Return to Wentworth Place--Autumn occupations: The _Cap and Bells_:
Recast of _Hyperion_--Growing despondency--Visit of George Keats to
England--Attack of Illness in February--Rally in the Spring--Summer in
Kentish Town--Publication of the _Lamia_ volume--Relapse--Ordered
South--Voyage to Italy--Naples--Rome--Last Days and Death. [October
1819-Feb. 1821.]
We left Keats at Winchester, with _Otho_, _Lamia_, and the _Ode to Autumn_
just written, and with his mind set on trying to face life sanely, and
take up arms like other men against his troubles, instead of letting
imagination magnify and passion exasperate them as heretofore. At his
request Dilke took for him a lodging in his own neighbourhood in
Westminster (25 College Street), and here Keats came on the 8th of October
to take up his quarters. But alas! his blood proved traitor to his will:
and the plan of life and literary work in London broke down at once on
trial. The gain of health and composure which he thought he had made at
Winchester proved illusory, or at least could only be maintained at a
distance from the great perturbing cause. Two days after his return he
went to Hampstead--'into the fire'--and in a moment the flames had seized
him more fiercely than ever. It was the first time he had seen his
mistress for four months. He found her kind, and from that hour was
utterly passion's slave again. In the solitude of his London lodging he
found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He must send
her a line, he writes to Fanny Brawne two days later, "and see if that
will assist in dismissing you from my mind for ever so short a time. Upon
my soul I can think of nothing else.... I cannot exist without you. I am
forgetful of everything but seeing you again--my life seems to stop
there--I see no further. You have absorb'd me." A three days' visit at her
mother's house, followed by another of a day or two at the Dilkes', ended
in his giving up all resistance to the spell. Within ten days, apparently,
of his return from Winchester, he had settled again at Hampstead under
Brown's roof, next door to the home of his joy and torment. He writes with
a true foreboding: "I shall be able to do nothing. I should like to cast
the die for Love or Death.--I have no patience with anything else."
It was for death that the die was cast, and from the date of his return to
Wentworth Place in October, 1819, begins the melancholy closing chapter of
Keats's history. Of the triple flame which was burning away his life, the
flame of genius, of passion, and of disease, while the last kept
smouldering in secret, the second burnt every day more fiercely, and the
first began from this time forth to sink. Not that he was idle during the
ensuing season of autumn and early winter; but the work he did was marked
both by infirmity of purpose and failure of power. For the present he
determined not to publish _Lamia_, _Isabella_, and the other poems written
since _Endymion_. He preferred to await the result of Brown's attempt to
get _Otho_ brought on the stage, thinking, no doubt justly, that a success
in that field would help to win a candid hearing for his poetry. In the
meantime the scoffs of the party critics had brought him so low in
estimation that Brown in sending in the play thought it best to withhold
his friend's name. The great hope of the authors was that Kean would see
an opportunity for himself in the part of Ludolph. In this they were not
disappointed: the play was accepted: but Elliston, the manager, proposing
to keep it back till the next season or the next but one, Keats and Brown
objected to the delay, and about Christmas transferred the offer of their
MS. to Covent Garden, where Macready, under Harris's management, was at
this time beginning to act the leading parts. It was after a while
returned unopened, and with that the whole matter seems to have dropped.
In the meanwhile tragedy was still the goal towards which Keats bent his
hopes. "One of my ambitions," he had written to Bailey from Winchester,
"is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has
done in acting." And now, in a letter to Mr Taylor of Nov. 17, he says
that to write a few fine plays is still his greatest ambition, when he
does feel ambitious, which is very seldom. The little dramatic skill he
may as yet have, however badly it might show in a drama, would, he
conceives, be sufficient for a poem; and what he wishes to do next is "to
diffuse the colouring of _St Agnes' Eve_ throughout a poem in which
character and sentiment would be the figures to such drapery." Two or
three such poems would be, he thinks, the best _gradus_ to the _Parnassum
altissimum_ of true dramatic writing. Meantime, he is for the moment
engaged on a task of a different nature. "As the marvellous is the most
enticing, and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers, I have been
endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy, and to let her manage
for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all." The piece to
which Keats here alludes is evidently the satirical fairy poem of the _Cap
and Bells_, on which we know him to have been at this time busy. Writing
of the autumn days immediately following their return to Wentworth Place,
Brown says:--
"By chance our conversation turned on the idea of a comic faery poem
in the Spenser stanza, and I was glad to encourage it. He had not
composed many stanzas before he proceeded in it with spirit. It was to
be published under the feigned authorship of 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,' and
to bear the title of the _Cap and Bells_, or, which he preferred, the
_Jealousies_. This occupied his mornings pleasantly. He wrote it with
the greatest facility; in one instance I remember having copied (for I
copied as he wrote) as many as twelve stanzas before dinner[59]."
