Chapter XI
DECEMBER 1818-JUNE 1819: KEATS AND BROWN HOUSEMATES: FANNY BRAWNE: WORK AND IDLENESS
Removal to Wentworth Place--Work on Hyperion--The insatiable Haydon--The Misses Porter--A mingled yarn--Charles Lamb and punning--Hunt and his satellites--Fanny Brawne--A sudden enslavement--Severn's impressions--Visit to Hampshire--The Eve of St. Agnes--Return and engagement--Ode to Fanny--Love and jealousy--Haydon again--Letters to Fanny Keats--Two months' idleness--Praise of claret--Bailey's love-affairs--Fit of languor--Fight with a butcher--Sonnet-confessions--Reflections ethical and cosmic--Meeting with Coleridge--The same according to the sage--A tactful review--Sonnets on fame--La Belle Dame Sans Merci--The right version quoted--The five Odes--Their date and order--A fruitful May--Indecision and anxiety--A confidential letter--Departure for Shanklin.
Dilke and Brown, as has been said already, had built for themselves a joint block of two houses in a garden near the bottom of John Street, Hampstead, and had called the property Wentworth Place, after a name hereditary in the Dilke family. Dilke and his wife occupied the larger of the two houses forming the block, and Brown, who was a bachelor, the smaller house, standing to the west.[1] The accommodation in Brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them, and a small spare bedroom or 'crib' where a bachelor guest could be put up for the night. The arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses, occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. His move to his new quarters does not seem to have been quite so immediate as Brown represents it. Beginning a new journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law a week or two after Tom's death, Keats writes, 'With Dilke and Brown I am quite thick--with Brown indeed I am going to domesticate, that is, we shall keep house together. I shall have the front parlour and he the back one, by which I shall be able to avoid the noise of Bentley's Children--and be better able to go on with my studies--which have been greatly interrupted lately, so that I have not a shadow of an idea for books in my head, and my pen seems to have grown gouty for verse.'
This phase of poetical stagnation, which had naturally set in as his cares for his dying brother grew more engrossing towards the end, passed away quickly. By about the middle of December Keats was settled at Wentworth Place, whither his ex-landlord, Bentley the postman, we are told, carried down his little library of some hundred and fifty books in a clothes-basket from Well Walk. In spite of the noisy children Keats parted not without regret from the Bentleys, and speaks feelingly of Mrs Bentley's kindness and attention during his late trouble. As soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in some measure softened his grief, he plunged once more into poetry, his special task being Hyperion, at which he had already begun to work before his brother died. But he never got into a quite happy or uninterrupted flow of work on it. Once and again we find him moved to lay it aside for a bout of brotherly gossip with George and Georgiana in America. 'Just now I took out my poem to go on with it--but the thought of my writing so little to you came upon me and I could not get on--so I have begun at random and I have not a word to say--and yet my thoughts are so full of you that I can do nothing else.' And again: 'I have no thought pervading me so constantly and frequently as that of you--my Poem cannot frequently drive it away--you will retard it much more than you could by taking up my time if you were in England. I never forget you except after seeing now and then some beautiful woman--but that is a fever--the thought of you both is a passion with me, but for the most part a calm one.'
This letter, covering some three weeks from mid-December to January 4, enables us, like others to the same correspondents, to lay our finger on almost every strand in the 'mingled yarn' of Keats's life and doings. Of one tiresome interruption which befell him about Christmas he tells nothing, doubtless in order to spare his brother anxiety. This was a request for money from the insatiable Haydon. The correspondence on the matter cannot be read without anger against the elder man and admiring affection for the generous lad--yet not foolishly or recklessly generous--on whom he sponged. Haydon's only excuses are a recent eye-trouble which had hindered his work, and his inflated belief, which had so far successfully imposed both upon himself and his friends, in his own huge importance to art and to his country. Keats writes, showing incidentally how last year's critical rebuffs had changed, more or less permanently, his attitude in regard to the public and public recognition:--
Believe me Haydon I have that sort of fire in my heart that would sacrifice everything I have to your service--I speak without any reserve--I know you would do so for me--I open my heart to you in a few words. I will do this sooner than you shall be distressed: but let me be the last stay--Ask the rich lovers of Art first--I'll tell you why--I have a little money which may enable me to study, and to travel for three or four years. I never expect to get anything by my Books: and moreover I wish to avoid publishing--I admire Human Nature but I do not like Men. I should like to compose things honourable to Man--but not fingerable over by Men. So I am anxious to exist without troubling the printer's devil or drawing upon Men's or Women's admiration--in which great solitude I hope God will give me strength to rejoice. Try the long purses--but do not sell your drawings or I shall consider it a breach of friendship.
Haydon answers in a gush of grandiloquent gratitude, promising to try every corner first, but intimating pretty clearly that he knew his wealthier habitual helpers were for the present tired out with him. One of his phrases is a treasure. 'Ah Keats, this is sad work for one of my soul and Ambition. The truest thing you ever said of mortal was that I had a touch of Alexander in me! I have, I know it, and the World shall know it, but this is a purgative drug I must first take.' 'This' means his own perpetual need and habit of living on other people. In the next letter Haydon of course accepts Keats's offer, and in the Christmas weeks, when he should have been wholly engrossed in Hyperion, Keats had much and for some time fruitless ado with bankers, lawyers, and guardian in endeavouring to fulfil his promise. To his brother he only says he has been dining with Haydon and otherwise seeing much of him; mentions the painter's eye-trouble; and quotes him as describing vividly at second hand the sufferings of Captain (afterwards Sir John) Ross and his party on their voyage in search of the North-West passage.
From Ross in Baffin's Bay the same letter rambles to Ritchie in the deserts of Morocco, and thence to gossip about the best way of keeping his own and George's brotherly intimacy unbroken across the ocean; about the 'sickening stuff' printed in Hunt's new Literary Pocket Book (it was when he was seeing most of Haydon that Keats was always most inclined to harsh criticism of Hunt); about Mrs Dilke's cats, and about Godwin's novels and Hazlitt's opinion of them, and the rare pleasure he has had at Haydon's in looking through a book of engravings after early Italian frescoes in a church at Milan. 'Milan' must be a mistake, for there are no such engravings,[2] and what Keats saw must certainly have been the fine series by Lasinio, published in 1814, after the frescoes of Orcagna, Benozzo Gozzoli, and the rest in the Campo Santo at Pisa. 'I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare. Full of romance and the most tender feeling--magnificence of draperies beyond everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael's. But Grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole--even finer to me than more accomplished works--as there was left so much room for Imagination.' It is interesting to find Keats thus vividly awake, as very few yet were either by instinct or fashion, to the charm of the Italian primitives, and to remember how it was a copy of this same book of prints, in the possession of young John Everett Millais thirty years later, which first aroused the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm in him and his associates Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt (the last-named is our witness for the fact).
Keats tells moreover how an unknown admirer from the west country had sent him a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a further tribute in the shape of a L25 note; how he had been both pleased and displeased,--'if I had refused it I should have behaved in a very braggadocio dunderheaded manner, and yet the present galls me a little'; and again how he has received through Woodhouse a glowing letter of sympathy and encouragement from Miss Jane Porter, the then famous authoress of Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs, who desires his acquaintance on her own behalf and that of her sister Anna Maria, almost equally popular at the hour by her romance of The Hungarian Brothers. By all this, says Keats, he feels more obliged than flattered--'so obliged that I will not at present give you an extravaganza of a Lady Romancer. I will be introduced to them if it be merely for the pleasure of writing to you about it--I shall certainly see a new race of People.' Pity he failed to carry out his purpose: pen-portraits satirical and other are not lacking of these admired sisters, the tall and tragical Jane, the blonde and laughing Anna Maria, 'La Penserosa' and 'L'Allegra,' but a sketch by Keats would have been an interesting addition to them. Still in the same letter, he complains of the sore throat which he finds it hard to shake off, and tells how he has given up or all but given up taking snuff (nearly everybody in that generation snuffed), and how he has been shooting with Dilke on Hampstead Heath and shot a tomtit,--a feat which for a moment calls up this divine poet to our minds in the guise of one of the cockney sportsmen of Seymour's caricatures. Never mind: he can afford it.
From an enquiry about the expected baby in America,--'will the little bairn have made his entrance before you have this? Kiss it for me, and when it can first know a cheese from a Caterpillar show it my picture twice a week,'--from this he passes to the re-assuring statement that the attack upon him in the Quarterly has in some quarters done him actual service. He tells how constrained and out of his element he feels in ordinary society; a common experience of genius, and part of the price it pays for living at a different level and temperature of thought and feeling from the herd. 'I am passing a Quiet day--which I have not done for a long while--and if I do continue so, I feel I must again begin with my poetry--for if I am not in action of mind or Body I am in pain--and from that I suffer greatly by going into parties where from the rules of society and a natural pride I am obliged to smother my Spirit and look like an Idiot--because I feel my impulses given way to would too much amaze them--I live under an everlasting restraint--never relieved except when I am composing--so I will write away.' And resuming apparently on Christmas Day:--'I think you knew before you left England, that my next subject would be "the fall of Hyperion." I went on a little with it last night, but it will take some time to get into the vein again. I will not give you any extracts, because I wish the whole to make an impression. I have however a few Poems which you will like, and I will copy out on the next sheet.' Nearly a week later he adds, 'I will insert any little pieces I may write--though I will not give any extracts from my large poem which is scarce began.' The phrase about Hyperion must be taken as indicating on how great a scale he had conceived the poem rather than how little he had yet written of it. In point of fact all we have of this mighty fragment must have been written either by his brother's bedside in September-October 1818 (but then certainly only a little) or else in these Christmas weeks from mid-December to mid-January 1818-19. The short poems he sends are the spirited sets of heptasyllabics, Fancy, and Lines on the Mermaid Tavern, the former one of the best things in the second and lighter class of his work: and with them the fragment written for music, 'I had a dove.' In relation to these he says 'It is my intention to wait a few years before I publish any minor poems--and then I hope to have a volume of some worth--and which those people will relish who cannot bear the burthen of a long poem.'
Presently Charles Lamb comes for a moment upon the scene. 'I have seen Lamb lately--Brown and I were taken by Hunt to Novello's--there we were devastated and excruciated with bad and repeated puns--Brown don't want to go again.' Punning, like snuffing, was the all but universal fashion of that age, as those of us can best realize who are old enough to remember grandfathers that belonged to it; and judging by the specimens Brown and Keats have themselves left, puns too bad for them are scarce imaginable. Novello is of course the distinguished organist, composer and music-publisher, Vincent Novello, whose Sunday evening musical parties were frequented by all the Lamb and Hunt circle, and whose eldest daughter, Mary Victoria, was married some ten years later to Cowden Clarke. At this time she was but a child of ten, but writing many years afterwards she has left a vivid reminiscence of Keats at her father's house, 'with his picturesque head, leaning against the instruments, one foot raised on his knee and smoothed beneath his hands' (an attitude said to have been perpetuated in a lost portrait by Severn). Is the above a memory of the one evening only which Keats himself mentions, or of others when his love of music may have drawn him to the Novellos' house in spite of the puns and of company for the moment not much to his taste? For the ways of Hunt and some of his circle, their mutual flatteries, their habit of trivial, chirping ecstasy over the things they liked, their superfluity of glib, complacent comment rubbing the bloom off sacred beauties of art and poetry and nature, were jarring on Keats's nerves just now; and though perfectly aware of Hunt's essential virtues of kind-heartedness and good comradeship, he writes with some irritability of impatience:--
Hunt has asked me to meet Tom Moore some day so you shall hear of him. The night we went to Novello's there was a complete set-to of Mozart and punning. I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow my own inclinations I should never meet any one of that set again, not even Hunt who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are with him--but in reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in matters of taste and in morals. He understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself professes--he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually. Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts--and many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a nothing. This distorts one's mind--makes one's thoughts bizarre--perplexes one in the standard of Beauty.
A little later he improvises a sample, not more than mildly satirical, from a comedy he professes to be planning on the ways and manners of Hunt and his satellites.
In the same letter a new personage makes her momentous entry on the scene. 'Mrs Brawne who took Brown's house for the summer still resides at Hampstead--she is a very nice woman--and her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and strange--we have a little tiff now and then, and she behaves better, or I must have sheered off.' This Mrs Brawne was a widow lady of West Indian connexions and some little fortune, with a daughter, Fanny, just grown up and two younger children. She had rented Brown's house while he and Keats were away in Scotland, and had naturally become acquainted with the Dilkes living next door and sharing a common garden. After Brown's return Mrs Brawne moved with her family to a house in Downshire Street close by. The acquaintance with the Dilkes was kept up, and it was through them, not long after he came back from Scotland, that Keats first met Fanny Brawne. His next words about her are these:--
Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort--she manages to make her hair look well--her nostrils are fine--though a little painful--her mouth is bad and good--her Profile is better than her full-face which indeed is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone. Her shape is very graceful and so are her movements--her Arms are good, her hands bad-ish her feet tolerable--she is not seventeen--but she is ignorant--monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx--this is I think not from any innate vice but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am however tired of such style and shall decline any more of it.
An attraction which has begun by repulsion is ever the most dangerous of all. The heightened emotional strain of his weeks of tendance on his dying brother had laid Keats open to both influences at their fullest power; he was ripe, as several passages from his letters have made us feel, for the tremendous adventure of love; and the 'new, strange, and threatening sorrow' from which he had with relief declared himself escaped when the momentary lure of the East-Indian Charmian left him fancy-free, was about to fall on him in good earnest now. Before many weeks he was hopelessly enslaved, and passion teaching him a sensitive secretiveness and reserve, he says to brother and sister no word more of his enslaver except by way of the lightest passing allusion. From his first semi-sarcastic account of her above quoted, as well as from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in Titian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is possible to realise something of her aspect and presence.
A brisk and blooming young beauty of a little over eighteen (Keats's 'not seventeen' is a mistake) with blonde hair and vivid palish colouring, a somewhat sharply cut aquiline cast of features, a slight, shapely figure rather short than tall, a liveliness of manner bordering on the boisterous, and no doubt some taking air and effluence of youth and vitality and sex,--such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her character we have scant means of judging. Neither she nor her mother can have been worldly-minded, or they would never have encouraged the attentions of a youth like Keats, whose prospects were problematical or null. It is clear that, though certainly high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident, she was kind and in essentials constant to her lover, and patient and unresentful under his occasional wild outbursts of jealousy and suspicion. But it seems equally clear that she did not half realise what manner of man he was, nor how high and privileged was the charge committed to her. She had no objection to the prospect of a long engagement, and despite her lover's remonstrances held herself free in the meantime to enjoy to the full the pleasures of her age and the admiration of other men.[3] One day early in the new year Keats took the devoted Severn to call on his new friends. Severn was much pleased with the mother, who seems to have been in truth a cultivated kind and gentle person; but he did not take to the daughter or even much admire her looks, and though perceiving her attraction for Keats did not then or till long afterwards realise the fatal strength of its hold upon him. 'That poor idle Thing of Womankind to whom he has so unaccountably attached himself'--so she is styled by Reynolds in a letter to Taylor a year and a half later. Brown, who knew her much better, and whose friendship with her sometimes showed itself in gallantries at which Keats writhed in secret, writes of her always in terms of kindness and respect, but never very explicitly. The very few of Keats's friends who came to be in his confidence, including Dilke and his wife, seem to have been agreed, although they bore her no ill will, in regarding the attachment as a misfortune for him.
So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion for a woman have been. Blow on blow had in truth begun to fall on Keats, as though in fulfilment of the constitutional misgivings to which he was so often secretly a prey. First the departure of his brother George had deprived him of his closest friend, to whom alone he had from boyhood been accustomed to confide those obsessions of his darker hours and in confiding to find relief from them. Next the exertions of his Scottish tour had proved too much for his strength, and laid him open to the attacks of his hereditary enemy, consumption. Coming back, he had found his brother Tom almost at his last gasp in the clutch of that enemy, and in nursing him had both lived in spirit through all his pains and breathed for many weeks a close atmosphere of infection. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his practical hopes from literature. Now were to be added the pangs of love,--love requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even love disdained might have made him suffer less. The passion took him, as it often takes consumptives, in its fiercest form: Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there is no withstanding, never harried a more helpless victim.[4]
By what stages the coils closed on him we can only guess. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting: which took place, we know, some time during the period of watching by Tom's sick-bed. After he went to live with Brown in December they must have met frequently. Probably it was this new attraction, as well as his chronic throat trouble and his concern over Haydon's affairs, which made him postpone a promised visit to Dilke's relations in Hampshire from Christmas until mid-January. He then carried out his promise, going to join Brown at Bedhampton, the home of Dilke's brother-in-law Mr John Snook. He liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit, but was unwell and during a stay of a fortnight only once went outside the garden. This was to a gathering of country clergy reinforced by two bishops, at the consecration of a chapel built by a great Jew-convertor, a Mr Way. The ceremony got on his nerves and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. He spent also a few days with Dilke's father in Chichester, and went out twice to dowager card parties. These social pleasures were naught to him, and his spirits, like his health, were low. But his genius was never more active. We have seen in the midst of what worries and interruptions he had worked before and during Christmas at Hyperion, the fragment which in our language stands next in epic quality to Paradise Lost. At Bedhampton in January, on some thin sheets of thin paper brought down for the purpose, he wrote the Eve of St Agnes, for its author merely 'a little poem,' for us a masterpiece aglow in every line with the vital quintessence of romance.
No word of Keats's own or of his friends prepares us for this new achievement or informs when he began first to think of the subject. It must of course have been ripening in his mind some good while before he thus suddenly and swiftly cast it into shape. When he wrote three months earlier of having to seek relief beside the sick-bed of his brother by 'plunging into abstract images,' were they images of primeval Greek gods and Titans only, or were these contrasted figures and colours of mediaeval romance beginning to occupy his imagination at the same time? Had the subject perhaps come into his mind as long ago as the preceding March, when Hunt and Reynolds and he were having the talks about Boccaccio which resulted in Keats's Isabella and Reynolds's Garden of Florence and Ladye of Provence? We shall see that Boccaccio counts for something in Keats's treatment of the St Agnes' Eve story, so that the supposition is at least plausible. Or may it even have been of this story and not, as is commonly assumed, of Hyperion that he was thinking as far back as September 1817 when he wrote to Haydon from Oxford of the 'new romance' he had in his mind? Woodhouse does not throw much light on such questions when he tells us that 'the subject was suggested by Mrs Jones.' This name, uncongenial to the muse (excepting the muse of Wordsworth) is otherwise unknown in connexion with Keats. Did the same lady also tell him of the tradition concerning St Mark's day (April 25th), and so become the 'only begetter' of that remarkable fragment The Eve of St Mark, which he wrote (Woodhouse again is the authority for the dates) between the 13th and 17th of February after his return to Hampstead? In connexion with Keats few stones have been left unturned for further personal or critical research, but here is one.
Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of January and it must have been very soon afterwards that he became the declared and accepted lover of Fanny Brawne, savouring intensely thenceforward all the tantalising sweets and bitters of that estate, though nothing was said to friends about the engagement. From the first he suffered severely from the sense of her freedom to enjoy pleasures and excitements for which neither his health nor his social habits and inclinations fitted him. The tale of the Eve of St Mark, begun and broken off just at this time, may possibly, as Rossetti thought, have been designed to turn on the remorse of a young girl for sufferings of a like kind inflicted on her lover and ending in his death. However that may be, we have two direct cries from his heart, one of pure love-yearning, the other of racking jealousy, which were written, if I read the evidences aright, almost immediately after the engagement and can be dated almost to a day. These are the first version, which has only lately become known, of the 'Bright Star' sonnet, and the ode To Fanny published posthumously by Lord Houghton. Both carry internal evidence of having been written before the winter was out: the sonnet in the words which invoke the star as watching the moving waters,
Or gazing at the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
the ode in the lines,
I come, I see thee as thou standest there, Beckon me not into the wintry air.[5]
Now it happens that this year there was frost and rough weather late in February, with snowfalls on the afternoon of the 24th and again the following morning. I imagine both sonnet and ode to have been written while the cold spell lasted, the sonnet probably before dawn on the actual morning of the 25th.[6] As slightly changed in form a year and a half later this sonnet has been long endeared to us all as one of the most beautiful in the language: I shall defer its discussion till we come to the date of this recast. The ode has flaws, for to make good or even bearable poetry out of that humiliating and grotesque passion of physical jealousy is a hard matter. It begins poorly, with a sense of discord, in the first stanza, between the choking violence of feeling expressed and the artificial form into which its expression is cast. But if we leave out this stanza, and also the fifth and sixth, which are a little common and unequal, we get an appeal as painful, indeed, as it is passionate, yet lacking neither in courtesy nor dignity, and conveyed in a strain of verse almost without fault:--
Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears, And hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,-- To-night, if I may guess, thy beauty wears A smile of such delight, As brilliant and as bright, As when with ravished, aching, vassal eyes, Lost in soft amaze, I gaze, I gaze!
Who now, with greedy looks, eats up my feast? What stare outfaces now my silver moon? Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least; Let, let the amorous burn-- But, pr'ythee, do not turn The current of your heart from me so soon. O! save, in charity, The quickest pulse for me.
Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe Voluptuous visions into the warm air; Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath, Be like an April day, Smiling and cold and gay, A temperate lily, temperate as fair; Then, Heaven! there will be A warmer June for me.
Ah! if you prize my subdu'd soul above The poor, the fading, brief pride of an hour; Let none profane my Holy See of Love, Or with a rude hand break The sacramental cake: Let none else touch the just new-budded flower: If not--may my eyes close, Love! on their last repose.
In both of these poems Keats soothes himself with thoughts of dying, and they are doubtless among the things he had in mind when two or three months later, in the ode To a Nightingale, he speaks of having invoked Death by soft names 'in many a mused rhyme.'
Fearing the intrusion of what in another sonnet of the time he calls 'The dragon-world and all its hundred eyes,' he was intensely jealous in guarding his secret from friends and acquaintances; and in writing even to those dearest to him he lets slip no word that might betray it. To his brother he merely says, 'Miss Brawne and I have now and then a chat and a tiff,' while to his young sister he writes on February 27th that he wishes he could come to her at Walthamstow for a month or so, packing off Mrs Abbey to town, and get her to teach him 'a few common dancing steps,'--for what reason, to us too pathetically evident, he of course gives no hint.
On February 14th, about a fortnight after his return from Hampshire, and on the very day when according to Woodhouse he began The Eve of St Mark, Keats had put pen to a new journal-letter for America. A straw showing how the wind was blowing with him is his mention that the Reynolds sisters, whose company used to be among his chief pleasures, are staying at the Dilkes next door and that he finds them 'very dull.' So, we may guess, will they on their parts have found him. His only other correspondents in these weeks are Haydon and his young sister Fanny. Early in March Haydon returned to the charge about the loan. 'My dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised assistance.... Before the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst.' Keats had intended for Haydon's relief some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share in their grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over to him at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were raised, and for some time after the new year he had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. When by-and-by Haydon writes, in the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with his promise and his failure to keep it, Keats replies without loss of temper, explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting possession of his money. Moreover he finds that much less remains of his small inheritance than he had supposed, and even if all he had were laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live on for two years. Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent sums to various friends amounting in all to near L200, of which he expects the repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds which he could very ill spare.
To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are charming. He lets her perceive nothing of his anxieties, and is full of brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of interest in her preparation for her approaching confirmation; of regrets that she is kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey, with humorous admonitions to patience under that lady's 'unfeeling and ignorant gabble'; and of plans for coming over to see her when the weather and his throat allow or when he is in cash to pay the coach fare. On one day he is serious, begging her to lean on him in all things:--'We have been very little together: but you have not the less been with me in thought. You have no one else in the world besides me who would sacrifice anything for you--I feel myself the only Protector you have. In all your little troubles think of me with the thought that there is at least one person in England who if he could would help you out of them--I live in hopes of being able to make you happy.' Another day he is all playfulness, thinking of various little presents to please her, a selection of Tassie's gems, flowers from the Tottenham nursery garden, drawing materials--and here follows the passage above quoted (p. 10) against keeping live birds or fishes:--
They are better in the trees and the water,--though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome globe of gold-fish--then I would have it hold ten pails of water and be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their beautiful silver and crimson. Then I would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round with Myrtles and Japonicas. I should like the window to open on to the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading.
For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a constant anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the distant Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices been bound. Pending such news, he keeps writing up his journal for them, and for nearly four months it grew and grew. Still in February, he promises to send in the next packet his 'Pot of Basil, St Agnes' Eve, and if I should have finished it, a little thing called the Eve of St Mark. You see what fine Mother Radcliffe names I have--it is not my fault--I do not search for them. I have not gone on with Hyperion, for to tell the truth I have not been in great cue for writing lately--I must wait for the spring to rouse me up a little!'
As it fell out, he never went on either with Hyperion or with the Eve of St Mark, the romance just so promisingly begun. For fully two months after breaking off the latter fragment (February 17th or 18th) he was quite out of cue for writing, and produced nothing except the ode To Fanny (if I am right as to its date) and a few personal sonnets. Many causes, we can feel, were working together to check for the time being the creative impulse within him: the mere disturbing influence of the spring season for one thing; discouragement at the public reception of his work for another, though this was a motive external and relatively secondary; the results of a deliberate mental stock-taking of his own powers and performances for a third; and more deep-seated and compulsive, though unexpressed, than any of these, the love-passion by which three-fourths of his soul and consciousness had come to be absorbed. Here, from a letter to Haydon of March 8, is an example of what I mean by his mental stock-taking. The resolution it expresses is of course more a matter of mood than of fixed purpose:--
I have come to this resolution--never to write for the sake of writing or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge or experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me; otherwise I will be dumb. What imagination I have I shall enjoy, and greatly, for I have experienced the satisfaction of having great conceptions without the trouble of sonnetteering. I will not spoil my love of gloom by writing an Ode to Darkness.
With respect to my livelihood, I will not write for it,--for I will not run with that most vulgar of all crowds, the literary. Such things I ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental weights, as it were. I am three and twenty, with little knowledge and middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing.
Some five weeks later, about mid-April, we find that Haydon himself has been a contributing cause to Keats's poetic inactivity by his behaviour in regard to the loan which Keats had hoped but so far been unable to make him. The failure he writes, has not been his fault:--
I am doubly hurt at the slightly reproachful tone of your note and at the occasion of it,--for it must be some other disappointment; you seem'd so sure of some important help when last I saw you--now you have maimed me again; I was whole, I had begun reading again--when your note came I was engaged in a Book. I dread as much as a Plague the idle fever of two months more without any fruit. I will walk over the first fine day: then see what aspect your affairs have taken, and if they should continue gloomy walk into the City to Abbey and get his consent for I am persuaded that to me alone he will not concede a jot.
In the journal-letter of these weeks to his brother and sister-in-law, mentioning how he had been asked to join Woodhouse over a bottle of claret at his coffee-house, he breaks into a rhapsody over the virtues and wholesomeness of that beverage and adds 'this same claret is the only palate-passion I have--I forgot game--I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the back-bone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant, and a Woodcock passim.' Turning to his own affairs, he says,--
I am in no despair about them--my poem has not at all succeeded; in the course of a year or so I think I shall try the public again--in a selfish point of view I should suffer my pride and my contempt of public opinion to hold me silent--but for yours and Fanny's sake I will pluck up a spirit and try again. I have no doubt of success in a course of years if I persevere--but it must be patience--for the Reviews have enervated and made indolent men's minds--few think for themselves. These Reviews are getting more and more powerful, especially the Quarterly--they are like a superstition which the more it prostrates the Crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness. I was in hopes that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and iniquity of these Plagues they would scout them, but no, they are like the spectators at the Westminster cock-pit--they like the battle--and do not care who wins or who loses.
Among other matters he has a long story to tell about his friend Bailey's fickleness in love. It appears that Bailey, after a first unfortunate love-affair, had during the past year been paying his addresses to Mariane Reynolds, begging that she would take time to consider her answer, and that while her decision was still uncertain Bailey, to the great indignation of all the Reynolds family and a little to Keats's own, had engaged himself in Scotland to the sister of his friend Gleig, afterwards well known as author of The Subaltern and Chaplain General to the Forces. Next Keats begins quoting with a natural zest of admiration, almost in full, that incomparable piece of studied and sustained invective, Hazlitt's Letter to William Gifford Esqr., beside which Gifford's own controversial virulences seem relatively blunt and boorish. Half way through Keats has to say he will copy the rest tomorrow,--
for the candles are burnt down and I am using the wax taper--which has a long snuff on it--the fire is at its last click--I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet--I am writing this on the Maid's tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure. Beside this volume of Beaumont and Fletcher--there are on the table two volumes of Chaucer and a new work of Tom Moore's called Tom Cribb's Memorial to Congress,--nothing in it. These are trifles but I require nothing so much of you but that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me. Could I see that same thing done of any great Man long since dead it would be a great delight: As to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began 'To be or not to be'--such things become interesting from distance of time or place. I hope you are both now in that sweet sleep which no two beings deserve more than you do--I must fancy you so--and please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing over you and your lives--God bless you--I whisper good night in your ears and you will dream of me.
This is on the 13th of March. Six days later he gives another picture, this time of his state of body rather than of mind:--
This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely careless--I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's Castle of Indolence--my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor, but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase--a Man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body over-powering the Mind.
The criticism is foolish which sees in this passage the expression of a languid, self-indulgent nature, and especially foolish considering the footnote in which Keats observes that at the moment he has a black eye. The black eye was no doubt the mark of the fight in which he had lately well thrashed a young blackguard of a butcher whom he found tormenting a kitten. That the said fight took place just about this time is clear by the following evidences. Cowden Clarke, in his recollections communicated privately to Lord Houghton, writes, 'The last time I saw Keats was during his residence with Mr Brown. I spent the day with him; and he read to me the poem he had last finished--The Eve of St Agnes. Shortly after this I removed many miles from London, and was spared the sorrow of beholding the progress of the disease that was to take him from us. When I last saw him he was in fine health and spirits; and he told me that he had, not long before our meeting, had an encounter with a fellow who was tormenting a kitten, or puppy, and who was big enough to have eaten him; that they fought for nearly an hour; and that his opponent was led home.'[7] The reading of the Eve of St Agnes fixes the date of Clarke's visit as after Keats's return from Chichester at the end of January, and a remark of Keats, writing to his brother between February the 14th and 19th, that he has not seen Clarke 'for God knows how long', further fixes it as after mid-February; while the latest limit is set by the fact that by Easter Clarke had gone away to live with his family at Ramsgate, where they had settled after his father had given up the Enfield school. What the 'effeminacy' passage really expresses is of course no more than a passing mood of lassitude, gratefully welcomed as a relief from the strain of feelings habitually more acute than nature could well bear. Ambition he was schooling, or trying to school, himself to cherish in moderation, but it was not often or for long that the stings either of poetry or of love abated for him the least jot of their bitter-sweet intensity, or that anticipations of poverty or the fever of incipient disease relaxed their grip.
Though Keats's letters to his brother and sister-in-law contain no confidence on the subject, some of the verses he encloses betray in abstract form the strain of passion under which he was living; notably the fine weird sonnet on a dream which came to him after reading the Paolo and Francesca passage in Dante, and the other sonnet beginning 'Why did I laugh to-night?' In copying this last, he adds careful and considerate words of re-assurance lest his brother should take alarm for his sake:
I am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet--but Look over the two last pages and ask yourselves whether I have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with no Agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but Knowledge when pushed to the point though the first steps to it were through my human passions--and perhaps I must confess a little bit of my heart--
Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell: No God, no Demon of severe response Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.-- Then to my human heart I turn at once-- Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone; Say wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain! O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain! Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease; My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: Yet could I on this very midnight cease And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds. Verse, fame and Beauty are intense indeed But Death intenser--Death is Life's High meed.
I went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep. Sane I went to bed and sane I arose.
This is yet another of those invocations to friendly Death to which he himself refers in the Ode to the Nightingale written a few weeks later, and in its phrase 'on this very midnight cease' anticipates one of the great lines of the ode itself.
No letter of Keats--or of any one--is richer than this of February to May 1819 in variety of mood and theme and interest. It contains two of the freshest and most luminous of his discursive passages of meditation on life and on the nature of the soul and the meaning of things: passages showing a native power of thought untrained indeed, but also unhampered, by academic knowledge and study, and hardly to be surpassed for their union of steady human common-sense with airy ease and play of imaginative speculation. In one, starting from reflections on the unforeseen way in which circumstances, like clouds, gather and burst, reflections suggested by the expected death of the father of his friend Haslam, he calls up a series of pictures of the instinctiveness with which men, like animals,--the hawk, the robin, the stoat, the deer,--go about their purposes; considers the rarity of the exceptional human beings whose disinterestedness helps on the progress of the world; and then turns his thoughts on himself with the comment,--
Even here, though I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of, I am, however young, writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin? May there not be superior beings, amused with any graceful, though instinctive, attitude my mind may fall into as I am entertained with the alertness of the Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer?
In the other passage he disposes of all Rousseau-Godwin theories of human perfectibility by a consideration of the physical frame and order of the world we live in, the flaws and violences which mar and jar it, and which its human offspring are likely to derive from and share with it until the end; and, provisionally accepting the doctrine of immortality, he broaches of his own a scheme of the spiritual discipline for the sake of which, as he suggests, the life of men on this so imperfect earth may have been designed.
In marked, not always entirely pleasant contrast with these passages of thought and beauty Keats sends his brother such things as a summary of a satiric fairy story of Brown's and an impromptu comic tale of his own in verse, much in Brown's manner, about a princess, a mule, and a dwarf: both of them apparently to his mind amusing, but to us rather silly and the former a little coarse: also some friendly satiric verses of his own on Brown in the Spenserian stanza. He tells how he has been turning over the love-letters palmed off by way of hoax upon his brother Tom by Charles Wells in the character of a pretended 'Amena', and vows fiercely to make Wells suffer for his heartlessness; gossips further of Dilke and his overstrained parental anxiety about his boy at school; asks a string of playful questions about his sister-in-law and her daily doings; and in another place gives us, in the mention of a casual walk and talk with Coleridge, the liveliest record we have of the astonishing variety of matters and mysteries over which that philosopher was capable, in a short hour's conversation, of ranging without pause or taking breath:--
Last Sunday I took a walk towards Highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield's park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator at Guy's[8] in conversation with Coleridge--I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable--I walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In those two Miles he broached a thousand things--let me see if I can give you a list--Nightingales, Poetry--on Poetical Sensation--Metaphysics--Different genera and species of Dreams--Nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single and double touch--a dream related--First and second consciousness--the difference explained between will and Volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness--Monsters--the Kraken--Mermaids--Southey believes in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a Ghost story--Good morning--I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he moved away--I had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so. He was civil enough to ask me to call on him at Highgate.
It is amusing to note how the time and distance covered by his own encyclopaedic volubility shrank afterwards in Coleridge's memory. In his Table Talk taken down thirteen years later his account of the meeting is recorded as follows (with the name of his companion left blank: I fill it in from Keats's letter): 'A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "There is death in that hand," I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.' The story of Coleridge's observation after the handshake is no doubt exact: the 'not well-dressed' in his description of Keats may very well be so too: but the 'loose' and 'slack' applied to his appearance must have been drawn from the sage's inward eye, as all accounts are agreed as to Keats's well-knit compactness of person. One cannot but regret that Keats failed to follow up the introduction by going, as invited, to see Coleridge at Highgate: but in all cases save those of Hunt and Haydon, his contact with distinguished seniors seems thus to have stopped short at kindly and respectful acquaintance and not to have been pushed to intimacy.
Another, somewhat divergent, account of the meeting taken down, also from Coleridge's lips, by Mr John Frere three years earlier has only lately been published. Its inaccuracy in details is evident, but there is much sense as well as kindness in Coleridge's remarks on the reviews and their effect:--
C. Poor Keats, I saw him once. Mr Green, whom you have heard me mention, and I were walking out in these parts, and we were overtaken by a young man of a very striking countenance whom Mr Green recognised and shook hands with, mentioning my name; I wish Mr Green had introduced me, for I did not know who it was. He passed on, but in a few moments sprung back and said, 'Mr Coleridge, allow me the honour of shaking your hand.' I was struck by the energy of his manner, and gave him my hand. He passed on and we stood still looking after him, when Mr Green said, 'Do you know who that is? That is Keats, the poet.' 'Heavens!' said I, 'when I shook him by the hand there was death!' This was about two years before he died.
