Excursion to Isle of Wight, Margate, and Canterbury--Summer at
Hampstead--New Friends: Dilke: Brown: Bailey--With Bailey at
Oxford--Return: Old Friends at Odds--Burford Bridge--Winter at
Hampstead--Wordsworth: Lamb: Hazlitt--Poetical Activity--Spring at
Teignmouth--Studies and Anxieties--Marriage and Emigration of George
Keats. [April, 1817-May, 1818.]
As soon as Keats reached the Isle of Wight, on April 16, 1817, he went to
see Shanklin and Carisbrooke, and after some hesitation between the two,
decided on a lodging at the latter place. The next day he writes to
Reynolds that he has spent the morning arranging the books and prints he
had brought with him, adding to the latter one of Shakspere which he had
found in the passage and which had particularly pleased him. He speaks
with enthusiasm of the beauties of Shanklin, but in a postscript written
the following day, mentions that he has been nervous from want of sleep,
and much haunted by the passage in _Lear_, 'Do you not hear the
sea?'--adding without farther preface his own famous sea-sonnet
beginning--
"It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns"--.
In the same postscript Keats continues:--
"I find I cannot do without poetry--without eternal poetry; half the
day will not do--the whole of it. I began with a little, but habit has
made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble from not having
written anything of late: the Sonnet overleaf did me good; I slept the
better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad
again.... I shall forthwith begin my _Endymion_, which I hope I shall
have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses
in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the Castle."
The Isle of Wight, however, Keats presently found did not suit him, and
Haydon's prescription of solitude proved too trying. He fell into a kind
of fever of thought and sleeplessness, which he thought it wisest to try
and shake off by flight. Early in May we find him writing to Leigh Hunt
from Margate, where he had already stayed the year before, and explaining
the reasons of his change of abode. Later in the same letter, endeavouring
to measure his own powers against the magnitude of the task to which he
has committed himself, he falls into a vein like that which we have seen
recurring once and again in his verses during the preceding year, the vein
of awed self-questioning, and tragic presentiment uttered half in earnest
and half in jest. The next day we find him writing a long and intimate,
very characteristic letter to Haydon, signed 'your everlasting friend,'
and showing the first signs of the growing influence which Haydon was
beginning to exercise over him in antagonism to the influence of Leigh
Hunt. Keats was quite shrewd enough to feel for himself after a little
while the touches of vanity, fuss, and affectation, the lack of depth and
strength, in the kind and charming nature of Hunt, and quite loyal enough
to value his excellences none the less, and hold him in grateful and
undiminished friendship. But Haydon, between whom and Hunt there was by
degrees arising a coolness, must needs have Keats see things as he saw
them. "I love you like my own brother," insists he: "beware, for God's
sake, of the delusions and sophistications that are ripping up the talents
and morality of our friend! He will go out of the world the victim of his
own weakness and the dupe of his own self-delusions, with the contempt of
his enemies and the sorrow of his friends, and the cause he undertook to
support injured by his own neglect of character." There is a lugubrious
irony in these words, when we remember how Haydon, a self-deluder indeed,
came to realise at last the very fate he here prophesies for
another,--just when Hunt, the harassing and often sordid, ever brightly
borne troubles of his earlier life left behind him, was passing surrounded
by affection into the haven of a peaceful and bland old age. But for a
time, under the pressure of Haydon's masterful exhortations, we find Keats
inclining to take an exaggerated and slightly impatient view of the
foibles of his earlier friend.
Among other interesting confessions to be found in Keats's letter to
Haydon from Margate, is that of the fancy--almost the sense--which often
haunted him of dependence on the tutelary genius of Shakspere:--
"I remember your saying that you had notions of a good genius
presiding over you. I have lately had the same thought, for things
which I do half at random, are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in
a dozen features of propriety. Is it too daring to fancy Shakspeare
this presider? When in the Isle of Wight I met with a Shakspeare in
the passage of the house at which I lodged. It comes nearer to my idea
of him than any I have seen; I was but there a week, yet the old woman
made me take it with me, though I went off in a hurry. Do you not
think this ominous of good?"