Excellent friend as Brown was to Keats, he was not the most judicious
adviser in matters of literature, and the attempt made in the _Cap and
Bells_ to mingle with the strain of fairy fancy a strain of worldly
flippancy and satire was one essentially alien to Keats's nature. As long
as health and spirits lasted, he was often full, as we have seen, of
pleasantry and nonsense: but his wit was essentially amiable[60], and he
was far too tender-hearted ever to be a satirist. Moreover the spirit of
poetry in him was too intense and serious to work hand-in-hand with the
spirit of banter, as poetry and banter had gone hand-in-hand in some of
the metrical romances of the Italian Renaissance, and again, with
unprecedented dexterity and brilliance, in the early cantos of _Don
Juan_. It was partly the influence of the facetious Brown, who was a great
student of Pulci and Boiardo, partly that of his own recent Italian
studies, and partly the dazzling example of Byron's success, that now
induced Keats to make an attempt in the same dual strain. Having already
employed the measure most fit for such an attempt, the _ottava rima_ of
the Italians, in his serious poem of _Isabella_, he now, by what seems an
odd technical perversity, adopted for his comic poem the grave Spenserian
stanza, with its sustained and involved rhymes and its long-drawn close.
Working thus in a vein not truly his own, and hampered moreover by his
choice of metre, Keats nevertheless manages his transitions from grave to
gay with a light hand, and the movement of the _Cap and Bells_ has much of
his characteristic suppleness and grace. In other respects the poem is not
a success. The story, which appears to have been one of his own and
Brown's invention, turned on the perverse loves of a fairy emperor and a
fairy princess of the East. The two are unwillingly betrothed, each being
meanwhile enamoured of a mortal. The eighty-eight stanzas, which were all
that Keats wrote of the poem, only carry us as far as the flight of the
emperor Elfinan for England, which takes place at the moment when his
affianced bride alights from her aerial journey to his capital. Into the
Elfinan part of the story Keats makes it clear that he meant somehow to
weave in the same tale which had been in his mind when he began the
fragment of _St Mark's Eve_ at the beginning of the year,--the tale of an
English Bertha living in a minster city and beguiled in some way through
the reading of a magic book. With this and other purely fanciful elements
of the story are mixed up satirical allusions to the events of the day.
It was in this year, 1819, that the quarrels between the Prince Regent and
his wife were drawing to a head: the public mind was full of the subject:
and the general sympathy was vehemently aroused on the side of the
scandalous lady in opposition to her thrice scandalous husband. The
references to these royal quarrels and intrigues in the _Cap and Bells_
are general rather than particular, although here and there individual
names and characters are glanced at: as when 'Esquire Biancopany' stands
manifestly, as Mr Forman has pointed out, for Whitbread. But the social
and personal satire of the piece is in truth aimless and weak enough. As
Keats had not the heart, so neither had he the worldly experience, for
this kind of work; and beside the blaze of the Byronic wit and devilry his
raillery seems but child's play. Where the fun is of the purely fanciful
and fairy kind, he shows abundance of adroitness and invention, and in
passages not humorous is sometimes really himself, his imagination
becoming vivid and alert, and his style taking on its own happy light and
colour,--but seldom for more than a stanza or half-stanza at a time.
