For a companion on his journey, Keats's first thoughts turned to Brown,

who was still away on his second tramp through the Highlands. But the

letter he wrote asking whether Brown could go with him missed its

destination, and he was left with the prospect of having either to give

up his journey or venture on it alone, a thing hardly to be thought of

in his state of health. At this juncture Haslam, always the most useful

of friends in an emergency, betook himself to Severn, whose prospects in

London, in spite of the practice he had found as a miniature-painter and

of his success in winning the gold medal of the Academy the previous

December, seemed far from bright, and urged him to go out with Keats to

Rome. Severn at once consented, his immediate impulse of devotion to his

friend being strengthened, on reflection, both by the lure of Rome

itself and by the idea that he might be able while there to work for,

and perhaps win, the travelling studentship of the Royal Academy. He

made his arrangements on the shortest possible notice, while Haslam

undertook the business of procuring passports and the like. A weird

incident marked Severn's departure from his home. His father,

passionately attached to him but resenting his resolve to go to Italy

now as fiercely as he had before resented his change of profession, on

being asked to lend a hand in moving his trunk, in an uncontrollable fit

of anger struck and felled him. How and with what rending of the heart

Keats took his own farewell from the home of his joy and torment at

Hampstead--of this we hear, and may be thankful to hear, nothing. He

spent his last days in England with Taylor in Fleet Street, having gone

thither on Wednesday September 13th to be at hand for the day and hour

when the 'Maria Crowther' might be ready to sail. On the evening of

Sunday the 17th of September he and Severn went on board at the London

docks. Here the kind Taylor and the serviceable Haslam took leave of

them, and their ship weighed anchor and slipped down tide as far as

Gravesend, where she came to moorings for the night. Moored close by her

was a smack from Dundee, and on board this smack, by one of the minor

perversities of fate, who should be a passenger but Charles Brown? He

had caught this means of conveyance as the first available when he at

last got news of Keats's plans, and had hoped to reach London in time to

bid him farewell. But it was all unknowingly that the friends lay that

night within earshot of one another.

One lady passenger, a Miss Pidgeon, had come aboard at the docks: a

pleasing person, the friends thought at first, but found reason to

change their minds later. At Gravesend early the next morning there came

another, a pretty and gentle Miss Cotterell, as far gone in consumption

as Keats himself. Keats was in lively spirits and exerted himself with

Severn to welcome and amuse the new comer. In the course of the day

Severn went ashore to buy medicines and other needments for the voyage,

and among them, at Keats's special request, a bottle of laudanum. The

captain, by name Thomas Walsh, was kind and attentive and did his best,

unsuccessfully, to find a goat for the supply of goat's milk to the

invalids while on board ship. That evening they put to sea, and Keats's

health and spirits seemed to rise with the first excitements of the

voyage. The events of the next days are best told in the words of the

journal-letter written at the time by Severn to Haslam; vagueness of

memory having made much less trustworthy the several accounts of the

voyage which he wrote and rewrote in after years. Severn was innocent of

all stops save dashes, and I print exactly as he wrote:--

19th Sept. Tuesday, off Dover Castle, etc.

I arose at day break to see the glorious eastern gate--Keats slept

till 7--Miss C. was rather ill this morning I prevailed on her to walk

the deck with me at half past 6 she recovered much--Keats was still

better this morning and Mrs Pidgeon looked and was the picture of

health--but poor me! I began to feel a waltzing on my stomach at

breakfast when I wrote the note to you I was going it most

soundly--Miss Cotterell followed me--then Keats who did it in the most

gentlemanly manner--and then the saucy Mrs Pidgeon who had been

laughing at us--four faces bequeathing to the mighty deep their

breakfasts--here I must change to a minor key Miss C. fainted--we soon

recovered her--I was very ill nothing but lying down would do for me.

Keats ascended his bed--from which he dictated surgically like

Esculapius of old in basso-relievo through him Miss C. was recovered

we had a cup of tea each and no more went to bed and slept until it

was time to go to bed--we could not get up again--and slept in our

clothes all night--Keats the King--not even looking pale.

20th Sept. Wednesday off Brighton. Beautiful morning--we all

breakfasted on deck and recovered as we were could enjoy it--about 10

Keats said a storm was hatching--he was right--the rain came on and we

retired to our cabin--it abated and once more we came on deck--at 2

storm came on furiously--we retired to our beds. The rolling of the

ship was death to us--towards 4 it increased and our situation was

alarming--the trunks rolled across the cabin--the water poured in from

the sky-light and we were tumbled from one side to the other of our

beds--my curiosity was raised to see the storm--and my anxiety to see

Keats for I could only speak to him when in bed--I got up and fell

down on the floor from my weakness and the rolling of the ship. Keats

was very calm--the ladies were much frightened and would scarce

speak--when I got up to the deck I was astounded--the waves were in

mountains and washed the ship--the watery horizon was like a

mountainous country--but the ship's motion was beautifully to the sea

falling from one wave to the other in a very lovely manner--the sea

each time crossing the deck and one side of the ship being level with

the water--this when I understood gave me perfect ease--I communicated

below and it did the same--but when the dusk came the sea began to

rush in from the side of our cabin from an opening in the planks--this

made us rather long faced--for it came by pail-fulls--again I got out

and said to Keats 'here's pretty music for you'--with the greatest

calmness he answered me only by 'Water parted from the sea.'[1] I

staggered up again and the storm was awful--the Captain and Mate soon

came down--for our things were squashing about in the dark--they

struck a light and I succeeded in getting my desk off the ground--with

clothes and books, etc. The Captain finding it could not be

stopped--tacked about from our voyage--and the sea ceased to dash

against the cabin for we were sailing against wind and tide--but the

horrible agitation continued in the ship lengthways--here were the

pumps working--the sails squalling the confused voices of the

sailors--the things rattling about in every direction and us poor

devils pinn'd up in our beds like ghosts by daylight--except Keats he

was himself all the time--the ladies suffered the most--but I was out

of bed a dozen times to wait on them and tell them there was no

danger--my sickness made me get into bed very soon each time--but

Keats this morning brags of my sailorship--he says could I have kept

on my legs in the water cabin I should have been a standing miracle.

20th Sept.

I caught a sight of the moon about 3 o'clock this morning--and ran

down to tell the glad tidings--but the surly rolling of the sea was

worse than the storm--the ship trembled to it--and the sea was

scarcely calmed by daylight--so that we were kept from 2 o'clock

yesterday until 6 this morning without anything--well it has done us

good, we are like a Quartett of fighting cocks this morning. The

morning is serene we are now back again some 20 miles--waiting for a

wind--but full of spirits--Keats is without even complaining and Miss

Cottrell has a colour in her face--the sea has done his worst upon us.

I am better than I have been for years. Farewell my dear fellow.

J. SEVERN--show this to my family with my love to them.

When you read this you will excuse the manner--I am quite beside

myself--and have written the whole this morning Thursday on the deck

after a sleepless night and with a head full of care--you shall have a

better the next time.

The storm had driven them back from off Brighton more than half way to

the Downs, and then abated enough to let them land for a scramble on the

shingles at Dungeness, where they excited the suspicions of the coast

guard, and to get the above letter posted from Romney. After this calms

and contrary airs kept them beating about the channel for many more days

yet. At Portsmouth they were held up again, and to pass the time Keats

landed and went to call on Dilke's sister Mrs Snook at Bedhampton; again

by ill chance barely missing Brown, whom he supposed to be still in

Scotland but who was actually only ten miles away, having run down to

stay with Dilke's father at Chichester. The next day, while the ship was

still hanging in the Solent off Yarmouth, Keats wrote unbosoming himself

to Brown of his inward agony more fully than he had ever done in

speech:--

I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much--there is

one I must mention and have done with it. Even if my body would

recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want

to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help

it. Who can help it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how

can I bear it in my state? I dare say you will be able to guess on

what subject I am harping--you know what was my greatest pain during

the first part of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day

and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away,

for death would destroy even those pains which are better than

nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but

death is the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought

has passed through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is

passed. I often wish for you that you might flatter me with the best.

I think without my mentioning it for my sake you would be a friend to

Miss Brawne when I am dead. You think she has many faults--but, for my

sake, think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her

by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a state at present in

which woman merely as woman can have no more power over me than

stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with

respect to Miss Brawne and my sister is amazing. The one seems to

absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother

and sister in America. The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond

everything horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me--I eternally

see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the

habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my

ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?

There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

That night, (September 28) adds Keats, they expected to put into

Portland Roads; but calms again held them up, and again they were

allowed to land, having made only some few miles' headway down the

Dorsetshire coast. The day of this landing was for Keats one of

transitory calm and lightening of the spirit. The weather was fine, and

'for a moment,' says Severn, 'he became like his former self. He was in

a part that he already knew, and showed me the splendid caverns and

grottoes with a poet's pride, as though they had been his birthright.'

These are vivid phrases, that about the caverns and grottoes certainly a

little over-coloured for the scene, which was Lulworth Cove and the

remarkable, but scarcely splendid, rock tunnels and fissures of Stair

Hole and Durdle Door. When Severn says that Keats knew the ground, one

half wonders whether the Dorsetshire Keatses may really have been

kindred of his to whom he had at some time paid an unrecorded visit: or

otherwise, whether in travelling to and from Teignmouth in 1818, taking,

as we know he did, the southern route from Salisbury by Bridport and

Axminster, he may have broken the journey at Dorchester and visited the

curiosities of the coast. But in truth, to understand and possess

beauties of nature as a birthright, Keats needed not to have seen them

before. On board ship the same night Keats borrowed the copy of

Shakespeare's Poems which he had given Severn a few days before, and

wrote out fair and neatly for him, on the blank page opposite the

heading _A Lover's Complaint_, the beautiful sonnet which every lover

of English knows so well:--

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--

No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Severn in later life clearly cherished the impression that the sonnet

had been actually composed for him on the day of the Dorsetshire

landing. Lord Houghton in his _Life and Literary Remains_ distinctly

asserts as much, and it had seemed to us all a beautiful and consolatory

circumstance, in the tragedy of Keats's closing days, that his last

inspiration in poetry should have come in a strain of such unfevered

beauty and tenderness, and with images of such a refreshing and solemn

purity. But in point of fact the sonnet was work of an earlier date, and

the autograph given to Severn is on the face of it no draught but a fair

copy. Its original form had been this--

Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art!

Not in lone splendour hung amid the night;

Not watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's devout sleepless Eremite,

The morning waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores;

Or, gazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:--

No;--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Cheek-pillow'd on my Love's white ripening breast,

To touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell,

Awake, for ever, in a sweet unrest;

To hear, to feel her tender-taken breath,

Half passionless, and so swoon on to death.

The sonnet is copied in this form by Charles Brown, under date 1819, in

the collection of transcripts from Keats's fugitive verses which from

the spring of that year he regularly made as soon after they were

written as he could lay hands on them. His dates I have found always

trustworthy, and I have shown reason (above, p. 334) for holding the

sonnet to have been written in the last week of February, 1819, and the

first days of Keats's engagement to Fanny Brawne. All that Keats can

actually have done during that evening of tranquillity off Lulworth was

to return to it in thought and recopy it for Severn with changes which

in the second line heightened the remoteness of the star; in the fourth

made an inverted metrical stress normal by substituting 'patient' for

'devout'; in the fifth changed the word 'morning' into 'moving,'[2] in

the tenth cancelled one of his defining and arresting compound

participles in favour of a simpler phrase; and in the four concluding

lines varied a little the mood and temperature of the longing expressed,

calling for death not as the sequel to his longing's fulfilment, but as

the alternative for it. In Severn's first mention of the subject, which

is in a letter written from Rome a few weeks after Keats's death, he

shows himself aware that Brown might be in possession already of a

version of the sonnet, which of course could only have been the case if

it had been composed before Keats left Hampstead. 'Do you know,' he

writes, 'the sonnet beginning Bright Star etc., he wrote this down in

the ship--it is one of his most beautiful things. I will send it, if you

have it not.'

The rest of the voyage, after getting clear of the English Channel, was

quick but uncomfortable, the weather variable and often squally. Signs

of improvement in Keats's health alternated with alarming returns of

haemorrhage, and the painful symptoms of his fellow-traveller Miss

Cotterell preyed sometimes severely on his nerves and spirits. At other

times his thoughts ran pleasantly on poems yet to be written, and

especially on one he had planned on the story of Sabrina. 'He mentioned

to me many times in our voyage', writes Severn within a few weeks of the

poet's death, 'his desire to write this story and to connect it with

some points in the English history and character. He would sometimes

brood over it with immense enthusiasm, and recite the story from

Milton's _Comus_ in a manner that I will remember to the end of my

days.' It is good to think of Keats being thus able to occupy and soothe

his fevered spirit with the lovely cadences that tell how Nereus pitied

the rescued nymph,

And gave her to his daughters to imbathe

In nectar'd lavers strew'd with Asphodel,

or with those that invoke her in the prayer,--

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,--

it is good to think of this and to try and conceive what Keats while he

was in health might have made of this English theme which haunted his

imagination now and afterwards at Rome, when the power to shape and

almost the power to live and breathe had left him.