Next he lays his finger on the great secret flaw in his own nature,
describing it in words which the after issue of his life will keep but
too vividly and constantly before our minds:--"truth is, I have a horrid
Morbidity of Temperament, which has shown itself at intervals; it is, I
have no doubt, the greatest Enemy and stumbling-block I have to fear; I
may even say, it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment." Was it
that, in this seven-months' child of a consumptive mother, some unhealth
of mind as well as body was congenital?--or was it that, along with what
seems his Celtic intensity of feeling and imagination, he had inherited a
special share of that inward gloom which the reverses of their history
have stamped, according to some, on the mind of the Celtic race? We cannot
tell, but certain it is that along with the spirit of delight, ever
creating and multiplying images of beauty and joy, there dwelt in Keats's
bosom an almost equally busy and inventive spirit of self-torment.
The fit of dejection which led to the remark above quoted had its
immediate cause in apprehensions of money difficulties conveyed to Keats
in a letter from his brother George. The trust funds of which Mr Abbey had
the disposal for the benefit of the orphans, under the deed executed by
Mrs Jennings, amounted approximately to £8,000[26], of which the capital
was divisible among them on their coming of age, and the interest was to
be applied to their maintenance in the meantime. But the interest of
John's share had been insufficient for his professional and other expenses
during his term of medical study at Edmonton and London, and much of his
capital had been anticipated to meet them; presumably in the form of loans
raised on the security of his expectant share. Similar advances had also
been for some time necessary to the invalid Tom for his support, and
latterly--since he left the employment of Mr Abbey--to George as well. It
is clear that the arrangements for obtaining these advances were made both
wastefully and grudgingly. It is further plain that the brothers were very
insufficiently informed of the state of their affairs. In the meantime
John Keats was already beginning to discount his expectations from
literature. Before or about the time of his rupture with the Olliers, he
had made the acquaintance of those excellent men, Messrs Taylor and
Hessey, who were shortly, as publishers of the _London Magazine_, to
gather about them on terms of cordial friendship a group of contributors
comprising more than half the choicest spirits of the day. With them,
especially with Mr Taylor, who was himself a student and writer of
independent, somewhat eccentric ability and research, Keats's relations
were excellent from first to last, generous on their part, and
affectionate and confidential on his. He had made arrangements with them,
apparently before leaving London, for the eventual publication of
_Endymion_, and from Margate we find him acknowledging a first payment
received in advance. Now and again afterwards he turns to the same friends
for help at a pinch, adding once, "I am sure you are confident of my
responsibility, and of the sense of squareness that is always in me;" nor
did they at any time belie his expectation.
From Margate, where he had already made good progress with _Endymion_,
Keats went with his brother Tom to spend some time at Canterbury. Thence
they moved early in the summer to lodgings kept by a Mr and Mrs Bentley in
Well Walk, Hampstead, where the three brothers had decided to take up
their abode together. Here he continued through the summer to work
steadily at _Endymion_, being now well advanced with the second book; and
some of his friends, as Haydon, Cowden Clarke, and Severn, remembered all
their lives afterwards the occasions when they walked with him on the
heath, while he repeated to them, in his rich and tremulous, half-chanting
tone, the newly-written passages which best pleased him. From his poetical
absorption and Elysian dreams they were accustomed to see him at a touch
come back to daily life; sometimes to sympathize heart and soul with their
affairs, sometimes in a burst of laughter, nonsense, and puns, (it was a
punning age, and the Keats's were a very punning family), sometimes with a
sudden flash of his old schoolboy pugnacity and fierceness of righteous
indignation. To this summer or the following winter, it is not quite
certain which, belongs the well-known story of his thrashing in stand-up
fight a stalwart young butcher whom he had found tormenting a cat (a
'ruffian in livery' according to one account, but the butcher version is
the best attested).
For the rest, the choice of Hampstead as a place of residence had much to
recommend it to Keats: the freshness of the air for the benefit of the
invalid Tom: for his own walks and meditations those beauties of heath,
field, and wood, interspersed with picturesque embosomed habitations,
which his imagination could transmute at will into the landscapes of
Arcadia, or into those, 'with high romances blent,' of an earlier England
or of fable-land. For society there was the convenient proximity to, and
yet seclusion from, London, together with the immediate neighbourhood of
one or two intimate friends. Among these, Keats frequented as familiarly
as ever the cottage in the Vale of Health where Leigh Hunt was still
living--a kind of self-appointed poet-laureate of Hampstead, the features
of which he was for ever celebrating, now in sonnets, and now in the
cheerful singsong of his familiar _Epistles_:--
"And yet how can I touch, and not linger awhile
On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile?