Besides his morning task in Brown's company on the _Cap and Bells_, Keats
had other work on hand during this November and December. "In the
evenings," writes Brown, "at his own desire, he occupied a separate
apartment, and was deeply engaged in re-modelling the fragment of
_Hyperion_ into the form of a Vision." The result of this attempt, which
has been preserved, is of a singular and pathetic interest in Keats's
history. We have seen how, in the previous August, he had grown
discontented with the style and diction of _Hyperion_, as being too
artificial and Miltonic. Now, in the decline of his powers, he took the
poem up again[61], and began to re-write and greatly amplify it; partly,
it would seem, through a mere relapse into his old fault of overloading,
partly through a desire to give expression to thoughts and feelings which
were pressing on his mind. His new plan was to relate the fall of the
Titans, not, as before, in direct narrative, but in the form of a vision
revealed and interpreted to him by a goddess of the fallen race. The
reader remembers how he had broken off his work on _Hyperion_ at the point
where Mnemosyne is enkindling the brain of Apollo with the inspiration of
her ancient wisdom. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of
mythology he had lately bought[62], he now identifies this Greek
Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, with the Roman Moneta; and (being
possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome
was not far from that of Saturn) makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess
and guardian of Saturn's temple. His vision takes him first into a grove
or garden of delicious fruits, having eaten of which he sinks into a
slumber, and awakes to find himself on the floor of a huge primeval
temple. Presently a voice, the voice of Moneta, whose form he cannot yet
see for the fumes of incense, summons him to climb the steps leading to an
image beside which she is offering sacrifice. Obeying her with difficulty,
he questions her concerning the mysteries of the place, and learns from
her, among other knowledge, that he is standing in the temple of Saturn.
Then she withdraws the veils from her face, at sight of which he feels an
irresistible desire to learn her thoughts; and thereupon finds himself
conveyed in a trance by her side to the ancient scene of Saturn's
overthrow. 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' &c.,--from this point
Keats begins to weave into the new tissue of his _Vision_ the text of the
original _Hyperion_; with alterations which are in almost all cases for
the worse. Neither does the new portion of his work well match the old.
Side by side with impressive passages, it contains others where both
rhythm and diction flag, and in comparison depends for its beauty far more
on single lines and passages, and less on sustained effects. Keats has
indeed imagined nothing richer or purer than the feast of fruits at the
opening of the _Vision_, and of supernatural presences he has perhaps
conjured up none of such melancholy beauty and awe as that of the
priestess when she removes her veils. But the especial interest of the
poem lies in the light which it throws on the inward distresses of his
mind, and on the conception he had by this time come to entertain of the
poet's character and lot. When Moneta bids him mount the steps to her
side, she warns him that if he fails to do so he is bound to perish
utterly where he stands. In fact he all but dies before he reaches the
stair, but reviving, ascends and learns from her the meaning of the
ordeal:--
"None can usurp this height," returned that shade,
"But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world,
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they come,
Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half."
"Are there not thousands in the world," said I,
Encouraged by the sooth voice of the shade,
"Who love their fellows even to the death,
Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labour for mortal good? I sure should see
Other men here, but I am here alone."
"Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,"
Rejoin'd that voice; "they are no dreamers weak;
They seek no wonder but the human face,
No music but a happy-noted voice:
They come not here, they have no thought to come;
And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself: think of the earth:
What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?
What haven? Every creature hath its home,
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low--
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.
Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared,
Such things as thou art are admitted oft
Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile,
And suffer'd in these temples--"[63].
Tracing the process of Keats's thought through this somewhat obscure
imagery,--the poet, he means, is one who to indulge in dreams withdraws
himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary men. At first he is
lulled to sleep by the sweets of poetry (the fruits of the garden):
awakening, he finds himself on the floor of a solemn temple, with
Mnemosyne, the mother and inspirer of song, enthroned all but inaccessibly
above him. If he is a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow
men, he is condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten: he is suffered to
approach the goddess, to commune with her and catch her inspiration, only
on condition that he shares all those troubles and makes them his own. And
even then, his portion is far harder and less honourable than that of
common men. In the conception Keats here expresses of the human mission
and responsibility of his art there is nothing new. Almost from the first
dawning of his ambition, he had looked beyond the mere sweets of poetry
towards--
"a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts."
What is new is the bitterness with which he speaks of the poet's lot even
at its best.
"Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve,"
--through what a circle must the spirit of Keats, when this bitter cry
broke from him, have travelled since the days, only three years before,
when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of
the poetic life:--
"These are the living pleasures of the bard,
But richer far posterity's award.