Severn took during the voyage an opportunity to make a new drawing of

Keats as he lay propped and resting on his berth. Such a drawing would

have been an invaluable addition to our memorials of the poet: it

remained long in the possession first of one and then of another of

Severn's sons, but has of late years unluckily disappeared: stolen,

thinks its latest owner, Mr Arthur Severn: let us hope that this mention

may perhaps lead to its recognition and recovery. During some rough

weather in the Bay of Biscay Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of

_Don Juan_, but presently found its reckless and cynic brilliancy

intolerable, and flung the volume from him in disgust. Perhaps something

of his real feelings, but certainly nothing of his way of expressing

them, is preserved in Severn's account of the matter written

five-and-twenty years later:--

Keats threw down the book and exclaimed: 'this gives me the most

horrid idea of human nature, that a man like Byron should have

exhausted all the pleasures of the world so completely that there was

nothing left for him but to laugh and gloat over the most solemn and

heart-rending scenes of human misery, this storm of his is one of the

most diabolical attempts ever made upon our sympathies, and I have no

doubt it will fascinate thousands into extreme obduracy of heart--the

tendency of Bryon's poetry is based on a paltry originality, that of

being new by making solemn things gay and gay things solemn.'

In a calm off Cape St Vincent, Keats was delighted with the play of

silken colours on the sea, and interested in watching the movement of a

whale. The next day there came an alarm: a shot was fired over the bows

of the 'Maria Crowther' from one of two Portuguese men of war becalmed

close by; but drifting within hail one of the Portuguese captains

explained that there were supposed to be privateers in those waters and

that he only wanted to learn whether the Englishman had sighted any

such.

On October 21, thirty-four days out from London, the 'Maria Crowther'

reached Naples harbour and was promptly put in quarantine. In that

predicament her passengers sweltered and fumed for ten full days, their

number having been increased by the addition of a lieutenant and six

seamen, who were despatched from an English man-of-war in the harbour to

enquire as to the vessel's name and status, and having thoughtlessly

gone on board her were forbidden by the port authorities to go off

again. The friends found some alleviation from the tedium of the time

through the kindness of Miss Cotterell's brother, a banker in Naples,

who kept them supplied with all manner of dainties and luxuries, and

especially with abundance of fruit and flowers. 'Keats', says Severn,

'was never tired of admiring (not to speak of eating) the beautiful

clusters of grapes and other fruits, and was scarce less enthusiastic

over the autumn flowers, though I remember his saying once that he would

gladly give them all for a wayside dog-rose bush covered with pink

blooms.' The time of detention passed with a good deal of merriment,

songs from the man-of-war's men on board, songs, laughter, and gibes

from the Neapolitan boatmen swarming round. In all this Keats would

join, feverishly enough it is evident, and declared afterwards that he

had made more puns in the course of those ten days than in any whole

year of his life beside. Once he flashed into a characteristic heat of

righteous wrath, when the seamen took to trolling obscene catches in

full hearing of the ladies. On the fourth day of their detention he

wrote to Mrs Brawne, (to Fanny he dared not write, nor suffer his

thoughts to dwell on her at all), saying what he thought of his own

state:--

We have to remain in the vessel ten days and are at present shut in a

tier of ships. The sea air has been beneficial to me about to as great

extent as squally weather and bad accommodations and provisions has

done harm. So I am about as I was. Give my love to Fanny and tell her,

if I were well there is enough in this Port of Naples to fill a quire

of Paper--but it looks like a dream--every man who can row his boat

and walk and talk seems a different being from myself. I do not feel

in the world.

It is impossible to describe exactly in what state of health I am--at

this moment I am suffering from indigestion very much, which makes

such stuff of this Letter. I would always wish you to think me a

little worse than I really am; not being of a sanguine disposition I

am likely to succeed. If I do not recover your regret will be

softened--if I do your pleasure will be doubled. I dare not fix my

Mind upon Fanny, I have not dared to think of her. The only comfort I

have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having

the knife she gave me put in a silver-case--the hair in a Locket--and

the Pocket Book in a gold net. Show her this. I dare say no more. Yet

you must not believe I am so ill as this Letter may look, for if ever

there was a person born without the faculty of hoping I am he. Severn

is writing to Haslam, and I have just asked him to request Haslam to

send you his account of my health. O what an account I could give you

of the Bay of Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of

this world--I feel a spirit in my Brain would lay it forth

pleasantly--O what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints!

Once released from quarantine and landed at Naples Severn wrote to

Haslam fully his impressions of the voyage and of its effects on his

friend.

Naples, Nov. 1 1820.

My dear Haslam,

We are just released from the loathsome misery of quarantine--foul

weather and foul air for the whole 10 days kept us to the small

cabin--surrounded by about 2,000 ships in a wretched hole not

sufficient for half the number, yet Keats is still living--may I not

have hopes of him? He has passed what I must have thought would kill

myself. Now that we are on shore and feel the fresh air, I am horror

struck at his sufferings on this voyage, all that could be fatal to

him in air and diet--with the want of medicine and conveniences he has

weather'd it, if I may call his poor shattered frame and broken heart

weathering it. For myself I have stood it firmly until this morning

when in a moment my spirits dropt at the sight of his suffering--a

plentiful shower of tears (which he did not see) has relieved me

somewhat--what he passed still unnerves me. But now we are breathing

in a large room with Vesuvius in our view--Keats has become calm and

thinks favourably of this place for we are meeting with much kind

treatment on every side--more particularly from an English gentleman

here (brother to Miss Cottrell one of our lady passengers) who has

shown unusually humane treatment to Keats--unasked--these with very

good accommodation at our Inn (Villa de Londra) have kept him up

through dinner--but on the other hand Dr Milner is at Rome (whither

Keats is proposing to go) the weather is now cold wet and foggy, and

we find ourselves on the wrong side for his hope for recovery (for the

present I will talk to him--he is disposed to it. I will talk him to

sleep for he has suffered much fatigue).

Nov. 2.

Keats went to bed much recovered--I took every means to remove from

him a heavy grief that may tend more than anything to be fatal--he

told me much--very much--and I don't know whether it was more painful

for me or himself--but it had the effect of much relieving him--he

went very calm to bed.

Poor fellow! he is still sleeping at half past nine, if I can but ease

his mind I will bring him back to England _well_--but I fear it never

can be done in this world--the grand scenery here affects him a

little--but he is too infirm to enjoy it--his gloom deadens his sight

to everything--and but for intervals of something like ease he must

soon end it--

You will like to know how I have managed in respect to self. I have

had a most severe task full of contrarieties what I did one way was

undone another. The lady passenger though in the same state as

Keats--yet differing in constitution required almost everything the

opposite to him--for instance if the cabin windows were not open she

would faint and remain entirely insensible 5 or 6 hours together--if

the windows were open poor Keats would be taken with a cough (a

violent one--caught from this cause) and sometimes spitting of blood,

now I had this to manage continually for our other passenger is a most

consumate brute--she would see Miss Cottrell stiffened like a

corpse--I have sometimes thought her dead--nor ever lend the least

aid--full a dozen times I have recovered this lady and put her to

bed--sometimes she would faint 4 times in a day yet at intervals would

seem quite well--and was full of spirits--she is both young and

lively--and but for her we should have had more heaviness--though much

less trouble. She has benefited by Keats's advice--I used to act under

him--and reduced the fainting each time--she has recovered very much

and gratefully ascribes it to us--her brother the same.

The Captain has behaved with great kindness to us all--but more

particularly Keats--everything that could be got or done--was at his

service without asking--he is a good-natured man to his own

injury--strange for a captain I won't say so much for his ship--it's a

black hole--5 sleeping in one cabin--the one you saw--the only

one--during the voyage I have been frequently sea-sick--sometimes

severely--2 days together. We have had only one real fright on the

seas--not to mention continued squalls--and a storm. 'All's well that

ends well,' and these ended well. Our fright was from two Portugese

ships of war--they brought us to with a shot--which passed close under

our stern--this was not pleasant for us you will allow--nor was it

decreased when they came up--for a more infernal set I never could

imagine--after some trifling questions they allowed us to go on to our

no small delight--our captain was afraid they would plunder the

ship--this was in the Bay of Biscay--over which we were carried by a

good wind.

Keats has written to Brown--and in quarantine another to Mrs

Brawne--he requests you will tell Mrs Brawne what I think of him--for

he is too bad to judge of himself--this morning he is still very much

better. We are in good spirits and I may say hopeful fellows--at least

I may say as much for Keats--he made an Italian pun to-day--the rain

is coming down in torrents.

The confession Keats had made to Severn was of course that of the

effects of the passion which had so long been racking and wasting him,

and the violence of which he had shrunk till now from disclosing to

friend or brother. Writing on the same day to Brown, he could not

control or disguise the anguish of his heart.

Naples, 1 November 1820.

My dear Brown,

Yesterday we were let out of Quarantine, during which my health

suffered more from bad air and the stifled cabin than it had done the

whole voyage. The fresh air revived me a little, and I hope I am well

enough this morning to write to you a short calm letter;--if that can

be called one, in which I am afraid to speak of what I would fainest

dwell upon. As I have gone thus far into it, I must go on a little;

perhaps it may relieve the load of WRETCHEDNESS which presses upon me.

The persuasion that I will see her no more will kill me. My dear

Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have

remained well. I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her. O, God!

God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes

through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap

scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see

her--I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest

to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I was in

England; I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a

prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all

day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again--Now!--O that I

could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her--to

receive a letter from her--to see her handwriting would break my

heart--even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be

more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? Where can I look

for consolation or ease?

I cannot say a word about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in

the thousand novelties around me. I am afraid to write to her--I

should like her to know that I do not forget her. Oh, Brown, I have

coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart is

capable of containing and bearing so much misery. Was I born for this

end? God bless her, and her mother, and my sister, and George, and

his wife, and you, and all!

During the four days they remained at Naples Keats received a second

invitation in the kindest possible terms from Shelley to come and settle

near him in Pisa, but determined to carry out his original plan of

wintering at Rome, where he was to place Taylor's bill to his credit at

Torlonia's and whither he carried a special introduction to Dr

(afterwards Sir James) Clark. Severn was also the bearer of one from Sir

Thomas Lawrence to Canova. Keats attempted to amuse himself reading

_Clarissa Harlowe_, and also seeing some of the sights of Naples. After

almost a century there has lately come to light a record, set down at

second-hand and probably touched up in the telling, of some things

noticed and words spoken by the stricken poet in drives about the city

and suburbs in the friendly company of Mr Charles Cotterell, the brother

of his invalid fellow-passenger. Keats was driving, says the narrator,

Mr Charles Macfarlane,--

--he was driving with Charles Cottrell from the Bourbon Museum, up the

beautiful open road which leads up to Capo di Monte and the Ponte

Rossi. On the way, in front of a villa or cottage, he was struck and

moved by the sight of some rose trees in full bearing. Thinking to

gratify the invalid, Cottrell, a ci-devant officer in the British

Navy, jumped out of the carriage, spoke to somebody about the house or

garden, and was back in a trice with a bouquet of roses. 'How late in

the year! What an exquisite climate!' said the Poet; but on putting

them to his nose, he threw the flowers down on the opposite seat, and

exclaimed: 'Humbugs! they have no scent! What is a rose without its

fragrance? I hate and abhor all humbug, whether in a flower or in a

man or woman!' And having worked himself strongly up in the

anti-humbug humour, he cast the bouquet out on the road. I suppose

that the flowers were China roses, which have little odour at any

time, and hardly any at the approach of winter.

Returning from that drive, he had intense enjoyment in halting close

to the Capuan Gate, and in watching a group of lazzaroni or labouring

men, as, at a stall with fire and cauldron by the roadside in the open

air, they were disposing of an incredible quantity of macaroni,

introducing it in long unbroken strings into their capacious mouths,

without the intermediary of anything but their hands. 'I like this,'

said he; 'these hearty fellows scorn the humbug of knives and forks.

Fingers were invented first. Give them some _carlini_ that they may

eat more! Glorious sight! How they take it in!'[3]

But the political state and servile temper of the Neapolitan

people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms

imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous

summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and misinterpreting at the

theatre the sight of a couple of armed sentries posted (as was the

custom of the time and country) on the stage, he broke into a fit of

anger and determined suddenly to leave the place. Accordingly on the 4th

or 5th of November the friends set out for Rome in a small hired

carriage, which jogged so loiteringly on the road that Severn was able

to walk beside it almost all the way. Keats suffered seriously at the

stopping-places from bad quarters and bad food, and was for the most

part listless and dispirited, but would become animated 'when an

unusually fine prospect opened before us, or the breeze bore to us

exquisite hill fragrances or breaths from the distant blue seas, and

particularly when I literally filled the little carriage with flowers.

He never tired of these, and they gave him a singular and almost

fantastic pleasure which was at times almost akin to a strange joy.'

Entering Rome by the Lateran gate they settled at once in lodgings which

Dr Clark, to whom Keats had written from Naples, had already secured

for them, in the first house on the right going up the steps from the

Piazza di Spagna to Sta Trinita dei Monti. Here, according to the manner

of those days in Italy, they were left pretty much to shift for

themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and at first they were ill

served by the trattoria from which they got their meals, until Keats,

having bidden Severn see how he would mend matters, one day coolly

emptied all the dishes out of the window, and handed them back to the

porter: a hint, says Severn, which was quickly taken. For a while the

patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of

seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit

these alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the

Pincian close by.

