy looks, eats up my feast?

What stare outfaces now my silver moon?

Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least;

Let, let the amorous burn--

But, pr'ythee, do not turn

The current of your heart from me so soon.

O! save, in charity,

The quickest pulse for me.

Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe

Voluptuous visions into the warm air;

Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath,

Be like an April day,

Smiling and cold and gay,

A temperate lily, temperate as fair;

Then, Heaven! there will be

A warmer June for me.

Ah! if you prize my subdu'd soul above

The poor, the fading, brief pride of an hour;

Let none profane my Holy See of Love,

Or with a rude hand break

The sacramental cake:

Let none else touch the just new-budded flower:

If not--may my eyes close,

Love! on their last repose.

In both of these poems Keats soothes himself with thoughts of dying, and

they are doubtless among the things he had in mind when two or three

months later, in the ode _To a Nightingale_, he speaks of having invoked

Death by soft names 'in many a mused rhyme.'

Fearing the intrusion of what in another sonnet of the time he calls

'The dragon-world and all its hundred eyes,' he was intensely jealous in

guarding his secret from friends and acquaintances; and in writing even

to those dearest to him he lets slip no word that might betray it. To

his brother he merely says, 'Miss Brawne and I have now and then a chat

and a tiff,' while to his young sister he writes on February 27th that

he wishes he could come to her at Walthamstow for a month or so,

packing off Mrs Abbey to town, and get her to teach him 'a few common

dancing steps,'--for what reason, to us too pathetically evident, he of

course gives no hint.

On February 14th, about a fortnight after his return from Hampshire, and

on the very day when according to Woodhouse he began _The Eve of St

Mark_, Keats had put pen to a new journal-letter for America. A straw

showing how the wind was blowing with him is his mention that the

Reynolds sisters, whose company used to be among his chief pleasures,

are staying at the Dilkes next door and that he finds them 'very dull.'

So, we may guess, will they on their parts have found him. His only

other correspondents in these weeks are Haydon and his young sister

Fanny. Early in March Haydon returned to the charge about the loan. 'My

dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised assistance.... Before

the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and manna and all the

blessings of gratified thirst.' Keats had intended for Haydon's relief

some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share in their

grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over to him

at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were raised,

and for some time after the new year he had the annoyance of finding

himself unable to do as he had hoped. When by-and-by Haydon writes, in

the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with his promise and his

failure to keep it, Keats replies without loss of temper, explaining

that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his hand,

but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting possession of

his money. Moreover he finds that much less remains of his small

inheritance than he had supposed, and even if all he had were laid on

the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live on

for two years. Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent sums to

various friends amounting in all to near L200, of which he expects the

repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats

contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds which he could very ill

spare.

To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are charming.

He lets her perceive nothing of his anxieties, and is full of brotherly

tenderness and careful advice; of interest in her preparation for her

approaching confirmation; of regrets that she is kept so much from him

by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey, with humorous admonitions to

patience under that lady's 'unfeeling and ignorant gabble'; and of plans

for coming over to see her when the weather and his throat allow or when

he is in cash to pay the coach fare. On one day he is serious, begging

her to lean on him in all things:--'We have been very little together:

but you have not the less been with me in thought. You have no one else

in the world besides me who would sacrifice anything for you--I feel

myself the only Protector you have. In all your little troubles think of

me with the thought that there is at least one person in England who if

he could would help you out of them--I live in hopes of being able to

make you happy.' Another day he is all playfulness, thinking of various

little presents to please her, a selection of Tassie's gems, flowers

from the Tottenham nursery garden, drawing materials--and here follows

the passage above quoted (p. 10) against keeping live birds or fishes:--

They are better in the trees and the water,--though I must confess

even now a partiality for a handsome globe of gold-fish--then I would

have it hold ten pails of water and be fed continually fresh through a

cool pipe with another pipe to let through the floor--well ventilated

they would preserve all their beautiful silver and crimson. Then I

would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round

with Myrtles and Japonicas. I should like the window to open on to the

Lake of Geneva--and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of

somebody reading.

[Illustration: PL. VIII

_From a posthumous portrait by Joseph Severn

in the National Portrait Gallery

Emery Walker ph &c._]

For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a

constant anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the

distant Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last

advices been bound. Pending such news, he keeps writing up his

journal for them, and for nearly four months it grew and grew. Still in

February, he promises to send in the next packet his '_Pot of Basil_,

_St Agnes' Eve_, and if I should have finished it, a little thing called

the _Eve of St Mark_. You see what fine Mother Radcliffe names I

have--it is not my fault--I do not search for them. I have not gone on

with _Hyperion_, for to tell the truth I have not been in great cue for

writing lately--I must wait for the spring to rouse me up a little!'

As it fell out, he never went on either with _Hyperion_ or with the _Eve

of St Mark_, the romance just so promisingly begun. For fully two months

after breaking off the latter fragment (February 17th or 18th) he was

quite out of cue for writing, and produced nothing except the ode _To

Fanny_ (if I am right as to its date) and a few personal sonnets. Many

causes, we can feel, were working together to check for the time being

the creative impulse within him: the mere disturbing influence of the

spring season for one thing; discouragement at the public reception of

his work for another, though this was a motive external and relatively

secondary; the results of a deliberate mental stock-taking of his own

powers and performances for a third; and more deep-seated and

compulsive, though unexpressed, than any of these, the love-passion by

which three-fourths of his soul and consciousness had come to be

absorbed. Here, from a letter to Haydon of March 8, is an example of

what I mean by his mental stock-taking. The resolution it expresses is

of course more a matter of mood than of fixed purpose:--

I have come to this resolution--never to write for the sake of writing

or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge or

experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me;

otherwise I will be dumb. What imagination I have I shall enjoy, and

greatly, for I have experienced the satisfaction of having great

conceptions without the trouble of sonnetteering. I will not spoil my

love of gloom by writing an Ode to Darkness.

With respect to my livelihood, I will not write for it,--for I will

not run with that most vulgar of all crowds, the literary. Such things

I ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental

weights, as it were. I am three and twenty, with little knowledge and

middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have

been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing.