F. But what was it?
C. I cannot describe it. There was a heat and a dampness in the hand. To say that his death was caused by the Review is absurd, but at the same time it is impossible adequately to conceive the effect which it must have had on his mind. It is very well for those who have a place in the world and are independent to talk of these things, they can bear such a blow, so can those who have a strong religious principle; but all men are not born Philosophers, and all men have not those advantages of birth and education. Poor Keats had not, and it is impossible I say to conceive the effect which such a Review must have had upon him, knowing as he did that he had his way to make in the world by his own exertions, and conscious of the genius within him.[9]
In the Leigh Hunt circle it had always been the fashion to regard with contempt, mingled with regret, Wordsworth's more childishly worded poems and ballads of humble life such as The Idiot Boy and Alice Fell. The announcement of his forthcoming piece, Peter Bell, now drew from John Hamilton Reynolds an anonymous skit in the shape of an adroit and rather stinging anticipatory parody, which Taylor and Hessey published in the course of this April despite a strong letter of protest addressed to them by Coleridge when he heard of their intention: a protest greatly to his credit considering his and Wordsworth's recent estrangement. Keats copies for his brother the draft of a notice which at Reynolds's request he has been writing of this skit for the Examiner, taking care to turn it compatibly with due reverence for the sublimer works of the master parodied. The thing is quite deftly and tactfully done, and seems to show that Keats might have made himself, could he have bent his mind to it, a skilled hand at newspaper criticism. 'You will call it a little politic,' he says to his brother--'seeing I keep clear of all parties--I say something for and against both parties--and suit it to the tone of the Examiner--I mean to say I do not unsuit it--and I believe I think what I say--I am sure I do--I and my conscience are in luck to-day--which is an excellent thing.'
At intervals throughout these two months Keats asserts and re-asserts the strength of the hold which idleness has laid upon him so far as poetry is concerned. Thus on March 13 to his brother and sister-in-law:--'I know not why poetry and I have been so distant lately; I must make some advances or she will cut me entirely': and again to the same on April 15, 'I am still at a standstill in versifying, I cannot do it yet with any pleasure.' To his young sister Fanny he had written two days earlier that his idleness had been growing upon him of late, 'so that it will require a great shake to get rid of it. I have written nothing and almost read nothing--but I must turn over a new leaf.' Within the next two weeks the dormant impulse began to re-awake in him with power. As we have seen, he had never quite stopped writing personal sonnets. Towards the end of the month we find him trying, not very successfully, to invent a new sonnet form, but soon reverting to his accustomed Shakespearean type of three quatrains closed by a couplet. Here is the better of two sonnets which he wrote on April 30 to express the present abatement of his former hot desire for fame:--
Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish knees, But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy, And dotes the more upon a heart at ease; She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those Who have not learnt to be content without her; A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close, Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her; A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born, Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar; Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn, Ye Artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are! Make your best bow to her and bid adieu, Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.
The thought here is curiously anticipated in a passage of Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, itself reminiscent of a well known line in Theocritus. Is the coincidence a coincidence merely, or had the lines from Browne been working unconsciously in Keats's mind?
True Fame is ever liken'd to our shade, He sooneth misseth her, that most hath made To overtake her; who so takes his wing, Regardless of her, she'll be following: Her true proprieties she thus discovers, 'Loves her contemners and contemns her Lovers.'[10]
Two days earlier Keats had copied out in his letter for America, side by side with the words for a commonplace operatic chorus of the Fairies of the Four Elements, and as though it were of no greater value, that masterpiece of romantic and tragic symbolism on the wasting power of Love, La Belle Dame sans Merci. This title had already been haunting Keats's imagination when he wrote the Eve of St Agnes. He calls by it the air to which Porphyro touches his lute beside the sleeping Madeline. It is the title of a cold allegoric dialogue of the old French court poet Alan Chartier, which Keats knew in the translation traditionally ascribed to Chaucer. But except the title, Keats's new poem has nothing in common with the French or the Chaucerian Belle Dame. The form, the poetic mould, he chooses is that of a ballad of the 'Thomas the Rhymer' class, in which a mortal passes for a time into the abode and under the power of a being from the elfin world. Into this mould Keats casts--with suchlike imagery he invests--all the famine and fever of his private passion, fusing and alchemising by his art a remembered echo from William Browne, 'Let no bird sing,' and another from Wordsworth, 'Her eyes are wild,' into twelve stanzas of a new ballad music vitally his own and as weirdly ominous and haunting as the music of words can be. The metrical secret lies in shortening the last line of each stanza from four feet[11] to two, the two to take in reading the full time of four, whereby the movement is made one of awed and bodeful slowness--but let us shrink from the risk of laying an analytic finger upon the methods of a magic that calls to be felt, not dissected. Known as it is by heart to all lovers of poetry, I will print the piece again here, partly for the reason that in some of the most accessible and authoritative recent editions it is unfortunately given with changes which rob it of half its magic:--
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms Alone and palely loitering? The sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing!
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms So haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel's granary is full, And the harvest's done.
I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever dew; And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast withereth too--
I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery's child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild--
I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan--
I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery's song--
She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew; And sure in language strange she said, I love thee true--
She took me to her elfin grot, And there she gazed and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild, wild eyes With kisses four.
And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dreamed, ah woe betide, The latest dream I ever dreamed On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall.'
I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke, and found me here On the cold hill side.
And this is why I sojourn here Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing.
Keats of course gives his brother no hint of what to us seems so manifest, the application of these verses to his own predicament, and only adds a light and laughing comment on one of the rime-words. Closing his packet a few days later (May 3) he adds, as the last poem he has written, the Ode to Psyche. He wrote, as is well known, four other odes this spring, those On Indolence, On a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale and To Melancholy. The Ode to Psyche has commonly been taken to be the latest of the five. I take it, on the contrary, to have been the first. Had he been ready with any of the others when he finished his letter, I think he would almost certainly have copied and sent on one or more of them also. Coupled with his re-iterated assertion of complete poetic idleness,--'the idle fever of two months without any fruit,'--lasting from mid-February until well past mid-April, the absence of all the four other odes from this packet must count as evidence that the Ode to Psyche represents the first wave of a new tide of inspiration--inspiration this time not narrative and creative but lyric and meditative--and that the rest of the odes followed and were composed in the course of May. Personally I am convinced that this was the case. I make no exception in regard to the ode On Indolence, although, seeing that it embodies just such a relaxed mood of mind and body as we have found recorded by Keats in his letter to his brother under date March 19, and embodies it with the self-same imagery, it is usually assumed to have been written at or very nearly about the same date. But Keats in the ode itself expressly tells us otherwise, calling his mood at the hour of writing one of 'summer indolence' and defining the season as May-time, when the outdoor vines are newly bursting into leaf. Of course, it may be answered, a poet writing in March may perfectly well choose to advance the season to May by a poetic fiction. But would Keats in this case have felt any need or impulse to do so? I doubt it. Moreover a reference to the poem by Keats in a letter of early June shows that phrases of it were still hanging freshly in his memory and seems to imply that it was a thing then lately written. What happened, I take it, was either that Keats let the March vision, with its imagery of symbolic figures following one another as on a Greek sculptured urn, ripen in his mind until he was ready to compose upon it, and then attributed the vision itself to the season when he was actually putting it into verse; or else that, having fallen some time in May into a second mood of drowsiness and relaxation nearly repeating that of March, the same imagery for its expression arose naturally again in his mind.
The ode On a Grecian Urn is obviously of kindred, and probably of contemporary, inspiration with that On Indolence, and if the one belongs to May so doubtless does the other. That this is true of the Nightingale ode we know. Some time early in May, nightingales heard both in the Wentworth Place garden and in the grove beside the Spaniards inn at the upper end of the heath set Keats brooding on the contrast between the age-long permanence of that bird-song, older than history, and the fleeting lives of the generations of men that have listened to it; and one morning he took his chair out under a plum-tree in the garden and wrote down the immortal verses, in and out and back and forth on a couple of loose sheets which Brown, two hours after seeing him go out, found him folding away carelessly behind some books in his room. This discovery, says Brown, made him search for more such neglected scraps; and Keats acquiesced in the search, and moreover gave Brown leave to make copies of anything he might find.[12] Haydon tells how Keats recited the new ode to him, 'in his low, tremulous under-tone,' as they walked together in the Hampstead meadows; and it was no doubt on Haydon's suggestion that Keats let James Elmes, a subservient ally of Haydon's in all his battles with the academic powers, have it for publication in his periodical, the Annals of the Fine Arts, during the following July. For the date of the Ode on Melancholy the clues are less definite. Burton's Anatomy has clearly to do with inspiring it, but of this, and especially of the sections on the cure of Love-Melancholy, Keats's letters and some of his verses furnish evidence that he had been much of a reader all the spring. Particular phrases, however, in letters of May and early June expressing a very similar strain of feeling to that of the ode, besides its general resemblance to the rest of the group both as to form and mood, may be taken as approximately dating it.
Following these so fruitful labours (if I am right as to the dates) of May, came a month of strained indecision and anxiety during which Keats again could do no work. Questions of his own fortune and future were weighing heavily on his mind. For the time being he could not touch such small remainder of his grandmother's legacy as was still unexpended. A lawsuit threatened by the widow of his uncle Captain Jennings against his guardian Mr Abbey, in connexion with the administration of the trust, had had the effect for the time being of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very gently asked Haydon to make an effort to repay his recent loan; who not only made none--'he did not,' says Keats, 'seem to care much about it, but let me go without my money almost with nonchalance.' This was too much even for Keats's patience, and he declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend again. Nevertheless he by and by let old affection resume its sway, and entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as kindly as ever. Apart from Mrs Jennings's bequest, there was a not inconsiderable sum which, as we know, had been left invested by Mr Jennings for the direct benefit of his Keats grandchildren; but this sum could not be divided until Fanny Keats came of age, and there seems to have been no thought of John's anticipating his reversionary share. Indeed it is doubtful if the very existence of these and other funds lying by for them had not at this time been forgotten.[13]
In this predicament Keats began very seriously to entertain the idea, which we have seen broached by him several times already, of seeking the post of surgeon on an East Indiaman as at least a temporary means of livelihood. He mentions the idea not only to George and to his young sister, but he debates it with a new correspondent, one of the Miss Jeffrey's of Teignmouth, whom he suddenly now addresses in terms of confidence which show how warm must have been their temporary friendship the year before:--
Your advice about the Indiaman is a very wise advice, because it just suits me, though you are a little in the wrong concerning its destroying the energies of Mind: on the contrary it would be the finest thing in the world to strengthen them--to be thrown among people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies forces the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its speculations of the differences of human character and to class them with the calmness of a Botanist. An Indiaman is a little world. One of the great reasons that the English have produced the finest writers in the world is, that the English world has ill-treated them during their lives and foster'd them after their deaths. They have in general been trampled aside into the bye paths of life and seen the festerings of Society. They have not been treated like the Raphaels of Italy. And where is the Englishman and Poet who has given a magnificent Entertainment at the christening of one of his Hero's Horses as Boyardo did? He had a Castle in the Appenine. He was a noble Poet of Romance; not a miserable and mighty Poet of the human heart. The middle age of Shakespeare was all clouded over; his days were not more happy than Hamlet's who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in his common every day Life than any other of his Characters--Ben Johnson was a common Soldier and in the Low Countries in the face of two armies, fought a single combat with a French Trooper and slew him--For all this I will not go on board an Indiaman, nor for example's sake run my head into dark alleys: I daresay my discipline is to come, and plenty of it too. I have been very idle lately, very averse to writing; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying Pet-lamb. I have put no more in Print or you should have had it. You will judge of my 1819 temper when I tell you that the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence.
The reader will have noticed in the phrase about 'versifying Pet-lamb' a repetition from this very ode On Indolence. Here is another confidence imparted to the same correspondent concerning his present mood and disposition:--
I have been always till now almost as careless of the world as a fly--my troubles were all of the Imagination--My brother George always stood between me and any dealings with the world. Now I find I must buffet it--I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to fight--I must choose between despair and Energy--I choose the latter though the world has taken on a quakerish look with me, which I once thought was impossible--
'Nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass and glory in the flower.'
I once thought this a Melancholist's dream.
His immediate object in writing had been to ask, in case he should decide against the Indiaman project and in favour of another attempt at the literary life, for the address of a cheap lodging somewhere in the Teign valley, the beauties of which, seen in glimpses through the rain, he had sung in some doggrel stanzas the year before. Brown, more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and promise of his friend's genius, was dead against the Indiaman scheme and in the end persuaded Keats to accept an advance of money for his present needs and to devote the summer to work in the country. Part of such work was to be upon a tragedy to be written by the two in collaboration and on a basis of half profits. Brown had not less belief in Keats's future than affection for his person, and it was the two combined that made him ready and eager, as he frankly told Keats, to sail in the same boat with him. In the end the Devonshire idea gave place to a new plan, that of joining the invalid James Rice for a stay at Shanklin. 'I have given up the idea of the Indiaman', Keats writes to his young sister on June 9; 'I cannot resolve to give up my favourite studies: so I propose to retire once more. A friend of Mine who has an ill state of health called on me yesterday and proposed to spend a little time with him at the back of the Isle of Wight where he said we might live cheaply. I agreed to his proposal.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Later occupants re-named the place Lawn Bank and threw the two semi-detached houses into one, making alterations and additions the exact nature of which were pointed out to me in 1885 by Mr William Dilke, the then surviving brother of Keats's friend. This gentleman also showed me a house across the road which he himself had built in early life, occupied for a while, and then let on a sixty years' lease: 'which lease,' he added, as though to outlive a sixty years' agreement contracted at thirty were the most ordinary occurrence in the world, 'fell in a year or two ago.' He died shortly afterwards, aged 93. He and Mrs Procter, the widow of Barry Cornwall the poet--staunchest, wittiest, and youngest-hearted defier of Time that she was--were the only two persons I have known and spoken to who had known and spoken to Keats.
[2] The only set of engravings existing in Keats's time after pictures at Milan was the Raccolta, etc., of G. Zanconi (1813), which gives only panels and canvases by masters of the full Renaissance in private collections.
[3] The fullest and, it must be said, least favourable account we have of her is in the retrospect of a cousin who had frequented her mother's house as a young boy about 1819-20, and seventy years later gave his impressions as follows (New York Herald, April 12, 1889). 'Miss Fanny Brawne was very fond of admiration. I do not think she cared for Keats, although she was engaged to him. She was very much affected when he died, because she had treated him so badly. She was very fond of dancing, and of going to the opera and to balls and parties. Miss Brawne's mother had an extensive acquaintance with gentlemen, and the society in which they mingled was musical and literary. Through the Dilkes, Miss Brawne was invited out a great deal, and as Keats was not in robust health enough to take her out himself (for he never went with her), she used to go with military men to the Woolwich balls and to balls in Hampstead; and she used to dance with these military officers a great deal more than Keats liked. She did not seem to care much for him. Mr Dilke, the grandfather of the present Sir Charles Dilke, admired her very much in society, and although she was not a great beauty she was very lively and agreeable. I remember that among those frequenting Mrs Brawne's house in Hampstead were a number of foreign gentlemen. Keats could not talk French as they could, and their conversation with his fiancee in a language he could not understand was a source of continual disagreement between them. Keats thought that she talked and flirted and danced too much with them, but his remonstrances were all unheeded by Miss Brawne.' Against these impressions should be set Brown's testimony, contained in letters of the time to Severn and others, to her signs of acute distress on the news coming from Italy of the hopelessness of her lover's condition and finally of his death: and stronger still, her own words written in later years to Medwin, which seem to show a true, and even tender, understanding of his character if not of his genius (see below p. 465).
[4] [Greek: eros d' aute m' ho lysimeles donei glykypikron amachanon orpeton.]--Sappho, Fr. 40.
[5] There is no autograph of this ode, only transcripts by friends, and Mr Buxton Forman was most likely right in suggesting that the true reading for 'not' should be 'out.'
[6] Keats was staying that night and two more at Mr Taylor's in London: but there is nothing against my theory in this: he might have composed the sonnet as well in Fleet Street as at Hampstead.
[7] In his printed account of the matter Clarke calls the victim definitely a kitten, and says of Keats: 'He thought he should be beaten, for the fellow was the taller and stronger; but like an authentic pugilist, my young poet found that he had planted a blow which "told" upon his antagonist; in every succeeding round therefore (for they fought nearly an hour), he never failed of returning to the weak point, and the contest ended in the hulk being led home.'
[8] Joseph Henry Green, afterwards F.R.S. and Professor of Anatomy to the Royal Academy; distinguished alike as a teacher in his own profession and as a disciple and interpreter of Coleridge's philosophy.
[9] Cornhill Magazine, April 1917: 'A Talk with Coleridge,' edited by Miss E. M. Green.
[10] [Greek: kai pheugei phileonta kai ou phileonta diokei.] Theocr. Idyll. vi. 27.
[11] I use the foot nomenclature for convenience, because to count by stresses seems to make the point less immediately clear, while to count by syllables would involve pointing out that in the last lines of stanzas ii, iv, ix and xi the movement is varied by resolving the light first syllable into two that take the time of one.
[12] Brown, writing many years after the events, must be a little out here, seeing that already on April 30th Keats tells his brother that Brown is busy 'rummaging out his Keats's old sins, that is to say sonnets.' (Note that Keats mentions no odes). Brown is in like manner wrong in remembering the draft of the Nightingale ode as written on 'four or five scraps' when it was in fact written on two, as became apparent when it appeared in the market thirteen years ago (see Monthly Review, March 1903). It is now in the collection of Lord Crewe.
[13] When in 1823-4 their existence was disclosed and they were divided on the order of the Court of Chancery between George Keats and his sister, they amounted with accumulations of interest to a little over L4500.
Chapter XII
JUNE 1819-JANUARY 1820: SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, HAMPSTEAD: TROUBLE AND HEALTH FAILURE
Work on Otho and Lamia--Letters to Fanny Brawne--Keats as lover--An imagined future--Change to Winchester--Work and fine weather--Ill news from George--A run to town--A talk with Woodhouse--Woodhouse as critic--Alone at Winchester--Spirited letters: to his brother--To Reynolds, Brown, and Dilke--Hopes and resolutions--Will work for the press--Attempt and breakdown--Return to Wentworth Place--Morning and evening tasks--Cries of passion--Signs of despondency--Testimony of Brown--Haydon's exaggerations--Schemes and doings--Visit of George Keats--Pleasantry and bitterness--Beginning of the end.
