Particulars of Early Life in London--Friendships and First
Poems--Henry Stephens--Felton Mathew--Cowden Clarke--Leigh Hunt: his
literary and personal influence--John Hamilton Reynolds--James
Rice--Cornelius Webb--Shelley--Haydon--Joseph Severn--Charles
Wells--Personal characteristics--Determination to publish. [1814-April
1817.]
When Keats moved from Dean Street to St Thomas's Street in the summer of
1815, he at first occupied a joint sitting-room with two senior students,
to the care of one of whom he had been recommended by Astley Cooper[13].
When they left he arranged to live in the same house with two other
students, of his own age, named George Wilson Mackereth and Henry
Stephens. The latter, who was afterwards a physician of repute near St
Albans, and later at Finchley, has left some interesting reminiscences of
the time[14]. "He attended lectures," says Mr Stephens of Keats, "and went
through the usual routine, but he had no desire to excel in that
pursuit.... Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations--the
only thing worthy the attention of superior minds--so he thought--all
other pursuits were mean and tame.... It may readily be imagined that
this feeling was accompanied by a good deal of pride and some conceit, and
that amongst mere medical students he would walk and talk as one of the
gods might be supposed to do when mingling with mortals." On the whole, it
seems, 'little Keats' was popular among his fellow-students, although
subject to occasional teasing on account of his pride, his poetry, and
even his birth as the son of a stable-keeper. Mr Stephens goes on to tell
how he himself and a student of St Bartholomew's, a merry fellow called
Newmarch, having some tincture of poetry, were singled out as companions
by Keats, with whom they used to discuss and compare verses, Keats taking
always the tone of authority, and generally disagreeing with their tastes.
He despised Pope, and admired Byron, but delighted especially in Spenser,
caring more in poetry for the beauty of imagery, description, and simile,
than for the interest of action or passion. Newmarch used sometimes to
laugh at Keats and his flights,--to the indignation of his brothers, who
came often to see him, and treated him as a person to be exalted, and
destined to exalt the family name. Questions of poetry apart, continues Mr
Stephens, he was habitually gentle and pleasant, and in his life steady
and well-behaved--"his absolute devotion to poetry prevented his having
any other taste or indulging in any vice." Another companion of Keats's
early London days, who sympathized with his literary tastes, was a certain
George Felton Mathew, the son of a tradesman whose family showed the young
medical student some hospitality. "Keats and I," wrote in 1848 Mr
Mathew,--then a supernumerary official on the Poor-Law Board, struggling
meekly under the combined strain of a precarious income, a family of
twelve children, and a turn for the interpretation of prophecy,--"Keats
and I, though about the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in
many respects as different as two individuals could be. He enjoyed good
health--a fine flow of animal spirits--was fond of company--could amuse
himself admirably with the frivolities of life--and had great confidence
in himself. I, on the other hand, was languid and melancholy--fond of
repose--thoughtful beyond my years--and diffident to the last degree....
He was of the sceptical and republican school--an advocate for the
innovations which were making progress in his time--a faultfinder with
everything established. I on the other hand hated controversy and
dispute--dreaded discord and disorder"[15]--and Keats, our good Mr
Timorous farther testifies, was very kind and amiable, always ready to
apologize for shocking him. As to his poetical predilections, the
impression left on Mr Mathew quite corresponds with that recorded by Mr
Stephens:--"he admired more the external decorations than felt the deep
emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of
elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the
pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never
observed the tears nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme
sensibility."
The exact order and chronology of Keats's own first efforts in poetry it
is difficult to trace. They were certainly neither precocious nor
particularly promising. The circumstantial account of Brown above quoted
compels us to regard the lines _In Imitation of Spenser_ as the earliest
of all, and as written at Edmonton about the end of 1813 or beginning of
1814. They are correct and melodious, and contain few of those archaic or
experimental eccentricities of diction which we shall find abounding a
little later in Keats's work. Although, indeed, the poets whom Keats loved
the best both first and last were those of the Elizabethan age, it is
clear that his own earliest verses were modelled timidly on the work of
writers nearer his own time. His professedly Spenserian lines resemble not
so much Spenser as later writers who had written in his measure, and of
these not the latest, Byron[16], but rather such milder minstrels as
Shenstone, Thomson, and Beattie, or most of all perhaps the sentimental
Irish poetess Mrs Tighe; whose _Psyche_ had become very popular since her
death, and by its richness of imagery, and flowing and musical
versification, takes a place, now too little recognised, among the pieces
preluding the romantic movement of the time. That Keats was familiar with
this lady's work is proved by his allusion to it in the lines, themselves
very youthfully turned in the tripping manner of Tom Moore, which he
addressed about this time to some ladies who had sent him a present of a
shell. His two elegiac stanzas _On Death_, assigned by George Keats to the
year 1814, are quite in an eighteenth-century style and vein of
moralizing. Equally so is the address _To Hope_ of February 1815, with its
'relentless fair' and its personified abstractions, 'fair Cheerfulness,'
'Disappointment, parent of Despair,' 'that fiend Despondence,' and the
rest. And once more, in the ode _To Apollo_ of the same date, the voice
with which this young singer celebrates his Elizabethan masters is an
echo not of their own voice but rather of Gray's:--
"Thou biddest Shakspeare wave his hand,
And quickly forward spring
The Passions--a terrific band--
And each vibrates the string
That with its tyrant temper best accords,
While from their Master's lips pour forth the inspiring words.