Some five weeks later, about mid-April, we find that Haydon himself has

been a contributing cause to Keats's poetic inactivity by his behaviour

in regard to the loan which Keats had hoped but so far been unable to

make him. The failure he writes, has not been his fault:--

I am doubly hurt at the slightly reproachful tone of your note and at

the occasion of it,--for it must be some other disappointment; you

seem'd so sure of some important help when last I saw you--now you

have maimed me again; I was whole, I had begun reading again--when

your note came I was engaged in a Book. I dread as much as a Plague

the idle fever of two months more without any fruit. I will walk over

the first fine day: then see what aspect your affairs have taken, and

if they should continue gloomy walk into the City to Abbey and get his

consent for I am persuaded that to me alone he will not concede a jot.

In the journal-letter of these weeks to his brother and sister-in-law,

mentioning how he had been asked to join Woodhouse over a bottle of

claret at his coffee-house, he breaks into a rhapsody over the virtues

and wholesomeness of that beverage and adds 'this same claret is the

only palate-passion I have--I forgot game--I must plead guilty to the

breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the back-bone of a grouse,

the wing and side of a Pheasant, and a Woodcock _passim_.' Turning to

his own affairs, he says,--

I am in no despair about them--my poem has not at all succeeded; in

the course of a year or so I think I shall try the public again--in a

selfish point of view I should suffer my pride and my contempt of

public opinion to hold me silent--but for yours and Fanny's sake I

will pluck up a spirit and try again. I have no doubt of success in a

course of years if I persevere--but it must be patience--for the

Reviews have enervated and made indolent men's minds--few think for

themselves. These Reviews are getting more and more powerful,

especially the Quarterly--they are like a superstition which the more

it prostrates the Crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful

it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness. I was in

hopes that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and

iniquity of these Plagues they would scout them, but no, they are like

the spectators at the Westminster cock-pit--they like the battle--and

do not care who wins or who loses.

Among other matters he has a long story to tell about his friend

Bailey's fickleness in love. It appears that Bailey, after a first

unfortunate love-affair, had during the past year been paying his

addresses to Mariane Reynolds, begging that she would take time to

consider her answer, and that while her decision was still uncertain

Bailey, to the great indignation of all the Reynolds family and a little

to Keats's own, had engaged himself in Scotland to the sister of his

friend Gleig, afterwards well known as author of _The Subaltern_ and

Chaplain General to the Forces. Next Keats begins quoting with a natural

zest of admiration, almost in full, that incomparable piece of studied

and sustained invective, Hazlitt's _Letter to William Gifford Esqr._,

beside which Gifford's own controversial virulences seem relatively

blunt and boorish. Half way through Keats has to say he will copy the

rest tomorrow,--

for the candles are burnt down and I am using the wax taper--which has

a long snuff on it--the fire is at its last click--I am sitting with

my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other

with the heel a little elevated from the carpet--I am writing this on

the Maid's tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure.

Beside this volume of Beaumont and Fletcher--there are on the table

two volumes of Chaucer and a new work of Tom Moore's called _Tom

Cribb's Memorial to Congress_,--nothing in it. These are trifles but I

require nothing so much of you but that you will give me a like

description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to

me. Could I see that same thing done of any great Man long since dead

it would be a great delight: As to know in what position Shakespeare

sat when he began 'To be or not to be'--such things become interesting

from distance of time or place. I hope you are both now in that sweet

sleep which no two beings deserve more than you do--I must fancy you

so--and please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing

over you and your lives--God bless you--I whisper good night in your

ears and you will dream of me.

This is on the 13th of March. Six days later he gives another picture,

this time of his state of body rather than of mind:--

This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely

careless--I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's _Castle of

Indolence_--my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till

nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a

delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness.

If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it

languor, but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of

effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest

of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of

enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition,

nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they

seem rather like figures on a Greek vase--a Man and two women whom no

one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the

only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body

over-powering the Mind.

[Illustration: PL. IX

'Figures on a Greek vase: a man and two women'

FROM AN ETCHING IN PIRANESI'S VASI E CANDELABRI]

The criticism is foolish which sees in this passage the expression of a

languid, self-indulgent nature, and especially foolish considering the

footnote in which Keats observes that at the moment he has a black eye.

The black eye was no doubt the mark of the fight in which he had lately

well thrashed a young blackguard of a butcher whom he found tormenting a

kitten. That the said fight took place just about this time is clear by

the following evidences. Cowden Clarke, in his recollections

communicated privately to Lord Houghton, writes, 'The last time I saw

Keats was during his residence with Mr Brown. I spent the day with him;

and he read to me the poem he had last finished--_The Eve of St Agnes_.

Shortly after this I removed many miles from London, and was spared the

sorrow of beholding the progress of the disease that was to take him

from us. When I last saw him he was in fine health and spirits; and he

told me that he had, not long before our meeting, had an encounter with

a fellow who was tormenting a kitten, or puppy, and who was big enough

to have eaten him; that they fought for nearly an hour; and that his

opponent was led home.'[7] The reading of the _Eve of St Agnes_ fixes

the date of Clarke's visit as after Keats's return from Chichester at

the end of January, and a remark of Keats, writing to his brother

between February the 14th and 19th, that he has not seen Clarke 'for God

knows how long', further fixes it as after mid-February; while the

latest limit is set by the fact that by Easter Clarke had gone away to

live with his family at Ramsgate, where they had settled after his

father had given up the Enfield school. What the 'effeminacy' passage

really expresses is of course no more than a passing mood of lassitude,

gratefully welcomed as a relief from the strain of feelings habitually

more acute than nature could well bear. Ambition he was schooling, or

trying to school, himself to cherish in moderation, but it was not often

or for long that the stings either of poetry or of love abated for him

the least jot of their bitter-sweet intensity, or that anticipations of

poverty or the fever of incipient disease relaxed their grip.

Though Keats's letters to his brother and sister-in-law contain no

confidence on the subject, some of the verses he encloses betray in

abstract form the strain of passion under which he was living; notably

the fine weird sonnet on a dream which came to him after reading the

Paolo and Francesca passage in Dante, and the other sonnet beginning

'Why did I laugh to-night?' In copying this last, he adds careful and

considerate words of re-assurance lest his brother should take alarm

for his sake:

I am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for

the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that

reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet--but

Look over the two last pages and ask yourselves whether I have not

that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the

best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with

no Agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but

Knowledge when pushed to the point though the first steps to it were

through my human passions--and perhaps I must confess a little bit of

my heart--

Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell:

No God, no Demon of severe response

Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.--

Then to my human heart I turn at once--

Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone;

Say wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain!