By the last days of June Keats was settled with Rice in the village of Shanklin, in a lodging above the cliff and a little way back from the sea,[1] and forthwith got to work upon a new poetical romance, Lamia, at which he seems to have made some beginning before he left Hampstead. He found the subject, that of the enchantress of Corinth who under her woman's guise was really a serpent, in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a book in these days often in his hands, and for the form of his narrative chose rimed heroics, only this time leaning on Dryden as his model instead of the Elizabethans.
Rice's health was at this time worse than ever, and Keats himself was far from well; his throat chronically sore, his nerves unstrung, his heart, in despite of distance, knowing little rest from agitation between the pains and joys of love. As long as Rice and he were alone together at Shanklin, the two ailing and anxious men, fast friends as they were, depressed and did each other harm. Things went better when Brown with his settled good health and good spirits came to join them. Soon afterwards Rice left, and Brown and Keats then got to work diligently at the joint task they had set themselves, that of writing a tragedy suitable for the stage. What struggling man or woman of letters has not at one time or another shared the hope which animated them, that this way lay the road to success and competence? Brown, whose opera Narensky had made a hit in its day, and brought him in a sum variously stated at L300 or L500, was supposed to possess the requisite stage experience. To him were assigned the plot and construction of the play, for which he was to receive half profits in the event of success, while Keats undertook to compose the dialogue. The subject was one taken from the history of the Emperor Otho the Great. The two friends sat opposite each other at the same table, and Keats wrote scene after scene as Brown sketched it out to him, in each case without enquiring what was to come next. The collaboration of genius and mediocrity rarely succeeds, and it seems hard to conceive a more unpromising mode of it than this. Besides the work by means of which Keats thus hoped, at least in sanguine hours, to find an escape from material difficulties, he was busily engaged working by himself on Lamia. But a cloud of depression continued to hang over him. The climate of Shanklin was against him: the quarter where they lodged lay screened by hills except from the south-east, whence, as he afterwards wrote, 'came the damps of the sea, which having no egress, the air would for days together take on an unhealthy idiosyncrasy altogether enervating and weakening as a city smoke.' After a stay of some six weeks, Keats consequently made up his mind to move with Brown to the more bracing air of Winchester.
From these weeks at Shanklin date the earliest of the preserved series of Keats's love-letters to Fanny Brawne. More than any man, more certainly than any other unripe youth fretting in the high fever of an unhopeful love, Keats has had to pay the penalty of genius in the loss of posthumous privacy for the most sacred and secret of his emotions. He thought his name would be forgotten, but posterity in an excess of remembrance has suffered no corner of his soul to escape the searchlight. Once preserved and printed, these love-letters of his cannot be ignored. Unselfish through and through, and naturally well-conditioned in all thoughts and feelings over which he had control, he strives hard in them to keep to a vein of considerate tenderness, and the earlier letters of the series contain charming passages. But often, more often indeed than not even from the first, they show him a prey, despite his best efforts to master himself and be reasonable, to an uncontrollable intensity and fretfulness of passion. Now that experience of love had come to him, it belied instead of confirming the view he had expressed in Isabella that too much pity has been spent on the sorrows of lovers, and that
--for the general award of love The little sweet doth kill much bitterness.
In his own passion there was from the first, and increasingly as time went on, at least as much of bitterness as of sweet. An enraptured but an untrustful lover, alternately rejoicing and chafing at his bondage and passing through a hundred conflicting extremes of feeling in an hour, he finds in the fever of work and composition his only antidote against the fever of his love-sickness. This is written soon after his arrival at Shanklin:--
I am glad I had not an opportunity of sending off a Letter which I wrote for you on Tuesday night--'twas too much like one out of Rousseau's Heloise. I am more reasonable this morning. The morning is the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful Girl whom I love so much: for at night, when the lonely day has closed, and the lonely, silent, unmusical Chamber is waiting to receive me as into a Sepulchre, then believe me my passion gets entirely the sway, then I would not have you see those Rhapsodies which I once thought it impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed at in another, for fear you should think me either too unhappy or perhaps a little mad. I am now at a very pleasant Cottage window, looking onto a beautiful hilly country, with a glimpse of the sea; the morning is very fine. I do not know how elastic my spirit might be, what pleasure I might have in living here and breathing and wandering as free as a stag about this beautiful Coast if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me. I have never known any unalloy'd Happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of some one has always spoilt my hours--and now when none such troubles oppress me, it is you must confess very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me. Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom.
A fortnight later he manages to write a little more at ease of himself, his moods, and his doings:--
Do not call it folly, when I tell you I took your letter last night to bed with me. In the morning I found your name on the sealing wax obliterated. I was startled at the bad omen till I recollected that it must have happened in my dreams, and they you know fall out by contraries. You must have found out by this time I am a little given to bode ill like the raven; it is my misfortune not my fault; it has proceeded from the general tenor of the circumstances of my life, and rendered every event suspicious. However I will no more trouble either you or myself with sad Prophecies; though so far I am pleased at it as it has given me opportunity to love your disinterestedness towards me. I cannot say when I shall get a volume ready. I have three or four stories half done, but as I cannot write for the mere sake of the press, I am obliged to let them progress or lie still as my fancy chooses. By Christmas perhaps they may appear, but I am not yet sure they ever will. 'Twill be no matter, for Poems are as common as newspapers and I do not see why it is a greater crime in me than in another to let the verses of an half-fledged brain tumble into the reading-rooms and drawing-room windows.... To-morrow I shall, if my health continues to improve during the night, take a look farther about the country, and spy at the parties about here who come hunting after the picturesque like beagles. It is astonishing how they raven down scenery like children do sweetmeats. The wondrous Chine here is a very great Lion: I wish I had as many guineas as there have been spy-glasses in it.
Yet another fortnight, and we find him uttering aloud the same yearning to attain the double goal of love and death together as he had often uttered to himself in secret since he came under the spell. On another day, letting his imagination comply with the longing for Alpine travel and seclusion which since Rousseau had been one of the romantic fashions of the time, he draws her a picture of an imagined future for herself and him which, judging at least by her choice of pleasures until now, would ill have stood the test of reality:--
You would delight very greatly in the walks about here; the Cliffs, woods, hills, sands, rocks, etc., about here. They are however not so fine but I shall give them a hearty goodbye to exchange them for my Cathedral.--Yet again I am not so tired of Scenery as to hate Switzerland. We might spend a pleasant year at Berne or Zurich--if it should please Venus to hear my 'Beseech thee to hear us O Goddess.' And if she should hear, God forbid we should what people call, settle--turn into a pond, a stagnant Lethe--a vile crescent, row or buildings. Better be imprudent moveables than prudent fixtures. Open my Mouth at the Street door like the Lion's head at Venice to receive hateful cards, letters, messages. Go out and wither at tea parties; freeze at dinners; bake at dances; simmer at routs. No my love, trust yourself to me and I will find you nobler amusements, fortune favouring.
The most sanely self-revealing and pleasant passages in the correspondence occur in a letter written in the second week after Keats and Brown had settled at Winchester:--
I see you through a Mist: as I daresay you do me by this time. Believe me in the first Letters I wrote you: I assure you I felt as I wrote--I could not write so now. The thousand images I have had pass through my brain--my uneasy spirits--my unguess'd fate--all spread as a veil between me and you. Remember I have had no idle leisure to brood over you.--'tis well perhaps I have not. I could not have endured the throng of jealousies that used to haunt me before I had plunged so deeply into imaginary interests. I would fain, as my sails are set, sail on without an interruption for a Brace of Months longer--I am in complete cue--in the fever; and shall in these four Months do an immense deal. This Page as my eye skims over it I see is excessively unloverlike and ungallant--I cannot help it--I am no officer in yawning quarters; no Parson-romeo.... 'Tis harsh, harsh, I know it. My heart seems now made of iron--I could not write a proper answer to an invitation to Idalia.... This Winchester is a fine place: a beautiful Cathedral and many other ancient buildings in the Environs. The little coffin of a room at Shanklin is changed for a large room, where I can promenade at my pleasure.... One of the pleasantest things I have seen lately was at Cowes. The Regent in his Yatch (I think they spell it) was anchored opposite--a beautiful vessel--and all the Yatchs and boats on the coast were passing and repassing it; and circuiting and tacking about it in every direction--I never beheld anything so silent, light, and graceful.--As we pass'd over to Southampton, there was nearly an accident. There came by a Boat, well mann'd, with two naval officers at the stern. Our Bow-lines took the top of their little mast and snapped it off close by the board. Had the mast been a little stouter they would have been upset. In so trifling an event I could not help admiring our seamen--neither officer nor man in the whole Boat mov'd a muscle--they scarcely notic'd it even with words. Forgive me for this flint-worded Letter, and believe and see that I cannot think of you without some sort of energy--though mal a propos. Even as I leave off it seems to me that a few more moments' thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. I must not give way to it--but turn to my writing again--if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy--I must forget them.
The old cathedral city of Winchester, with its peaceful closes breathing antiquity, its hurrying limpid chalk-streams and beautiful elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the tonic climate of its surrounding downs, 'where the air,' he writes, 'is worth sixpence a pint,' exactly suited Keats, and he quickly improved both in health and spirits. The days he spent here, from the middle of August to the second week of October, were the last good days of his life. Working with a steady intensity of application, he managed, as the last extract shows, to steel himself for the time being against the importunity of his passion, although never without a certain feverishness in the effort, and to keep the thought of money troubles at bay by buoying himself up with the firm hope of a stage success. His work continued to be chiefly on Lamia, with the concluding part of Otho, and the beginning of a new tragedy on the story of King Stephen. In the last act of Otho and the opening scenes (which are all he did) of King Stephen he laboured alone, without accepting help from Brown. On the 25th of August he writes to Reynolds, as usual more gravely and openly than to any other correspondent, of his present feelings in regard to life and literature.
The more I know what my diligence may in time probably effect, the more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinacy[2]--I feel it in my power to become a popular writer--I feel it in my power to refuse the poisonous suffrage of a public. My own being which I know to be becomes of more consequence to me than the crowds of Shadows in the shape of men and women that inhabit a kingdom. The soul is a world of itself, and has enough to do in its own home. Those whom I know already, and who have grown as it were a part of myself, I could not do without: but for the rest of mankind, they are as much a dream to me as Milton's Hierarchies. I think if I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox's, so as to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could pass my life very nearly alone though it should last eighty years. But I feel my body too weak to support me to the height, I am obliged continually to check myself, and be nothing.
A letter to his young sister of three days later is in quite another key, but one of wholesome and unforced high spirits:--
The delightful Weather we have had for two Months is the highest gratification I could receive--no chill'd red noses--no shivering--but fair atmosphere to think in--a clean towel mark'd with the mangle and a basin of clear Water to drench one's face with ten times a day: no need of much exercise--a Mile a day being quite sufficient. My greatest regret is that I have not been well enough to bathe though I have been two Months by the sea side and live now close to delicious bathing--Still I enjoy the Weather--I adore fine Weather as the greatest blessing I can have.... I should like now to promenade round your Gardens--apple-tasting--pear-tasting--plum-judging--apricot nibbling--peach-scrunching--nectarine-sucking and Melon-carving. I have also a great feeling for antiquated cherries full of sugar cracks--and a white currant tree kept for company. I admire lolling on a lawn by a water lillied pond to eat white currants and see gold fish: and go to the Fair in the Evening if I'm good. There is not hope for that--one is sure to get into some mess before evening.
A week later (September 5) he discourses pleasantly to Taylor on the virtues and drawbacks of different kinds of country air and on the effects of field labour on the character; and by way of a specimen of his work sends a passage of thirty lines from Lamia. By this time Brown had gone off to visit friends at Bedhampton and elsewhere, and Keats was left alone at Winchester. Presently came a disturbing letter from George, established by this time at the then remote trading settlement of Louisville, Ohio, and in difficulties from a heavy loss incurred through a venture into which he had been led, dishonestly as he believed, by the naturalist Audubon. He asks in consequence that Abbey should be pressed to send him the share due to him from their brother Tom's estate. This could only be done if their aunt Jennings could be persuaded to free Abbey's hands by dropping her threatened Chancery suit. Hurrying to London to try and put this business through, Keats stayed there three days (Septr. 10-13), but dared not break his serenity by sight or touch of his enchantress. In a note to her he writes, 'I love you too much to venture to Hampstead, I feel it is not paying a visit, but venturing into a fire.... I am a Coward, I cannot bear the pain of being happy, 'tis out of the question; I must admit no thought of it.' He found few of his friends in town; dined with the Wylies, the family of his sister-in-law; and had much talk with Mr Abbey, who seemed inclined to dangle before him some prospect of employment in the hatter's business which he combined with his tea-dealing, and read to him with approval a passage from Don Juan ('Lord Byron's last flash poem,' says Keats) against literary ambition. He went to see his sister Fanny at Walthamstow, passed some time with Rice, and had a long six hours' talk with Woodhouse: of this Keats's own letters make no mention, but Woodhouse's account of it, written a week later to Taylor, has been preserved and is curiously interesting.[3]
Keats, warm from the composition of Lamia, had had an impulse to publish it immediately, together with the Eve of St Agnes, but the publishers had thought the time inopportune. Woodhouse asked why not Isabella too? and Keats answered that he could not bear that poem now and thought it mawkish. Whereupon Woodhouse makes the judicious comment: 'this certainly cannot be so, the feeling is very likely to come across an author on review of a former work of his own, particularly when the object of his present meditations is of a more sober and unimpassioned character. The feeling of mawkishness seems to me that which comes upon us when anything of great tenderness and simplicity is met with when we are not in a sufficiently tender and simple frame of mind to hear it: when we experience a sort of revulsion or resiliency (if there be such a word) from the sentiment or expression.' Keats, full of Lamia, read it out to his friend, who comments: 'I am much pleased with it. I can use no other terms for you know how badly he reads his own poetry.' (Other witnesses on the contrary tell of the thrilling effect of Keats's reading--a reading which was half chanting, 'in a low, tremulous undertone'--of his own work.) 'And you know,' continues Woodhouse, 'how slow I am to catch the effect of poetry read by the best reader for the first time.' Nevertheless he is able to give his correspondent a quite accurate sketch of the plot, and adds, 'you may suppose all these events have given K. scope for some beautiful poetry, which even in this cursory hearing of it, came every now and then upon me and made me "start, as tho' a sea-nymph quired."'
The talk turning to the Eve of St Agnes, Keats showed Woodhouse some changes he had just made in recopying it. One of these introduced a slight but disfiguring note of cynical realism or 'pettish disgust' into the concluding lines telling of the deaths of old Angela and the beadsman, and is the first sign we find of that inclination to mix a worldly would-be Don Juanish vein with romance which was soon to appear so disastrously in the Cap and Bells. The other change was to make it clear that the melting of Porphyro into Madeline's dream, at the enchanted climax of the poem, implied love's full fruition between them then and there. At this point Woodhouse's prudery took alarm. He pleaded against the change vehemently, and Keats to tease him still more vehemently defended it, vowing that his own and his hero's character for virility required the new reading, and that he did not write for misses. The correct and excellent Woodhouse, scandalized though he somewhat was by what he calls his friend's 'rhodomontade,' declares that they had a delightful time together. He was leaving London the same afternoon for Weymouth, and Keats came to the coach-office to see him off. At parting they each promised to mend their ways in the matter of letter-writing, Keats holding out the hope, which was not fulfilled, of a rimed epistle to follow. Woodhouse tells how, being the only inside passenger in the coach, he 'amused himself by diving into a deep reverie, and recalling all that had passed during the six hours we were tete a tete.'
Such touches of over-sensitive prudery set aside, the more light we get on this friend of Keats, Richard Woodhouse, the higher grows our esteem both for his character and judgment. In other extant letters to Taylor of this date, he comments with fine insight on Keats's own confessions of secret pride and obstinacy, and on his vice ('for a vice in a poor man it is') of lending more than he could afford to friends in need. And what can be more sagacious than the following, from a letter of Woodhouse to a lady cousin of his own?--
You were so flattered as to say the other day, you wished I had been in a company where you were, to defend Keats.--In all places, and at all times, and before all persons, I would express and as far as I am able, support, my high opinion of his poetical merits--such a genius, I verily believe, has not appeared since Shakspeare and Milton.... But in our common conversation upon his merits, we should always bear in mind that his fame may be more hurt by indiscriminate praise than by wholesale censure. I would at once admit that he has great faults--enough indeed to sink another writer. But they are more than counter-balanced by his beauties: and this is the proper mode of appreciating an original genius. His faults will wear away--his fire will be chastened--and then eyes will do homage to his brilliancy. But genius is wayward, trembling, easily daunted. And shall we not excuse the errors, the luxuriancy of youth? Are we to expect that poets are to be given to the world, as our first parents were, in a state of maturity? Are they to have no season of childhood? are they to have no room to try their wings before the steadiness and strength of their flight are to be finally judged of?... Now, while Keats is unknown, unheeded, despised of one of our arch-critics, neglected by the rest--in the teeth of the world, and in the face of 'these curious days,' I express my conviction, that Keats, during his life (if it please God to spare him to the usual age of man, and the critics not to drive him from the free air of the Poetic heaven before his Wings are fully fledged) will rank on a level with the best of the last or of the present generation: and after his death will take his place at their head. But, while I think thus, I would make persons respect my judgment by the discrimination of my praise, and by the freedom of my censure where his writings are open to it. These are the Elements of true criticism. It is easy, like Momus, to find fault with the clattering of the slipper worn by the Goddess of beauty; but 'the serious Gods' found better employment in admiration of her unapproachable loveliness. A Poet ought to write for Posterity. But a critic ought to do so too.