A silver trumpet Spenser blows,
And, as its martial notes to silence flee,
From a virgin chorus flows
A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity.
'Tis still! Wild warblings from the Æolian lyre
Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire."
The pieces above cited are all among the earliest of Keats's work, written
either at Edmonton or during the first year of his life in London. To the
same class no doubt belongs the inexpert and boyish, almost girlish,
sentimental sonnet _To Byron_, and probably that also, which is but a
degree better, _To Chatterton_ (both only posthumously printed). The more
firmly handled but still mediocre sonnet on Leigh Hunt's release from
prison brings us again to a fixed date and a recorded occasion in the
young poet's life. It was on either the 2nd or the 3rd of February, 1815,
that the brothers Hunt were discharged after serving out the term of
imprisonment to which they had been condemned on the charge of libelling
the Prince Regent two years before. Young Cowden Clarke, like so many
other friends of letters and of liberty, had gone to offer his respects to
Leigh Hunt in Surrey jail; and the acquaintance thus begun had warmed
quickly into friendship. Within a few days of Hunt's release, Clarke
walked in from Enfield to call on him (presumably at the lodging he
occupied at this time in the Edgware Road). On his return Clarke met
Keats, who walked part of the way home with him, and as they parted, says
Clarke, "he turned and gave me the sonnet entitled _Written on the day
that Mr Leigh Hunt left prison_. This I feel to be the first proof I had
received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I
recollect the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it!
There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with
life."
Not long afterwards Cowden Clarke left Enfield, and came to settle in
London. Keats found him out in his lodgings at Clerkenwell, and the two
were soon meeting as often and reading together as eagerly as ever. One of
the first books they attacked was a borrowed folio copy of Chapman's
Homer. After a night's enthusiastic study, Clarke found when he came down
to breakfast the next morning, that Keats, who had only left him in the
small hours, had already had time to compose and send him from the Borough
the sonnet, now so famous as to be almost hackneyed, _On First Looking
into Chapman's Homer_;--
"Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many Western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
The date of the incident cannot be precisely fixed; but it was when nights
were short in the summer of 1815. The seventh line of the sonnet is an
afterthought: in the original copy sent to Cowden Clarke it stood more
baldly, 'Yet could I never tell what men might mean.' Keats here for the
first time approves himself a poet indeed. The concluding sestet is almost
unsurpassed, nor can there be a finer instance of the alchemy of genius
than the image of the explorer, wherein a stray reminiscence of schoolboy
reading (with a mistake, it seems, as to the name, which should be Balboa
and not Cortez, but what does it matter?) is converted into the perfection
of appropriate poetry.
One of the next services which the ever zealous and affectionate Cowden
Clarke did his young friend was to make him personally known to Leigh
Hunt. The acquaintance carried with it in the sequel some disadvantages
and even penalties, but at first was a source of unmixed encouragement and
pleasure. It is impossible rightly to understand the career of Keats if we
fail to realise the various modes in which it was affected by his
intercourse with Hunt. The latter was the elder of the two by eleven
years. He was the son, by marriage with an American wife, of an eloquent
and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher of West
Indian origin, who had chiefly exercised his vocation in the northern
suburbs of London. Leigh Hunt was brought up at Christ's Hospital, about a
dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, and gained at sixteen some
slight degree of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile
poems. A few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being
then a clerk in the War Office; an occupation which he abandoned at
twenty-four (in 1808) in order to join his brother John Hunt in the
conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper. For five years the managers of that
journal helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of
Eldon and of Castlereagh, with a dexterous brisk audacity, and a perfect
sincerity, if not profoundness, of conviction. At last they were caught
tripping, and condemned to two years' imprisonment for strictures ruled
libellous, and really stinging as well as just, on the character and
person of the Prince Regent. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with
cheerful fortitude, and issued from it a sort of hero. Liberal statesmen,
philosophers, and writers pressed to offer him their sympathy and society
in prison, and his engaging presence, and affluence of genial
conversation, charmed all who were brought in contact with him. Tall,
straight, slender, and vivacious, with curly black hair, bright coal-black
eyes, and 'nose of taste,' Leigh Hunt was ever one of the most winning of
companions, full of kindly smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and
ideas, with an infinity of pleasant things to say of his own, yet the most
sympathetic and deferential of listeners. If in some matters he was far
too easy, and especially in that of money obligations, which he shrank
neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circumstances made him nearly
always a receiver,--still men of sterner fibre than Hunt have more lightly
abandoned graver convictions than his, and been far less ready to suffer
for what they believed. Liberals could not but contrast his smiling
steadfastness under persecution with the apostasy, as in the heat of the
hour they considered it, of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. In
domestic life no man was more amiable and devoted under difficulties; and
none was better loved by his friends, or requited them, so far as the
depth of his nature went, with a truer warmth and loyalty. His literary
industry was incessant, hardly second to that of Southey himself. He had
the liveliest faculty of enjoyment, coupled with a singular quickness of
intellectual apprehension for the points and qualities of what he enjoyed;
and for the gentler pleasures, graces, and luxuries (to use a word he
loved) of literature, he is the most accomplished of guides and
interpreters. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy penetration,
and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those faults to which
Coleridge and De Quincey, with their more philosophic powers and method,
were subject, the faults of pedantry and effort. The infirmity of Leigh
Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. "Incomparable," according to Lamb's
well-known phrase, "as a fire-side companion," it was his misfortune to
carry too much of the fire-side tone into literature, and to affect both
in prose and verse, but much more in the latter, an air of chatty
familiarity and ease which passes too easily into Cockney pertness.