O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan

To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain!

Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease;

My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads:

Yet could I on this very midnight cease

And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds.

Verse, fame and Beauty are intense indeed

But Death intenser--Death is Life's High meed.

I went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep. Sane I went to bed and

sane I arose.

This is yet another of those invocations to friendly Death to which he

himself refers in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ written a few weeks

later, and in its phrase 'on this very midnight cease' anticipates one

of the great lines of the ode itself.

No letter of Keats--or of any one--is richer than this of February to

May 1819 in variety of mood and theme and interest. It contains two of

the freshest and most luminous of his discursive passages of meditation

on life and on the nature of the soul and the meaning of things:

passages showing a native power of thought untrained indeed, but also

unhampered, by academic knowledge and study, and hardly to be surpassed

for their union of steady human common-sense with airy ease and play of

imaginative speculation. In one, starting from reflections on the

unforeseen way in which circumstances, like clouds, gather and burst,

reflections suggested by the expected death of the father of his friend

Haslam, he calls up a series of pictures of the instinctiveness with

which men, like animals,--the hawk, the robin, the stoat, the deer,--go

about their purposes; considers the rarity of the exceptional human

beings whose disinterestedness helps on the progress of the world; and

then turns his thoughts on himself with the comment,--

Even here, though I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as

the veriest human animal you can think of, I am, however young,

writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a

great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of

any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin? May there not

be superior beings, amused with any graceful, though instinctive,

attitude my mind may fall into as I am entertained with the alertness

of the Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer?

In the other passage he disposes of all Rousseau-Godwin theories of

human perfectibility by a consideration of the physical frame and order

of the world we live in, the flaws and violences which mar and jar it,

and which its human offspring are likely to derive from and share with

it until the end; and, provisionally accepting the doctrine of

immortality, he broaches of his own a scheme of the spiritual discipline

for the sake of which, as he suggests, the life of men on this so

imperfect earth may have been designed.

In marked, not always entirely pleasant contrast with these passages of

thought and beauty Keats sends his brother such things as a summary of a

satiric fairy story of Brown's and an impromptu comic tale of his own in

verse, much in Brown's manner, about a princess, a mule, and a dwarf:

both of them apparently to his mind amusing, but to us rather silly and

the former a little coarse: also some friendly satiric verses of his own

on Brown in the Spenserian stanza. He tells how he has been turning

over the love-letters palmed off by way of hoax upon his brother Tom by

Charles Wells in the character of a pretended 'Amena', and vows fiercely

to make Wells suffer for his heartlessness; gossips further of Dilke and

his overstrained parental anxiety about his boy at school; asks a string

of playful questions about his sister-in-law and her daily doings; and

in another place gives us, in the mention of a casual walk and talk with

Coleridge, the liveliest record we have of the astonishing variety of

matters and mysteries over which that philosopher was capable, in a

short hour's conversation, of ranging without pause or taking breath:--

Last Sunday I took a walk towards Highgate and in the lane that winds

by the side of Lord Mansfield's park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator

at Guy's[8] in conversation with Coleridge--I joined them, after

enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable--I walked with him

at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In

those two Miles he broached a thousand things--let me see if I can

give you a list--Nightingales, Poetry--on Poetical

Sensation--Metaphysics--Different genera and species of

Dreams--Nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single

and double touch--a dream related--First and second consciousness--the

difference explained between will and Volition--so say metaphysicians

from a want of smoking the second consciousness--Monsters--the

Kraken--Mermaids--Southey believes in them--Southey's belief too much

diluted--a Ghost story--Good morning--I heard his voice as he came

towards me--I heard it as he moved away--I had heard it all the

interval--if it may be called so. He was civil enough to ask me to

call on him at Highgate.

It is amusing to note how the time and distance covered by his own

encyclopaedic volubility shrank afterwards in Coleridge's memory. In his

_Table Talk_ taken down thirteen years later his account of the meeting

is recorded as follows (with the name of his companion left blank: I

fill it in from Keats's letter): 'A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth

met Mr Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and

spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or

so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, "Let me

carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "There

is death in that hand," I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this

was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.' The

story of Coleridge's observation after the handshake is no doubt exact:

the 'not well-dressed' in his description of Keats may very well be so

too: but the 'loose' and 'slack' applied to his appearance must have

been drawn from the sage's inward eye, as all accounts are agreed as to

Keats's well-knit compactness of person. One cannot but regret that

Keats failed to follow up the introduction by going, as invited, to see

Coleridge at Highgate: but in all cases save those of Hunt and Haydon,

his contact with distinguished seniors seems thus to have stopped short

at kindly and respectful acquaintance and not to have been pushed to

intimacy.

Another, somewhat divergent, account of the meeting taken down, also

from Coleridge's lips, by Mr John Frere three years earlier has only

lately been published. Its inaccuracy in details is evident, but there

is much sense as well as kindness in Coleridge's remarks on the reviews

and their effect:--

_C._ Poor Keats, I saw him once. Mr Green, whom you have heard me

mention, and I were walking out in these parts, and we were overtaken

by a young man of a very striking countenance whom Mr Green recognised

and shook hands with, mentioning my name; I wish Mr Green had

introduced me, for I did not know who it was. He passed on, but in a

few moments sprung back and said, 'Mr Coleridge, allow me the honour

of shaking your hand.' I was struck by the energy of his manner, and

gave him my hand. He passed on and we stood still looking after him,

when Mr Green said, 'Do you know who that is? That is Keats, the

poet.' 'Heavens!' said I, 'when I shook him by the hand there was

death!' This was about two years before he died.

_F._ But what was it?

