A HAMPSTEAD GROUP
Out at Hampstead you may still visit what was once that studio of Romney's
to which Flaxman sent his collection of plaster casts from Italy. It had
been a favourite idea of Romney's, his son tells us, "to form a complete
Gallery of Casts, and to open it to any youths of respectability," and in
his closing years, after he had removed to Hampstead, he carried out his
wish, to some extent, with Flaxman's aid, and had three pupils working in
his studio there, copying the casts and studying under him. The house he
occupied from 1796 to 1799 is now the Holly Bush Inn; he bought a piece of
land at the back of it, and on this built himself a studio and gallery,
which now form part of the Hampstead Constitutional Club. "It was to
Hampstead that Hayley's friend Romney, the painter, retired in the decline
of his life," writes J. T. Smith, in _Nollekens and his Times_, "when he
built a dining-room close to his kitchen, with a buttery hatch opening
into it, so that he and his friends might enjoy beef-steaks, hot and hot,
upon the same plan as the members of the Beef-steak Club are supplied at
their room in the Lyceum."
[Illustration: ROMNEY'S HOUSE. HAMPSTEAD.]
Though Romney was then in the decline of his life, he was at the height of
his fame. He had married at the age of nineteen, and six years later set
out for London, leaving his wife behind at Kendal. He had no intention of
deserting her, but in London his genius soon won recognition, he began to
move in good society, and partly because Sir Joshua Reynolds had once said
that "marriage spoilt an artist," partly because he became infatuated with
Nelson's enchantress, Lady Hamilton, he neither brought his wife to
London, nor visited her, nor ever saw her again until he was dying. On
April 28, 1799, Hayley called on him for the last time at Hampstead, and
thought that "increasing weakness of body and mind afforded only a gloomy
prospect for the residue of his life." Then in July Flaxman saw him, and
says in one of his letters, "I and my father dined at Mr. Romney's at
Hampstead last Sunday, by particular invitation, and were received in the
most cordial manner; but, alas! I was grieved to see so noble a collection
in a state so confused, so mangled, and prepared, I fear, for worse, and
not better." Very soon after this Romney left London for ever, and
returned to Kendal and the wife he had neglected since the days of his
obscure youth, and early in 1801, by his directions, "the collection of
castes from the antique, a very fine skeleton, and other artistic
properties of George Romney, at his late residence, Hollybush Hill,
Hampstead," were sold by Messrs. Christie.
Meanwhile, his wife had pardoned him and was caring for him. "Old, nearly
mad, and quite desolate," writes Fitzgerald, "he went back to her, and she
received him and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth
all Romney's pictures!--even as a matter of art, I am sure." It is this
beautiful devotion of hers that gave Tennyson a subject for one of his
later poems, _Romney's Remorse_; in which the dying painter, rousing out
of delirium, says:--
"There--you spill
The drops upon my forehead. Your hand shakes.
I am ashamed. I am a trouble to you,
Could kneel for your forgiveness. Are they tears?
For me--they do me too much grace--for me?...
My curse upon the Master's apothegm,
That wife and children drag an artist down!
This seemed my lodestar in the Heaven of Art,
And lured me from the household fire on earth....
This Art, that harlot-like,
Seduced me from you, leaves me harlot-like,
Who love her still, and whimper, impotent
To win her back before I die--and then--
Then in the loud world's bastard judgment day
One truth will damn me with the mindless mob,
Who feel no touch of my temptation, more
Than all the myriad lies that blacken round
The corpse of every man that gains a name:
'This model husband, this fine artist!' Fool,
What matters! Six feet deep of burial mould
Will dull their comments! Ay, but when the shout
Of His descending peals from Heaven, and throbs
Thro' earth and all her graves, if _He_ should ask
'Why left you wife and children? for My sake,
According to My word?' and I replied,
'Nay, Lord, for _Art_,' why, that would sound so mean
That all the dead who wait the doom of Hell
For bolder sins than mine, adulteries,
Wife-murders--nay, the ruthless Mussulman
Who flings his bowstrung Harem in the sea,
Would turn and glare at me, and point and jeer
And gibber at the worm who, living, made
The wife of wives a widow-bride, and lost
Salvation for a sketch....
