_To Thomas Egerton, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford_.
Dear Egerton,--Yes, as you say, Mr. Sidney Colvin's new "Life of Keats"
{3} has only one fault, it's too short. Perhaps, also, it is almost too
studiously free from enthusiasm. But when one considers how Keats (like
Shelley) has been gushed about, and how easy it is to gush about Keats,
one can only thank Mr. Colvin for his example of reserve. What a good
fellow Keats was! How really manly and, in the best sense, moral he
seems, when one compares his life and his letters with the vagaries of
contemporary poets who lived longer than he, though they, too, died
young, and who left more work, though not better, never so good, perhaps,
as Keats's best.
However, it was not of Keats that I wished to write, but of his friend,
John Hamilton Reynolds. _Noscitur a sociis_--a man is known by the
company he keeps. Reynolds, I think, must have been excellent company,
if we may judge him by his writings. He comes into Lord Houghton's "Life
and Letters of Keats" very early (vol. i. p. 30). We find the poet
writing to him in the April of 1817, from the Isle of Wight. "I shall
forthwith begin my 'Endymion,' which I hope I shall have got some way
with before you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful place
I have set my heart upon, near the castle." Keats ends "your sincere
friend," and a man to whom Keats was a sincere friend had some occasion
for pride.
About Reynolds's life neither time nor space permits me to say very much,
if I knew very much, which I don't. He was the son of a master in one of
our large schools. He went to the Bar. He married a sister of Thomas
Hood. He wrote, like Hood, in the _London Magazine_. With Hood for
ally, he published "Odes and Addresses to Great People;" the third
edition, which I have here, is of 1826. The late relations of the
brothers-in-law were less happy; possibly the ladies of their families
quarrelled; that is usually the way of the belligerent sex.
Reynolds died in the enjoyment of a judicial office in the Isle of Wight,
some thirty years later than his famous friend, the author of "Endymion."
"It is to be lamented," says Lord Houghton, "that Mr. Reynolds's own
remarkable verse is not better known." Let us try to know it a little
better.
I have not succeeded in getting Reynolds's first volume of poems, which
was published before "Endymion." It contained some Oriental melodies,
and won a careless good word from Byron. The earliest work of his I can
lay my hand on is "The Fancy, a Selection from the Poetical Remains of
the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray's Inn, Student at Law, with a brief
memoir of his Life." There is a motto from Wordsworth:
"Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive." {4}
It was the old palmy time of the Ring. Every one knows how Byron took
lessons from Jackson the boxer; how Shelley had a fight at Eton in which
he quoted Homer, but was licked by a smaller boy; how Christopher North
whipped the professional pugilist; how Keats himself never had enough of
fighting at school, and beat the butcher afterwards. His friend
Reynolds, also, liked a set-to with the gloves. His imaginary character,
Peter Corcoran, is a poetical lad, who becomes possessed by a passion for
prize-fighting. It seems odd in a poet, but "the stains are fugitive."
We would liefer see a young man rejoicing in his strength and improving
his science, than loafing about with long hair and giving anxious thought
to the colour of his necktie. It is a disinterested preference, as
fighting was never my _forte_, any more than it was Artemus Ward's. At
school I was "more remarkable for what I suffered than for what I
achieved."
Peter Corcoran "fought nearly as soon as he could walk," wherein he
resembled Keats, and part of his character may even have been borrowed
from the author of the "Ode to the Nightingale." Peter fell in love,
wrote poetry, witnessed a "mill" at the Fives-Court, and became the
Laureate of the Ring. "He has made a good set-to with Eales, Tom Belcher
(the monarch of the _gloves_!), and Turner, and it is known that he has
parried the difficult and ravaging hand even of Randall himself." "The
difficult and ravaging hand"--there is a style for you!