On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades,
Dark pines, and white houses, and long-alley'd shades,
With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees
The hills up above him with roofs in the trees."
Several effusions of this kind, with three sonnets addressed to Keats
himself, some translations from the Greek, and a not ungraceful
mythological poem, the _Nymphs_, were published early in the following
year by Leigh Hunt in a volume called _Foliage_, which helped to draw down
on him and his friends the lash of Tory criticism.
Near the foot of the heath, in the opposite direction from Hunt's cottage,
lived two new friends of Keats who had been introduced to him by Reynolds,
and with whom he was soon to become extremely intimate. These were Charles
Wentworth Dilke and Charles Armitage Brown (or plain Charles Brown as he
at this time styled himself). Dilke was a young man of twenty-nine, by
birth belonging to a younger branch of the Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle, by
profession a clerk in the Navy Pay office, and by opinions at this time a
firm disciple of Godwin. He soon gave himself up altogether to literary
and antiquarian studies, and lived, as every one knows, to be one of the
most accomplished and influential of English critics and journalists, and
for many years editor and chief owner of the _Athenæum_. No two men could
well be more unlike in mind than Dilke and Keats: Dilke positive, bent on
certainty, and unable, as Keats says, "to feel he has a personal identity
unless he has made up his mind about everything:" while Keats on his part
held that "the only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up
one's mind about nothing--to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all
thoughts." Nevertheless the two took to each other and became fast
friends. Dilke had married young, and built himself, a year or two before
Keats knew him, a modest semi-detached house in a good-sized garden near
the lower end of Hampstead Heath, at the bottom of what is now John
Street; the other part of the same block being built and inhabited by his
friend Charles Brown. This Brown was the son of a Scotch stockbroker
living in Lambeth. He was born in 1786, and while almost a boy went out to
join one of his brothers in a merchant's business at St Petersburg; but
the business failing, he returned to England in 1808, and lived as he
could for the next few years, until the death of another brother put him
in possession of a small competency. He had a taste, and some degree of
talent for literature, and held strongly Radical opinions. In 1810 he
wrote an opera on a Russian subject, called _Narensky_, which was brought
out at the Lyceum with Braham in the principal part; and at intervals
during the next twenty years many criticisms, tales, and translations from
the Italian, chiefly printed in the various periodicals edited by Leigh
Hunt. When Keats first knew him, Brown was a young man already of somewhat
middle-aged appearance, stout, bald, and spectacled,--a kindly companion,
and jovial, somewhat free liver, with a good measure both of obstinacy and
caution lying in reserve, _more Scotico_, under his pleasant and convivial
outside. It is clear by his relations with Keats that his heart was warm,
and that when once attached, he was capable not only of appreciation but
of devotion. After the poet's death Brown went to Italy, and became the
friend of Trelawney, whom he helped with the composition of the
_Adventures of a Younger Son_, and of Landor, at whose villa near Florence
Lord Houghton first met him in 1832. Two years later he returned to
England, and settled at Plymouth, where he continued to occupy himself
with literature and journalism, and particularly with his chief work, an
essay, ingenious and in part sound, on the autobiographical poems of
Shakspere. Thoughts of Keats, and a wish to be his biographer, never left
him, until in 1841 he resolved suddenly to emigrate to New Zealand, and
departed leaving his materials in Lord Houghton's hands. A year afterwards
he died of apoplexy at the settlement of New Plymouth, now called
Taranaki[27].