A combination of accidents, political, personal, and literary, caused this
writer of amiable memory and second-rate powers to exercise, about the
time of which we are writing, a determining influence both on the work and
the fortunes of stronger men. And first of his influence on their work. He
was as enthusiastic a student of 'our earlier and nobler school of poetry'
as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the
characteristic excellences of the 'French school,' the school of polished
artifice and restraint which had come in since Dryden, he was not less
bent on its overthrow, and on the return of English poetry to the paths of
nature and freedom. But he had his own conception of the manner in which
this return should be effected. He did not admit that Wordsworth with his
rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. "It
was his intention," he wrote in prison, "by the beginning of next year to
bring out a piece of some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce
to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various
and legitimate harmony of the English heroic." The result of this
intention was the _Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and
published a year after his release, in February or March, 1816. "With the
endeavour," so he repeated himself in the preface, "to recur to a freer
spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater
importance,--that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language."
In versification Hunt's aim was to bring back into use the earlier form of
the rhymed English decasyllabic or 'heroic' couplet. The innovating poets
of the time had abandoned this form of verse (Wordsworth and Coleridge
using it only in their earliest efforts, before 1796); while the others
who still employed it, as Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, and Byron, adhered,
each in his manner, to the isolated couplet and hammering rhymes with
which the English ear had been for more than a century exclusively
familiar. The two contrasted systems of handling the measure may best be
understood if we compare the rhythm of a poem written in it to one of
those designs in hangings or wall-papers which are made up of two
different patterns in combination: a rigid or geometrical ground pattern,
with a second, flowing or free pattern winding in and out of it. The
regular or ground-pattern, dividing the field into even spaces, will stand
for the fixed or strictly metrical divisions of the verse into equal
pairs of rhyming lines; while the flowing or free pattern stands for its
other divisions--dependent not on metre but on the sense--into clauses and
periods of variable length and structure. Under the older system of
versification the sentence or period had been allowed to follow its own
laws, with a movement untrammelled by that of the metre; and the beauty of
the result depended upon the skill and feeling with which this free
element of the pattern was made to play about and interweave itself with
the fixed element, the flow and divisions of the sentence now crossing and
now coinciding with those of the metre, the sense now drawing attention to
the rhyme and now withholding it. For examples of this system and of its
charm we have only to turn at random to Chaucer:--
"I-clothed was sche fresh for to devyse.
Hir yelwe hair was browded in a tresse,
Byhynde her bak, a yerdë long, I gesse,
And in the garden as the sonne upriste
She walketh up and down, and as hir liste
She gathereth floures, party white and reede,
To make a sotil garland for here heede,
And as an aungel hevenlyche sche song."
Chaucer's conception of the measure prevails throughout the Elizabethan
age, but not exclusively or uniformly. Some poets are more inobservant of
the metrical division than he, and keep the movement of their periods as
independent of it as possible; closing a sentence anywhere rather than
with the close of the couplet, and making use constantly of the
_enjambement_, or way of letting the sense flow over from one line to
another, without pause or emphasis on the rhyme-word. Others show an
opposite tendency, especially in epigrammatic or sententious passages, to
clip their sentences to the pattern of the metre, fitting single
propositions into single lines or couplets, and letting the stress fall
regularly on the rhyme. This principle gradually gained ground during the
seventeenth century, as every one knows, and prevails strongly in the work
of Dryden. But Dryden has two methods which he freely employs for varying
the monotony of his couplets: in serious narrative or didactic verse, the
use of the triplet and the Alexandrine, thus:--
"Full bowls of wine, of honey, milk, and blood
Were poured upon the pile of burning wood,
And hissing flames receive, and hungry lick the food.