The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the air, says

Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. Clark gave Severn an

introduction to Gibson, the then famous American sculptor, and Keats

insisted on his delivering it at once and losing no opportunity of

making acquaintances in Rome that might be useful to him, and no time in

getting to work on his projected competition picture, 'The Death of

Alcibiades.' In Severn's absence Keats had a companion he liked in an

invalid Lieutenant Elton. In their walks on the Pincian these two often

met the famous beauty Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms

were by this time failing--but not for lack of exercise; and her melting

glances at his companion, who was tall and handsome, presently affected

Keats's nerves, and made them change the direction of their walks.

Sometimes, instead of walking, they would take short invalid rides, on

hired mounts suited to their respective statures, about the Pincian or

outside the Porta del Popolo, while Severn was working among the ruins.

The mitigation of Keats's sufferings lasted for some five weeks, and

filled the anxious heart of Severn with hope. Nevertheless he could not

but be aware of the deep-seated dejection in his friend which found

expression now and again in word or act, as when he began reading a

volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the lines, too sadly applicable to

himself:--

Misera me! sollievo a me non resta

Altro che 'l pianto, ed il pianto e delitto.

Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more placid.

Severn had hired a piano for their lodgings, and the patient often

allowed himself to be soothed with music. His thoughts even turned

towards verse, and he again meditated and spoke of his proposed poem on

the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and

on November 30 Keats himself wrote to Brown in a strain far from

cheerful, indeed, but much less desperate than before.

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I

am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have

been--but it appears to me--however, I will not speak of that subject.

I must have been at Bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to

me from Chichester--how unfortunate--and to pass on the river too!

There was my star predominant! I cannot answer anything in your

letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to

look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the

sight of any handwriting of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I

ride the little horse, and, at my worst, even in quarantine, summoned

up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year

of my life. There is one thought enough to kill me; I have been well,

healthy, alert, etc., walking with her, and now the knowledge of

contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive

sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of the

stomach. There, you rogue, I put you to the torture; but you must

bring your philosophy to bear, as I do mine, really, or how should I

be able to live? Dr Clark is very attentive to me; he says there is

very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very

bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George, for it

runs in my head we shall all die young. I have not written to Reynolds

yet, which he must think neglectful; being anxious to send him a good

account of my health, I have delayed it from week to week. If I

recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made

during sickness; and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven.

Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember

me to all friends, and tell Haslam I should not have left London

without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind.

Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as

far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister--who walks about my

imagination like a ghost--she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you

good-bye, even in a letter. I always make an awkward bow.

God bless you!

But on the glimmering hopes of these first weeks at Rome there suddenly

followed despair. On Dec. 10, 'when he was going on in good spirits,

quite merrily,' says Severn, came a relapse which left no doubt of the

issue. Haemorrhage followed haemorrhage on successive days, and then came

a period of violent fever, with scenes the most piteous and distressing.

To put an end to his misery, Keats with agonies of entreaty begged to

have the bottle of laudanum which Severn had by his desire bought at

Gravesend: and on Severn's refusal, 'his tender appeal turned to

despair, with all the power of his ardent imagination and bursting

heart.' It was no unmanly fear of pain in Keats, Severn again and again

insists, that prompted this appeal, but above all his acute sympathetic

sense of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend. 'He

explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual dissolution,

enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger to my

life and certainly to my fortune of my continued attendance on him.'

Severn gently holding firm, Keats for a while fiercely refused his

friend's ministrations, until presently the example of that friend's

patience and his own better mind made him ashamed.

From these relapses until the end Severn had no respite from his devoted

ministrations. Writing to Mrs Brawne a week after the crisis, he says

'Not a moment can I be from him. I sit by his bed and read all day, and

at night I humour him in all his wanderings. He has just fallen asleep,

the first sleep for eight nights, and now from mere exhaustion.' By

degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great,

partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of

the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to

combat it. His diet was at one time reduced to one anchovy and a small

piece of toast a day, so that he endured cruel pangs of actual hunger.

Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then were in

Italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous kindness of

Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr Ewing. The

devotion and resource of Severn were infinite, and had their reward.

Occasionally there came times of delirium or half-delirium, when the

dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and his ruined hopes, and of

all that he would have done in poetry had life and the fruition of his

love been granted him, till his companion was almost exhausted with

'beating about in the tempest of his mind'; and once and again some

fresh remembrance of his betrothed, or the sight of her handwriting in a

letter, would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally,

after the first days of storm, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a

white cornelian, one of the little tokens she had given him at starting,

while his companion soothed him with reading or music. The virulence of

the reviewers, which most of his friends supposed to be what was killing

him, was a matter, Severn declares, scarcely ever on his lips or in his

mind at all. Gradually he seemed to mend and gather a little strength

again, till Severn actually began to dream that he might even yet

recover, though he himself would admit no such hope. 'He says the

continued stretch of his imagination has already killed him. He will not

hear of his good friends in England, except for what they have done; and

this is another load; but of their high hopes of him, his certain

success, his experience, he will not hear a word. Then the want of some

kind of hope to feed his voracious imagination'--This is from a letter

to Mr Taylor which Severn began on Christmas Eve and never finished. On

the 11th January, in one conveying to Mrs Brawne the reviving hopes he

was beginning on the slenderest grounds to cherish, Severn writes:--

Now he has changed to calmness and quietude, as singular as productive

of good, for his mind was most certainly killing him. He has now given

up all thoughts, hopes, or even wish for recovery. His mind is in a

state of peace from the final leave he has taken of this world and all

its future hopes; this has been an immense weight for him to rise

from. He remains quiet and submissive under his heavy fate. Now, if

anything will recover him, it is this absence of himself. I have

perceived for the last three days symptoms of recovery. Dr Clark even

thinks so. Nature again revives in him--I mean where art was used

before; yesterday he permitted me to carry him from his bedroom to our

sitting-room--to put clean things on him--and to talk about my

painting to him. This is my good news--don't think it otherwise, my

dear madam, for I have been in such a state of anxiety and

discomfiture in this barbarous place, that the least hope of my

friend's recovery is a heaven to me.

For three weeks I have never left him--I have sat up all night--I have

read to him nearly all day, and even in the night--I light the

fire--make his breakfast, and sometimes am obliged to cook--make his

bed, and even sweep the room. I can have these things done, but never

at the time when they must and ought to be done--so that you will see

my alternative; what enrages me most is making a fire--I blow--blow

for an hour--the smoke comes fuming out--my kettle falls over on the

burning sticks--no stove--Keats calling me to be with him--the fire

catching my hands and the door-bell ringing: all these to one quite

unused and not at all capable--with the want of even proper

material--come not a little galling. But to my great surprise I am not

ill--or even restless--nor have I been all the time; there is nothing

but what I will do for him--there is no alternative but what I think

and provide myself against--except his death--not the loss of him--I

am prepared to bear that--but the inhumanity, the barbarism of these

Italians....

O! I would my unfortunate friend had never left your Wentworth

Place--for the hopeless advantages of this comfortless Italy. He has

many, many times talked over 'the few happy days at your house, the

only time when his mind was at ease.' I hope still to see him with you

again. Farewell, my dear madam. One more thing I must say--poor Keats

cannot see any letters, at least he will not--they affect him so much

and increase his danger. The two last I repented giving, he made me

put them into his box--unread.

The complaint about the barbarity of Rome and of Italian law was due to

a warning Severn had received that on the death of his friend every

stick and shred of furniture in the house would have to be burnt. Within

a few days the last thread of hope was snapped by fresh returns of

haemorrhage and utter prostration, with renewed feverish agitations of

the tortured spirit. Writing to Haslam on January the 15th, Severn shows

himself almost broken down by the imminence of money difficulties about

to add themselves to his other cares:--

Poor Keats has just fallen asleep--I have watched him and read to

him--to his very last wink--he has been saying to me 'Severn I can see

under your quiet look--immense twisting and contending--you don't know

what you are reading--you are enduring for me more than I'd have

you--O that my last hour was come--what is it puzzles you now--what is

it happens--' I tell him that 'nothing happens--nothing worries me

beyond his seeing--that it has been the dull day.' Getting from myself

to his recovery--and then my painting--and then England--and then--but

they are all lies--my heart almost leaps to deny them--for I have the

veriest load of care--that ever came upon these shoulders of mine. For

Keats is sinking daily--perhaps another three weeks may lose me him

for ever--this alone would break down the most gallant spirit--I had

made sure of his recovery when I set out. I was selfish and thought of

his value to me--and made a point of my future success depend on his

candor to me--this is not all--I have prepared myself to bear this

now--now that I must and should have seen it before--but Torlonias the

bankers have refused any more money--the bill is returned

unaccepted--'no effects' and I tomorrow must--aye must--pay the last

solitary crown for this cursed lodging place--yet more should our

unfortunate friend die--all the furniture will be burnt--bed

sheets--curtains and even the walls must be scraped--and these devils

will come upon me for L100 or L150--the making good--but above all

this noble fellow lying on the bed is dying in horror--no kind hope

smoothing down his suffering--no philosophy--no religion to support

him--yet with all the most gnawing desire for it--yet without the

possibility of receiving it....

Now Haslam what do you think of my situation--for I know not what may

come with tomorrow--I am hedg'd in every way that you look at me--if I

could leave Keats for a while every day I could soon raise money by my

face painting--but he will not let me out of his sight--he cannot bear

the face of a stranger--he has made me go out twice and leave him

solus. I'd rather cut my tongue out than tell him that money I must

get--that would kill him at a word--I will not do anything that may

add to his misery--for I have tried on every point to leave for a few

hours in the day but he wont unless he is left alone--this won't

do--nor shall not for another minute whilst he is John Keats.

Yet will I not bend down under these--I will not give myself a jot of

credit unless I stand firm--and will too--you'd be rejoiced to see how

I am kept up--not a flinch yet--I read, cook, make the beds--and do

all the menial offices--for no soul comes near Keats except the doctor

and myself--yet I do all this with a cheerful heart--for I thank God

my little but honest religion stays me up all through these trials.

I'll pray to God tonight that He may look down with mercy on my poor

friend and myself. I feel no dread of what more I am to bear but look

to it with confidence.

In religion Keats had been neither a believer nor by any means (except

in the earliest days of his enthusiasm for Leigh Hunt) a scoffer;

respecting Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by

turns clinging to and drifting from the doctrine of human immortality.

Now, on his death-bed, says Severn, among the most haunting and

embittering of his distresses was the thought that not for him were

those ready consolations of orthodoxy which were within the reach of

every knave and fool. After a time, contrasting the steadfast behaviour

of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the power of

the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to him from

Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Dying and Holy Living_, strove to pass the

remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy.

The danger of money trouble must have been due to a pure

misunderstanding, as the credit at Torlonia's was in fact not exhausted,

and a fresh communication from Mr Taylor removed all anxiety on that

score. One day Keats was seized with a desire for books and was able

for a time to take pleasure in reading those which Severn procured for

him. Another and continual pleasure was Severn's playing on the piano,

and especially his playing of Haydn's sonatas. 'With all his suffering

and consciousness of approaching death,' wrote Severn in after years,

'he never quite lost the play of his cheerful and elastic mind, yet

these happier moments were but slight snatches from his misery, like the

flickering rays of the sun in a smothering storm. Real rays of sunshine

they were, all the same, such as would have done honour to the brightest

health and the happiest mind: yet the storm of sickness and death was

always going on, and I have often thought that these bursts of wit and

cheerfulness were called up of set purpose--were, in fact, a great

effort on my account.'

Neither patient nor watcher thought any more of recovery. For a few days

Severn had the help of an English nurse. It was doubtless then that

Keats made his friend go and see the place chosen for his burial. 'He

expressed pleasure at my description of the locality of the Pyramid of

Caius Cestius, about the grass and the many flowers, particularly the

innumerable violets--also about a flock of goats and sheep and a young

shepherd--all these intensely interested him. Violets were his favourite

flowers, and he joyed to hear how they overspread the graves. He assured

me that he seemed already to feel the flowers growing over him': and it

seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he gave for his

epitaph the words, partly taken from a phrase in Beaumont and Fletcher's

_Philaster_,[4]--'here lies one whose name was writ in water.' Ever

since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to speak of

himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual question to

the doctor when he came in was, 'Doctor, when will this posthumous life

of mine come to an end?'. As he turned to ask it neither physician nor

friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at all times of

extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing unearthly

brightness in his wasted cheeks. Once or twice he was torn again by too

sharp a reminder of vanished joys and hopes. Severn handed him a letter

which he supposed to be from Mrs Brawne, but which was really from her

daughter. 'The glance of that letter tore him to pieces. The effects

were on him for many days--he did not read it--he could not, but

requested me to place it in his coffin together with a purse and a

letter (unopened) of his sister's--since which time he has requested me

not to place _that letter_, but only his sister's purse and letter with

some hair.' Loveable and considerate to the last, 'his generous concern

for me,' reiterates Severn, 'in my isolated position at Rome was one of

his greatest cares.' His response to kindness was irresistibly winning,

and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with him to the end.

Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to fall asleep, and

awakening, find they were in the dark. 'To remedy this one night I tried

the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a lighted candle to

the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be conducted, all

which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found the first

candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while doubting

suddenly cried out, "Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy lamp-lighter

actually lit up the other candle."' And again: 'Poor Keats has me ever

by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens his

eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close

gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep.'