Yet another friend of Reynolds who in these months attached himself with a
warm affection to Keats was Benjamin Bailey, an Oxford undergraduate
reading for the Church, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo. Bailey was a
great lover of books, devoted especially to Milton among past and to
Wordsworth among present poets. For his earnestness and integrity of
character Keats conceived a strong respect, and a hearty liking for his
person, and much of what was best in his own nature, and deepest in his
mind and cogitations, was called out in the intercourse that ensued
between them. In the course of this summer, 1817, Keats had been invited
by Shelley to stay with him at Great Marlow, and Hunt, ever anxious that
the two young poets should be friends, pressed him strongly to accept the
invitation. It is said by Medwin, but the statement is not confirmed by
other evidence, that Shelley and Keats had set about their respective
'summer tasks,' the composition of _Laon and Cythna_ and of _Endymion_, by
mutual agreement and in a spirit of friendly rivalry. Keats at any rate
declined his brother poet's invitation, in order, as he said, that he
might have his own unfettered scope. Later in the same summer, while his
brothers were away on a trip to Paris, he accepted an invitation of Bailey
to come to Oxford, and stayed there during the last five or six weeks of
the Long Vacation. Here he wrote the third book of _Endymion_, working
steadily every morning, and composing with great facility his regular
average of fifty lines a day. The afternoons they would spend in walking
or boating on the Isis, and Bailey has feelingly recorded the pleasantness
of their days, and of their discussions on life, literature, and the
mysteries of things. He tells of the sweetness of Keats's temper and charm
of his conversation, and of the gentleness and respect with which the hot
young liberal and free-thinker would listen to his host's exposition of
his own orthodox convictions: describes his enthusiasm in quoting
Chatterton and in dwelling on passages of Wordsworth's poetry,
particularly from the _Tintern Abbey_ and the _Ode on Immortality_: and
recalls his disquisitions on the harmony of numbers and other
technicalities of his art, the power of his thrilling looks and low-voiced
recitations, his vividness of inner life, and intensity of quiet enjoyment
during their field and river rambles and excursions[28]. One special
occasion of pleasure was a pilgrimage they made together to
Stratford-on-Avon. From Oxford are some of the letters written by Keats
in his happiest vein; to Reynolds and his sister Miss Jane Reynolds,
afterwards Mrs Tom Hood; to Haydon; and to his young sister Frances Mary,
or Fanny as she was always called (now Mrs Llanos). George Keats, writing
to this sister after John's death, speaks of the times "when we lived with
our grandmother at Edmonton, and John, Tom, and myself were always
devising plans to amuse you, jealous lest you should prefer either of us
to the others." Since those times Keats had seen little of her, Mr Abbey
having put her to a boarding-school before her grandmother's death, and
afterwards taken her into his own house at Walthamstow, where the visits
of her poet brother were not encouraged. "He often," writes Bailey, "spoke
to me of his sister, who was somehow withholden from him, with great
delicacy and tenderness of affection:" and from this time forward we find
him maintaining with her a correspondence which shows his character in its
most attractive light. He bids her keep all his letters and he will keep
hers--"and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good
bundle--which hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and God
knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on
times past--that now are to come." He tells her about Oxford and about his
work, and gives her a sketch of the story of _Endymion_--"but I daresay
you have read this and all other beautiful tales which have come down to
us from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece."
Early in October Keats returned to Hampstead, whence he writes to Bailey
noticing with natural indignation the ruffianly first article of the
_Cockney School_ series, which had just appeared in _Blackwood's
Magazine_ for that month. In this the special object of attack was Leigh
Hunt, but there were allusions to Keats which seemed to indicate that his
own turn was coming. What made him more seriously uneasy were signs of
discord springing up among his friends, and of attempts on the part of
some of them to set him against others. Haydon had now given up his studio
in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove; and Hunt, having left
the Vale of Health, was living close by him at a lodging in the same
street. "I know nothing of anything in this part of the world," writes
Keats: "everybody seems at loggerheads." And he goes on to say how Hunt
and Haydon are on uncomfortable terms, and "live, _pour ainsi dire_,
jealous neighbours. Haydon says to me, 'Keats, don't show your lines to
Hunt on any account, or he will have done half for you'--so it appears
Hunt wishes it to be thought." With more accounts of warnings he had
received from common friends that Hunt was not feeling or speaking
cordially about _Endymion_. "Now is not all this a most paltry thing to
think about?... This is, to be sure, but the vexation of a day, nor would
I say so much about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and
reputation at heart[29]." When three months later Keats showed Hunt the
first book of his poem in proof, the latter found many faults. It is clear
he was to some extent honestly disappointed in the work itself. He may
also have been chagrined at not having been taken more fully into
confidence during its composition; and what he said to others was probably