_C._ I cannot describe it. There was a heat and a dampness in the

hand. To say that his death was caused by the Review is absurd, but at

the same time it is impossible adequately to conceive the effect

which it must have had on his mind. It is very well for those who have

a place in the world and are independent to talk of these things, they

can bear such a blow, so can those who have a strong religious

principle; but all men are not born Philosophers, and all men have not

those advantages of birth and education. Poor Keats had not, and it is

impossible I say to conceive the effect which such a Review must have

had upon him, knowing as he did that he had his way to make in the

world by his own exertions, and conscious of the genius within him.[9]

In the Leigh Hunt circle it had always been the fashion to regard with

contempt, mingled with regret, Wordsworth's more childishly worded poems

and ballads of humble life such as _The Idiot Boy_ and _Alice Fell_. The

announcement of his forthcoming piece, _Peter Bell_, now drew from John

Hamilton Reynolds an anonymous skit in the shape of an adroit and rather

stinging anticipatory parody, which Taylor and Hessey published in the

course of this April despite a strong letter of protest addressed to

them by Coleridge when he heard of their intention: a protest greatly to

his credit considering his and Wordsworth's recent estrangement. Keats

copies for his brother the draft of a notice which at Reynolds's request

he has been writing of this skit for the _Examiner_, taking care to turn

it compatibly with due reverence for the sublimer works of the master

parodied. The thing is quite deftly and tactfully done, and seems to

show that Keats might have made himself, could he have bent his mind to

it, a skilled hand at newspaper criticism. 'You will call it a little

politic,' he says to his brother--'seeing I keep clear of all parties--I

say something for and against both parties--and suit it to the tone of

the _Examiner_--I mean to say I do not unsuit it--and I believe I think

what I say--I am sure I do--I and my conscience are in luck

to-day--which is an excellent thing.'

At intervals throughout these two months Keats asserts and re-asserts

the strength of the hold which idleness has laid upon him so far as

poetry is concerned. Thus on March 13 to his brother and

sister-in-law:--'I know not why poetry and I have been so distant

lately; I must make some advances or she will cut me entirely': and

again to the same on April 15, 'I am still at a standstill in

versifying, I cannot do it yet with any pleasure.' To his young sister

Fanny he had written two days earlier that his idleness had been growing

upon him of late, 'so that it will require a great shake to get rid of

it. I have written nothing and almost read nothing--but I must turn over

a new leaf.' Within the next two weeks the dormant impulse began to

re-awake in him with power. As we have seen, he had never quite stopped

writing personal sonnets. Towards the end of the month we find him

trying, not very successfully, to invent a new sonnet form, but soon

reverting to his accustomed Shakespearean type of three quatrains closed

by a couplet. Here is the better of two sonnets which he wrote on April

30 to express the present abatement of his former hot desire for fame:--

Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy

To those who woo her with too slavish knees,

But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy,

And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;

She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those

Who have not learnt to be content without her;

A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,

Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;

A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born,

Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;

Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn,

Ye Artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are!

Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,

Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

The thought here is curiously anticipated in a passage of Browne's

_Britannia's Pastorals_, itself reminiscent of a well known line in

Theocritus. Is the coincidence a coincidence merely, or had the lines

from Browne been working unconsciously in Keats's mind?

True Fame is ever liken'd to our shade,

He sooneth misseth her, that most hath made

To overtake her; who so takes his wing,

Regardless of her, she'll be following:

Her true proprieties she thus discovers,

'Loves her contemners and contemns her Lovers.'[10]

Two days earlier Keats had copied out in his letter for America, side by

side with the words for a commonplace operatic chorus of the _Fairies of

the Four Elements_, and as though it were of no greater value, that

masterpiece of romantic and tragic symbolism on the wasting power of

Love, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. This title had already been haunting

Keats's imagination when he wrote the _Eve of St Agnes_. He calls by it

the air to which Porphyro touches his lute beside the sleeping Madeline.

It is the title of a cold allegoric dialogue of the old French court

poet Alan Chartier, which Keats knew in the translation traditionally

ascribed to Chaucer. But except the title, Keats's new poem has nothing

in common with the French or the Chaucerian _Belle Dame_. The form, the

poetic mould, he chooses is that of a ballad of the 'Thomas the Rhymer'

class, in which a mortal passes for a time into the abode and under the

power of a being from the elfin world. Into this mould Keats casts--with

suchlike imagery he invests--all the famine and fever of his private

passion, fusing and alchemising by his art a remembered echo from

William Browne, 'Let no bird sing,' and another from Wordsworth, 'Her

eyes are wild,' into twelve stanzas of a new ballad music vitally his

own and as weirdly ominous and haunting as the music of words can be.

The metrical secret lies in shortening the last line of each stanza from

four feet[11] to two, the two to take in reading the full time of four,

whereby the movement is made one of awed and bodeful slowness--but let

us shrink from the risk of laying an analytic finger upon the methods of

a magic that calls to be felt, not dissected. Known as it is by heart

to all lovers of poetry, I will print the piece again here, partly for

the reason that in some of the most accessible and authoritative recent

editions it is unfortunately given with changes which rob it of half its

magic:--

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing!

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel's granary is full,

And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever dew;

And on thy cheek a fading rose

Fast withereth too--

I met a lady in the meads

Full beautiful, a faery's child;

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild--

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan--

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long;

For sideways would she lean, and sing

A faery's song--

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew;

And sure in language strange she said,

I love thee true--

She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she gazed and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild, wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep,

And there I dreamed, ah woe betide,

The latest dream I ever dreamed

On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

Who cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall.'

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke, and found me here

On the cold hill side.

And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

Keats of course gives his brother no hint of what to us seems so

manifest, the application of these verses to his own predicament, and

only adds a light and laughing comment on one of the rime-words. Closing

his packet a few days later (May 3) he adds, as the last poem he has

written, the _Ode to Psyche_. He wrote, as is well known, four other

odes this spring, those _On Indolence_, _On a Grecian Urn_, _To a

Nightingale_ and _To Melancholy_. The _Ode to Psyche_ has commonly been

taken to be the latest of the five. I take it, on the contrary, to have

been the first. Had he been ready with any of the others when he

finished his letter, I think he would almost certainly have copied and

sent on one or more of them also. Coupled with his re-iterated assertion

of complete poetic idleness,--'the idle fever of two months without any

fruit,'--lasting from mid-February until well past mid-April, the

absence of all the four other odes from this packet must count as

evidence that the _Ode to Psyche_ represents the first wave of a new

tide of inspiration--inspiration this time not narrative and creative

but lyric and meditative--and that the rest of the odes followed and

were composed in the course of May. Personally I am convinced that this

was the case. I make no exception in regard to the ode _On Indolence_,

although, seeing that it embodies just such a relaxed mood of mind and

body as we have found recorded by Keats in his letter to his brother

under date March 19, and embodies it with the self-same imagery, it is

usually assumed to have been written at or very nearly about the same

date. But Keats in the ode itself expressly tells us otherwise, calling

his mood at the hour of writing one of 'summer indolence' and defining

the season as May-time, when the outdoor vines are newly bursting into

leaf. Of course, it may be answered, a poet writing in March may

perfectly well choose to advance the season to May by a poetic fiction.