What shall he murmur with his latest breath,
When his proud eye looks through the film of death?"--
His present cry in its bitterness is in truth a cry not so much of the
spirit as of the flesh, or rather of the spirit vanquished by the flesh.
The wasting of his vital powers by latent disease was turning all his
sensations and emotions into pain--at once darkening the shadow of
impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding
instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied
cravings of his passion. In verses at this time addressed, though
doubtless not shown, to his mistress, he exclaims once and again in tones
like this:--
"Where shall I learn to get my peace again?"--
--"O for some sunny spell
To dissipate the shadows of this hell":--
or at the conclusion of a piteous sonnet:--
"Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom's atom or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life's purposes,--the palate of the mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind."
That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does
not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible in the present state of his
fortunes. "However selfishly I may feel," he had written to her some
months earlier, "I am sure I could never act selfishly." The Brawnes on
their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and
independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly
be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, Keats's sufferings,
disguise them as he might, could not escape the notice of his affectionate
comrade Brown. Without understanding the cause, Brown was not slow to
perceive the effect, and to realise how vain were the assurances Keats had
given him at Winchester, that the pressure of real troubles would stiffen
him against troubles of imagination, and that he was not and would not
allow himself to be unhappy.
"I quickly perceived," writes Brown, "that he was more so than I had
feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and,
frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great
uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do
no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding
that word however.... All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge,
was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and in kindness,
or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend
could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too
thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health.
Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times,
a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered by
accident, and without delay, revealed to me. He needed not to be
warned of the danger of such a habit; but I rejoiced at his promise
never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could
induce him to break his word when once given,--which was a difficulty.
Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional
proof of his rooted misery"[64].
Some of the same symptoms were observed by Haydon, and have been described
by him with his usual reckless exaggeration, and love of contrasting
another's weakness with his own strength[65]. To his friends in general
Keats bore himself as affectionately as ever, but they began to notice
that he had lost his cheerfulness. One of them, Severn, at this time
competed for and carried off (December 9, 1819) the annual gold medal of
the Academy for a historical painting, which had not been adjudged for
several years. The subject was Spenser's 'Cave of Despair.' We hear of
Keats flinging out in anger from among a company of elder artists where
the deserts of the winner were disparaged; and we find him making an
appointment with Severn to go and see his prize picture,--adding, however,
parenthetically from his troubled heart, "You had best put me into your
Cave of Despair." In December his letters to his sister make mention
several times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had been made
to him by Mr Abbey, and which for a moment he was willing to entertain,
that he should take advantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in
connection with that gentleman's business. Early in January, 1820, George
Keats appeared on a short visit to London. He was now settled with his
wife and child in the far West, at Louisville on the Ohio. Here his first
trading adventure had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty of
the naturalist Audubon who was concerned in it; and he was brought to
England by the necessity of getting possession, from the reluctant Abbey,
of a further portion of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers
from their grandmother's gift. His visit lasted only three weeks, during
which John made no attempt to unbosom himself to him as of old. "He was
not the same being," wrote George, looking back on the time some years
afterwards; "although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish,
he did not speak with his former openness and unreserve, he had lost the
reviving custom of venting his griefs." In a letter which the poet wrote
to his sister-in-law while her husband was in England, he attempts to keep
up the old vein of lively affectionate fun and spirits, but soon falls
involuntarily into one of depression and irritation against the world. Of
his work he says nothing, and it is clear from Brown's narrative that
both his morning and his evening task--the _Cap and Bells_ and the
_Vision_--had been dropped some time before this[66], and left in the
fragmentary state in which we possess them.
George left for Liverpool on Friday Jan. 28. A few days later Keats was
seized by the first overt attack of the fatal mischief which had been set
up in his constitution by the exertions of his Scotch tour, and which
recent agitations, and perhaps imprudences, had aggravated.
"One night," writes Brown--it was on the Thursday Feb. 3--"at eleven
o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce
intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible[67]; it
therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, 'What is the
matter? you are fevered?' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was on the
outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,--but
now I don't feel it. Fevered!--of course, a little.' He mildly and
instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my
request that he should go to bed. I followed with the best immediate
remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On
entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he
slightly coughed, and I heard him say,--'That is blood from my mouth.'
