Character and Genius.
The touching circumstances of Keats's illness and death at Rome aroused
naturally, as soon as they were known, the sympathy of every generous
mind. Foremost, as all the world knows, in the expression of that sympathy
was Shelley. He had been misinformed as to the degree in which the critics
had contributed to Keats's sufferings, and believing that they had killed
him, was full both of righteous wrath against the offenders, and of
passionate regret for what the world had lost. Under the stress of that
double inspiration Shelley wrote,--
"And a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres."
As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, _Adonaïs_ is unsurpassed
in literature: with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and
the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is
perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effort of Shelley's art: while
its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most
lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the
elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his
character and fate is erroneous. A similar false impression was at the
same time conveyed, to a circle of readers incommensurably wider than
that reached by Shelley, in the well-known stanza of _Don Juan_. In regard
to Keats Byron tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare.
When the _Edinburgh_ praised him, he was furious, and on receipt of the
Lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to Murray:--"No more Keats, I
entreat:--flay him alive;--if some of you don't, I must skin him myself."
Then after his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, he
turns against the latter, and cries:--"I would not be the person who wrote
that homicidal article for all the honour and glory of the world." In the
_Don Juan_ passage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers and at
the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the same breath.
Taken together with the notion of 'Johnny Keats' to which _Blackwood_ and
the _Quarterly_ had previously given currency, the _Adonaïs_ and the _Don
Juan_ passage alike tended to fix in the public mind an impression of
Keats's character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of detraction
had been poison. It was long before his friends, who knew that he was 'as
like Johnny Keats as the Holy Ghost,' did anything effectual to set his
memory right. Brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in the
end wrote only the brief memoir, still in manuscript, which has been
quoted so often in the above pages. For anything like a full biography
George Keats in America could alone have supplied the information; but
against him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in the
hour of need, (having been in truth simply unable to do so,) Brown had
unluckily conceived so harsh a prejudice that friendly communication
between them became impossible. Neither was Dilke, who alone among Keats's
friends in England took George's part, disposed under the circumstances
to help Brown in his task. For a long time George himself hoped to
superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his
want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his
occupations in the West, prevented him. Mr Taylor, the publisher, also at
one time wished to be Keats's biographer, and with the help of Woodhouse
collected materials for the purpose; but in the end failed to use them.
The same wish was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose literary
skill, and fine judgment and delicacy, should have made him of all the
poet's friends the most competent for the work. But of these many projects
not one had been carried out, when five-and-twenty years after Keats's
death a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task,--the
Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton freshly remembered by us
all,--and with help from nearly all Keats's surviving friends, and by the
grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet
in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every
student is familiar.
Keats had indeed enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can
with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all,
inherited disease, which killed him. He had a nature all tingling with
pride and sensitiveness: he had the perilous capacity and appetite for
pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own 'exquisite sense of
the luxurious': and with it the besetting tendency to self-torment which
he describes as his 'horrid morbidity of temperament.' The greater his
credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self-indulgence, and
that on the other he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued
him. To the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way
when he speaks of the 'violence of his temperament, continually smothered
up.' Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during
the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but
that of apprenticeship in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such
generosity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct
and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely
better trained and less hardly tried. His hold over himself gave way,
indeed, under the stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the
weak places of his nature. But we must remember his state of health when
the passion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him,
as well as the lack there was in her who caused it,--not indeed, so far as
we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of
the woman's finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under another kind of
trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of
self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult,
he bore himself with true dignity: and if the practical consequences
preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his
fortunes justified.
In all ordinary relations of life, his character was conspicuous alike for
manly spirit and sweetness. No man who ever lived has inspired in his
friends a deeper or more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have
heard little in this history[74], wrote while the poet lay dying: "Keats
must get himself again, Severn, if but for me--I cannot afford to lose
him: if I know what it is to love I truly love John Keats." The following
is from a letter of Brown written also during his illness:--"he is
present to me every where and at all times,--he now seems sitting here at
my side, and looking hard into my face.... So much as I have loved him, I
never knew how closely he was wound about my heart[75]." Elsewhere,
speaking of the time of his first attack, Brown says:--"while I waited on
him his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance
of his eye, or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as
absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like
this, Severn his last nurse, observed to me[76]:" and we know in fact how
the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend's
death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. When Lord
Houghton's book came out in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon to
thank the writer for doing merited honour to one "whose genius I did not,
and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the _Man_[77]." The
points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two. First his high
good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for
many. "He had a soul of noble integrity," says Bailey: "and his common
sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was,
in the best sense, manly." Next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of
sympathy. This is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very
intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed,
requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it
nothing,--but with charm only, and when the trial comes, refusing to
friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. But when
genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all the
ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it,
then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. And this is what
his companions found in Keats. "He was the sincerest friend," cries
Reynolds, "the most loveable associate,--the deepest listener to the
griefs and distresses of all around him,--'That ever lived in this tide of
times[78].'" To the same effect Haydon:--"He was the most unselfish of
human creatures: unadapted to this world, he cared not for himself, and
put himself to any inconvenience for the sake of his friends.... He had a
kind gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who
wanted it." And again Bailey:--
"With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew, than was John
Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one
particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit.... In his
letters he talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his
conversation. On the contrary he was uniformly the apologist for poor
frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man
I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any
act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he
rose into sudden and animated indignation[79]."
Lastly, "he had no fears of self," says George Keats, "through
interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and
without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed,
defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and
purse."
In this chorus of admiring affection, Haydon alone must assert his own
superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. When he laments over
Keats's dissipations, he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show,
idly and calumniously. When on the other hand he speaks of the poet's
"want of decision of character and power of will," and says that "never
for two days did he know his own intentions," his criticism is deserving
of more attention. This is only Haydon's way of describing a fact in
Keats's nature of which no one was better aware than himself. He
acknowledges his own "unsteady and vagarish disposition." What he means is
no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in
regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in
regard to himself. "The Celtic instability," a reader may perhaps surmise
who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet's descent. Whether the quality
was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar
complexion of Keats's genius. Or rather it was an expression in character
of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance,
namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. Acute as
was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the
order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own
personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. He realised
clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility
to external impressions was apt to overpower in him, not practical
consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity.
"As to the poetic character itself," he writes, "(I mean that sort, of
which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from
the Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime; which is a thing _per se_,
and stands alone), it is not itself--it has no self--it is everything
and nothing--it has no character--it enjoys light and shade--it lives
in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or
elevated,--it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.
A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he
has no identity; he is continually in for, and filling, some other
body.... If then, he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the
wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that
very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops?
It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that not one
word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out
of my identical nature."
"Even now," he says on another occasion, "I am perhaps not speaking from
myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live." Keats was often
impatient of this Protean quality of his own mind. "I would call the head
and top of those who have a proper self," he says, "men of power": and it
is the men of power, the men of trenchant individuality and settled aims,
that in the sphere of practical life he most admires. But in the sphere of
thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the instinctive bent
of his own genius. In that sphere he is impatient, in turn, of all
intellectual narrowness, and will not allow that poetry should make itself
the exponent of any single creed or given philosophy. Thus in speaking of
what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work of Wordsworth:--
"For the sake," he asks, "of a few fine imaginative or domestic
passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in
the whims of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man
does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and
deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven,
and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing.... We hate poetry
that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to
put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and
unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul."