Life held out for six weeks after the second relapse, but from the first

days of February the end was visibly drawing near. On one of his nights

of vigil Severn occupied himself in making that infinitely touching

death-bed drawing in black and white of his friend with which all

readers are familiar. Between the 14th and 22nd of February Severn wrote

letters to Brown, to Mrs Brawne, and to Haslam to prepare them for the

worst and to tell them of the reconciled and tranquil state into which

the dying man had fallen. Death came very peacefully at last. On the

23rd of that month, writes Severn, 'about four, the approaches of death

came on. 'Severn--I--lift me up--I am dying--I shall die easy; don't be

frightened--be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my

arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until

eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still

thought he slept.' Three days later his body was carried, attended by

several of the English in Rome who had heard his story, to its grave in

that retired and verdant cemetery which for his sake and Shelley's has

become a place of pilgrimage to the English-speaking world for ever.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A long-popular song from Arne's opera _Artaxerxes_.

[2] Unless Brown had transcribed 'morning' for 'moving' in error; and

this was probably the case, though there is a tempting sonority in

the juxtaposition of the nearly identical broad vowel sounds in his

version.

[3] _Reminiscences of a Literary Life_, by Charles Macfarlane:

London, John Murray, 1917, pp. 12-15.--Keats in his letters is apt

enough to talk of cant and flummery, but not of humbug, and I suspect

the word, though not the thought, is put into his mouth. With

reference to Mr Macfarlane's account of Keats generally as 'one of

the most cheery and plucky little fellows I ever knew,' and as a man

to have stood with composure a whole broadside of Blackwood and

Quarterly articles, and to have faced a battery by the side of any

friend, it is difficult to conjecture at what date the writer can

have seen enough of Keats to form these impressions. From January

1816, when he was in his seventeenth year, to 1827, young Macfarlane

seems to have lived entirely at Naples, except for some excursions to

the Levant and a short visit to England in 1820, when Keats was a

consumptive patient already starting or started for Italy.

[4] Act v, Sc. iii. See Harrison S. Morris in _Bulletin and Review of

the Keats-Shelley Memorial_, 1913, p. 30.

CHAPTER XVII

EPILOGUE

Hopes and fears at home--Fanny Brawne: Leigh Hunt--Supposed effect of

reviews--Shelley misled and inspired--_Adonais_--A _Blackwood_

Parody--False impressions confirmed--Death of Shelley--Hazlitt and

Severn--Brown at Florence--Inscription for Keats's grave--Severn and

Walter Scott--Slow growth of Keats's fame--Its beginnings at

Cambridge--Opinion in the early 'forties--Would-be biographers at

odds--Taylor and Brown: Brown and Dilke--A solution: Monckton

Milnes--The old circle: Hunt and Haydon--John Hamilton

Reynolds--Haslam, Severn, Bailey--Flaws and slips in Milnes's

work--Its merit and timeliness--Its reception--The

Pre-Raphaelites--Rossetti and Morris--The battle won: Later

critics--Keats and Shelley--Pitfalls and prejudices--Arnold and

Palgrave--Mr. Buxton Forman and others--Latest eulogists--Risks to

permanence of fame--His will conquer--Youth and its storms--The

might-have-been--Guesses and a certainty.

The friends of Keats at home had in their love for him tried hard after

his departure to nurse some sparks of hope for his recovery. John

Hamilton Reynolds, answering from Exmouth a letter in which Taylor told

him of the poet's having sailed, wrote, 'I am _very_ much pleased at

what you tell me. I cannot now but hold a hope of his refreshed health,

which I confess his residence in England greatly discouraged.... Keats,

then, by this is at sea fairly--with England and one or two sincere

friends behind him,--and with a warm clime before his face! If ever I

wished well to Man, I wish well to him!' Haslam in a like strain of

feeling wrote in December to Severn at Rome:--'The climate, however,

will, I trust, avail him. Keep him quiet, get the winter through; an

opening year in Italy will perfect everything. Ere this reaches you, I

trust Doctor Clark will have confirmed the most sanguine hopes of his

friends in England; and to you, my friend, I hope he will have given

what you stand much in need of--a confidence amounting to a faith....

Keats must get himself well again, Severn, if but for us. I, for one,

cannot afford to lose him. If I know what it is to love, I truly love

John Keats.' The letters written by Severn to this faithful friend

during the voyage and from beside the sick-bed were handed round and

eagerly scanned among the circle. Brown, when they came into his hands,

used to read passages from them at his discretion to the Brawne ladies

next door, keeping the darkest from the daughter by her mother's wish.

Mrs Brawne, evidently believing her child's heart to be deeply engaged,

dealt in the same manner with Severn's letters to herself. The girl

seems to have divined none the less that her lover's condition was past

hope, and her demeanour, according to Brown's account as follows, to

have been human and natural. Keats, writes Brown in a broken style,--

Keats is present to me everywhere and at all times--he now seems

sitting by my side and looking hard in my face, though I have taken

the opportunity of writing this in company--for I scarcely believe I

could do it alone. Much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely

he was wound about my heart. Mrs Brawne was greatly agitated when I

told her of--and her daughter--I don't know how--for I was not

present--yet she bears it with great firmness, mournfully but without

affectation. I understand she says to her mother, 'I believe he must

soon die, and when you hear of his death, tell me immediately. I am

not a fool!'

As the news grew worse, it seems to have been more and more kept back

from her, injudiciously as Brown thought, and in a mutilated letter he

gives glimpses of moods in her, apparently hysterical, of alternate

forced gaiety and frozen silence. A letter or two which she had written

to her dying lover were withheld from him, as we have seen, by reason of

the terrible agitation into which the mere sight of her handwriting

threw him. We hear in the meantime of her being in close correspondence

with his young sister at Walthamstow. When the news of the end came,

Brown writes,--'I felt at the moment utterly unprepared for it. Then

_she_--she was to have it told her, and the worst had been concealed

from her knowledge ever since your December letter. It is now five days

since she heard it. I shall not speak of the first shock, nor of the

following days,--it is enough she is now pretty well,--and thro'out she

has shown a firmness of mind which I little expected from one so young,

and under such a load of grief.'

Leigh Hunt had written in these days a letter to Severn which did not

reach Rome until after Keats's death. I must quote it as showing yet

again the strength of the hold which Keats had on the hearts of his

friends, and how he, in a second degree only to Shelley, had struck on

something much deeper in Hunt's nature than the sunny, kindly,

easy-going affectionateness which was all that in most relations he had

to bestow:--

Judge how often I thought of Keats, and with what feelings. Mr Brown

tells me he is comparatively calm now. If he can bear to hear of us,

pray tell him; but he knows it all already, and can put it in better

language than any man. I hear he does not like to be told that he may

get better, nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm

persuasion that he shall not thrive. But if this persuasion should

happen no longer to be so strong upon him, or if he can now put up

with such attempts to console him, remind him of what I have said a

thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour I swear) think

always, that I have seen too many cases of recovery from apparently

desperate cases of consumption, not to indulge in hope to the very

last. If he still cannot bear this, tell him--tell that great poet and

noble-hearted man that we shall all bear his memory in the most

precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads

to it as our loves do. Or if this will trouble his spirit, tell him

that we shall never cease to remember and love him, and that Christian

or Infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high

things that nature puts into our heads, to think that all who are of

one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and the same place,

and shall meet somehow or other again, face to face, mutually

conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only before us on the

road, as he was in everything else; or whether you tell him the latter

or no, tell him the former, and add, that we shall never forget that

he was so, and that we are coming after him. The tears are again in my

eyes, and I must not afford to shed them.

During Keats's year of illness and dejection at home, and until the end

and after it, the general impression among his friends and acquaintances

was that the cause of all his troubles was the agony of mind into which

the hostile reviews had thrown him. Severn in the course of his tendance

discovered, as we have seen, that this was not so, and learnt the full

share which was due to the pangs of unsatisfied, and in a worldly sense

hopeless, passion in a consumptive constitution. Brown on his part,

although he knew the secret of the heart which Keats so jealously

guarded, yet attributed the chief part of his friend's distress to the

fear of impending poverty--truly another contributing cause--and

conceived a fierce and obstinate indignation against George for having,

as he quite falsely imagined, deliberately fleeced his brother, as well

as against other friends who had borrowed money from the poet and failed

to pay it back. But most of those who knew Keats less intimately, seeing

his sudden fall from robustness and high spirits,--having never thought

of him as a possible consumptive subject,--and being themselves

white-hot with anger against _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_,--inferred

the poet's feelings from their own, and at the same time added fuel to

their wrath against the critics, by taking it for granted that it was

their cruelty which was killing him.

To no one was this impression conveyed in a more extravagant form than

to Shelley, presumably through his friends the Gisbornes. In that letter

of remonstrance to Gifford, as editor of the _Quarterly_, which he

drafted in the autumn of 1820 but never sent, Shelley writes:--

Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review,

which I am, persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing

the effect, to which it has, at least, greatly contributed, of

embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are

now but faint hopes of his recovery. The first effects are described

to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching

that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony

of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in

the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun.

In the preface to _Adonais_, composed at San Giuliano, near Pisa, in the

June following Keats's death in the next year, Shelley repeats the same

delusion in different words, adding the still less justified

statement,--probably founded by his informant, Colonel Finch, on

expressions used by Brown to Severn about George Keats and other

borrowers,--that Keats's misery had been 'exasperated by the bitter

sense of unrequited benefits:--the poor fellow seems to have been hooted

from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the

promise of his genius, than those on whom he had lavished his fortune

and his care.' Of the critical attacks upon Keats, Shelley seems not to

have known the _Blackwood_ lampoons, and to have put down all the

mischief (as did Byron following him) to the _Quarterly_ alone. With his

heart and soul full of passionate poetic regret for what the world had

lost in the death of the author of _Hyperion_, and of passionate human

indignation against the supposed agents of his undoing, Shelley wrote

that lament for Keats which is the best of his longer poems and next to

_Lycidas_ the noblest of its class in the language. Like Milton, Shelley

chose to conform to a consecrated convention and link his work to a long

tradition by going back to the precedent of the Sicilian pastoral

elegies, those beautiful examples of a form even in its own day

conventional and literary. He took two masterpieces of that school, the

dirge or ritual chant of Bion on the death of Adonis and the elegy of

Moschus on the death of Bion, and into strains directly caught and

blended from both of these wove inseparably a new strain of imagery and

emotion entirely personal and his own.

The human characteristics of the lamented person, the flesh and blood

realities of life, are not touched or thought upon. A rushing train of

abstractions, such as were at all times to Shelley more inspiring and

more intensely realized than persons and things,--a rushing train of

beautiful and sorrowful abstractions sweeps by, in _Adonais_, to a

strain of music so entrancing that at a first, or even at a twentieth,

reading it is perhaps more to the music of the poem than to its imagery

that the spiritual sense of the reader attends. Nevertheless he will

find at last that the imagery, all unsubstantial as it is, has been

floated along the music into his mental being to haunt and live with

him: he will be conscious of a possession for ever in that invocation of

the celestial Muse to awake and weep for the youngest of her sons,--that

pageant of the dead poet's own dreams and imaginations conceived as

gathering 'like mist over an autumnal stream' to attend upon his

corpse,--the voice of Echo silenced (again a direct adaptation from the

Greek) since she has no longer words of his to repeat and awaken the

spring withal,--the vision of the coming of Urania to the death

chamber,--her lament, with its side-shafts of indignation against the

wolves and ravens who have made her youngest-born their prey--the

approach and homage of the other 'mountain shepherds,' Byron, Shelley

himself, Moore, Leigh Hunt, all figured, especially Shelley, in a guise

purely abstract and mythologic and yet after its own fashion

passionately true,--the bitter ironic application to the reviewers of

the verses from Moschus used as a motto to the poem,--

Our Adonais has drunk poison--oh!

What deaf and viperous murderer could crown

Life's early cup with such a draught of woe?--

the swift change to a consolatory strain exhorting the mourners to cease

their grief and recognise that the lost poet is made one with Nature and

that it is Death who is dead, not he,--the invitation to the beautiful

burial-place at Rome,--the high strain of Platonic meditation on the

transcendental permanence of the One while the Many change and

pass,--the final vision by the rapt spirit of Shelley of the soul of

his brother poet beckoning like a star from the abode of the Eternals.

Looking upon his own work in his modest and unsanguine way, Shelley

could not suppress the hope that this time he had written something that

should not be utterly neglected. He had the poem printed at Pisa, whence

a small number of copies only were sent to England. One immediate effect

was to instigate the last and silliest--happily, perhaps, also the least

remembered--of the _Blackwood_ blackguardries. Not even the tragic

experiences of the preceding winter had cured the conductors of that

journal of their taste for savage ribaldry. John Scott, the keen-witted

and warm-hearted editor, formerly of the _Champion_ and latterly of

Taylor's and Hessey's _London Magazine_, had denounced the 'Z' papers,

and demanded a disclosure of Lockhart's share in them and in the

management of the magazine, in terms so peremptory and scathing that the

threat of a challenge from Lockhart followed as an inevitable

consequence. The clumsy, well meant intromission of third parties had

only the effect of substituting Lockhart's friend Christie in the broil

for Lockhart himself. The duel was fought on January 16, 1821, exactly a

week before Keats's death, and Scott was killed. None the less, when

late in the summer of the same year copies of _Adonais_ reached England,

remarks on it outdoing all previous outbreaks in folly and insolence

were contributed to _Blackwood_ by a comparatively new recruit, the

learned and drunken young Dublin scholar William Maginn. Professing

absurdly to regard the cockney school as a continuation of the 'Della

Cruscan' school laughed out of existence by Gifford some five-and-twenty

years earlier, the writer includes Shelley of all men (forgetting former

laudations of him) among the cockneys, flings up a heel at the memory of

Keats as 'a young man who had left a decent calling for the melancholy

trade of cockney-poetry and has lately died of a consumption after

having written two or three little books of verse much neglected by the

public'; and proceeds to give a comic analysis of _Adonais_, with some

specimens of parody upon it, which were afterwards re-published without

shame under Maginn's name.