Then thrice the mounted squadrons ride around
The fire, and Arcite's name they thrice resound:
'Hail and farewell,' they shouted thrice amain,
Thrice facing to the left, and thrice they turned again--:"
and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also with the
Elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes:--
"I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye;
I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly.
Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil;
I'm what I was, a little harmless devil."
In the hands of Pope, the poetical legislator of the following century,
these expedients are discarded, and the fixed and purely metrical element
in the design is suffered to regulate and control the other element
entirely. The sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and
clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease,
are compelled mechanically to coincide with and repeat the metrical
divisions of the verse. To take a famous instance, and from a passage not
sententious, but fanciful and discursive:--
"Some in the fields of purest æther play,
And bask and whiten in the blaze of day.
Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high,
Or roll the planets through the boundless sky.
Some less refined, beneath the moon's pale light
Pursue the stars that shoot across the night,
Or seek the mists in grosser air below,
Or dip their pinions in the painted bow,
Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,
Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain."
Leigh Hunt's theory was that Pope, with all his skill, had spoiled instead
of perfecting his instrument, and that the last true master of the heroic
couplet had been Dryden, on whom the verse of _Rimini_ is avowedly
modelled. The result is an odd blending of the grave and the colloquial
cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in
either:--
"The prince, at this, would bend on her an eye
Cordial enough, and kiss her tenderly;
Nor, to say truly, was he slow in common
To accept the attentions of this lovely woman,
But the meantime he took no generous pains,
By mutual pleasing, to secure his gains;
He entered not, in turn, in her delights,
Her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights;
Nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he
Unless his pride was roused by company;
Or when to please him, after martial play,
She strained her lute to some old fiery lay
Of fierce Orlando, or of Ferumbras,
Or Ryan's cloak, or how by the red grass
In battle you might know where Richard was."
It is usually said that to the example thus set by Leigh Hunt in _Rimini_
is due the rhythmical form alike of _Endymion_ and _Epipsychidion_, of
Keats's _Epistles_ to his friends and Shelley's _Letter to Maria
Gisborne_. Certainly the _Epistles_ of Keats, both as to sentiment and
rhythm, are very much in Hunt's manner. But the earliest of them, that to
G. F. Mathew, is dated Nov. 1815: when _Rimini_ was not yet published, and
when it appears Keats did not yet know Hunt personally. He may indeed have
known his poem in MS., through Clarke or others. Or the likeness of his
work to Hunt's may have arisen independently: as to style, from a natural
affinity of feeling: and as to rhythm, from a familiarity with the
disyllabic rhyme and the 'overflow' as used by some of the Elizabethan
writers, particularly by Spenser in _Mother Hubbard's Tale_ and by Browne
in _Britannia's Pastorals_. At all events the appearance of _Rimini_
tended unquestionably to encourage and confirm him in his practice.
As to Hunt's success with his 'ideas of what is natural in style,' and his
'free and idiomatic cast of language' to supersede the styles alike of
Pope and Wordsworth, the specimen of his which we have given is perhaps
enough. The taste that guided him so well in appreciating the works of
others deserted him often in original composition, but nowhere so
completely as in _Rimini_. The piece indeed is not without agreeable
passages of picturesque colour and description, but for the rest, the
pleasant creature does but exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his
prose, redoubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, and
handling the great passions of the theme with a tea-party manner and
vocabulary that are intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any
departure from the outworn poetical conventions of the eighteenth century,
found, indeed, something to praise in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_: and ladies
are said to have wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine: but what,
one can only ask, must be the sensibilities of the human being who can
endure to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and
Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like this?--
"What need I tell of lovely lips and eyes,
A clipsome waist, and bosom's balmy rise?--"
"How charming, would he think, to see her here,
How heightened then, and perfect would appear
The two divinest things the world has got,
A lovely woman in a rural spot."
When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and
instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a
familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it
need not be said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred
strain as this: but Keats at first falls, or is near falling, into it more
than once.
Next as to the influence which Leigh Hunt involuntarily exercised on his
friends' fortunes and their estimation by the world. We have seen how he
found himself, in prison and for some time after his release, a kind of
political hero on the liberal side, a part for which nature had by no
means fitted him. This was in itself enough to mark him out as a special
butt for Tory vengeance: yet that vengeance would hardly have been so
inveterate as it was but for other secondary causes. During his
imprisonment Leigh Hunt had reprinted from the _Reflector_, with notes and
additions, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse called the _Feast of the
Poets_, which he had written about two years before. In it Apollo is
represented as convoking the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to
the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper. Some of those who
present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others he cordially
welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. Moore and
Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof,
Coleridge and Wordsworth chidden and dismissed. The criticisms are not
more short-sighted than those even of just and able men commonly are on
their contemporaries. The bitterness of the 'Lost Leader' feeling to which
we have referred accounts for much of Hunt's disparagement of the Lake
writers, while in common with all liberals he was prejudiced against Scott
as a conspicuous high Tory and friend to kings. But he quite acknowledged
the genius, while he condemned the defection, and also what he thought the
poetical perversities, of Wordsworth. His treatment of Scott, on the other
hand, is idly flippant and patronising. Now it so happened that of the two
champions who were soon after to wield, one the bludgeon, and the other
the dagger, of Tory criticism in Edinburgh,--I mean Wilson and
Lockhart,--Wilson was the cordial friend and admirer of Wordsworth, and
Lockhart a man of many hatreds but one great devotion, and that devotion
was to Scott. Hence a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem
paradoxical rancour with which the gentle Hunt, and Keats as his friend
and supposed follower, were by-and-bye to be persecuted in _Blackwood_.