This is but one of many passages in which Keats proclaims the necessity,
for a poet, of an all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind. His
critics sometimes speak as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise
of art and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the world. If the
foregoing pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware
that no criticism can be more mistaken. At the creation, the revelation,
of beauty Keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty wherever its
elements existed:--"I have loved," as he says, "the principle of beauty in
all things." His conception of the kingdom of poetry was Shaksperean,
including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the
soul and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he lived long
enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, those that by their
manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit
of youth. Would he have been able to make the rest also his own? Would the
faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of nature, to
divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the spell of the
Middle Age,--would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the
mysteries of the heart, and, still in obedience to the law of beauty, to
illuminate and harmonize the great struggles and problems of human life?
My belief is that such power they would not have failed to gain. From the
height to which the genius of Keats arose during the brief period between
its first effervescence and its exhaustion,--from the glowing humanity of
his own nature, and the completeness with which, by the testimony alike of
his own consciousness and his friends' experience, he was accustomed to
live in the lives of others,--from the gleams of true greatness of mind
which shine not only in his poetry, but equally amid the gossip and
pleasantry of his familiar letters,--from all our evidences, in a word, as
to what he was as well as from what he did,--I think it probable that by
power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shaksperean
spirit that has lived since Shakspere; the true Marcellus, as his first
biographer has called him, of the realm of English song; and that in his
premature death our literature has sustained its greatest loss. Something
like this, it would seem, is also the opinion of his foremost now living
successors, as Lord Tennyson, Mr Browning, Mr Matthew Arnold. Others have
formed a different judgment: but among those unfortunate guests at the
banquet of life, the poets called away before their time, who can really
adjudge the honours that would have been due had they remained? In a final
estimate of any writer's work, we must take into account not what he might
have done, but only what he did. And in the work actually left by Keats,
the master-chord of humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with
fulness. When we sum up in our minds the total effect of his poetry, we
can think, indeed, of the pathos of _Isabella_, but of that alone, as
equally powerful in its kind with the nature-magic of the _Hymn to Pan_
and the _Ode to a Nightingale_, with the glow of romance colour in _St
Agnes' Eve_, the weirdness of romance sentiment in _La Belle Dame Sans
Merci_, the conflict of elemental force with fate in _Hyperion_, the
revelations of the soul of ancient life and art in the _Ode on a Grecian
Urn_ and the fragment of an _Ode to Maia_.
It remains to glance at the influence exercised by Keats on the poets who
have come after him. In two ways chiefly, I should say, has that influence
been operative. First on the subject-matter of poetry, in kindling and
informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake, and
also, in equal degrees, the love both of classic fable and of romance. And
secondly on its form, in setting before poets a certain standard of
execution--a standard not of technical correctness, for which Keats never
cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he himself refers when he
speaks of 'loading every rift of a subject with ore.' We may define it as
the endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of
phrase. A typical instance is to be found in the lines already quoted that
tell us of the trembling hopes of Madeline,--
"But to her heart her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side."
The beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy or of sound; it is
the beauty which resides in truth only, every word being chosen and every
touch laid by a vital exercise of the imagination. The first line
describes in perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment of
suspense, the second makes us realise at once the physical effect of the
emotion on the heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on
ourselves. In so far as Keats has taught other poets really to write like
this, his influence has been wholly to their advantage,--but not so when
for this quality they give us only its simulacrum, in the shape of
brilliancies merely verbal and a glitter not of gold. The first
considerable writer among Keats's successors on whom his example took
effect was Hood, in the fairy and romance poems of his earlier time. The
dominant poet of the Victorian age, Tennyson, has been profoundly
influenced by it both in the form and the matter of his art, and is indeed
the heir of Keats and of Wordsworth in almost equal degrees. After or
together with Coleridge, Keats has also contributed most, among English
writers, to the poetic method and ideals of Rossetti and his group.
Himself, as we have seen, alike by gifts and training a true child of the
Elizabethans, he thus stands in the most direct line of descent between
the great poets of that age and those, whom posterity has yet to estimate,
of our own day.
Such, I think, is Keats's historic place in English literature. What his
place was in the hearts of those who best knew him, we have just learned
from their own lips. The days of the years of his life were few and evil,
but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines
immortally.
THE END.
APPENDIX.
p. 2, note 1. As to the exact date of Keats's birth the evidence is
conflicting. He was christened at St Botolph's, Bishopsgate, Dec. 18,
1795, and on the margin of the entry in the baptismal register (which I am
informed is in the handwriting of the rector, Dr Conybeare) is a note
stating that he was born Oct. 31. The date is given accordingly without
question by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. I. p. xlviii). But it seems
certain that Keats himself and his family believed his birthday to have
been Oct. 29. Writing on that day in 1818, Keats says, "this is my
birthday." Brown (in Houghton MSS.) gives the same day, but only as on
hearsay from a lady to whom Keats had mentioned it, and with a mistake as
to the year. Lastly, in the proceedings in _Rawlings v. Jennings_, Oct. 29
is again given as his birthday, in the affidavit of one Anne Birch, who
swears that she knew his father and mother intimately. The entry in the St
Botolph's register is probably the authority to be preferred.--Lower
Moorfields was the space now occupied by Finsbury Circus and the London
Institution, together with the east side of Finsbury Pavement.--The births
of the younger brothers are in my text given rightly for the first time,
from the parish registers of St Leonard's, Shoreditch; where they were all
three christened in a batch on Sept. 24, 1801. The family were at that
date living in Craven Street.
p. 2, note 2. Brown (Houghton MSS.) says simply that Thomas Keats was a
'native of Devon.' His daughter, Mrs Llanos, tells me she remembers
hearing as a child that he came from the Land's End. Persons of the name
are still living in Plymouth.
p. 5, note 2. The total amount of the funds paid into Court by the
executors under Mr Jennings's will (see Preface, p. viii) was £13160.
19_s._ 5_d._
p. 11, note 1, and p. 70, note 1. Of the total last mentioned, there came
to the widow first and last (partly by reversion from other legatees who
predeceased her) sums amounting to £9343. 2_s._ In the Chancery
proceedings the precise terms of the deed executed by Mrs Jennings for the
benefit of her grandchildren are not quoted, but only its general purport;
whence it appears that the sum she made over to Messrs Sandell and Abbey
in trust for them amounted approximately to £8000, and included all the
reversions fallen or still to fall in as above mentioned. The balance it
is to be presumed she retained for her own support (she being then 74).
p. 17, note 1. The following letter written by Mr Abbey to Mr Taylor the
publisher, under April 18, 1821, soon after the news of Keats's death
reached England, speaks for itself. The letter is from Woodhouse MSS. B.
"Sir,
I beg pardon for not replying to your favor of the 30th ult.
respecting the late Mr Jno. Keats.
I am obliged by your note, but he having withdrawn himself from my
controul, and acted contrary to my advice, I cannot interfere with his
affairs.
I am, Sir,
Yr. mo. Hble St.,
RICHD. ABBEY."
p. 34, note 1. The difficulty of determining the exact date and place of
Keats's first introduction to Hunt arises as follows.--Cowden Clarke
states plainly and circumstantially that it took place in Leigh Hunt's
cottage at Hampstead. Hunt in his _Autobiography_ says it was 'in the
spring of the year 1816' that he went to live at Hampstead in the cottage
in question. Putting these two statements together, we get the result
stated as probable in the text. But on the other hand there is the
strongly Huntian character of Keats's _Epistle_ to G. F. Mathew, dated
November 1815, which would seem to indicate an earlier acquaintance (see
p. 31). Unluckily Leigh Hunt himself has darkened counsel on the point by
a paragraph inserted in the last edition of his _Autobiography_, as
follows:--(Pref. no. 7, p. 257) "It was not at Hampstead that I first saw
Keats. It was at York Buildings, in the New Road (No. 8), where I wrote
part of the _Indicator_, and he resided with me while in Mortimer Street,
Kentish Town (No. 13), where I concluded it. I mention this for the
curious in such things, among whom I am one." The student must not be
misled by this remark of Hunt's, which is evidently only due to a slip of
memory. It is quite true that Keats lived with Hunt in Mortimer Street,
Kentish Town, during part of July and August 1820 (see page 197): and that
before moving to that address Hunt had lived for more than a year (from
the autumn of 1818 to the spring of 1820) at 8, New Road. But that Keats
was intimate with him two years and a half earlier, when he was in fact
living not in London at all but at the Vale of Health, is abundantly
certain.
p. 37, note 1. Cowden Clarke tells how Keats once calling and finding him
fallen asleep over Chaucer, wrote on the blank space at the end of the
_Floure and the Leafe_ the sonnet beginning 'This pleasant tale is like a
little copse.' Reynolds on reading it addressed to Keats the following
sonnet of his own, which is unpublished (Houghton MSS.), and has a certain
biographical interest. It is dated Feb. 27, 1817.
"Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves,
Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed;
They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed
The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eves,
O'er the excited soul.--Thy genius weaves
Songs that shall make the age be nature-led,
And win that coronal for thy young head
Which time's strange [qy. strong?] hand of freshness ne'er bereaves.
Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way,
Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung;
Be thou companion of the summer day,
Roaming the fields and older woods among:--
So shall thy muse be ever in her May,
And thy luxuriant spirit ever young."
p. 45, note 1. Woodhouse MSS. A. contains the text of the first draft in
question, with some preliminary words of Woodhouse as follows:--
"The lines at p. 36 of Keats's printed poems are altered from a copy of
verses written by K. at the request of his brother George, and by the
latter sent as a valentine to the lady. The following is a copy of the
lines as originally written:--
Hadst thou lived in days of old,
Oh what wonders had been told
Of thy lively dimpled face,
And thy footsteps full of grace:
Of thy hair's luxurious darkling,
Of thine eyes' expressive sparkling.
And thy voice's swelling rapture,
Taking hearts a ready capture.
Oh! if thou hadst breathed then,
Thou hadst made the Muses ten.
Could'st thou wish for lineage higher
Than twin sister of Thalia?
At least for ever, ever more
Will I call the Graces four."
Here follow lines 41--68 of the poem as afterwards published: and in
conclusion:--
"Ah me! whither shall I flee?
Thou hast metamorphosed me.
Do not let me sigh and pine,
Prythee be my valentine.
14 Feby. 1816."
p. 47, note 1. Mrs Procter's memory, however, betrayed her when she
informed Lord Houghton that the colour of Keats's eyes was blue. That they
were pure hazel-brown is certain, from the evidence alike of C. C. Clarke,
of George Keats and his wife (as transmitted by their daughter Mrs Speed
to her son), and from the various portraits painted from life and
posthumously by Severn and Hilton. Mrs Procter calls his hair auburn: Mrs
Speed had heard from her father and mother that it was 'golden red,' which
may mean nearly the same thing: I have seen a lock in the possession of
Sir Charles Dilke, and should rather call it a warm brown, likely to have
looked gold in the lights. Bailey in Houghton MSS. speaks of it as
extraordinarily thick and curly, and says that to lay your hand on his
head was like laying it 'on the rich plumage of a bird.' An evidently
misleading description of Keats's general aspect is that of Coleridge when
he describes him as a 'loose, slack, not well-dressed youth.' The sage
must have been drawing from his inward eye: those intimate with Keats
being of one accord as to his appearance of trim strength and 'fine
compactness of person.' Coleridge's further mention of his hand as
shrunken and old-looking seems exact.
p. 78, note 1. The isolated expressions of Keats on this subject, which
alone have been hitherto published, have exposed him somewhat unjustly to
the charge of petulance and morbid suspicion. Fairness seems to require
that the whole passage in which he deals with it should be given. The
passage occurs in a letter to Bailey written from Hampstead and dated
Oct. 8, 1817, of which only a fragment was printed by Lord Houghton, and
after him by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. III. p. 82, no. xvi.).
"I went to Hunt's and Haydon's who live now neighbours.--Shelley was
there--I know nothing about anything in this part of the world--every Body
seems at Loggerheads. There's Hunt infatuated--there's Haydon's picture in
statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his painting-room criticizing
every head most unmercifully--There's Horace Smith tired of Hunt--'The Web
of our life is of mingled yarn.'... I am quite disgusted with literary
men, and will never know another except Wordsworth--no not even Byron.
Here is an instance of the friendship of such. Haydon and Hunt have known
each other many years--now they live, pour ainsi dire, jealous neighbours.
Haydon says to me, Keats, don't show your lines to Hunt on any account, or
he will have done half for you--so it appears Hunt wishes it to be
thought. When he met Reynolds in the Theatre, John told him I was getting
on to the completion of 4000 lines--Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me
they would have been 7000! If he will say this to Reynolds, what would he
to other people? Haydon received a Letter a little while back on the
subject from some Lady, which contains a caution to me, thro' him, on this
subject. Now is not all this a most paultry thing to think about?"
p. 83, note 1. See Haydon, _Autobiography_, vol. I. pp. 384-5. The letter
containing Keats's account of the same entertainment was printed for the
first time by Speed, _Works_, vol. I. p. i. no. 1, where it is dated
merely 'Featherstone Buildings, Monday.' (At Featherstone Buildings lived
the family of Charles Wells.) In Houghton MSS. I find a transcript of the
same letter in the hand of Mr Coventry Patmore, with a note in Lord
Houghton's hand: "These letters I did not print. R. M. M." In the
transcript is added in a parenthesis after the weekday the date 5 April,
1818: but this is a mistake; the 5th of April in that year was not a
Monday: and the contents of Keats's letter itself, as well as a comparison
with Haydon's words in his _Autobiography_, prove beyond question that it
was written on Monday, the 5th of January.
p. 87, note 1. Similar expressions about the Devonshire weather occur in
nearly all Keats's letters written thence in the course of March and
April. The letter to Bailey containing the sentences quoted in my text is
wrongly printed both by Lord Houghton and Mr Forman under date Sept.
1818. I find the same date given between brackets at the head of the same
letter as transcribed in Woodhouse MSS. B., proving that an error was
early made either in docketing or copying it. The contents of the letter
leave no doubt as to its real date. The sentences quoted prove it to have
been written not in autumn but in spring. It contains Keats's reasons both
for going down to join his brother Tom at Teignmouth, and for failing to
visit Bailey at Oxford on the way: now in September Keats was not at
Teignmouth at all, and Bailey had left Oxford for good, and was living at
his curacy in Cumberland (see p. 122). Moreover there is an allusion by
Keats himself to this letter in another which he wrote the next day to
Reynolds, whereby its true date can be fixed with precision as Friday,
March 13.
p. 112, note 1. The following unpublished letter of Keats to Mr Taylor
(from Woodhouse MSS. B.) has a certain interest, both in itself and as
fixing the date of his departure for the North:--
"Sunday evening,
"My dear Taylor,
I am sorry I have not had time to call and wish you health till my
return. Really I have been hard run these last three days. However, au
revoir, God keep us all well! I start tomorrow Morning. My brother Tom
will I am afraid be lonely. I can scarcely ask the loan of books for
him, since I still keep those you lent me a year ago. If I am
overweening, you will I know be indulgent. Therefore when you shall
write, do send him some you think will be most amusing--he will be
careful in returning them. Let him have one of my books bound. I am
ashamed to catalogue these messages. There is but one more, which
ought to go for nothing as there is a lady concerned. I promised Mrs
Reynolds one of my books bound. As I cannot write in it let the
opposite" [a leaf with the name and 'from the author,' notes
Woodhouse] "be pasted in 'prythee. Remember me to Percy St.--Tell
Hilton that one gratification on my return will be to find him engaged
on a history piece to his own content. And tell Dewint I shall become
a disputant on the landscape. Bow for me very genteely to Mrs D. or
she will not admit your diploma. Remember me to Hessey, saying I hope
he'll _Carey_ his point. I would not forget Woodhouse. Adieu!
