Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death of Tom
Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--Fanny Brawne--Excursion to
Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon and Money
Difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening Prospects--Summer at
Shanklin and Winchester--Wise Resolutions--Return from Winchester.
[June 1818-October, 1819.]
While Keats in the spring of 1818 was still at Teignmouth, with _Endymion_
on the eve of publication, he had been wavering between two different
plans for the immediate future. One was to go for a summer's walking tour
through Scotland with Charles Brown. "I have many reasons," he writes to
Reynolds, "for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from
spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and
Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather. I'll
have leather buttons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, 'over the hills
we go.' If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in
turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." A
fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an
over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the
necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the
flight of poetry:--
"I was proposing to travel over the North this summer. There is but
one thing to prevent me. I know nothing--I have read nothing--and I
mean to follow Solomon's directions, 'Get learning--get
understanding.' I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can
have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I
find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the
world. Some do it with their society; some with their wit; some with
their benevolence; some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure
and good-humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful
to the command of great nature. There is but one way for me. The road
lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it; and,
for that end, purpose retiring for some years. I have been hovering
for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love
for philosophy: were I calculated for the former I should be glad; but
as I am not, I shall turn all my soul to the latter."
After he had come back to Hampstead in May, however, Keats allowed himself
to be persuaded, no doubt partly by considerations of health, and the
recollection of his failure to stand the strain of solitary thought a year
before, to resume his original intention. It was agreed between him and
Brown that they should accompany George Keats and his bride as far as
Liverpool, and then start on foot from Lancaster. They left London
accordingly on Monday, June 22[37]. The coach stopped for dinner the first
day at Redbourn near St Albans, where Keats's friend of medical-student
days, Mr Stephens, was in practice. He came to shake hands with the
travelling party at the poet's request, and many years afterwards wrote an
account of the interview, the chief point of which is a description of Mrs
George Keats. "Rather short, not what might be strictly called handsome,
but looked like a being whom any man of moderate sensibility might easily
love. She had the imaginative poetical cast. Somewhat singular and girlish
in her attire.... There was something original about her, and John seemed
to regard her as a being whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her
with evident satisfaction[38]." With no other woman or girl friend was
Keats ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy as with this 'Nymph
of the downward smile and side-long glance' of his early sonnet--'Sister
George' as she had now become; and for that reason, and on account of the
series of charming playful affectionate letters he wrote to her afterwards
in America, the portrait above quoted, such as it is, seems worth
preserving.
The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went on by coach to
Lancaster, and thence began their walk, Keats taking for his reading one
book only, the little three-volume edition of Cary's _Dante_. "I cannot,"
writes Brown, "forget the joy, the rapture of my friend when he suddenly,
and for the first time, became sensible to the full effect of mountain
scenery. It was just before our descent to the village of Bowness, at a
turn of the road, when the lake of Windermere at once came into view....
All was enchantment to us both." Keats in his own letters says
comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly,
not at all with the descriptive enthusiasm of the modern picturesque
tourist; nor indeed with so much of that quality as the sedate and
fastidious Gray had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. The truth
is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like his needs
not for its exercise the stimulus of the continued presence of beauty, but
on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply for itself spirit
sunsets, and glories of dream and lake and mountain, richer and more
varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery, eager to enjoy but
impotent to create, can witness in a life-time of travel and pursuit.
Moreover, whatever the effect on him of that first burst of Windermere, it
is evident that as Keats proceeded northwards he found the scenery
somewhat foreign to his taste. Besides the familiar home beauties of
England, two ideals of landscape, classic and mediæval, haunted and
allured his imagination almost equally; that of the sunny and fabled
south, and that of the shadowed and adventurous north; and the Scottish
border, with its bleak and moorish, rain-swept and cloud-empurpled hills,
and its unhomely cold stone villages, struck him at first as answering to
neither. "I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem
anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish."
A change, besides, was coming over Keats's thoughts and feelings whereby
scenery altogether was beginning to interest him less, and his
fellow-creatures more. In the acuteness of childish and boyish sensation,
among the suburban fields or on sea-side holidays, he had unconsciously
absorbed images of nature enough for his faculties to work on through a
life-time of poetry; and now, in his second chamber of Maiden-thought, the
appeal of nature yields in his mind to that of humanity. "Scenery is
fine," he had already written from Devonshire in the spring, "but human
nature is finer." In the Lake country, after climbing Skiddaw one morning
early, and walking to Treby the same afternoon, where they watched with
amusement the exercises in a country dancing-school: "There was as fine a
row of boys and girls," says Keats, "as you ever saw; some beautiful
faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of
patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. This is
what I like better than scenery." The same note recurs frequently in
letters of a later date.