I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the
sheet. 'Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.' After
regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of
countenance that I can never forget, and said,--'I know the colour of
that blood;--it is arterial blood;--I cannot be deceived in that
colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--I must die.' I ran
for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, I left
him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep."
Keats knew his case, and from the first moment had foreseen the issue
truly. He survived for twelve months longer, but the remainder of his life
was but a life-in-death. How many are there among us to whom such
_lacrymae rerum_ come not home? Happy at least are they whose lives this
curse consumption has not darkened with sorrow unquenchable for losses
past, with apprehensions never at rest for those to come,--who know not
what it is to watch, in some haven of delusive hope, under Mediterranean
palms, or amid the glittering winter peace of Alpine snows, their dearest
and their brightest perish. The malady in Keats's case ran through the
usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. The doctors would
not admit that his lungs were injured, and merely prescribed a lowering
regimen and rest from mental excitement. The weakness and nervous
prostration of the patient were at first excessive, and he could bear to
see nobody but Brown, who nursed him affectionately day and night. After a
week or so he was able to receive little daily visits from his betrothed,
and to keep up a constant interchange of notes with her. A hint, which his
good feelings wrung from him, that under the circumstances he ought to
release her from her engagement, was not accepted, and for a time he
became quieter and more composed. To his sister at Walthamstow he wrote
often and cheerfully from his sickbed, and pleasant letters to some of his
men friends: among them one to James Rice, which contains this often
quoted and touching picture of his state of mind:--
"I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not passed
a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering
under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify that
acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had
lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that
illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my
mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive
things in a truer light),--how astonishingly does the chance of
leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us!
Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields;
I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from
my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just
created them with a super-human fancy."
The greatest pleasure he had experienced in life, Keats said at another
time, was in watching the growth of flowers: and in a discussion on the
literary merits of the Bible he once, says Hazlitt, found fault with the
Hebrew poetry for saying so little about them. What he wants to see again,
he writes now further from his sickbed, are 'the simple flowers of our
spring.' And in the course of April, after being nearly two months a
prisoner, he began gradually to pick up strength and get about. Even as
early as the twenty-fifth of March, we hear of him going into London, to
the private view of Haydon's 'Entry into Jerusalem,' where the painter
tells how he found him and Hazlitt in a corner, 'really rejoicing.'
Keats's friends, in whose minds his image had always been associated with
the ideas of intense vitality and of fame in store, could not bring
themselves to believe but that he would recover. Brown had arranged to
start early in May on a second walking-tour in Scotland, and the doctor
actually advised Keats to go with him: a folly on which he knew his own
state too well to venture. He went with Brown on the smack as far as
Gravesend, and then returned; not to Hampstead, but to a lodging in
Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. He had chosen this neighbourhood for the
sake of the companionship of Leigh Hunt, who was living in Mortimer
Street close by. Keats remained at Wesleyan Place for about seven weeks
during May and June, living an invalid life, and occasionally taking
advantage of the weather to go to an exhibition in London or for a drive
on Hampstead Heath. During the first weeks of his illness he had been
strictly enjoined to avoid not only the excitement of writing, but even
that of reading, poetry. About this time he speaks of intending to begin
(meaning begin again) soon on the _Cap and Bells_. But in fact the only
work he really did was that of seeing through the press, with some slight
revision of the text, the new volume of poems which his friends had at
last induced him to put forward. This is the immortal volume containing
_Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St Agnes_, _Hyperion_, and the _Odes_. Of
the poems written during Keats's twenty months of inspiration from March
1818 to October 1819, none of importance are omitted except the _Eve of St
Mark_, the _Ode on Indolence_, and _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. The first
Keats no doubt thought too fragmentary, and the second too unequal: La
Belle Dame sans Merci he had let Hunt have for his periodical _The
Indicator_, where it was printed (with alterations not for the better) on
May 20, 1820. _Hyperion_, as the publishers mention in a note, was only at
their special desire included in the book: it is given in its original
shape, the poet's friends, says Brown, having made him feel that they
thought the re-cast no improvement. The volume came out in the first week
of July. An admirably kind and discreet review by Leigh Hunt appeared in
the _Indicator_ at the beginning of August[68]: and in the same month
Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh Review_ for the first time broke silence in
Keats's favour. The impression made on the more intelligent order of
readers may be inferred from the remarks of Crabb Robinson in his
_Diaries_ for the following December[69]. "My book has had good success
among the literary people," wrote Keats a few weeks after its appearance,
"and I believe has a moderate sale."