Eight years later, as we shall see, it was on the enthusiasm of a band

of young Cambridge men for _Adonais_ that the fame of Keats began to be

spread abroad among our younger generation in England. In the meantime

the chief effect of the poem was to confirm in the minds of the few

readers whom it reached the sentimental view of Keats as an

over-sensitive weakling whom the breath of hostile criticism had

withered up. And when two years later Byron printed in the eleventh

canto of _Don Juan_ his patronizing semi-palinode, part laudatory part

contemptuous, on Keats, his closing couplet,

Strange that the mind, that very fiery particle,

Should let itself be snuffed out by an article,

stamped that impression for good on the minds of men in far wider

circles, until the publication of Monckton Milnes's memoir after

five-and-twenty years brought evidence to modify if not to efface it.

None of Keats's friends at home did anything in the days following his

death to counteract such impression. Some of them, as we have said,

fully shared and helped to propagate it. Haydon, writing to Miss Mitford

soon after the news of the death reached England, says 'Keats was a

victim of personal abuse and want of nerve to bear it. Ought he to have

sunk in that way because a few quizzers told him he was an apothecary's

apprentice?... Fiery, impetuous, ungovernable and undecided, he expected

the world to bow at once to his talents as his friends had done, and he

had not patience to bear the natural irritation of envy at the undoubted

proof he gave of strength.' In his private journal Haydon treats the

events in the same spirit, not forgetting to imply a contrast between

Keats's weakness and his own power of stubbornly presenting his prickles

to his enemies. Reynolds, it would seem, had more excuse than others

for adopting the same view, inasmuch as Keats had said to him on his

sick-bed, in one of his extremely rare allusions to the subject,--'If I

die, you must ruin Lockhart.' In the summer following Keats's death,

Reynolds published a little volume of verse dedicated to the young bride

at whose bidding he was abandoning literature for law, and included in

it the two versified tales from Boccaccio which he had originally

planned for printing together with Keats's _Isabella_: as to which

pieces he says,--

They were to have been associated with tales from the same source,

intended to have been written by a friend, but illness on his part,

and distracting engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing

our plan at the time; and Death now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated

it for ever! He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I

possessed, and yet he was not kinder perhaps to me, than to others.

His intense mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have

done the world some service, had his life been spared--but he was of

too sensitive a nature--and thus he was destroyed!

Later in the same summer, 1822, befell the tragedy of Shelley's own

death, such a tragedy of a poet's death as a poet might have loved to

invent with all its circumstances,--the disappearance of the boat in a

squall; the recovery of the body with the volume of Keats's poems in the

coat-pocket; its consumption on a funeral pyre by the Tuscan shore in

the presence of Leigh Hunt, newly come to Italy on Shelley's invitation,

of Byron, and of the Cornish sea-rover and social rebel Trelawny, a

personage who might well have been a creation of Byron's brain; the

snatching of the heart from the flames; the removal of the ashes to

Rome, and their deposit in a new Protestant burial-ground adjacent to

the old, where the remains of Trelawny were to be laid beside them after

the lapse of nearly sixty years.

Two years later again, when Byron had himself died during the struggle

for the liberation of Greece, Hazlitt took occasion to criticize

Shelley's posthumous poems in the _Edinburgh Review_, and having his own

bitter grounds of quarrel with the _Blackwood_ gang, strained the bonds

of prose in an outburst of half-lyric indignation on behalf of Keats as

follows:--

Mr Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr Keats's poetry grasped

with one hand in his bosom! These are two out of four poets, patriots

and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years, both of whom

have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. Keats died young; and

'yet his infelicity had years too many.' A canker had blighted the

tender bloom that o'erspread a face in which youth and genius strove

with beauty; the shaft was sped--venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove

him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and

followed him to his grave. And yet there are those who could trample

on the faded flower--men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of

merriment--who laugh loud over the silent urn of Genius, and play out

their game of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of their

victims!

Severn, living on at Rome in the halo of sympathy and regard with which

the story of his friend's death and his own devotion had justly

surrounded him, seems to have done nothing to remove from the minds of

the English colony through successive years an impression which he knew

to have been only in a very partial measure true. And even Brown, when

in the year after Keats's death he came out with his natural son, a

child of a few years, to make his home in Italy, in his turn let himself

fall in with the view of Keats's sufferings and of their origin which

had taken such strong hold on the minds of most persons interested and

commended itself so naturally to the tender-hearted and the righteously

indignant. Brown did not come to Rome, but established himself first at

Pisa and afterwards at Florence. At Pisa he saw something both of

Trelawny and of Byron, who took to him kindly; and made several

contributions to the _Liberal_ during the brief period while Hunt

continued to conduct that journal at Pisa after Shelley's death and

before his final rupture with Byron and departure from Italy. The Greek

adventure having in 1823 carried off Trelawny for a season and Byron

never to return, Brown settled at Florence and became for some years a

popular member of the lettered English colony in Tuscany, living in

intimacy with Seymour Kirkup, the artist and man of fortune who was for

many years the centre of that circle, and before long admitted to the

regard and hospitality of Walter Savage Landor in his beautiful Fiesolan

villa. Landor, as readers will hardly need to be reminded, was an early,

firm, and just admirer of Keats's poetry.

It was not until some five years after Byron's death in Greece that

Trelawny came back to settle for a while again in Tuscany. Then, in

1829, he and Brown being at the time housemates, Brown helped him in

preparing for the press his autobiographical romance, _The Adventures of

a Younger Son_, and especially by supplying mottoes in verse for its

chapter-headings, chiefly from the unpublished poems of Keats in his

possession. One day Trelawny said to him that 'Brown' was no right

distinguishing name for a man, or even for a family, but merely the name

of a tribe: whereupon and whenceforward, adding to his own Christian

name one that had been borne by a deceased brother, he took to styling

himself, not always in familiar but regularly in formal signatures,

Charles Armitage Brown. It is both anachronism and pedantry to give him

these names, as is often done, in writing of him in connexion with

Keats, to whom he was never anything but plain Charles Brown.

Of Keats Brown's thoughts had in the meantime remained full. From his

first arrival in Italy he had been in close communication with Severn as

to the memorial stone and inscription to be placed over the poet's grave

at Rome and as to the biography to be written of him. He let the wish

expressed by Keats that his epitaph should be 'here lies one whose name

was writ in water' stand for him as an absolute command, and studied how

to combine those words with others explaining their choice as due to the

poet's sense of neglect by his countrymen. In the end the result agreed

on between him and Severn was that which, despite much after-regret on

Severn's and some on Brown's part and many proposals of change, still

stands, having been carefully re-cut and put in order more than half a

century after the poet's death:--namely a design of a lyre with only two

of its strings strung, and an inscription perpetuating the idea of the

poet having been a victim to the malice of his enemies:--

THIS GRAVE

CONTAINS ALL THAT WAS MORTAL

OF A

YOUNG ENGLISH POET

WHO

ON HIS DEATH BED,

IN THE BITTERNESS OF HIS HEART,

AT THE MALICIOUS POWER OF HIS ENEMIES,

DESIRED

THESE WORDS TO BE ENGRAVEN ON HIS TOMB STONE

"HERE LIES ONE

WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER."

February 24th, 1821.

Severn in his correspondence with Brown at Florence, and with Haslam and

other friends at home, shows himself always loyally anxious to attribute

to his connexion with Keats the social acceptance and artistic success

which he found himself enjoying from the first at Rome, and to which in

fact his own actively amiable nature, his winning manners and facile,

suave pictorial talent, in a great measure contributed. Though the

general feeling towards the memory of Keats among English residents and

visitors was sympathetic, there were not lacking voices to repeat the

stock gibe,--'"his name was writ in water"; yes, and his poetry in milk

and water.' Severn eagerly notes any signs of increasing appreciation of

his friend's poetry, or of changed opinion on the part of scoffers, that

came under his notice. One touching incident he recorded in later life

as having happened in the spring of 1832, the eleventh year after

Keats's death. Sir Walter Scott, stricken with premature decrepitude

from the labour and strain of mind undergone in his six years' colossal

effort to clear himself of debt after the Constable crash, had come

abroad with his daughter Anne in the hope of regaining some measure of

health and strength from rest and southern air.[1] He spent a spring

month at Rome, surrounded with attentions and capable of some

sight-seeing, but could not shake off his grief for what he had lost in

the death there two years earlier of his beloved Lady Northampton, whose

beauty and charm and gift for verse and song (her singing portrait by

Raeburn is one of the most beautiful in the world) had endeared her to

him from childhood in her island home in Mull. Scott's distress in

thinking of her was pitiable, and he found some relief in pouring

himself out to the sympathetic Severn, who had known her well.

By Scott's desire Severn went every morning to see him, generally

bringing some picture or sketch to amuse him. One morning Severn having

innocently shown him the portrait of Keats reproduced at page 338 of

this book, and said something about his genius and fate, observed Anne

Scott turn away flushed and embarrassed, while Scott took Severn's hand

to close the interview, and said falteringly, 'yes, yes, the world finds

out these things for itself at last.' The story has been commonly, but

without reason, scouted as though it implied a guilty conscience in

Scott himself as to the _Blackwood_ lampoons. It implies nothing of the

kind. Scott had indeed had nothing to do with these matters: but one of

his nearest and dearest had. The current belief that the death of Keats

had been caused or hastened by Lockhart's attack in _Blackwood_, with

the tragic circumstances of the Christie-Scott duel, however little he

may have said about them, will assuredly have left in a heart so great

and tender an abiding regret and pain, and his manner and words on being

reminded of them, as recorded by Severn, are perfectly in character.

By degrees the signs of admiration for Keats's work noted by Severn

become more frequent. Young Mr Gladstone, coming fresh from Oxford to

Rome in this same year 1832, seeks him out because of his friendship for

the poet. Another year a group of gentlemen and ladies in the English

colony propose to give an amateur performance of the unpublished _Otto

the Great_, a proposal never, it would seem, carried out. But despite

the loyal enthusiasm of special English circles abroad and the untiring

tributes of Leigh Hunt and other friends and admirers at home, his

repute among the reading public in general was of extraordinarily slow

growth. In the interval of some score of years between the death of

Byron and the establishment--itself slow and contested--of Tennyson's

position, Byron and Scott held with most even of open-minded judges an

uncontested sovereignty among recent English poets; while among a

growing minority the fame of Wordsworth steadily grew, and the popular

and sentimental suffrage was given to writers of the calibre of Felicia

Hemans and Letitia Landon, feminine talents and temperaments truly not

to be despised, however ephemeral has proved their fame.

So small was the demand for Keats's poetry that the remaining stock of

his original three volumes sufficed throughout nearly this score of

years to supply it. The yeast was nevertheless working. We know of one

famous instance, so far back as 1825, when a gift of the original

volumes of Keats and Shelley inspired the recipient--the lad Robert

Browning, then aged fourteen--with a fervent and wholly new conception,

as he used afterwards to declare, of the scope and power of poetry.

Young John Sterling, writing in 1828 in the _Athenaeum_, of which his

friend and senior Frederick Denison Maurice was for the time being

editor, showed which way the wind was beginning to blow at Cambridge

when he said, 'Keats, whose memory they (the _Blackwood_ group)

persevered only a few months back in spitting upon, was, as everyone

knows who has read him, among the most intense and delightful English

poets of our day.'[2] But no reprint of Keats's poems was published

until 1829, and then only by the Paris house of Galignani, who printed

for the continental market, in a single tall volume with double columns,

a collective edition of the poems of Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats.[3]

The same year saw the reprint of _Adonais_ on the initiative of Arthur

Hallam and his group of undergraduate friends at Cambridge, and the

visit of three of the group, Hallam himself, Monckton Milnes, and

Sunderland, to uphold in debate at Oxford the opinion that Shelley was a

greater poet than Byron. Their enthusiasm for _Adonais_ implied

enthusiasm for its subject, Keats, as a matter of course.

Alfred Tennyson was a close associate of this group; and from the first,

among recent influences, it was that of Keats which did most to colour

his style in poetry and make him strive to 'load every rift of a subject

with ore.' His friend Edward FitzGerald shared the same admiration to

the full. But these young pioneer spirits still stood, except for the

surviving band of Keats's early friends, almost alone. Wilson, it is

true, with whom consistency counted for nothing, had by this time shown

signs of wavering, and in his character as Christopher North speaks of

Keats's 'genius' being shown to best advantage in _Lamia_ and

_Isabella_,--but does so, we feel, less for the sake of praising Keats

than of getting in a dig at Jeffrey for having praised him tardily and

indiscriminately.[4] The _Quarterly_ remained quite impenitent, and in a

review of Tennyson's second volume of 1832 writes of him with viciously

laboured irony as 'a new prodigy of genius--another and brighter star of

a galaxy or _milky way_ of poetry, of which the lamented Keats was the

harbinger'; and then follows a gibing testimony, to be read in the same

inverted sense, of the vast popularity which _Endymion_ has notoriously

attained.[5] So far as popularity was concerned, the _Quarterly_ gibe

remained justified. It was not until 1840 that there appeared in England

the first separate reprint of Keats's collected poems:[6] what is sad to

relate is that even this edition found a scanty sale, and that before

long 'remainder' copies of it were being bound up by the booksellers

with the 'remainders' of another unsuccessful issue of the day, the

series of _Bells and Pomegranates_ by Robert Browning.