By September 14 Keats was back at Winchester, where during the next three weeks he had a chance of testing his capacity for solitude. He seems to have looked at Hyperion again, but made up his mind to go no farther with it, having got to feel its style too latinized and Miltonic. A very few weeks before, in August, he had written to two different correspondents that Paradise Lost was becoming every day a greater wonder to him. Now, in the third week of September he had come to regard it, 'though so fine itself,' as a 'corruption of our language,' a case of 'a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations;' and had convinced himself, paradoxically, that the purest English was Chatterton's,--which is in truth no right English at all, but the attempt of a brilliant self-taught boy to forge himself a fifteenth-century style by gathering miscellaneous half-understood archaisms out of dictionaries and stringing them in fluent stanzas of Spenserian, or post-Spenserian, rhythm and syntax. But it was probably not of Chatterton's vocabulary that Keats was thinking, but rather of the unartificial, straightforward flow of his verse in contrast with Milton's. The apparent suddenness of Keats's change of mind on this matter is characteristic, like his quite unjust return upon himself in regard to Isabella, of what Haydon calls his lack of decisions and fixity of aim:--'One day he was full of an epic poem; the next day epic poems were splendid impositions on the world. Never for two days did he know his own intentions.' By these words, to be taken with the usual discount, Haydon means the same thing as Keats means himself when he speaks of his 'unsteady and vagarish disposition'; let us rather say his sensitive and receptive openness of mind to contradictory impressions, even on questions of that art of which he had become so fine a master, and withal his habit of complete surrender to whatever was the dominant impression of the moment.
With reference to his other occupations of the hour,--Lamia he had finished, and for the present he did no more to King Stephen. Realizing the low repute into which critical derision had brought him as a member of the Cockney School, he proposed to withhold his next volume of poems in hope that the production of Otho the Great at Drury Lane in the autumn might, if successful, create a more favourable atmosphere for its reception; and was in consequence seriously dashed when he learnt that Kean was on the point of starting for America. One of his chief present pursuits was studying Italian in the pages of Ariosto. The wholesome brightness of an unusually fine season continuing to sustain and soothe him, he wrote the last, most unclouded and serenely accomplished of his meditative odes, that To Autumn. A sudden return of the epistolary mood came upon him, and between September 17th and 27th he poured himself out to his brother and sister-in-law in a new long journal-letter, full of confidences on every subject that dwelt in or flitted through his mind except the one master-subject of the passion he was striving to keep subdued by absence. 'I am inclined,' he says, 'to write a good deal; for there can be nothing so remembrancing and enchaining as a good long letter, be it composed of what it may.'
Accordingly he ranges as usual over all manner of miscellaneous themes, discussing his own and his brother's situation and future; telling of Haydon and his inconsiderate behaviour about the loan, and of Dilke's political dogmatism and over-anxiety about his boy; giving accounts of the several members of the Hampstead circle, mixed up with playful messages to his sister-in-law, whom he represents as caring nothing for these tiresome people and interrupting her husband's reading of the letter to insist on prattling about her baby. He adds anecdotes of his visit to her family in London, and a propos of babies tells of a thing he had heard Charles Lamb say. 'A child in arms was passing by his chair toward its mother, in the nurse's arms. Lamb took hold of the long clothes, saying: "Where, God bless me, where does it leave off?"' With an unexpressed shaft of inward mockery at his own plight, he describes the ridiculous figure cut by a man in love, the victim in this case being his friend Haslam; relates jokes practical and other which had lately passed between Brown, Dilke, and himself, and after a very sensible excursion into history and current politics, to which he was never at all so indifferent as is commonly said, he dwells with a kindly, humorous enjoyment on the sedate maiden-ladylike ways and aspects of the cathedral town where he found the autumn quietude so comforting. This sets him thinking of his fragment of a poem written seven months earlier and breathing a similar spirit, the Eve of St Mark; so he transcribes it for their benefit, and also, in odd contrast, a long passage from Burton's Anatomy which had tickled some queer corner of his brain by its cumulative effect of exuberant and grotesque disgustfulness, and which he declares he would love to hear delivered by an actor across the footlights.
During the same days at Winchester Keats also wrote intimately and purposefully to Reynolds, Brown, and Dilke. In all these letters we see the well conditioned, wise and admirable Keats, the sane and healthy partner in his so dual and divided nature, for the time being holding firmly, or at any rate hopeful and confident of being able to hold firmly, the upper hand. He resolves manfully to rally his moral powers, to banish over-passionate and fretful feelings and to put himself on a right footing with the world. Imaginary troubles, he declares, are what prey upon a man: real troubles spur him to exertion, and exert himself and fight against morbid imaginings he will. In reference to George's money troubles, 'Rest in the confidence,' he says, 'that I will not omit any exertion to benefit you by some means or other: if I cannot remit you hundreds, I will tens, and if not that, ones:' a promise which we shall find George taking only too literally later on. Of his brothers and his own immediate prospect he writes with seriousness, nevertheless more encouragingly than the occasion well warranted. He will not let himself seem too much depressed even by the heavy check which his and Brown's hopes about Otho the Great had just received from the news of Kean's intended departure for America.
We are certainly in a very low estate--I say we, for I am in such a situation, that were it not for the assistance of Brown and Taylor, I must be as badly off as a man can be. I could not raise any sum by the promise of any poem, no, not by the mortgage of my intellect. We must wait a little while. I really have hopes of success. I have finished a tragedy, which if it succeeds will enable me to sell what I may have in manuscript to a good advantage. I have passed my time in reading, writing, and fretting, the last I intend to give up, and stick to the other two. They are the only chances of benefit to us. Your wants will be a fresh spur to me. I assure you you shall more than share what I can get whilst I am still young. The time may come when age will make me more selfish. I have not been well treated by the world, and yet I have, capitally well. I do not know a person to whom so many purse-strings would fly open as to me, if I could possibly take advantage of them, which I cannot do, for none of the owners of these purses are rich.... Mine, I am sure, is a tolerable tragedy; it would have been a bank to me, if just as I had finished it, I had not heard of Kean's resolution to go to America. That was the worst news I could have had.... But be not cast down any more than I am; I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings 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.
And again, in still better heart:--
With my inconstant disposition it is no wonder that this morning, amid all our bad times and misfortunes, I should feel so alert and well-spirited. At this moment you are perhaps in a very different state of mind. It is because my hopes are ever paramount to my despair. I have been reading over a part of a short poem I have composed lately, called Lamia, and I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way. Give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation--what they want is a sensation of some sort. I wish I could pitch the key of your spirits as high as mine is; but your organ-loft is beyond the reach of my voice.
To Dilke and Brown he writes at the same time of his own immediate plans, telling them that he is determined to give up trusting to mere hopes of ultimate success, whether from plays or poems, and to turn to the natural resource of a man fit for nothing but literature and needing to support himself by his pen; the resource, that is, of journalism and reviewing. These are some of his words to Dilke:--
Wait for the issue of this Tragedy? No--there cannot be greater uncertainties east, west, north, and south than concerning dramatic composition. How many months must I wait! Had I not better begin to look about me now? If better events supersede this necessity what harm will be done? I have no trust whatever on Poetry. I don't wonder at it--the marvel is to me how people read so much of it. I think you will see the reasonableness of my plan. To forward it I purpose living in a cheap Lodging in Town, that I may be in the reach of books and information of which there is here a plentiful lack. If I can find any place tolerably comfortable I will settle myself and fag till I can afford to buy Pleasure--which if I never can afford I must go without.
He had been living since May on an advance from Taylor and a loan from Brown to be repaid out of the eventual profits of their play, and was uneasy at putting Brown to a present sacrifice. He writes to him accordingly:--
I have not known yet what it is to be diligent. I purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for a beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper. When I can afford to compose deliberate poems, I will.... I had got into a habit of mind of looking towards you as a help in all difficulties. You will see it as a duty I owe myself to break the neck of it. I do nothing for my subsistence--make no exertion. At the end of another year you shall applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct.
Brown, returning to Winchester a few days later, found his friend unshaken in the same healthy resolutions, and however loth to lose him for housemate and doubtful of his power to live the life he proposed, respected his motives too much to contend against them. It was accordingly settled that the two friends, after travelling up to London together, should part company, Brown returning to his home at Hampstead, while Keats went to live by himself and look out for employment on the press. The Dilkes, who were living in Great Smith Street, Westminster, at his desire engaged a lodging for him close by, at the corner of College Street (no. 25), and thither he betook himself, it would seem on the 7th or 8th of October.
College Street, as all Londoners or visitors to London know, is one of sedately picturesque Queen Anne or early Georgian houses overlooking the Abbey gardens. No corner of the town could have been more fitted to soothe him with a sense of cathedral quietude resembling that which he had just left. But the wise and purposeful Keats had reckoned without his other self, the Keats distracted by uncontrollable love-cravings. His blood proved traitor to his will, and the plan of life and literary hackwork in London broke down at once on trial, or even before trial. On the 10th he went up to Hampstead, and in a moment all his strength, to borrow words of his own, was uncrystallized and dissolved. It was the first time he had seen his mistress since June. He found her kind, and from that hour was utterly passion's slave again. In the solitude of his London lodging he found that he could not work nor rest nor fix his thoughts. He writes to her three days later:--
This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else. The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising morning of my Life. My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again--my Life seems to stop there--I see no further. You have absorb'd me.
He seems to have spent the next week going backwards and forwards between Hampstead and London, staying for three nights as a guest at her mother's house ('my three days' dream,' he calls the visit) and for one or two at the Dilkes' in Westminster, and finally about the 20th settling back into his old quarters with Brown at Wentworth Place next door to her. 'I shall be able to do nothing,' he writes.--and again there comes the cry, 'I should like to cast the die for Love or death.'
It was for death that the die was cast, and three months later came the seizure which made manifest the certainty of the issue. In the meantime he lived outwardly through the autumn and early winter much the same life as before among his own friends and Brown's. Some of them noticed in him at times a loss of natural gaiety and an unaccustomed strain of recklessness and moodiness. Severn, who had spent with him part of one of his days at the College Street lodgings, hearing him read Lamia and tell of the change of mind about Hyperion (to Severn as an ardent Miltonian a sore disappointment), called there again a few days later only to find him flown; and going to see him the next Sunday at Hampstead was perturbed by the change in him. 'He seemed well neither in mind nor in body, with little of the happy confidence and resolute bearing of a week earlier: while alternating moods of apathetic dejection and spasmodic gaiety rendered him a companion somewhat difficult to humour.' His correspondence at the same time falls off, and from mid-October until past Christmas we get only one letter to Severn, one to Rice, one to Taylor the publisher, and three or four to his sister Fanny. For other evidence we have the recollections, fairly full but somewhat enigmatical withal, of his housemate Brown; some blatancies, little to be trusted, of Haydon; and what is more revealing, the tenor of his own attempts at new poetical work, as well as a few private utterances in verse which the stress of passion forced from him.
For some weeks he was able to ply at Wentworth Place a double daily task: one, that of writing each morning in the same sitting-room with Brown, who copied as he wrote, some stanzas of a comic fairy poem which they had devised together, to be called The Cap and Bells, or The Jealousies, and to come out under the pseudonym of 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd': the other, carried on each evening in the seclusion of his own room, that of remodelling Hyperion into the form of a Dream or Vision, in which parts of the poem as begun a year before should be incorporated with certain changes of style and diction. At the former scheme Keats worked with great fluency but little felicity: the mere, almost mechanical act of spinning the verses of The Cap and Bells seems to have come all the easier to him in that they sprang from no vital or inward part of his imaginative being, and the result is as nearly worthless as anything written by such a man can be conceived to be. In his solitary work on the recast of Hyperion Keats wrote, on the other hand, out of the truest--which had come, alas! also to be the saddest--depths of himself; and the fragment needs to be studied with as much care as the best of his earlier work by those who would understand the ripening thoughts of this great, now stricken, spirit on the destinies of poets and the relation of poetry to human life. To that study we shall come by and by. For the present let it be only noted that these twofold occupations seem to have been kept up by Keats through November, and broken off soon afterwards 'owing to a circumstance which,' says Brown, mysteriously, 'it is needless to mention.' But judging by the rest of Brown's narrative, as well as by some of Keats's own private outpourings, no special or external circumstance can have been needed,--his inward sufferings were quite enough of themselves,--to put a stop to his writing. The wasting of his vital powers by latent disease was turning all his sensations and emotions into pain: at once darkening the shadow of impending poverty, increasing the natural importunity of ill-boding instincts at his heart, and exasperating into agony the unsatisfied cravings of his passion. During his 'three days' dream' under the same roof with his betrothed in October he had been able to write peaceably at nightfall:--
Faded the flower and all its budded charms, Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes, Faded the shape of beauty from my arms, Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise-- Vanish'd unseasonably at shut of eve, When the dusk holiday--or holinight Of fragrant-curtain'd love begins to weave The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight; But, as I've read love's missal through to-day, He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.
But now the hunger is uncontrollable:--
Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all, Withold no atom's atom or I die, Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall. Forget, in the mist of idle misery, Life's purposes,--the palate of my mind Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!
And again he cries, what can he do to recover his old liberty?--
When every fair one that I saw was fair, Enough to catch me in but half a snare, Not keep me there: When, howe'er poor or particolour'd things, My muse had wings, And ever ready was to take her course Whither I bent her force, Unintellectual, yet divine to me;-- Divine, I say!--What sea-bird o'er the sea Is a philosopher the while he goes Winging along where the great water throes?
How shall I do To get anew Those moulted feathers, and so mount once more Above, above The reach of fluttering Love, And make him cower lowly while I soar? Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism, A heresy and schism, Foisted into the canon law of love;-- No,--wine is only sweet to happy men; More dismal cares Seize on me unawares,-- Where shall I learn to get my peace again? To banish thoughts of that most hateful land, Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life; That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour, Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore, Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods, Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods, Ic'd in the great lakes, to afflict mankind; Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbag'd meads Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds; There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song, And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.
With that image of the sea-bird winging untroubled its chosen way over the waves, and as free as they, the poet sheds a real light on his own psychology in happier days, while the later lines figure direfully the obsession that now seems to make him think of even his friendships as wrecked and darkened, and of love as a ghastly error in nature, no joy but a scourge that blights and devastates. That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his passion does not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible at the present ebb-tide of his fortune. 'However selfishly I feel,' he had written to her some months earlier, 'I am sure I could never act selfishly.' The Brawnes on their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, he was not able to disguise his plight from his affectionate companion Brown, though he shrank from speaking of its causes. Looking back upon the time after ten years Brown records the impression it left upon him thus:--
It was evident from the letters he had sent me, even in his self-deceived assurance that he was 'as far from being unhappy as possible,' that he was unhappy. I quickly perceived he was more so than I had feared; his abstraction, his occasional lassitude of mind, and, frequently, his assumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding that word however.
Brown then tells of his morning and evening work on The Cap and Bells and the revised Hyperion and, in the vague terms I have quoted, of its cessation. And then, seeming to assign to money troubles an even greater part than they really bore in causing Keats's distress of mind, Brown goes on--
He could not resume his employment, and he became dreadfully unhappy. His hopes of fame, and other more tender hopes were blighted. His patrimony, though much consumed in a profession he was compelled to relinquish, might have upheld him through the storm, had he not imprudently lost a part of it in generous loans.... He possessed the noble virtues of friendship and generosity to excess; and they, in this world, may chance to spoil a man of independent feeling, till he is destitute. Even the 'immediate cash,' of which he spoke in the extracts I have given from his letters, was lent, with no hope of its speedy repayment, and he was left worse than pennyless. All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and, in kindness, or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too thoughtful, or too unquiet; and he began to be reckless of health. Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered by accident, and, without delay, revealed to me. He needed not to be warned of the danger of such a habit; but I rejoiced at his promise never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could induce him to break his word, when once given,--which was a difficulty. Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional proof of his rooted misery.
Where Brown hints of his being 'careless of health,' Haydon, referring apparently to this time of his life in particular, declares roundly and crudely as follows:--
Unable to bear the sneers of ignorance or the attacks of envy, not having strength of mind enough to buckle himself together like a porcupine, and present nothing but his prickles to his enemies, he began to despond, and flew to dissipation as a relief, which after a temporary elevation of spirits plunged him into deeper despondency than ever. For six weeks he was scarcely sober, and--to show what a man does to gratify his appetites, when once they get the better of him--once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the 'delicious coldness of claret in all its glory,'--his own expression.
If Keats really told Haydon that silly, and I should suppose impossible, story about the claret and cayenne it was probably only a piece of such 'rhodomontade' as his friends describe, invented on the spur of the moment to scandalize Haydon or under the provocation of one of his preachments. That he may at moments during these unhappy months have sought relief in dissipation of one kind or another, as Brown tells us he did in drug-taking, is likely: that he was now or at any time habitually given to drink is disproved by the explicit testimony of all his friends as well as of Brown, his closest intimate. In his few letters of the time his secret misery is betrayed only by a single phrase. Early in December he writes arranging to go with Severn to see the picture with which Severn was competing for, and eventually won, the annual gold medal of the Academy for historical painting. The subject was 'The Cave of Despair' from Spenser. Keats in making the appointment adds parenthetically from his troubled heart, 'you had best put me into your Cave of Despair.' A little later we hear of him flinging out in a fit of angered loyalty from a company of elder artists, Hilton, De Wint and others, where the deserts of the winner were disparaged and his success put down to favouritism.
It would seem that as late as November 17th he was still, or had quite lately been, going on with The Cap and Bells. He writes on that date to Taylor depreciating what he has recently been about and indicating in what direction his thoughts, when he could bend them seriously upon work at all, were inclined to turn:--
As the marvellous is the most enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers I have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy and to let her manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all. Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men and women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic skill I may as yet have however badly it might show in a Drama would I think be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes eve throughout a poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such Poems, if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six years, would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine Plays--my greatest ambition--when I do feel ambitious. I am sorry to say that is very seldom. The subject we have once or twice talked of appears a promising one, The Earl of Leicester's history. I am this morning reading Holingshed's Elizabeth.
It does not seem clear whether his idea about Leicester was to use the subject for a narrative poem or for a play. Scott's Kenilworth, be it remembered, had not yet been written.
In December he writes to his sister Fanny of the trouble his throat keeps giving him or threatening him with on exertion or cold, and says that he has been ordering a thick great coat and thick shoes on the advice of his doctor. He also mentions that he has begun to prepare a volume of poems to come out in the spring, and that he is touching up his and Brown's tragedy in order to brighten its interest. It had been accepted, he tells her, by Drury Lane, but only with the promise of coming out next season, and as that is not soon enough they intend either to insist on its being brought out this season or else to transfer it to Covent Gardens. He has been anxiously expecting, and has just now received, news of George; and has promised to dine with Mrs Dilke in London on Christmas day. Whether he was able to keep this engagement we do not learn; but Brown at any rate was there, and between him and Dilke there arose a challenge on which Keats among others was called to adjudicate. The conversation, writes Mrs Dilke, 'turned on fairy tales--Brown's forte--Dilke not liking them. Brown said he was sure he could beat Dilke, and to let him try they betted a beefsteak supper, and an allotted time was given. They had been read by the persons fixed on--Keats, Reynolds, Rice, and Taylor--and the wager was decided the night before last in favour of Dilke. Next Saturday night the supper is to be given,--Beefsteaks and punch--the food of the "Cockney School."'