But had the success been even far greater than it was, Keats was in no
heart and no health for it to cheer him. Passion with lack of hope were
working havoc in his blood, and frustrating any efforts of nature towards
recovery. The relapse was not long delayed. Fresh hæmorrhages occurring on
the 22nd and 23rd of June, he moved from his lodgings in Wesleyan Place to
be nursed by the Hunts at their house in Mortimer Street. Here everything
was done that kindness could suggest to keep him amused and comforted: but
all in vain: he "would keep his eyes fixed all day," as he afterwards
avowed, on Hampstead; and once when at Hunt's suggestion they took a drive
in that direction, and rested on a seat in Well Walk, he burst into a
flood of unwonted tears, and declared his heart was breaking. In writing
to Fanny Brawne he at times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but
breaks into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels himself
chained and desperate while mistress and friends are free, and whose heart
is racked between desire and helplessness, and a thousand daily pangs of
half-frantic jealousy and suspicion. "Hamlet's heart was full of such
misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, 'Go to a nunnery, go, go!'"
Keats when he wrote thus was not himself, but only in his own words, 'a
fever of himself:' and to seek cause for his complaints in anything but
his own distempered state would be unjust equally to his friends and his
betrothed. Wound as they might at the time, we know from her own words
that they left no impression of unkindness on her memory[70].
Such at this time was Keats's condition that the slightest shock unmanned
him, and he could not bear the entrance of an unexpected person or
stranger. After he had been some seven weeks with the Hunts, it happened
on the 12th of August, through the misconduct of a servant, that a note
from Fanny Brawne was delivered to him opened and two days late. This
circumstance, we are told, so affected him that he could not endure to
stay longer in the house, but left it instantly, intending to go back to
his old lodgings in Well Walk. The Brawnes, however, would not suffer
this, but took him into their own home and nursed him. Under the eye and
tendance of his betrothed, he found during the next few weeks some
mitigation of his sufferings. Haydon came one day to see him, and has
told, with a painter's touch, how he found him "lying in a white bed, with
white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic
flush of his cheeks. He was deeply affected and so was I[71]." Ever since
his relapse at the end of June, Keats had been warned by the doctors that
a winter in England would be too much for him, and had been trying to
bring himself to face the prospect of a journey to Italy. The Shelleys had
heard through the Gisbornes of Keats's relapse, and Shelley now wrote in
terms of the most delicate and sympathetic kindness inviting him to come
and take up his residence with them at Pisa. This letter reached Keats
immediately after his return to Hampstead. He replied in an uncertain
tone, showing himself deeply touched by the Shelleys' friendship, but as
to the _Cenci_, which had just been sent him, and generally as to
Shelley's and his own work in poetry, finding nothing very cordial or much
to the purpose to say.
As to the plan of wintering in Italy, Keats had by this time made up his
mind to try it, "as a soldier marches up to a battery." His hope was that
Brown would accompany him, but the letters he had written to that friend
in the Highlands were delayed in delivery, and the time for Keats's
departure was fast approaching while Brown still remained in ignorance of
his purpose. In the meantime another companion offered himself in the
person of Severn, who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the
Royal Academy the year before, determined now to go and work at Rome with
a view to competing for the travelling studentship. Keats and Severn
accordingly took passage for Naples on board the ship 'Maria Crowther,'
which sailed from London on Sept. 18[72]. Several of the friends who loved
Keats best went on board with him as far as Gravesend, and among them Mr
Taylor, who had just helped him with money for his journey by the purchase
for £100 of the copyright of _Endymion_. As soon as the ill news of his
health reached Brown in Scotland, he hastened to make the best of his way
south, and for that purpose caught a smack at Dundee, which arrived in the
Thames on the same evening as the 'Maria Crowther' sailed: so that the two
friends lay on that night within hail of one another off Gravesend
unawares.
