It is an awful mission,

A terrible division;

And leaves a gulph austere

To be fill'd with worldly fear.

Aye, when the soul is fled

Too high above our head,

Affrighted do we gaze

After its airy maze,

As doth a mother wild,

When her young infant child

Is in eagle's claws--

And is not this the cause

Of madness?--God of Song,

Thou bearest me along

Through sights I scarce can bear;

O let me, let me share

With the hot lyre and thee,

The staid Philosophy.

Temper my lonely hours,

And let me see thy bowers

More unalarm'd!

But our main business in this chapter must be not with illuminating

snatches such as these, but with things begun of set purpose and not

carried through.

When Keats, drawing near the end of his work on _Endymion_, was

meditating what he meant to be his second long and arduous poem,

_Hyperion_, he still thought and spoke of it as a 'romance.' But a

phrase he uses elsewhere shows him conscious that its style would have

to be more 'naked and Grecian' than that of _Endymion_. Was he trying an

experiment in the naked and Grecian style when on May day 1818 he wrote

at Teignmouth the beginning of an ode on Maia? He never went on with it,

and the fragment as it stands is of fourteen lines only; but these are

in a more truly Greek manner than anything else he wrote, not even

excepting, as I have just said, the _Ode to Autumn_. The words figuring

what Greek poets were and did for Greek communities, and expressing the

aspiration to be even as they, bear the true, the classic, mint-mark of

absolute economy and simplicity in absolute rightness. Considering how

meagre are the hints antiquity has left us concerning Maia, the eldest

of the Pleiades and mother of Hermes, and her late identification with

the Roman divinity to whom sacrifice was paid on the first of May, and

hence how little material for development the theme seems to

offer,--considering these things, perhaps it is as well that Keats,

despite his promise to finish it 'all in good time,' should have

tantalized posterity by breaking off this beautiful thing where he did.

The next fragment we come to is colossal,--it is _Hyperion_ itself. From

the poem as far as it was written no reader could guess either that it

was taken up as a 'feverous relief' from tendance on his dying brother,

or that in continuing it later under Brown's roof he had to put force

upon himself against the intrusion of private cares and affections upon

his thoughts, as well as against a reaction from his own mode of

conceiving and handling the task itself. The impression _Hyperion_ makes

is one, as Woodhouse on first reading it justly noted, of serene

mastery by the poet both over himself and over his art:--'It has an air

of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power': and

again,--'the above lines give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur

and quiet power which characterize the poem.' Woodhouse goes on to tell

what he knew of the scheme of the work as Keats had first conceived

it:--

The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of

Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo,--and incidentally of

those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the

war of the giants for Saturn's reestablishment-- with other events, of

which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece

and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the

Poet's brain.

The statement inserted by the publishers at the head of the volume in

which the poem appeared in 1820, that _Hyperion_ was intended to be as

long as _Endymion_, is probably also due to Woodhouse, their right-hand

man (Keats, we know, had nothing to do with it), and may represent what

he had gathered in conversation to have been the poet's original idea.

Mr de Selincourt has shown grounds for inferring that when Keats came to

actual grips with the subject he decided to treat it much more briefly

and partially. Clearly the essential meaning of the story was for him

symbolical; it meant the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by

one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held

a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers. Into this

story the poet plunges, not even in the middle but near the close. When

his poem opens, the younger gods, the Olympians, have won their victory,

and the Titans, all except Hyperion, are already overthrown. In their

debate whether to fight again general despondency prevails, and only one

of the fallen, Enceladus, strikes a note of defiance; so that it seems

as if there were nothing left to tell except the coming defeat or

abdication of Hyperion in favour of Apollo. Hyperion, it is true, has

not yet spoken when we are called away from the council, and Keats

might have made him side with Enceladus and rouse his brethren to a

temporary renewal of the strife. Or leaving the Titans conquered, he

might, as Woodhouse suggests, have gone on to narrate the second

warfare, that waged against the Olympians not by them but later by the

Giants in revolt. In either case we should have seen the poet try his

hand, hitherto untested in such themes, on scenes of superhuman battle

and violence.

Woodhouse is right at any rate in saying that the hints for handling the

theme to be found in the ancient poets are few and uncertain, leaving a

modern writer free to invent most of his incidents for himself. Beyond

the bald notices in his classical dictionaries, Chapman's _Iliad_ would

have given Keats a picture of the dethroned Saturn: Chapman's Homer's

hymn to Apollo might have filled his imagination, even to overflowing,

with visions of the youth of that god in Delos,--'Chief isle of the

embowered Cyclades': Hesiod's _Theogony_ (which he had doubtless read in

the translation of Pope's butt and enemy, Thomas Cooke) would have

taught him more, but very confusedly, about the warfare of Gods, Titans,

and Giants in general, besides inspiring his vision of the den where the

Titans lie vanquished; while he would have gleaned other stray matters

from Sandys's notes on certain passages of Ovid. As far as his beloved

English poets are concerned, brief allusions occur in the _Faerie

Queene_ and in _Paradise Lost_, where Milton includes the fallen Titans

among the rebel hosts that flock to the standard of Satan in hell. But I

think the source freshest in his mind at the moment when he began to

write is one which has not hitherto been suggested, the ode of the

famous French Renaissance poet Ronsard to his friend Michel de

l'Hopital. We know by his translation of the sonnet _Nature ornant

Cassandre_ that Keats had the works of Ronsard in his hands--lent, it

would seem, by Mr Taylor--exactly about this time. The ode in question,

partly founded on Hesiod, partly on Horace,[1] but largely on Ronsard's

own invention, relates the birth of the Muses, their training by their

mother Memoire (= Mnemosyne), their desire as young girls to visit their

father Jupiter, their mother's consent, their undersea journey to the

palace of Oceanus where Jupiter is present at a high festival, their

choral singing before him, first of the strife of Neptune and Pallas for

the soil of Attica, and then of the battle of the gods and giants:--

Apres sur la plus grosse corde

D'un bruit qui tonnait jusqu'aux cieux,

Le pouce des Muses accorde

L'assaut des Geants et des Dieux.

Keats, although he writes of the battle of the Gods not against the

Giants but against the earlier Titans, yet when he rolls out rebel names

like this,--

Coeus, and Gyges, and Briareus;

Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion

Were pent in regions of laborious breath

Dungeon'd in opaque elements,--

Keats, when he rolls out these rebel names, has surely been haunted by

the strophes of Ronsard:--

Styx d'un noir halecret rempare

Ses bras, ses jambes, et son sein,

Sa fille amenant par la main

Contre Cotte, Gyge, et Briare.[2]

Neptune a la fourche estofee

De trois crampons vint se mesler

Par la troupe contre Typhee

Qui rouoit une fonde en l'air:

Ici Phoebus d'un trait qu'il jette

Fit Encelade trebucher,

La Porphyre lui fit broncher

Hors des poings l'arc et la sagette.

For such an epic theme Keats felt instinctively, when he set to work,

that an epic and not a romance treatment was necessary; and for an

English poet the obvious epic model is Milton. Ever since his visit to

Bailey at Oxford, and especially during his stay at Teignmouth the next

year, Keats had been absorbing Milton and taking him into his being, as

formerly he had taken Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, and now he can

utter his own thoughts and imaginations almost with Milton's voice.

Speaking generally of the blank verse of _Hyperion_, its rhythms are

almost as full and sonorous as Milton's own, but simpler; its march more

straightforward, with less of what De Quincey calls 'solemn planetary

wheelings'; its periods do not sweep through such complex evolutions to

so stately and far foreseen a close. The Miltonisms in _Hyperion_ are

rather matters of diction and construction--construction almost always

derived from the Latin--than of rhythm: sometimes also they are matters

of direct verbal echo and reminiscence. To take a single instance out of

many:--

For as among us mortals omens drear

Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he.

It is only in _Hyperion_ that Keats habitually thus puts the noun

Latin-wise before the adjective: and the omens that 'perplex' are

derived from the eclipse which in _Paradise Lost_ 'with fear of change

Perplexes monarchs.' Throughout the fragment Keats uses frequently and

with fine effect the Miltonic figure of the 'turn' or rhetorical

iteration of identical words to a fresh purport, as in that noble phrase

which seems to have inspired one of the finest passages in Shelley's

_Defence of Poesy_[3]:

How beautiful, if Sorrow had not made

Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.

It has been said, and justly, that Keats has done nothing greater than

the debate of the fallen Titans in their cave of exile, modelled frankly

in its main outlines on that of the rebel angels in _Paradise Lost_, but

with the personages and utterances nevertheless entirely his own. In

creating and animating these colossal figures between the elemental and

the human, what masterly imaginative instinct does he show--to take one

point only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast

inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realise

their voices. Thus of the murmuring of the assembled gods when Saturn is

about to speak:--

There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines

When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise

Among immortals when a God gives sign,

With hushing finger, how he means to load

His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,

With thunder, and with music, and with pomp:

Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines.

This is not a whit the less Keats for his use of the Miltonic 'turn' in

rounding the period by a repetition in the last line of the 'bleak-grown

pines' from the first. Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:--

So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea,

Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,

But cogitation in his watery shades,

Arose, with locks not oozy, and began,

In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue

Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.

Here the affirmation by negation in the second and fourth lines is a

Latin usage already employed by Keats in the _Pot of Basil_[4]: the

'locks not oozy' are a reminiscence from _Lycidas_ and the

'first-endeavouring tongue' from _The Vacation Exercise_. But into what

a vitally apt and beautiful new music of his own has Keats moulded and

converted all such echoes. Once more, of Clymene following Enceladus in

debate:--

So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook

That, lingering along a pebbled coast,

Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met,

And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice

Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath:

The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves

In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,

Came booming thus.

In this last example the sublimity owes nothing to Milton except in the

single case of the repetition in the third line. Even the scoffing Byron

recognized after Keats's death the authentic 'large utterance of the

early gods' in passages like these, though Keats in his modesty had

himself refused to recognize it.

Further to compare Keats with Milton,--the poet of _Hyperion_ is

naturally no match for Milton in passages where the elder master has

been inspired by life-long impassioned meditation on his readings of

history and romance, like that famous one ending with

What resounds

In fable or romance of Uther's son.

Begirt with British and Armoric knights

Or all who since, baptized or infidel

Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,

Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebizond,

Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore

When Charlemain with all his peerage fell

By Fontarrabia--

On the other hand Milton, even in the sweetness and the nearness to

nature of _Comus_ and his other early work, is scarce a match for Keats

when it comes to the evocation, even in a mode relatively simple, of

nature's secret sources of delight,--as thus:

throughout all the isle

There was no covert, no retired cave

Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves

Though scarcely heard in many a green recess:

while comparison is scarcely possible in the case of the nature images

most characteristically Keats's own, for instance:--

As when, upon a tranced summer night,

Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,

Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,

Dream, and so dream all night without a stir--.

Neither to the Greek nor the Miltonic, but essentially to the modern,

the romantic, sentiment of nature does it belong to try and express, by

such a concourse of metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to

the most fugitive, which a forest scene by starlight can have upon the

mind: the pre-eminence of the oaks among the other trees--their

quasi-human venerableness--their verdure, unseen in the darkness--the

sense of their preternatural stillness and suspended life in an

atmosphere that seems to vibrate with mysterious influences communicated

between earth and sky.

All good poems, it has been said, begin well. None begins better than

_Hyperion_, with its 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' and its

grand mournful dialogue between the discrowned Saturn and the Titaness

Thea, his would-be comforter. Then, with a rich contrast from this scene

of despondency, comes the scene, dazzling and resplendent for all its

ominousness, of the mingled wrath and terror of the threatened sun-god

in his flaming palace. The second book, relating the council of the

dethroned Titans, has neither the contrasted sublimities of the first

nor the intensity, rising almost to fever-point, of the unfinished

third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the

afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his

godhead. But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which

place it, to my mind, fully on a level with the other two. And it is in

this book, in the speech of Oceanus, that Keats sets forth the whole

symbolical purport and meaning of the myth as he had conceived it:--

Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain;

O folly! for to bear all naked truths,

And to envisage circumstance, all calm,

That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!

As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far

Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;

And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth

In form and shape compact and beautiful,

In will, in action free, companionship,

And thousand other signs of purer life;

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,

A power more strong in beauty, born of us

And fated to excel us, as we pass

In glory that old Darkness: nor are we

Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule

Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil

Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed,

And feedeth still, more comely than itself?

Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?

Or shall the tree be envious of the dove

Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings

To wander wherewithal and find its joys?