But would Keats in this case have felt any need or impulse to do so? I

doubt it. Moreover a reference to the poem by Keats in a letter of early

June shows that phrases of it were still hanging freshly in his memory

and seems to imply that it was a thing then lately written. What

happened, I take it, was either that Keats let the March vision, with

its imagery of symbolic figures following one another as on a Greek

sculptured urn, ripen in his mind until he was ready to compose upon it,

and then attributed the vision itself to the season when he was actually

putting it into verse; or else that, having fallen some time in May into

a second mood of drowsiness and relaxation nearly repeating that of

March, the same imagery for its expression arose naturally again in his

mind.

The ode _On a Grecian Urn_ is obviously of kindred, and probably of

contemporary, inspiration with that _On Indolence_, and if the one

belongs to May so doubtless does the other. That this is true of the

Nightingale ode we know. Some time early in May, nightingales heard both

in the Wentworth Place garden and in the grove beside the Spaniards inn

at the upper end of the heath set Keats brooding on the contrast between

the age-long permanence of that bird-song, older than history, and the

fleeting lives of the generations of men that have listened to it; and

one morning he took his chair out under a plum-tree in the garden and

wrote down the immortal verses, in and out and back and forth on a

couple of loose sheets which Brown, two hours after seeing him go out,

found him folding away carelessly behind some books in his room. This

discovery, says Brown, made him search for more such neglected scraps;

and Keats acquiesced in the search, and moreover gave Brown leave to

make copies of anything he might find.[12] Haydon tells how Keats

recited the new ode to him, 'in his low, tremulous under-tone,' as they

walked together in the Hampstead meadows; and it was no doubt on

Haydon's suggestion that Keats let James Elmes, a subservient ally of

Haydon's in all his battles with the academic powers, have it for

publication in his periodical, the _Annals of the Fine Arts_, during the

following July. For the date of the _Ode on Melancholy_ the clues are

less definite. Burton's _Anatomy_ has clearly to do with inspiring it,

but of this, and especially of the sections on the cure of

Love-Melancholy, Keats's letters and some of his verses furnish evidence

that he had been much of a reader all the spring. Particular phrases,

however, in letters of May and early June expressing a very similar

strain of feeling to that of the ode, besides its general resemblance to

the rest of the group both as to form and mood, may be taken as

approximately dating it.

Following these so fruitful labours (if I am right as to the dates) of

May, came a month of strained indecision and anxiety during which Keats

again could do no work. Questions of his own fortune and future were

weighing heavily on his mind. For the time being he could not touch such

small remainder of his grandmother's legacy as was still unexpended. A

lawsuit threatened by the widow of his uncle Captain Jennings against

his guardian Mr Abbey, in connexion with the administration of the

trust, had had the effect for the time being of stopping his supplies

from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very gently asked Haydon to

make an effort to repay his recent loan; who not only made none--'he did

not,' says Keats, 'seem to care much about it, but let me go without my

money almost with nonchalance.' This was too much even for Keats's

patience, and he declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend

again. Nevertheless he by and by let old affection resume its sway, and

entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as

kindly as ever. Apart from Mrs Jennings's bequest, there was a not

inconsiderable sum which, as we know, had been left invested by Mr

Jennings for the direct benefit of his Keats grandchildren; but this sum

could not be divided until Fanny Keats came of age, and there seems to

have been no thought of John's anticipating his reversionary share.

Indeed it is doubtful if the very existence of these and other funds

lying by for them had not at this time been forgotten.[13]

In this predicament Keats began very seriously to entertain the idea,

which we have seen broached by him several times already, of seeking the

post of surgeon on an East Indiaman as at least a temporary means of

livelihood. He mentions the idea not only to George and to his young

sister, but he debates it with a new correspondent, one of the Miss

Jeffrey's of Teignmouth, whom he suddenly now addresses in terms of

confidence which show how warm must have been their temporary friendship

the year before:--

Your advice about the Indiaman is a very wise advice, because it just

suits me, though you are a little in the wrong concerning its

destroying the energies of Mind: on the contrary it would be the

finest thing in the world to strengthen them--to be thrown among

people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies forces

the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its

speculations of the differences of human character and to class them

with the calmness of a Botanist. An Indiaman is a little world. One of

the great reasons that the English have produced the finest writers in

the world is, that the English world has ill-treated them during their

lives and foster'd them after their deaths. They have in general been

trampled aside into the bye paths of life and seen the festerings of

Society. They have not been treated like the Raphaels of Italy. And

where is the Englishman and Poet who has given a magnificent

Entertainment at the christening of one of his Hero's Horses as

Boyardo did? He had a Castle in the Appenine. He was a noble Poet of

Romance; not a miserable and mighty Poet of the human heart. The

middle age of Shakespeare was all clouded over; his days were not more

happy than Hamlet's who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in

his common every day Life than any other of his Characters--Ben

Johnson was a common Soldier and in the Low Countries in the face of

two armies, fought a single combat with a French Trooper and slew

him--For all this I will not go on board an Indiaman, nor for

example's sake run my head into dark alleys: I daresay my discipline

is to come, and plenty of it too. I have been very idle lately, very

averse to writing; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets

and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a

Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying

Pet-lamb. I have put no more in Print or you should have had it. You

will judge of my 1819 temper when I tell you that the thing I have

most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence.

The reader will have noticed in the phrase about 'versifying Pet-lamb' a

repetition from this very ode _On Indolence_. Here is another confidence

imparted to the same correspondent concerning his present mood and

disposition:--

I have been always till now almost as careless of the world as a

fly--my troubles were all of the Imagination--My brother George always

stood between me and any dealings with the world. Now I find I must

buffet it--I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to

fight--I must choose between despair and Energy--I choose the latter

though the world has taken on a quakerish look with me, which I once

thought was impossible--

'Nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass and glory in the flower.'