O let me lean my head upon your breast.
'Beat, little heart,' on this fool brain of mine.
I once had friends--and many--none like you.
I love you more than when we married. Hope!
O yes, I hope, or fancy that, perhaps,
Human forgiveness touches heaven, and thence--
For you forgive me, you are sure of that--
Reflected, sends a light on the forgiven."
Another famous artist who is closely associated with Hampstead was John
Constable. In 1820, writing to his friend, the Rev. John Fisher
(afterwards Archdeacon Fisher), he says, "I have settled my wife and
children comfortably at Hampstead"; and a little later he writes, again to
Fisher, "My picture is getting on, and the frame will be here in three
weeks or a fortnight.... I now fear (for my family's sake) I shall never
make a popular artist, _a gentleman and ladies painter_. But I am spared
making a fool of myself, and your hand stretched forth teaches me to value
what I possess (if I may say so), and this is of more consequence than
gentlemen and ladies can well imagine." He was then living at No. 2 Lower
Terrace, a small house of two storeys, and writes from that address, again
to Fisher, on the 4th August 1821, "I am as much here as possible with my
family. My placid and contented companion and her three infants are well.
I have got a room at a glazier's where is my large picture, and at this
little place I have many small works going on, for which purpose I have
cleared a shed in the garden, which held sand, coals, mops and brooms, and
have made it a workshop. I have done a good deal here." Lower Terrace is
within a few minutes' walk of the Heath, the scenery of which appears in
so many of Constable's paintings. He removed presently to Charlotte
Street, Fitzroy Square; one of his pictures exhibited in the Louvre made
him famous in France, and his fame was spreading in England when he went
back to Hampstead in 1826, and after staying for a while at 25 Downshire
Hill (which has since been rebuilt) was "at length fixed," as he wrote to
Fisher, "in a comfortable little house at Well Walk, Hampstead.... So
hateful is moving about to me that I could gladly exclaim, 'Here let me
take my everlasting rest.' This house is to my wife's heart's content; it
is situated on an eminence at the back of the spot in which you saw us,
and our little drawing-room commands a view unsurpassed in Europe from
Westminster Abbey to Gravesend. The dome of St. Paul's in the air seems to
realise Michael Angelo's words on seeing the Pantheon--'I will build such
a thing in the sky.'" In Constable's time the house was not numbered, but
it has been identified as the present No. 40, and after his wife's death
he kept it as an occasional residence until he died in 1837. He is buried
not far from it, in the Hampstead Churchyard.
[Illustration: JOHN KEATS]
[Illustration: CONSTABLE. CHARLOTTE STREET.]
In the same churchyard is buried Joanna Baillie, who spent the last
forty-five years of her life at Bolton House, Windmill Hill, opposite the
Hollybush Inn, and here Wordsworth, Rogers, and Scott were among her
visitors. Other famous Hampstead residents buried in this churchyard are
Mrs. Barbauld, who lived in Church Row, then near the foot of Rosslyn
Hill, and died in John Street; Sir Walter Besant, who died at Frognal End,
near the top of Frognal Gardens; and George du Maurier, who lived for
twenty-five years in Church Row and at New Grove House, by Whitestone
Pond, and dying in 1896, a year after he left Hampstead, was brought back
here to be buried.
[Illustration: JOANNA BAILLIE. WINDMILL HILL. HAMPSTEAD.]