After an interval of thirteen years, John Sterling must still, in 1841,

write to Julius Hare as follows:--

Lately I have been reading again some of Alfred Tennyson's second

volumes, and with profound admiration of his truly lyric and idyllic

genius. There seems to me to have been more epic power in Keats, that

fiery beautiful meteor; but they are two most true and great poets.

When one thinks of the amount of recognition they have received, one

may well bless God that poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether

it be crowned by all mankind or left alone in its own magic

hermitage.[7]

So late as 1844, Jeffrey, who in spite of the justice he had been

induced to do to Keats in his lifetime, had no real belief in the new

poetry and was an instinctive partisan of the conventional

eighteenth-century style, could write that the 'rich melodies' of Keats

and Shelley were passing out of public memory, and that the poets of

their age destined to enduring fame were Campbell and Rogers. De Quincey

in 1845 could grotesquely insult the memory and belittle the work of

Keats in a passage pouring scorn on _Endymion_, treating _Hyperion_ as

his only achievement that counted, and ending,--'Upon this mother

tongue, upon this English language has Keats trampled as with the hoofs

of a buffalo. With its syntax, with its prosody, with its idiom, he has

played such fantastic tricks as could only enter the heart of a

barbarian, and for which only the anarchy of Chaos could furnish a

forgiving audience. Verily it required _Hyperion_ to weigh against the

deep treason of these unparalleled offences.'[8]

In the meantime none of Keats's friends had succeeded in doing anything

to strengthen his reputation or make his true character known by the

publication either of a personal memoir or of his poetry that remained

in manuscript. Several of them had fully desired and intended to do both

these things. But mutual jealousies and dislikes, such as are but too

apt to break out among the surviving intimates of a man of genius, had

prevented any such purpose taking effect. Taylor and Woodhouse had been

first in the field, collecting what material for a memorial volume they

could, including the transcripts zealously made by Woodhouse from

Keats's papers while he was alive, and others, both verse and

correspondence, which they had borrowed from Reynolds. But help both

from Brown and from George Keats would have been necessary to give

anything like completeness to their work; and Brown, who himself desired

to be his friend's biographer, looked askance at them and their project.

As for information or material from George Keats, Brown on his part was

debarred from seeking it by his obstinate conviction, reiterated in all

companies and on all occasions and naturally resented by its subject,

that George was a traitor, cheat, and villain. When Fanny Keats came of

age in 1824, the duty devolved on Dilke of going into the family

accounts and putting pressure on Abbey, who had proved a muddler both of

his wards' affairs and of his own, to make over the residue of the

estate which he held in trust. In the discharge of this duty Dilke

satisfied himself, as a practical man of business, that George's conduct

had been strictly upright and his motives honourable. But Brown refused

to let his prejudices be shaken; and he and Dilke, though they met both

in Italy and later in England, were never again on their old terms of

friendship and mutual regard. Brown, criticizing Dilke in his

influential position as editor of the _Athenaeum_ after 1830 and as a

learned and recognized authority on various problems of literary

history, declares that he has become dogmatic and arrogant from success.

Dilke, writing confidentially of Brown, scouts the notion which had got

abroad of his having been a 'generous benefactor' to Keats, and insists

that he had always expected to profit by a literary partnership with the

poet, and after his death had demanded and received from the estate

payment in full, with interest, of all advances made by him.

So much--and the reader may hold it more than enough--in order to

explain why no sufficient memoir of Keats or collection of his remains

could be published by his surviving friends. Brown, indeed, wrote some

ten years after Keats's death the brief memoir of which I have freely

made use in these pages, and tried some editors with it, but in vain.

Destiny had provided otherwise and better. One of the Cambridge group of

Shelley-Keats enthusiasts of 1830, Richard Monckton Milnes, being in

Italy with his family not long after his degree, visited Rome and

Florence in 1833 and 1834, and with his genius for knowing, liking, and

being liked by everybody, made immediate friends with Severn at Rome,

and at Florence soon found his way to Landor's home at the Villa

Gherardesca, and there met and was quickly on good terms with Brown.

Some two or three years later Brown left Tuscany for good and

established himself at Laira Green, near Plymouth, where he lived the

life of amateur in letters, a busy local lecturer and contributor to

local journals, and published his very ingenious interpretation of

Shakespeare's sonnets as a cryptic autobiography of the poet,

continuing the while to nurse the hope and desire of being Keats's

biographer. He had all but concluded an arrangement for the publication

of his memoir in the _Monthly Chronicle_, when one day near the end of

1840, having heard a lecture on the prospects of the then young colony

of New Zealand, he determined suddenly to emigrate thither with his son,

who had been in training as a civil engineer; and before he left

designated Monckton Milnes, with whom he had not ceased to keep in

touch, as the fit man to do justice to Keats's memory, and handed to him

all his own cherished material.

Within a year Brown had died in New Zealand of an apoplectic stroke.

Monckton Milnes was faithful to his trust, but not swift or prompt in

fulfilling it. That was more than could well have been expected of a man

of so many interests and pursuits and so eager in them all,--poet,

politician, orator, wit, entertainer, athirst and full of relish for

every varied cup of experience and every social or intellectual pleasure

or activity, or opportunity for help or kindness, that life had to offer

him. It was not until the fifth year after Brown's departure that he

buckled to his task. He began by collecting, with some measure of

secretarial help from Coventry Patmore, further information and material

from all the surviving friends of Keats whom he could hear of. George

Keats had died at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1842, leaving an honoured

memory among his fellow citizens; and his widow had taken a second

husband, a Mr Jeffrey, who on Milnes's request sent him among other

material copies, unluckily very imperfect, of Keats's incomparable

journal-letters to George and to herself. From Cowden Clarke, the

happiest of all Keats's friends in after-life, happy in a perfect

marriage, the sunniest of dispositions, and a sustained success in the

congenial occupation of a public reader in and lecturer on Shakespeare

and other poets,--from Cowden Clarke and from Keats's younger school

friend Edward Holmes, Milnes drew the information about Keats's school

days which I have quoted above almost in full. Leigh Hunt, the friend

whom Keats owed to Clarke and who had had the most decisive influence on

his life, had passed with advancing years, not indeed out of his

lifelong, lightly borne condition of debt and poverty and embarrassment

and household worry, but out of the old atmosphere of obloquy and

contention into one of peace, and of affectionate regard all but

universal as the most genial and companionable, the most versatile,

industrious and sweet-natured of literary veterans, praised and admired,

to a pitch almost of generous passion, even by the growler Carlyle, who

had nothing but a gibe of contempt to bestow upon the weaknesses of a

Lamb or a Keats. In regard to Keats, Hunt had said his say, personal and

critical, long ago, in the unwise but in its day grossly over-reviled

book _Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries_ (1828), as well as in

many incidental notes and observations through thirty years, and

especially in that masterpiece in his own vein of criticism,

_Imagination and Fancy_ (1844). Accordingly he had now little that was

fresh to tell the biographer. As for Haydon, the destiny he had in the

old days been used to prophesy for Hunt,--even such a destiny, and

worse, had in the irony of things befallen himself. That tragic gulf

which existed in him between ambition and endowment, between temperament

and faculty, had led him through ever fiercer contentions and deeper and

more desperate difficulties to the goal of suicide. This had happened in

the days when the biographer of Keats was just setting hand to his task;

hence such accounts of the poet as I have quoted from Haydon were not at

Milnes's disposal, but are drawn from later posthumous publications of

the painter's journals and correspondence. By way of farewell to this

ill-starred overweening half-genius, I add here the facsimile of a page

from a letter he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett in 1834, describing a scene

of rather squalid tragi-comedy which he and Keats had witnessed at

Hunt's Hampstead cottage seventeen years before, and adding from memory

a sketch of Keats's profile, with an answer to his correspondent's

conjecture that the poet's expression had been 'too subtle for the

brush.'

[Illustration: PL. XIII

PAGE FROM A LETTER OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON TO ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1834]

Among Keats's other intimate friends and associates, Mr Taylor let

Monckton Milnes have the loan of the notes and transcripts bequeathed

him by Woodhouse, who had died in 1834. Reynolds heard by accident of

the intended biography, and never having quite abandoned his own purpose

in the matter, wrote at first complainingly, resenting that use should

be made of those letters of Keats to himself which he had allowed

Woodhouse to copy. But a gracious answer quickly won him over, and he

made the new biographer welcome to all his material. His own career had

been a rather melancholy failure. He had never quite given up literature

in accordance with the purpose he had declared on marriage. Indeed it

was not until six years after that declaration, in 1825, that his best

piece of work was done, in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Thomas

Hood: I mean the anonymous volume of humorous poems, not inferior to

_Rejected Addresses_, called _Odes and Addresses to Great People_, which

Coleridge confidently declared to be the work of Lamb. In later years

Reynolds was a not infrequent contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_ and

to the _Athenaeum_ under the editorship of Dilke. For some unspecified

reason he did not prosper in the place which his friend Rice had found

for him with the eminent firm of solicitors, the Fladgates; and in later

life he was glad to accept a small piece of patronage as deputy clerk of

the County Court at Newport in the Isle of Wight. Here, if the latest

mention of him is to be trusted, he fell into self-neglecting habits and

consequent disrepute.[9] In one of his letters to Milnes he speaks about

'that poor, obscure, baffled thing, myself': in another he declares his

entire confidence in his correspondent, and his unfading admiration and

affection for his lost friend, as follows:--

All the papers I possess--all the information I can render--whatever I

can do to aid your kind and judiciously intended work--are at your

service! But a word or two on the great subject of our correspondence.

He was hunted in his youth, before he had strength to escape his

ban-dogs. He had the greatest power of poetry in him, of any one since

Shakespeare! He was the sincerest friend, the most lovable associate,

the deepest listener to the griefs and disappointments of all around

him 'that ever lived in the tide of times.' Your expressed intentions

as to the Life are so clear and good; that I seem to have the weight

of an undone work taken from me.

Haslam in like manner lends all the help he can, and from his office as

a solicitor in Copthall Court writes somewhat dispiritedly about

himself, and declares that this correspondence 'has been a clean taking

me back to a separate state of existence that I had more than thirty

years ago, a state that has long appeared to me almost as a dream. The

realities of life have intervened, but God be praised they have but been

laid upon the surface--have but hidden, not effaced those happy happy

days.' He sends a number of letters from Severn, including those written

on the voyage to Naples and quoted in full above. But as to letters from

Keats himself says he has found none,--'they probably were so well or

intended to be so well taken care of, that every endeavour to lay my

hands on them has proved unavailing.' One wonders whether they may not

be lurking yet, a forgotten bundle, in the dust of some unexplored

corner of a safe in that same office. Severn was at this time living in

London, and some correspondence passed between him and Milnes about the

biography, Severn's chief point being to insist that not the malice of

the critics, but the 'death-stricken' marriage project, was the trouble

preying upon Keats in his dying days, and that the outcries of his

delirium ran constantly upon his unfulfilled love and unwritten poems

together.

As to yet another of Keats's closest friends, Benjamin Bailey, Milnes

had somehow been misinformed, and believed and positively stated him to

be dead. He had in fact risen to colonial preferment in the Church, and

was alive and well as archdeacon of Colombo in Ceylon. Thence on the

appearance of Milnes's book he wrote to declare his survival, and

forwarded to the biographer, for use in future editions, those memoranda

of old days spent in Keats's company upon which I have above (in Chapter

V) so fully drawn.

There are a few other points upon which Milnes's information was less

accurate than might have been expected. He assumes that the _fiancee_ of

Keats's tragic passion was identical with the rich-complexioned Charmian

described in his autumn letters of 1819, and ignores the existence of

Fanny Brawne and of her family. One would have supposed that he must

have heard the real story both from Brown and from Dilke, whom Mrs

Brawne had appointed trustee for her children, and who had not since

lost sight of them. That kind lady herself met an unhappy fate, burned

to death upon her own doorstep. Her daughter Fanny, ten years after her

poet-lover's death, married a Mr Lindo, who afterwards changed his name

to Lindon, and of whom we know little except that he was at one time

drawn into the meshes of Spanish politics and was afterwards one of the

Commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Not long before her

marriage, Mrs Lindon is recorded to have said of Keats that the kindest

thing to his memory would be to let it die. Little wonder, perhaps, that

she should have felt thus, when she remembered the tortured, the

terrifying vehemence of his passion for herself and when, being probably

incapable of independent literary judgment, she saw his name and work

still made customary objects of critical derision. It is harder to

forgive her when some time later we find her parting with her lover's

miniature, under pressure of some momentary money difficulty, to Dilke.