To go back to the point at which Hunt and Keats first became known to each
other. Cowden Clarke began by carrying up to Hunt, who had now moved from
the Edgware Road to a cottage in the Vale of Health at Hampstead, a few of
Keats's poems in manuscript. Horace Smith was with Hunt when the young
poet's work was shown him. Both were eager in its praises, and in
questions concerning the person and character of the author. Cowden Clarke
at Hunt's request brought Keats to call on him soon afterwards, and has
left a vivid account of their pleasant welcome and conversation. The
introduction seems to have taken place early in the spring of 1816[17].
Keats immediately afterwards became intimate in the Hampstead household;
and for the next year or two Hunt's was the strongest intellectual
influence to which he was subject. So far as opinions were concerned,
those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been partly formed in boyhood
by Leigh Hunt's writings in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed sceptic
as to established creeds, and supplied their place with a private gospel
of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his
own sunny temperament, and partly by the hopeful doctrines of
eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy
of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and optimistic view of things, and he
had a mind naturally unapt for dogma:--ready to entertain and appreciate
any set of ideas according as his imagination recognised their beauty or
power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth.
In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in
common. Both alike were given to 'luxuriating' somewhat effusively and
fondly over the 'deliciousness' of whatever they liked in art, books, or
nature. To the every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt
brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception, and acuteness
of sensuous and imaginative enjoyment, which in Keats were intense beyond
parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also felt with Keats the
undying charm of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about
this time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some,
less adequate, of Homer. The poets Hunt loved best were Ariosto and the
other Italian masters of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style; and in
English he was devoted to Keats's own favourite Spenser.
The name of Spenser is often coupled with that of 'Libertas,' 'the lov'd
Libertas,' meaning Leigh Hunt, in the verses written by Keats at this
time. He attempts, in some of these verses, to embody the spirit of the
_Faerie Queene_ in the metre of _Rimini_, and in others to express in the
same form the pleasures of nature as he felt them in straying about the
beautiful, then rural Hampstead woods and slopes. In the summer of 1816 he
seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the Vale of Health, where a
bed was made up for him in the library. In one poem he dilates at length
on the associations suggested by the busts and knick-knacks in the room;
and the sonnet beginning, 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and
there', records pleasantly his musings as he walked home from his friend's
house one night in winter. We find him presenting Hunt with a crown of
ivy, and receiving a set of sonnets from him in return. Or they would
challenge each other to the composition of rival pieces on a chosen theme.
Cowden Clarke, in describing one such occasion in December 1816, when they
each wrote to time a sonnet _on the Grasshopper and Cricket_, has left us
a pleasant picture of their relations:--
"The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences
which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard
and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious
encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line:--
'The poetry of earth is never dead.'
"Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth
and eleventh lines:--
'On a lone winter morning, when the frost
Hath wrought a silence'--
"Ah that's perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation
on the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and
torpidity."
Through Leigh Hunt Keats was before long introduced to a number of
congenial spirits. Among them he attached himself especially to one John
Hamilton Reynolds, a poetic aspirant who, though a year younger than
himself, had preceded him with his first literary venture. Reynolds was
born at Shrewsbury, and his father settled afterwards in London, as
writing-master at the Blue Coat School. He lacked health and energy, but
has left the reputation of a brilliant playful wit, and the evidence of a
charming character and no slight literary talent. He held a clerkship in
an Insurance office, and lived in Little Britain with his family,
including three sisters with whom Keats was also intimate, and the eldest
of whom afterwards married Thomas Hood. His earliest poems show him
inspired feelingly enough with the new romance and nature sentiment of the
time. One, _Safie_, is an indifferent imitation of Byron in his then
fashionable Oriental vein: much better work appears in a volume published
in the year of Keats's death, and partly prompted by the writer's
relations with him. In a lighter strain, Reynolds wrote a musical
entertainment which was brought out in 1819 at what is now the Lyceum
theatre, and about the same time offended Wordsworth with an anticipatory
parody of _Peter Bell_, which Byron assumed to be the work of Moore. In
1820 he produced a spirited sketch in prose and verse purporting to
relate, under the name _Peter Corcoran_, the fortunes of an amateur of the
prize-ring; and a little later, in conjunction with Hood, the volume of
anonymous _Odes and Addresses to Eminent Persons_ which Coleridge on its
appearance declared confidently to be the work of Lamb. But Reynolds had
early given up the hope of living by literature, and accepted the offer of
an opening in business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell
sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakspeare which he gave to Keats, and in
1821 he writes again,
"As time increases
I give up drawling verse for drawing leases."