We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs

Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves,

But eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower

Above us in their beauty, and must reign

In right thereof; for 'tis the eternal law

That first in beauty should be first in might:

That difficulty, to which we have referred, of surmising how there could

have remained material to fill out a poem on the Titanomachia which had

begun with the Titans, all but one, dethroned already, seems to increase

when we consider the above speech of Oceanus, setting forth with

resigned prophetic wisdom the fated necessity of their fall. It

increases still further when Clymene, following on the same side as

Oceanus, tells how she has heard the strains of a new and ravishing

music from the lyre of Apollo which have made her cast away in despair

the instrument of her own formless music, the sea-shell; and still

further again when in the next book we witness the meeting of Apollo

with the Titaness Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, who for his sake has

'forsaken old and sacred thrones,' and when we hear him proclaim how in

the inspiration of her presence,

Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.

Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions,

Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,

Creations and destroyings, all at once

Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,

And deify me, as if some blithe wine

Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,

And so become immortal.

Before the glory of this new-deified Apollo, what could long have

delayed the defeat or abdication of the elder sun-god Hyperion?--what

could have remained for Keats to invent that should have much enriched

or lengthened out his poem? The sense of the difficulty of sustaining

the battle of the primeval powers against these new and nobler

successors may well have been one of the things (even had he not had

Milton's comparative failure with the warfare in heaven to warn him)

that hindered his going on with his poem. To the reader there occurs

another and even greater difficulty: and that is that Keats had already

given to his fallen elder gods or Titans so much not only of majesty but

of nobleness and goodness that it is hard to see wherein he could have

shown their successors excelling them. He had represented Saturn as

wroth, indeed, at his downfall, but chiefly because it leaves him

--smother'd up,

And buried from all godlike exercise

Of influence benign on planets pale,

Of admonition to the winds and seas,

Of peaceful sway above man's harvesting,

And all those acts which Deity supreme

Doth ease its heart of love in.

Increase of knowledge, of skill in the arts of life and of beauty, the

gods of the new dynasty might indeed extend to mankind, but what

increase of love and beneficence? Even the relations of Saturn to his

father Coelus (the Greek Uranus), which in the ancient cosmogony are of

the crudest barbarity, Keats in _Hyperion_ makes benignant and

sympathetic.

Such inherent difficulties as these might well have made Keats diffident

of his power to complete his poem as a rounded or satisfying whole had

its intended scope been what we are told. But I am sometimes tempted to

conjecture that his root idea had been other than what his friends

attributed to him,--that battle, and the victory of the Olympians over

the Titans or Giants or both, would not in fact have been his main

theme, but that he intended to present to us Apollo, enthroned after

the abdication of Hyperion, in the character of a prophet and to have

put into his mouth revelations of things to come, a great monitory

vision of the world's future. To such a supposition some colour is

surely lent by the speech of Apollo above quoted on the 'knowledge

enormous' just poured into his brain by Mnemosyne. On the other hand it

has to be remembered that Keats himself, in a forecast of his work made

ten months before it was written, shows clearly that he then meant his

Apollo to be above all things a god of action.

Keats himself, writing some eight months later, when he had finally

decided to give up his epic attempt, cites as his chief reason a

re-action of his critical judgment against the Miltonic style, at least

as a style suitable for him, Keats, to work in:--

I have given up _Hyperion_--there were too many Miltonic inversions in

it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather,

artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English

ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some

lines from _Hyperion_, and put a mark * to the false beauty proceeding

from art, and one to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul 'twas

imagination--I cannot make the distinction--Every now and then there

is a Miltonic intonation--But I cannot make the division properly.

And again: 'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to

him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the

verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.' This

re-action was certainly not fully conscious or formulated in Keats's

mind by the previous winter. But it would seem none the less to have

been working in him instinctively: for the moment he had turned, in _The

Eve of St Agnes_, to a romance in the flowing, straightforward,

Spenserian-Chattertonian manner of narration, he had been able to carry

his task through with felicity and ease.

This was on his excursion to Hampshire in the latter half of January.

Within three weeks of his return he was at work again on a kindred

theme of popular and traditional belief, _The Eve of St Mark_. The

belief was that a person standing in the church porch of any town or

village on the evening before St Mark's day (April 24th) might thereby

gain a vision of all the inhabitants fated to die or fall grievously

sick within the year. Those destined to die would be seen passing in but

not returning, those who were to be in peril and recover would go in and

after a while come out. The heroine of the poem, to whom this vision

would appear, was to be a maiden of Canterbury named Bertha, no doubt

after the first Christian queen of Kent, the Frankish wife of Ethelbert;

the scene, Canterbury itself, memories of the poet's stay there in 1817

mingling apparently with impressions of his recent visit to Chichester.

Keats never got on with this poem after his first three or four days'

work (February 14th-17th 1819), and it remains a mere fragment,

tantalizing and singular, of a hundred and twenty lines' length. Why?

Perhaps merely because it was begun almost at the very hour when he

became the accepted lover of Fanny Brawne. We have seen how various

causes, but chiefly the obsession of that passion, paralysed his power

of work for the next two months, and what were the thoughts and tasks

that held him fully occupied afterwards. It has been suggested by the

late Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Keats meant to give the story a turn

applicable to himself and his mistress, and that the present fragment

would have served as the opening of a poem which afterwards, in

sickness, he mentioned to her as being in his mind:--'I would show some

one in love, as I am, with a person living in such Liberty as you do.' I

can find no sure evidence, internal or external, either to refute the

suggestion or confirm it.

The fragment of _The Eve of St Mark_ is Keats's only attempt at

narrative writing in the eight-syllabled four-stress couplet. Its pace

and movement are nearer to Chaucer in _The Romaunt of the Rose_ or _The

House of Fame_ than to Coleridge or Scott or any other model of Keats's

own time. That he was writing with Chaucer in his mind is proved by some

lines in which he tries in Rowley fashion to reproduce Chaucer's actual

style and vocabulary, thus:--

Gif ye wol stonden hardie wight--

Amiddes of the blacke night--

Righte in the churche porch, pardie

Ye wol behold a companie

Approchen thee full dolourouse

For sooth to sain from everich house

Be it in city or village

Wol come the Phantom and image

Of ilka gent and ilka carle

Who colde Deathe hath in parle

And wol some day that very year

Touchen with foule venime spear

And sadly do them all to die--

Hem all shalt thou see verilie--

And everichon shall by thee pass

All who must die that year, Alas.

These lines give us a sure key to the main motive of the story which was

to follow. With some others in the same style, they are quoted by the

poet as composing a gloss written in minute script on the margin of a

wonderful illuminated book over which the damsel is found poring and

which is to have some mysterious influence on her destiny. More

noticeable and interesting than their somewhat random Rowleyism is the

way in which some of the descriptive lines in the body of the poem

anticipate the very cadences of Chaucer's great latter-day disciple,

William Morris. The first eight or ten lines of the following might have

come straight from _The Man born to be King_ or _The Land East of the

Sun_, and provide, as it were, in the history of our poetry a direct

stepping-stone between Chaucer and Morris:--

The city streets were clean and fair

From wholesome drench of April rains;

And, on the western window panes,

The chilly sunset faintly told

Of unmatur'd green vallies cold,

Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,

Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,

Of primroses by shelter'd rills,

And daisies on the aguish hills.

Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell:

The silent streets were crowded well

With staid and pious companies,

Warm from their fire-side orat'ries;

And moving, with demurest air,

To even-song, and vesper prayer.

Each arched porch, and entry low,

Was fill'd with patient folk and slow,

With whispers hush, and shuffling feet,

While play'd the organ loud and sweet.

The relation of this fragment to the Pre-Raphaelites of the mid

nineteenth century and their work is altogether curious and interesting.

It was natural that it should appeal to them by the pure and living

freshness of English nature-description with which it opens, by the

perfectly imagined scene of hushed movement in the twilight streets that

follows, perhaps most of all by the insistent delight in vivid colour,

and in minuteness of animated and suggestive detail, which marks the

final indoor scene of the maiden Bertha over her book by firelight. But

what is strange is that Rossetti should not only have coupled the

fragment with _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ as 'the chastest and choicest

example of Keats's maturing manner,' an opinion which may well pass, but

that he should have claimed it as showing 'astonishingly real

mediaevalism for one not bred an artist,' and even as the finest picture

of the Middle Age period ever done. The truth is that the description of

the Sabbath streets and the maiden's chamber are not mediaeval at all and

probably not intended to be, while the one thing so intended, the

illuminated manuscript from which she reads, is a quite impossible

invention jumbling fantastically together things that never could have

figured in the same manuscript, things from the Golden Legend, from the

book of Exodus, the book of Revelation, with others from no possible

manuscript source at all. Keats evidently took some interest in

mediaeval illuminations, for in speculating on the old skulls of supposed

monks at Beauly Abbey he had apostrophized one of them,--

Poor Skull, thy fingers set ablaze

With silver saint in golden rays,

The holy Missal: thou didst craze

Mid bead and spangle,

While others pass'd their idle days

In coil and wrangle.

But he can have seen few and made no study of them, and his imagined

mystically illuminated book in _The Eve of St Mark_ is invented with no

such fine instinctive tact or likelihood as his imagined Grecian urn of

the ode.

An elder member of the Rossetti circle, that shrewd and caustic, very

originally minded if only half accomplished Scottish poet and painter,

William Bell Scott, was much exercised over his friend's misconception

in this matter. I will give his comment, certainly in some points just,

as written to me in 1885. 'On reading the fragment it seems to me

impossible to resist the conclusion that the scene represented is of the

present day. The dull and quiet Sunday evening represented is of our

time in any cathedral town in England, not the Sunday evening of old

when morning Mass was the religious observance, and the evening was

spent in long-bow and popinjay games and practice. The weary girl sits

at a coal fire with a screen behind her, a Japanese screen apparently,'

[Japanese or old English lacquer imitating Oriental the screen certainly

is]. 'Every item of the description is modern. But alas! what shall we

say to the ancient illuminated MS. she has in hand, with the pictures of

early martyrs dying by fire, the Inquisition punishment of heretics, and

the writing annotated, the notes referred to modern printers' signs? As

he describes a mediaeval MS. book so badly, it may be said he intended

the scene of the poem to be mediaeval, but did the description also so

badly. But no, the description of the dreariness of Sunday evening,

utterly silent but for the passing of the people going to evening

sermon, is admirable.' By 'badly' my old friend meant inexactly. But

Keats never was nor tried to be exact in his antiquarianism. If we take

_The Eve of St Agnes_ as intended to be a faithful picture from the

Middle Ages, it simply goes to pieces in the line--

And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.

Probably neither _The Eve of St Agnes_ nor _St Mark's Eve_ were dated

with any definiteness in the poet's mind at all. A reference he makes to

the last-named piece in a letter from Winchester the following autumn

lends no definite support either to the modern or the mediaeval

interpretation:--'Some time since I began a poem called _The Eve of St

Mark_, quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you

the sensation of walking about an old country town on a coolish

evening.' The impression of mediaevalism which the two poems convey is

not by any evidence of antiquarian knowledge or accuracy but by the

intense spirit of romance that is in them,--by that impassioned delight

in vivid colour and beautiful, imaginative detail which we have noted.

After his four days' start on this poem in February came the spell of

two months' idleness which towards its close yielded _La Belle Dame sans

Merci_ and came to an end with the _Ode to Psyche_, followed in the

course of May by the four other odes. The choral _Song of the Four

Fairies_, for some inchoate opera, sent by Keats to his brother together

with _La Belle Dame_, is not worth pausing upon, and we may pass to

Keats's main work of the ensuing July and August, _Otho the Great_. This

is no fragment, having been duly finished to the last scene of the last

act; but it is very much of an experiment. The question whether Keats,

had he lived, might have become a great dramatic poet and creator is one

of the most interesting possible. His intense and growing interest in

humankind, together with his recorded and avowed liability to receive

('like putty,' as modern criticism has conjectured of Shakespeare) the

impression of any character he might come in contact with, has led many

students to believe that he had in him the stuff of a great creative

playwright. _Otho the Great_ does nothing to solve the question. The

plot and construction, as we have said, were entirely Brown's, building

with quite arbitrary freedom on certain bald historical facts of the

rebellion raised against Otho, in the course of his Hungarian wars, by

his son Ludolf and the Red Duke Conrad of Lorraine, whom the emperor

subsequently forgave. Creation demands fore-knowledge, premeditation on

the characters you desire to create and the situations in which they are

to be placed, and Keats, Brown tells us, only foreknew what was coming

in any scene after they had sat down at the table to work on it. His

business was to supply the words, and what the result shows is only the

surprising facility with which he could by this time improvise poetry to

order. The speeches in Otho are much more than passably poetical, they

are often quite brilliant and touched with Keats's unique genius for

felicity in lines and phrases. But they affect us as put into the mouths

of puppet speakers, not as coming out of the hearts and passions of men

and women.