Neither does the biographer seem to have made any attempt to get into

touch with Keats's young sister, who had been married long before this

to an accomplished Spanish man of letters, Senor Valentine Llanos. He

also was at various times involved in the political troubles of his

country. Of his and his wife's children, one attained distinction as an

artist and assumed the name of Keats y Llanos. Keats had written to his

sister once as a child gaily prophesying that they all, her brothers and

herself, would live to have 'tripple chins and stubby thumbs.' She in

fact fully attained the predicted length of days, and having lived to be

well assured of the full and final triumph of her brother's fame died

less than thirty years ago at eighty-six. In mature life she had come

into touch with one at least of her brother's surviving familiars, that

is with Severn at Rome, and with more than one of his admirers in a

younger generation. Of these a good friend to her was Mr Buxton Forman,

through whose initiative a Civil List pension was awarded her by Lord

Beaconsfield. A subtle observer, the poet and humorist, Frederick

Locker-Lampson, has left a rather disappointing though not unkindly

impression of her as follows:--

Whilst I was in Rome Mr Severn introduced me to M. and Mme. Valentine

de Llanos, a kindly couple. He was a Spaniard, lean, silent, dusky,

and literary, the author of _Don Esteban_ and _Sandoval_. She was fat,

blonde, and lymphatic, and both were elderly. _She was John Keats's

sister!_ I had a good deal of talk with her, or rather _at_ her, for

she was not very responsive. I was disappointed, for I remember that

my sprightliness made her yawn; she seemed inert and had nothing to

tell me of her wizard brother of whom she spoke as of a mystery--with

a vague admiration but a genuine affection. She was simple and

natural--I believe she is a very worthy woman.

Gaps and errors there thus were not a few in Monckton Milnes's book when

it appeared in two volumes in 1848. But it served its purpose admirably

for the time being, and with some measure of revision for long

afterwards. Distinguished in style and perfect in temper, the preface

and introduction struck with full confidence the right note in

challenging for Keats the character of 'the Marcellus of the Empire of

English song'; while the body of the book, giving to the world a

considerable, though far from complete, series of those familiar

letters, to his friends in which his genius shines almost as vividly as

in his verse, established on full evidence the essential manliness of

his character against the conception of him as a blighted weakling which

both his friends and enemies had contrived to let prevail. Among the

posthumous poems printed for the first time, the two longest, _Otho_ and

the _Cap and Bells_ were not of his best, but masterpieces like _La

Belle Dame_ and _The Eve of St Mark_, with many miscellaneous things of

high interest, were included. The reception of the book, though not, of

course, unmixed, was in all quarters respectful, and the old tone of

flippant contempt hardly made itself heard at all. I shall quote only

one critical dictum on its appearance, and that is the letter in which

the veteran Landor, in his highest style of urbanity and authority,

acknowledged a copy sent him by the author:--

Dear Milnes,

On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, I find

your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an

editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets,

excepting Shakespeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of

the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity.... There is an

effluence of power and light pervading all his works, and a freshness

such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.

The book appeared just at the right moment, when the mounting enthusiasm

of the young generation for the once derided poet was either gradually

carrying the elders along with it or leaving them bewildered behind. Do

readers remember how the simple soul of Colonel Newcome was perplexed by

the talk of his son Clive and of Clive's friends?--

He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him: he heard that Byron

was no great poet, though a very clever man ... that his favourite,

Doctor Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English; that

young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young

Raphael; and that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately

published two volumes of verses might take rank with the greatest

poets of all. Doctor Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of

the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second

order! Mr Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr

Keats and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern

poetic literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington

delivered with a puff of tobacco smoke; to which Mr. Honeyman blandly

assented, and Clive listened with pleasure?

Thackeray's sketch of Clive and his companions scarcely suggests, nor

was it meant to suggest, the characteristics of the special group of

young artists in whom, almost contemporaneously with the appearance of

Milnes's book, the enthusiasm for Keats had begun to burn at its whitest

heat. I refer of course to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Of the three

leaders of that movement, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, it is hard

to say which, in the late 'forties and early 'fifties, declared himself

first or most ardent in Keats-worship.[10] Of Hunt's exhibited pictures,

one of the earliest showed the lovers in the _Eve of St Agnes_ stealing

past the sprawling porter and the sleeping bloodhound into the night;

and of Millais's earliest, one is from _Isabella or the Pot of Basil_,

showing the merchant brothers and their sister and her lover at a meal

in company (the well-known work, so queerly designed and executed with

so much grip and character, now in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool).

Rossetti had in these early days much less technical skill and training

than either of his two associates. But from the first he was poet as

well as painter, and instinctively and spiritually stood, we can well

discern, much nearer to Keats than they did for all their enthusiasm.

Combining Italian blood and temperament with British upbringing,

Rossetti added to his inherited and paternally inculcated knowledge and

love of Dante a no less intense love and knowledge of English romance

poetry, both that of the old ballads and that of the revival of 1800 and

onwards. In boyhood and early youth waves of enthusiasm for different

recent poets had swept over him one after another, first Shelley, then

Keats, then Browning; but Keats, and next to Keats Coleridge, kept the

strongest and deepest hold on him. When his first associates Hunt and

Millais had parted from him on their several, widely divergent paths of

public success and distinction, Rossetti became, in the comparative

seclusion in which he chose to live, a powerful focus of romantic

inspiration to younger men who came about him. He is reported to have

urged upon William Morris that he should become a painter and not a

poet, seeing that Keats had already done all there was to be done in

poetry. Of all Keats's poems, it was _La belle dame sans Merci_ and _The

Eve of St Mark_ which most aroused the enthusiasm of Rossetti and his

group. We have already seen how the latter fragment stands in our

nineteenth-century poetry as a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between

Chaucer and Morris. It was the task and destiny of Morris as a writer to

give, by his abounding fertility and brooding delight in the telling of

Greek and mediaeval stories in verse, the most profuse and for the

present perhaps the last expression to the pure romantic spirit in

English narrative poetry: and to this effort Keats had given him the

immediate impulse, though Chaucer was his ultimate great exemplar.

Answering a congratulatory letter addressed to him by the veteran Cowden

Clarke on the publication of the first volume of the _Earthly Paradise_,

Morris speaks of 'Keats for whom I have such a boundless admiration, and

whom I venture to call one of my masters.' I have quoted above (page

470) his emphatic later words to a like effect.

While the leaven was thus intensely working among a special group in

England, an English poetess of quite other training and associations,

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, paid in _Aurora Leigh_ (1857) her well-known

tribute to Keats in lines that are neither good as poetry nor accurate

as fact, but in their chaotic way none the less passionately felt and

haunting:--

By Keats's soul, the man who never stepped

In gradual progress like another man,

But, turning grandly on his central self,

Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years

And died, not young, (the life of a long life

Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear

Upon the world's cold cheek to make it burn

For ever;) by that strong accepted soul,

I count it strange and hard to understand

That nearly all young poets should write old.

Thus, between the effects of Monckton Milnes's book and the enthusiasm

of various groups of university men and poets and artists, the

previously current contempt for Keats was from soon after the

mid-century practically silenced and the battle for his fame, at least

among the younger generation, won. He has counted for the last sixty

years and more, alike in England and in America, as an uncontested great

poet, whose works, collected or single, have been in demand in edition

after edition. One of the earliest new issues was that edited in 1850 by

Monckton Milnes, who continued nearly until the end, under his new style

as Lord Houghton, to further by fresh editions and revisions the good

work he had begun. Not only every professed critic and historian of our

poetry, but nearly all our chief poets themselves, as Aubrey de Vere,

James Russell Lowell, Matthew Arnold, Coventry Patmore, Swinburne, and

latterly the present poet laureate, have been in various tones public

commentators on Keats. All such comments have shed light upon his work

in their degree. I can here only touch on a few special points and

mention in their order a few of the contributions to the knowledge or

appreciation of the poet which I think have helped the most.

One point to be remarked is that very few judges have seemed able to

care equally for Keats and Shelley. A special devotion to Shelley, the

poet who wedded himself in youth to a set of ready-made beliefs from

Godwin, of which the chief was that all the miseries of the world were

due to laws and institutions and could be cured by their abolition, who

clothed these abstract beliefs in imagery of clouds and winds and

ocean-streams, of meteor and rainbow and sunset and all things radiant

and evanescent, and sang them to strains of music inimitably swift and

passionate, seems incompatible with complete delight in the work of that

other young poet who could hold fast no dogma spiritual or social, but

found truth wherever his imagination could divine or create living and

concrete beauty, and who, as to the sorrows of the world, was convinced

that they were inherent in its very fabric and being, and yearned for

knowledge and wisdom to assuage them but died before he had attained

clearness or found his way. As between these two, Tennyson's final and

calm opinion is quoted by his son as follows:--'Keats would have become

one of the very greatest of all poets had he lived. At the time of his

death there was apparently no sign of exhaustion or having written

himself out; his keen poetical instinct was in full process of

development at the time. Each new effort was a steady advance on that

which had gone before. With all Shelley's splendid imagery and colour, I

find a sort of _tenuity_ in his poetry.' FitzGerald was much stronger on

the same side, counting Shelley, to use his own words, as not worth

Keats's little finger. Matthew Arnold, who has said some memorably fine

and just things about Keats, belittles the poetry of Shelley and even

paradoxically prefers the prose of his essays and letters to his verse.

With ardent Shelley-worshippers on the other hand full appreciation of

Keats is rare. Swinburne, for one, has done little for Keats's memory by

the torrent of hyperbolical adjectives of alternate praise and blame

which he has poured upon it. Mr William Rossetti, for whom Shelley is

'one of the ultimate glories of our race and planet,' has in his

monograph on Keats, as I think, been icily unjust to his subject. And I

can remember my admirable friend and colleague, Mr Richard Garnett of

the British Museum, taking me roundly to task for the opinion, which I

still stoutly hold, that the letters of Keats, with all their every-day

humanity and fun and gossip, are in their wonderful sudden gleams and

intuitions more vitally the letters of a poet than Shelley's. But such

preferences between two such contrasted geniuses and creators of beauty

are perhaps inevitable, and have at any rate not prevented the equal

and brotherly association of the two in the memorial house--the house in

which Keats died--lately acquired and consecrated to their joint fame by

representative English and Americans at Rome.

One great snare in judging of Keats is his variability of mood and

opinion. The critic is apt to seize upon the expression of some one

phase or attitude of mind that strikes him, and to theorize and draw

conclusions from it as though it were permanent and dominant. The very

excellence of what was best both in his poetry and himself is a second

snare, tempting us to forget that after all he was but a lad, a genius

and character not made but in the making. A third is the obvious and

frankly avowed intensity of the sensuous elements in his nature. But the

critic who casts these up against him should remember that it took the

same capacity for sense-delights that inspired the rhapsodies on

claret-drinking and nectarine-sucking in the letters, to inspire also,

being spiritualized into imaginative emotion, the 'blushful Hippocrene'

passage in the Nightingale ode or the feast of fruits, in all its

pureness, of the revised _Hyperion_; and also that Keats, with his clear

and sane self-consciousness, has rarely any doubt that the master bent

within him was not his 'exquisite sense of the luxurious' but his love

for the high things and thoughts which he calls 'philosophy.'

It is a pity that the author of the one full and recent history of our

poetry, the late Mr W.J. Courthope, should have been debarred from just

appreciation of this poet alike by adopted dogma and by natural taste.

Both led him to hold that the true power of poetry, the true test by

which posterity must judge it, lies in the direct relations which it

bears to the social and political activities of its period. That the

re-awakening of the Western mind and imagination to nature and romance

in the days of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars was a spiritual

phenomenon not less important in human history than the wars themselves

would have been a conception that his mind was incapable of

entertaining. He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or

politics. But of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the

secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that

those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a

disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one great

overshadowing tyranny had but ended in re-instating a number of ancient

and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. To that

which lies behind and above politics and history, to the general

destinies and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not

indifferent but only too acutely and tragically sensitive.

Turning to the chief real contributions to our appreciation and

knowledge of Keats, I should give the first place to Matthew Arnold's

well-known essay[11] of 1880. With his cunning art in the minting and

throwing into circulation of phrases that cannot be forgotten, Arnold

balanced the weaknesses against the strength of Keats's work and

character, blaming the gushing admirers who injured his memory by their

'pawing and fondness,' insisting on the veins of 'flint and iron' in his

nature, insisting on his clear-sightedness, his lucidity, his perception

of the vital connexion of beauty with truth and of both with joy,

declaring that 'no one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in

expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of

loveliness,' and clenching all, with reference to Keats's own saying, 'I

think I shall be among the English poets after my death,' by the

comment, 'he is, he is with Shakespeare.[11] Almost simultaneously with

Matthew Arnold's essay, there appeared the very thoughtful and original

study of Mrs F.M. Owen, in which were laid the foundations of a true

understanding of _Endymion_ as a parable of the experiences of a poet's

soul in its quest after Beauty.

