One would like to know whether a first reading in the letters of Keats
does not generally produce something akin to a severe mental shock. It
is a sensation which presently becomes agreeable, being in that
respect like a plunge into cold water, but it is undeniably a shock.
Most readers of Keats, knowing him, as he should be known, by his
poetry, have not the remotest conception of him as he shows himself in
his letters. Hence they are unprepared for this splendid exhibition of
virile intellectual health. Not that they think of him as morbid,--his
poetry surely could not make this impression,--but rather that the
popular conception of him is, after all these years, a legendary
Keats, the poet who was killed by reviewers, the Keats of Shelley's
preface to the _Adonais_, the Keats whose story is written large in
the world's book of Pity and of Death. When the readers are confronted
with a fair portrait of the real man, it makes them rub their eyes.
Nay, more, it embarrasses them. To find themselves guilty of having
pitied one who stood in small need of pity is mortifying. In plain
terms, they have systematically bestowed (or have attempted to bestow)
alms on a man whose income at its least was bigger than any his
patrons could boast. Small wonder that now and then you find a reader,
with large capacity for the sentimental, who looks back with terror to
his first dip into the letters.
The legendary Keats dies hard; or perhaps we would better say that
when he seems to be dying he is simply, in the good old fashion of
legends, taking out a new lease of life. For it is as true now as when
the sentence was first penned, that 'a mixture of a lie doth ever add
pleasure.' Among the many readers of good books, there will always be
some whose notions of the poetical proprieties suffer greatly by the
facts of Keats's history. It is so much pleasanter to them to think
that the poet's sensitive spirit was wounded to death by bitter words
than to know that he was carried off by pulmonary disease. But when
they are tired of reading _Endymion_, _Isabella_, and _The Eve of St.
Agnes_ in the light of this incorrect conception, let them try a new
reading in the light of the letters, and the masculinity of this very
robust young maker of poetry will prove refreshing.
The letters are in every respect good reading. Rather than deplore
their frankness, as one critic has done, we ought to rejoice in their
utter want of affectation, in their boyish honesty. At every turn
there is something to amuse or to startle one into thinking. We are
carried back in a vivid way to the period of their composition. Not a
little of the pulsing life of that time throbs anew, and we catch
glimpses of notable figures. Often, the feeling is that we have been
called in haste to a window to look at some celebrity passing by, and
have arrived just in time to see him turn the corner. What a touch of
reality, for example, does one get in reading that 'Wordsworth went
rather huff'd out of town'! One is not in the habit of thinking of
Wordsworth as capable of being 'huffed,' but the writer of the letters
feared that he was. All of Keats's petty anxieties and small doings,
as well as his aspirations and his greatest dreams, are set down here
in black on white. It is a complete and charming revelation of the
man. One learns how he 'went to Hazlitt's lecture on Poetry, and got
there just as they were coming out;' how he was insulted at the
theatre, and wouldn't tell his brothers; how it vexed him because the
Irish servant said that his picture of Shakespeare looked exactly like
her father, only 'her father had more color than the engraving;' how
he filled in the time while waiting for the stage to start by counting
the buns and tarts in a pastry-cook's window, 'and had just begun on
the jellies;' how indignant he was at being spoken of as 'quite the
little poet;' how he sat in a hatter's shop in the Poultry while Mr.
Abbey read him some extracts from Lord Byron's 'last flash poem,' _Don
Juan_; how some beef was carved exactly to suit his appetite, as if he
'had been measured for it;' how he dined with Horace Smith and his
brothers and some other young gentlemen of fashion, and thought them
all hopelessly affected; in a word, almost anything you want to know
about John Keats can be found in these letters. They are of more value
than all the 'recollections' of all his friends put together. In their
breezy good-nature and cheerfulness they are a fine antidote to the
impression one gets of him in Haydon's account, 'lying in a white bed
with a book, hectic and on his back, irritable at his weakness and
wounded at the way he had been used. He seemed to be going out of life
with a contempt for this world, and no hopes of the other. I told him
to be calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he
would destroy himself.' This is taking Keats at his worst. It is well
enough to know that he seemed to Haydon as Haydon has described him,
but few men appear to advantage when they are desperately ill. Turn to
the letters written during his tour in Scotland, when he walked twenty
miles a day, climbed Ben Nevis, so fatigued himself that, as he told
Fanny Keats, 'when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe
and trundle me around the town, like a Hoop, without waking me. Then I
get so hungry a Ham goes but a very little way, and fowls are like
Larks to me.... I take a whole string of Pork Sausages down as easily
as a Pen'orth of Lady's fingers.' And then he bewails the fact that
when he arrives in the Highlands he will have to be contented 'with an
acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of Milk, and a Cloaths basket of
Eggs morning, noon, and night.' Here is the active Keats, of honest
mundane tastes and an athletic disposition, who threatens' to cut all
sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut Sickness.'
Indeed, the letters are so pleasant and amusing in the way they
exhibit minor traits, habits, prejudices, and the like, that it is a
temptation to dwell upon these things. How we love a man's
weaknesses--if we share them! I do not know that Keats would have
given occasion for an anecdote like that told of a certain book-loving
actor, whose best friend, when urged to join the chorus of praise that
was quite universally sung to this actor's virtues, acquiesced by
saying amiably, 'Mr. Blank undoubtedly has genius, but he can't
spell;' yet there are comforting evidences that Keats was no servile
follower of the 'monster Conventionality' even in his spelling, while
in respect to the use of capitals he was a law unto himself. He
sprinkled them through his correspondence with a lavish hand, though
at times he grew so economical that, as one of his editors remarks, he
would spell Romeo with a small _r_, Irishman with a small _i_, and God
with a small _g_.
It is also a pleasure to find that, with his other failings, he had a
touch of book-madness. There was in him the making of a first-class
bibliophile. He speaks with rapture of his black-letter Chaucer, which
he proposes to have bound 'in Gothique,' so as to unmodernize as much
as possible its outward appearance. But to Keats books were literature
or they were not literature, and one cannot think that his affections
would twine about ever so bookish a volume which was merely 'curious.'
One reads with sympathetic amusement of Keats's genuine and natural
horror of paying the same bill twice, 'there not being a more
unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others).' The
necessity of preserving adequate evidence that a bill had been paid
was uppermost in his thought quite frequently; and once when, at Leigh
Hunt's instance, sundry packages of papers belonging to that eminently
methodical and businesslike man of letters were to be sorted out and
in part destroyed, Keats refused to burn any, 'for fear of demolishing
receipts.'
But the reader will chance upon few more humorous passages than that
in which the poet tells his brother George how he cures himself of the
blues, and at the same time spurs his flagging powers of invention:
'Whenever I find myself growing vaporish I rouse myself, wash and put
on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings
neatly, and, in fact, adonize, as if I were going out--then all clean
and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest
relief.' The virtues of a clean shirt have often been sung, but it
remained for Keats to show what a change of linen and a general
_adonizing_ could do in the way of furnishing poetic stimulus. This is
better than coffee, brandy, absinthe, or falling in love; and it
prompts one to think anew that the English poets, taking them as a
whole, were a marvelously healthy and sensible breed of men.
It is, however, in respect to the light they throw upon the poet's
literary life that the letters are of highest significance. They
gratify to a reasonable extent that natural desire we all have to see
authorship in the act. The processes by which genius brings things to
pass are so mysterious that our curiosity is continually piqued; and
our failure to get at the real thing prompts us to be more or less
content with mere externals. If we may not hope to see the actual
process of making poetry, we may at least study the poet's manuscript.
By knowing of his habits of work we flatter ourselves that we are a
little nearer the secret of his power.
We must bear in mind that Keats was a boy, always a boy, and that he
died before he quite got out of boyhood. To be sure, most boys of
twenty-six would resent being described by so juvenile a term. But one
must have successfully passed twenty-six without doing anything in
particular to understand how exceedingly young twenty-six is. And to
have wrought so well in so short a time, Keats must have had from the
first a clear and noble conception of the nature of his work, as he
must also have displayed extraordinary diligence in the doing of it.
Perhaps these points are too obvious, and of a sort which would
naturally occur to any one; but it will be none the less interesting
to see how the letters bear witness to their truth.
In the first place, Keats was anything but a loafer at literature. He
seems never to have dawdled. A fine healthiness is apparent in all
allusions to his processes of work. 'I read and write about eight
hours a day,' he remarks in a letter to Haydon. Bailey, Keats's Oxford
friend, says that the fellow would go to his writing-desk soon after
breakfast, and stay there until two or three o'clock in the afternoon.
He was then writing _Endymion_. His stint was about 'fifty lines a
day, ... and he wrote with as much regularity, and apparently with as
much ease, as he wrote his letters.... Sometimes he fell short of his
allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. But
he never forced himself.' Bailey quotes, in connection with this,
Keats's own remark to the effect that poetry would better not come at
all than not to come 'as naturally as the leaves of a tree.' Whether
this spontaneity of production was as great as that of some other
poets of his time may be questioned; but he would never have deserved
Tom Nash's sneer at those writers who can only produce by 'sleeping
betwixt every sentence.' Keats had in no small degree the 'fine
extemporal vein' with 'invention quicker than his eye.'
We uncritically feel that it could hardly have been otherwise in the
case of one with whom poetry was a passion. Keats had an infinite
hunger and thirst for good poetry. His poetical life, both in the
receptive and productive phases of it, was intense. Poetry was meat
and drink to him. He could even urge his friend Reynolds to talk about
it to him, much as one might beg a trusted friend to talk about one's
lady-love, and with the confidence that only the fitting thing would
be spoken. 'Whenever you write, say a word or two on some passage in
Shakespeare which may have come rather new to you,'--a sentence which
shows his faith in the many-sidedness of the great poetry. Shakespeare
was forever 'coming new' to _him_, and he was 'haunted' by particular
passages. He loved to fill the cup of his imagination with the
splendors of the best poets until the cup overflowed. 'I find I cannot
exist without Poetry,--without eternal Poetry; half the day will not
do,--the whole of it; I began with a little, but habit has made me a
leviathan.' He tells Leigh Hunt, in a letter written from Margate,
that he thought so much about poetry, and 'so long together,' that he
could not get to sleep at night. Whether this meant in working out
ideas of his own, or living over the thoughts of other poets, is of
little importance; the remark shows how deeply the roots of his life
were imbedded in poetical soil. He loved a debauch in the verse of
masters of his art. He could intoxicate himself with Shakespeare's
sonnets. He rioted in 'all their fine things said unconsciously.' We
are tempted to say, by just so much as he had large reverence for
these men, by just so much he was of them.
Undoubtedly, this ability to be moved by strong imaginative work may
be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment.
Keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses.
He knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than
mere ambition could. He understood the limits of ambition as a force
in literature. Keats's ambition trembled in the presence of Keats's
conception of the magnitude of the poetic office. 'I have asked myself
so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great
a thing it is.' Yet he had honest confidence. One cannot help liking
him for the fine audacity with which he pronounces his own work
good,--better even than that of a certain other great name in English
literature; one cannot help loving him for the sweet humility with
which he accepts the view that, after all, success or failure lies
entirely without the range of self-choosing. There is a point of view
from which it is folly to hold a poet responsible even for his own
poetry, and when _Endymion_ was spoken of as 'slipshod' Keats could
reply, 'That it is so is no fault of mine.... The Genius of Poetry
must work out its own salvation in a man.... That which is creative
must create itself. In _Endymion_ I leaped headlong into the sea, and
thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the
quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore,
and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was
never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the
greatest.'
Well might a man who could write that last sentence look upon poetry
not only as a responsible, but as a dangerous pursuit. Men who aspire
to be poets are gamblers. In all the lotteries of the literary life
none is so uncertain as this. A million chances that you don't win the
prize to one chance that you do. It is a curious thing that ever so
thoughtful and conscientious an author may not know whether he is
making literature or merely writing verse. He conforms to all the
canons of taste in his own day; he is devout and reverent; he shuns
excesses of diction, and he courts originality; his verse seems to
himself and to his unflattering friends instinct with the spirit of
his time, but twenty years later it is old-fashioned. Keats, with all
his feeling of certainty, stood with head uncovered before that power
which gives poetical gifts to one, and withholds them from another.
Above all would he avoid self-delusion in these things. 'There is no
greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter one's self into an
idea of being a great Poet.'
Keats, if one may judge from a letter written to John Taylor in
February, 1818, had little expectation that his _Endymion_ was going
to be met with universal plaudits. He doubtless looked for fair
treatment. He probably had no thought of being sneeringly addressed as
'Johnny,' or of getting recommendations to return to his 'plasters,
pills, and ointment boxes.' In fact, he looked upon the issue as
entirely problematical. He seemed willing to take it for granted that
in _Endymion_ he had but moved into the go-cart from the
leading-strings. 'If _Endymion_ serves me for a pioneer, perhaps I
ought to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand
Shakespeare to his depths; and I have, I am sure, many friends who if
I fail will attribute any change in my life to humbleness rather than
pride,--to a cowering under the wings of great poets rather than to
bitterness that I am not appreciated.' And for evidence of any
especial bitterness because of the lashing he received one will search
the letters in vain. Keats was manly and good-humored, most of his
morbidity being referred directly to his ill health. The trouncing he
had at the hands of the reviewers was no more violent than the one
administered to Tennyson by Professor Wilson. Critics, good and bad,
can do much harm. They may terrorize a timid spirit. But a greater
terror than the fear of the reviewers hung over the head of John
Keats. He stood in awe of his own artistic and poetic sense. He could
say with truth that his own domestic criticism had given him pain
without comparison beyond what _Blackwood_ or the _Quarterly_ could
possibly inflict. If he had had any terrible heart-burning over their
malignancy, if he had felt that his life was poisoned, he could hardly
have forborne some allusion to it in his letters to his brother,
George Keats. But he is almost imperturbable. He talks of the episode
freely, says that he has been urged to publish his _Pot of Basil_ as a
reply to the reviewers, has no idea that he can be made ridiculous by
abuse, notes the futility of attacks of this kind, and then, with a
serene conviction that is irresistible, adds, 'I think I shall be
among the English Poets after my death!'
Such egoism of genius is magnificent; the more so as it appears in
Keats because it runs parallel with deep humility in the presence of
the masters of his art. Naturally, the masters who were in their
graves were the ones he reverenced the most and read without stint.
But it was by no means essential that a poet be a dead poet before
Keats did him homage. It is impossible to think that Keats's attitude
towards Wordsworth was other than finely appreciative, in spite of the
fact that he applauded Reynolds's _Peter Bell_, and inquired almost
petulantly why one should be teased with Wordsworth's 'Matthew with a
bough of wilding in his hand.' But it is also impossible that his
sense of humor should not have been aroused by much that he found in
Wordsworth. It was Wordsworth he meant when he said, 'Every man has
his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them
till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself,'--a sentence, by
the way, quite as unconsciously funny as some of the things he laughed
at in the works of his great contemporary.
It will be pertinent to quote here two or three of the good critical
words which Keats scattered through his letters. Emphasizing the use
of simple means in his art, he says, 'I think that poetry should
surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike
the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost
a remembrance.'
'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.... Poetry should
be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and
does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.' Or
as Ruskin has put the thing with respect to painting, 'Entirely
first-rate work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute
over it.'
Keats appears to have been in no sense a hermit. With the exception of
Byron, he was perhaps less of a recluse than any of his poetical
contemporaries. With respect to society he frequently practiced total
abstinence; but the world was amusing, and he liked it. He was fond of
the theatre, fond of whist, fond of visiting the studios, fond of
going to the houses of his friends. But he would run no risks; he was
shy and he was proud. He dreaded contact with the ultra-fashionables.
Naturally, his opportunities for such intercourse were limited, but he
cheerfully neglected his opportunities. I doubt if he ever bewailed
his humble origin; nevertheless, the constitution of English society
would hardly admit of his forgetting it. He had that pardonable pride
which will not allow a man to place himself among those who, though
outwardly fair-spoken, offer the insult of a hostile and patronizing
mental attitude.
Most of his friendships were with men, and this is to his credit. The
man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding
friendship with one of his own sex; and to go a step farther, that man
is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. We may
not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young
thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that 'men are the
idealists, after all;' yet it is easy to comprehend how one may take
this point of view. The friendships of men are a vastly more
interesting and poetic study than the friendships of men and women.
This is in the nature of the case. It is the usual victory of the
normal over the abnormal. As a rule, it is impossible for a friendship
to exist between a man and woman, unless the man and woman in question
be husband and wife. Then it is as rare as it is beautiful. And with
men, the most admirable spectacle is not always that where attendant
circumstances prompt to heroic display of friendship, for it is often
so much easier to die than to live. But you may see young men pledging
their mutual love and support in this difficult and adventurous quest
of what is noblest in the art of living. Such love will not urge to a
theatrical posing, and it can hardly find expression in words. Words
seem to profane it. I do not say that Keats stood in such an ideal
relation to any one of his many friends whose names appear in the
letters. He gave of himself to them all, and he received much from
each. No man of taste and genius could have been other than flattered
by the way in which Keats approached him. He was charming in his
attitude toward Haydon; and when Haydon proposed sending Keats's
sonnet to Wordsworth, the young poet wrote, 'The Idea of your sending
it to Wordsworth put me out of breath--you know with what Reverence I
would send my well wishes to him.'
But interesting as a chapter on Keats's friendships with men would be,
we are bound to confess that in dramatic intensity it would grow pale
when laid beside that fiery love passage of his life, his acquaintance
with Fanny Brawne. The thirty-nine letters given in the fourth volume
of Buxton Forman's edition of _Keats's Works_ tell the story of this
affair of a poet's heart. These are the letters which Mr. William
Watson says he has never read, and at which no consideration shall
ever induce him to look. But Mr. Watson reflects upon people who have
been human enough to read them when he compares such a proceeding on
his own part (were he able to be guilty of it) to the indelicacy of
'listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall.' This is not a just
illustration. The man who takes upon himself the responsibility of
being the first to open such intimate letters, and adds thereto the
infinitely greater responsibility of publishing them in so attractive
a form that he who runs will stop running in order to read,--such an
editor will need to satisfy Mr. Watson that in so doing he was not
listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall. For the general public,
the wall is down, and the door containing the keyhole thrown open.
Perhaps our duty is not to look. I, for one, wish that great men would
not leave their love letters around. Nay, I wish you a better wish
than that: it is that the perfect taste of the gentleman and scholar
who gave us in its present form the correspondence of Carlyle and
Emerson, the early and later letters of Carlyle, and the letters of
Lowell might have control of the private papers of every man of genius
whose teachings the world holds dear. He would need for this an
indefinite lease upon life; but since I am wishing, let me wish
largely. There is need of such wishing. Many editors have been called,
and only two or three chosen.
But why one who reads the letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne should have
any other feeling than that of pity for a poor fellow who was so
desperately in love as to be wretched because of it I do not see. Even
a cynic will grant that Keats was not disgraced, since it is very
clear that he did not yield readily to what Dr. Holmes calls the great
passion. He had a complacent boyish superiority of attitude with
respect to all those who are weak enough to love women. 'Nothing,' he
says, 'strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love.
A man in love I do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world. Even
when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it I could burst
out laughing in his face. His pathetic visage becomes irresistible.'
Then he speaks of that dinner party of stutterers and squinters
described in the _Spectator_, and says that it would please him more
'to scrape together a party of lovers.' If this letter be genuine and
the date of it correctly given, it was written three months after he
had succumbed to the attractions of Fanny Brawne. Perhaps he was
trying to brave it out, as one may laugh to conceal embarrassment.
In a much earlier letter than this he hopes he shall never marry, but
nevertheless has a good deal to say about a young lady with fine eyes
and fine manners and a 'rich Eastern look.' He discovers that he can
talk to her without being uncomfortable or ill at ease. 'I am too much
occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble.... She kept me
awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do.... I don't cry to take
the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind
me.' But he was not a little touched, and found it easy to fill two
pages on the subject of this dark beauty. She was a friend of the
Reynolds family. She crosses the stage of the Keats drama in a very
impressive manner, and then disappears.
The most extraordinary passage to be met with in relation to the
poet's attitude towards women is in a letter written to Benjamin
Bailey in July, 1818. As a partial hint towards its full meaning I
would take two phrases in _Daniel Deronda_. George Eliot says of
Gwendolen Harleth that there was 'a certain fierceness of maidenhood
in her,' which expression is quoted here only to emphasize the girl's
feeling towards men as described a little later, when Rex Gascoigne
attempted to tell her his love. Gwendolen repulsed him with a sort of
fury that was surprising to herself. The author's interpretative
comment is, '_The life of passion had begun negatively in her._'
So one might say of Keats that the life of passion began negatively in
him. He was conscious of a hostility of temper towards women. 'I am
certain I have not a right feeling toward women--at this moment I am
striving to be just to them, but I cannot.' He certainly started with
a preposterously high ideal, for he says that when a schoolboy he
thought a fair woman a pure goddess. And now he is disappointed at
finding women only the equals of men. This disappointment helps to
give rise to that antagonism which is almost inexplicable save as
George Eliot's phrase throws light upon it. He thinks that he insults
women by these perverse feelings of unprovoked hostility. 'Is it not
extraordinary,' he exclaims, 'when among men I have no evil thoughts,
no malice, no spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; ... I am
free from all suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among women, I
have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am
full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry
to be gone.' He wonders how this trouble is to be cured. He speaks of
it as a prejudice produced from 'a gordian complication of feelings,
which must take time to unravel.' And then, with a good-humored,
characteristic touch, he drops the subject, saying, 'After all, I do
think better of women than to suppose they care whether Mister John
Keats, five feet high, likes them or not.'
Three or four months after writing these words he must have begun his
friendly relations with the Brawne family. This would be in October or
November, 1818. Keats's description of Fanny is hardly flattering, and
not even vivid. What is one to make of the colorless expression 'a
fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort'? But she was fair to
him, and any beauty beyond that would have been superfluous. We look
at the silhouette and sigh in vain for trace of the loveliness which
ensnared Keats. But if our daguerreotypes of forty years ago can so
entirely fail of giving one line of that which in its day passed for
dazzling beauty, let us not be unreasonable in our demands upon the
artistic capabilities of a silhouette. Not infrequently is it true
that the style of dress seems to disfigure. But we have learned, in
course of experience, that pretty women manage to be pretty, however
much fashion, with their cordial help, disguises them.
It is easy to see from the letters that Keats was a difficult lover.
Hard to please at the best, his two sicknesses, one of body and one of
heart, made him whimsical. Nothing less than a woman of genius could
possibly have managed him. He was jealous, perhaps quite unreasonably
so. Fanny Brawne was young, a bit coquettish, buoyant, and he
misinterpreted her vivacity. She liked what is commonly called 'the
world,' and so did he when he was well; but looking through the
discolored glass of ill health, all nature was out of harmony. For
these reasons it happens that the letters at times come very near to
being documents in love-madness. Many a line in them gives sharp pain,
as a record of heart-suffering must always do. You may read Richard
Steele's love letters for pleasure, and have it. The love letters of
Keats scorch and sting; and the worst of it is that you cannot avoid
reflecting upon the transitory character of such a passion. Withering
young love like this does not last. It may burn itself out, or, what
is quite as likely, it may become sober and rational. But in its
earlier maddened state it cannot possibly last; a man would die under
it. Men as a rule do not so die, for the race of the Azra is nearly
extinct.
These Brawne letters, however, are not without their bright side; and
it is wonderful to see how Keats's elastic nature would rebound the
instant that the pressure of the disease relaxed. He is at times
almost gay. The singing of a thrush prompts him to talk in his natural
epistolary voice: 'There's the Thrush again--I can't afford it--he'll
run me up a pretty Bill for Music--besides he ought to know I deal at
Clementi's.' And in the letter which he wrote to Mrs. Brawne from
Naples is a touch of the old bantering Keats when he says that 'it's
misery to have an intellect in splints.' He was never strong enough to
write again to Fanny, or even to read her letters.
I should like to close this reading with a few sentences from a letter
written to Reynolds in February, 1818. Keats says: 'I had an idea that
a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner--let him on a
certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and
let him wander with it, and muse upon it, ... and prophesy upon it,
and dream upon it, until it becomes stale--but when will it do so?
Never! When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one
grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting post towards all
the "two-and-thirty Palaces." How happy is such a voyage of
conception, what delicious diligent Indolence!... Nor will this
sparing touch of noble Books be any irreverence to their Writers--for
perhaps the honors paid by Man to Man are trifles in comparison to the
Benefit done by great Works to the Spirit and pulse of good by their
mere passive existence.'
May we not say that the final test of great literature is that it be
able to be read in the manner here indicated? As Keats read, so did he
write. His own work was
'accomplished in repose
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.'