I once thought this a Melancholist's dream.

His immediate object in writing had been to ask, in case he should

decide against the Indiaman project and in favour of another attempt at

the literary life, for the address of a cheap lodging somewhere in the

Teign valley, the beauties of which, seen in glimpses through the rain,

he had sung in some doggrel stanzas the year before. Brown, more than

ever impressed during these last months with the power and promise of

his friend's genius, was dead against the Indiaman scheme and in the end

persuaded Keats to accept an advance of money for his present needs and

to devote the summer to work in the country. Part of such work was to be

upon a tragedy to be written by the two in collaboration and on a basis

of half profits. Brown had not less belief in Keats's future than

affection for his person, and it was the two combined that made him

ready and eager, as he frankly told Keats, to sail in the same boat with

him. In the end the Devonshire idea gave place to a new plan, that of

joining the invalid James Rice for a stay at Shanklin. 'I have given up

the idea of the Indiaman', Keats writes to his young sister on June 9;

'I cannot resolve to give up my favourite studies: so I propose to

retire once more. A friend of Mine who has an ill state of health called

on me yesterday and proposed to spend a little time with him at the back

of the Isle of Wight where he said we might live cheaply. I agreed to

his proposal.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Later occupants re-named the place Lawn Bank and threw the two

semi-detached houses into one, making alterations and additions the

exact nature of which were pointed out to me in 1885 by Mr William

Dilke, the then surviving brother of Keats's friend. This gentleman

also showed me a house across the road which he himself had built in

early life, occupied for a while, and then let on a sixty years'

lease: 'which lease,' he added, as though to outlive a sixty years'

agreement contracted at thirty were the most ordinary occurrence in

the world, 'fell in a year or two ago.' He died shortly afterwards,

aged 93. He and Mrs Procter, the widow of Barry Cornwall the

poet--staunchest, wittiest, and youngest-hearted defier of Time that

she was--were the only two persons I have known and spoken to who had

known and spoken to Keats.

[2] The only set of engravings existing in Keats's time after

pictures at Milan was the Raccolta, etc., of G. Zanconi (1813), which

gives only panels and canvases by masters of the full Renaissance in

private collections.

[3] The fullest and, it must be said, least favourable account we

have of her is in the retrospect of a cousin who had frequented her

mother's house as a young boy about 1819-20, and seventy years later

gave his impressions as follows (_New York Herald_, April 12, 1889).

'Miss Fanny Brawne was very fond of admiration. I do not think she

cared for Keats, although she was engaged to him. She was very much

affected when he died, because she had treated him so badly. She was

very fond of dancing, and of going to the opera and to balls and

parties. Miss Brawne's mother had an extensive acquaintance with

gentlemen, and the society in which they mingled was musical and

literary. Through the Dilkes, Miss Brawne was invited out a great

deal, and as Keats was not in robust health enough to take her out

himself (for he never went with her), she used to go with military

men to the Woolwich balls and to balls in Hampstead; and she used to

dance with these military officers a great deal more than Keats

liked. She did not seem to care much for him. Mr Dilke, the

grandfather of the present Sir Charles Dilke, admired her very much

in society, and although she was not a great beauty she was very

lively and agreeable. I remember that among those frequenting Mrs

Brawne's house in Hampstead were a number of foreign gentlemen. Keats

could not talk French as they could, and their conversation with his

fiancee in a language he could not understand was a source of

continual disagreement between them. Keats thought that she talked

and flirted and danced too much with them, but his remonstrances were

all unheeded by Miss Brawne.' Against these impressions should be set

Brown's testimony, contained in letters of the time to Severn and

others, to her signs of acute distress on the news coming from Italy

of the hopelessness of her lover's condition and finally of his

death: and stronger still, her own words written in later years to

Medwin, which seem to show a true, and even tender, understanding of

his character if not of his genius (see below p. 465).

[4]

[Greek: eros d' aute m' ho lysimeles donei

glykypikron amachanon orpeton.]--Sappho, Fr. 40.

[5] There is no autograph of this ode, only transcripts by friends,

and Mr Buxton Forman was most likely right in suggesting that the

true reading for 'not' should be 'out.'

[6] Keats was staying that night and two more at Mr Taylor's in

London: but there is nothing against my theory in this: he might have

composed the sonnet as well in Fleet Street as at Hampstead.

[7] In his printed account of the matter Clarke calls the victim

definitely a kitten, and says of Keats: 'He thought he should be

beaten, for the fellow was the taller and stronger; but like an

authentic pugilist, my young poet found that he had planted a blow

which "told" upon his antagonist; in every succeeding round therefore

(for they fought nearly an hour), he never failed of returning to the

weak point, and the contest ended in the hulk being led home.'

[8] Joseph Henry Green, afterwards F.R.S. and Professor of Anatomy to

the Royal Academy; distinguished alike as a teacher in his own

profession and as a disciple and interpreter of Coleridge's

philosophy.

[9] _Cornhill Magazine_, April 1917: 'A Talk with Coleridge,' edited

by Miss E. M. Green.

[10] [Greek: kai pheugei phileonta kai ou phileonta diokei.] Theocr.

Idyll. vi. 27.

[11] I use the foot nomenclature for convenience, because to count by

stresses seems to make the point less immediately clear, while to

count by syllables would involve pointing out that in the last lines

of stanzas ii, iv, ix and xi the movement is varied by resolving the

light first syllable into two that take the time of one.

[12] Brown, writing many years after the events, must be a little out

here, seeing that already on April 30th Keats tells his brother that

Brown is busy 'rummaging out his Keats's old sins, that is to say

sonnets.' (Note that Keats mentions no odes). Brown is in like manner

wrong in remembering the draft of the Nightingale ode as written on

'four or five scraps' when it was in fact written on two, as became

apparent when it appeared in the market thirteen years ago (see

_Monthly Review_, March 1903). It is now in the collection of Lord

Crewe.

[13] When in 1823-4 their existence was disclosed and they were

divided on the order of the Court of Chancery between George Keats

and his sister, they amounted with accumulations of interest to a

little over L4500.