due partly to such chagrin, partly to nervousness on behalf of his
friend's reputation: for of double-facedness or insincerity in friendship
we know by a hundred evidences that Hunt was incapable. Keats, however,
after what he had heard, was by no means without excuse when he wrote to
his brothers concerning Hunt,--not unkindly, or making much of the
matter,--"the fact is, he and Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my
not having showed them the affair officiously; and from several hints I
have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or
slip I may have made. But who's afraid?" Keats was not the man to let this
kind of thing disturb seriously his relations with a friend: and writing
about the same time to Bailey, still concerning the dissensions in the
circle, he expounds the practical philosophy of friendship with truly
admirable good sense and feeling:--
"Things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have heard
of them; Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting
for ever. The same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is
unfortunate: men should bear with each other; there lives not the man
who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest side. The
best of men have but a portion of good in them--a kind of spiritual
yeast in their frames, which creates the ferment of existence--by
which a man is propelled to act, and strive, and buffet with
circumstance. The sure way, Bailey, is first to know a man's faults,
and then be passive. If after that he insensibly draws you towards
him, then you have no power to break the link. Before I felt
interested in either Reynolds or Haydon, I was well-read in their
faults; yet knowing them both I have been cementing gradually with
both. I have an affection for them both, for reasons almost opposite;
and to both must I of necessity cling, supported always by the hope
that when a little time, a few years, shall have tried me more fully
in their esteem, I may be able to bring them together. This time must
come, because they have both hearts; and they will recollect the best
parts of each other when this gust is overblown."
Keats had in the meantime been away on another autumn excursion into the
country: this time to Burford Bridge near Dorking. Here he passed
pleasantly the latter part of November, much absorbed in the study of
Shakspere's minor poems and sonnets, and in the task of finishing
_Endymion_. He had thus all but succeeded in carrying out the hope which
he had expressed in the opening passage of the poem:--
"Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white,
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finished; but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end."
Returning to Hampstead, Keats spent the first part of the winter in
comparative rest from literary work. His chief occupation was in revising
and seeing _Endymion_ through the press, with much help from the
publisher, Mr Taylor; varied by occasional essays in dramatic criticism,
and as the spring began, by the composition of a number of minor
incidental poems. In December he lost the companionship of his brothers,
who went to winter in Devonshire for the sake of Tom's health. But in
other company he was at this time mixing freely. The convivial gatherings
of the young men of his own circle were frequent, the fun high, the
discussions on art and literature boisterous, and varied with a moderate,
evidently never a very serious, amount of card-playing, drinking, and
dissipation. From these gatherings Keats was indispensable, and more than
welcome in the sedater literary circle of his publishers, Messrs Taylor
and Hessey, men as strict in conduct and opinion as they were
good-hearted. His social relations began, indeed, in the course of this
winter to extend themselves more than he much cared about, or thought
consistent with proper industry. We find him dining with Horace Smith in
company with some fashionable wits, concerning whom he reflects:--"They
only served to convince me how superior humour is to wit, in respect to
enjoyment. These men say things which make one start, without making one
feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know
fashionables; they have all a mannerism in their very eating and drinking,
in their mere handling a decanter. They talked of Kean and his low
company. 'Would I were with that company instead of yours', said I to
myself." Men of ardent and deep natures, whether absorbed in the realities
of experience, or in the ideals of art and imagination, are apt to be
affected in this way by the conventional social sparkle which is only
struck from and only illuminates the surface. Hear, on the other hand,
with what pleasure and insight, what sympathy of genius for genius, Keats
writes after seeing the great tragedian last mentioned interpret the inner
and true passions of the soul:--
"The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean ... his
tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them
honeyless! There is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by which we
feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while
speaking of the instant. When he says in Othello, 'Put up your bright
swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat had
commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he
speaks as though his body were unassailable. Again, his exclamation of
'blood! blood! blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the last degree;
the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over them,
making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the wild
dogs on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can
distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' In
Richard, 'Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!' came
from him, as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns."