In the house at the corner of Prince Arthur Road and the High Street, that
is now occupied by the Hampstead Subscription Library, Clarkson Stanfield
made his home for many years. He did notable work as a landscape and sea
painter and became a Royal Academician, but was best known and most
successful as a scenic artist for the theatre, and brought the art of
scene-painting to a higher level than it had ever reached before. His more
ambitious pictures are in private collections, however, his stage scenery
has had its day, and I suppose most of us remember him better as one of
Dickens's most familiar friends. He painted the scenery for Wilkie
Collins's play, _The Lighthouse_, when Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mark
Lemon, and others of their circle produced it at Tavistock House, and for
other of the plays that Dickens staged there in his "smallest theatre in
the world"; and Dickens's letters are sown with references to him. Writing
to an American friend describing the Christmas sports he had been holding
at his house, Dickens says he has purchased the entire stock-in-trade of a
conjuror, and that "in those tricks which require a confederate I am
assisted (by reason of his imperturbable good humour) by Stanfield, who
always does his part exactly the wrong way, to the unspeakable delight of
all beholders. We come out on a small scale to-night" (31st December 1842)
"at Forster's, where we see the old year out and the new one in." On the
16th January 1844 (putting _Martin Chuzzlewit_ aside) he is writing to
Forster, "I had written you a line pleading Jonas and Mrs. Gamp, but this
frosty day tempts me sorely. I am distractingly late; but I look at the
sky, think of Hampstead, and feel hideously tempted. Don't come with Mac
and fetch me. I couldn't resist if you did"; and a month later, on the
18th February, "Stanfield and Mac have come in, and we are going to
Hampstead to dinner. I leave Betsy Prig as you know, so don't you make a
scruple about leaving Mrs. Harris. We shall stroll leisurely up to give
you time to join us, and dinner will be on the table at Jack Straw's at
four"; and in less than a month, on the 5th March, "Sir, I
will--he--he--he--he--he--he--I will NOT eat with you, either at your own
house or the club. But the morning looks bright, and a walk to Hampstead
would suit me marvellously. If you should present yourself at my gate
(bringing the R.A.'s along with you) I shall not be sapparised. So no more
at this writing from poor MR. DICKENS." In June of the same year he sent
Forster the proof of a preface he had written to a book by a poor
carpenter named Overs, saying, "I wish you would read this, and give it me
again when we meet at Stanfield's to-day"; and, still in the same year,
"Stanny" is one of the friends he wishes Forster to invite to his chambers
in Lincoln's Inn Fields to hear a reading of _The Chimes_ before it is
published.
No part of London is richer in literary and artistic associations than
Hampstead. At the "Upper Flask" tavern, now known as the "Upper Heath,"
Pope, Addison, Steele, Congreve, Hogarth and the other members of the
Kit-Kat club used to meet in the eighteenth century, and Hogarth and
Addison and his friends frequently resorted to the "Bull and Bush" at
North End. Akenside lived for a while in Hampstead, and after he had left
it went to stay occasionally with his friend Mr. Dyson at Golder's Hill,
and was staying there in 1758 when he wrote his _Ode on recovering from a
fit of sickness in the Country_, beginning:--
"Thy verdant scenes, O Goulder's Hill,
Once more I seek, a languid guest."
Gay often went to Hampstead to drink the waters, at the Pump Room, in Well
Walk; Dr. Arbuthnot lived in Hampstead, where Swift and Pope were among
his visitors; Fuseli lodged in Church Row; Dr. Johnson's wife spent some
of her summer holidays at a cottage near the entrance to the Priory, and
the Doctor would tear himself away from his loved Fleet Street to pass an
occasional day or two there with her; and of recent years Robert Louis
Stevenson stayed with Sidney Colvin at Abernethy House, Mount Vernon, and
at that time Stevenson, who was then twenty-four, so far conformed to the
proprieties as to go about in "a frock coat and tall hat, which he had
once worn at a wedding."
[Illustration: STANFIELD'S HOUSE. HAMPSTEAD.]