CHAPTER XII

JUNE 1819-JANUARY 1820: SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, HAMPSTEAD: TROUBLE AND

HEALTH FAILURE

Work on _Otho_ and _Lamia_--Letters to Fanny Brawne--Keats as

lover--An imagined future--Change to Winchester--Work and fine

weather--Ill news from George--A run to town--A talk with

Woodhouse--Woodhouse as critic--Alone at Winchester--Spirited letters:

to his brother--To Reynolds, Brown, and Dilke--Hopes and

resolutions--Will work for the press--Attempt and breakdown--Return to

Wentworth Place--Morning and evening tasks--Cries of passion--Signs of

despondency--Testimony of Brown--Haydon's exaggerations--Schemes and

doings--Visit of George Keats--Pleasantry and bitterness--Beginning of

the end.

By the last days of June Keats was settled with Rice in the village of

Shanklin, in a lodging above the cliff and a little way back from the

sea,[1] and forthwith got to work upon a new poetical romance, _Lamia_,

at which he seems to have made some beginning before he left Hampstead.

He found the subject, that of the enchantress of Corinth who under her

woman's guise was really a serpent, in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_,

a book in these days often in his hands, and for the form of his

narrative chose rimed heroics, only this time leaning on Dryden as his

model instead of the Elizabethans.

Rice's health was at this time worse than ever, and Keats himself was

far from well; his throat chronically sore, his nerves unstrung, his

heart, in despite of distance, knowing little rest from agitation

between the pains and joys of love. As long as Rice and he were alone

together at Shanklin, the two ailing and anxious men, fast friends as

they were, depressed and did each other harm. Things went better when

Brown with his settled good health and good spirits came to join them.

Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got to work

diligently at the joint task they had set themselves, that of writing a

tragedy suitable for the stage. What struggling man or woman of letters

has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated them, that

this way lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose opera

_Narensky_ had made a hit in its day, and brought him in a sum variously

stated at L300 or L500, was supposed to possess the requisite stage

experience. To him were assigned the plot and construction of the play,

for which he was to receive half profits in the event of success, while

Keats undertook to compose the dialogue. The subject was one taken from

the history of the Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat opposite

each other at the same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as Brown

sketched it out to him, in each case without enquiring what was to come

next. The collaboration of genius and mediocrity rarely succeeds, and it

seems hard to conceive a more unpromising mode of it than this. Besides

the work by means of which Keats thus hoped, at least in sanguine hours,

to find an escape from material difficulties, he was busily engaged

working by himself on _Lamia_. But a cloud of depression continued to

hang over him. The climate of Shanklin was against him: the quarter

where they lodged lay screened by hills except from the south-east,

whence, as he afterwards wrote, 'came the damps of the sea, which having

no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy

idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke.' After

a stay of some six weeks, Keats consequently made up his mind to move

with Brown to the more bracing air of Winchester.

From these weeks at Shanklin date the earliest of the preserved series

of Keats's love-letters to Fanny Brawne. More than any man, more

certainly than any other unripe youth fretting in the high fever of an

unhopeful love, Keats has had to pay the penalty of genius in the loss

of posthumous privacy for the most sacred and secret of his emotions. He

thought his name would be forgotten, but posterity in an excess of

remembrance has suffered no corner of his soul to escape the

searchlight. Once preserved and printed, these love-letters of his

cannot be ignored. Unselfish through and through, and naturally

well-conditioned in all thoughts and feelings over which he had control,

he strives hard in them to keep to a vein of considerate tenderness, and

the earlier letters of the series contain charming passages. But often,

more often indeed than not even from the first, they show him a prey,

despite his best efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an

uncontrollable intensity and fretfulness of passion. Now that experience

of love had come to him, it belied instead of confirming the view he had

expressed in _Isabella_ that too much pity has been spent on the sorrows

of lovers, and that

--for the general award of love

The little sweet doth kill much bitterness.

In his own passion there was from the first, and increasingly as time

went on, at least as much of bitterness as of sweet. An enraptured but

an untrustful lover, alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage

and passing through a hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an

hour, he finds in the fever of work and composition his only antidote

against the fever of his love-sickness. This is written soon after his

arrival at Shanklin:--

I am glad I had not an opportunity of sending off a Letter which I

wrote for you on Tuesday night--'twas too much like one out of

Rousseau's _Heloise_. I am more reasonable this morning. The morning

is the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful Girl whom I

love so much: for at night, when the lonely day has closed, and the

lonely, silent, unmusical Chamber is waiting to receive me as into a

Sepulchre, then believe me my passion gets entirely the sway, then I

would not have you see those Rhapsodies which I once thought it

impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed

at in another, for fear you should think me either too unhappy or

perhaps a little mad. I am now at a very pleasant Cottage window,

looking onto a beautiful hilly country, with a glimpse of the sea; the

morning is very fine. I do not know how elastic my spirit might be,

what pleasure I might have in living here and breathing and wandering

as free as a stag about this beautiful Coast if the remembrance of you

did not weigh so upon me. I have never known any unalloy'd Happiness

for many days together: the death or sickness of some one has always

spoilt my hours--and now when none such troubles oppress me, it is you

must confess very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me. Ask

yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so

entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom.

A fortnight later he manages to write a little more at ease of himself,

his moods, and his doings:--

Do not call it folly, when I tell you I took your letter last night to

bed with me. In the morning I found your name on the sealing wax

obliterated. I was startled at the bad omen till I recollected that it

must have happened in my dreams, and they you know fall out by

contraries. You must have found out by this time I am a little given

to bode ill like the raven; it is my misfortune not my fault; it has

proceeded from the general tenor of the circumstances of my life, and

rendered every event suspicious. However I will no more trouble either

you or myself with sad Prophecies; though so far I am pleased at it as

it has given me opportunity to love your disinterestedness towards me.

I cannot say when I shall get a volume ready. I have three or four

stories half done, but as I cannot write for the mere sake of the

press, I am obliged to let them progress or lie still as my fancy

chooses. By Christmas perhaps they may appear, but I am not yet sure

they ever will. 'Twill be no matter, for Poems are as common as

newspapers and I do not see why it is a greater crime in me than in

another to let the verses of an half-fledged brain tumble into the

reading-rooms and drawing-room windows.... To-morrow I shall, if my

health continues to improve during the night, take a look farther

about the country, and spy at the parties about here who come hunting

after the picturesque like beagles. It is astonishing how they raven

down scenery like children do sweetmeats. The wondrous Chine here is a

very great Lion: I wish I had as many guineas as there have been

spy-glasses in it.