It was in the Christmas weeks of 1817-18 that Keats undertook the office
of theatrical critic for the _Champion_ newspaper in place of Reynolds,
who was away at Exeter. Early in January he writes to his brothers of the
pleasure he has had in seeing their sister, who had been brought to London
for the Christmas holidays; and tells them how he has called on and been
asked to dine by Wordsworth, whom he had met on the 28th of December at a
supper given by Haydon. This is the famous Sunday supper, or 'immortal
dinner' as Haydon calls it, which is described at length in one of the
most characteristic passages of the painter's _Autobiography_. Besides
Wordsworth and Keats and the host, there were present Charles Lamb and
Monkhouse. "Wordsworth's fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil,
Keats's eager inspired look, Lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so
speeded the stream of conversation," says Haydon, "that I never passed a
more delightful time." Later in the evening came in Ritchie the African
traveller, just about to start on the journey to Fezzan on which he died,
besides a self-invited guest in the person of one Kingston, Comptroller of
Stamps, a foolish good-natured gentleman, recommended only by his
admiration for Wordsworth. Presently Lamb getting fuddled, lost patience
with the platitudes of Mr Kingston, and began making fun of him, with
pranks and personalities which to Haydon appeared hugely funny, but which
Keats in his letter to his brothers mentions with less relish, saying,
"Lamb got tipsy and blew up Kingston, proceeding so far as to take the
candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft
fellow he was[30]." Keats saw Wordsworth often in the next few weeks after
their introduction at Haydon's, but has left us no personal impressions of
the elder poet, except a passing one of surprise at finding him one day
preparing to dine, in a stiff collar and his smartest clothes, with his
aforesaid unlucky admirer Mr Comptroller Kingston. We know from other
sources that he was once persuaded to recite to Wordsworth the Hymn to Pan
from _Endymion_. "A pretty piece of Paganism," remarked Wordsworth,
according to his usual encouraging way with a brother poet; and Keats was
thought to have winced under the frigidity. Independently of their
personal relations, the letters of Keats show that Wordsworth's poetry
continued to be much in his thoughts throughout these months; what he has
to say of it varying according to the frame of mind in which he writes. In
the enthusiastic mood he declares, and within a few days again insists,
that there are three things to rejoice at in the present age, "The
_Excursion_, Haydon's Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste." This
mention of the name of Hazlitt brings us to another intellectual influence
which somewhat powerfully affected Keats at this time. On the liberal side
in politics and criticism there was no more effective or more uncertain
free lance than that eloquent and splenetic writer, with his rich,
singular, contradictory gifts, his intellect equally acute and fervid, his
temperament both enthusiastic and morose, his style at once rich and
incisive. The reader acquainted with Hazlitt's manner will easily
recognize its influence on Keats in the fragment of stage criticism above
quoted. Hazlitt was at this time delivering his course of lectures on the
English poets at the Surrey Institution, and Keats was among his regular
attendants. With Hazlitt personally, as with Lamb, his intercourse at
Haydon's and elsewhere seems to have been frequent and friendly, but not
intimate: and Haydon complains that it was only after the death of Keats
that he could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius.
Of Haydon himself, and of his powers as a painter, we see by the words
above quoted that Keats continued to think as highly as ever. He had, as
Severn assures us, a keen natural instinct for the arts both of painting
and music. Cowden Clarke's piano-playing had been a delight to him at
school, and he tells us himself how from a boy he had in his mind's eye
visions of pictures:--"when a schoolboy the abstract idea I had of an
heroic painting was what I cannot describe. I saw it somewhat sideways,
large, prominent, round, and coloured with magnificence--somewhat like the
feel I have of Anthony and Cleopatra. Or of Alcibiades leaning on his
crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving
with the sea." In Haydon's pictures Keats continued to see, as the friends
and companions of every ardent and persuasive worker in the arts are apt
to see, not so much the actual performance, as the idea he had
pre-conceived of it in the light of his friend's intentions and
enthusiasm. At this time Haydon, who had already made several drawings of
Keats's head in order to introduce it in his picture of Christ entering
Jerusalem, proposed to make another more finished, "to be engraved,"
writes Keats, "in the first style, and put at the head of my poem, saying,
at the same time, he had never done the thing for any human being, and
that it must have considerable effect, as he will put his name to it."
Both poet and publisher were delighted with this condescension on the part
of the sublime Haydon; who failed, however, to carry out his promise. "My
neglect," said Haydon long afterwards, "really gave him a pang, as it now
does me."