In point of fact Reynolds continued for years to contribute to the _London
Magazine_ and other reviews, and to work occasionally in conjunction with
Hood. But neither in literature nor law did he attain a position
commensurate with the promise of his youth. Starting level, at the time of
which we speak, with men who are now in the first rank of fame,--with
Keats and Shelley,--he died in 1852 as Clerk of the County at Newport,
Isle of Wight, and it is only in association with Keats that his name will
live. Not only was he one of the warmest friends Keats had, entertaining
from the first an enthusiastic admiration for his powers, as a sonnet
written early in their acquaintance proves[18], but also one of the
wisest, and by judicious advice more than once saved him from a mistake.
In connection with the name of Reynolds among Keats's associates must be
mentioned that of his inseparable friend James Rice, a young solicitor of
literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or worse in health,
but always, in Keats's words, "coming on his legs again like a cat"; ever
cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and indefatigable in
good offices to those about him: "dear noble generous James Rice," records
Dilke,--"the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest
men I ever knew." Besides Reynolds, another and more insignificant rhyming
member of Hunt's set, when Keats first joined it, was one Cornelius Webb,
remembered now, if remembered at all, by _Blackwood's_ derisory quotation
of his lines on--
"Keats,
The Muses' son of promise, and what feats
He yet may do"--
as well as by a disparaging allusion in one of Keats's own later letters.
He disappeared early from the circle, but not before he had caught enough
of its spirit to write sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost
be taken for the work of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his
weak moments[19]. For some years afterwards Webb served as press-reader in
the printing-office of Messrs Clowes, being charged especially with the
revision of the _Quarterly_ proofs. Towards 1830--1840 he re-appeared in
literature, as Cornelius 'Webbe', author of the _Man about Town_ and other
volumes of cheerful gossipping Cockney essays, to which the _Quarterly_
critics extended a patronizing notice.
An acquaintance more interesting to posterity which Keats made a few
months later, at Leigh Hunt's, was that of Shelley, his senior by only
three years. During the harrowing period of Shelley's life which followed
the suicide of his first wife--when his principle of love a law to itself
had in action entailed so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his
own morality had brought him into such harsh collision with the
world's--the kindness and affection of Leigh Hunt were among his chief
consolations. After his marriage with Mary Godwin, he flitted often, alone
or with his wife, between Great Marlow and Hampstead, where Keats met him
early in the spring of 1817. "Keats," says Hunt, did not take to Shelley
as kindly as Shelley did to him, and adds the comment: "Keats, being a
little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in
every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." "He was haughty, and had a
fierce hatred of rank," says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his
pride had not been aroused by anticipation, Keats had a genius for
friendship, but towards Shelley we find him in fact maintaining a tone of
reserve, and even of something like moral and intellectual patronage: at
first, no doubt, by way of defence against the possibility of social or
material patronage on the other's part: but he should soon have learnt
better than to apprehend anything of the kind from one whose delicacy,
according to all evidence, was as perfect and unmistakeable as his
kindness. Of Shelley's kindness Keats had in the sequel sufficient proof:
in the meantime, until Shelley went abroad the following year, the two met
often at Hunt's without becoming really intimate. Pride and social
sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy
between them, and that Keats, with his strong vein of every-day humanity,
sense, and humour, and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as
much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and accents of Shelley,
his passionate negation of the world's creeds and the world's law, and his
intense proselytizing ardour.
It was also at Hunt's house that Keats for the first time met by
pre-arrangement, in the beginning of November 1816, the painter Haydon,
whose influence soon became hardly second to that of Hunt himself. Haydon
was now thirty. He had lately been victorious in one of the two great
objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory
in the other. He had been mainly instrumental in getting the pre-eminence
of the Elgin marbles among the works of the sculptor's art acknowledged in
the teeth of hostile cliques, and their acquisition for the nation
secured. This is Haydon's chief real title to the regard of posterity. His
other and life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to
take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the
crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His
indomitable high-flaming energy and industry, his strenuous self-reliance,
his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his
self-assertion and of his fierce oppugnancy against the academic powers,
even his unabashed claims for support on friends, patrons, and society at
large, had won for him much convinced or half-convinced attention and
encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of
dilettantism and fashion. His first two great pictures, 'Dentatus' and
'Macbeth', had been dubiously received; his last, the 'Judgment of
Solomon', with acclamation; he was now busy on one more ambitious than
all, 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' and while as usual sunk deep in
debt, was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in
truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of
the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he
possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely
exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. "Never," wrote he about this
time, "have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future
greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and
ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming
flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and
shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God."