The voyage at first seemed to do Keats good, and Severn was struck by his
vigour of appetite and apparent cheerfulness. The fever of travel and
change is apt to produce this deceptive effect in a consumptive patient,
and in Keats's case, aided by his invincible spirit of pleasantness to
those about him, it was sufficient to disguise his sufferings, and to
raise the hopes of his companion throughout the voyage and for some time
afterwards. Contrary winds held them beating about the Channel, and ten
days after starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where Keats
landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at Bedhampton. On board
ship in the Solent immediately afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter
confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever
confided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of itself, his
passion, he says would prevent it. "The very thing which I want to live
most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can
help it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in
my state? I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these
pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even these
pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline,
are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for ever."
On the night when Keats wrote these words (Sept. 28) Brown was staying
with the Dilkes at Chichester, so that the two friends had thus narrowly
missed seeing each other once more. The ship putting to sea again, still
with adverse winds, there came next to Keats that day of momentary calm
and lightening of the spirit of which Severn has left us the record, and
the poet himself a testimony in the last and one of the most beautiful of
his sonnets. They landed on the Dorsetshire coast, apparently near
Lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, the beauties of
which Keats showed and interpreted with the delighted insight of one
initiated from birth into the secrets of nature. On board ship the same
night he wrote the sonnet which every reader of English knows so well;
placing it, by a pathetic choice or chance, opposite the heading a
_Lover's Complaint_, on a blank leaf of the folio copy of Shakespeare's
poems which had been given him by Reynolds, and which in marks, notes, and
under-scorings bears so many other interesting traces of his thought and
feeling:--
"Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of cold ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death."
These were Keats's last verses. With the single exception of the sonnet
beginning 'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,' composed
probably immediately after his return from Winchester, they are the only
love-verses in which his passion is attuned to tranquillity; and surely no
death-song of lover or poet came ever in a strain of more unfevered beauty
and tenderness, or with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity.
Getting clear of the Channel at last, the vessel was caught by a violent
storm in the Bay of Biscay; and Severn waking at night, and finding the
water rushing through their cabin, called out to Keats "half fearing he
might be dead," and to his relief was answered cheerfully with the first
line of Arne's long-popular song from _Artaxerxes_--'Water parted from the
sea.' As the storm abated Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of _Don
Juan_, but found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and
presently flung the volume from him in disgust. A dead calm followed:
after which the voyage proceeded without farther incident, except the
dropping of a shot across the ship's bow by a Portuguese man-of-war, in
order to bring her to and ask a question about privateers. After a voyage
of over four weeks, the 'Maria Crowther' arrived in the Bay of Naples, and
was there subjected to ten days' quarantine; during which, says Keats, he
summoned up, 'in a kind of desperation,' more puns than in the whole
course of his life before. A Miss Cotterill, consumptive like himself, was
among his fellow-passengers, and to her Keats showed himself full of
cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight of her sufferings inwardly
preying all the while on his nerves, and contributing to aggravate his
own. He admits as much in writing from Naples harbour to Mrs Brawne: and
in the same letter says, "O what an account I could give you of the Bay of
Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world--I feel a
spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly." The effort he
constantly made to keep bright, and to show an interest in the new world
of colour and classic beauty about him, partly imposed on Severn; but in a
letter he wrote to Brown from Naples on Nov. 1, soon after their landing,
his secret anguish of sense and spirit breaks out terribly:--
"I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her.... Oh God! God! God!
Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me
like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my
head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see her--I hear
her.... Oh Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me
that the human heart is capable of so much misery."