In rhythm they are vital and varied enough, in style extremely

high-pitched, and they resemble much Elizabethan work of the second

order in smothering action and passion under a redundance and feverish

excess of poetry. There is violence amounting to hysteria alike in the

villainy of Conrad and of his sister Auranthe, the remorse of Albert,

and the mixture of filial devotion and lover's blindness in Ludolf, with

his vengeful frenzy when he finds how he has been gulled. Keats, it is

recorded, had in his eye the special gift of Edmund Kean for enacting

frantic extremes and long-drawn agonies of passion; and it is possible

that as played by him the last act, of which Keats took the conduct as

well as the writing into his own hands, might have proved effective on

the stage. It shows the maddened Conrad bent on executing vengeance on

the traitress Auranthe, and insanely stabbing empty air while he

imagines he is stabbing his victim, until curtains drawn aside disclose

an inner apartment where she has at the very moment fallen self-slain.

But it is doubtful whether any acting could carry off a plot so

ultra-romantically extravagant and in places so obscure, or characters

so incommensurably more eloquent than they are alive. Nor do lovers of

Keats commonly care to read the play twice, for all its bursts and

coruscations of fine poetry, feeling that these do not spring from the

poet's own inner self and imagination, but are rather as fireworks

fitted by a man of genius on to a frame which another man, barely of

talent, has put together.

The case is different when we come to _King Stephen_, the brief dramatic

fragment on which Keats wrought alone after _Otho the Great_ was

finished. This teaches us one thing at any rate about Keats, that he

could at will call away his imagination from matters luxurious or

refreshing to the spirit, from themes broodingly meditative or

tragically tender, to deal in a manner of fiery energy with the clash of

war. He is still enough a child of the Renaissance to make his

twelfth-century knights and princes quote Homer in their taunts and

counter-taunts; but in the three-and-a-half scenes which he wrote he

makes us feel his Stephen, defiant in defeat, a real elemental force and

not a mere mouther of valiant rhetoric, fine and concentrated as the

rhetoric sometimes is, as for instance when an enemy taunts him with

being disarmed and helpless and he cries back, 'What weapons has the

lion but himself?'

In persuading Keats to work with him on a tragedy for the stage, Brown

had had the entirely laudable motive of putting his friend in the way of

earning money for them both. But what would we not have given that the

time and labour thus, as it turned out, thrown away should have yielded

us from Keats's self another _Isabella_ or _Eve of St Agnes_, or a

finished _Eve of St Mark_, or even another _Lamia_? Brown's next piece

of suggestion and would-be help was far more unfortunate still. We have

seen how in the unhappy weeks after Keats's return from Winchester in

October, he spent his mornings in Brown's company spinning the verses of

a comic and satiric fairy tale the scheme of which they had concocted

together,--_The Cap and Bells_ or _The Jealousies_. The idea of the

friends in this was no doubt to throw a challenge to Byron, the first

cantos of whose _Don Juan_ had lately been launched upon a dazzled and

scandalized world. Byron's genius, the spirit, that is, of brilliant

devilry and worldly mockery which was the sincerest part of his genius,

with his rich experiences of life, travel and society, of passion and

dissipation and the extremes of fame and obloquy, and his incomparable

address and versatility in playing tricks of legerdemain with ideas and

language, had here all found their perfect opportunity for display.

Attempts at worldly banter and satire by the tender-hearted, intensely

loving and imagining Keats, with his narrow and in the main rather

second-rate social experience, were never more than wry-mouthed as I

have called them, ineffectual, and essentially against the grain.

His collaborator Brown imagined he had a gift for satiric fairy tales,

but his recorded efforts in that kind are silly and dull as well as

inclining to coarseness. What happier result could be expected from

their new joint work than that which posterity deplores in _The Cap and

Bells_? The story is of an Indian Faery emperor Elfinan,--a name

suggested by Spenser,--enamoured of an English maiden Bertha Pearl,--the

very Bertha of _The Eve of St Mark_, resuscitated to our amazement,--but

having for political reasons to seek in marriage a Faery princess

Bellanaine, who herself is in love with an English youth named Hubert.

The eighty-eight stanzas which Keats wrote on those autumn mornings in

Brown's room carry the tale no farther than Elfinan's despatching his

chancellor Crafticanto on an embassy to fetch Bellanaine on an aerial

journey from her home in Imaus, his consultation with his magician Hum

as to the means of escaping the marriage and conveying himself secretly

to England, his departure, and the arrival of Bellanaine and her escort

to find the palace empty and the emperor flown. How the seriously,

perhaps tragically, conceived Bertha of _St Mark's Eve_, with the mystic

book fated to have influence on her life, could have been worked, as

they were evidently meant to be worked, into this new ridiculous

narrative, we cannot guess, nor how the relations of Bellanaine with her

mortal lover would have been managed.

Before Keats's deepening despondency and recklessness caused him to drop

writing altogether, which apparently happened early in December, he was

evidently out of conceit with _The Cap and Bells_.[5] One of the most

unfortunate things about the attempt is the choice of the Spenserian

stanza for its metre. Keats had probably wished to avoid seeming merely

to imitate Byron, as he might have seemed to do had he written in the

_ottava rima_ of Don Juan, the one perfectly fit measure for such a

blend of fantasy and satire as he was attempting. But not even Keats's

power over the Spenserian stanza could make it a fit vehicle for his

purpose. Thomson and Shenstone had used it in work of mild and leisurely

playfulness, but to bite in satire or sting in epigram it cannot

effectively be bent. To my sense the precedent most in Keats's mind was

not these, but the before-mentioned translation of Wieland's _Oberon_ by

Sotheby. Sotheby had invented a modified form of the Spenserian stanza

riming _abbaccddc_ instead of _abcbbdbdd_ and keeping the final

alexandrine. Much of the machinery and spirit of _The Cap and

Bells_--the magic journeys through the air--the comic atmosphere and

adventures of the courts--are closely akin to the jocular parts of this

_Oberon_. Some of the passages of mere fun and playfulness are pleasant

enough, like that description of a dilapidated hackney coach (much

resembling the four-wheeler of our youth) which Hunt selected to publish

in the _Indicator_ while Keats was lying sick in his house the next

year: but the attempts at social satire are almost always feeble and

tiresome, and still more so those at political satire, turning for the

most part rather obscurely on the scandals, then at their height,

attending the relations of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In the

faery narrative itself there break forth momentary flashes from the true

genius of the poet, such as might delight the reader if he could lose

his sense of irritation at the rubbish from amidst which they gleam. As

thus, of the princess's flight through the air (was Keats thinking, in

the first line, of the children carried heavenward by angels in

Orcagna's _Triumph of Death_?)

As in old pictures tender cherubim

A child's soul thro' the sapphir'd canvas bear,

So, thro' a real heaven, on they swim

With the sweet princess on her plumag'd lair,

Speed giving to the winds her lustrous hair.

Or this, telling how Bertha of Canterbury, in Keats's queer new

conception of her, was really a changeling born in the jungle:--

She is a changeling of my management;

She was born at midnight in an Indian wild;

Her mother's screams with the striped tiger's blent,

While the torch-bearing slaves a halloo sent

Into the jungles.

Or again, some of the stanzas describing the welcome prepared in

Elfinan's capital for the faery princess after her flight: note in the

last the persistence with which Keats carries into these incongruous

climates his passion for the English spring flowers:--

The morn is full of holiday; loud bells

With rival clamours ring from every spire;

Cunningly-station'd music dies and swells

In echoing places; when the winds respire,

Light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire;

A metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm,

Comes from the northern suburbs; rich attire

Freckles with red and gold the moving swarm;

While here and there clear trumpets blow a keen alarm.

And again:--

As flowers turn their faces to the sun,

So on our flight with hungry eyes they gaze,

And, as we shap'd our course, this, that way run,

With mad-cap pleasure, or hand-clasp'd amaze;

Sweet in the air a mild-ton'd music plays,

And progresses through its own labyrinth;

Buds gather'd from the green spring's middle-days,

They scatter'd,--daisy, primrose, hyacinth,--

Or round white columns wreath'd from capital to plinth.

After his mornings spent in Brown's company over the strained

frivolities of _The Cap and Bells_, Keats was in the same weeks

striving, alone with himself of an evening, to utter the new thoughts on

life and poetry which he found taking shape in the depths of his being.

He took up again the abandoned _Hyperion_, and began rewriting it no

longer as a direct narrative, but as a vision shewn and interpreted by a

supernatural monitress acting to him somewhat the same part as Virgil

acts to Dante. In altering the form and structure of the poem Keats also

takes pains to alter its style, de-Miltonizing and de-latinizing,

sometimes terribly to their disadvantage, the passages which he takes

over from the earlier version. It is not in these, it is in the two

hundred and seventy lines of its wholly new pre-amble or introduction

that the value of the altered poem lies.

The reader remembers how Keats had broken off his work on the original

_Hyperion_ at the point where Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory and mother of

the Muses, is enkindling the brain of Apollo by mysteriously imparting

to him her ancient wisdom and all-embracing knowledge. Following a clue

which he had found in a Latin book of mythology he had lately bought,[6]

he now identifies this Greek Mnemosyne with the Roman Moneta, goddess of

warning or admonition; and being possibly also aware that the temple of

Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome was not far from that of Saturn,

makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess and guardian of Saturn's

temple. His vision takes him first into a grove or garden of trees and

flowers and fountains, with a feast of summer fruits spread on the moss

before an embowered arbour. The events that follow, and the converse

held between the poet and the priestess, are in their ethical and

allegoric meanings at many points obscure, and capable, like all symbols

that are truly symbolic, of various interpretations. But the leading

ideas they embody can be recognised clearly enough.

They are primarily the same ideas, developed in a deeper and more sombre

spirit, as had been present in Keats's mind almost from the beginning:

the idea that in the simple delights of nature and of art as

unreflectingly felt in youth there is no abiding place for the poetic

spirit, that from the enjoyment of such delights it must rise to

thoughts higher and more austere and prompting to more arduous tasks:

the further idea that to fit it for such tasks two things above all are

necessary, growth in human sympathy through the putting down of self,

and growth in knowledge and wisdom through strenuous study and

meditation. Such ideas had already been thrown out by Keats in _Sleep

and Poetry_; they had been developed with much more fullness, though in

a manner made obscure from redundance of imagery, in _Endymion_,

especially in the third book: they had been expressed with a difference

under the new and clearer symbolism of the Two Chambers of Thought in

Keats's letter to Reynolds from Teignmouth. About the same hour, the

hour, as I think, of the finest achievement of Keats's genius as well as

of its highest promise,--there had appeared in his letters and some of

his verses the quite new idea, which would have been inconceivable to

him a year earlier, of questioning whether poetry was a worthy pursuit

at all in a world full of pain and destruction. Musing beside the sea on

a calm evening of April, he anticipates the Tennysonian vision of

'nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine.' In letters written during

the next few weeks he insists over and over again alike upon the

acuteness of his new sense that the world is 'full of Misery and

Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression,' and upon the poet's need of

knowledge, and again knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to take away

the heat and fever and ease 'the Burden of the Mystery.' The first

passage that shows the dawn of a desire in his mind to do good to a

suffering world by means possibly other than his art is that well-known

and deeply significant one:--

I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment

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

worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do

it with their society--some with their wit--some with their

benevolence--some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good

humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the

command of great Nature--there is but one way for me. The road lies

through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.

The next time he expresses such an idea, it comes struck from him in a

darker mood and in phrases of greater poignancy:--'were it in my choice,

I would reject a Petrarcal coronation,--on account of my dying day, and

because women have cancers ... I am never alone without rejoicing that

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

of dying for a great human purpose.'

The pressure of the sense of human misery, the hunger of the soul for

knowledge and vision to lighten it, though they naturally do not colour

his impersonal work of the next year and a half, nevertheless set their

mark, the former strain in especial, upon his most deeply felt

meditative verse, as in the odes to the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn,

and reappear occasionally in his private confessions to his friends.

Now, after intense experience both of personal sorrow and of poetic

toil, and under the strain of incipient disease and consuming passion,

it is borne in upon his solitary hours that such poetry as he has

written, the irresponsible poetry of beauty and romance, has been mere

idle dreaming, a refuge of the spirit from its prime duty of sharing and

striving to alleviate the troubles of the world. It seems to him that

every ordinary man and woman is worth more to mankind than such a

dreamer. If poetry is to be worth anything to the world, it must be a

different kind of poetry from this: the true poet is something the very

opposite of the mere dreamer: he is one who has prepared himself through

self-renunciation and arduous effort and extreme probation of the spirit

to receive and impart the highest wisdom, the wisdom that comes from

full knowledge of the past and foresight into the future. Of such wisdom

_The Fall of Hyperion_ in its amended form, as revealed and commented by

Mnemosyne-Moneta, the great priestess and prophetess, remembrancer and

admonisher in one, was meant to be a sample,--or such an attempt at a

sample as Keats at the present stage of his mental growth could supply.

But the attempt soon proved beyond his strength and was abandoned.

The preamble, or induction, he had finished; and this, if we leave out

the futile eighteen lines with which it begins, contains much lofty

thought conveyed in noble imagery and in a style of blank verse quite

his own and independent of all models. Take the feast of fruits,

symbolic of the poet's early unreflecting joys, and the new thirst for

some finer and more inspiring elixir which follows it:--

On a mound

Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits,

Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal

By angel tasted or our Mother Eve;

For empty shells were scattered on the grass,

And grape-stalks but half bare, and remnants more

Sweet-smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know.

Still was more plenty than the fabled horn

Thrice emptied could pour forth at banqueting,

For Proserpine return'd to her own fields,

Where the white heifers low. And appetite,

More yearning than on earth I ever felt,

Growing within, I ate deliciously,--

And, after not long, thirsted; for thereby

Stood a cool vessel of transparent juice

Sipp'd by the wander'd bee, the which I took,

And pledging all the mortals of the world,

And all the dead whose names are in our lips,

Drank. That full draught is parent of my theme.

The draught plunges him into a profound sleep, from which he awakens a

changed being among utterly changed surroundings. The world in which he

finds himself is no longer a delicious garden but an ancient and august

temple,--the noblest and most nobly described architectural vision in

all Keats's writings:--

I look'd around upon the curved sides

Of an old sanctuary, with roof august,

Builded so high, it seemed that filmed clouds

Might spread beneath as o'er the stars of heaven.

So old the place was, I remember'd none

The like upon the earth: what I had seen

Of grey cathedrals, buttress'd walls, rent towers,

The superannuations of sunk realms,

Or Nature's rocks toil'd hard in waves and winds,

Seem'd but the faulture of decrepit things

To that eternal domed monument.

The sights the poet sees and the experiences which befall him within

this temple; the black gates closed against the east,--which must

symbolize the forgotten past of the world; the stupendous image

enthroned aloft in the west, with the altar at its foot, approachable

only by an interminable flight of steps; the wreaths of incense veiling

the altar and spreading a mysterious sense of happiness; the voice of

one ministering at the altar and shrouded in the incense--a voice at

once of invitation and menace, bidding the dreamer climb to the summit

of the steps by a given moment or he will perish utterly; the sense of

icy numbness and death which comes upon him before he can reach even the

lowest step; the new life that pours into him as he touches the step;

his accosting of the mysterious veiled priestess who stands on the

altar platform when he has climbed to it; all these phases of the poet's

ordeal are impressively told, but are hard to interpret otherwise than

dubiously and vaguely. Matters become more definite a moment afterwards,

when in answer to the poet's questions the priestess tells him that none

can climb to the altar beside which he stands,--the altar, we must

suppose, of historic and prophetic knowledge where alone, after due

sacrifice of himself, the poet can find true inspiration,--except those

to whom the miseries of the world

Are misery and will not let them rest.

The poet pleads that there are thousands of ordinary men and women who

feel the sorrows of the world and do their best to mitigate them, and is

answered,--

'Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries'

Rejoin'd that voice; 'they are no dreamers weak;

They seek no wonder but the human face,

No music but a happy-noted voice:

They come not here, they have no thought to come;

And thou art here, for thou art less than they.

What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,

To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,

A fever of thyself: think of the earth;

What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?

What haven? every creature hath its home,

Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,

Whether his labours be sublime or low--

The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:

Only the dreamer venoms all his days,

Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.

What a pilgrimage has the soul of Keats gone through, when he utters

this heartrending cry, from the day, barely three years before, when he

was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of the

poetic life and of the end that awaits it:--

These are the living pleasures of the bard,

But richer far posterity's award.

What shall he murmur with his latest breath,

When his proud eye looks through the film of death?

The truth is that, in all this, Keats in his depression of mind and body

has become fiercely unjust to his own achievements and their value: for

if posterity were asked, would it not reply that the things of sheer

beauty his youth has left us, draughts drawn from the inmost wells of

nature and antiquity and romance, are of greater solace and refreshment

to his kind than anything he could have been likely to achieve by

deliberate effort in defiance of his natural genius or in premature

anticipation of its maturity?

At this point there follows a fretful passage, ill-written or rather

only roughly drafted, and therefore not included in the transcripts of

the fragments by his friends, in which his monitress affirms

contemptuously the gulf that separates the romantic dreamer from the

true poet. He accepts the reproof and the threatened punishment, the

more willingly if they are to extend to certain 'hectorers in proud bad

verse' (he means Byron) who have aroused his spleen. Reverting to a

loftier strain, and acknowledging the grace she has so far shown him,

the poet asks his monitress to reveal herself. He had probably long

before been impressed by engravings of the well-known ancient statue of

the seated Mnemosyne sitting forward with her chin resting on her hand,

her arm and shoulder heavily swathed in drapery: but his vision of her

here seems wholly independent, and is noble and mystically haunting.

When she has signified to him in a softened voice that the gigantic

image above the altar is that of Saturn, and that the scenes of the

world's past she is about to evoke before him are those of the fall of

Saturn, the poet relates:--

As near as an immortal's sphered words

Could to a mother's soften were these last:

And yet I had a terror of her robes,

And chiefly of the veils that from her brow

Hung pale, and curtain'd her in mysteries,

That made my heart too small to hold its blood.

This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand

Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face,

Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd

By an immortal sickness which kills not;

It works a constant change, which happy death

Can put no end to; deathwards progressing

To no death was that visage; it had past

The lilly and the snow; and beyond these

I must not think now, though I saw that face.

But for her eyes I should have fled away;

They held me back with a benignant light,

Soft, mitigated by divinest lids

Half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd

Of all external things; they saw me not,

But in blank splendour beam'd, like the mild moon,

Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not

What eyes are upward cast.

The aspirant now adoringly entreats her to disclose the tragedy that he

perceives to be working in her brain: she consents, and from this point

begins the original _Hyperion_ re-cast and narrated as a vision within

the main vision, with comments put into the mouth of the prophetess. But

the scheme, which under no circumstances, one would say, could have been

a prosperous one, was soon abandoned, and this, the last of Keats's

great fragments, breaks off near the beginning of the second book.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Carm._ iii. 4, which probably Keats knew also at first hand.

[2] The daughter of Styx is Victory, and 'halecret' is a corslet.

[3] The passage ending, 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter

than the pleasure of pleasure itself.'

[4]

With duller steel than the Persean sword

They cut away no formless monster's head.

[5] See the letter to Taylor quoted above, pp. 380, 381.

[6] _Auctores Mythographi Latini_, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742.

Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after

his death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon

Bailey (Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in

Keats's mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus.

CHAPTER XV

FEBRUARY-AUGUST 1820: HAMPSTEAD AND KENTISH TOWN: PUBLICATION OF _LAMIA_

VOLUME.

Letters from the sick-bed--To Fanny Brawne--To James Rice--Barry

Cornwall--Hopes of returning health--Haydon's private

view--Improvement not maintained--Summer at Kentish Town--Kindness of

Leigh Hunt--Misery and jealousy--Severn and Mrs Gisborne--Invitation

from Shelley--Keats on _The Cenci_--_La Belle Dame_ published--A

disfigured version--The _Lamia_ volume published--Charles Lamb's

appreciation--The _New Monthly_--Other favourable reviews--Taylor and

Blackwood--A skirmish--Impenitence--And impertinence--Jeffrey in the

_Edinburgh_--Appreciation full though tardy--Fury of Byron--Shelley on

_Hyperion_--And on Keats in general--Impressions of Crabb Robinson.

Such and so gloomy, although with no ignoble gloom, had been Keats's

deeper thoughts on poetry and life, and such the imagery under which he

figured them, during the last weeks when the state of his health enabled

his mind to work with anything approaching its natural power. From the

night of his seizure on February 3rd 1820, which was three months after

his twenty-fourth birthday, he never wrote verse again: unless indeed

the lines found on the margin of his manuscript of _The Cap and Bells_

were written from his sick-bed and in a moment of bitterness addressed

in his mind to Fanny Brawne: but from a certain pitch and formality of

style in them, I should take them rather to be meant for putting into

the mouth of one of the characters in some such historical play as he

had been meditating in the weeks before Christmas:--

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calm'd--see here it is--

I hold it towards you.

For several days after the haemorrhage he was kept to his room and his

bed, and for nearly two months had to lead a strictly invalid life. At

first he could bear no one in the room except the doctor and Brown.

'While I waited on him day and night,' testifies Brown, 'his instinctive

generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance of his eye, a

motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely

nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment.' (How often have these

words come home to the heart of the present writer in days when he used

to be busy about the mute sick-bed of another of these shining ones!)

Severn, nursing Keats later under conditions even more trying and

hopeless, bears similar testimony to his unabated charm and sweetness in

suffering. Almost from the first he was able to write little letters to

his sister Fanny, and is careful to give them a cheering and re-assuring

turn. When after some days he is down on a sofa-bed made up for him in

the front parlour he tells her what an improvement it is:--

Besides I see all that passes-for instance now, this morning--if I had

been in my own room I should not have seen the coals brought in. On

Sunday between the hours of twelve and one I descried a Pot boy. I

conjectured it might be the one o'clock beer--Old women with bobbins

and red cloaks and unpresuming bonnets I see creeping about the heath.

Gipseys after hare skins and silver spoons. Then goes by a fellow with

a wooden clock under his arm that strikes a hundred and more. Then

comes the old French emigrant (who has been very well to do in France)

with his hands joined behind on his hips, and his face full of

political schemes. Then passes Mr David Lewis, a very good-natured,

good-looking old gentleman who has been very kind to Tom and George

and me. As for those fellows the Brick-makers they are always passing

to and fro. I mustn't forget the two old maiden Ladies in Well Walk

who have a Lap dog between them that they are very anxious about. It

is a corpulent Little beast whom it is necessary to coax along with an

ivory-tipp'd cane. Carlo our Neighbour Mrs Brawne's dog and it meet

sometimes. Lappy thinks Carlo a devil of a fellow and so do his

Mistresses.

Very soon his betrothed was allowed to pay him little visits from next

door, and he was able to take pleasure in these and in a constant

interchange of notes with her. He tells her of his thoughts and some of

his words (which are not quite the same as Brown puts in his mouth) at

the moment of his seizure:--

You must believe--you shall, you will--that I can do nothing, say

nothing, think nothing of you but what has its spring in the Love

which has so long been my pleasure and torment. On the night I was

taken ill--when so violent a rush of blood came to my Lungs that I

felt nearly suffocated--I assure you I felt it possible I might not

survive, and at that moment thought of nothing but you. When I said to

Brown 'this is unfortunate' I thought of you. 'Tis true that since the

first two or three days other subjects have entered my head.

On the whole his love-thoughts keep peaceable and contented, and his

jealousies are for the moment at rest. But he has to struggle with the

sense that considering his health and circumstances he is bound in

fairness to release her from her engagement: an idea which to her credit

she seems steadily to have refused to entertain.

My greatest torment since I have known you has been the fear of you

being a little inclined to the Cressid; but that suspicion I dismiss

utterly and remain happy in the surety of your Love, which I assure

you is as much a wonder to me as a delight. Send me the words 'Good

night' to put under my pillow....

You know our situation--what hope is there if I should be recovered

ever so soon--my very health will not suffer me to make any great

exertion. I am recommended not even to read poetry, much less write

it. I wish I had even a little hope. I cannot say forget me--but I

would mention that there are impossibilities in the world. No more of

this. I am not strong enough to be weaned--take no notice of it in

your good night.

The healthier and more tranquil tenor of his thoughts and feelings for

the time is beautifully expressed in the often quoted letter written to

James Rice a fortnight after his attack:--

I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not passed

a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering

under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify, that

acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had

lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that

illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my

mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive

things in a truer light),--how astonishingly does the chance of

leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us!

Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble', I think of green fields;

I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from

my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just

created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected

with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I

have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature,

but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring

are what I want to see again.

Some time in the month he owns to his beloved that the thoughts of what

he had hoped to do in poetry mingle with his thoughts of her:--

How illness stands as a barrier betwixt me and you! Even if I was

well--I must make myself as good a Philosopher as possible. Now I have

had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found

other thoughts intrude upon me. 'If I should die,' said I to myself,

'I have left no immortal work behind me--nothing to make my friends

proud of my memory--but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all

things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.'

Thoughts like these came very feebly whilst I was in health and every

pulse beat for you--now you divide with this (may I say it?) 'last

infirmity of noble minds' all my reflection.

Presently we learn from his letters that Reynolds, Dilke, and one or two

other friends have been dropping in to see him. He expresses himself

touched by the courtesy of a new poetical acquaintance of much more

prosperous worldly connexions than his own, Mr Bryan Waller Procter

('Barry Cornwall') in sending him copies of his volumes lately

published. Keats does not mention that one of these contains a version,

_The Sicilian Story_, of the same tale from Boccaccio as his own as yet

unpublished _Isabella_: but he cannot quite conceal his perception of

those qualities in Barry Cornwall's work, its prevailing strain of

fluent imitative common-place, its affectations and exaggerations of

Hunt's and his own leanings towards over-lusciousness, which Shelley, as

we shall see, found so exasperating. 'However,' he adds, 'that is

nothing--I think he likes poetry for its own sake not his.'[1] Before

the end of the month we find him taking pleasure, as in earlier

Februaries, in the song of the thrush, which portends, he hopes, an end

of the north-east wind. The month of March brings signs of gradually

returning strength. Brown, he says, declares he is getting stout; and

having in the first weeks of his illness avowed that he was so feeble he

could be flattered into a hope in which faith had no part, he now begins

really to believe in his own recovery and to let his thoughts run again

on fame and poetry. He writes to Fanny Brawne the most trustful and

least agitated of all his love letters:--

You uttered a half complaint once that I only lov'd your Beauty. Have

I nothing else then to love in you but that? Do not I see a heart

naturally furnish'd with wings imprison itself with me? No ill

prospect has been able to turn your thoughts a moment from me. This

perhaps should be as much a subject of sorrow as joy--but I will not

talk of that. Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire

devotion to you: how much more deeply then must I feel for you knowing

you love me. My Mind has been the most discontented and restless one

that ever was put into a body too small for it. I never felt my Mind

repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment--upon no

person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of

window: you always concentrate my whole senses. The anxiety shown

about our Loves in your last note is an immense pleasure to me:

however you must not suffer such speculations to molest you any more:

nor will I any more believe you can have the least pique against me.

And again: 'let me have another opportunity of years and I will not die

without being remember'd. Take care of yourself dear that we may both be

well in the summer.'

He began to get about again, and by the 25th of March was well enough to

go into town to the private view of Haydon's huge picture, finished at

last, of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. This was the occasion which

Haydon in his autobiography describes in language so vivid and with a

self-congratulation so boisterous and contagious that it is impossible

in reading not to share his sense of the day's triumph. As in the case

of the Elgin marbles three years earlier, he had achieved his object in

the face of a thousand difficulties and enmities, living the while on

the bounty of friends, some of them rich, others, as we know, the

reverse, whom his ardour and importunity had whipped up to his help. At

the last moment he had contrived to scrape together money enough to stop

the mouths of his creditors and to pay the cost of hiring the Egyptian

Hall and hanging up his gigantic canvas there, with the help of three

gigantic guardsmen, his models and assistants; and the world of taste

and fashion, realising how Haydon had been right and the established

dilettanti wrong in regard to the Elgin marbles, were determined to be

on the safe side this time in case he should turn out to be right also

about the merits of his own work.

Some exalted and many distinguished personages had been to see the

picture in his studio, and now, on the opening day, the hall was

thronged in answer to his invitations. 'All the ministers and their

ladies, all the foreign ambassadors, all the bishops, all the beauties

in high life, all the geniuses in town, and everybody of any note, were

invited and came.... The room was full. Keats and Hazlitt were up in a

corner, really rejoicing.' Hazlitt expressed in the _Edinburgh Review_

for the following August a tempered, far from undiscriminating

admiration of certain qualities in the painting. Keats himself merely

mentions to his sister Fanny, without comment, the fact of his having

been there. One wonders whether he witnessed the scene which Haydon goes

on in his effective way to narrate.

He had tried to treat the head of Christ unconventionally, had painted

and repainted it, and was nervous and dissatisfied over the result. The

crowd seemed doubtful too. 'Everybody seemed afraid, when in walked,

with all the dignity of her majestic presence, Mrs Siddons, like a Ceres

or a Juno. The whole room remained dead silent, and allowed her to

think. After a few minutes Sir George Beaumont, who was extremely

anxious, said in a very delicate manner, "How do you like the Christ?"

Everybody listened for her reply. After a moment, in a deep, loud,

tragic tone she said, "It is completely successful." I was then

presented with all the ceremonies of a levee, and she invited me to her

house in an awful tone.'... I think it is not recorded whether

Northcote's acid comment in a different sense, 'Mr Haydon, your ass is

the Saviour of your picture', was made on this famous occasion or

privately. Certainly the ass, judging by photographs of the picture as

it now hangs in a wrecked condition at Cincinnati, is the object that

first takes the eye with its black ears and shoulders strongly relieved

against the white drapery of Christ, and what looks like the realistic

treatment of the creature in contrast with the 'ideal,' that is the

vapidly pompous and pretentious, portraiture of geniuses past and

present, Newton, Voltaire, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Keats, introduced among

the crowd in the foreground.[2]

In the course of April the improvement in Keats's health failed to

maintain itself. We find him complaining much of nervous irritability

and general weakness. He is recommended, one would like to know by whom,

to avoid the excitement of writing or even reading poetry and turn to

the study of geometry--of all things!--as a sedative. He has no strength

for the walk to Walthamstow to see his young sister, and even shrinks

from the fatigue of going by coach. Brown having arranged to let his

house again and go for another tramp through Scotland--not, one would

have said under the circumstances, the course of a very considerate or

solicitous friend, but he was probably misled by Keats's apparent

improvement the month before--Brown having made this arrangement, Keats,

also on the recommendation of the doctors, thinks of sailing with him on

the packet and returning alone, in hopes of getting strength from the

sea-trip to Scotland and back. This plan, when it came to the point, he

gave up, and only accompanied his friend down the river as far as

Gravesend. Having to turn out of Wentworth Place in favour of Brown's

summer tenants, he thought of taking a lodging a few doors from the

house where Leigh Hunt was then living in Kentish Town, then still a

village on the way between London and Hampstead. Almost at the same time

he writes to Dilke in regard to his future course of life, 'My mind has

been at work all over the world to find out what to do. I have my choice

of three things, or at least two, South America, or surgeon to an

Indiaman; which last, I think, will be my fate.' For the present he

moved as he had proposed to Kentish Town (2 Wesleyan Place). Here he

stayed for six or seven weeks (approximately May 6-June 23), and then,

having suffered a set-back in the shape of two slight returns of

haemorrhage from the lung, moved for the sake of better nursing into the

household of the ever kind and affectionate, but not less ever feckless

and ill-managing, Leigh Hunts at 13 Mortimer Terrace. With them he

remained for another period of about seven weeks, ending on August 12th.

Those three months in Kentish Town were to Keats a time of distressing

weakness and for the most part of terrible inward fretfulness and

despondency. Early in the time he speaks of intending soon to begin

(meaning begin again) on _The Cap and Bells_. When we read those vivid

stanzas quoted above (p. 446) describing the welcome by the crowd of

princess Bellanaine after her aerial journey, we are inevitably reminded

of an event--the triumphal approach and entry of Queen Caroline into

London from Dover--which happened on the 9th of June this same year. It

would be tempting to suppose that Keats may have witnessed the event and

been thereby inspired to his description. But he was too ill for such

outings, and moreover the earlier of the two stanzas comes well back in

the poem (sixty-fourth out of eighty-eight) and it is impossible to

suppose that in his then state he could have added so much to the

fragment as that would imply. So we must credit the stanzas to

imagination only, and take it as certain that his only real occupation

with poetry in these days was in passing through the press the new

volume of poems (_Lamia_, _Isabella_, etc.,) which his friends had at

last persuaded him to put forward. Even on this task his hold must have

been loose, seeing that the publishers put in without his knowledge a

note which he afterwards sharply disowned, to the effect that his reason

for dropping _Hyperion_ had been the ill reception of _Endymion_ by the

critics.

His only outing, so far as we hear, was to an exhibition of English

historical portraits at the British Institution, of which he writes to

Brown with some interest and vividness. He tells at the same time of an

invitation, which he was not well enough to accept, to meet Wordsworth,

Southey, Lamb, Haydon, and some others at supper. Leigh Hunt, despite

his engrossing literary and editorial occupations and a recent trying

illness of his own, did his best, while Keats was his inmate, to keep

him interested and amused. Keats in writing to his sister gratefully

acknowledges as much. 'Mr Hunt does everything in his power to make the

time pass as agreeably with me as possible. I read the greatest part of

the day and generally take two half-hour walks a day up and down the

terrace which is very much pester'd with cries, ballad singers, and

street music.' But the obsession of his passion, its consuming jealousy

and hopelessness, gave him little respite. He would keep his eyes fixed

all day, as he afterwards avowed, on Hampstead; and once when, at Hunt's

suggestion, they took a drive as far as the Heath, he burst into a flood

of unwonted tears and declared his heart was breaking.

His letters to his beloved in these same months are too agonizing to

read. He is so little himself in them, so merely and utterly, to borrow

words of his own, 'a fever of himself,' that many of us could not

endure, when they were first published, the thought of this

Keats-that-is-no-Keats being exposed before a hastily reading and

carelessly judging after-world, and even now cannot but regret it. All

the morbid self-torturing elements of his nature, which in health it had

been a main part of the battle of his life to subdue, and of which he

never suffered those about him to see a sign, now burst from control and

flamed out against the girl he loved and the friends he loved next best

to her. Once only, at the beginning of the time, he could write

contentedly, telling her that he is marking for her the most beautiful

passages in Spenser, 'comforting myself in being somewhat occupied to

give you however small a pleasure. It has lightened my time very much.

God bless you.' His other letters are in a tortured, almost frenzied,

strain of jealous suspicion and reproach against her and against those

of his intimates who had, as he imagined, disapproved their attachment,

or pried into or made light of it, or else had shown her too marked

attentions. Among the former were Reynolds and his sisters, from whom

for the time being he was tacitly estranged. Among the latter he

includes Brown and Dilke, with especial bitterness against Brown.

Between them all they had made, he vows, a football of his heart, and

again, 'Hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is when he cried

to Ophelia, "Go to a Nunnery, go, go!".' That these were but the

half-delirious promptings of his fevered blood is clear from the fact

that a very few weeks both before and after such outbreaks he wrote to

Brown as though counting him as much a friend as ever. As for his

betrothed, wound as his reproaches might at the time, we know from her

own words that they left no lasting impression of unkindness on her

memory. Writing in riper years to Medwin, who had asked her whether the

accounts current in Rome of Keats's violence of nature were true, she

says:--

That his sensibility was most acute, is true, and his passions were

very strong, but not violent, if by that term, violence of temper is

implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to

turn on himself than on others, and in moments of greatest irritation,

it was only by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved

and wounded his friends. Violence such as the letter describes, was

quite foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before

quitting England, I saw him every day, often witnessed his sufferings,

both mental and bodily, and I do not hesitate to say, that he never

could have addressed an unkind expression, much less a violent one, to

any human being.[3]

These words of Fanny Brawne, then Mrs Lindon, to Medwin are not well

known, and it is only fair to quote them as proving that if in youth the

lady had not been willing to sacrifice her gaieties and her pleasure in

admiration for the sake of her lover's peace of mind, she showed at any

rate in after life a true and loyal understanding of his character.

While Keats was staying in Kentish Town Severn went often to see him,

and in the second week of July writes to Haslam struggling to keep up

his hopes for their friend in spite of appearances and of Keats's own

conviction:--'It will give you pleasure to say I trust he will still

recover. His appearance is shocking and now reminds me of poor Tom and I

have been inclined to think him in the same way. For himself--he makes

sure of it--and seems prepossessed that he cannot recover--now I seem

more than ever _not_ to think so and I know you will agree with me when

you see him--are you aware another volume of Poems was published last

week--in which is "Lovely Isabel--poor simple Isabel"? I have been

delighted with this volume and think it will even please the million.'

During the same period Shelley's friends the Gisbornes twice met him at

Leigh Hunt's. The first time was on June 23. Mrs Gisborne writes in her

journal that having lately been ill he spoke little and in a low tone:

'the _Endymion_ was not mentioned, this person might not be its author;

but on observing his countenance and eyes I persuaded myself that he was

the very person.' It is always Keats's eyes that strangers thus notice

first: the late Mrs Procter, who met him only once, at a lecture of

Hazlitt's, remembered them to the end of her long life as like those of

one 'who had been looking at some glorious sight.' This first time Keats

and Mrs Gisborne had some talk about music and singing, but some three

weeks later, on July 12th, the same lady notes, 'drank tea at Mr Hunt's;

I was much pained by the sight of poor Keats, under sentence of death

from Dr Lamb. He never spoke and looks emaciated.'

Doubtless it was under the impression of this last meeting that Mr

Gisborne sent Shelley the account of Keats's state of health which moved

Shelley to write in his own and his wife's name urging that Keats should

come to Italy to avoid the English winter and take up his quarters with

or near them at Pisa. Shelley repeats nearly the same kind and just

opinion of _Endymion_ as he had previously expressed in writing to the

Olliers; saying he has lately read it again, 'and ever with a new sense

of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth

with indistinct profusion. This people in general will not endure, and

that is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold.

I feel persuaded that you are capable of the greatest things, so you but

will.' At the same time Shelley sends Keats a copy of his _Cenci_.

Keats's answer shows him touched and grateful for the kindness offered,

but nevertheless, as always where Shelley is in question, in some degree

embarrassed and ungracious. He says nothing of the invitation to Pisa,

though he was already considering the possibility of going to winter in

Italy. As to _Endymion_, he says he would willingly unwrite it did he

care so much as once about reputation, and as to _The Cenci_, and _The

Prometheus_ announced as forthcoming, he makes the well-known, rather

obscurely worded criticism of which the main drift is that to his mind

Shelley pours out new poems too quickly and does not concentrate enough

upon the purely artistic aims and qualities of his work. These, Keats

goes on, are 'by many spirits nowadays considered the Mammon. A modern

work, it is said, must have a purpose which may be the God. An artist

must serve Mammon; he must have 'self-concentration'--selfishness,

perhaps. You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that

you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every

rift of your subject with ore.'

Keats in these admonitions was no doubt remembering views of Shelley's

such as are expressed in his words 'I consider poetry very subordinate

to moral and political science.' Judging by them, his mind would seem to

have veered back from the convictions which inspired the pre-amble to

the revised _Hyperion_ the autumn before, insisting, in language which

might almost seem borrowed from the preface to _Alastor_, on the doom

that awaits poets who play their art in selfishness instead of making it

their paramount aim to 'pour balm' upon the miseries of mankind. With

reference to the promised _Prometheus_ he adds, 'could I have my own

wish effected, you would have it still in manuscript, or be but now

putting an end to the second act. I remember your advising me not to

publish my first blights, on Hampstead Heath. I am returning advice upon

your hands.' Finally, mentioning that he is sending out a copy of his

lately published _Lamia_ volume, he says that most of its contents have

been written above two years (a slip of memory, the statement being only

true of _Isabella_ and of one or two minor pieces) and would never have

been published now but for hope of gain.

Shelley's letter was written from Pisa on the 27th of July and received

by Keats on the 13th of August. On the previous day he had fled suddenly

from under the Leigh Hunts' roof, having been thrown into a fit of

uncontrollable nervous agitation by the act of a discharged servant, who

kept back a letter to him from Fanny Brawne and on quitting the house

left it to be delivered, opened and two days late, by one of the

children. His first impulse on leaving the Hunts' was to go back to his

old lodging with Bentley the postman, but this Mrs Brawne would not hear

of, and took him into her own house, where she and her daughter for the

next few weeks nursed him and did all they could for his comfort.

During those unhappy months at Kentish Town Keats's best work was given

to the world. First, in Leigh Hunt's _Indicator_ for May 20, _La Belle

Dame sans Merci_, signed, obviously in bitterness, 'Caviare' (Hamlet's

'caviare to the general'), and unluckily enfeebled by changes for which

we find no warrant either in Keats's autograph or in extant copies made

by his friends Woodhouse and Brown. Keats's judgment in revising his own

work had evidently by this time become unsure. We have seen how in

recasting _Hyperion_ the previous autumn he changed some of the finest

of his original lines for the worse: and it is conceivable that in the

case of _La Belle Dame_ he may have done so again of his own motion, but

much more likely, I should say, that the changes, which are all in the

direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt's

suggestion and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference, or

perhaps even from that very sense of lack of sympathy in most readers

which made him sign 'Caviare.' Hunt introduced the piece with some

commendatory words, showing that he at all events felt nothing amiss

with it in its new shape, and added a short account of the old French

poem by Alain Chartier from which the title was taken. It is to be

deplored that in some recent and what should be standard editions of

Keats the poem stands as thus printed in the _Indicator_, instead of in

the original form rightly given by Lord Houghton from Brown's

transcript, in which it had become a classic of the language.[4]

It is surely a perversion in textual criticism to perpetuate the worse

version merely because it happens to be the one printed in Keats's

lifetime. No sensitive reader but must feel that 'wretched wight' is a

vague and vapid substitute for the clear image of the 'knight-at-arms,'

while 'sigh'd full sore' is ill replaced by 'sighed deep,' and 'wild

wild eyes' still worse by 'wild sad eyes': that the whimsical

particularity of the 'kisses four,' removed in the new version, gives

the poem an essential part of its savour (Keats was fond of these

fanciful numberings, compare the damsels who stand 'by fives and sevens'

in the Induction to Calidore, and the 'four laurell'd spirits' in the

Epistle to George Felton Matthew): and again, that the loose broken

construction--'So kissed to sleep' is quite uncharacteristic of the

poet: and yet again, that the phrase 'And there we slumbered on the

moss,' is what any amateur rimester might write about any pair of

afternoon picknickers, while the phrase which was cancelled for it, 'And

there she lulled me asleep,' falls with exactly the mystic cadence and

hushing weight upon the spirit which was required. The reader may be

interested to hear the effect which these changes had upon the late

William Morris, than whom no man had a better right to speak. Mr Sydney

Cockerell writes me:--

In February 1894 the last sheets of the Kelmscott Press Keats, edited

by F. S. Ellis, were being printed. A specimen of each sheet of every

book was brought in to Morris as soon as it came off the press. I was

with him when he happened to open the sheet on which _La Belle Dame

sans Merci_ was printed. He began to read it and was suddenly aware of

unfamiliar words, 'wretched wight' for 'knight at arms,' verses 4 and

5 transposed, and several changes in verse 7. Great was his

indignation. He swiftly altered the words and then read the poem to

me, remarking that it was the germ from which all the poetry of his

group had sprung--The sheet was reprinted and the earlier and better

version restored--I still have the cancelled sheet with his

corrections.

Six weeks later, in the first days of July, appeared the volume _Lamia,

Isabella, and other Poems_ in right of which Keats's name is immortal.

_La Belle Dame_ was not in it, nor _In drear-nighted December_, nor any

sonnets, nor any of the verses composed on the Scotch tour, nor the

fragment of _The Eve of St Mark_, nor, happily, _The Cap and Bells_: but

it included all the odes except that on Indolence and the fragment _To

Maia_, as well as nearly all the other minor pieces of any account

written since _Endymion_, such as _Fancy_, the _Mermaid Tavern_ and

_Robin Hood_ lines, with the three finished Tales, _Isabella_, _The Eve

of St Agnes_, and _Lamia_, and the great fragment of _Hyperion_ in its

original, not its recast, form. Keats was too far gone in illness and

the hopelessness of passion to be much moved by the success or failure

of his new venture. But the story of its first reception is part of his

biography, and shall be briefly told in this place.

The first critic in the field was the best: no less a master than

Charles Lamb, who within a fortnight of the appearance of the volume

contributed to the _New Times_ a brief notice, anonymous but marked with

all the charm and authority of his genius.[5] He begins by quoting the

four famous stanzas picturing Madeline at her prayers in the moonlit

chamber, and comments--'Like the radiance, which comes from those old

windows upon the limbs and garments of the damsel, is the almost

Chaucer-like painting, with which this poet illumes every subject he

touches. We have scarcely anything like it in modern description. It

brings us back to ancient days and "Beauty making-beautiful old

rhymes."' 'The finest thing,' Lamb continues, 'in the volume is _The Pot

of Basil_.' Noting how the anticipation of the assassination is

wonderfully conceived in the one epithet of 'the _murder'd_ man,' he

goes on to quote the stanzas telling the discovery of and digging for

the corpse, 'than which,' he says. 'there is nothing more awfully simple

in diction, more nakedly grand and moving in sentiment, in Dante, in

Chaucer or in Spenser.' It is to be noted that Lamb, who loved things

Gothic better than things Grecian, ignores _Hyperion_, which most

critics in praising the volume pitched on to the neglect of the rest,

and proceeds to tell of _Lamia_, winding up with a return to _The Pot of

Basil_:--

More exuberantly rich in imagery and painting is the story of the

_Lamia_. It is of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of.

Her first appearance in serpentine form--

--A beauteous wreath with melancholy eyes--

her dialogue with Hermes, the _Star of Lethe_, as he is called by one

of these prodigal phrases which Mr Keats abounds in, which are each a

poem in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once,

like a picture, all the dim regions and their inhabitants, and the

sudden coming of a celestial among them; the charming of her into

woman's shape again by the God; her marriage with the beautiful

Lycius; her magic palace, which those who knew the street, and

remembered it complete from childhood, never remembered to have seen

before; the few Persian mutes, her attendants,

--who that same year

Were seen about the markets: none knew where

They could inhabit;--

the high-wrought splendours of the nuptial bower, with the fading of

the whole pageantry, Lamia, and all, away, before the glance of

Apollonius,--are all that fairy land can do for us. They are for

younger impressibilities. To _us_ an ounce of feeling is worth a pound

of fancy; and therefore we recur again, with a warmer gratitude, to

the story of Isabella and the pot of basil, and those never-cloying

stanzas which we have cited, and which we think should disarm

criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it would not deny to

honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light to the stars in

Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies, rather than

acknowledge she is fair.

Leigh Hunt, who during all this time was in all ways loyally doing his

best for Keats's encouragement and comfort, and had just dedicated his

translation of Tasso's _Aminta_ to him as to one 'equally pestered by

the critical and admired by the poetical,'--Leigh Hunt within a month of

the appearance of the volume reviewed and quoted from it with full

appreciation in two numbers of the _Indicator_. His notice contained

those judicious remarks which we have already cited on the philosophical

weakness of _Lamia_, praising at the same time the gorgeousness of the

snake description, and saying, of the lines on the music being the sole

support of the magical palace-roof, 'this is the very quintessence of

the romantic.' 'When Mr Keats errs in his poetry,' says Hunt in regard

to the _Pot of Basil_, 'it is from the ill-management of a good

thing--exuberance of ideas'; and, comparing the contents of this volume

with his earlier work, concludes as follows:--

The author's versification is now perfected, the exuberances of his

imagination restrained, and a calm power, the surest and loftiest of

all power, takes place of the impatient workings of the younger god

within him. The character of his genius is that of energy and

voluptuousness, each able at will to take leave of the other, and

possessing, in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to

the best authors who can less combine them. Mr Keats undoubtedly takes

his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets.

But Leigh Hunt's praise of one of his own supposed disciples of the

Cockney School would carry little weight outside the circle of special

sympathizers. A better index to the way the wind was beginning to blow

was the treatment of the volume in Colburn's _New Monthly Magazine_, of

which the poet Thomas Campbell had lately been appointed editor, with

the excellent Cyrus Redding as acting editor under him:--'These poems

are very far superior', declares the critic, 'to any which the author

has previously committed to the press. They have nothing showy, or

extravagant, or eccentric about them; but are pieces of calm beauty, or

of lone and self-supported grandeur.' In _Lamia_, 'there is a mingling

of Greek majesty with fairy luxuriance which we have not elsewhere

seen.' _Isabella_ is compared with Barry Cornwall's _Sicilian Story_:

'the poem of Mr Keats has not the luxury of description, nor the rich

love-scenes, of Mr Cornwall; but he tells the tale with a naked and

affecting simplicity which goes irresistibly to the heart. _The Eve of

St Agnes_ is 'a piece of consecrated fancy', in which 'a soft religious

light is shed over the whole story.' In _Hyperion_ 'the picture of the

vast abode of Cybele and the Titans is 'in the sublimest style of

AEschylus': and in conclusion the critic takes leave of Mr Keats 'with

wonder at the gigantic stride which he has taken, and with the good

hope that if he proceeds in the high and pure style which he has now

chosen, he will attain an exalted and a lasting station among English

poets.' Of the other chief literary reviews in England, the

old-established _Monthly_ begins in a strain scarcely less laudatory,

but wavers and becomes admonitory before the end, while Keats's dismal

monitor of three years before, the sententious _Eclectic Review_,

acknowledging in him 'a young man possessed of an elegant fancy, a warm

and lively imagination, and something above the average talents of

persons who take to writing poetry', proceeds to warn him against

regarding imagination as the proper organ of poetry, to lecture him on

his choice of subjects, his addiction to the Greek mythology, and to

poetry for poetry's sake ('poetry, after all, if pursued as an end, is

but child's play'). The _British Critic_, more contemptuous even than

Blackwood or the Quarterly in its handling of _Endymion_, this time

prints a kind of palinode, admitting that 'Mr Keats is a person of no

ordinary genius', and prophesying that if he will take Spenser and

Milton for models instead of Leigh Hunt he 'need not despair of

attaining to a very high and enviable place in the public esteem'.

Writing to Brown from Hampstead in the latter half of August, Keats

seems aware that the critics are being kinder to him than before. 'My

book,' he says, 'has had good success among the literary people, and I

believe has a moderate sale;' and again, 'the sale of my book has been

very slow, but it has been very highly rated.' The great guns of

Scottish criticism had not yet spoken. Constable's _Edinburgh_ (formerly

the _Scots_) _Magazine_, which never either hit or bit hard, and whose

managers had preferred the ways of prudence when Bailey urged them two

years before boldly to denounce the outrages of the 'Z' gang in

Blackwood, in due course praised Keats's new volume, but cautiously,

saying that 'it must and ought to attract attention, for it displays the

ore of true poetic genius, though mingled with a large portion of

dross.... He is continually shocking our ideas of poetical decorum, at

the very time when we are acknowledging the hand of genius. In thus

boldly running counter to old opinions, however, we cannot conceive that

Mr Keats merits bitter contempt or ridicule; the weapons which are too

frequently employed when liberal discussion and argument would be

unsuccessful.' As to _Blackwood's Magazine_ itself, we are fortunate in

having an amusing first-hand narrative of an encounter of its owner and

manager with Keats's publisher which preceded the appearance of Keats's

new volume. The excellent Taylor, staunch to his injured young friend

and client even at some risk, as in his last words he shows himself

aware, to his own interests, writes from Fleet Street on the last day of

August to his partner Hessey:--

I have had this day a call from Mr Blackwood. We shook hands and went

into the Back Shop. After asking him what was new at Edinburgh, and

talking about Clare, the _Magazine_, Baldwin, Peter Corcoran and a few

other subjects,[6] I observed that we had published another Volume of

Keats's Poems on which his Editors would have another opportunity of

being witty at his expense. He said they were disposed to speak

favourably of Mr K. this time--and he expected that the article would

have appeared in this month's mag.

'But can they be so inconsistent?' 'There is no inconsistency in

praising him if they think he deserves it.' 'After what has been said

of his talents I should think it very inconsistent.' 'Certainly they

found fault with his former Poems but that was because they thought

they deserved it.' 'But why did they attack him personally?' 'They did

not do so.'

'No? Did not they speak of him in ridicule as Johnny Keats, describe

his appearance while addressing a Sonnet to Ailsa Crag, and compare

him as a (?) hen to Shelley as a Bird of Paradise, besides, what can

you say to that cold blooded passage when they say they will take

care he shall never get L50 again for a vol. of his Poems--what had he

done to deserve such attacks as these?'

'Oh, it was all a joke, the writer meant nothing more than to be

witty. He certainly thought there was much affectation in his Poetry,

and he expressed his opinion only--It was done in the fair spirit of

criticism.'

'It was done in the Spirit of the Devil, Mr Blackwood. So if a young

man is guilty of affectation while he is walking the streets it is

fair in another Person because he dislikes it to come and knock him

down.'

'No,' says B., 'but a poet challenges public opinion by printing his

book, but I suppose you would have them not criticized at all?'

'I certainly think they are punished enough by neglect and by the

failure of their hopes and to me it seems very cruel to abuse a man

merely because he cannot give us as much pleasure as he wishes. But

you go even beyond his ...(?) you strike a man when he is down. He

gets a violent blow from the Quarterly--and then you begin.'

'I beg your pardon,' says B., 'we were the first.'

'I think not, but if you were the first, you continued it after, for

that truly diabolical thrust about the L50 appeared after the critique

in the Quarterly.'

'You mistake that altogether,' said B., 'the writer does not like the

Cockney School, so he went on joking Mr K. about it.'

'Why should not the manners of gentlemen continue to regulate their

conduct when they are writing of each other as much as when they are

in conversation? No man would insult Mr Keats in this manner in his

company, and what is the difference between writing and speaking of a

person except that the written attack is the more base from being made

anonymously and therefore at no personal risk.--I feel regard for Mr

Keats as a man of real Genius, a Gentleman, nay more, one of the

gentlest of Human Beings. He does not resent these things himself, he

merely says of his Opponents "They don't know me." Now this

mildness(?) his friends feel the more severely when they see him ill

used. But this feeling is not confined to them. I am happy to say that

the Public Interest is awakened to the sense of the Injustice which

has been done him and the attempts to ruin him will have in the end a

contrary effect.' Here I turned the conversation to another subject by

asking B. if he read the _Abbot_, and in about 10 minutes more he made

his Exit with a formal Bow and a Good Morning.

The above is the Substance and as clearly as possible the words, I

made use of. His replies were a little more copious than I have

stated but to the same effect. I have written this conversation down

on the day it took place because I suspect some allusion may hereafter

be made to it in the Mag. and I fully expect that whatever Books we

publish will be received with reference to the feeling it is

calculated to excite in the bosoms of these freebooting....[7]

In the upshot, the Blackwood critics took no direct notice of the

_Lamia_ volume at all, but made occasion during the autumn to say their

new say about Keats in a review of Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_. This

time the hand is unmistakably that of Wilson. For the last year or more

Wilson, following a hint given him by De Quincey, had chosen to take

Shelley boisterously under his patronage as a poet of true genius, for

whom scarcely any praise would be too high could he only be weaned from

his impious opinions. Now, after rebutting a current and really

gratuitous charge that the magazine praised Shelley from the knowledge

that he was a man of means and family, and denounced Hunt and Keats

because they were poor and struggling, the critic blusters

characteristically on, in a strain half apologetic in one breath and in

the next as odiously insolent as ever:--

As for Mr Keats, we are informed that he is in a very bad state of

health, and that his friends attribute a great deal of it to the pain

he has suffered from the critical castigation his _Endymion_ drew down

on him in this magazine. If it be so, we are most heartily sorry for

it, and have no hesitation in saying, that had we suspected that young

author, of being so delicately nerved, we should have administered our

reproof in a much more lenient shape and style. The truth is, we from

the beginning saw marks of feeling and power in Mr Keats's verses,

which made us think it very likely, he might become a real poet in

England, provided he could be persuaded to give up all the tricks of

Cockneyism, and forswear for ever the thin potations of Mr Leigh Hunt.

We, therefore, rated him as roundly as we decently could do, for the

flagrant affectations of those early productions of his. In the last

volume he has published we find more beauties than in the former, both

of language and of thought, but we are sorry to say, we find abundance

of the same absurd affectations also, and superficial conceits, which

first displeased us in his writings;--and which we are again very

sorry to say, must in our opinion, if persisted in, utterly and

entirely prevent Mr Keats from ever taking his place among the pure

and classical poets of his mother tongue. It is quite ridiculous to

see how the vanity of these Cockneys makes them overrate their own

importance, even in the eyes of us, that have always expressed such

plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all, a

contempt too calm and profound, to admit of any admixture of anything

like anger or personal spleen. We should just as soon think of being

wroth with vermin, independently of their coming into our apartment,

as we should of having any feelings at all about any of these people,

other than what are excited by seeing them in the shape of authors.

Many of them, considered in any other character than that of authors,

are, we have no doubt, entitled to be considered as very worthy people

in their own way. Mr Hunt is said to be a very amiable man in his own

sphere, and we believe him to be so willingly. Mr Keats we have often

heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and we have no doubt his

manners and feelings are calculated to make his friends love him. But

what has all this to do with our opinion of their poetry? What, in the

name of wonder, does it concern us, whether these men sit among

themselves, with mild or with sulky faces, eating their mutton steaks,

and drinking their porter at Highgate, Hampstead, or Lisson Green?...

Last of all, what should forbid us to announce our opinion, that Mr

Shelley, as a man of genius, is not merely superior, either to Mr

Hunt, or to Mr Keats, but altogether out of their sphere, and totally

incapable of ever being brought into the most distant comparison with

either of them.

The critical utterance on Keats's side likely to tell most with general

readers was that of Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh Review_. A year earlier

Keats had written from Winchester expressing impatience at what he

thought the cowardice of the Edinburgh in keeping silence as to

_Endymion_ in face of the Quarterly attack. 'They do not know what to

make of it, and they will not praise it for fear. They are as shy of it

as I should be of wearing a Quaker's hat. The fact is they have no real

taste. They dare not compromise their judgments on so puzzling a

question. If on my next publication they should praise me, and so lug in

_Endymion_, I will address them in a manner they will not at all relish.

The cowardliness of the Edinburgh is more than the abuse of the

Quarterly'. Exactly what Keats had anticipated now took place. Jeffrey's

natural taste in poetry was conservative, and favoured the correct, the

classical and traditional: but in this case, whether from genuine and

personal opinion, or to please influential well-wishers of Keats on his

own side in politics and criticism like Sir James Mackintosh, he on the

appearance of the new volume took occasion to print, now when Keats was

far past caring about it, an article on his work which was mainly in

eulogy of _Endymion_: eulogy not unmixed with reasonable criticism, but

in a strain, on the whole, gushing almost to excess:--

We had never happened to see either of these volumes till very

lately--and have been exceedingly struck with the genius they display,

and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their

extravagance. That imitation of our older writers, and especially of

our older dramatists, to which we cannot help flattering ourselves

that we have somewhat contributed, has brought on, as it were, a

second spring in our poetry;--and few of its blossoms are either more

profuse of sweetness or richer in promise than this which is now

before us. Mr Keats, we understand, is still a very young man; and his

whole works, indeed, bear evidence enough of the fact. They are full

of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality,

interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. They manifestly

require, therefore, all the indulgence that can be claimed for a first

attempt: but we think it no less plain that they deserve it; for they

are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured

and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and

bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the

intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the

enchantments they so lavishly present. The models upon which he has

formed himself, in the _Endymion_, the earliest and by much the most

considerable of his poems, are obviously the _Faithful Shepherdess_ of

Fletcher, and the _Sad Shepherd_ of Ben Jonson;--the exquisite metres

and inspired diction of which he has copied, with great boldness and

fidelity--and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart

to the whole piece that true rural and poetical air which breathes

only in them and in Theocritus--which is at once homely and majestic,

luxurious and rude, and sets before us the genuine sights and sounds

and smells of the country, with all the magic and grace of Elysium.

Then, after acknowledgment of the confusedness of the narrative and the

fantastic wilfulness of some of the incidents and style, the critic goes

on:--

There is no work, accordingly, from which a malicious critic could

cull more matter for ridicule, or select more obscure, unnatural, or

absurd passages. But we do not take _that_ to be our office:--and just

beg leave, on the contrary, to say, that any one who, on this account,

would represent the whole poem as despicable, must either have no

notion of poetry, or no regard to truth. It is, in truth, at least is

full of genius as of absurdity; and he who does not find a great deal

in it to admire and to give delight, cannot in his heart see much

beauty in the two exquisite dramas to which we have already alluded,

or find any great pleasure in some of the finest creations of Milton

and Shakespeare. There are many such persons, we verily believe, even

among the reading and judicious part of the community--correct

scholars we have no doubt many of them, and, it may be, very classical

composers in prose and in verse--but utterly ignorant of the true

genius of English poetry, and incapable of estimating its appropriate

and most exquisite beauties. With that spirit we have no hesitation in

saying that Mr K. is deeply imbued--and of those beauties he has

presented us with many striking examples. We are very much inclined

indeed to add, that we do not know any book which we would sooner

employ as a test to ascertain whether anyone had in him a native

relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm.