But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of
genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties
which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to
Haydon: its vital gifts of choice and of creation, its magic power of
working on the materials offered it by experience, its felicity of touch
and insight, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an
occasional bold conception, or a touch of craftsmanship caught from
greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to
immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of
true heroic art but of rodomontade. Even in drawing from the Elgin
marbles, Haydon fails almost wholly to express the beauties which he
enthusiastically perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety
of the original. Very much better is his account of them in words: as
indeed Haydon's chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best
instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know with
what fluent, effective, if often overcharged force and vividness of style
he can relate an experience or touch off a character. But in this, the
literary, form of expression also, as often as he flies higher, and tries
to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied
void turgidity, and proof of a commonplace mind, as in his paintings.
Take for instance, in relation to Keats himself, Haydon's profound
admonition to him as follows:--"God bless you, my dear Keats! do not
despair; collect incident, study character, read Shakspere, and trust in
Providence, and you will do, you must:" or the following precious
expansion of an image in one of the poet's sonnets on the Elgin
marbles:--"I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable
to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he
must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling
sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing
angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless
wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects
of their seeking"--
But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those
he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his temperament, and not
his essential commonness of mind and faculty, that impressed his
associates as they impressed himself. The most distinguished spirits of
the time were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by
him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others
after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of
purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of
thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and
protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for
deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies', and the like. "I always rose up
from my knees," he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, "with a refreshed
fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me
streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." And he
was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both
particulars, lecturing them on faith and conduct while he was living, it
might be, on their bounty. Experience of these qualities partly alienated
Keats from him in the long run. But at first sight Haydon had much to
attract the spirits of ardent youth about him as a leader, and he and
Keats were mutually delighted when they met. Each struck fire from the
other, and they quickly became close friends and comrades. After an
evening of high talk at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th
of November, 1816, the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his
name with those of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:--
"Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the
following:--
Great spirits now on earth are sojourning:
He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,
Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake,
Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing:
He of the rose, the violet, the spring,
The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake,
And lo! whose steadfastness would never take
A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering.
And other spirits there are standing apart
Upon the forehead of the age to come;
These, these will give the world another heart,
And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings in the human mart?
Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb."
Haydon was not unused to compliments of this kind. The three well-known
sonnets of Wordsworth had been addressed to him a year or two before; and
about the same time as Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds also wrote him a
sonnet of enthusiastic sympathy and admiration. In his reply to Keats he
proposed to hand on the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which "puts
me," answers Keats, "out of breath--you know with what reverence I would
send my well-wishes to him." Haydon suggested moreover what I cannot but
think the needless and regrettable mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out
the words after 'workings' in the last line but one. The poet, however,
accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision. Two
other sonnets, which Keats wrote at this time, after visiting the Elgin
marbles with his new friend, are indifferent poetically, but do credit to
his sincerity in that he refuses to go into stock raptures on the subject,
confessing his inability rightly to grasp or analyse the impressions he
had received. By the spring of the following year his intimacy with Haydon
was at its height, and we find the painter giving his young friend a
standing invitation to his studio in Great Marlborough Street, declaring
him dearer than a brother, and praying that their hearts may be buried
together.
To complete the group of Keats's friends in these days, we have to think
of two or three others known to him otherwise than through Hunt, and not
belonging to the Hunt circle. Among these were the family and friends of a
Miss Georgiana Wylie, to whom George Keats was attached. She was the
daughter of a navy officer, with wit, sentiment, and an attractive
irregular cast of beauty, and Keats on his own account had a great liking
for her. On Valentine's day, 1816, we find him writing, for George to send
her, the first draft of the lines beginning, 'Hadst thou lived in days of
old,' afterwards amplified and published in his first volume[20]. Through
the Wylies Keats became acquainted with a certain William Haslam, who was
afterwards one of his own and his brothers' best friends, but whose
character and person remain indistinct to us; and through Haslam with
Joseph Severn, then a very young and struggling student of art. Severn was
the son of an engraver, and to the despair of his father had determined to
be himself a painter. He had a talent also for music, a strong love of
literature, and doubtless something already of that social charm which Mr
Ruskin describes in him when they first met five-and-twenty years later at
Rome[21]. From the moment of their introduction Severn found in Keats his
very ideal of the poetical character realized, and attached himself to him
with an admiring affection.
A still younger member of the Keats circle was Charles Wells, afterwards
author of _Stories after Nature_, and of that singular and strongly
imagined Biblical drama or 'dramatic poem' of _Joseph and his Brethren_,
which having fallen dead in its own day has been resuscitated by a group
of poets and critics in ours. Wells had been a school companion of Tom
Keats at Enfield, and was now living with his family in Featherstone
buildings. He has been described by those who knew him as a sturdy,
boisterous, blue-eyed and red-headed lad, distinguished in those days
chiefly by an irrepressible spirit of fun and mischief. He was only about
fifteen when he sent to John Keats the present of roses acknowledged in
the sonnet beginning, 'As late I rambled in the happy fields.' A year or
two later Keats quarrelled with him for a practical joke played on Tom
Keats without due consideration for his state of health; and the _Stories
after Nature_, published in 1822, are said to have been written in order
to show Keats "that he too could do something."