Tennyson's mother had a house in Flask Walk; when Edward Fitzgerald was
in London, Tennyson introduced him to Dickens, and these three, taking
Thackeray with them, drove out together to Hampstead Heath. Relics of Dick
Turpin are preserved at the Spaniards Inn, a quaint, old-world hostelry
that has in different generations entertained Goldsmith, Gainsborough, Sir
Joshua Reynolds, Garrick and Constable, as well as Dickens and many of his
familiars.
[Illustration: THE UPPER FLASK. FROM THE BOWLING GREEN.]
But more intimately than with any other of the immortals Hampstead has
come to be associated with Keats and Leigh Hunt--with Keats in particular.
He was born, a good Cockney, in Moorfields, over his father's livery
stables, and in 1816 went to live with his brother Tom at No. 1 Well Walk,
next door to the "Green Man," which has been succeeded by the Wells
Tavern, and in his room here, on the 18th November 1816, when he was
one-and-twenty, wrote a sonnet _To My Brothers_:--
"Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,
And their faint cracklings o'er our silence creep
Like whispers of the household gods that keep
A gentle empire o'er fraternal souls.
And while for rhymes I search around the poles,
Your eyes are fixed, as in poetic sleep,
Upon the lore so voluble and deep
That aye at fall of night our care condoles.
This is your birthday, Tom, and I rejoice
That thus it passes smoothly, quietly:
Many such eves of gently whispering noise
May we together pass, and calmly try
What are this world's true joys--ere the great Voice
From its fair face shall bid our spirits fly."
In 1818 Keats moved to another part of Hampstead, and lodged with his
friend, Charles Armitage Brown, a retired merchant, at Wentworth Place,
now known as Lawn Bank, in John Street, which was the other day, for no
sufficient reason, renamed Keats Grove. At that date Wentworth Place was
divided into two houses, Brown renting one, and Wentworth Dilke occupying
the other; and when the Dilkes were away from home they left their house
in the possession of Mrs. Brawne, her son, and two daughters, the elder of
these daughters being the Fanny Brawne of Keats's piteous love romance.
Though he finished the writing of it, and wrote the preface to it, on a
holiday at Teignmouth, _Endymion_ was published, and most of it had been
written, whilst he was at Wentworth Place, and under this roof also he
wrote his _Eve of St. Agnes_, _Isabella_, _Hyperion_, and the _Ode to a
Nightingale_. As every one knows, the publication of _Endymion_ brought
him little but ridicule and abuse from the reviewers; but, much as this
must have wounded and mortified his sensitive nature, it was so far from
being the cause of his death, as some sentimentalists said it was, that,
as you may gather from his correspondence, it did not even discourage him.
The _Quarterly_ snubbed him as a copyist of Leigh Hunt, professed to find
_Endymion_ so tedious as to be almost unreadable, and saw nothing in it
but "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy"; _Blackwood's
Magazine_, referring to his having qualified as a surgeon, sneered "Back
to the shop, Mr. John, stick to plasters, pills, ointment-boxes;" and the
majority of critics were equally unappreciative. Byron dubbed him "a
tadpole of the Lakes," and in divers letters to John Murray says, "There
is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables that I am ashamed to
look at them. No more Keats, I entreat.... Of the praises of the little
dirty blackguard Keats in the _Edinburgh_ I shall observe, as Johnson did
when Sheridan the actor got a pension, 'What, has _he_ got a pension? Then
it is time that I should give up _mine_.' At present, all the men they
have ever praised are degraded by that insane article. Why don't they
review and praise _Solomon's Guide to Health_? It is better sense and as
much poetry as Johnny Keats." After Keats was dead, Byron changed his
opinions somewhat, and was anxious that his disparagements of him should
be suppressed. "You know very well," he writes to Murray, "that I did not
approve of Keats's poetry, or principles of poetry, or of his abuse of
Pope; but as he is dead, omit all that it said about him in any MSS. of
mine, or publication. His _Hyperion_ is a fine monument, and will keep his
name"; and he added later, "His fragment of _Hyperion_ seems actually
inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus. He is a loss to our
literature."