Your sincere friend,
JOHN O'GROTS.
June 22, 1818. Hampstead" [The date and place are added by Woodhouse
in red ink, presumably from the post-mark].
p. 120, note 1. In the concluding lines quoted in my text, Mr Buxton
Forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between 'All the magic of the
place' and the next line, 'So saying, with a spirit's glance,' and has
proposed, by way of improvement, to read 'with a spirit's grace'. I find
the true explanation in Woodhouse MSS. A., where the poem is continued
thus in pencil after the word 'place'.
"'Tis now free to stupid face,
To cutters, and to fashion boats,
To cravats and to petticoats:--
The great sea shall war it down,
For its fame shall not be blown
At each farthing Quadrille dance.
So saying with a spirit's glance
He dived"--.
Evidently Keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as he
well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both for his
correspondents and for the press: forgetting at the same time to give any
indication of the hiatus so caused.
p. 128, note 1. Lord Houghton says, "On returning to the south, Keats
found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him at
Teignmouth." It is certain that no such second visit to Teignmouth was
made by either brother. The error is doubtless due to the misdating of
Keats's March letter to Bailey: see last note but two, p. 225.
p. 138, note 1. Keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his
knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been
mismanaged. At the time when he thus found himself near the end of the
capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another resource at
his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. Quite apart from the
provision made by Mrs Jennings for her grandchildren after her husband's
death, and administered by Mr Abbey, there were the legacies Mr Jennings
himself had left them by will; one of £1000 direct; the other, of a
capital to yield £50 a year, in reversion after their mother's death (see
p. 5). The former sum was invested by order of the Court in Consols, and
brought £1550. 7_s._ 10_d._ worth of that security at the price at which
it then stood. £1666. 13_s_. 4_d._ worth of the same stock was farther
purchased from the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of £50
a year. The interest on both these investments was duly paid to Frances
Rawlings during her life: but after her death in 1810 both investments
lay untouched and accumulating interest until 1823; when George Keats, to
whose knowledge their existence seems then to have been brought for the
first time, received on application to the Court a fourth share of each,
with its accumulations. Two years afterwards Fanny Keats received in like
manner on application the remaining three shares (those of her brothers
John and Tom as well as her own), the total amount paid to her being
£3375. 5_s._ 7_d._, and to George £1147. 5_s._ 1_d._ It was a part of the
ill luck which attended the poet always that the very existence of these
funds must have been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors
at the time when he most needed them.
p. 148, note 1. Landor's letter to Lord Houghton on receipt of a
presentation copy of the _Life and Letters_, in 1848, begins
characteristically as follows:--
"Bath, Aug. 29.
Dear Milnes,
On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, I find
your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an
editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets,
excepting Shakspeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of
the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity. He has not indeed
overcome so great a difficulty as Shelley in his _Cenci_, nor united
so many powers of the mind as Southey in _Kehama_--but there is an
effluence of power and light pervading all his work, and a freshness
such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.--"
p. 152, note 1. I think there is no doubt that _Hyperion_ was begun by
Keats beside his brother's sickbed in September or October 1818, and that
it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of 'plunging into
abstract images,' and finding a 'feverous relief' in the 'abstractions' of
poetry. Certainly these phrases could hardly apply to so slight a task as
the translation of Ronsard's sonnet, _Nature ornant Cassandre_, which is
the only specific piece of work he about the same time mentions. Brown
says distinctly, of the weeks when Keats was first living with him after
Tom's death in December--"It was then he wrote _Hyperion_"; but these
words rather favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already
begun. In his December-January letter to America Keats himself alludes to
the poem by name, and says he has been 'going on a little' with it: and on
the 14th of February, 1819, says 'I have not gone on with _Hyperion_.'
During the next three months he was chiefly occupied on the _Odes_, and
whether he at the same time wrote any more of _Hyperion_ we cannot tell.
It was certainly finished, all but the revision, by some time in April, as
in that month Woodhouse had the MS. to read, and notes (see Buxton Forman,
_Works_, vol. II. p. 143) that "it contains 2 books and 1/2--(about 900
lines in all):" the actual length of the piece as published being 883
lines and a word, and that of the draft copied by Woodhouse before
revision 891 and a word (see below, note to p. 164). When Keats, after
nearly a year's interruption of his correspondence with Bailey, tells him
in a letter from Winchester in August or September, "I have also been
writing parts of my _Hyperion_," this must not be taken as meaning that he
has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing
them,--like _Isabella_ and the _Eve of St Agnes_, which he mentions at the
same time,--since the date of his last letter.
p. 164, note 1. The version of _The Eve of St Agnes_ given in Woodhouse
MSS. A. is copied almost without change from the corrected state of the
original MS. in the possession of Mr F. Locker-Lampson; which is in all
probability that actually written by Keats at Chichester (see p. 133). The
readings of the MS. in question are given with great care by Mr Buxton
Forman (_Works_, vol. II. p. 71 foll.), but the first seven stanzas of the
poem as printed are wanting in it. Students may therefore be glad to have,
from Woodhouse's transcript, the following table of the changes in those
stanzas made by the poet in the course of composition:--
Stanza I.: line 1, for "chill" stood "cold": line 4, for "was" stood
"were": line 7, for "from" stood "in": line 9 (and Stanza II., line 1),
for "prayer" stood "prayers". Stanza III.: line 7, for "went" stood
"turn'd": line 8, for "Rough" stood "Black". After stanza III. stood the
following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed.
4.
But there are ears may hear sweet melodies,
And there are eyes to brighten festivals,
And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies,
And many a lip that for the red wine calls--
Follow, then follow to the illumined halls,
Follow me youth--and leave the eremite--
Give him a tear--then trophied bannerals
And many a brilliant tasseling of light
Shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night.
Stanza V.; line 1, for "revelry" stood "revellers": lines 3-5, for--
"Numerous as shadows haunting fairily
The brain new-stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay
Of old romance. These let us wish away,"--
stood the following:--
"Ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs,
The muse should never make the spirit gay;
Away, bright dulness, laughing fools away."
p. 166, note 1. At what precise date _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ was
written is uncertain. As of the _Ode to Melancholy_, Keats makes no
mention of this poem in his correspondence. In Woodhouse MSS. A. it is
dated 1819. That Woodhouse made his transcripts before or while Keats was
on his Shanklin-Winchester expedition in that year, is I think certain
both from the readings of the transcripts themselves, and from the absence
among them of _Lamia_ and the _Ode to Autumn_. Hence it is to the first
half of 1819 that _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ must belong, like so much of
the poet's best work besides. The line quoted in my text shows that the
theme was already in his mind when he composed the _Eve of St Agnes_ in
January. Mr Buxton Forman is certainly mistaken in supposing it to have
been written a year later, after his critical attack of illness (_Works_,
vol. II. p. 357, note).
p. 186, note 1. The relation of _Hyperion, A Vision_, to the original
_Hyperion_ is a vital point in the history of Keats's mind and art, and
one that has been generally misunderstood. The growth of the error is
somewhat interesting to trace. The first mention of the _Vision_ is in
Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_, ed. 1848, Vol. I. p. 244. Having then
doubtless freshly in his mind the passage of Brown's MS. memoir quoted in
the text, Lord Houghton stated the matter rightly in the words following
his account of _Hyperion_:--"He afterwards published it as a fragment, and
still later re-cast it into the shape of a Vision, which remains equally
unfinished." When eight years later the same editor printed the piece for
the first time (in _Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society_, Vol. III.