So life went on for the friends, on the surface, pretty much as usual, into the new year (1820). Early in January George Keats came for a short visit to England to try and advance his affairs and get possession of more capital for his business. He seems not to have realized at all fully the true state of his brother's health or heart. He noticed, indeed, a change, and looking back on the time some years afterwards writes, 'he was not the same being; although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, he did not speak with former openness and unreserve, he had lost the reviving custom of venting his griefs.' George was probably too full of his own affairs to enquire very closely into John's, or he would never have allowed John, as he did, to strip himself practically bare of future means of subsistence in fulfilment of the brotherly promises of help conveyed, as we have seen, in his letter from Winchester the previous September. 'It was not fair of him, was it?' John is recorded to have said a little later from his sick-bed, referring to George's action in so taking him at his word; and Brown from this circumstance conceived of George a bitter bad opinion which nothing afterwards would shake. Nevertheless there is ample evidence of George's honourable and affectionate character, and it seems clear that in striving for commercial success he had his brother's ultimate benefit in view as much as his own, and that in the meantime he believed he had reason to take for granted the willingness and ability of John's many friends to keep him afloat.
On January 13th, a week after George's arrival, John took up his pen to try and write to his sister-in-law a journal letter in the old chatty affectionate style. If he had the means, he says, he would like to come and pay them a visit in America for a few months. 'I should not think much of the time, or my absence from my books; or I have no right to think, for I am very idle. But then I ought to be diligent, or at least to keep myself within reach of the materials for diligence. Diligence, that I do not mean to say; I should say dreaming over my books, or rather over other people's books.' He gossips about friends and acquaintances, less good-naturedly than usual, as he seems to be aware when he says, 'any third person would think I was addressing myself to a lover of scandal. But we know we do not love scandal, but fun; and if scandal happens to be fun, that is no fault of ours.' He tells how George is making copies of his verses, including the ode to the Nightingale; lets his inward embitterment show through for an instant when he says, 'If you should have a boy, do not christen him John, and persuade George not to let his partiality for me come across: 'tis a bad name, and goes against a man;' describes a dance he has been to at the Dilkes, and among a good deal of rather irritable and wry-mouthed social satire, to which he tries to give a colour of pleasantry and playfulness, strikes into sharp definition with the fewest possible words the characters of some of his friends and acquaintances:--
I know three witty people, all distinct in their excellence--Rice, Reynolds, and Richards. Rice is the wisest, Reynolds the playfullest, Richards the out-o'-the-wayest. The first makes you laugh and think, the second makes you laugh and not think, the third puzzles your head. I admire the first, I enjoy the second, I stare at the third.... I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see him at all though he were six feet high.--I bear the first, I forbear the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel, the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.
This was written on January 17th. Ten days later George started on his return journey, and John, having forgotten to hand him for delivery at home the budget he had been writing, was obliged to send it after him by post. A week later again, on February 3rd, came the crash towards which, as we can now see, Keats's physical constitution had been hastening ever since the over exertion of his Scottish tour twenty months before. The weather had been very variable, almost sultry in mid-January, then bitter cold with frost and sleet, then a thaw, whereby Keats was tempted to leave off his greatcoat. Coming from London to Hampstead outside the stage coach on the night of Thursday February 3rd, the chill of the thaw caught him. Everyone knows the words in which Brown relates the sequel:--
At eleven o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible; it therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, 'What is the matter? you are fevered?' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was on the outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,--but now I don't feel it. Fevered!--of course, a little.' He mildly and instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my request that he should go to bed. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say,--'That is blood from my mouth.' I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. 'Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.' After regarding it steadfastly he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,--'I know the colour of that blood;--it is arterial blood;--I cannot be deceived in that colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--I must die.' I ran for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, I left him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep.
Keats lived for twelve months longer, but it was only, in his own words, a life in death. Before narrating the end, let us pause and consider his work of the two preceding years, 1818 and 1819, on which his fame as a great English poet is chiefly founded.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Local tradition, I am informed, used to identify the house as one called Eglantine Villa, now demolished. The existing 'Keats Crescent' was so named, not as indicating the special neighbourhood where the poet lodged, but only by way of general commemoration of his sojourn.
[2] --and now his heart Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength Glories--.
Milton, Par. Lost, i. 581.
[3] Morgan MSS.
XIII. WORK OF 1818, 1819.--I. THE ACHIEVEMENTS
Minor achievements--Bards of Passion and of Mirth--Fancy--The tales--Isabella--Story and metre--Influence of Chaucer--Apostrophes and invocations--Horror turned to beauty--The digging scene--Its quality--The Eve of St Agnes--Variety of sources--Boccaccio's Filocolo--Poetic scope and method--Examples--The unrobing scene--The feast of fruits--A rounded close--Lamia--Sources: and a comparison--Metre and quality--Beauties and faults--Perplexing moral--The sage denounced: why?--Comments of Leigh Hunt--The odes: To Psyche--Sources: Burton and Apuleius--Qualities: A questionable claim--On Indolence--On a Grecian Urn--Sources: a composite--Spheres of art and life contrasted--Play between the two spheres--The Nightingale ode--Ode on Melancholy--A grand close--The last of the odes--To Autumn.
The work of Keats's two mature years (if any poet or man in his twenty-third and twenty-fourth years can be called mature) seems to divide itself naturally into two main groups or classes. One class consists of his finished achievements, things successfully carried through in accordance with his first intention; the other of his fragments and experiments, things begun and broken off either from external causes or because in the execution the poet changed his mind or his inspiration failed to sustain itself. I shall ask the reader to consider the two classes separately, the achievements first: not because there may not be even finer work in some of the fragments, but because a thing incomplete, a torso, however splendid in power and promise, cannot be judged on the same terms or with the same approach to finality as a thing of which the whole is before us. One finished thing only, the play of Otho the Great, I shall turn over to the second or experimental class, seeing that an experiment it essentially was, and one tried under conditions which made it impossible for Keats to be his true self.
The class of achievements will include, then, besides a score of sonnets and a few minor pieces of various form, the three completed tales in verse, Isabella or the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St Agnes, and Lamia; with the six odes, To Psyche, On Indolence (not published in Keats's lifetime), On a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale, To Melancholy, and To Autumn. Beginning with the minor things,--the sonnets, being mostly occasional and autobiographical, have been sufficiently touched on in our narrative chapters, and so have several of the shorter lyrics, In drear-nighted December, Meg Merrilies, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. There remains chiefly the batch of pieces in the seven-syllable couplet metre printed in the Lamia volume between the odes To Psyche and To Autumn. Two of these, Lines on the Mermaid Tavern and Robin Hood, were written, as we have seen, at the beginning of 1818, in the months when Keats was living alone in Well Walk and resting after his labour on Endymion. Both are easy, spirited, and intensely English in feeling; both, for all their gay lightness of touch, are marked with that vivid imaginative life in single phrases which almost from the first, amidst all the rawnesses of his youth, stamps Keats for a poet of the great lineage. Already two years earlier, in the valentine 'Hadst thou liv'd in days of old,' he had shown a fair command of this metre, and now we can feel that he has an ear well trained in its cadences by familiarity with the finest early models, from Fletcher (in the Faithful Shepherdess) and Ben Jonson (in the masque of The Satyr, the songs To Celia, and the Charis lyrics) down to L'Allegro and Il Penseroso.
The other two pieces in the same form, Bards of Passion and of Mirth and Fancy, date from nearly a year later, when Keats had settled under Brown's roof after Tom's death, and were copied by him for his brother in a letter dated January 2nd 1819. In the Mermaid Tavern lines he had followed in fancy the poet-guests of that hostelry to the Elysian fields and asked them if they found there any finer entertainment than in their old haunt. In Bards of Passion and of Mirth, which he wrote on a blank page in Dilke's copy of Beaumont and Fletcher, Keats singles out this particular pair of poet-partners to follow beyond the grave, and in a strain somewhat more serious tells of the double lives they lead,--their souls left here on earth in their writings, and themselves--
Seated on Elysian lawns Brows'd by none but Dian's fawns ... Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine, melodious truth; Philosophic numbers smooth; Tales and golden histories Of heaven and its mysteries.
In the affirmation with which the piece concludes,--
Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on Earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-liv'd in regions new!--
in this affirmation it seems, as Mr Buxton Forman has pointed out, as though Keats were gaily countering the view of Wordsworth in the well-known stanzas where, declaring how the power of Burns survives 'deep in the general heart of men,' he goes on to ask what need has the poet for any other kind of Elysian after-life.[1]
Following an eighteenth-century practice, Keats calls this set of heptasyllabics an ode, a form which in strictness it no way resembles. A higher place is taken in his work by the longest poem he sends his brother in the same metre, Fancy. He calls it a rondeau, again rather at random; but he had already called the Bacchus lyric in Endymion a roundelay, and seems to have thought that the name might apply to any set of verses returning upon itself at the end with a repetition of its beginning. In the present case he both opens and closes his poem with the same idea as has been condensed by a later writer in the two-line refrain--
But every poet, born to stray, Still feeds upon the far-away.
The opening lines run,--
Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home: At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, Like to bubbles when rain pelteth; Then let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind's cage-door, She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar. O sweet Fancy! let her loose; Summer's joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the Spring Fades as does its blossoming; Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too, Blushing through the mist and dew, Cloys with tasting: What do then?
The answer is that the thing to do is to sit by the chimney corner while Fancy goes ranging abroad to find and bring home a harvest of incompatible and contradictory delights; and after the evocation of a number of such the poem comes round at the end to a slightly altered repetition of its opening couplet,--
Let the winged Fancy roam Pleasure never is at home.
I like to think that Keats may have drawn his impulse to writing this poem from the fine passage in Fuller's Holy State quoted by Lamb in his brief 'Specimens' of that author[2]:--
Fancy.--It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul ... it digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without wings, builds without charges, fights without bloodshed; in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference of the world; by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating things in an instant; and things divorced in Nature are married in Fancy as in a lawless place.
At any rate Keats's poem, in its best and central part, is a delightful embroidery on the ideas here expressed. The notion, or vision, of a lawless place where all manner of things divorced in nature abide together and happily jostle, was one that often haunted him, as witness his verse-epistle to Reynolds from Teignmouth, the fragment he calls The Castle Builder, and again the piece beginning 'Welcome joy and welcome sorrow,' to which there has been posthumously given the title A Song of Opposites. The lines evoking such a vision in this poem, Fancy, are almost his happiest in his lighter vein, and are written in the true Elizabethan tradition: the predominant influence in the handling of the measure being, to my ear, that of Ben Jonson, who is wont to give it a certain weight and slowness of movement by the free use of long syllables in the unaccented places; even so Keats, in the passage quoted above, puts in such places words like 'sweet,' 'rain,' 'still,' 'cage,' 'dart,' 'lipp'd.'
Passing from the minor to the major achievements of the time, the earliest, and to my mind the finest, of these is Isabella or the Pot of Basil. During the writing of Endymion, Keats had intended his next effort to be on the lofty classic and symbolic theme of the dethronement of Hyperion and the Titans and the accession of Apollo and the Olympians. But certain reading and talk in the Hunt circle having diverted him from this purpose for a while, and made him take up the idea of a volume of metrical tales from Boccaccio to be written jointly by himself and Reynolds, he chose the tale of the Pot of Basil (the fifth of the fourth day in the Decameron), made a sudden beginning at it before he left Hampstead at the end of February, (1819), and finished it at Teignmouth in the course of April. As an appropriate vehicle for an Italian story he took the Italian ottava rima or stanza of eight. Several of the earlier English poets had used this metre: Keats's main model for it was doubtless Edward Fairfax, who, following other Elizabethan translators, had in his fine version from Tasso, Godfrey of Bulloigne, done much more than any of his predecessors towards suppling and perfecting its treatment in English. Since then it had been little employed in our serious poetry, but had lately been brilliantly revived for flippant and satiric uses, after later Italian models, by Hookham Frere and Byron. Keats goes over the heads of these direct to Fairfax, and in certain points at least, in variety of pause and cadence and subtle adaptation of verbal music to emotional effect, by a good deal outdoes even that excellent master.[3] Of course it is of the essence of his treatment to avoid, in the closing couplet of the stanza, the special effect of witty snap and suddenness which fits it so well for the purpose of satire.
Every one knows the story: how a maiden of Messina (Keats chooses to transfer the scene to Florence), living in the house of her merchant brothers, in secret loves one of their clerks: how her brothers, discovering her secret, take out her lover to the forest and there slay and bury him: how his ghost appearing to her in a dream reveals his fate and burial place: how she hastens thither with her nurse, digs till she finds the corpse and having found it carries home the head and sets it in a pot of basil, or sweet marjoram, which she cherishes and waters with her tears until her brothers take it from her, whereupon she pines away and dies.
Boccaccio tells this story with that admirable combination of straightforward conciseness and finished grace which characterizes his mature prose. Keats in his poem romantically amplifies and embroiders it. In his way of doing so we can trace the influence of Chaucer, with whose Troilus and Criseyde, that miracle of detailed, long-drawn, yet ever human and rarely tedious narrative, he was by this time familiar. Keats, while avoiding Chaucer's prolixity, diversifies his tale with invocations to Love and to the Muses, with apostrophes to the reader and ejaculatory comments on the events, entirely in Chaucer's manner: only whereas Chaucer relegates the more part of such matter to the 'proems' of his several books, Keats, having plunged into the thick of the story in his first line, finds room for his apostrophes and invocations in the course of the narrative itself. Most critics have taken the view that this is evidence of weak or immature art. To my mind this is not so: the pauses thus introduced are never long enough to hold up the flow and interest of the narrative, while they afford welcome rests to the attention, pleasant changes from a too sustained narrative construction, with consequent beautiful and happy modulations in the movement of the verse.
One of these invocations--invocation and apology together--is to Boccaccio himself, disowning all idea of improving the tale and defining the poet's attempt as made but to honour him,--
To stead thee as a verse in English tongue, An echo of thee in the north-wind sung.
The definition is exact. The revived spirit of English romantic poetry breathes in every line of the verse, and as in Endymion, so here, the southern setting is conceived as though it were English. 'So the two brothers and their murder'd man' (the force of the anticipatory epithet has been celebrated by every critic since Lamb)--
So the two brothers and their murder'd man Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream Keep head against the freshets.
Another such criticized 'digression' tells of the toilers yoked in all quarters of the world to the service of these avaricious merchant brothers. In calling up their sufferings Keats for a moment strikes an unexpected verbal echo from the Annus Mirabilis of Dryden.[4] Dryden, telling of the monopolies of the Dutch in the East India trade, had written,--
For them alone the Heav'ns had kindly heat, In eastern quarries ripening precious dew: For them the Idumean balm did sweat, And in hot Ceilon spicy forests grew.
Keats writes of Isabella's brothers,--
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, And went all naked to the hungry shark, For them his ears gush'd blood--
with more in the same strain, very vividly and humanly imagined, but somewhat unevenly written. On the other hand the last of the rests or interruptions in this poem is to my thinking one of its most original and admirable beauties: I mean the invocation beginning 'O Melancholy, linger here awhile,' repeated with lovely modulations in stanzas lv, lvi, and lxi; the poet deliberately pausing to heighten his effect as it were by an accompaniment of words chosen purely for their pathetic melody and more musical than music itself.
Keats's way of imagining and telling the story is not less delicate than it is intense. Flaws and false notes there are: phrases, as in Endymion, too dulcet and cloying, like that which tells how the lover's lips grew bold, 'And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:' a flat line where it is most out of place--'And Isabella did not stamp or rave:' a far-fetched rime, as where 'love' and 'grove' draw in after them the alien idea of Lorenzo not being embalmed in 'Indian clove.' But such flaws, abundant in Endymion, are in Isabella rare and need to be searched for. If we want an example of the staple tissue of the poem we shall rather find it in a stanza like this:--
Parting they seem'd to tread upon the air, Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart Only to meet again more close, and share The inward fragrance of each other's heart. She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair Sang of delicious love and honey'd dart; He with light steps went up a western hill, And bade the sun farewell, and joy'd his fill.
The image of love-happiness in the last couplet is as jocund and uplifting as some radiant symbolic drawing by Blake, and poetry has few things more perfect or easier in their perfection.
In a far more difficult kind, where Keats has to deal with the features of the story that might easily make for the repulsive or the macabre, he triumphs not by shirking but by sheer force of passionate imagination. 'The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.' This dictum of Keats can scarcely be better illustrated than by his own handling of the Isabella story. Take the vision of the murdered man appearing to the girl at night:--
Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake; For there was striving, in its piteous tongue, To speak as when on earth it was awake, And Isabella on its music hung: Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake, As in a palsied Druid's harp unstrung; And through it moan'd a ghostly under-song, Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among.
Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof From the poor girl by magic of their light.
How wonderfully, in these touches, do we feel love prevailing over horror and purging the apparition of all its charnel ghastliness. When we come to the discovery and digging up of the body, Boccaccio turns the difficulty which must inhere in any realistic treatment of the theme by simply saying that it was uncorrupted; as though some kind of miracle had kept it fresh. Keats on the other hand confronts the difficulty and overcomes it. First he acknowledges how the imagination in dwelling on the dead is prone to call up images of corruptibility:--
Who hath not loiter'd in a green church-yard, And let his spirit, like a demon-mole, Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard, To see scull, coffin'd bones, and funeral stole; Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr'd, And filling it once more with human soul? Ah! this is holiday to what was felt When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.
Then he compulsively leads away the mind from such images to think only of the passionate absorption with which Isabella flings herself upon her task:--
She gaz'd into the fresh-thrown mould, as though One glance did fully all its secrets tell; Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well; Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow, Like to a native lilly of the dell: Then with her knife, all sudden, she began To dig more fervently than misers can.
Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies, She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone, And put it in her bosom, where it dries And freezes utterly unto the bone Those dainties made to still an infant's cries: Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care, But to throw back at times her veiling hair.