Keats was too fully occupied with the writing of other poems, with the
glowing raptures and black despairs of his passion for Fanny Brawne, and
the anxieties attendant upon the illness that was already wearing him
down, to give overmuch of his thoughts to the attacks of his critics;
moreover, he found consolation in the society and friendship of such men
as Cowden Clarke, Wentworth Dilke (who founded the _Athenæum_), John
Hamilton Reynolds, Haydon the painter, and Leigh Hunt, whom he frequently
visited at that cottage of his in the Vale of Health, which ought never to
have been demolished. For it was the meeting-place, too, of Keats and
Shelley, and within it on one occasion, according to Cowden Clarke, Leigh
Hunt challenged Keats, "then, and there, and to time," to write in
competition with him a sonnet on _The Grasshopper and the Cricket_, and
Keats finished his first. Passing a night there when he could not sleep,
Keats wrote his _Sleep and Poetry_; and the cottage was rich, too, in
rumours of such guests as Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge.
[Illustration: KEATS' HOUSE. HAMPSTEAD.]
Keats was introduced to Coleridge by Leigh Hunt. In 1816, when he was
trying to cure himself of the opium habit, Coleridge went to live with Mr.
Gilman, a surgeon, in a house that still stands in The Grove, Highgate,
and walking with Hunt one day in Millfield Lane, which runs on the
Highgate side of the Heath, he chanced to meet Keats, and this is his own
account of the meeting: "A loose, slack, and not well-dressed youth met me
in a lane near Highgate. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed
a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he ran back and said,
'Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand.'
'There is death in that hand,' I said when Keats was gone; yet this was, I
believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly." But another
four years were not past when Hone, the author of _The Table Book_, saw
"poor Keats, the poet of _The Pot of Basil_, sitting and sobbing his dying
breath into a handkerchief," on a bench at the end of Well Walk,
overlooking the Heath, "glancing parting looks towards the quiet landscape
he had delighted in so much."
Perhaps the best descriptions of Keats in the last four years of his life
are those given by Haydon, the painter, in his _Memoirs_, and by Leigh
Hunt in his _Autobiography_. "He was below the middle size," according to
Haydon, "with a low forehead and an eye that had an inward look perfectly
divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions.... Unable to bear the
sneers of ignorance or the attacks of envy, not having strength of mind
enough to buckle himself together like a porcupine, and present nothing
but his prickles to his enemies, he began to despond, flew to dissipation
as a relief which, after a temporary elevation of spirits, plunged him
into deeper despondency than ever. For six weeks he was scarcely sober,
and to show what a man does to gratify his habits, when once they get the
better of him, he once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could
reach with cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the 'delicious coldness
of claret in all its glory'--his own expression." Leigh Hunt writes, "He
was under the middle height; and his lower limbs were small in comparison
with the upper, but neat and well turned. His shoulders were very broad
for his size: he had a face in which energy and sensibility were
remarkably mixed up; an eager power, checked and made patient by ill
health. Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If
there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which was not
without something of a character of pugnacity. His face was rather long
than otherwise; the upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin
was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and
sensitive. At the recital of a noble action, or a beautiful thought, they
would suffuse with tears and his mouth trembled. In this there was ill
health as well as imagination, for he did not like these betrayals of
emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral courage. He once
chastised a butcher, who had been insolent, by a regular stand-up fight."
(Tradition says this fight took place in one of the narrow courts out of
the High Street, Hampstead.) "His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and
hung in natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the phrenologists,
being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity he had in common with
Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on." Add to these a
description given by one who knew him to Lord Houghton: "His eyes were
large and blue, his hair auburn; he wore it divided down the centre, and
it fell in rich masses each side of his face; his mouth was full, and less
intellectual than his other features. His countenance lives in my mind as
one of singular beauty and brightness; it had the expression as if it had
been looking on some glorious sight."