1856-7) from the MS. given him by Brown, he must have forgotten Brown's
account of its origin, and writes doubtfully: "Is it the original sketch
out of which the earlier part of the poem was composed, or is it the
commencement of a reconstruction of the whole? I have no external evidence
to decide this question:" and further,--"the problem of the priority of
the two poems--both fragments, and both so beautiful--may afford a wide
field for ingenious and critical conjecture." Ten years later again, when
he brought out the second edition of the _Life and Letters_, Lord Houghton
had drifted definitely into a wrong conclusion on the point, and printing
the piece in his Appendix as 'Another Version,' says in his text (p. 206)
"on reconsideration, I have no doubt that it was the first draft."
Accordingly it is given as 'an earlier version' in Mr W. M. Rossetti's
edition of 1872, as 'the first version' in Lord Houghton's own edition of
1876; and so on, positively but quite wrongly, in the several editions by
Messrs Buxton Forman, Speed, and W. T. Arnold. The obvious superiority of
_Hyperion_ to the _Vision_ no doubt at first sight suggested the
conclusion to which these editors, following Lord Houghton, had come. In
the mean time at least two good critics, Mr W. B. Scott and Mr. R.
Garnett, had always held on internal evidence that the _Vision_ was not a
first draft, but a recast attempted by the poet in the decline of his
powers: an opinion in which Mr Garnett was confirmed by his recollection
of a statement to that effect in the lost MS. of Woodhouse (see above,
Preface, p. v, and W. T. Arnold, _Works_ &c. p. xlix, note). Brown's
words, quoted in my text, leave no doubt whatever that these gentlemen
were right. They are confirmed from another side by Woodhouse MSS. A,
which contains the copy of a real early draft of _Hyperion_. In this copy
the omissions and alterations made in revising the piece are all marked in
pencil, and are as follows, (taking the number of lines in the several
books of the poem as printed).
BOOK I. After line 21 stood the cancelled lines--
"Thus the old Eagle, drowsy with great grief,
Sat moulting his weak plumage, never more
To be restored or soar against the sun;
While his three sons upon Olympus stood."
In line 30, for "stay'd Ixion's wheel" stood "eased Ixion's toil". In line
48, for "tone" stood "tune". In line 76, for "gradual" stood "sudden". In
line 102, after the word "Saturn," stood the cancelled words--
"What dost think?
Am I that same? O Chaos!"
In line 156, for "yielded like the mist" stood "gave to them like mist."
In line 189, for "Savour of poisonous brass" stood "A poison-feel of
brass." In line 200 for "When earthquakes jar their battlements and
towers" stood "When an earthquake hath shook their city towers." After
line 205 stood the cancelled line "Most like a rose-bud to a fairy's
lute." In line 209, for "And like a rose" stood "Yes, like a rose." In
line 268, for "Suddenly" stood "And, sudden."
BOOK II. In line 128, for "vibrating" stood "vibrated." In line 134 for
"starry Uranus" stood "starr'd Uranus" (some friend doubtless called
Keats's attention to the false quantity).
BOOK III. After line 125 stood the cancelled lines:--
"Into a hue more roseate than sweet pain
Gives to a ravish'd nymph, when her warm tears
Gush luscious with no sob; or more severe."
In line 126, for "most like" stood "more like."
In these omissions and corrections, two things will be apparent to the
student: first, that they are all greatly for the better; and second, that
where a corrected passage occurs again in the _Vision_, it in every case
corresponds to the printed _Hyperion_, and not to the draft of the poem
preserved by Woodhouse. This of itself would make it certain that the
_Vision_ was not a first version of _Hyperion_, but a recast of the poem
as revised (in all probability at Winchester) after its first composition.
Taken together with the statement of Brown, which is perfectly explicit as
to time, place, and circumstances, and the corresponding statement of
Woodhouse as recollected by Mr Garnett, the proof is from all sides
absolute: and the 'first version' theory must disappear henceforward from
editions of and commentaries on our poet.
p. 193, note 2. A more explicit refutation of Haydon's account was given,
some years after its appearance, by Cowden Clarke (see Preface, no. 10),
not, indeed, from personal observation at the time in question, but from
general knowledge of the poet's character:--
"I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which
that ill-ordered being, Haydon, the artist, left behind him in his 'Diary'
respecting the idolised object of his former intimacy, John Keats" ...
"Haydon's detraction was the more odious because its object could not
contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical
antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against
him of Cockney ostentation and display. The most mean-spirited and
trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that Keats was so far gone in
sensual excitement as to put cayenne pepper on his tongue when taking his
claret. In the first place, if the stupid trick were ever played, I have
not the slightest belief in its serious sincerity. During my knowledge of
him Keats never purchased a bottle of claret; and from such observation as
could not escape me, I am bound to say that his domestic expenses never
would have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof; and, lastly, I never
perceived in him even a tendency to imprudent indulgence."
p. 198, note 1. In Medwin's _Life of Shelley_ (1847), pp. 89-92, are some
notices of Keats communicated to the writer by Fanny Brawne (then Mrs
Lindon), to whom Medwin alludes as his 'kind correspondent.' Medwin's
carelessness of statement and workmanship is well known: he is perfectly
casual in the use of quotation marks and the like: but I think an
attentive reading of the paragraph, beginning on p. 91, which discusses Mr
Finch's account of Keats's death, leaves no doubt that it continues in
substance the quotation previously begun from Mrs Lindon. "That his
sensibility," so runs the text, "was most acute, is true, and his passions
were very strong, but not violent; if by that term, violence of temper is
implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn
on himself than others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only
by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his
friends. Violence such as the letter" [of Mr Finch] "describes, was quite
foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting
England, I saw him every day", [this would be true of Fanny Brawne from
Oct. 1819 to Sept. 1820, if we except the Kentish Town period in the
summer, and is certainly more nearly true of her than of anyone else,] "I
often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not
hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression,
much less a violent one, to any human being." The above passage has been
overlooked by critics of Keats, and I am glad to bring it forward, as
serving to show a truer and kinder appreciation of the poet by the woman
he loved than might be gathered from her phrase in the letter to Dilke so
often quoted.
INDEX.
Abbey, Mr Richard, 11, 17, 70, 77, 138, 144, 192.
_Adonaïs_ (Shelley's), 209, 210.
_Adventures of a younger Son_ (Trelawney's), 75.
Alfieri, 205.
_Alfred, The_, 124.
_Anatomy of Melancholy_ (Burton's), 167.
_Antiquary_ (Scott's), 115.
_Apollo, Ode to_, 21-22.
_Autumn, Ode to_, 177.
Bailey, Benjamin, 75, 76, 77, 122, 213, 214.
Beattie, 21.
_Biographia Literaria_ (Coleridge's), 64.
Boccaccio, 148.
Bonaparte, Pauline, Princess Borghese, 204.
Brawne, Miss Fanny, 131 seq., 180-181, 197, 198.
_Britannia's Pastorals_ (Browne's), 31.
Brown, Charles, 13, 73, 111 seq., 128, 143 seq., 181, 200, 210.
Browne, 31.
Browning, Robert, 218.
Burnet, 10.
Byron, 1, 19, 65, 210;
Sonnet to, 22.
Canterbury, 71.
_Cap and Bells_, 183 seq.
Castlereagh, 25.
_Champion, The_, 82.
Chatterton, 157, 158;
Sonnet to, 22.
Chaucer, 28.
Chichester, 133.
Clarke, Cowden, 3, 8, 12, 22, 23, 72, 84.