At Naples Keats and Severn stayed at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and received
much kindness and hospitality from a brother of Miss Cotterill's who was
there to meet her. The political state and servile temper of the
people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms
imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous
summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and it was the sight, in the
theatre, of sentries actually posted on the stage during a performance
that one evening determined him suddenly to leave the place. He had
received there another letter from Shelley, who since he last wrote had
read the _Lamia_ volume, and was full of generous admiration for
_Hyperion_. Shelley now warmly renewed his invitation to Keats to come to
Pisa. But his and Severn's plans were fixed for Rome. On their drive
thither (apparently in the second week of November) Keats suffered
seriously from want of proper food: but he was able to take pleasure in
the beauty of the land, and of the autumn flowers which Severn gathered
for him by the way. Reaching Rome, they settled at once in lodgings which
Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark had taken for them in the Piazza di
Spagna, in the first house on the right going up the steps to Sta Trinità
dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were
left pretty much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and
at first they were ill served by the _trattorìa_ from which they got their
meals, until Keats mended matters by one day coolly emptying all the
dishes out of window, and handing them back to the messenger; a hint, says
Severn, which was quickly taken. One of Severn's first cares was to get a
piano, since nothing soothed Keats's pain so much as music. For a while
the patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of
seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit these
alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the Pincian
close by. The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the
air, says Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. In Severn's
absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid Lieutenant Elton. In
their walks on the Pincian these two often met the famous beauty Pauline
Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing--but
not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who
was tall and handsome, presently affected Keats's nerves, and made them
change the direction of their walks. Sometimes, instead of walking, they
would ride a little way on horseback while Severn was working among the
ruins.
It is related by Severn that Keats in his first days at Rome began reading
a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the words, too sadly applicable to
himself:--
"Misera me! sollievo a me non resta
Altro che 'l pianto, _ed il pianto è delitto_."
Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more cheerful.
His thoughts even turned again towards verse, and he meditated a poem on
the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and
wrote encouragingly to his friends in England; and on Nov. 30 Keats
himself wrote to Brown in a strain much less despondent than before. But
suddenly on these glimmerings of hope followed despair. On Dec. 10 came a
relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Hæmorrhage followed hæmorrhage
on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes
the most piteous and distressing. Keats at starting had confided to his
friend a bottle of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty begged to
have it, in order that he might put an end to his misery: and on Severn's
refusal, "his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his
ardent imagination and bursting heart." It was no unmanly fear of pain in
Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but
above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would
bring upon his friend. "He explained to me the exact procedure of his
gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon
the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued
attendance on him." Severn gently persisting in refusal, Keats for a while
fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example
of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed. In
religion Keats had been neither a believer nor a scoffer, respecting
Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by turns clinging to
and drifting from the doctrine of immortality. Contrasting now the
behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the
power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to
him from Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_, strove to pass the
remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy.
By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great,
partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of
the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to
combat it. Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then
were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous
kindness of Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr
Ewing. At one moment, their stock of money having run out, they were in
danger of actual destitution, till a remittance from Mr Taylor arrived
just in time to save them. The devotion and resource of Severn were
infinite, and had their reward. Occasionally there came times of delirium
or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and
his ruined hopes, till his companion was almost exhausted with "beating
about in the tempest of his mind;" and once and again some fresh
remembrance of his love, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter,
would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the
first few weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian,
one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his
companion soothed him with reading or music. His favourite reading was
still Jeremy Taylor, and the sonatas of Haydn were the music he liked
Severn best to play to him. Of recovery he would not hear, but longed for
nothing except the peace of death, and had even weaned, or all but weaned,
himself from thoughts of fame. "I feel," he said, "the flowers growing
over me," and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he
gave the words for his epitaph:--"here lies one whose name was writ in
water." Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to
speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual
question to the doctor when he came in was, "Doctor, when will this
posthumous life of mine come to an end?" As he turned to ask it neither
physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at
all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing
unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. Loveable and considerate to the
last, "his generous concern for me," says Severn, "in my isolated position
at Rome was one of his greatest cares." His response to kindness was
irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with
him to the end. Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to
fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. "To remedy this
one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a
lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be
conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found
the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while
doubting suddenly cried out, 'Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy
lamplighter actually lit up the other candle.'" And again "Poor Keats has
me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens
his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close
gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep."
Such tender and harrowing memories haunted all the after life of the
watcher, and in days long subsequent it was one of his chief occupations
to write them down. Life held out for two months and a half after the
relapse, but from the first days of February the end was visibly drawing
near. It came peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes
Severn, "about four, the approaches of death came on. 'Severn--I--lift me
up--I am dying--I shall die easy; don't be frightened--be firm, and thank
God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in
his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death,
so quiet, that I still thought he slept." Three days later his body was
carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his
story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his
sake and Shelley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the English race
for ever. It was but the other day that the remains of Severn were laid in
their last resting-place beside his friend[73].