Thus by his third winter in London our obscurely-born and half-schooled
young medical student found himself fairly launched in a world of art,
letters, and liberal aspirations, and living in familiar intimacy with
some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the brightest and most
ardent spirits of the time. His youth, origin, and temperament alike saved
him from anything but a healthy relation of equality with his younger, and
deference towards his elder, companions. But the power and the charm of
genius were already visibly upon him. Portraits both verbal and other
exist in abundance, enabling us to realise his presence and the impression
which he made. "The character and expression of his features," it is said,
"would arrest even the casual passenger in the street." A small, handsome,
ardent-looking youth--the stature little over five feet: the figure
compact and well-turned, with the neck thrust eagerly forward, carrying a
strong and shapely head set off by thickly clustering gold-brown hair: the
features powerful, finished, and mobile: the mouth rich and wide, with an
expression at once combative and sensitive in the extreme: the forehead
not high, but broad and strong: the eyebrows nobly arched, and eyes
hazel-brown, liquid-flashing, visibly inspired--"an eye that had an inward
look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." "Keats
was the only man I ever met who seemed and looked conscious of a high
calling, except Wordsworth." These words are Haydon's, and to the same
effect Leigh Hunt:--"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." It is noticeable that
his friends, whenever they begin to describe his looks, go off in this way
to tell of the feelings and the soul that shone through them. To return to
Haydon:--"he was in his glory in the fields. The humming of a bee, the
sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature
tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed, and his mouth quivered."
In like manner George Keats:--"John's eyes moistened, and his lip
quivered, at the relation of any tale of generosity or benevolence or
noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress;" and a shrewd and
honoured survivor of those days, "herself of many poets the frequent theme
and valued friend,"--need I name Mrs Procter?--has recorded the impression
the same eyes have left upon her, as those of one who had been looking on
some glorious sight[22].
In regard to his social qualities, Keats is said, and owns himself, to
have been not always perfectly well-conditioned or at his ease in the
company of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was
pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by
turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and
unaffected. If the conversation did not interest him he was apt to draw
apart, and sit by himself in the window, peering into vacancy; so that the
window-seat came to be recognized as his place. His voice was rich and
low, and when he joined in discussion, it was usually with an eager but
gentle animation, while his occasional bursts of fiery indignation at
wrong or meanness bore no undue air of assumption, and failed not to
command respect. His powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are said to
have been great, and never used unkindly.
Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have described,
Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check, but rather
everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and trembling,
passion for the poetic life. His guardian, as we have said, of course was
adverse: but his brothers, including George, the practical and sensible
one of the family, were warmly with him, as his allusions and addresses to
them both in prose and verse, and their own many transcripts from his
compositions, show. In August 1816 we find him addressing from Margate a
sonnet and a poetical Epistle in terms of the utmost affection and
confidence to George. About the same time he gave up his lodgings in St
Thomas's Street to go and live with his brothers in the Poultry; and in
November he composes another sonnet on their fraternal fire-side
occupations. Poetry and the love of poetry were at this period in the air.
It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read: a
time of literary excitement, expectancy, and discussion, such as England
has not known since. In such an atmosphere Keats soon found himself
induced to try his fortune and his powers with the rest. The encouragement
of his friends was indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. It was Leigh
Hunt who first brought him before the world in print, publishing without
comment, in the _Examiner_ for the 5th of May, 1816, his sonnet beginning,
'O Solitude! if I with thee must dwell,' and on the 1st of December in the
same year the sonnet on Chapman's Homer. This Hunt accompanied by some
prefatory remarks on the poetical promise of its author, associating with
his name those of Shelley and Reynolds. It was by the praise of Hunt in
this paper, says Mr Stephens, that Keats's fate was sealed. But already
the still more ardent encouragement of Haydon, if more was wanted, had
come to add fuel to the fire. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the
Hampstead cottage, in the City lodgings of the three brothers, and in the
convivial gatherings of their friends, it was determined that John Keats
should put forth a volume of his poems. A sympathetic firm of publishers
was found in the Olliers. The volume was printed, and the last
proof-sheets were brought one evening to the author amid a jovial company,
with the intimation that if a dedication was to be added the copy must be
furnished at once. Keats going to one side quickly produced the sonnet _To
Leigh Hunt Esqr._, with its excellent opening and its weak conclusion:--
"Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away;
For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathèd incense do we see upborne
Into the East to meet the smiling day:
No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay,
In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,
Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn
The shrine of Flora in her early May.
But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please,
With these poor offerings, a man like thee."
With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the old
pagan world, and of gratitude for present friendship, the young poet's
first venture was sent forth in the month of March 1817.