Clarke, Rev. John, 4.
'Cockaigne, King of,' 121.
_Cockney School of Poetry_ (Articles in _Blackwood's Magazine_), 77,
121 seq.
Coleridge, 16, 25, 26, 33, 64.
Cooper, Astley, 18.
Cotterill, Miss, 202, 203.
Cox, Miss Charlotte, 130.
_Dante_ (Cary's), 113.
_Death_, Stanzas on, 21;
Keats' contemplation of, 140;
longing for, 200.
De Quincey, 26.
Devonshire, 87.
_Dictionary_ (Lempriere's), 10.
Dilke, 73, 210.
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 73, 128, 135.
_Don Juan_ (Byron's), 184, 202, 210.
Dryden, 29, 30, 53.
Edmonton, 5, 6, 11, 14, 20.
Eldon, 25.
Elton, Lieutenant, 204.
Emancipation, Literary, 63-64.
_Endymion_, 66, 68, 71, 76, 80, 83, 86, 91;
Keats' low opinion of the poem, 91;
its beauties and defects, 91, 106-109;
Drayton's and Fletcher's previous treatment of the subject, 94-95;
Keats' unclassical manner of treatment, 96;
its one bare circumstance, 87;
scenery of the poem, 97;
its quality of nature-interpretation, 98;
its love passages, 100;
comparison of description with a similar one in _Richard III._, 103;
its lyrics, 104-106;
appreciation of the lyrics a test of true relish for poetry, 106;
its rhythm and music, 109;
Keats' own preface the best criticism of the poem, 110.
Enfield, 4, 12.
_Epistles_, their tributes to the conjoined pleasures of literature and
friendship, 53;
ungrammatical slips in, 54;
characteristic specimens of, 54-55.
_Epithalamium_ (Spenser's), 12.
_Eve of St Agnes_, its simple theme, 160;
its ease and directness of construction, 161;
its unique charm, 163.
_Eve of St Mark_, contains Keats' impressions of three Cathedral towns,
164;
its pictures, 164;
the legend, 164;
its pictorial brilliance, 165;
its influence on later English poetry, 165.
_Examiner, The_ (Leigh Hunt's), 25.
_Faerie Queene_ (Spenser's), 12, 13, 35.
_Faithful Shepherdess_ (Fletcher's), 95.
_Fanny, Lines to_, 134.
_Feast of the Poets_ (Leigh Hunt's), 32.
Fletcher, 95.
_Foliage_ (Leigh Hunt's), 73.
Genius, births of, 1.
_Gisborne, Letter to Maria_ (Shelley's), 30.
Goethe, 154.
_Grasshopper and Cricket_, 35.
Gray, 113.
Greece, Keats' love of, 58, 77, 154.
_Guy Mannering_ (Scott's), 115.
Hammond, Mr, 11, 14.
Hampstead, 72, 77.
Haslam, William, 45, 212 (note).
Haydon, 3, 40, 65, 68, 78, 137, 138, 191, 214.
Hazlitt, William, 83, 84.
_History of his own Time_ (Burnet's), 10.
Holmes, Edward, 8.
_Holy Living and Dying_ (Jeremy Taylor's), 206.
_Homer, On first looking into Chapman's_ (Sonnet), 23-24.
Hood, 219.
_Hope_, address to, 21.
Horne, R. H., 11.
Houghton, Lord, 75, 211-213.
Hunt, John, 25.
Hunt, Leigh, 22, 24, 25, 32, 35, 39, 49, 51, 68, 72, 78, 196.
_Hyperion_, 129, 133, 144;
its purpose, 152;
one of the grandest poems of our language, 157;
the influences of _Paradise Lost_ on it, 158;
its blank verse compared with Milton's, 158;
its elemental grandeur, 160;
remodelling of it, 185 seq.;
description of the changes, 186-187;
special interest of the poem, 187.
_Imitation of Spenser_ (Keats' first lines), 14, 20.
_Indolence, Ode on_, 174-175.
_Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, 86;
source of its inspiration, 148;
minor blemishes, 149;
its Italian metre, 149;
its conspicuous power and charm, 149;
description of its beauties, 151.
Isle of Wight, 67.
Jennings, Mrs, 5, 11.
Jennings, Capt. M. J., 7.
Joseph and his Brethren (Wells'), 45.
Kean, 81.
Keats, John, various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224;
birth, 2;
education at Enfield, 4;
death of his father, 5;
school-life, 5-9;
his studious inclinations, 10;
death of his mother, 10;
leaves school at the age of fifteen, 11;
is apprenticed to a surgeon, 11;
finishes his school-translation of the _Æneid_, 12;
reads Spenser's _Epithalamium_ and _Faerie Queene_, 12;
his first attempts at composition, 13;
goes to London and walks the hospitals, 14;
his growing passion for poetry, 15;
appointed dresser at Guy's Hospital, 16;
his last operation, 16;
his early life in London, 18;
his early poems, 20 seq.;
his introduction to Leigh Hunt, 24;
Hunt's great influence over him, 26 seq.;
his acquaintance with Shelley, 38;
his other friends, 40-45;
personal characteristics, 47-48;
goes to live with his brothers in the Poultry, 48;
publication of his first volume of poems, 65;
retires to the Isle of Wight, 66;
lives at Carisbrooke, 67;
changes to Margate, 68;
money troubles, 70;
spends some time at Canterbury, 71;
receives first payment in advance for _Endymion_, 71;
lives with his two brothers at Hampstead, 71;
works steadily at _Endymion_, 71-72;
makes more friends, 73;
writes part of _Endymion_ at Oxford, 76;
his love for his sister Fanny, 77;
stays at Burford Bridge, 80;
goes to the 'immortal dinner,' 82;
he visits Devonshire, 87;
goes on a walking tour in Scotland with Charles Brown, 113;
crosses over to Ireland, 116;
returns to Scotland and visits Burns' country, 118;
sows there the seeds of consumption, 120;
returns to London, 120;
is attacked in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_, 121;
Lockhart's conduct towards him, 122;
death of his young brother Tom, 128;
goes to live with Charles Brown, 128;
falls in love, 130-131;
visits friends in Chichester, 133;
suffers with his throat, 133;
his correspondence with his brother George, 139;
goes to Shanklin, 143;
collaborates with Brown in writing _Otho_, 143;
goes to Winchester, 144;
returns again to London, 146;
more money troubles, 146;
determines to make a living by journalism, 146;
lives by himself, 146;
goes back to Mr Brown, 181;
_Otho_ is returned unopened after having been accepted, 182;
want of means prevents his marriage, 190;
his increasing illness, 191 seq.;
temporary improvement in his health, 194;
publishes another volume of poems, 196;
stays with Leigh Hunt's family, 197;
favourable notice in the _Edinburgh Review_, 197;
lives with the family of Miss Brawne, 198;
goes with Severn to spend the winter in Italy, 199;
the journey improves his health, 200;
writes his last lines, 201;
stays for a time at Naples, 203;
goes on to Rome, 203-204;
further improvement in his health, 205;
sudden and last relapse, 205;
he is tenderly nursed by his friend Severn, 206;
speaks of himself as already living a 'posthumous life,' 207;
grows worse and dies, 208;
various tributes to his memory, 214.
His genius awakened by the _Faerie Queene_, 13;
influence of other poets on him, 21;
experiments in language, 21, 64, 147, 169;
employment of the 'Heroic' couplet, 27, 30;
element and spirit of his own poetry, 50;
experiments in metre, 52;
studied musical effect of his verse, 55;
his Grecian spirit, 58, 77, 95, 114, 154;
view of the aims and principles of poetry, 61;
imaginary dependence on Shakspere, 69;
thoughts on the mystery of Evil, 88;
puns, 72, 202;
his poems Greek in idea, English in manner, 96;
his poetry a true spontaneous expression of his mind, 110;
power of vivifying, 161;
verbal licenses, 169;
influence on subsequent poets, 218;
felicity of phrase, 219.