Is any scene in poetry written with more piercing, more unerring, vision? The swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with too dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at the same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile of the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action, as she begins (with a fine implied commentary on the relative strength of passions) to dig 'more fervently than misers can':--then the first reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not ghastly, but beautiful both in itself and for the tenderness of which it is a token: her womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom, while all the woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us as blighted by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and continuance of her labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic truth as well as grace:--to imagine and to write like this is the privilege of the best poets only, and even the best have not often combined such concentrated force and beauty of conception with such a limpid and flowing ease of narrative.[5] Poetry had always come to Keats as naturally as leaves to a tree. So he considered it ought to come, and now that it came of a quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers of the school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school seem thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms mechanical: nay, those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two kinds of writing comparable.
The final consignment by Isabella of her treasure to its casket is told with the same genius for turning horror into beauty: note the third and fourth lines of the following, with the magically cooling and soothing effect of their open-vowelled sonority;--
Then in a silken scarf,--sweet with the dews Of precious flowers pluck'd in Araby, And divine liquids come with odorous ooze Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,-- She wrapp'd it up; and for its tomb did choose A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by, And cover'd it with mould, and o'er it set Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.
And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun, And she forgot the blue above the trees, And she forgot the dells where waters run, And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze; She had no knowledge when the day was done, And the new morn she saw not: but in peace Hung over her sweet Basil evermore, And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.
In passages like these of Isabella Keats, for one reader at least, reaches his high-water mark in human feeling, and in felicity both imaginative and executive. The next of his three poetic tales, The Eve of St Agnes, does not strike so deep, though it is more nearly faultless and lives as the most complete and enchanting English pure romance-poem of its time. Little or none of the effect is due in this case to elements of magic weirdness or supernatural terror such as counted for so much in the general romantic poetry of the day, and had been of the very essence of achievements so diverse as The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and Isabella itself. The tale hinges on the popular belief that on St Agnes's Eve (January the 20th) a maiden might win sight of her future husband in a dream by going to bed supperless, silent and without looking behind her, and sleeping on her back with her hands on the pillow above her head. This belief is mentioned by two writers at least with whom Keats was very familiar: by Ben Jonson in his masque The Satyr and Robert Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy. An eighteenth century book of reference which he may well have known also, Brand's Popular Antiquities, cites the superstition and adds from a current chapbook a fuller account of it, mentioning other and alternative rites. But one feature of the promised vision which in Keats's mind was evidently essential, that the lover should regale his mistress after her fasting dream with exquisite viands and music, is not noted in any of these sources: Keats must either have invented it or drawn it from some other authority which criticism has not yet recognized.
It was an obvious and easy idea for Keats to weave into the St Agnes' Eve motive the motive of a love-passion between the son and daughter of hostile houses, and to bring the youth to a festival in the halls of his enemies in a manner which reminds one both of Romeo and Juliet and of the young Lochinvar in Scott's ballad. A remoter source has lately been pointed out as probable for the subsequent incidents of the lover's concealment by the old nurse in a closet next the maiden's chamber, his coming in to her while she sleeps, the melting of his real self into her dream of him, her momentary disenchantment and alarm on awakening, her re-assurance and surrender and their ensuing happy union and flight. All these circumstances, it has been shown, except the immediate flight of the lovers, are closely paralleled in Boccaccio's early novel Il Filocolo, and look as though they must have been derived from it. The Filocolo is an excessively tedious and occasionally coarse amplification in prose, made by Boccaccio when his style was still unformed, of the old French metrical romance, long popular throughout Europe, of Floire et Blancheflor. The question is, how should Keats have come to be acquainted with it? At this time he knew very little Italian. He was accustomed to read his Decameron in a translation,[6] and eight months later we find him with difficulty making out Ariosto at the rate of ten or a dozen stanzas a day. A French seventeenth-century version of the Filocolo indeed existed, but none in English. Can it be that Hunt had told Keats the story, or at least those parts of it which would serve him, in the course of talk about Boccaccio? One would not have expected even Hunt's love of Italian reading to sustain him through the tedium of this early and little known novel by the master: moreover in criticizing The Eve of St Agnes he gives no hint that Keats was indebted to him for any of its incidents. But there the resemblances are, too close to be easily explained as coincidences. The part played by the old nurse Angela in Keats's poem echoes pretty closely the part played by Glorizia in the Filocolo; the drama, dreaming and awake, played between Madeline and Porphyro, repeats, though in a far finer strain, that between Biancofiore and Florio; so that Keats's narrative reads truly like a magically refined and enriched quintessence distilled from the corresponding chapter in Boccaccio's tale.[7]
But the question of sources is one for the special student, and its discussion may easily tire the lay reader. Passing to the poem and its qualities, we have to note first that, fresh from treading, in his Hyperion attempt, in the path of Milton, Keats in The Eve of St Agnes went back, so far as his manner is derivative at all, to the example of his first master, Spenser. He shows as perfect a command of the Spenserian stanza, with its 'sweet-slipping movement,' as Spenser himself, and as subtle a sense as his of the leisurely meditative pace imposed upon the metre by the lingering Alexandrine at the close. Narrating at this pace and in this mood, he is able at any moment with the lightest of touches to launch the imagination to music on a voyage beyond the beyonds, and to charge every line, every word almost, with a richness and fullness of far-away suggestion that yet never clogs the easy harmonious flow of the verse. At the same time he does not, in this new poem, attempt anything like the depth of human passion and pathos which he had touched in Isabella, and his personages appeal to us in the manner strictly defined as 'romantic,' that is to say not so much humanly and in themselves as by the circumstances, scenery, and atmosphere amidst which they move.
In handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some writers vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life, movement, and feeling. From the opening stanza, which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close, where the lovers disappear into the night, the poetry throbs in every line with the life of imagination and beauty. The monuments in the aisle are brought before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:--
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.
Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels supporting the banquet-hall roof the poet strikes life:--
The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts.[8]
The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out their beauties in detail, he calls--
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--
a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry.[9] In the last line of the same stanza--
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings,
--the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on thoughts of her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that moonlight has not the power to transmit the separate hues of painted glass as Keats in this celebrated passage represents it, but fuses them into a kind of neutral or indiscriminate opaline shimmer. Let us be grateful for the error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. If any reader wishes to realise how the genius of Elizabethan romantic poetry re-awoke in Keats, and how much enriched and enhanced, after two hundred years, let him compare all this scene of Madeline's unrobing with the passage from Brown's Britannia's Pastorals which was probably in his memory when he wrote it (see above, p. 98).
When Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and speaks straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the wearer,--'Her warmed jewels.' When Porphyro spreads the feast of dainties beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own natural richness, but with the associations and the homage of all far countries whence they have been gathered--
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.
Concerning this sumptuous passage of the spread feast of fruits, not unequally rivalling the famous one in Milton,[10] Leigh Hunt has some interesting things to say in his Autobiography[11]:--
I remember Keats reading to me, with great relish and particularity, conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper and ending with the words,
And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.
Mr Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but Keats knew where his vowels were not to be varied. On the occasion above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:--
The singing masons building roofs of gold.
This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare's negligence, if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.
The reader will remember how Bailey records this subject of the musical and emotional effect of vowel sounds, open and close, varied or iterated as the case might be, as one on which Keats's talk had often run at Oxford. Whatever his theories, he was by this time showing himself as fine a master of such effects as any, even the greatest, of our poets. This same passage, or interlude, of the feast of fruits has despite its beauty been sometimes blamed as a 'digression.' A stanza which in Keats's original draft stood near the beginning of the poem shows that in his mind it was no mere ornament and no digression at all, but an essential part of his scheme. In revision he dropped out this stanza, doubtless as being not up to the mark poetically: pity that he did not rather perfect it and let it keep its place: but even as it is the provision of the dainties made beforehand by the old nurse at Porphyro's request (stanza xx) proves the feast essential to the story.
While the unique charm of The Eve of St Agnes lies thus in the richness and vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions of the personages are not less happily conceived as far as they go. What can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the old nurse Angela? How admirable in particular is the debate held by Angela with Porphyro in her
little moonlight room Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb.
Madeline, a figure necessarily in the main passive, is none the less exquisite, whether in her gentle dealing with the nurse on the staircase, or when closing her chamber door she pants with quenched taper in the moonlight, and most of all when awakening she finds her lover beside her, and contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:--
'Ah, Porphyro!' said she, 'but even now Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear, Made tuneable with every sweetest vow; And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear: How chang'd thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear! Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!'[12]
In all the doings and circumstances attending the departure of the lovers for a destination left thrillingly vague in the words, 'For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee,'[13]--in the elfin storm sent to cover their flight (the only touch of the supernatural in the story), their darkling grope down the stairway, the hush that holds the house and guest-chambers, the wind-shaken arras, the porter sprawling asleep beside his empty flagon, the awakened bloodhound who recognizes his mistress and is quiet--in Keats's telling of all these things a like unflagging richness and felicity of imagination holds us spell-bound: and with the deaths of the old nurse and beadsman, once the house has lost its spirit of life and light in Madeline, the poet brings round the tale, after all its glow of passionate colour and music, of trembling anticipation and love-worship enraptured or in suspense, to a chill and wintry close in subtlest harmony with its beginning:--
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl, With a huge empty flaggon by his side: The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, But his sagacious eye an inmate owns: By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide: The chains lie silent on the footworn stones; The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
And they are gone: aye, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the storm. That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm, Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform; The Beadsman, after thousand aves told, For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.[14]
The last of the trio of Keats's tales in verse, Lamia, owed its origin, and perhaps part of its temper, to his readings in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. His own experiences under the stings of love and jealousy had led him, during those spring months of 1819 when he could write nothing, to pore much over the treatise of that prodigiously read, satiric old commentator on the maladies of the human mind and body, and especially over those sections of it which deal with the cause and cure of love-melancholy. Entertainment in abundance, information in cartloads, Keats could draw from the matter accumulated and glossed by Burton, but little or nothing to gladden or soothe or fortify him. One story, however, he found which struck his imagination so much that he was moved to write upon it, and that was the old Greek story, quoted by Burton from Philostratus, of Lamia the serpent-lady, at once witch and victim of witchcraft, who loved a youth of Corinth and lived with him in a palace of delights built by her magic, until their happiness was shattered by the scrutiny of intrusive and coldblooded wisdom.
In June 1819, soon after the inspiration which produced the Odes had passed away, and before he left Hampstead for the Isle of Wight, Keats made a beginning on this new task; continued it at intervals, concurrently with his attempts in drama, at Shanklin and Winchester; and finished it by the first week in September. It happened that Thomas Love Peacock had published the year before a tale in verse on a nearly similar theme,--that of the beautiful Thessalian enchantress Rhododaphne: one wonders whether Keats may not have felt in Peacock's attempt a challenge and stimulus to his own. Peacock's work, now unduly neglected, is that of an accomplished scholar and craftsman sitting down to tell an old Greek tale of magic in the form of narrative verse then most fashionable, the mixed four-stressed couplet and ballad measure of Scott and Byron, and telling it, for a poet not of genius, gracefully and well. Whether Keats's Lamia is a work of genius there is no need to ask. No one can deny the truth of his own criticism of it when he says, 'I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way--give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation.' But personally I cannot agree with the opinion of the late Francis Turner Palgrave and other critics--I think they are the majority--who give it the first place among the tales. On the contrary, if an order of merit among them there must be, I should put it third and lowest, for several reasons of detail as well as for one reason affecting the whole design and composition.
As to the technical qualities of the poetry, let it be granted that Keats's handling of the heroic couplet, modelled this time on the example of Dryden and not of the Elizabethans, though retaining pleasant traces of the Elizabethan usages of the over-run or enjambement and the varied pause,--let it be granted that his handling of this mode of the metre is masterly. Let it be admitted also that there are passages in the narrative imagined as intensely as any in Isabella or The Eve of St Agnes and told quite as vividly in a style more rapid and condensed. Such is the passage, in the introductory episode which fills so large a relative place in the poem, where Mercury woos and wins his wood-nymph after Lamia has lifted from her the spell of invisibility. Such is the gorgeous, agonized transformation act of Lamia herself from serpent to woman: such again the scene of her waylaying and ensnaring of the youth on his way to Corinth. And such above all would be the whole final scene of the banquet and its break-up, from 'Soft went the music with soft air along' to the end, but for the perplexing apostrophe, presently to be considered, which interrupts it. Still counting up the things in the poem to be most praised, here is an example where the poetry of Greek mythology is very eloquently woven into the rhetoric of love:--
Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah! goddess, see Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee! For pity do not this sad heart belie-- Even as thou vanishest so I shall die. Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay! To thy far wishes will thy streams obey: Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain, Alone they can drink up the morning rain: Though a descended Pleiad, will not one Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?
And here a beautiful instance of power and justness in scenic imagination:--
As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, Throughout her palaces imperial, And all her populous streets and temples lewd, Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, To the wide-spreaded night above her towers. Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, Companion'd or alone; while many a light Flar'd here and there, from wealthy festivals, And threw their moving shadows on the walls, Or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade.
Turning now to the other side of the account: for one thing, we find jarring and disappointing notes, such as had disappeared from Keats's works since Endymion, of the old tasteless manner of the Hunt-taught days: for instance the unpalatable passage in the first book beginning 'Let the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and worse still, with a new note of idle cynicism added, the lines about love which open the second book. Misplaced archaisms also reappear, such as 'unshent' and the participle 'daft,' from the obsolete verb 'daff,' used as though it meant to puzzle or daze; with bad verbal coinages like 'piazzian,' 'psalterian.' Moreover, though many things in the poem are potently conceived, others are not so. The description of the magical palace-hall is surely a failure, except for the one fine note in the lines,--
A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone Supporters of the faery-roof, made moan Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.
The details of the structure, with its pairs of palms and plantains carved in cedar-wood, its walls lined with mirrors, its panels which change magically from plain marble to jasper, its fifty censers and 'Twelve sphered tables, by twelve seats insphered,'--all this seems feebly and even tastelessly invented in comparison with the impressive dream-architecture in some of Keats's other poems: I will even go farther, and say that it scarce holds its own against the not much dissimilar magic hall in the sixth canto of Rhododaphne.
But the one fundamental flaw in Lamia concerns its moral. The word is crude: what I mean is the bewilderment in which it leaves us as to the effect intended to be made on our imaginative sympathies. Lamia is a serpent-woman, baleful and a witch, whose love for Lycius fills him with momentary happiness but must, we are made aware, be fatal to him. Apollonius is a philosopher who sees through her and by one steadfast look withers up her magic semblance and destroys her, but in doing so fails to save his pupil, who dies the moment his illusion vanishes. Are these things a bitter parable, meaning that all love-joys are but deception, and that at the touch of wisdom and experience they melt away? If so, the tale might have been told either tragically or satirically, in either case leaving the reader impartial as between the sage and his victim. But Keats in this apostrophe, which I wish he had left out, deliberately points a moral and expressly invites us to take sides:--
What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius? What for the sage, old Apollonius? Upon her aching forehead be there hung The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue; And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage, Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage War on his temples. Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine-- Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
These lines to my mind have not only the fault of breaking the story at a critical point and anticipating its issue, but challenge the mind to untimely questionings and reflections. The wreaths of ominous growth distributed to each of the three personages may symbolize the general tragedy: but why are we asked to take sides with the enchantress, ignoring everything about her except her charm, and against the sage? If she were indeed a thing of bale under a mask of beauty, was not the friend and tutor bound to unmask her? and if the pupil could not survive the loss of his illusion,--if he could not confront the facts of life and build up for himself a new happiness on a surer foundation,--was it not better that he should be let perish? Is there not in all this a slackening of imaginative and intellectual grasp? And especially as to the last lines, do we not feel that they are but a cheap and unilluminating repetition of a rather superficial idea, the idea phrased shortly in Campbell's Rainbow and at length in several well-known passages of Wordsworth's Excursion, particularly that in the fifth book beginning--
Ambitious spirits!-- Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh The planets in the hollow of their hand; And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains Have solved the elements, or analysed The thinking principle--shall they in fact Prove a degraded Race?
Wordsworth had fifteen years earlier written more wisely, 'Poetry is the impassioned expression in the countenance of all science.' The latter-day Wordsworth, and Keats after him, should have realised that the discoveries of 'philosophy,' meaning science, create new mysteries while they solve the old, and leave the world as full of poetry as they found it: poetry, it may be, with its point of view shifted, poetry of a new kind, but none the less poetical. Leigh Hunt, in his review of Lamia published on the appearance of the volume, has some remarks partly justifying and partly impugning Keats's treatment of the story in this respect:--
Mr Keats has departed as much from common-place in the character and moral of this story, as he has in the poetry of it. He would see fair play to the serpent, and makes the power of the philosopher an ill-natured and disturbing thing. Lamia though liable to be turned into painful shapes had a soul of humanity; and the poet does not see why she should not have her pleasures accordingly, merely because a philosopher saw that she was not a mathematical truth. This is fine and good. It is vindicating the greater philosophy of poetry.
So far, this is a manifest piece of special pleading by Hunt on Lamia's behalf. If she is nothing worse than a being with a soul of humanity liable to be turned into painful shapes, why must Apollonius feel it his duty to wither and destroy her for the safeguarding of his pupil, even at the cost of that pupil's life? Her witchcraft must consist in something much worse than not being a mathematical truth, else why is he her so bitter enemy? Hunt proceeds, more to the purpose, to protest against the poet's implication--
that modern experiment has done a deadly thing to poetry by discovering the nature of the rainbow, the air, etc., that is to say, that the knowledge of natural history and physics, by shewing us the nature of things, does away with the imaginations that once adorned them. This is a condescension to a learned vulgarism, which so excellent a poet as Mr Keats ought not to have made. The world will always have fine poetry, so long as it has events, passions, affections, and a philosophy that sees deeper than this philosophy. There will be a poetry of the heart, so long as there are tears and smiles: there will be a poetry of the imagination, as long as the first causes of things remain a mystery. A man who is no poet, may think he is none, as soon as he finds out the physical cause of the rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:--he was none before. The true poet will go deeper. He will ask himself what is the cause of that physical cause; whether truths to the senses are after all to be taken as truths to the imagination; and whether there is not room and mystery enough in the universe for the creation of infinite things, when the poor matter-of-fact philosopher has come to the end of his own vision.
In Endymion Keats had impeded and confused his narrative by working into it much incident and imagery symbolic of the cogitations and aspirations, the upliftings and misgivings, of his own unripe spirit. Three years later, writing to Shelley from his sickbed, he contrasts that former state of his mind with its present state, saying that it was then like a scattered pack of cards but is now sorted to a pip. The three tales just discussed, written in the interval, show how quickly the power of sorting and controlling his imaginations had matured itself in him. In them he is already an artist standing outside of his own conceptions, certain of his own aim in dealing with them (subject perhaps to some reservation in the case of Lamia), and scarcely letting his personal self intrude upon his narrative at all to complicate or distract it.