One immediate result of the Edinburgh criticism was to provoke an almost

incredible outburst of jealous fury on the part of the personage then

most conspicuous on the stage of England's, nay of the world's, poetry,

Lord Byron. Byron, with next to no real critical power, could bring

dazzling resources of wit and rhetoric to the support of any random

opinion, traditional or revolutionary, he might happen by whim or habit

to entertain. In these days he was just entering the lists as a

self-appointed champion of Pope, the artificial school, and eighteenth

century critical tradition in general, against Pope's latest editor and

depreciator, the clerical sonneteer William Lisle Bowles. Ever since the

Pope-Boileau passage in Keats's _Sleep and Poetry_ it had been Byron's

pleasure to regard Keats with gratuitous contempt and aversion. When

Murray sent him the _Lamia_ volume with a parcel of other books to

Ravenna, he wrote back, 'Pray send me _no more_ poetry but what is rare

and decidedly good. There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my

tables that I am ashamed to look at them.... No more Keats, I

entreat;--flay him alive; if some of you don't I must skin him myself;

there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.' A month

later, evidently not having read a word of Keats's book, he comes across

Jeffrey's praise of it in the _Edinburgh Review_, and thereupon falls

into a fit of anger so foul-mouthed and outrageous that his latest, far

from squeamish editors have had to mask its grossness under a cloud of

asterisks. A little later he repeats the same disgusting obscenities in

cool blood: his only quotable remark on the subject being as

follows:--'Of the praises of that little dirty blackguard Keates in the

Edinburgh, I shall observe as Johnson did when Sheridan the actor got a

_pension_: "What, has he got a pension? Then it is time I should give up

_mine_." Nobody could be prouder of the praises of the Edinburgh than I

was, or more alive to their censure. At present all the men they have

ever praised are degraded by that insane article.' By and by he

proceeded to administer his own castigation to 'Mr John Ketch' in a

second letter written for the Pope-Bowles controversy: but Keats having

died meanwhile he withheld this from publication, and a little later,

perhaps at the prompting of his own better mind, but more probably

through the good influence of Shelley, took in _Don Juan_ the altered

tone about Keats which all the world knows, and having been at first

thus savagely bent on hunting with the hounds, turned and chose to run

part of the way, as far as suited him, with the hare.

Shelley, of course, judged for himself; was incapable of a thought

towards a brother poet that was not generous; and had moreover a feeling

of true and particular kindness towards Keats. We have seen how wisely

and fairly he judged _Endymion_. Were we to take merely his own words

written at the time, we might think that he failed to do justice to the

new volume as a whole. His first impression of it, coupled with a wildly

overdrawn picture which had reached him of Keats's sufferings under the

stings of the reviewers, apparently determined him to sit down and draft

that indignant letter to Gifford, never completed or delivered, pleading

against the repetition of any such treatment of his new volume as

_Endymion_ had received from the _Quarterly_. In this Shelley speaks of

_Hyperion_ as though it were the one thing he admired in the book: and

writing about the same time to Peacock, he says 'Among modern things

which have reached me is a volume of poems by Keats; in other respects

insignificant enough, but containing the fragment of a poem called

_Hyperion_. I dare say you have not time to read it; but it certainly is

an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats

which I confess I had not before.' And again, 'Among your anathemas of

modern poetry, do you include Keats's _Hyperion_? I think it very fine.

His other poems are worth little; but if the _Hyperion_ be not grand

poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.' In considering

these utterances we should remember that they were addressed to

correspondents bound to be unsympathetic. Gifford would be so as a

matter of course: while Peacock had from old Marlow days been a

disbeliever in Keats and his poetry, and had lately adopted a public

attitude of disbelief in modern poetry altogether. We must also remember

that Shelley had himself been wrought into a mood of unwonted

intolerance of certain fashions in poetry by some of Barry Cornwall's

recent performances, which he held to be an out-Hunting of Hunt and

out-Byroning of Byron.[8] There is a statement of Medwin's which, if

Medwin were ever a witness much to be trusted, we would rather take as

representing Shelley's ripened and permanent opinion of the contents of

the _Lamia_ volume than his own words to Gifford or Peacock. 'He

perceived', says Medwin, 'in every one of these productions a marked and

continually progressing improvement, and hailed with delight his release

from his leading strings, his emancipation from what he called a

"perverse and limited school". _The Pot of Basil_ and _The Eve of St

Agnes_ he read and re-read with ever new delight, and looked upon

_Hyperion_ as almost faultless, grieving that it was but a fragment and

that Keats had not been encouraged to complete a work worthy of Milton.'

At all events Shelley, apart from the immortal tribute of _Adonais_, has

left other words of his own which may content us, addressed to a

different correspondent, as to what he felt about Keats and his work and

promise on the whole, without reference to one poem rather than another.

I mean those in which he expresses to Mrs Leigh Hunt his hope to see and

take care of Keats in Italy:--'I consider his a most valuable life, and

I am deeply interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician both

of his body and of his soul, to keep the one warm, and to teach the

other Greek and Spanish. I am aware, indeed, in part, that I am

nourishing a rival who will far surpass me; and this is an additional

motive, and will be an added pleasure.'

The opinions of neither of these two famous men, Byron and Shelley, will

have had any immediate effect in England. Murray could not possibly

disseminate Byron's private obscenities, and Byron's own intended public

castigation of Keats in a second letter to Bowles was, as we have seen,

withheld. On the other side Shelley made no public use of the draft of

his indignant letter to Gifford, and Peacock would not be by way of

saying much about his private expressions of enthusiasm for _Hyperion_.

But we can gather the impression current in sympathetic circles about

Keats's future from a couple of entries in the December diaries of Crabb

Robinson. He tells how he has been reading out some of the new volume,

first _Hyperion_ and then _The Pot of Basil_, to his friends the Aders',

and adds,--'There is a force, wildness, and originality in the works of

this young poet which, if his perilous journey to Italy does not destroy

him, promise to place him at the head of our next generation of poets.

Lamb places him next to Wordsworth--not meaning any comparison, for they

are dissimilar' ... and again, 'I am greatly mistaken if Keats do not

soon take a high place among our poets. Great feeling and a powerful

imagination are shown in this little volume.' Had his health held out,

such recognition would have been all and more than all Keats asked for

or would have thought he had yet earned. But praise and dispraise were

all one to him before now, and we must go back and follow the tragedy of

his personal history to its close.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A letter of Procter's to Keats shows that he had been among

Keats's visitors during the weeks that followed his attack of

haemorrhage (see Buxton Forman, _Complete Works_, v. 163). Whether

they had been much or at all acquainted before then seems uncertain,

but Procter's impressions of Keats recorded almost half a century

later read as though he had known him while still in health:--

'I saw him only two or three times before his departure for Italy.

I was introduced to him by Leigh Hunt, and found him very

pleasant, and free from all affectation in manner and opinion.

Indeed, it would be difficult to discover a man with a more bright

and open countenance. He was always ready to hear and to reply; to

discuss, to reason, to admit; and to join in serious talk or

common gossip. It has been said that his poetry was affected and

effeminate. I can only say that I never encountered a more manly

and simple young man. In person he was short, and had eyes large

and wonderfully luminous, and a resolute bearing; not defiant, but

well sustained.'

[2] As against this judgment, formed from photographs of the wrecked

picture and from the general character of Haydon's work, let it be

remembered that Hazlitt, no mean judge, declares that the head of

Wordsworth is of all his portraits 'the most like his drooping weight

of thought and expression.' Lamb's complimentary punning address, _In

tabulam eximii pictoris_, with its English translation, may be taken

as exercises in friendly congratulation rather than in criticism. The

picture in its present state is reproduced and discussed by Mr Louis

A. Holman in the New York _Bookman_, Feb. 1913, pp. 608 _sqq._

[3] Medwin's carelessness of statement and workmanship are well

known: he is perfectly casual in the use of quotation marks and the

like, and in the original edition of his untrustworthy _Life of

Shelley_ it was difficult to be sure that these words were quoted as

textually Mrs Lindon's own. But in re-editing the book from its

author's revised and expanded copy, Mr Buxton Forman has left no

doubt on the matter.

[4] I allude to the various editions issued in recent years by the

Delegates of the Oxford University Press, to whom I would hereby

appeal to let the piece be cancelled on the plates and the earlier

text re-established.

[5] The recognition of this review and its inclusion in the canon of

Lamb's works is one of the many services for which thanks are due to

his never-enough-to-be-praised editor, Mr E. V. Lucas (_The Works of

Charles and Mary Lamb_, Vol. I, pp. 200, 470).

[6] Clare is John Clare, the distressed peasant poet, in whom many

kindly people fancied they had discovered an English Burns, and on

whose behalf, at the same time as on Keats's, Taylor was exerting

himself to raise a fund. 'Peter Corcoran' refers to a brilliant

medley called _The Fancy_ lately published anonymously by John

Hamilton Reynolds, and purporting to tell the fortunes and sample the

poetical remains of an ill-starred youth so-named, lured away from

fair prospects in love and literature by a passion for the prize

ring. The gaps and queries in this letter, the MS. of which is in

America, indicate places which its friendly transcriber found

illegible.

[7] Morgan MSS. Some words at the end have baffled the transcriber.

[8] _Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley_, ed. Ingpen, vol. ii, p. 839.

CHAPTER XVI

AUGUST 1820-FEBRUARY 1821: VOYAGE TO ITALY: LAST DAYS AND DEATH AT ROME

Resolve to winter in Italy--Severn as companion--The 'Maria

Crowther'--Fellow passengers--Storm in the Channel--Held up in the

Solent--Landing near Lulworth--The 'Bright Star' sonnets--The voyage

resumed--A meditated poem--Incidents at sea--Quarantine at

Naples--Letters from Keats and Haslam--Lady passengers described--A

cry of agony--Neapolitan impressions--On the road to Rome--Life at

Rome--Apparent improvement--Relapse and despair--Severn's

ministrations--His letters from the sickroom--The same

continued--Tranquil last days--Choice of epitaph--Spirit of charm and

pleasantness--The end.

In telling of the critical reception of Keats's _Lamia_ volume I have

anticipated by three or four months the course of time. Returning to his

personal condition and doings, we find that by or before the date of his

move from Kentish Town to be under the care of the Brawne ladies at

Wentworth Place, that is by mid-August, he had accepted the verdict of

the doctors that a winter in Italy would be the only thing to give him a

chance of recovery. He determined accordingly, not without sore

gain-giving and agitation of mind, to make the attempt. In his letter to

Shelley acknowledging receipt of _The Cenci_ and answering Shelley's

invitation to Pisa, he writes:--'there is no doubt that an English

winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering, hateful,

manner. Therefore, I must either voyage or journey to Italy, as a

soldier marches up to a battery'. And again, using the same phrase, he

writes to Taylor on August 14th:--'This journey to Italy wakes me at

daylight every morning, and haunts me horribly. I shall endeavour to

go, though it will be with the sensation of marching against a battery.

The first step towards it is to know the expense of a journey and a

year's residence, which if you will ascertain for me, and let me know

early, you will greatly serve me.' The next day he sends Taylor a note

of his wish that in case of his death his books should be divided among

his friends and that any assets arising or to arise from the sale of his

poems should be devoted to paying his debts--those to Brown and to

Taylor himself ranking first. The good publisher promptly bestirred

himself to enquire about sailings and make provision for ways and means.

For the latter purpose he bought the copyright of _Endymion_ for L100,

furnished Keats at starting with a bill on London for L120, and procured

promises of eventual help to the extent of L100 more by subscription

among persons interested in the poet's fate; James Rice and the painters

Hilton and De Wint being among guarantors of L10 each and Lord

Fitzwilliam closing the list with a promise of L50.

The vessel chosen for the voyage was a merchant brigantine, the 'Maria

Crowther,' having berth accommodation for a few passengers and due to

sail from London about the middle of September. The four intervening

weeks were spent by the invalid in comparative respite from suffering

and distress under the eye and tendance of his beloved. By his desire

Haydon came one day to see him, and has told, with a painter's touch,

how he found him 'lying in a white bed, with white quilt, and white

sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic flush of his cheeks.'

Haydon's vehement, self-confident and self-righteous manner of

admonition to friends in trouble seems to have had an effect the reverse

of consolatory, and elsewhere he amplifies this account of his last

sight of Keats, saying, 'He seemed to be going out of life with a

contempt for this world and no hopes of the other. I told him to be

calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he would

destroy himself. I tried to reason against such violence, but it was no

use; he grew angry, and I went away deeply affected.' Writing about the

same time to his young sister, Keats shows himself, as ever, thoughtful

and wise on her behalf and does his best to be re-assuring on his own:--

Now you are better, keep so. Do not suffer your Mind to dwell on

unpleasant reflexions--that sort of thing has been the destruction of

my health. Nothing is so bad as want of health--it makes one envy

scavengers and cinder sifters. There are enough real distresses and

evils in wait for every one to try the most vigorous health. Not that

I would say yours are not real--but they are such as to tempt you to

employ your imagination on them, rather than endeavour to dismiss them

entirely. Do not diet your mind with grief, it destroys the

constitution; but let your chief care be of your health, and with that

you will meet your share of Pleasure in the world--do not doubt it. If

I return well from Italy I will turn over a new leaf for you. I have

been improving lately, and have very good hopes of 'turning a Neuk'

and cheating the consumption.