The last two years of his life at Hampstead, with their quiet happiness,
fierce unrests, passionate hopes and despairs, are all wonderfully
reflected in his letters of this period. He writes from Wentworth Place to
John Taylor, the publisher, in 1818, setting forth his poetical creed and
saying, with a clear perception of its defects, "If _Endymion_ serves me
as a pioneer, perhaps I ought to be content.... I have, I am sure, many
friends who, if I fail, will attribute any change in my life and temper to
humbleness rather than pride--to a cowering under the wings of great
poets, rather than to a bitterness that I am not appreciated. I am anxious
to get _Endymion_ printed that I may forget it and proceed." There is a
long letter to his sister in 1819, telling her of the books he has been
reading, and describing his every-day life, beginning, "The candles are
burnt down and I am using the wax taper, which has a long snuff on it--the
fire is at its last click--I am sitting with my back to it, with one foot
rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated
from the carpet. I am writing this on _The Maid's Tragedy_, which I have
read since tea with great pleasure. Besides this volume of Beaumont and
Fletcher, there are on the table two volumes of Chaucer and a new work of
Tom Moore's called _Tom Cribb's Memorial to Congress_--nothing in it."
Reading this minute little sketch of himself, it is easy to picture him
sitting late that night in his quiet room in Keats Grove; but it is the
letters to Fanny Brawne that give this house, which was then two houses,
its deepest and most living interest.
[Illustration: CONSTABLE'S HOUSE. HAMPSTEAD.]
In 1819 he writes to her, whilst he is away holidaying in the Isle of
Wight and she at Wentworth Place, "I have never known any unalloyed
happiness for many days together; the death or sickness of some one has
always spoilt my hours--and now, when none such troubles oppress me, it
is, you must confess, very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me.
Ask yourself, my love, whether you are not very cruel to have so
entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom." And again, "Your letter gave me
more delight than anything in the world but yourself could do.... I never
knew before what such love as you have made me feel was; I did not believe
in it; my fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up." And again,
"I have been in so irritable a state of health these two or three last
days, that I did not think I should be able to write this week.... I have
been, I cannot tell why, in capital spirits this last hour. What reason?
When I have to take my candle and retire to a lonely room, without the
thought, as I fall asleep, of seeing you to-morrow morning? or the next
day, or the next--it takes on the appearance of impossibility and
eternity. I will say a month--I will say I will see you in a month at
most, though no one but yourself should see me; if it be but for an hour.
I should not like to be so near you as London without being continually
with you; after having once more kissed you, Sweet, I would rather be here
alone at my task than in the bustle and hateful literary chitchat.
Meantime you must write to me--as I will every week--for your letters keep
me alive."
Back in London, making a short stay with Leigh Hunt, then living at
College Street, Kentish Town, Keats sends to Wentworth Place a letter to
Fanny Brawne, in the course of which he tells her, "My love has made me
selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but
seeing you again--my Life seems to stop there--I see no further. You have
absorbed me.... My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you." Even
when he is home again, in his own part of the Wentworth Place house, he is
writing in February 1820, "They say I must remain confined to this room
for some time. The consciousness that you love me will make a pleasant
prison of the house next to yours. You must come and see me frequently:
this evening without fail"; and again, in the same month, "You will have a
pleasant walk to-day. I shall see you pass. I shall follow you with my
eyes over the Heath. Will you come towards evening instead of before
dinner? When you are gone, 'tis past--if you do not come till the evening
I have something to look forward to all day. Come round to my window for a
moment when you have read this."
In September of that year he set out on that voyage to Italy from which he
was never to return, and whilst the ship was delayed off the Isle of
Wight, he wrote to his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, at the old
Hampstead address, "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?... I
daresay 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.... 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.... 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."
[Illustration: GEORGE DUMAURIER'S GRAVE. HAMPSTEAD.]
Because of all this, and of the reiterated longings and the heartaches
that Keats poured out in other letters that he wrote from Italy, and that
were delivered here to Armitage Brown, I always feel that Wentworth Place
is the saddest and most sacred of London's literary shrines.