Yet another fortnight, and we find him uttering aloud the same yearning

to attain the double goal of love and death together as he had often

uttered to himself in secret since he came under the spell. On another

day, letting his imagination comply with the longing for Alpine travel

and seclusion which since Rousseau had been one of the romantic fashions

of the time, he draws her a picture of an imagined future for herself

and him which, judging at least by her choice of pleasures until now,

would ill have stood the test of reality:--

You would delight very greatly in the walks about here; the Cliffs,

woods, hills, sands, rocks, etc., about here. They are however not so

fine but I shall give them a hearty goodbye to exchange them for my

Cathedral.--Yet again I am not so tired of Scenery as to hate

Switzerland. We might spend a pleasant year at Berne or Zurich--if it

should please Venus to hear my 'Beseech thee to hear us O Goddess.'

And if she should hear, God forbid we should what people call,

_settle_--turn into a pond, a stagnant Lethe--a vile crescent, row or

buildings. Better be imprudent moveables than prudent fixtures. Open

my Mouth at the Street door like the Lion's head at Venice to receive

hateful cards, letters, messages. Go out and wither at tea parties;

freeze at dinners; bake at dances; simmer at routs. No my love, trust

yourself to me and I will find you nobler amusements, fortune

favouring.

The most sanely self-revealing and pleasant passages in the

correspondence occur in a letter written in the second week after Keats

and Brown had settled at Winchester:--

I see you through a Mist: as I daresay you do me by this time. Believe

me in the first Letters I wrote you: I assure you I felt as I wrote--I

could not write so now. The thousand images I have had pass through my

brain--my uneasy spirits--my unguess'd fate--all spread as a veil

between me and you. Remember I have had no idle leisure to brood over

you.--'tis well perhaps I have not. I could not have endured the

throng of jealousies that used to haunt me before I had plunged so

deeply into imaginary interests. I would fain, as my sails are set,

sail on without an interruption for a Brace of Months longer--I am in

complete cue--in the fever; and shall in these four Months do an

immense deal. This Page as my eye skims over it I see is excessively

unloverlike and ungallant--I cannot help it--I am no officer in

yawning quarters; no Parson-romeo.... 'Tis harsh, harsh, I know it. My

heart seems now made of iron--I could not write a proper answer to an

invitation to Idalia.... This Winchester is a fine place: a beautiful

Cathedral and many other ancient buildings in the Environs. The little

coffin of a room at Shanklin is changed for a large room, where I can

promenade at my pleasure.... One of the pleasantest things I have seen

lately was at Cowes. The Regent in his Yatch (I think they spell it)

was anchored opposite--a beautiful vessel--and all the Yatchs and

boats on the coast were passing and repassing it; and circuiting and

tacking about it in every direction--I never beheld anything so

silent, light, and graceful.--As we pass'd over to Southampton, there

was nearly an accident. There came by a Boat, well mann'd, with two

naval officers at the stern. Our Bow-lines took the top of their

little mast and snapped it off close by the board. Had the mast been a

little stouter they would have been upset. In so trifling an event I

could not help admiring our seamen--neither officer nor man in the

whole Boat mov'd a muscle--they scarcely notic'd it even with words.

Forgive me for this flint-worded Letter, and believe and see that I

cannot think of you without some sort of energy--though mal a propos.

Even as I leave off it seems to me that a few more moments' thought of

you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. I must not give way to

it--but turn to my writing again--if I fail I shall die hard. O my

love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy--I must forget

them.

The old cathedral city of Winchester, with its peaceful closes breathing

antiquity, its hurrying limpid chalk-streams and beautiful elm-shadowed

meadow walks, and the tonic climate of its surrounding downs, 'where the

air,' he writes, 'is worth sixpence a pint,' exactly suited Keats, and

he quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days he spent here,

from the middle of August to the second week of October, were the last

good days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application,

he managed, as the last extract shows, to steel himself for the time

being against the importunity of his passion, although never without a

certain feverishness in the effort, and to keep the thought of money

troubles at bay by buoying himself up with the firm hope of a stage

success. His work continued to be chiefly on _Lamia_, with the

concluding part of _Otho_, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the

story of King Stephen. In the last act of _Otho_ and the opening scenes

(which are all he did) of _King Stephen_ he laboured alone, without

accepting help from Brown. On the 25th of August he writes to Reynolds,

as usual more gravely and openly than to any other correspondent, of his

present feelings in regard to life and literature.

The more I know what my diligence may in time probably effect, the

more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinacy[2]--I feel it in

my power to become a popular writer--I feel it in my power to refuse

the poisonous suffrage of a public. My own being which I know to be

becomes of more consequence to me than the crowds of Shadows in the

shape of men and women that inhabit a kingdom. The soul is a world of

itself, and has enough to do in its own home. Those whom I know

already, and who have grown as it were a part of myself, I could not

do without: but for the rest of mankind, they are as much a dream to

me as Milton's Hierarchies. I think if I had a free and healthy and

lasting organization of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox's, so as

to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation

without weariness, I could pass my life very nearly alone though it

should last eighty years. But I feel my body too weak to support me to

the height, I am obliged continually to check myself, and be nothing.

A letter to his young sister of three days later is in quite another

key, but one of wholesome and unforced high spirits:--

The delightful Weather we have had for two Months is the highest

gratification I could receive--no chill'd red noses--no

shivering--but fair atmosphere to think in--a clean towel mark'd with

the mangle and a basin of clear Water to drench one's face with ten

times a day: no need of much exercise--a Mile a day being quite

sufficient. My greatest regret is that I have not been well enough to

bathe though I have been two Months by the sea side and live now close

to delicious bathing--Still I enjoy the Weather--I adore fine Weather

as the greatest blessing I can have.... I should like now to promenade

round your Gardens--apple-tasting--pear-tasting--plum-judging--apricot

nibbling--peach-scrunching--nectarine-sucking and Melon-carving. I

have also a great feeling for antiquated cherries full of sugar

cracks--and a white currant tree kept for company. I admire lolling on

a lawn by a water lillied pond to eat white currants and see gold

fish: and go to the Fair in the Evening if I'm good. There is not hope

for that--one is sure to get into some mess before evening.