Personal characteristics:
Celtic temperament, 3, 58, 70;
affectionate nature, 6, 7, 9, 10, 77;
morbid temperament, 6, 70, 211;
lovable disposition, 6, 8, 19, 212, 213;
temper, 7, 9, 233;
personal beauty, 8;
_penchant_ for fighting, 8, 9, 72;
studious nature, 9, 112;
humanity, 39, 89, 114-115;
sympathy and tenderness, 47, 213;
eyes, description of, 46, 207, 224;
love of nature, 47, 55-56;
voice, 47;
desire of fame, 60, 125, 141, 207;
natural sensibility to physical and spiritual spell of moonlight, 95;
highmindedness, 125-126;
love romances, 127, 130-134, 180-181, 197, 200, 203, 212;
pride and sensitiveness, 211;
unselfishness, 213, 214;
instability, 215.
Various descriptions of, 7, 8, 9, 46, 47, 76, 136, 224.
Keats, Admiral Sir Richard, 7.
Keats, Fanny (Mrs Llanos), 77.
Keats, Mrs (Keats' mother), 5, 10.
Keats, George, 90, 113, 192, 193, 210.
Keats, Thomas (Keats' father), 2, 5.
Keats, Tom, 6, 127.
_King Stephen_, 179.
'Kirk-men,' 116-117.
_La Belle Dame sans Merci_, 165, 166, 218;
origin of the title, 165;
a story of the wasting power of love, 166;
description of its beauties, 166.
Lamb, Charles, 26, 82, 83.
_Lamia_, 143;
its source, 167;
versification, 167;
the picture of the serpent woman, 168;
Keats' opinion of the Poem, 168.
Landor, 75.
_Laon and Cythna_, 76.
Letters, extracts, etc., from Keats', 66, 67, 68, 69, 77, 78, 79, 81,
85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 114, 116-117, 118, 126, 127, 129, 130,
134, 137, 139, 141, 145, 146, 157, 181, 182, 190, 194-195, 200,
203, 226.
'Little Keats,' 19.
Lockhart, 33, 122, 123.
_London Magazine_, 71.
Mackereth, George Wilson, 18.
Madeline, 162 seq.
'Maiden-Thought,' 88, 114.
_Man about Town_ (Webb's), 38.
_Man in the Moon_ (Drayton's), 93.
Margate, 68.
Mathew, George Felton, 19.
Meg Merrilies, 115-116.
_Melancholy, Ode on_, 175.
Milton, 51, 52, 54, 88.
Monckton, Milnes, 211.
Moore, 65.
_Morning Chronicle, The_, 124.
_Mother Hubbard's Tale_ (Spenser's), 31.
Mythology, Greek, 10, 58, 152, 153.
Naples, 203.
_Narensky_ (Brown's), 74.
Newmarch, 19.
_Nightingale, Ode to a_, 136, 175, 218.
_Nymphs_, 73.
Odes, 21, 137, 145, 170-171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 218.
_Orion_, 11.
_Otho_, 143, 144, 180, 181.
Oxford, 75, 77.
_Oxford Herald, The_, 122.
_Pan, Hymn to_, 83.
_Pantheon_ (Tooke's), 10.
_Paradise Lost_, 88, 152, 154, 158.
Patriotism, 115.
_Peter Corcoran_ (Reynolds'), 36.
Plays, 178, 179, 181, 182.
Poems (Keats' first volume), faint echoes of other poets in them, 51;
their form, 52;
their experiments in metre, 52;
merely poetic preludes, 53;
their rambling tendency, 53;
immaturity, 60;
attractiveness, 61;
characteristic extracts, 63;
their moderate success, 65-66.
Poetic Art, Theory and Practice, 61, 64.
Poetry, joys of, 55;
principle and aims of, 61;
genius of, 110.
_Polymetis_ (Spence's), 10.
Pope, 19, 29, 30.
'Posthumous Life,' 207.
Prince Regent, 25.
Proctor, Mrs, 47.
_Psyche, Ode to_, 136, 171, 172.
_Psyche_ (Mrs Tighe's), 21.
Quarterly Review, 121, 124.
_Rainbow_ (Campbell's), 170.
Rawlings, William, 5.
Reynolds, John Hamilton, 36, 211, 214.
Rice, James, 37, 142.
_Rimini, Story of_, 27, 30, 31, 35.
Ritchie, 82.
Rome, 204.
Rossetti, 220.
_Safie_ (Reynolds'), 36.
Scott, Sir Walter, 1, 33, 65, 115, 123, 124.
Scott, John, 124.
Sculpture, ancient, 136.
_Sea-Sonnet_, 67.
Severn, Joseph, 45, 72, 135, 191, 199 seq.
Shakspere, 67, 69.
Shanklin, 67, 143.
Shelley, 16, 32, 38, 56, 85, 110, 199, 203, 209.
Shenstone, 21.
_Sleep and Poetry_, 52, 60, 61, 109.
Smith, Horace, 33, 81.
Sonnets, 22, 23, 43, 48, 49, 57, 201.
_Specimen of an Induction to a Poem_, 52.
Spenser, 19, 20, 21, 31, 35, 54, 55.
Stephens, Henry, 18-20.
Surrey Institution, 84.
Taylor, Mr, 71, 81, 126, 144, 146, 206, 211.
Teignmouth, 87.
Tennyson, 218.
Thomson, 21.
_Urn, Ode on a Grecian_, 136, 172-174.
_Vision, The_, 187, 193 (_see_ Hyperion).
Webb, Cornelius, 38.
Wells, Charles, 45.
Wilson, 33.
Winchester, 143-145.
Windermere, 113, 114.
Wordsworth, 1, 44, 46, 56, 64, 82, 83, 158, 219.
CAMBRIDGE PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Appendix, p. 221.
[2] _Ibid._
[3] John Jennings died March 8, 1805.
[4] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See below, p. 138, and Appendix, p. 221.
[5] Captain Jennings died October 8, 1808.
[6] Houghton MSS.
[7] _Rawlings v. Jennings._ See Appendix, p. 221.
[8] Mrs Alice Jennings was buried at St Stephen's, Coleman Street,
December 19, 1814, aged 78. (Communication from the Rev. J. W. Pratt,
M.A.)
[9] I owe this anecdote to Mr Gosse, who had it direct from Horne.
[10] Houghton MSS.
[11] A specimen of such scribble, in the shape of a fragment of romance
narrative, composed in the sham Old-English of Rowley, and in prose, not
verse, will be found in _The Philosophy of Mystery_, by W. C. Dendy
(London, 1841), p. 99, and another, preserved by Mr H. Stephens, in the
_Poetical Works_, ed. Forman (1 vol. 1884), p. 558.
[12] See Appendix.
[13] See C. L. Feltoe, _Memorials of J. F. South_ (London, 1884), p. 81.
[14] Houghton MSS. See also Dr B. W. Richardson in the _Asclepiad_, vol.
i. p. 134.
[15] Houghton MSS.
[16] What, for instance, can be less Spenserian and at the same time less
Byronic than--
"For sure so fair a place was never seen
Of all that ever charm'd romantic eye"?
[17] See Appendix, p. 222.
[18] See Appendix, p. 223.
[19] See particularly the _Invocation to Sleep_ in the little volume of
Webb's poems published by the Olliers in 1821.
[20] See Appendix, p. 223.
[21] See _Praeterita_, vol. ii. chap. 2.
[22] See Appendix, p. 224.
[23] Compare Chapman, _Hymn to Pan_:--
"the bright-hair'd god of pastoral,
Who yet is lean and loveless, and doth owe,
By lot, all loftiest mountains crown'd with snow,
All tops of hills, and _cliffy highnesses_,
All sylvan copses, and the fortresses
Of thorniest queaches here and there doth rove,
And sometimes, by allurement of his love,
Will wade the _wat'ry softnesses_."
[24] Compare Wordsworth:--
"Bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest peak of Furness Fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells."
Is the line of Keats an echo or merely a coincidence?
[25] Mr W. T. Arnold in his _Introduction_ (p. xxvii) quotes a parallel
passage from Leigh Hunt's _Gentle Armour_ as an example of the degree to
which Keats was at this time indebted to Hunt: forgetting that the _Gentle
Armour_ was not written till 1831, and that the debt in this instance is
therefore the other way.
[26] See Appendix, p. 220.
[27] The facts and dates relating to Brown in the above paragraph were
furnished by his son, still living in New Zealand, to Mr Leslie Stephen,
from whom I have them. The point about the _Adventures of a Younger Son_
is confirmed by the fact that the mottoes in that work are mostly taken
from the Keats MSS. then in Brown's hands, especially _Otho_.
[28] Houghton MSS.
[29] See Appendix, p. 224.
[30] See Appendix, p. 225.
[31] See Appendix, p. 225.
[32] In the extract I have modernized Drayton's spelling and endeavoured
to mend his punctuation: his grammatical constructions are past mending.
[33] Mrs Owen was, I think, certainly right in her main conception of an
allegoric purpose vaguely underlying Keats's narrative.
[34] Lempriere (after Pausanias) mentions Pæon as one of the fifty sons of
Endymion (in the Elean version of the myth): and in Spenser's _Faerie
Queene_ there is a Pæana--the daughter of the giant Corflambo in the
fourth book. Keats probably had both of these in mind when he gave
Endymion a sister and called her Peona.
[35] Book 1, Song 4. The point about Browne has been made by Mr W. T.
Arnold.
[36] The following is a fair and characteristic enough specimen of
Chamberlayne:--
"Upon the throne, in such a glorious state
As earth's adored favorites, there sat
The image of a monarch, vested in
The spoils of nature's robes, whose price had been
A diadem's redemption; his large size,
Beyond this pigmy age, did equalize
The admired proportions of those mighty men
Whose cast-up bones, grown modern wonders, when
Found out, are carefully preserved to tell
Posterity how much these times are fell
From nature's youthful strength."
[37] See Appendix, p. 226.
[38] Houghton MSS.
[39] See Appendix, p. 227.
[40] Severn in Houghton MSS.
[41] Houghton MSS.
[42] Dilke (in a MS. note to his copy of Lord Houghton's _Life and
Letters_, ed. 1848) states positively that Lockhart afterwards owned as
much; and there are tricks of style, _e.g._ the use of the Spanish
_Sangrado_ for doctor, which seem distinctly to betray his hand.
[43] Leigh Hunt at first believed that Scott himself was the writer, and
Haydon to the last fancied it was Scott's faithful satellite, the actor
Terry.
[44] Severn in the _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. XI., p. 401.
[45] See Preface, p. viii.
[46] See Appendix, p. 227.
[47] Houghton MSS.
[48] The house is now known as Lawn Bank, the two blocks having been
thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in the
summer of 1885 were pointed out to me in detail by Mr William Dilke, the
then surviving brother of Keats's friend.
[49] See Appendix, p. 227.
[50] See Appendix, p. 228.
[51] _Decamerone_, Giorn., iv. nov. 5. A very different metrical treatment
of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simultaneously
with that of Keats, by Barry Cornwall in his _Sicilian Story_ (1820). Of
the metrical tales from Boccaccio which Reynolds had agreed to write
concurrently with Keats (see above, p. 86), two were finished and
published by him after Keats's death in the volume called _A Garden of
Florence_ (1821).
[52] As to the date when _Hyperion_ was written, see Appendix, p. 228: and
as to the error by which Keats's later recast of his work has been taken
for an earlier draft, _ibid._, p. 230.
[53] If we want to see Greek themes treated in a Greek manner by
predecessors or contemporaries of Keats, we can do so--though only on a
cameo scale--in the best idyls of Chénier in France, as _L'Aveugle_ or _Le
Jeune Malade_, or of Landor in England, as the _Hamadryad_ or _Enallos and
Cymodamia_; poems which would hardly have been written otherwise at
Alexandria in the days of Theocritus.
[54] We are not surprised to hear of Keats, with his instinct for the
best, that what he most liked in Chatterton's work was the minstrel's song
in _Ælla_, that _fantasia_, so to speak, executed really with genius on
the theme of one of Ophelia's songs in _Hamlet_.
[55] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of the
beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of
rhyme. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the
beadsman in the lines,
"But no--already had his death-bell rung;
The joys of all his life were said and sung;"
that of Angela where she calls herself
"A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,
Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll."
[56] See Appendix, p. 229.
[57] Chartier was born at Bayeux. His _Belle Dame sans Merci_ is a poem of
over eighty stanzas, the introduction in narrative and the rest in
dialogue, setting forth the obduracy shown by a lady to her wooer, and his
consequent despair and death.--For the date of composition of Keats's
poem, see Appendix, p. 230.
[58] This has been pointed out by my colleague Mr A. S. Murray: see
Forman, _Works_, vol. iii. p. 115, note; and W. T. Arnold, _Poetical
Works_, &c., p. xxii, note.
[59] Houghton MSS.
[60] "He never spoke of any one," says Severn, (Houghton MSS.,) "but by
saying something in their favour, and this always so agreeably and
cleverly, imitating the manner to increase your favourable impression of
the person he was speaking of."
[61] See Appendix, p. 230.
[62] _Auctores Mythographi Latini_, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742.
Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after his
death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey
(Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats's
mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus.
[63] Mrs Owen was the first of Keats's critics to call attention to this
passage, without, however, understanding the special significance it
derives from the date of its composition.
[64] Houghton MSS.
[65] See below, p. 193, note 2.
[66] "Interrupted," says Brown oracularly in Houghton MSS., "by a
circumstance which it is needless to mention."
[67] This passing phrase of Brown, who lived with Keats in the closest
daily companionship, by itself sufficiently refutes certain statements of
Haydon. But see Appendix, p. 232.
[68] A week or two later Leigh Hunt printed in the _Indicator_ a few
stanzas from the _Cap and Bells_, and about the same time dedicated to
Keats his translation of Tasso's _Amyntas_, speaking of the original as
"an early work of a celebrated poet whose fate it was to be equally
pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical."
[69] See Crabb Robinson. _Diaries_, Vol. II. p. 197, etc.
[70] See Appendix, p. 233.
[71] Houghton MSS. In both the _Autobiography_ and the _Correspondence_
the passage is amplified with painful and probably not trustworthy
additions.
[72] I have the date of sailing from Lloyd's, through the kindness of the
secretary, Col. Hozier. For the particulars of the voyage and the time
following it, I have drawn in almost equal degrees from the materials
published by Lord Houghton, by Mr Forman, by Severn himself in _Atlantic
Monthly_, Vol. XI. p. 401, and from the unpublished Houghton and Severn
MSS.
[73] Severn, as most readers will remember, died at Rome in 1879, and his
remains were in 1882 removed from their original burying-place to a grave
beside those of Keats in the Protestant cemetery near the pyramid of Gaius
Cestius.
[74] Haslam, in Severn MSS.
[75] Severn MSS.
[76] Houghton MSS.
[77] _Ibid._
[78] Houghton MSS.
[79] _Ibid._
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