Reynolds has himself the enthusiasm of his hero; let us remember that
Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus have all described spirited rallies with
admiration and good taste. From his dissipation in cider-cellars and
coal-holes, this rival of Tom and Jerry wrote a sonnet that applies well
enough to Reynolds's own career:
"Were this a feather from an eagle's wing,
And thou, my tablet white! a marble tile
Taken from ancient Jove's majestic pile--
And might I dip my feather in some spring,
Adown Mount Ida threadlike wandering:--
And were my thoughts brought from some starry isle
In Heaven's blue sea--I then might with a smile
Write down a hymn to fame, and proudly sing!
"But I am mortal: and I cannot write
Aught that may foil the fatal wing of Time.
Silent, I look at Fame: I cannot climb
To where her Temple is--Not mine the might:--
I have some glimmering of what is sublime--
But, ah! it is a most inconstant light."
Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholy mood.
"About this time he (Peter) wrote a slang description of a fight he had
witnessed to a lady." Unlucky Peter! "Was ever woman in this manner
wooed?" The lady "glanced her eye over page after page in hopes of
meeting with something that was intelligible," and no wonder she did not
care for a long letter "devoted to the subject of a mill between Belasco
and the Brummagem youth." Peter was so ill-advised as to appear before
her with glorious scars, "two black eyes" in fact, and she "was
inexorably cruel." Peter did not survive her disdain. "The lady still
lives, and is married"! It is ever thus!
Peter's published works contain an American tragedy. Peter says he got
it from a friend, who was sending him an American copy of "Guy Mannering"
"to present to a young lady who, strange to say, read books and wore
pockets," virtues unusual in the sex. One of the songs (on the delights
of bull-baiting) contains the most vigorous lines I have ever met, but
they are _too_ vigorous for our lax age. The tragedy ends most
tragically, and the moral comes in "better late," says the author, "than
never." The other poems are all very lively, and very much out of date.
Poor Peter!
Reynolds was married by 1818, and it is impossible to guess whether the
poems of Peter Corcoran did or did not contain allusions to his own more
lucky love affair. "Upon my soul," writes Keats, "I have been getting
more and more close to you every day, ever since I knew you, and now one
of the first pleasures I look to is your happy marriage." Reynolds was
urging Keats to publish the "Pot of Basil" "as an answer to the attack
made on me in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_."
Next Keats writes that he himself "never was in love, yet the voice and
shape of a woman has haunted me these two days." On September 22, 1819,
Keats sent Reynolds the "Ode to Autumn," than which there is no more
perfect poem in the language of Shakespeare. This was the last of his
published letters to Reynolds. He was dying, haunted eternally by that
woman's shape and voice.
Reynolds's best-known book, if any of them can be said to be known at
all, was published under the name of John Hamilton. It is "The Garden of
Florence, and Other Poems" (Warren, London, 1821). There is a
dedication--to his young wife.
"Thou hast entreated me to 'write no more,'" and he, as an elderly "man
of twenty-four," promises to obey. "The lily and myself henceforth are
_two_," he says, implying that he and the lily have previously been
"one," a quaint confession from the poet of Peter Corcoran. There is
something very pleasant in the graceful regret and obedience of this
farewell to the Muse. He says to Mrs. Reynolds:
"I will not tell the world that thou hast chid
My heart for worshipping the idol Muse;
That thy dark eye has given its gentle lid
Tears for my wanderings; I may not choose
When thou dost speak but do as I am bid,--
And therefore to the roses and the dews,
Very respectfully I make my bow;--
And turn my back upon the tulips now."
"The chief poems in the collection, taken from Boccaccio, were to have
been associated with tales from the same source, intended to have been
written by a friend; but illness on his part and distracting engagements
on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our plan at the time; and Death
now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated it for ever!"
I cannot but quote what follows, the tribute to Keats's kindness, to the
most endearing quality our nature possesses; the quality that was Scott's
in such a winning degree, that was so marked in Moliere,
"He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I ever possessed,
and yet he was not kinder, perhaps, to me than to others. His intense
mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have done the world
some service had his life been spared--but he was of too sensitive a
nature--and thus he was destroyed! One story he completed, and that is
to me now the most pathetic poem in existence."