With Hunt also Keats's intercourse continued frequent, while with Reynolds
his intimacy grew daily closer. Both of these friendships had a
stimulating influence on his poetic powers. "The Wednesday before last
Shelley, Hunt, and I, wrote each a sonnet on the river Nile," he tells his
brothers on the 16th of February, 1818. "I have been writing, at
intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be at Teignmouth to read
them over to you." With the help of Keats's manuscripts or of the
transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the
actual order of many of these fugitive pieces. On the 16th of January was
written the humorous sonnet on Mrs Reynolds's cat; on the 21st, after
seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's,
the address to that poet beginning 'Chief of organic numbers!'--and on the
22nd the sonnet, 'O golden tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which
Keats describes himself as laying aside (apparently) his Spenser, in order
to read again the more rousing and human-passionate pages of _Lear_. On
the 31st he sends in a letter to Reynolds the lines to Apollo beginning
'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' and in the same letter the sonnet
beginning 'When I have fears that I may cease to be,' which he calls his
last. On the 3rd of February he wrote the spirited lines to Robin Hood,
suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest; on the 4th,
the sonnet beginning 'Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in
which he recalls the memory of an old, otherwise unrecorded love-fancy,
and also the well-known sonnet on the Nile, written at Hunt's in
competition with that friend and with Shelley; on the 5th, another sonnet
postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's
to compose something in honour, or in emulation of Spenser; and on the
8th, the sonnet in praise of the colour blue composed by way of protest
against one of Reynolds. About the same time Keats agreed with Reynolds
that they should each write some metrical tales from Boccaccio, and
publish them in a joint volume; and began at once for his own part with
_Isabella_ or _the Pot of Basil_. A little later in this so prolific month
of February we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird,
and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the
influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly in
a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind,
translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of a singular
and haunting melody. In the course of the next fortnight we find him in
correspondence with Taylor about the corrections to _Endymion_; and soon
afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing
to flit. His brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at
Teignmouth since December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a
scheme of marriage and emigration; and Tom's health having made a
momentary rally, Keats was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and
determined to join him there. He started in the second week of March, and
stayed almost two months. It was an unlucky season for weather--the
soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of Devonshire rain renewing
themselves, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know,
throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more
than occasional tantalizing snatches of enjoyment in the beauty of the
scenery, the walks, and flowers. His letters are full of objurgations
against the climate, conceived in a spirit which seems hardly compatible,
in one of his strong family feeling, with the tradition which represents
his father to have been a Devonshire man:--
"You may say what you will of Devonshire: the truth is, it is a
splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod
county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em; the
primroses are out,--but then you are in; the cliffs are of a fine deep
colour, but then the clouds are continually vieing with them."... "I
fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers,
all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them; I feel able to beat
off the Devonshire waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the
honour of Britain, that Julius Caesar did not first land in this
county: A Devonshirer, standing on his native hills, is not a distinct
object; he does not show against the light; a wolf or two would
dispossess him[31]."
Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering his invalid
brother, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during
these Devonshire days seeing through the press the last sheets of
_Endymion_. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had
begun at Hampstead, the whole of _Isabella_, the first of his longer poems
written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. At the same time
he was reading and appreciating Milton as he had never done before. With
the minor poems he had been familiar from a boy, but had not been
attracted by _Paradise Lost_, until first Severn, and then more
energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he
now turned to that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of
genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its
power and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, particularly Bailey
and Reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. It
was in all senses manifestly a time with Keats of rapidly maturing power,
and in some degree also of threatening gloom. The mysteries of existence
and of suffering, and the 'deeps of good and evil,' were beginning for the
first time to press habitually on his thoughts. In that beautiful and
interesting letter to Reynolds, in which he makes the comparison of human
life to a mansion of many apartments, it is his own present state which he
thus describes:--
"We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the
Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light
and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of
delaying there for ever in delight. However, among the effects this
breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one's
vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's nerves
that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and
oppression; whereby this Chamber of Maiden-thought becomes gradually
darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set
open--but all dark--all leading to dark passages. We see not the
balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, _we_ are in that state, we
feel the 'Burden of the Mystery.'"
A few weeks earlier, addressing to the same friend the last of his rhymed
_Epistles_, Keats had thus expressed the mood which came upon him as he
sat taking the beauty of the evening on a rock at the sea's edge:--
"twas a quiet eve,
The rocks were silent, the wide sea did weave
An untumultuous fringe of silver foam
Along the flat brown sand; I was at home
And should have been most happy,--but I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw
The greater or the less feeds evermore:--
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I far was gone.
Still am I sick of it, and tho' to-day,
I've gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay
Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,
Still do I that most fierce destruction see,--
The Shark at savage prey,--the Hawk at pounce,--
The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,
Ravening a worm,--Away, ye horrid moods!
Moods of one's mind!"--
In a like vein, recalling to Bailey a chance saying of his "Why should
woman suffer?"--"Aye, why should she?" writes Keats: "'By heavens, I'd
coin my very soul, and drop my blood for drachmas.' These things are, and
he who feels how incompetent the most skyey knight-errantry is to heal
this bruised fairness, is like a sensitive leaf on the hot hand of
thought." And again, "were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarchal
coronation--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. I
should not by rights speak in this tone to you, for it is an incendiary
spirit that would do so."
Not the general tribulations of the race only, but particular private
anxieties, were pressing in these days on Keats's thoughts. The shadow of
illness, though it had hitherto scarcely touched himself, hung menacingly
not only over his brother but his best friends. He speaks of it in a tone
of courage and gaiety which his real apprehensions, we can feel, belie.
"Banish money"--he had written in Falstaff's vein, at starting for the
Isle of Wight a year ago--"Banish sofas--Banish wine--Banish music; but
right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish Health and
banish all the world." Writing now from Teignmouth to Reynolds, who was
down during these weeks with rheumatic fever, he complains laughingly, but
with an undercurrent of sad foreboding, how he can go nowhere but Sickness
is of the company, and says his friends will have to cut that fellow, or
he must cut them.
Nearer and more pressing than such apprehensions was the pain of a family
break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his mind to emigrate to
America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as he could get
possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push his own
fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's part was the desire to
be in a position as quickly as possible to help, or if need be support,
his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long been attached,
Miss Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that they were to be
married and sail early in the summer. Keats came up from Teignmouth in May
to see the last of his brother, and he and Tom settled again in their old
lodgings in Well Walk. He had a warm affection and regard for his new
sister-in-law, and was in so far delighted for George's sake. But at the
same time he felt life and its prospects overcast. He writes to Bailey,
after his outburst about the sufferings of women, that he is never alone
now without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing
his ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose. And after
recounting his causes of depression, he recovers himself, and
concludes:--"Life must be undergone; and I certainly derive some
consolation from the thought of writing one or two more poems before it
ceases."
With reference to his poem then just appearing, and the year's work which
it represented, Keats was under no illusions whatever. From an early
period in its composition he had fully realised its imperfections, and had
written: "My ideas of it are very low, and I would write the subject
thoroughly again, but I am tired of it, and think the time would be better
spent in writing a new romance, which I have in my eye for next summer.
Rome was not built in a day, and all the good I expect from my employment
this summer is the fruit of experience which I hope to gather in my next
poem." The habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most
natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so
in Keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in his
strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested friend
might judge. He shows himself perfectly aware that in writing _Endymion_
he has rather been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than
producing a sound or satisfying work of poetry; and when the time comes
to write a preface to the poem, after a first attempt lacking reticence
and simplicity, and abandoned at the advice of Reynolds, he in the second
quietly and beautifully says of his own work all that can justly be said
in its dispraise. He warns the reader to expect "great inexperience,
immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a
deed accomplished," and adds most unboastfully:--"it is just that this
youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope
that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for
verses fit to live."
The apprehensions expressed in these words have not been fulfilled; and
_Endymion_, so far from having died away, lives to illustrate the maxim
conveyed in its own now proverbial opening line. Immature as the poem
truly is in touch and method, superabundant and confused as are the sweets
which it offers to the mind, still it is a thing of far too much beauty,
or at least of too many beauties, to perish. Every reader must take
pleasure in some of its single passages and episodes, while to the student
of the poetic art the work is interesting almost as much in its weakness
as its strength.