The years 1883 and 1884 were great Keats years. In them there appeared

the edition of the poems by the late W.T. Arnold, the first which

contained a scholar's investigations into the special sources of Keats's

poetic style and vocabulary: also the edition for the Golden Treasury

Series by Francis Turner Palgrave, with a studiously collated text and a

preface of more glowing and scarcely less just critical admiration than

Matthew Arnold's, only flawed, as I think, by a revival of that obsolete

heresy of the 'deadness' of the Grecian mythology: and thirdly, the

first issue of the late Mr Buxton Forman's edition of the poetry and

prose works together. All students know the results of this editor's

devoted and unremitting industry, maintained through a full quarter of a

century, in the textual criticism of his author and in the publication

and re-publication of editions containing every variant reading and

every scrap of scattered prose or verse that could be recovered. To the

same worker is due the unearthing and giving to the world of two groups

of the poet's letters which had been unknown to Monckton Milnes, the

wholly admirable and delightful series addressed to his young sister,

and the series, in great part distressing and deplorable, to Fanny

Brawne. About 1887, I was myself able to put straight two matters that

needed it by publishing the true text of the letters to America and by

rectifying the current notion that the revised _Hyperion_ had been a

first draft. Before long came the essay of Mr Robert Bridges, passing

the whole of Keats's poetry under review, and dealing out judgments in a

terse authoritative style to which, as one poet estimating another, he

was fully entitled, and which at all moments commands interest and

respect if it sometimes challenges contradiction. On some matters, and

especially on the relations of Keats's early poetry to Wordsworth, Mr

Bridges has thrown a light too clear and convincing to be questioned.

When in 1892 the late Mr William Sharp compiled his _Life of Joseph

Severn_ from the vast, almost unmanageable mass of papers in the

possession of the artist's family (I had had them previously through my

hands and can realize the difficulty of the task), he furnished valuable

new material for our knowledge both of the life of Keats and of his

after life in the opinions of men. Coming down to more recent years, we

have the admirable editorial work of Professor de Selincourt, as good, I

think, as has been bestowed on any English poet, carrying out to the

farthest point the researches initiated by W.T. Arnold, and illuminating

the text throughout with the comments and illustrations of a keen

scholar in classical and English literature. Nor can I leave unmentioned

the several lectures by two successive Oxford professors of poetry, that

of Mr A.C. Bradley on Keats's letters and that of Mr. J.W. Mackail on

his poetry. From these two minds, ripened in daily familiarity with the

best literatures of the world, we have, after a hundred years, praise of

Keats which almost makes Shelley's seating of him among 'Inheritors of

unfulfilled renown' seem like an irony,--praise more splendid than he

would have hoped for had he lived to fulfil even the most daring of his

ambitions. A special point in Mr Mackail's work is to make clear how

strong had been upon Keats the influence of the _Divine Comedy_, his

pocket companion on his Scottish tour, and how in _Hyperion_, written in

the next months after his return, there appears here and there, amid the

general Miltonic strain of the verse, a quality of thought and vision

drawn straight from and almost matching Dante. Lastly, there has

recently come from America a tribute of quite another kind, showing how

for purposes of systematic study Keats has been thought worthy of an

apparatus hitherto only bestowed on the great classics of literature: I

refer to the elaborate and monumental _Concordance_ to his poems lately

issued from Cornell University.

And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats's memory

and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and

biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all

poems ought to be understood without any comment,--must it not by this

time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of

smothering, Keats himself and his poetry? Naturally in the course of my

own work I have asked myself this question with qualms, bethinking

myself of Tennyson's phrase about swamping the sacred poets with

themselves. The answer is,--No, such a poet can carry any weight we may

choose to lay upon him, and more: he can never be smothered, inasmuch as

he has both given the world something it can nevermore cease to want and

suggested the existence within him of a power, quenched before its time,

to give it something much more and greater yet. If the result of all our

commentaries should be to provoke a reaction among readers, and to make

them crave for a naked text both of the poems and letters and insist

upon being left alone with that and their own meditations upon

it,--well, so much the better. Every reader of the English tongue that

has the works of Keats often enough in his hands, with or without

comment, will find his life enriched with much of the best that poetry

can do for human life, with achievements, very near to perfection, of

that faculty which is the essential organ of poetry,--to which all

others, spiritual and intellectual, are in poetry subordinate,--the

faculty of imagination transfusing the vital beauty and magic and secret

rhythm of things into the other magic and beauty and rhythm of words.

Over and above this, he will find himself living in the familiarity of a

great and lovable spirit, dowered at birth with capacities for joy and

misery more intense almost than any of which we have record, and

retaining its lovableness to the last in spite of circumstances that

gave misery too cruelly the upper hand.

But, again the objector may ask, is it so certain that in the coming

time the desire of readers for what Keats has to give them will survive

without abatement? Have not the last three years been an utterly

unprecedented, overwhelming and transforming experience for mankind?

Will not the new world after the war be a new world indeed, on the one

hand filled, nay, gorged, with recollections of doing and undergoing, of

endurance and adventure, of daring and suffering and horror, of

hellishness and heroism, beside which all the dreams of bygone romance

must forever seem tame and vapid; and on the other hand straining with a

hungry forecast towards a future of peace and justice such as mankind

has not known before, which it will be its tremendous task to try and

establish? Will not this world of so prodigiously intensified

experiences and enlarged hopes and besetting anxieties require and

produce new poets and a new poetry of its own that shall deal with the

realities it has gone through and those it is striving for, and put away

and cease to care for the old dreams and thrills and glamours of

romance? Have we not in fact witnessed the first-fruits of this new

tremendous stimulus in the cloud of young poets who have appeared--too

many of them alas! only to perish--since the war began?

And again the answer is, No. However changed the world, work like that

of Keats is not what it will ever let perish. The thrills and glamours

which pass away are only those of the second-rate and the second-hand

sort that come in and go out with literary fashion; not those which have

sprung from and struck deep into the innermost places of the spirit.

Doubtless there will arise and is arising a new poetry which will be

very different from any phase of poetry produced by the romantic

revolution and the generations that followed and nourished themselves on

it. The new poetry may not be able fully to share Keats's inspiring

conviction of the sovereign, the transcendental truth of whatsoever

ideas the imagination seizes as beauty. It may perhaps even abjure the

direct search for beauty as its primary aim and impulse. But no matter:

provided that its organ be the imagination, working with intensity on

whatever themes the genius of the age may dictate, it cannot but achieve

some phase, some incarnation, of beauty by the way. But gains like those

which were made for the human spirit by the poetry of which Keats was

one of the chief masters will never be lost again. Those who care for

poetry at all must always care for those refreshing and inspiring

draughts, as I have called them, from the innermost wells of antiquity,

of nature, and of romance, those meditations of mingled joy and sorrow

that search into the soul of things. Moreover they will never cease to

interest themselves in the question,--If only this great spirit had

survived, what would have been those unwritten poems of which he saw in

the sky the cloudy symbols, of which he felt the pressure and prescience

forcing the blood into his brain or bringing about his heart an awful

warmth 'like a load of immortality,' and the perishing of which unborn

within him was one of the two great haunting distresses of his dying

days?

In letting speculation wander in this field, we are brought up by many

problems as to what kind of manhood could have followed a youth like

that of Keats, had he had better fortune and had the conditions and

accidents of his life been such as to fortify his bodily constitution

instead of sapping it. Youth, especially half-trained youth, is always

subject to such storms and strains as those which Keats experienced with

a violence proportionate to the fervour of his being. To the sane and

sweet, the manly and courageous, elements in his character we have found

his friends bear unanimous evidence, amply supported by the

self-revelation of his letters. But self-revealed also we see the

morbid, the corroding elements which lay beneath these, just as beneath

his vigorous frame and gallant bearing there lay the bodily

susceptibilities that with ill-luck enabled lung disease to fasten on

and kill him. What must under any conditions have made life hard for him

was the habitual inner contention and disquiet of his instincts and

emotions in regard to that most momentous of human matters, love. When

he lets his mind dwell on the opposed extremes of human impulse and

experience, from the vilest to the most exalted, which the

word-of-all-work, love, is used to cover, he is more savagely perplexed

and out of conceit with life than from any other cause or thought

whatever.[12] The ruling power in himself, as he declares over and over

again, was the abstract passion for beauty, the love of the principle of

beauty in all things. But even in the poem specially designed to embody

and celebrate that passion, in _Endymion_, we find his conception of

realized and sexual human love to be mawkish and unworthy. When the

actual experience befalls himself, he falls utterly and almost

ignominiously a slave, at once enraptured and desperately resentful, to

the jealous cravings which absorb and paralyse all his other faculties.

Would ripened manhood or a happier experience have been able to bring

health and peace to his spirit on this supremely vital matter and to

turn him into a poet of love, love both human and transcendental, such

as at the outset he had longed and striven to be?

Again, along with his admirable capacity for loyal devotion and sympathy

in friendship, we find in him capacities of quite another kind,

capacities for disillusionment and for seeing through and chafing at

human and social shams and pretensions and absurdities; and we ask

ourselves, would this strain in him, which we find expressed with a

degree of pettish and premature cynicism, for instance in the _Cap and

Bells_ and in some of his later letters, have matured with time into a

power either of virile satire or genial, reconciling comedy?

And once more, would that haunting, that irrepressible sense of the

miseries of the world which we find breaking through from time to time

amid the beauty of the odes, or the playfulness and affectionate

confidences of the letters, or dictating that tragical return against

himself and his achievements in the revised _Hyperion_,--could it and

would it with experience have mellowed into such compassionate wisdom as

might have made him one of the rare great healers and sages among the

poets of the world?

Such speculations are as vain as they are inevitable. Let us indulge

ourselves at any rate by remembering that it is the greatest among his

successors who have held the most sanguine view as to the powers that

were in him. Here are more words of Tennyson's,--'Keats, with his high

spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us.

There is something magic and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost

everything which he wrote.' Leaving with these words the question of

what he might have done, and looking only at what he did, it is enough

for any man's glory. The days of the years of his life were few and

evil, but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship

shines eternally.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Everyone knows Wordsworth's beautiful sonnet of God-speed to him.

Haydon went to call on the great man, who had always been kind to

him, as he passed through London, and except for two unfortunately

chosen words, is at his very best in this picture of their

parting:--'After a quarter of an hour I took my leave, and as I arose

he got up, took his stick, with that sidelong look of his, and then

burst forth that beautiful smile of heart and feeling, geniality of

soul, manly courage and tenderness of mien, which neither painter nor

sculptor has ever touched. It was the smile of a superior creature

who would have gathered humanity under the shelter of its wings and

while he was amused at its follies would have saved it from sorrow

and sheltered it from pain.' (_Life of B. R. Haydon_, ed. Taylor, ii,

321.)

[2] John Sterling, _Essays and Tales_, ii, 53.

[3] Carefully edited, it is believed by Cyrus Redding, formerly an

employe of the house.

[4] _Noctes Ambrosianae_, ii, 146: from _Blackwood_ for December,

1828.

[5] _Quarterly Review_, April 1833, page 81. The article was long

supposed to be by Lockhart himself, but Mr Prothero has proved that

it was by Croker.

[6] In W. Smith's _Standard Library_, exactly reprinted from the

Galignani edition. America had in this matter been in advance of

England, an edition of the poet's works having appeared at Buffalo in

1834.

[7] _Essays and Tales_, p. clxviii.

[8] _Notes on Gilfillan's Literary Portraits_: Collected Works, xi,

393. It is fair to add that twelve years later De Quincey went a good

way in recantation of this outburst.

[9] See _Byron's Collected Works_, Prose, iii, 46, note.

[10] See particularly Chaps. iv and v of Holman Hunt's

_Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_.

[11] First published in T.H. Ward's _Selections from the English

poets_, and re-printed in the second series of _Essays in Criticism_

(1892). To this essay I possess a curious postscript in a note of

Arnold's written a few years later to myself. I had thought his

treatment of _Endymion_ too slighting. His answer shows how

fastidiousness could prevail in him over judgment. 'If Keats,' he

writes, 'had left nothing but _Endymion_, it would have alone shown

his remarkable power and have been worth preserving on that account:

but when he has left plenty which shows it much better I cannot but

wish _Endymion_ away from his volume.'

[12] See the bitter comment on a passage in Burton's _Anatomy_ quoted

in Mr Buxton Forman's _Complete Works of J. K._ iii, 268, where Keats

runs his head against the problem with which Plato had tried to deal

in his myth of the two Aphrodites, Pandemos and Urania. 'The

word-of-all-work, love,' is a phrase of George Eliot's.

APPENDIX

I. _The Alexander fragment_ (page 33). Here is the text:--

Whenne Alexandre the Conqueroure was wayfayringe in y^e londe of Inde,

there mette hym a damoselle of marveillouse beautie slepynge uponne

the herbys and flourys. He colde ne loke uponne her withouten grete

plesance, and he was welle nighe loste in wondrement. Her forme was

everyche whytte lyke y^e fayrest carvynge of Quene Cythere, onlie

thatte y^t was swellyd and blushyd wyth warmthe and lyffe wythalle.

Her forhed was as whytte as ys the snowe whyche y^e talle hed of a

Norwegian pyne stelythe from y^e northerne wynde. One of her fayre

hondes was yplaced thereonne, and thus whytte wyth whytte was ymyngld

as y^e gode Arthure saythe, lyke whytest lylys yspredde on whyttest

snowe; and her bryght eyne whenne she them oped, sparklyd lyke

Hesperus through an evenynge cloude.

Theye were yclosyd yn slepe, save that two slauntynge raies shotte to

her mouthe, and were theyre bathyd yn sweetenesse, as whenne by

chaunce y^e moone fyndeth a banke of violettes and droppethe thereonne

y^e silverie dewe.