From Lancaster the travellers walked first to Ambleside; from Ambleside to
the foot of Helvellyn, where they slept, having called by the way on
Wordsworth at Rydal, and been disappointed to find him away
electioneering. From Helvellyn to Keswick, whence they made the circuit of
Derwentwater; Keswick to Treby, Treby to Wigton, and Wigton to Carlisle,
where they arrived on the 1st of July. Thence by coach to Dumfries,
visiting at the latter place the tomb and house of Burns, to whose memory
Keats wrote a sonnet, by no means in his best vein. From Dumfries they
started southwestwards for Galloway, a region little frequented even now,
and then hardly at all, by tourists. Reaching the Kirkcudbrightshire
coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and
rocky tufted headlands, its views over the glimmering Solway to the hazy
hills of Man, Brown bethought him that this was Guy Mannering's country,
and began to tell Keats about Meg Merrilies. Keats, who according to the
fashion of his circle was no enthusiast for Scott's poetry, and of the
Waverley novels had read the _Antiquary_ but not _Guy Mannering_, was much
struck; and presently, writes Brown,--"there was a little spot, close to
our pathway. 'There,' he said, 'in that very spot, without a shadow of
doubt, has old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle.' It was among pieces
of rock, and brambles, and broom, ornamented with a profusion of
honeysuckles and roses, and foxgloves, and all in the very blush and
fulness of blossom." As they went along, Keats composed on Scott's theme
the spirited ballad beginning 'Old Meg, she was a gipsy,' and stopping to
breakfast at Auchencairn, copied it out in a letter which he was writing
to his young sister at odd moments, and again in another letter which he
began at the same place to Tom. It was his way on his tour, and indeed
always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing, and add scraps to
them as the fancy took him. The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote
regularly and uniformly in the evenings. "He affronts my indolence and
luxury," says Keats, "by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper;
secondly his pens; and last, his ink. Now I would not care if he would
change a little. I say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But
I might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead
of afterwards."
From Kirkcudbright they walked on July 5,--skirting the wild moors about
the Water of Fleet, and passing where Cairnsmore looks down over wooded
slopes to the steaming estuary of the Cree,--as far as Newton Stewart:
thence across the Wigtonshire levels by Glenluce to Stranraer and
Portpatrick. Here they took the Donaghadee packet for Ireland, with the
intention of seeing the Giant's Causeway, but finding the distances and
expense exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to
Belfast, and crossed again to Portpatrick on the third day. In letters
written during and immediately after this excursion, Keats has some
striking passages of human observation and reflection:--
"These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women,
old men, young men, old women, young women, hags, girls, and infants,
all careful; so they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and
gainers.... These Kirk-men have done Scotland harm; they have banished
puns, love, and laughing. To remind you of the fate of Burns:--poor,
unfortunate fellow! his disposition was Southern! How sad it is when a
luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its
delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have
leisure to go mad after things that are not!... I would sooner be a
wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the Kirk; and I would
sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's
penance before those execrable elders."
"On our return from Belfast we met a sedan--the Duchess of Dunghill.
It was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you
ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a
wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved
from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape,
with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed,
skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of
her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two
ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a
history of her life and sensations!"--.
From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking
along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald, and Maybole, to Ayr,
with the lonely mass of Ailsa Crag, and presently the mountains of Arran,
looming ever above the Atlantic floor on the left: and here again we find
Keats taking a keen pleasure in the mingled richness and wildness of the
coast scenery. They went to Kirk Alloway, and he was delighted to find the
home of Burns amid scenes so fair. He had made up his mind to write a
sonnet in the cottage of that poet's birth, and did so, but was worried by
the prate of the man in charge--"a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew
Burns: he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him"--"his gab
hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet." And
again, as they journeyed on toward Glasgow he composed with considerable
pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning 'There is a
charm in footing slow across a silent plain.' They were meant to express
the temper in which his pilgrimage through the Burns country had been
made, but in spite of an occasional striking breadth and concentration of
imagery, are on the whole forced and unlike himself.
From Ayr Keats and Brown tramped on to Glasgow, and from Glasgow by
Dumbarton through the _Lady of the Lake_ country, which they found
vexatiously full of tourists, to Inverary, and thence by Loch Awe to Oban.
At Inverary Keats was amused and exasperated by a performance of _The
Stranger_ to an accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the
next morning, he got horribly bitten by gadflies, and vented his smart in
a set of doggrel rhymes. The walk along the shores of Loch Awe impressed
him greatly, and for once he writes of it something like a set
description, for the benefit of his brother Tom. At the same point occur
for the first time complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort.
At the beginning of his tour Keats had written to his sister of its
effects upon his sleep and appetite: telling her how he tumbled into bed
"so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe
and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. Then I get
so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to
me.... I can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do bull's eyes."
Presently he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty
miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now in the remoter parts of
the Highlands the coarse fare and accommodation, and rough journeys and
frequent drenchings, begin to tell upon both him and Brown, and he
grumbles at the perpetual diet of oatcake and eggs. Arrived at Oban, the
friends undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for
Keats's strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and
Iona too expensive, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the hither
side of the island of Mull, and then with a guide cross on foot to the
farther side opposite Iona: a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some
thirty-seven miles over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather.
By good luck the sky lifted at the critical moment, and the travellers had
a favourable view of Staffa. By the power of the past and its associations
in the one 'illustrious island,' and of nature's architecture in the
other, Keats shows himself naturally much impressed. Fingal's cave in
especial touched his imagination, and on it and its profanation by the
race of tourists he wrote, in the seven-syllable metre which no writer
since Ben Jonson has handled better or more vigorously, the lines
beginning 'Not Aladdin Magian.' Avoiding mere epithet-work and
description, like the true poet he is, he begins by calling up for
comparison the visions of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then,
bethinking himself of Milton's cry to Lycidas,
"--where'er thy bones are hurl'd,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides"--
imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean, and
put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his priestly
character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion of the
place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and ends, with a fine
abruptness which is the most effective stroke of art in the piece:--
"So for ever I will leave
Such a taint, and soon unweave
All the magic of the place![39]
* * * *
So saying, with a spirit's glance
He dived--."
From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scotch tour, and
especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct
and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, and of the development
of his hereditary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his
brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fingal poem, he speaks of
a 'slight sore throat,' and of being obliged to rest for a day or two at
Oban. Thence they pushed on in bad weather to Fort William, made the
ascent of Ben Nevis in a dissolving mist, and so by the 6th of August to
Inverness. Keats's throat had in the meantime been getting worse: the
ascent, and especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses,
tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at
Inverness thought his condition threatening, and forbade him to continue
his tour. Accordingly he took passage on the 8th or 9th of August from the
port of Cromarty for London, leaving his companion to pursue his journey
alone,--"much lamenting," to quote Brown's own words, "the loss of his
beloved intelligence at my side." Keats in some degree picked up strength
during a nine days' sea passage, the humours of which he afterwards
described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George. But his throat
trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of
time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead,
and made his appearance among his friends the next day, "as brown and as
shabby as you can imagine," writes Mrs Dilke, "scarcely any shoes left,
his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his
knapsack. I cannot tell what he looked like." When he found himself
seated, for the first time after his hardships, in a comfortable stuffed
chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of the sensation,
quoting at himself the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates
his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis[40].
Simultaneously, almost, with Keats's return from the North appeared
attacks on him in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_. The
_Blackwood_ article, being No. IV. of a series bearing the signature 'Z'
on the 'Cockney School of Poetry,' was printed in the August number of the
magazine. The previous articles of the same series, as well as a letter
similarly signed, had been directed against Leigh Hunt, in a strain of
insult so preposterous as to be obviously inspired by the mere wantonness
of partisan licence. It is not quite certain who wrote them, but they were
most probably the work either of Lockhart or of Wilson, suggested and
perhaps revised by the publisher William Blackwood, at this time his own
sole editor. Not content with attacking Hunt's opinions, or his real
weaknesses as a writer or a man, his Edinburgh critics must needs heap on
him the grossest accusations of vice and infamy. In the course of these
articles allusion had several times been made to 'Johnny Keats' as an
'amiable bardling' and puling satellite of the arch-offender and king of
Cockaigne, Hunt. When now Keats's own turn came, his treatment was mild
in comparison with that of his supposed leader. The strictures on his work
are idle and offensive, but not more so than is natural to unsympathetic
persons full of prejudice and wishing to hurt. 'Cockney' had been in
itself a fair enough label for a hostile critic to fasten upon Hunt;
neither was it altogether inapplicable to Keats, having regard to the
facts of his origin and training: that is if we choose to forget that the
measure of a man is not his experience, but the use he is able to make of
it. The worst part of the Keats review was in its personalities,--"so back
to the shop, Mr John, stick to 'plasters, pills, ointment boxes,'
&c."--and what made these worse was the manner in which the materials for
them had been obtained. Keats's friend Bailey had by this time taken his
degree, and after publishing a friendly notice of _Endymion_ in the
_Oxford Herald_ for June, had left the University and gone to settle in a
curacy in Cumberland. In the course of the summer he staid at Stirling, at
the house of Bishop Gleig; whose son, afterwards the well-known writer and
Chaplain-general to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter (a
previous love-affair with one of the Reynolds sisters having fallen
through) he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey met Lockhart, then in the
hey-day of his brilliant and bitter youth; lately admitted to the intimacy
of Scott; and earning, on the staff of _Blackwood_ and otherwise, the
reputation and the nickname of 'Scorpion.' Bailey, anxious to save Keats
from the sort of treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took
the opportunity of telling Lockhart in a friendly way his circumstances
and history, explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt
was personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an
object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any
rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his
disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be so
used by _him_. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to all
appearance, and to Bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he had
thus confidentially communicated.
To the end of his life Bailey remained convinced that whether or not
Lockhart himself wrote the piece, he must at any rate have prompted and
supplied the materials for it[41]. It seems in fact all but certain that
he actually wrote it[42]. If so, it was a felon stroke on Lockhart's part,
and to forgive him we must needs remember all the gratitude that is his
due for his filial allegiance to and his immortal biography of Scott. But
even in that connection our grudge against him revives again; since in the
party violence of the time and place Scott himself was drawn into
encouraging the savage polemics of his young Edinburgh friends; and that
he was in some measure privy to the Cockney School outrages seems certain.
Such, at least, was the impression prevailing at the time[43]; and when
Severn, who did not know it, years afterwards innocently approached the
subject of Keats and his detractors in conversation with Scott at Rome, he
observed both in Scott and his daughter signs of pain and confusion which
he could only interpret in the same sense[44]. It is hard to say whether
the thought of the great-hearted Scott, the soul most free from jealousy
or harshness, thus associated with an act of stupid cruelty to genius, is
one to make us the more indignant against those who so misled him, or the
more patient of mistakes committed by commoner spirits among the
distracting cries and blind collisions of the world.
The _Quarterly_ article on _Endymion_ followed in the last week of
September (in the number dated April), and was in an equally contemptuous
strain; the writer professing to have been unable to read beyond the first
canto, or to make head or tail of that. In this case again the question of
authorship must remain uncertain: but Gifford, as editor, and an editor
who never shrank from cutting a contributor's work to his own pattern,
must bear the responsibility with posterity. The review is quite in his
manner, that of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable
of judging it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the
pain he gives. Considering the perfect modesty and good judgment with
which Keats had in his preface pointed out the weaknesses of his own work,
the attacks are both alike inexcusable. They had the effect of promptly
rousing the poet's friends in his defence. Reynolds published a warm
rejoinder to the Quarterly reviewer in a west-country paper, the _Alfred_;
an indignant letter on the same side appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_
with the initials J. S.--those probably of John Scott, then editor of the
_London Magazine_, and soon afterwards killed by a friend of Lockhart's in
a duel, arising out of these very Blackwood brawls, in which it was
thought that Lockhart himself ought to have come forward. Leigh Hunt
reprinted Reynolds's letter, with some introductory words, in the
_Examiner_, and later in his life regretted that he had not done more. But
he could not have done more to any purpose. He was not himself an
enthusiastic admirer of _Endymion_, and had plainly said so to Keats and
to his friends. Reynolds's piece, which he reprinted, was quite effective
and to the point; and moreover any formal defence of Keats by Hunt would
only have increased the virulence of his enemies, as they both perfectly
well knew; folly and spite being always ready to cry out that praise of a
friend by a friend must needs be interested or blind.
Neither was Keats's demeanour under the lash such as could make his
friends suppose him particularly hurt. Proud in the extreme, he had no
irritable vanity; and aiming in his art, if not always steadily, yet
always at the highest, he rather despised than courted such success as he
saw some of his contemporaries enjoy:--"I hate," he says, "a mawkish
popularity." Even in the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly
cherished, there was nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was
conscious of perceiving his own shortcomings at least as clearly as his
critics. Accordingly he took his treatment at their hands more coolly than
older and less sensitive men had taken the like. Hunt had replied
indignantly to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn.
Hazlitt endeavoured to have the law of them. Keats at the first sting
declared, indeed, that he would write no more poetry, but try to do what
good he could to the world in some other way. Then quickly recovering
himself, he with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance as one
merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When Mr Hessey sent for his
encouragement the extracts from the papers in which he had been defended,
he wrote:--
"I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part.
As for the rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my own
strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on
the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic
on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without
comparison beyond what 'Blackwood' or the 'Quarterly' could possibly
inflict: and also when I feel I am right, no external praise can give
me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of
what is fine."
And again:--"There have been two letters in my defence in the
'Chronicle,' and one in the 'Examiner,' copied from the Exeter paper,
and written by Reynolds. I don't know who wrote those in the
'Chronicle.' This is a mere matter of the moment: I think I shall be
among the English Poets after my death. Even as a matter of present
interest, the attempt to crush me in the 'Quarterly' has only brought
me more into notice, and it is a common expression among book-men, 'I
wonder the 'Quarterly' should cut its own throat.'"
In point of fact an unknown admirer from the west country sent Keats about
this time a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a
further tribute in the shape of a £25 note. Keats was both pleased and
displeased: "if I had refused it," he says, "I should have behaved in a
very braggadocio dunderheaded manner; and yet the present galls me a
little." About the same time he received, through his friend Richard
Woodhouse, a young barrister who acted in some sort as literary adviser or
assistant to Messrs Taylor and Hessey[45], a glowing letter of sympathy
and encouragement from Miss Porter, 'of Romance celebrity': by which he
shows himself in his reply not more flattered than politeness demands.
Keats was really living, during the stress of these _Blackwood_ and
_Quarterly_ storms, under the pressure of another and far more heartfelt
trouble. His Hampstead friends, before they heard of his intended return
from Scotland, had felt reluctantly bound to write and summon him home on
account of the alarming condition of his brother Tom. He had left the
invalid behind in their lodgings at Well Walk, and found that he had grown
rapidly worse during his absence. In fact the case was desperate, and for
the next few months Keats's chief occupation was the harrowing one of
watching and ministering to this dying brother. In a letter written in the
third week of September, he speaks thus of his feelings and
occupations:--"I wish I could say Tom was better. His identity presses
upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out--and although I had
intended to have given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and
plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice,
and feebleness--so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be
poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine 'the hateful siege of
contraries'--if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and
yet I must do so or suffer." And again about the same time to
Reynolds:--"I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has
haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverous
relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has
conquered--I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only
life--I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am
thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of
immortality." As the autumn wore on, the task of the watcher grew ever
more sorrowful and absorbing[46]. On the 29th of October Keats wrote to
his brother and sister-in-law in America, warning them, in language of a
beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to be prepared for the worst.
For the next month his time was almost wholly taken up by the sickbed, and
in the first week of December the end came. "Early one morning," writes
Brown, "I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats,
who came to tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we
both remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length,
my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,--'Have nothing
more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! Had you not better live
with me?' He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied,--'I think it
would be better.' From that moment he was my inmate[47]."
Brown, as has been said already, had built, and lived in, one part--the
smaller eastern part--of the block of two semi-detached houses near the
bottom of John Street, Hampstead, to which Dilke, who built and occupied
the other part, had given the name of Wentworth Place[48]. The
accommodation in Brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room
on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them. The
arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses,
occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. As
soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in
some measure alleviated his grief, Keats became gradually once more
absorbed in poetry: his special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had
already begun to work before his brother died. But not wholly absorbed;
for there was beginning to wind itself about his heart a new spell more
powerful than that of poetry itself. It was at this time that the flame
caught him, which he had always presciently sought to avoid 'lest it
should burn him up.' With his quick self-knowledge he had early realised,
not to his satisfaction, his own peculiar mode of feeling towards
womankind. Chivalrously and tremulously devoted to his mind's ideal of the
sex, he found himself only too critical of the real women that he met, and
too ready to perceive or suspect faults in them. Conscious at the same
time of the fire of sense and blood within him, he had thought himself
partly fortunate in being saved from the entanglements of passion by his
sense of this difference between the reality and his ideal. The set of
three sonnets in his first volume, beginning 'Woman, when I beheld thee
flippant, vain,' had given expression half gracefully, half awkwardly, to
this state of mind. Its persistency is affirmed often in his letters.
"I am certain," he wrote to Bailey from Scotland, "I have not a right
feeling towards women--at this moment I am striving to be just to
them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish
imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure
goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept,
though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than their
reality. I thought them ethereal, above men. I find them perhaps
equal--great by comparison is very small.... Is it not
extraordinary?--when among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no
spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; I can listen, and from
every one I can learn; my hands are in my pockets, I am free from all
suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among women, I have evil
thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak, or be silent; I am full of
suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be
gone.... I must absolutely get over this--but how?"
In a fine passage of a letter to his relatives in America, he alleges this
general opinion of women, and with it his absorption in the life, or
rather the hundred lives, of imagination, as reasons for hoping that he
will never marry:--
"The roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my
window-panes are my children; the mighty abstract idea of Beauty in
all things, I have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic
happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I contemplate as part of
that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles
to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination
strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand
worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are
stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is
equivalent to a King's Bodyguard: "then Tragedy with scepter'd pall
comes sweeping by." According to my state of mind, I am with Achilles
shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily;
or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating those lines, "I
wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage," I
melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content
to be alone. These things, combined with the opinion I have formed of
the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would
rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against
matrimony that I rejoice in."
But now Keats's hour was come. Since his return from Scotland, in the
midst of his watching by his brother's sick-bed, we have seen him
confessing himself haunted already by the shape of a woman. This was a
certain Miss Charlotte Cox, a West-Indian cousin of Reynolds's, to whom he
did not think the Reynolds sisters were quite kind. A few days later he
writes again how he has been attracted by her rich Eastern look and grace.
Very soon, however, the attraction passed, and this 'Charmian' left him
fancy-free; but only to find his fate elsewhere. A Mrs Brawne, a widow
lady of some little property, with a daughter just grown up and two
younger children, had taken Brown's house for the summer while he was away
in Scotland. Here the Brawnes had naturally become acquainted with the
Dilkes, living next door: the acquaintance was kept up when they moved
from Brown's house to one in Downshire Street close by: and it was at the
Dilkes' that Keats met Miss Fanny Brawne after his return. Her ways and
presence at first irritated and after a little while completely fascinated
him. From his first sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as
well as from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in
Titian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length
silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is not difficult to realise
her aspect and presence. A brisk and blooming, very young beauty, of the
far from uncommon English hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and
retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight,
shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile, and good hair,
carriage and complexion,--such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her
character we have little means of judging. She was certainly
high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident: as certainly, though
kind and constant to her lover in spite of prospects that before long grew
dark, she did not fully realise what manner of man he was. Both his men
and women friends, without thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of
one opinion in holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, and
in regarding the attachment as unlucky.
So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion
for a woman have been. Stroke on stroke of untoward fortune had in truth
begun to fall on Keats, as if in fulfilment of the constitutional
misgivings of his darker moods. First the departure of his brother George
had deprived him of his chief friend, to whom almost alone he had from
boyhood been accustomed to turn for relief in hours of despondency. Next
the exertions of his Scotch tour had over-taxed his strength, and
unchained, though as yet he knew it not, the deadly hereditary enemy in
his blood. Coming back, he had found the grasp of that enemy closed
inexorably upon his brother Tom, and in nursing him had lived in spirit
through all his pains. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little
as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and
carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his
practical hopes from literature. Last were added the pangs of love--love
requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even
love disdained might have made him suffer less. The passion wrought
fiercely in his already fevered blood; its alternations of doubt and
torment and tantalising rapture sapped his powers, and redoubled every
strain to which bereavement, shaken health, and anticipations of poverty,
exposed them. Within a year the combined assault proved too much for his
strength, and he broke down. But in the meantime he showed a brave face to
the world, and while anxiety gnawed and passion wasted him, was able to
throw himself into the labours of his art with a fruitful, if a fitful,
energy. During the first few weeks of winter following his brother's
death, he wrote indeed, as he tells Haydon, "only a little now and then:
but nothing to speak of--being discontented and as it were moulting." Yet
such work as Keats did at this time was done at the very height of his
powers, and included parts both of _Hyperion_ and _The Eve of St Agnes_.
Within a month of the date of the above extract the latter piece was
finished, having been written out during a visit which Keats and Brown
paid in Sussex in the latter part of January (1819). They stayed for a few
days with the father of their friend Dilke in Chichester, and for nearly a
fortnight with his sister and brother-in-law, the Snooks, at Bedhampton
close by. Keats liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit; but
his health kept him much indoors, his only outings being to 'a couple of
dowager card-parties,' and to a gathering of country clergy on a wet day,
at the consecration of a chapel for converted Jews. The latter ceremony
jarred on his nerves, and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an
entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy.
During his stay at Chichester he also seems to have begun, or at any rate
conceived, the poem on the _Eve of St Mark_, which he never finished, and
which remains so interesting a pre-Raphaelite fragment in his work.
Returning at the beginning of February, Keats resumed his life at
Hampstead under Brown's roof. He saw much less society than the winter
before, the state of his throat compelling him, for one thing, generally
to avoid the night air. But the chief cause of his seclusion was no doubt
the passion which was beginning to engross him, and to deaden his interest
in the other relations of life. The stages by which it grew on him we
cannot follow. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he
had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting. His
real first feeling for her, as we can see by his letters written at the
time, had been one, the most perilous indeed to peace of mind, of strong
mixed attraction and aversion. He might seem to have got no farther by the
14th of February, when he writes to his brother and sister-in-law in
America, "Miss Brawne and I have every now and then a chat and a tiff;"
but this is rather to be taken as an instance of his extreme general
reticence on the subject, and it is probable that by this time, if not
sooner, the attachment was in fact avowed and the engagement made. The
secret violence of Keats's passion, and the restless physical jealousy
which accompanied it, betray themselves in the verses addressed _To
Fanny_, which belong apparently to this date. They are written very
unequally, but with his true and brilliant felicity of touch here and
there. The occasion is the presence of his mistress at some dance:--
"Who now with greedy looks, eats up my feast,
What stare outfaces now my silver moon?
Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least;
Let, let the amorous burn--
But, pr'ythee, do not turn
The current of your heart from me so soon,
O! save, in charity,
The quickest pulse for me.
Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe
Voluptuous visions into the warm air,
Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath;
Be like an April day,
Smiling and cold and gay,
A temperate lily, temperate as fair;
Then, Heaven! there will be
A warmer June for me."
If Keats thus found in verse occasional relief from the violence of his
feelings, he sought for none in his correspondence either with his brother
or his friends. Except in the lightest passing allusion, he makes no
direct mention of Miss Brawne in his letters; partly, no doubt, from mere
excess of sensitiveness, dreading to profane his treasure; partly because
he knew, and could not bear the thought, that both his friends and hers,
in so far as they guessed the attachment, looked on it unfavourably. Brown
after a little while could hardly help being in the secret, inasmuch as
when the Dilkes left Hampstead in April, and went to live at Westminster,
the Brawnes again took their house; so that Keats and Brown thenceforth
had the young lady and her family for next-door neighbours. Dilke himself,
but apparently not till many months later, writes, "It is quite a settled
thing between John Keats and Miss Brawne, God help them. It's a bad thing
for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and her only hope is that
it will go off. He don't like any one to look at her or speak to her."
Other friends, including one so intimate and so affectionate as Severn,
never realised until Keats was on his death-bed that there had been an
engagement, or that his relations with Miss Brawne had been other than
those of ordinary intimacy between neighbours.
Intense and jealous as Keats's newly awakened passion was, it seemed at
first to stimulate rather than distract him in the exercise of his now
ripened poetic gift. The spring of this year 1819 seems to repeat in a
richer key the history of the last; fits of inspiration succeeding to fits
of lassitude, and growing more frequent as the season advanced. Between
the beginning of February and the beginning of June he wrote many of his
best shorter poems, including apparently all except one of his six famous
odes. About the middle of February he speaks of having taken a stroll
among the marbles of the British Museum, and the ode _On Indolence_ and
the ode _On a Grecian Urn_, written two or three months later, show how
the charm of ancient sculpture was at this time working in his mind. The
fit of morning idleness which helped to inspire the former piece is
recorded in his correspondence under the date of March 19. The lines
beginning 'Bards of passion and of mirth,' are dated the 26th of the same
month. On the 15th of April he sends off to his brother, as the last poem
he has written, the ode _To Psyche_, only less perfect and felicitous than
that _On a Grecian Urn_. About a week later the nightingale would be
beginning to sing. Presently it appeared that one had built her nest in
Brown's garden, near his house.
"Keats," writes Brown, "felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song;
and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the
grass-plot under a plum, where he sat for two or three hours. When he
came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his
hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry,
I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic
feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well
legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many
scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his _Ode to a
Nightingale_.... Immediately afterwards I searched for more of his (in
reality) fugitive pieces, in which task, at my request, he again
assisted me.... From that day he gave me permission to copy any verses
he might write, and I fully availed myself of it. He cared so little
for them himself, when once, as it appeared to me, his imagination was
released from their influence, that he required a friend at hand to
preserve them."
The above account perfectly agrees with what Keats had written towards
the end of the summer before:--"I feel assured I should write from the
mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's
labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever rest upon them."
And yet for these odes Keats seems to have had a partiality: with that to
Psyche, he tells his brother, he has taken more pains than with anything
he had ever written before; and Haydon has told how thrillingly, 'in his
low tremulous under-tone,' he recited to him that to the nightingale as
they walked one day in the Kilburn meadows.
During the winter and spring while his faculties were thus absorbed
between love and poetry, Keats had suffered his correspondence to flag,
except only with Haydon, with his young sister Fanny, and with his brother
and sister-in-law in America. About Christmas Haydon, whose work had been
interrupted by a weakness of the eyes, and whose borrowing powers were for
the time being exhausted, had turned in his difficulties to Keats of all
men. With his usual generosity Keats had promised, only asking him to try
the rich lovers of art first, that if the worst came to the worst he would
help him with all he had. Haydon in a few weeks returns to the
charge:--"My dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised
assistance.... Before the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and
manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst." Keats had intended for
Haydon's relief some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share
in their grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over
to him at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were
raised, and after much correspondence, attendance in bankers' and
solicitors' offices, and other ordeals harassing to the poetic mind, he
had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. When
by-and-by Haydon writes, in the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with
his promise and his failure to keep it, Keats replies with perfect temper,
explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his
hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting
possession of his money. Moreover he finds that even if all he had were
laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live
on for two years.[49] Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent
sums to various friends amounting in all to near £200, of which he expects
the repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats
contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds. Three months later a
law-suit threatened by the widow of Captain Jennings against Mr Abbey, in
connection with the administration of the trust, had the effect for a time
of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very
gently asks Haydon to make an effort to repay his loan; who not only made
none--"he did not," says Keats, "seem to care much about it, but let me go
without my money almost with nonchalance." This was too much even for
Keats's patience. He declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend
again: nevertheless he by-and-by let old affection resume its sway, and
entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as kindly
as ever.
To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are full of
playful brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of regrets that she is
kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey; and of plans
for coming over to see her at Walthamstow when the weather and his throat
allow. He thinks of various little presents to please her,--a selection of
Tassie's pretty, and then popular, paste imitations of ancient
gems,--flowers,--drawing materials,--
"anything but live stock. Though I will not now be very severe on it,
remembering how fond I used to be of Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows,
Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock Salmons and all the whole tribe of the
Bushes and the Brooks: but verily they are better in the trees and the
water,--though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome
globe of gold-fish--then I would have it hold ten pails of water and
be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let
through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their
beautiful silver and crimson. Then I would put it before a handsome
painted window and shade it all round with Myrtles and Japonicas. I
should like the window to open on to the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd
sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading."
For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a constant
anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the distant
Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices
been bound. In the middle of April news of them arrives, and he thereupon
sends off to them a long journal-letter which he has been writing up at
intervals during the last two months. Among all the letters of Keats, this
is perhaps the richest and most characteristic. It is full of the varied
matter of his thoughts, excepting always his thoughts of love: these are
only to be discerned in one trivial allusion, and more indistinctly in the
vaguely passionate tenor of two sonnets which he sends among other
specimens of his latest work in verse. One is that beginning 'Why did I
laugh to-night?'--the other that, beautiful and moving despite flaws of
execution, in which he describes a dream suggested by the Paolo and
Francesca passage in Dante. For the rest he passes disconnectedly as
usual--"it being an impossibility in grain," as Keats once wrote to
Reynolds, "for my ink to stain otherwise"--from the vein of fun and
freakishness to that of poetry and wisdom, with passages now of masterly
intuition, and now of wandering and uncertain, almost always beautiful,
speculative fancy, interspersed with expressions of the most generous
spirit of family affection, or the most searching and unaffected
disclosures of self-knowledge. Poetry and Beauty were the twin powers his
soul had ever worshipped; but his devotion to poetry seemed thus far to
promise him no reward either in fame or bread; while beauty had betrayed
her servant, and become to him a scorching instead of a sustaining power,
since his love for the beautiful in general had turned into a craving
passion for the beauty of a particular girl. As his flesh began to faint
in the service of these two, his soul turned often with a sense of
comfort, at times even almost of ecstasy, towards the milder divinity of
Death, whose image had never been unfamiliar to his thoughts:--
"Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser--Death is Life's high meed."
When he came down from these heights of feeling, and brought himself
soberly to face the facts of his existence, Keats felt himself compelled,
in those days while he was producing, 'out of the mere yearning and
fondness he had for the beautiful,' poem after poem that are among the
treasures of the English language, to consider whether as a practical
matter he could or ought to continue to apply himself to literature at
all. In spite of his magnanimous first reception of the _Blackwood_ and
_Quarterly_ gibes, we can see that as time went on he began more and more
to feel both his pride wounded and his prospects darkened by them.
Reynolds had hit the mark, as to the material harm which the reviews were
capable of inflicting, when he wrote the year before:--"Certain it is,
that hundreds of fashionable and flippant readers will henceforth set down
this young poet as a pitiable and nonsensical writer, merely on the
assertions of some single heartless critic, who has just energy enough to
despise what is good." Such in fact was exactly the reputation which
_Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_ had succeeded in making for Keats, except
among a small private circle of admirers. Of praise and the thirst for
praise he continues to speak in as manly and sane a tone as ever;
especially in the two sonnets _On Fame_; and in the _Ode to Indolence_
declares--
"For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce."
Again in the same ode, he speaks of his 'demon Poesy' as 'a maiden most
unmeek,' whom he loves the better the more blame is heaped on her. At the
same time he shows his sense of the practical position which the reviews
had made for him when he writes to his brother:--"These reviews are
getting more and more powerful, especially the 'Quarterly'.... I was in
hopes that as people saw, as they must do, all the trickery and iniquity
of these plagues, they would scout them; but no; they are like the
spectators at the Westminster cockpit, and do not care who wins or loses."
And as a consequence he adds presently, "I have been, at different times,
turning it in my head whether I should go to Edinburgh and study for a
physician. I am afraid I should not take kindly to it; I am sure I could
not take fees; and yet I should like to do so; it is not worse than
writing poems, and hanging them up to be fly-blown on the Review
shambles." A little later he mentions to his sister Fanny an idea he has
of taking a voyage or two as surgeon on board an East Indiaman. But Brown,
more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and
promise of his friend's genius, would not hear of this plan, and persuaded
him to abandon it and throw himself again upon literature. Keats being for
the moment unable to get at any of his money, Brown advanced him enough to
live on through the summer; and it was agreed that he should go and work
in the country, and that Brown should follow him.
Towards the end of July Keats accordingly left Hampstead, and went first
to join his friend Rice in lodgings at Shanklin. Rice's health was at this
time worse than ever; and Keats himself was far from well; his chest weak,
his nerves unstrung, his heart, as we can see by his letters to Fanny
Brawne, incessantly distracted between the pains and joys of love. These
love-letters of Keats are written with little or none of the bright ease
and play of mind which make his correspondence with his friends and family
so attractive. Pleasant passages, indeed, occur in them, but in the main
they are constrained and distressing, showing him a prey, despite his
efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an almost abject intensity
and fretfulness of passion. An enraptured but an untrustful lover,
alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage, and passing through a
hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an hour, he found in the fever
of work and composition his only antidote against the fever of his
love-sickness. As long as Rice and he were together at Shanklin, the two
ailing and anxious men, firm friends as they were, depressed and did each
other harm. It was better when Brown with his settled health and spirits
came to join them. Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got
to work diligently at the task they had set before themselves, that of
writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. What other struggling man of
letters has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated
them, that this way lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose
Russian opera had made a hit in its day, and brought him in £500, was
supposed to possess the requisite stage experience, and to him were
assigned the plot and construction of the play, while Keats undertook to
compose the dialogue. The subject was one taken from the history of the
Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat opposite each other at the
same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as Brown sketched it out to
him, in each case without enquiring what was to come next, until the end
of the fourth act, when he took the conduct of the rest into his own
hands. Besides the joint work by means of which he thus hoped, at least in
sanguine hours, to find an escape from material difficulties, Keats was
busily engaged by himself in writing a new Greek tale in rhymed heroics,
_Lamia_. But a cloud of depression continued to hang over him. The climate
of Shanklin was against him: their lodgings were under the cliff, and from
the south-east, as he afterwards wrote, "came the damps of the sea, which
having no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy
idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke." After a
stay of five or six weeks, the friends made up their minds to change their
quarters, and went in the second week of August to Winchester. The old
cathedral city, with its peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its
clear-coursing streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the
nimble and pure air of its surrounding downs, exactly suited Keats, who
quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days which he spent here,
from the middle of August to the middle of October, were the last good
days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application, he
managed to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his
passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort.
His work continued to be chiefly on _Lamia_, with the concluding part of
_Otho_, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of King Stephen;
in this last he laboured alone, without accepting help from Brown. Early
in September Brown left Winchester to go on a visit to Bedhampton.
Immediately afterwards a letter from America compelled Keats to go to town
and arrange with Mr Abbey for the despatch of fresh remittances to his
brother George. He dared not, to use his own words, 'venture into the
fire' by going to see his mistress at Hampstead, but stayed apparently
with Mr Taylor in Fleet Street, and was back on the fourth day at
Winchester, where he spent the following ten days or fortnight in
solitude. During this interval he took up _Hyperion_ again, but made up
his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style and method
too Miltonic and artificial. _Lamia_ he had finished, and his chief
present occupation was in revising the _Eve of St Agnes_, studying Italian
in the pages of Ariosto, and writing up one of his long and full
journal-letters to brother and sister George. The season was fine, and the
beauty of the walks and the weather entering into his spirit, prompted
also in these days the last, and one certainly of the happiest, of his
odes, that _To Autumn_. To the fragment of _St Mark's Eve_, begun or
planned, as we have seen, the January before, he now added lines inspired
at once by the spirit of city quietude, which his letters show to have
affected him deeply here at Winchester, and by the literary example of
Chatterton, for whom his old admiration had of late returned in full
force.
The wholesome brightness of the early autumn continuing to sustain and
soothe him, Keats made in these days a vigorous effort to rally his moral
powers, to banish over-passionate and morbid feelings, and to put himself
on a right footing with the world. The letter to America already
mentioned, and others written at the same time to Reynolds, Taylor, Dilke,
Brown, and Haydon, are full of evidences of this spirit. The ill success
of his brother in his American speculations shall serve, he is determined,
as a spur to his own exertions, and now that real troubles are upon them,
he will show that he can bear them better than those of imagination. The
imaginary nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him
up into an agent. He has been passing his time between reading, writing,
and fretting; the last he now intends to give up, and stick to the other
two. He does not consider he has any just cause of complaint against the
world; he has done nothing as yet except for the amusement of a few people
predisposed for sentiment, and is convinced that any thing really fine
will make its way. "What reviewers can put a hindrance to must be a
nothing--or mediocre which is worse." With reference to his own plans for
the future, he is determined to trust no longer to mere hopes of ultimate
success, whether from plays or poems, but to turn to the natural resource
of a man 'fit for nothing but literature' and needing to support himself
by his pen: the resource, that is, of journalism and reviewing. "I will
write, on the liberal side of the question, for whoever will pay me. I
have not known yet what it is to be diligent. I purpose living in town in
a cheap lodging, and endeavouring for a beginning, to get the theatricals
of some paper. When I can afford to compose deliberate poems, I will."
These words are from a letter written to Brown on the 22nd of September,
and further on in the same letter we find evidence of the honourable
spirit of independence and unselfishness towards his friends which went
together in Keats, as it too rarely does, with an affectionate willingness
to accept their services at a pinch. He had been living since May on a
loan from Brown and an advance from Taylor, and was uneasy at putting the
former to a sacrifice. The subject, he says, is often in his mind,--
"and the end of my speculations is always an anxiety for your
happiness. This anxiety will not be one of the least incitements to
the plan I propose pursuing. I had got into a habit of mind of looking
towards you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it is a duty I
owe myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my
subsistence--make no exertion. At the end of another year you shall
applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct."
Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found his friend unshaken
in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose his company, and
doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed, respected their
motives too much to contend against them. It was accordingly settled that
the two friends should part, Brown returning to his own house at
Hampstead, while Keats went to live by himself in London and look out for
employment on the press.