For the expression of his private moods and meditations he had perfected during the same interval a new and beautiful vehicle in the ode. He had been accustomed to try his hand at odes, or what he called such, from his earliest riming days: and odes also, to all intents and purposes, are the two great lyrics in Endymion, the choral hymn to Pan and the song of the Indian maiden to Sorrow. But those which he composed in quick succession, as we have seen, in the late spring of 1819 are of a reflective and meditative type, new in his work and highly personal.
That which I have shown reason for believing to be the earliest of the group, the Ode to Psyche written in the last days of April, differs somewhat from the rest both in form and spirit. Its strophes are longer and more irregular: its strain less inward and brooding, with more of lyric ardour and exaltation. It tells of the poet's delight in that late, exquisitely and spiritually symbolic product of the mythologic spirit of expiring paganism, the story of Cupid and Psyche. What may have especially turned his attention to this fable at that moment we cannot tell. Possibly the mention of it in Burton's Anatomy may have set him on to reading the original source, the Golden Ass of Apuleius, in Adlington's translation: there are passages in Lamia which suggest such a reading,[15] and the noble, rhythmical English of that Elizabethan version, loose as it may be in point of scholarship, could not fail to charm his ear. Or possibly recent study of the plates in the Musee Napoleon (as to which more by and by) may have brought freshly to his memory the sculptured group in which the story is embodied. But that he had always loved the story we know from the passage 'I stood tip-toe' beginning--
So felt he, who first told how Psyche went On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment,
as well as from his confession that in boyhood he used to admire its languid and long-drawn romantic treatment in the poem of Mrs Tighe.
Cloying touches of languor, such as often disfigure his own earlier work, are not wanting in the opening lines in which he tells how he came upon the fabled couple in a dream, but are more than compensated by the charm of the scene where he finds them reposing, 'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other poet has compressed into a single line so much of the essential virtue of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with Keats; and of Spenser with his 'sea-shouldering whales' he is now more than the equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden in St Agnes' Eve is matched in this ode by the 'soft-conched ear' of Psyche,--though the compound is perhaps a little forced and odd, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in Lamia. The invocation in the third and fourth stanzas expresses, with the fullest reach of Keats's felicity in style and a singular freshness and fire of music in the verse, both his sense of the meaning of Greek nature-religion and his delight in imagining the beauty of its shrines and ritual. For the rest, there seems at first something strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:--
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.
But in a moment we are carried beyond criticism by that incomparable distillation of one, or many, of his impressions among the Lakes or in Scotland,--
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.
For such a master-stroke of concentrated imaginative description no praise, much as has been showered on it by Ruskin and lesser critics, can be too great.
Keats declares to his brother that this is the first of his poems with which he has taken even moderate pains. That being so, it is remarkable that he should have let stand in it as many as three unrimed line-endings: and what the poem truly bears in upon the reader is a sense less of special care and finish than of special glow and ardour, till he is left breathless and delighted at the threshold of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his mind enthralled by the imagery and his ear by the verse, with its swift, mounting music and rich, vehemently iterated assonances towards the close:--
A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, With breeding flowers, will never breed the same; And thither will I bring all soft delights That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at nights, To let the warm Love in!
The four remaining spring odes are slower-paced, as becomes their more musing tenour, and are all written in a succession of stanzas repeated uniformly or with slight variations. Throughout them all each stanza is of ten lines and five rimes, the first and second rimes arranged in a quatrain, the third, fourth and fifth in a sestet: the order of rimes in the sestet varying in the different odes, and in one, the nightingale ode, the third line from the end being shortened so as to have three stresses instead of five.
Let us take first the two in which the imagery has been suggested to the poet by works of Greek sculpture whether seen or imagined. In the Ode on Indolence Keats merely revives his memory of a special type of Greek marble urn where draped figures of women, Seasons, it may be, or priestesses, walk with joined hands behind a solemn Bacchus, or priest in the god's guise (see Plate viii, p. 342),--he merely evokes this memory in order to describe the way in which certain symbolic personages have seemed in a day-dream to pass before him and re-pass and again re-pass, appearing and disappearing as the embossed figures on such an urn may be made to do by turning it round. From the 'man and two women' of the March letter they are changed to three women, whom at first he does not recognize; but seeing presently who they are, namely Love, Ambition, and that 'maiden most unmeek,' his 'demon Poesy,' he for a moment longs for wings to follow and overtake them. The longing passes, and in his relaxed mood he feels that none of the three holds any joy for him--
so sweet as drowsy noons, And evenings steep'd in honey'd indolence.
They come by once more, and again, barely aroused from the sweets of outdoor slumber and the spring afternoon, he will not so much as lift his head from where he lies, but bids them farewell and sees them depart without a tear.
Keats did not print this ode, thinking it perhaps not good enough or else too intimately personal. But writing to Miss Jeffrey a few weeks after it was composed, he tells her it is the thing he has most enjoyed writing this year. It is indeed a pleasant, lovingly meditated revival and casting into verse of the imagery which had come freshly into his mind when he wrote to his brother of his fit of languor in the previous March. It contains some powerful and many exquisite lines, but only one perfect stanza, the fifth: and there are slacknesses--shall we say lazinesses--in the execution, as where the need for rimes to 'noons' and 'indolence' prompts the all-too commonplace prayer--
That I may never know how change the moons, Or hear the voice of busy common-sense;
or where, thinking contemptuously of the old 'intercoronation' days with Leigh Hunt, he declines, in truly Cockney rime, to raise his head from the flowery grass in order to be fed with praise and become 'a pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.'
In bidding the phantoms of this day-dream adieu, Keats avows that there are others yet haunting him, and while imagery drawn from the sculptures on Greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse himself to a stronger effort and produce a true masterpiece in his famous Ode on a Grecian Urn. It is no single or actually existing specimen of Attic handicraft that he celebrates in this ode, but a composite conjured up instinctively in his mind out of several such known to him in reality or from engravings. During and after those hour-long silent reveries among the museum marbles of which Severn tells us, the creative spirit within him will have been busy almost unaware combining such images and re-combining them. Cricitism can plausibly analyse this creation into its several elements. In calling the scene a 'leaf-fringed legend' Keats will have remembered that the necks and shoulders of this kind of urn are regularly encircled by bands of leaf-pattern ornament. The idea of a sacrifice and a Bacchic dance being figured together in one frieze, a thing scarcely elsewhere to be found, will have come to him from the well known vase of Sosibios (so called from the name of the sculptor inscribed upon it), from the print of which in the Musee Napoleon there actually exists a tracing by his hand.[16] But this is a serene and ceremonial composition: for the tumult and 'wild ecstasy' of his imagined frieze, the 'pipes and timbrels,' the 'mad pursuit,' he will have had store of visions ready in his mind, from the Bacchanal pictures of Poussin, no doubt also from Bacchic vases like that fine one in the Townley collection at the British Museum and the nearly allied Borghese vase: while for the
--heifer lowing at the skies And all her silken flanks in garlands drest,
as well as for the thought of the pious morn and the little town emptied of its folk that old deep impression received from Claude's 'Sacrifice to Apollo' will have been reinforced by others from works of sculpture easy to guess at: most of all, naturally, from the sacrificial processions in the Parthenon frieze.
In the ode we read how the sculptured forms of such an imaginary antique, visualized in full intensity before his mind's eye, have set his thoughts to work, on the one hand asking himself what living, human scenes of ancient custom and worship lay behind them, and on the other hand speculating upon the abstract relations of plastic art to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which flash their own answer upon us--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'What men or gods are these, what maidens loth?' etc. The second and third stanzas express with full felicity and insight the differences between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even richer than the real. The thought thrown by Leonardo da Vinci into a single line--'Cosa bella mortal passa e non d'arte'--and expanded by Wordsworth in his later days into the sonnet, 'Praised be the art,' etc., finds here its most perfect utterance.
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Then the questioning begins again, and again conjures up a choice of pictures,--
What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
In the answering lines of the sestet--
And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--
in these lines we find that the poet's imagination has suddenly and lightly shifted its ground, and chooses to view the arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality, and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own compensations. Finally, dropping such airy play of the mind backward and forward between the two spheres, he consigns the work of ancient skill to the future, to remain,--
in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--
thus re-asserting his old doctrine, 'What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth'; a doctrine which amidst the gropings of reason and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of Keats's temper--the one anchorage to which his soul can and needs must cleave.
Let us turn now to the second pair--for as such I regard them--of odes written in May-time, those To a Nightingale and On Melancholy. Like the Ode on Indolence, the nightingale ode begins with the confession of a mood of 'drowsy numbness,' but this time one deeper and nearer to pain and heartache. Then invoking the nightingale, the poet attributes his mood not to envy of her song (perhaps, as Mr Bridges has suggested, there may be here an under-reminiscence from William Browne[17]), but to excess of happiness in it. Just as his Grecian urn was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that Keats thus invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he makes us realize in lines redolent, as are none others in our language, of the southern richness and joy which he had never known save in dreams. Then follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's tribulations which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness all the secrets of the season and the night. While thus rapt he remembers how often the thought of death has seemed welcome to him, and feels that it would be more richly welcome now than ever. The nightingale would not cease to sing--and by this time, though he calls her 'immortal bird,' what he has truly in mind is not the song-bird at all, but the bird-song, thought of as though it were a thing self-existing and apart, imperishable through the ages. So thinking, he contrasts its permanence with the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the generations of individual men and women who have listened to it. This last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn': and then, catching up his own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest dream the poem closes.
Throughout this ode Keats's genius is at its height. Imagination cannot be more rich and satisfying, felicity of phrase and cadence cannot be more absolute, than in the several contrasted stanzas calling for the draft of southern vintage, picturing the frailty and wretchedness of man's estate on earth, and conjecturing in the 'embalmed darkness' the divers odours of spring. To praise the art of a passage like that in the fourth stanza where with a light, lingering pause the mind is carried instantaneously away from the miseries of the world into the heart of the imagined forest,--to praise or comment on a stroke of art like this is to throw doubt on the reader's power to perceive it for himself. Let him be trusted to cherish and know the poem, as every lover of English poetry should, 'to its depths,' and let us go on to the last product, as I take it to be, of this spring month of inspiration, and that is the Ode on Melancholy.
The music of the word--its hundred associations derived from the early seventeenth-century poetry in which his soul was steeped--foremost among them no doubt Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, with the beautiful song from Fletcher's Nice Valour which inspired them--his recent familiarity with Burton's Anatomy, including those pithy stanzas of alternate praise and repudiation which preface it--all these things will have worked together with Keats's own haunting and deepest mood throughout these days to set him composing on this theme, Melancholy. He had dallied with an idea of doing so as far back as early in March, when being kept from writing both by physical disinclination and a temporary phase of self-criticism, he had written to Haydon, 'I will not spoil my gloom by writing an ode to Darkness.' Now that in May the springs of inspiration were again unlocked in him, such negative purpose fails to hold, and he adds this ode to the rest, throwing into it some of his most splendid imagery and diction. Its temper is nearly akin on the one hand to some of the gloomier passages in his letters to Miss Jeffrey of May 31 and June 9, and on the other to the tragic third stanza of the nightingale ode. Its main purport is to proclaim the spiritual nearness, the all but inseparableness, of joy and pain in human experience when either is present in its intensity. One of the attributes, it will be remembered, which he assigns to his enchantress Lamia is--
a sciential brain To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain.
In no nature have the sources of the two lain deeper or closer together than in his own, and it is from the fullness of impassioned experience that he writes. The real melancholy, he insists, is not that which belongs to things sad or direful in themselves. Having written two stanzas piling up gruesome images of such things, and discarded on reflection the former and more gruesome of the two, he lets the second stand, and goes on, evoking contrasted images of opulent beauty, to show how the true, the utter melancholy is that which is inextricably coupled with every joy and resides at the heart of every pleasure: ending magnificently--
Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovereign shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
One more ode remains, written in a different key and after a lapse of some four months, during which Keats had been away in the country, quieted by absence from the object of his passion and working diligently at Otho the Great and Lamia. This is the ode To Autumn. He was alone at Winchester, rejoicing in perfect September weather and in a mood more serene and contented than he had known for long or was ever to know again. 'How beautiful the season is now,' he writes to Reynolds, 'how fine the air--a temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies. I never liked stubble fields so much as now--aye, better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble plain looks warm, in the same way that some pictures look warm. This struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it.' The vein in which he composed is one of simple objectivity, very different from the passionate and complex phases of introspective thought and feeling which inspired the spring odes. The result is the most Greek thing, except the fragment To Maia, which Keats ever wrote. It opens up no such far-reaching avenues to the mind and soul of the reader as the odes To a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale, or To Melancholy, but in execution is more complete and faultless than any of them. In the first stanza the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the middle stanza the touches of literary art and Greek personification have an exquisite congruity and ease. Keats himself has hardly anywhere else written with so fine a subtlety of nature-observation. Students of form will notice a slight deviation from that of the spring odes, by which the second member of the stanza is now a septet instead of a sestet, one of its rimes being repeated three times instead of twice.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Had Keats been destined to know health and peace of mind, who can guess how much more work in this vein and of this quality the world might have owed to him?
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Thoughts suggested on the banks of Nith, near the poet's residence: the third poem in Memorials of a Tour in Scotland.
[2] First printed in Hunt's Reflector and reprinted in the two-volume edition of Lamb's works published in 1818.
[3] A copy of Fairfax's Tasso appears in the list of books left by Keats at his death.
[4] This point has been made by Mr Buxton Forman, Complete Works of J.K., ii. p. 41, footnote.
[5] I let this paragraph, somewhat officious and over-explanatory though it now seems to me, stand as I wrote it thirty years ago, for the sake of the pleasure I have since had in learning that the identical passage was singled out by Charles Lamb, in a notice which has only lately come to light, (see below, p. 471) as the pick of the whole Lamia volume.
[6] That published by Allen Awnmarsh, 5th ed. 1684, notes Woodhouse; and a copy of the same is noted in the list of Keats's books.
[7] See article by H. Noble M'Cracken in Philological Journal of the Chicago University, 1908. The romance of Floire and Blancheflor, which Boccaccio in the Filocolo expands with additions and inventions of his own, tells the story of a Moorish prince in Spain and a Christian damsel, brought up together and loving each other as children and thrown apart in maturity by adverse influences and ill fortune. After many chivalric and fantastic adventures both in West and East, of the kind usual in such romances, judicial combats, captures by corsairs, warnings by a magic ring and the like, Floire learns that Blancheflor is immured with other ladies in an impregnable tower by the 'Admiral of Babylon,' who desires to marry her. To Babylon Floire follows, cajoles the guardian of the tower and one of her damsels to admit him to her chamber concealed in a basket of roses: whence issuing, he and she are brought to one another's arms in happiness; various other adventures ensuing before they can be finally free and united. There exists a fragmentary English medieval version of this romance, which might easily have been known to Keats from the abstract and quotations given by George Ellis in his Specimens of Early English Metrical Romance (1806). But unluckily neither this nor, apparently, any version of the original French romance poem contains those incidents recounted in the Filocolo to which Keats's poem runs most closely parallel. These we must accordingly suppose to be Boccaccio's own invention and to have been known to Keats, directly or indirectly, from the Filocolo itself.
[8] In both the chapel monuments and the banquet-hall corbels there may be a memory of the following passage from Cary's Dante (quoted by Mr Buxton Forman and Prof. de Selincourt):--
As to support incumbent floor or roof, For corbel is a figure sometimes seen That crumples up its knees into its breast; With the feign'd posture, stirring ruth unfeign'd In the beholder's fancy; so I saw These fashion'd--.
[9] It may be noted that in the corresponding scene in the Filocolo a single special colour effect is got by describing the room as lit up by two great pendent self-luminous carbuncles.
[10] Paradise Lost, v. 341-347.
[11] Ed. 1860, pp. 269, 270.
[12] The final couplet of this stanza, as Keats wrote it after several attempts, is weak. Madeline continues,--
Oh leave me not in this eternal woe, For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go.
In the alternative version, intended to leave no doubt of what had happened, which he read to Woodhouse and Woodhouse disapproved, Madeline's speech breaks off and the poet in his own name adds,--
See while she speaks his arms encroaching slow Have zon'd her, heart to heart,--loud, loud, the dark winds blow.
[13] Keats, mentally placing his story in England and writing it at Teignmouth, had at first turned this line otherwise,--'For o'er the bleak Dartmoor I have a home for thee.'
[14] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the death of the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of rime. 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.
The touch of flippant realism which Keats had, again to Woodhouse's distress, proposed to throw into his story at this point was as follows. For the four last lines of the last stanza Keats had proposed to write,--
Angela went off Twitch'd with the palsy: and with face deform The beadsman stiffen'd, 'twixt a sigh and laugh Ta'en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough.
In printing the poem Keats, probably at the instance of Taylor and Woodhouse, reverted to the earlier and better version.
[15] May the following be counted evidence to the same effect? The old woman in Apuleius, chap. xxi, just as she is about to tell her daughter the story of Cupid and Psyche, says, 'as the visions of the day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night do often chance contrary.' Compare Keats at the end of the Ode on Indolence:--
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night, And for the day faint visions there is store.
[16] The Musee Napoleon is a set of four volumes illustrating with outline engravings the works of classic art collected by Napoleon Bonaparte as spoils of war and brought to Paris. Keats's original tracing from the Sosibios vase was in the collection of Sir Charles Dilke and is reproduced on the frontispiece of the Clarendon Press edition of Keats's poems, 1906. The subject has been much discussed, but only from the point of view of the classical archaeologist, which ignores the part played by paintings as well as antiques in stimulating Keats's imagination. From that point of view the nearest approach, as I hold, to a right solution is set out in a paper by Paul Wolters, in Archiv fuer das Studium der neueren Sprachen, Band xx, Heft 1/2: Braunschweig; though I think he is too positive in ruling out Roman representations of the Suovetaurilia such as the fine urn at Holland House suggested as Keats's source by the late Mr A. S. Murray and reproduced in The Odes of Keats, by A. C. Downer, M.A. (Oxford, 1897).
[17] Sweet Philomela (then he heard her sing) I do not envy thy sweet carolling, But do admire thee each even and morrow Canst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow.