XIV. WORK OF 1818, 1819.--II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS…

XIV. WORK OF 1818, 1819.--II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS

Snatches expressive of moods--Ode to Maia--Hyperion: its scheme and scale--Sources: Homer and Hesiod--Pierre Ronsard--Miltonisms--Voices of the Titans--A match and no match for Milton--A great beginning--Question as to sequel--Difficulties and a suggestion--The scheme abandoned--The Eve of St Mark--Chaucer and Morris--Judgement of Rossetti--Dissent of W. B. Scott--The solution--Keats as dramatist--Otho and King Stephen--The Cap and Bells--Why a failure--Flashes of Beauty--Recast of Hyperion--Its leading ideas--Their history in Keats's mind--Preamble: another feast of fruits--The sanctuary--The admonition--The monitress--The attempt breaks off.

Much of our clearest insight into Keats's mind and genius is gained from the class of his fragments which do not represent any definite poetical purpose or plan, and were never meant to be more than mere snatches and momentary outpourings. Such, though they only express a passing mood, are the lines in his letter to Reynolds of February 1818, translating the early song of the thrush into a warning not to fret after knowledge. Such is the contrasted passage of shifting, perplexed meditation on the problems of life, and the failure of the imagination to solve them alone, in the rimed epistle to the same friend six weeks later. Such, very especially, is the cry declaring that the true poet is the soul sympathetic with every form and mode of life and ready to merge its identity in that of any and every sentient creature: compare the passage in one of his letters where he tells how his own can enter into that of a sparrow picking about the gravel:--

Where's the Poet? show him! show him, Muses nine! that I may know him. 'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he King, Or poorest of the beggar-clan, Or any other wondrous thing A man may be'twixt ape and Plato; 'Tis the man who with a bird, Wren, or Eagle, finds his way to All its instincts; he hath heard The Lion's roaring, and can tell What his horny throat expresseth, And to him the Tiger's yell Comes articulate and presseth On his ear like mother-tongue.

Such again are the several passages in which he expressed a mood that frequently beset him, that of being rapt in spirit too high above earth to breathe, too far above his body not to feel an awful intoxication and fear of coming madness:--

It is an awful mission, A terrible division; And leaves a gulph austere To be fill'd with worldly fear. Aye, when the soul is fled Too high above our head, Affrighted do we gaze After its airy maze, As doth a mother wild, When her young infant child Is in eagle's claws-- And is not this the cause Of madness?--God of Song, Thou bearest me along Through sights I scarce can bear; O let me, let me share With the hot lyre and thee, The staid Philosophy. Temper my lonely hours, And let me see thy bowers More unalarm'd!

But our main business in this chapter must be not with illuminating snatches such as these, but with things begun of set purpose and not carried through.

When Keats, drawing near the end of his work on Endymion, was meditating what he meant to be his second long and arduous poem, Hyperion, he still thought and spoke of it as a 'romance.' But a phrase he uses elsewhere shows him conscious that its style would have to be more 'naked and Grecian' than that of Endymion. Was he trying an experiment in the naked and Grecian style when on May day 1818 he wrote at Teignmouth the beginning of an ode on Maia? He never went on with it, and the fragment as it stands is of fourteen lines only; but these are in a more truly Greek manner than anything else he wrote, not even excepting, as I have just said, the Ode to Autumn. The words figuring what Greek poets were and did for Greek communities, and expressing the aspiration to be even as they, bear the true, the classic, mint-mark of absolute economy and simplicity in absolute rightness. Considering how meagre are the hints antiquity has left us concerning Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades and mother of Hermes, and her late identification with the Roman divinity to whom sacrifice was paid on the first of May, and hence how little material for development the theme seems to offer,--considering these things, perhaps it is as well that Keats, despite his promise to finish it 'all in good time,' should have tantalized posterity by breaking off this beautiful thing where he did.

The next fragment we come to is colossal,--it is Hyperion itself. From the poem as far as it was written no reader could guess either that it was taken up as a 'feverous relief' from tendance on his dying brother, or that in continuing it later under Brown's roof he had to put force upon himself against the intrusion of private cares and affections upon his thoughts, as well as against a reaction from his own mode of conceiving and handling the task itself. The impression Hyperion makes is one, as Woodhouse on first reading it justly noted, of serene mastery by the poet both over himself and over his art:--'It has an air of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power': and again,--'the above lines give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur and quiet power which characterize the poem.' Woodhouse goes on to tell what he knew of the scheme of the work as Keats had first conceived it:--

The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo,--and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the giants for Saturn's reestablishment-- with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet's brain.

The statement inserted by the publishers at the head of the volume in which the poem appeared in 1820, that Hyperion was intended to be as long as Endymion, is probably also due to Woodhouse, their right-hand man (Keats, we know, had nothing to do with it), and may represent what he had gathered in conversation to have been the poet's original idea. Mr de Selincourt has shown grounds for inferring that when Keats came to actual grips with the subject he decided to treat it much more briefly and partially. Clearly the essential meaning of the story was for him symbolical; it meant the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers. Into this story the poet plunges, not even in the middle but near the close. When his poem opens, the younger gods, the Olympians, have won their victory, and the Titans, all except Hyperion, are already overthrown. In their debate whether to fight again general despondency prevails, and only one of the fallen, Enceladus, strikes a note of defiance; so that it seems as if there were nothing left to tell except the coming defeat or abdication of Hyperion in favour of Apollo. Hyperion, it is true, has not yet spoken when we are called away from the council, and Keats might have made him side with Enceladus and rouse his brethren to a temporary renewal of the strife. Or leaving the Titans conquered, he might, as Woodhouse suggests, have gone on to narrate the second warfare, that waged against the Olympians not by them but later by the Giants in revolt. In either case we should have seen the poet try his hand, hitherto untested in such themes, on scenes of superhuman battle and violence.

Woodhouse is right at any rate in saying that the hints for handling the theme to be found in the ancient poets are few and uncertain, leaving a modern writer free to invent most of his incidents for himself. Beyond the bald notices in his classical dictionaries, Chapman's Iliad would have given Keats a picture of the dethroned Saturn: Chapman's Homer's hymn to Apollo might have filled his imagination, even to overflowing, with visions of the youth of that god in Delos,--'Chief isle of the embowered Cyclades': Hesiod's Theogony (which he had doubtless read in the translation of Pope's butt and enemy, Thomas Cooke) would have taught him more, but very confusedly, about the warfare of Gods, Titans, and Giants in general, besides inspiring his vision of the den where the Titans lie vanquished; while he would have gleaned other stray matters from Sandys's notes on certain passages of Ovid. As far as his beloved English poets are concerned, brief allusions occur in the Faerie Queene and in Paradise Lost, where Milton includes the fallen Titans among the rebel hosts that flock to the standard of Satan in hell. But I think the source freshest in his mind at the moment when he began to write is one which has not hitherto been suggested, the ode of the famous French Renaissance poet Ronsard to his friend Michel de l'Hopital. We know by his translation of the sonnet Nature ornant Cassandre that Keats had the works of Ronsard in his hands--lent, it would seem, by Mr Taylor--exactly about this time. The ode in question, partly founded on Hesiod, partly on Horace,[1] but largely on Ronsard's own invention, relates the birth of the Muses, their training by their mother Memoire (= Mnemosyne), their desire as young girls to visit their father Jupiter, their mother's consent, their undersea journey to the palace of Oceanus where Jupiter is present at a high festival, their choral singing before him, first of the strife of Neptune and Pallas for the soil of Attica, and then of the battle of the gods and giants:--

Apres sur la plus grosse corde D'un bruit qui tonnait jusqu'aux cieux, Le pouce des Muses accorde L'assaut des Geants et des Dieux.

Keats, although he writes of the battle of the Gods not against the Giants but against the earlier Titans, yet when he rolls out rebel names like this,--

Coeus, and Gyges, and Briareus; Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion Were pent in regions of laborious breath Dungeon'd in opaque elements,--

Keats, when he rolls out these rebel names, has surely been haunted by the strophes of Ronsard:--

Styx d'un noir halecret rempare Ses bras, ses jambes, et son sein, Sa fille amenant par la main Contre Cotte, Gyge, et Briare.[2]

Neptune a la fourche estofee De trois crampons vint se mesler Par la troupe contre Typhee Qui rouoit une fonde en l'air: Ici Phoebus d'un trait qu'il jette Fit Encelade trebucher, La Porphyre lui fit broncher Hors des poings l'arc et la sagette.

For such an epic theme Keats felt instinctively, when he set to work, that an epic and not a romance treatment was necessary; and for an English poet the obvious epic model is Milton. Ever since his visit to Bailey at Oxford, and especially during his stay at Teignmouth the next year, Keats had been absorbing Milton and taking him into his being, as formerly he had taken Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, and now he can utter his own thoughts and imaginations almost with Milton's voice. Speaking generally of the blank verse of Hyperion, its rhythms are almost as full and sonorous as Milton's own, but simpler; its march more straightforward, with less of what De Quincey calls 'solemn planetary wheelings'; its periods do not sweep through such complex evolutions to so stately and far foreseen a close. The Miltonisms in Hyperion are rather matters of diction and construction--construction almost always derived from the Latin--than of rhythm: sometimes also they are matters of direct verbal echo and reminiscence. To take a single instance out of many:--

For as among us mortals omens drear Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he.

It is only in Hyperion that Keats habitually thus puts the noun Latin-wise before the adjective: and the omens that 'perplex' are derived from the eclipse which in Paradise Lost 'with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.' Throughout the fragment Keats uses frequently and with fine effect the Miltonic figure of the 'turn' or rhetorical iteration of identical words to a fresh purport, as in that noble phrase which seems to have inspired one of the finest passages in Shelley's Defence of Poesy[3]:

How beautiful, if Sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.

It has been said, and justly, that Keats has done nothing greater than the debate of the fallen Titans in their cave of exile, modelled frankly in its main outlines on that of the rebel angels in Paradise Lost, but with the personages and utterances nevertheless entirely his own. In creating and animating these colossal figures between the elemental and the human, what masterly imaginative instinct does he show--to take one point only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realise their voices. Thus of the murmuring of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:--

There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise Among immortals when a God gives sign, With hushing finger, how he means to load His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, With thunder, and with music, and with pomp: Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines.

This is not a whit the less Keats for his use of the Miltonic 'turn' in rounding the period by a repetition in the last line of the 'bleak-grown pines' from the first. Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:--

So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea, Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, But cogitation in his watery shades, Arose, with locks not oozy, and began, In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.

Here the affirmation by negation in the second and fourth lines is a Latin usage already employed by Keats in the Pot of Basil[4]: the 'locks not oozy' are a reminiscence from Lycidas and the 'first-endeavouring tongue' from The Vacation Exercise. But into what a vitally apt and beautiful new music of his own has Keats moulded and converted all such echoes. Once more, of Clymene following Enceladus in debate:--

So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook That, lingering along a pebbled coast, Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, Came booming thus.

In this last example the sublimity owes nothing to Milton except in the single case of the repetition in the third line. Even the scoffing Byron recognized after Keats's death the authentic 'large utterance of the early gods' in passages like these, though Keats in his modesty had himself refused to recognize it.

Further to compare Keats with Milton,--the poet of Hyperion is naturally no match for Milton in passages where the elder master has been inspired by life-long impassioned meditation on his readings of history and romance, like that famous one ending with

What resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son. Begirt with British and Armoric knights Or all who since, baptized or infidel Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebizond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarrabia--

On the other hand Milton, even in the sweetness and the nearness to nature of Comus and his other early work, is scarce a match for Keats when it comes to the evocation, even in a mode relatively simple, of nature's secret sources of delight,--as thus:

throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves Though scarcely heard in many a green recess:

while comparison is scarcely possible in the case of the nature images most characteristically Keats's own, for instance:--

As when, upon a tranced summer night, Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir--.

Neither to the Greek nor the Miltonic, but essentially to the modern, the romantic, sentiment of nature does it belong to try and express, by such a concourse of metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of the oaks among the other trees--their quasi-human venerableness--their verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky.

All good poems, it has been said, begin well. None begins better than Hyperion, with its 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' and its grand mournful dialogue between the discrowned Saturn and the Titaness Thea, his would-be comforter. Then, with a rich contrast from this scene of despondency, comes the scene, dazzling and resplendent for all its ominousness, of the mingled wrath and terror of the threatened sun-god in his flaming palace. The second book, relating the council of the dethroned Titans, has neither the contrasted sublimities of the first nor the intensity, rising almost to fever-point, of the unfinished third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to my mind, fully on a level with the other two. And it is in this book, in the speech of Oceanus, that Keats sets forth the whole symbolical purport and meaning of the myth as he had conceived it:--

Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain; O folly! for to bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well! As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, And thousand other signs of purer life; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, And feedeth still, more comely than itself? Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? Or shall the tree be envious of the dove Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings To wander wherewithal and find its joys? We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves, But eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower Above us in their beauty, and must reign In right thereof; for 'tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might:

That difficulty, to which we have referred, of surmising how there could have remained material to fill out a poem on the Titanomachia which had begun with the Titans, all but one, dethroned already, seems to increase when we consider the above speech of Oceanus, setting forth with resigned prophetic wisdom the fated necessity of their fall. It increases still further when Clymene, following on the same side as Oceanus, tells how she has heard the strains of a new and ravishing music from the lyre of Apollo which have made her cast away in despair the instrument of her own formless music, the sea-shell; and still further again when in the next book we witness the meeting of Apollo with the Titaness Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, who for his sake has 'forsaken old and sacred thrones,' and when we hear him proclaim how in the inspiration of her presence,

Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.

Before the glory of this new-deified Apollo, what could long have delayed the defeat or abdication of the elder sun-god Hyperion?--what could have remained for Keats to invent that should have much enriched or lengthened out his poem? The sense of the difficulty of sustaining the battle of the primeval powers against these new and nobler successors may well have been one of the things (even had he not had Milton's comparative failure with the warfare in heaven to warn him) that hindered his going on with his poem. To the reader there occurs another and even greater difficulty: and that is that Keats had already given to his fallen elder gods or Titans so much not only of majesty but of nobleness and goodness that it is hard to see wherein he could have shown their successors excelling them. He had represented Saturn as wroth, indeed, at his downfall, but chiefly because it leaves him

--smother'd up, And buried from all godlike exercise Of influence benign on planets pale, Of admonition to the winds and seas, Of peaceful sway above man's harvesting, And all those acts which Deity supreme Doth ease its heart of love in.

Increase of knowledge, of skill in the arts of life and of beauty, the gods of the new dynasty might indeed extend to mankind, but what increase of love and beneficence? Even the relations of Saturn to his father Coelus (the Greek Uranus), which in the ancient cosmogony are of the crudest barbarity, Keats in Hyperion makes benignant and sympathetic.

Such inherent difficulties as these might well have made Keats diffident of his power to complete his poem as a rounded or satisfying whole had its intended scope been what we are told. But I am sometimes tempted to conjecture that his root idea had been other than what his friends attributed to him,--that battle, and the victory of the Olympians over the Titans or Giants or both, would not in fact have been his main theme, but that he intended to present to us Apollo, enthroned after the abdication of Hyperion, in the character of a prophet and to have put into his mouth revelations of things to come, a great monitory vision of the world's future. To such a supposition some colour is surely lent by the speech of Apollo above quoted on the 'knowledge enormous' just poured into his brain by Mnemosyne. On the other hand it has to be remembered that Keats himself, in a forecast of his work made ten months before it was written, shows clearly that he then meant his Apollo to be above all things a god of action.

Keats himself, writing some eight months later, when he had finally decided to give up his epic attempt, cites as his chief reason a re-action of his critical judgment against the Miltonic style, at least as a style suitable for him, Keats, to work in:--

I have given up Hyperion--there were too many Miltonic inversions in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion, and put a mark * to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul 'twas imagination--I cannot make the distinction--Every now and then there is a Miltonic intonation--But I cannot make the division properly.

And again: 'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.' This re-action was certainly not fully conscious or formulated in Keats's mind by the previous winter. But it would seem none the less to have been working in him instinctively: for the moment he had turned, in The Eve of St Agnes, to a romance in the flowing, straightforward, Spenserian-Chattertonian manner of narration, he had been able to carry his task through with felicity and ease.

This was on his excursion to Hampshire in the latter half of January. Within three weeks of his return he was at work again on a kindred theme of popular and traditional belief, The Eve of St Mark. The belief was that a person standing in the church porch of any town or village on the evening before St Mark's day (April 24th) might thereby gain a vision of all the inhabitants fated to die or fall grievously sick within the year. Those destined to die would be seen passing in but not returning, those who were to be in peril and recover would go in and after a while come out. The heroine of the poem, to whom this vision would appear, was to be a maiden of Canterbury named Bertha, no doubt after the first Christian queen of Kent, the Frankish wife of Ethelbert; the scene, Canterbury itself, memories of the poet's stay there in 1817 mingling apparently with impressions of his recent visit to Chichester. Keats never got on with this poem after his first three or four days' work (February 14th-17th 1819), and it remains a mere fragment, tantalizing and singular, of a hundred and twenty lines' length. Why? Perhaps merely because it was begun almost at the very hour when he became the accepted lover of Fanny Brawne. We have seen how various causes, but chiefly the obsession of that passion, paralysed his power of work for the next two months, and what were the thoughts and tasks that held him fully occupied afterwards. It has been suggested by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Keats meant to give the story a turn applicable to himself and his mistress, and that the present fragment would have served as the opening of a poem which afterwards, in sickness, he mentioned to her as being in his mind:--'I would show some one in love, as I am, with a person living in such Liberty as you do.' I can find no sure evidence, internal or external, either to refute the suggestion or confirm it.

The fragment of The Eve of St Mark is Keats's only attempt at narrative writing in the eight-syllabled four-stress couplet. Its pace and movement are nearer to Chaucer in The Romaunt of the Rose or The House of Fame than to Coleridge or Scott or any other model of Keats's own time. That he was writing with Chaucer in his mind is proved by some lines in which he tries in Rowley fashion to reproduce Chaucer's actual style and vocabulary, thus:--

Gif ye wol stonden hardie wight-- Amiddes of the blacke night-- Righte in the churche porch, pardie Ye wol behold a companie Approchen thee full dolourouse For sooth to sain from everich house Be it in city or village Wol come the Phantom and image Of ilka gent and ilka carle Who colde Deathe hath in parle And wol some day that very year Touchen with foule venime spear And sadly do them all to die-- Hem all shalt thou see verilie-- And everichon shall by thee pass All who must die that year, Alas.

These lines give us a sure key to the main motive of the story which was to follow. With some others in the same style, they are quoted by the poet as composing a gloss written in minute script on the margin of a wonderful illuminated book over which the damsel is found poring and which is to have some mysterious influence on her destiny. More noticeable and interesting than their somewhat random Rowleyism is the way in which some of the descriptive lines in the body of the poem anticipate the very cadences of Chaucer's great latter-day disciple, William Morris. The first eight or ten lines of the following might have come straight from The Man born to be King or The Land East of the Sun, and provide, as it were, in the history of our poetry a direct stepping-stone between Chaucer and Morris:--

The city streets were clean and fair From wholesome drench of April rains; And, on the western window panes, The chilly sunset faintly told Of unmatur'd green vallies cold, Of the green thorny bloomless hedge, Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge, Of primroses by shelter'd rills, And daisies on the aguish hills. Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell: The silent streets were crowded well With staid and pious companies, Warm from their fire-side orat'ries; And moving, with demurest air, To even-song, and vesper prayer. Each arched porch, and entry low, Was fill'd with patient folk and slow, With whispers hush, and shuffling feet, While play'd the organ loud and sweet.

The relation of this fragment to the Pre-Raphaelites of the mid nineteenth century and their work is altogether curious and interesting. It was natural that it should appeal to them by the pure and living freshness of English nature-description with which it opens, by the perfectly imagined scene of hushed movement in the twilight streets that follows, perhaps most of all by the insistent delight in vivid colour, and in minuteness of animated and suggestive detail, which marks the final indoor scene of the maiden Bertha over her book by firelight. But what is strange is that Rossetti should not only have coupled the fragment with La Belle Dame sans Merci as 'the chastest and choicest example of Keats's maturing manner,' an opinion which may well pass, but that he should have claimed it as showing 'astonishingly real mediaevalism for one not bred an artist,' and even as the finest picture of the Middle Age period ever done. The truth is that the description of the Sabbath streets and the maiden's chamber are not mediaeval at all and probably not intended to be, while the one thing so intended, the illuminated manuscript from which she reads, is a quite impossible invention jumbling fantastically together things that never could have figured in the same manuscript, things from the Golden Legend, from the book of Exodus, the book of Revelation, with others from no possible manuscript source at all. Keats evidently took some interest in mediaeval illuminations, for in speculating on the old skulls of supposed monks at Beauly Abbey he had apostrophized one of them,--

Poor Skull, thy fingers set ablaze With silver saint in golden rays, The holy Missal: thou didst craze Mid bead and spangle, While others pass'd their idle days In coil and wrangle.

But he can have seen few and made no study of them, and his imagined mystically illuminated book in The Eve of St Mark is invented with no such fine instinctive tact or likelihood as his imagined Grecian urn of the ode.

An elder member of the Rossetti circle, that shrewd and caustic, very originally minded if only half accomplished Scottish poet and painter, William Bell Scott, was much exercised over his friend's misconception in this matter. I will give his comment, certainly in some points just, as written to me in 1885. 'On reading the fragment it seems to me impossible to resist the conclusion that the scene represented is of the present day. The dull and quiet Sunday evening represented is of our time in any cathedral town in England, not the Sunday evening of old when morning Mass was the religious observance, and the evening was spent in long-bow and popinjay games and practice. The weary girl sits at a coal fire with a screen behind her, a Japanese screen apparently,' [Japanese or old English lacquer imitating Oriental the screen certainly is]. 'Every item of the description is modern. But alas! what shall we say to the ancient illuminated MS. she has in hand, with the pictures of early martyrs dying by fire, the Inquisition punishment of heretics, and the writing annotated, the notes referred to modern printers' signs? As he describes a mediaeval MS. book so badly, it may be said he intended the scene of the poem to be mediaeval, but did the description also so badly. But no, the description of the dreariness of Sunday evening, utterly silent but for the passing of the people going to evening sermon, is admirable.' By 'badly' my old friend meant inexactly. But Keats never was nor tried to be exact in his antiquarianism. If we take The Eve of St Agnes as intended to be a faithful picture from the Middle Ages, it simply goes to pieces in the line--

And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.

Probably neither The Eve of St Agnes nor St Mark's Eve were dated with any definiteness in the poet's mind at all. A reference he makes to the last-named piece in a letter from Winchester the following autumn lends no definite support either to the modern or the mediaeval interpretation:--'Some time since I began a poem called The Eve of St Mark, quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town on a coolish evening.' The impression of mediaevalism which the two poems convey is not by any evidence of antiquarian knowledge or accuracy but by the intense spirit of romance that is in them,--by that impassioned delight in vivid colour and beautiful, imaginative detail which we have noted.

After his four days' start on this poem in February came the spell of two months' idleness which towards its close yielded La Belle Dame sans Merci and came to an end with the Ode to Psyche, followed in the course of May by the four other odes. The choral Song of the Four Fairies, for some inchoate opera, sent by Keats to his brother together with La Belle Dame, is not worth pausing upon, and we may pass to Keats's main work of the ensuing July and August, Otho the Great. This is no fragment, having been duly finished to the last scene of the last act; but it is very much of an experiment. The question whether Keats, had he lived, might have become a great dramatic poet and creator is one of the most interesting possible. His intense and growing interest in humankind, together with his recorded and avowed liability to receive ('like putty,' as modern criticism has conjectured of Shakespeare) the impression of any character he might come in contact with, has led many students to believe that he had in him the stuff of a great creative playwright. Otho the Great does nothing to solve the question. The plot and construction, as we have said, were entirely Brown's, building with quite arbitrary freedom on certain bald historical facts of the rebellion raised against Otho, in the course of his Hungarian wars, by his son Ludolf and the Red Duke Conrad of Lorraine, whom the emperor subsequently forgave. Creation demands fore-knowledge, premeditation on the characters you desire to create and the situations in which they are to be placed, and Keats, Brown tells us, only foreknew what was coming in any scene after they had sat down at the table to work on it. His business was to supply the words, and what the result shows is only the surprising facility with which he could by this time improvise poetry to order. The speeches in Otho are much more than passably poetical, they are often quite brilliant and touched with Keats's unique genius for felicity in lines and phrases. But they affect us as put into the mouths of puppet speakers, not as coming out of the hearts and passions of men and women.

In rhythm they are vital and varied enough, in style extremely high-pitched, and they resemble much Elizabethan work of the second order in smothering action and passion under a redundance and feverish excess of poetry. There is violence amounting to hysteria alike in the villainy of Conrad and of his sister Auranthe, the remorse of Albert, and the mixture of filial devotion and lover's blindness in Ludolf, with his vengeful frenzy when he finds how he has been gulled. Keats, it is recorded, had in his eye the special gift of Edmund Kean for enacting frantic extremes and long-drawn agonies of passion; and it is possible that as played by him the last act, of which Keats took the conduct as well as the writing into his own hands, might have proved effective on the stage. It shows the maddened Conrad bent on executing vengeance on the traitress Auranthe, and insanely stabbing empty air while he imagines he is stabbing his victim, until curtains drawn aside disclose an inner apartment where she has at the very moment fallen self-slain. But it is doubtful whether any acting could carry off a plot so ultra-romantically extravagant and in places so obscure, or characters so incommensurably more eloquent than they are alive. Nor do lovers of Keats commonly care to read the play twice, for all its bursts and coruscations of fine poetry, feeling that these do not spring from the poet's own inner self and imagination, but are rather as fireworks fitted by a man of genius on to a frame which another man, barely of talent, has put together.

The case is different when we come to King Stephen, the brief dramatic fragment on which Keats wrought alone after Otho the Great was finished. This teaches us one thing at any rate about Keats, that he could at will call away his imagination from matters luxurious or refreshing to the spirit, from themes broodingly meditative or tragically tender, to deal in a manner of fiery energy with the clash of war. He is still enough a child of the Renaissance to make his twelfth-century knights and princes quote Homer in their taunts and counter-taunts; but in the three-and-a-half scenes which he wrote he makes us feel his Stephen, defiant in defeat, a real elemental force and not a mere mouther of valiant rhetoric, fine and concentrated as the rhetoric sometimes is, as for instance when an enemy taunts him with being disarmed and helpless and he cries back, 'What weapons has the lion but himself?'

In persuading Keats to work with him on a tragedy for the stage, Brown had had the entirely laudable motive of putting his friend in the way of earning money for them both. But what would we not have given that the time and labour thus, as it turned out, thrown away should have yielded us from Keats's self another Isabella or Eve of St Agnes, or a finished Eve of St Mark, or even another Lamia? Brown's next piece of suggestion and would-be help was far more unfortunate still. We have seen how in the unhappy weeks after Keats's return from Winchester in October, he spent his mornings in Brown's company spinning the verses of a comic and satiric fairy tale the scheme of which they had concocted together,--The Cap and Bells or The Jealousies. The idea of the friends in this was no doubt to throw a challenge to Byron, the first cantos of whose Don Juan had lately been launched upon a dazzled and scandalized world. Byron's genius, the spirit, that is, of brilliant devilry and worldly mockery which was the sincerest part of his genius, with his rich experiences of life, travel and society, of passion and dissipation and the extremes of fame and obloquy, and his incomparable address and versatility in playing tricks of legerdemain with ideas and language, had here all found their perfect opportunity for display. Attempts at worldly banter and satire by the tender-hearted, intensely loving and imagining Keats, with his narrow and in the main rather second-rate social experience, were never more than wry-mouthed as I have called them, ineffectual, and essentially against the grain.

His collaborator Brown imagined he had a gift for satiric fairy tales, but his recorded efforts in that kind are silly and dull as well as inclining to coarseness. What happier result could be expected from their new joint work than that which posterity deplores in The Cap and Bells? The story is of an Indian Faery emperor Elfinan,--a name suggested by Spenser,--enamoured of an English maiden Bertha Pearl,--the very Bertha of The Eve of St Mark, resuscitated to our amazement,--but having for political reasons to seek in marriage a Faery princess Bellanaine, who herself is in love with an English youth named Hubert. The eighty-eight stanzas which Keats wrote on those autumn mornings in Brown's room carry the tale no farther than Elfinan's despatching his chancellor Crafticanto on an embassy to fetch Bellanaine on an aerial journey from her home in Imaus, his consultation with his magician Hum as to the means of escaping the marriage and conveying himself secretly to England, his departure, and the arrival of Bellanaine and her escort to find the palace empty and the emperor flown. How the seriously, perhaps tragically, conceived Bertha of St Mark's Eve, with the mystic book fated to have influence on her life, could have been worked, as they were evidently meant to be worked, into this new ridiculous narrative, we cannot guess, nor how the relations of Bellanaine with her mortal lover would have been managed.

Before Keats's deepening despondency and recklessness caused him to drop writing altogether, which apparently happened early in December, he was evidently out of conceit with The Cap and Bells.[5] One of the most unfortunate things about the attempt is the choice of the Spenserian stanza for its metre. Keats had probably wished to avoid seeming merely to imitate Byron, as he might have seemed to do had he written in the ottava rima of Don Juan, the one perfectly fit measure for such a blend of fantasy and satire as he was attempting. But not even Keats's power over the Spenserian stanza could make it a fit vehicle for his purpose. Thomson and Shenstone had used it in work of mild and leisurely playfulness, but to bite in satire or sting in epigram it cannot effectively be bent. To my sense the precedent most in Keats's mind was not these, but the before-mentioned translation of Wieland's Oberon by Sotheby. Sotheby had invented a modified form of the Spenserian stanza riming abbaccddc instead of abcbbdbdd and keeping the final alexandrine. Much of the machinery and spirit of The Cap and Bells--the magic journeys through the air--the comic atmosphere and adventures of the courts--are closely akin to the jocular parts of this Oberon. Some of the passages of mere fun and playfulness are pleasant enough, like that description of a dilapidated hackney coach (much resembling the four-wheeler of our youth) which Hunt selected to publish in the Indicator while Keats was lying sick in his house the next year: but the attempts at social satire are almost always feeble and tiresome, and still more so those at political satire, turning for the most part rather obscurely on the scandals, then at their height, attending the relations of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In the faery narrative itself there break forth momentary flashes from the true genius of the poet, such as might delight the reader if he could lose his sense of irritation at the rubbish from amidst which they gleam. As thus, of the princess's flight through the air (was Keats thinking, in the first line, of the children carried heavenward by angels in Orcagna's Triumph of Death?)

As in old pictures tender cherubim A child's soul thro' the sapphir'd canvas bear, So, thro' a real heaven, on they swim With the sweet princess on her plumag'd lair, Speed giving to the winds her lustrous hair.

Or this, telling how Bertha of Canterbury, in Keats's queer new conception of her, was really a changeling born in the jungle:--

She is a changeling of my management; She was born at midnight in an Indian wild; Her mother's screams with the striped tiger's blent, While the torch-bearing slaves a halloo sent Into the jungles.

Or again, some of the stanzas describing the welcome prepared in Elfinan's capital for the faery princess after her flight: note in the last the persistence with which Keats carries into these incongruous climates his passion for the English spring flowers:--

The morn is full of holiday; loud bells With rival clamours ring from every spire; Cunningly-station'd music dies and swells In echoing places; when the winds respire, Light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire; A metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm, Comes from the northern suburbs; rich attire Freckles with red and gold the moving swarm; While here and there clear trumpets blow a keen alarm.

And again:--

As flowers turn their faces to the sun, So on our flight with hungry eyes they gaze, And, as we shap'd our course, this, that way run, With mad-cap pleasure, or hand-clasp'd amaze; Sweet in the air a mild-ton'd music plays, And progresses through its own labyrinth; Buds gather'd from the green spring's middle-days, They scatter'd,--daisy, primrose, hyacinth,-- Or round white columns wreath'd from capital to plinth.

After his mornings spent in Brown's company over the strained frivolities of The Cap and Bells, Keats was in the same weeks striving, alone with himself of an evening, to utter the new thoughts on life and poetry which he found taking shape in the depths of his being. He took up again the abandoned Hyperion, and began rewriting it no longer as a direct narrative, but as a vision shewn and interpreted by a supernatural monitress acting to him somewhat the same part as Virgil acts to Dante. In altering the form and structure of the poem Keats also takes pains to alter its style, de-Miltonizing and de-latinizing, sometimes terribly to their disadvantage, the passages which he takes over from the earlier version. It is not in these, it is in the two hundred and seventy lines of its wholly new pre-amble or introduction that the value of the altered poem lies.

The reader remembers how Keats had broken off his work on the original Hyperion at the point where Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses, is enkindling the brain of Apollo by mysteriously imparting to him her ancient wisdom and all-embracing knowledge. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of mythology he had lately bought,[6] he now identifies this Greek Mnemosyne with the Roman Moneta, goddess of warning or admonition; and being possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome was not far from that of Saturn, makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess and guardian of Saturn's temple. His vision takes him first into a grove or garden of trees and flowers and fountains, with a feast of summer fruits spread on the moss before an embowered arbour. The events that follow, and the converse held between the poet and the priestess, are in their ethical and allegoric meanings at many points obscure, and capable, like all symbols that are truly symbolic, of various interpretations. But the leading ideas they embody can be recognised clearly enough.

They are primarily the same ideas, developed in a deeper and more sombre spirit, as had been present in Keats's mind almost from the beginning: the idea that in the simple delights of nature and of art as unreflectingly felt in youth there is no abiding place for the poetic spirit, that from the enjoyment of such delights it must rise to thoughts higher and more austere and prompting to more arduous tasks: the further idea that to fit it for such tasks two things above all are necessary, growth in human sympathy through the putting down of self, and growth in knowledge and wisdom through strenuous study and meditation. Such ideas had already been thrown out by Keats in Sleep and Poetry; they had been developed with much more fullness, though in a manner made obscure from redundance of imagery, in Endymion, especially in the third book: they had been expressed with a difference under the new and clearer symbolism of the Two Chambers of Thought in Keats's letter to Reynolds from Teignmouth. About the same hour, the hour, as I think, of the finest achievement of Keats's genius as well as of its highest promise,--there had appeared in his letters and some of his verses the quite new idea, which would have been inconceivable to him a year earlier, of questioning whether poetry was a worthy pursuit at all in a world full of pain and destruction. Musing beside the sea on a calm evening of April, he anticipates the Tennysonian vision of 'nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine.' In letters written during the next few weeks he insists over and over again alike upon the acuteness of his new sense that the world is 'full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression,' and upon the poet's need of knowledge, and again knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to take away the heat and fever and ease 'the Burden of the Mystery.' The first passage that shows the dawn of a desire in his mind to do good to a suffering world by means possibly other than his art is that well-known and deeply significant one:--

I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society--some with their wit--some with their benevolence--some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of great Nature--there is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.

The next time he expresses such an idea, it comes struck from him in a darker mood and in phrases of greater poignancy:--'were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarcal coronation,--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers ... I am never alone without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing my ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose.'

The pressure of the sense of human misery, the hunger of the soul for knowledge and vision to lighten it, though they naturally do not colour his impersonal work of the next year and a half, nevertheless set their mark, the former strain in especial, upon his most deeply felt meditative verse, as in the odes to the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn, and reappear occasionally in his private confessions to his friends. Now, after intense experience both of personal sorrow and of poetic toil, and under the strain of incipient disease and consuming passion, it is borne in upon his solitary hours that such poetry as he has written, the irresponsible poetry of beauty and romance, has been mere idle dreaming, a refuge of the spirit from its prime duty of sharing and striving to alleviate the troubles of the world. It seems to him that every ordinary man and woman is worth more to mankind than such a dreamer. If poetry is to be worth anything to the world, it must be a different kind of poetry from this: the true poet is something the very opposite of the mere dreamer: he is one who has prepared himself through self-renunciation and arduous effort and extreme probation of the spirit to receive and impart the highest wisdom, the wisdom that comes from full knowledge of the past and foresight into the future. Of such wisdom The Fall of Hyperion in its amended form, as revealed and commented by Mnemosyne-Moneta, the great priestess and prophetess, remembrancer and admonisher in one, was meant to be a sample,--or such an attempt at a sample as Keats at the present stage of his mental growth could supply. But the attempt soon proved beyond his strength and was abandoned.

The preamble, or induction, he had finished; and this, if we leave out the futile eighteen lines with which it begins, contains much lofty thought conveyed in noble imagery and in a style of blank verse quite his own and independent of all models. Take the feast of fruits, symbolic of the poet's early unreflecting joys, and the new thirst for some finer and more inspiring elixir which follows it:--

On a mound Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits, Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal By angel tasted or our Mother Eve; For empty shells were scattered on the grass, And grape-stalks but half bare, and remnants more Sweet-smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know. Still was more plenty than the fabled horn Thrice emptied could pour forth at banqueting, For Proserpine return'd to her own fields, Where the white heifers low. And appetite, More yearning than on earth I ever felt, Growing within, I ate deliciously,-- And, after not long, thirsted; for thereby Stood a cool vessel of transparent juice Sipp'd by the wander'd bee, the which I took, And pledging all the mortals of the world, And all the dead whose names are in our lips, Drank. That full draught is parent of my theme.

The draught plunges him into a profound sleep, from which he awakens a changed being among utterly changed surroundings. The world in which he finds himself is no longer a delicious garden but an ancient and august temple,--the noblest and most nobly described architectural vision in all Keats's writings:--

I look'd around upon the curved sides Of an old sanctuary, with roof august, Builded so high, it seemed that filmed clouds Might spread beneath as o'er the stars of heaven. So old the place was, I remember'd none The like upon the earth: what I had seen Of grey cathedrals, buttress'd walls, rent towers, The superannuations of sunk realms, Or Nature's rocks toil'd hard in waves and winds, Seem'd but the faulture of decrepit things To that eternal domed monument.

The sights the poet sees and the experiences which befall him within this temple; the black gates closed against the east,--which must symbolize the forgotten past of the world; the stupendous image enthroned aloft in the west, with the altar at its foot, approachable only by an interminable flight of steps; the wreaths of incense veiling the altar and spreading a mysterious sense of happiness; the voice of one ministering at the altar and shrouded in the incense--a voice at once of invitation and menace, bidding the dreamer climb to the summit of the steps by a given moment or he will perish utterly; the sense of icy numbness and death which comes upon him before he can reach even the lowest step; the new life that pours into him as he touches the step; his accosting of the mysterious veiled priestess who stands on the altar platform when he has climbed to it; all these phases of the poet's ordeal are impressively told, but are hard to interpret otherwise than dubiously and vaguely. Matters become more definite a moment afterwards, when in answer to the poet's questions the priestess tells him that none can climb to the altar beside which he stands,--the altar, we must suppose, of historic and prophetic knowledge where alone, after due sacrifice of himself, the poet can find true inspiration,--except those

to whom the miseries of the world Are misery and will not let them rest.

The poet pleads that there are thousands of ordinary men and women who feel the sorrows of the world and do their best to mitigate them, and is answered,--

'Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries' Rejoin'd that voice; 'they are no dreamers weak; They seek no wonder but the human face, No music but a happy-noted voice: They come not here, they have no thought to come; And thou art here, for thou art less than they. What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself: think of the earth; What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home, Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low-- The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.

What a pilgrimage has the soul of Keats gone through, when he utters this heartrending cry, from the day, barely three years before, when he was never tired of singing by anticipation the joys and glories of the poetic life and of the end that awaits it:--

These are the living pleasures of the bard, But richer far posterity's award. What shall he murmur with his latest breath, When his proud eye looks through the film of death?

The truth is that, in all this, Keats in his depression of mind and body has become fiercely unjust to his own achievements and their value: for if posterity were asked, would it not reply that the things of sheer beauty his youth has left us, draughts drawn from the inmost wells of nature and antiquity and romance, are of greater solace and refreshment to his kind than anything he could have been likely to achieve by deliberate effort in defiance of his natural genius or in premature anticipation of its maturity?

At this point there follows a fretful passage, ill-written or rather only roughly drafted, and therefore not included in the transcripts of the fragments by his friends, in which his monitress affirms contemptuously the gulf that separates the romantic dreamer from the true poet. He accepts the reproof and the threatened punishment, the more willingly if they are to extend to certain 'hectorers in proud bad verse' (he means Byron) who have aroused his spleen. Reverting to a loftier strain, and acknowledging the grace she has so far shown him, the poet asks his monitress to reveal herself. He had probably long before been impressed by engravings of the well-known ancient statue of the seated Mnemosyne sitting forward with her chin resting on her hand, her arm and shoulder heavily swathed in drapery: but his vision of her here seems wholly independent, and is noble and mystically haunting. When she has signified to him in a softened voice that the gigantic image above the altar is that of Saturn, and that the scenes of the world's past she is about to evoke before him are those of the fall of Saturn, the poet relates:--

As near as an immortal's sphered words Could to a mother's soften were these last: And yet I had a terror of her robes, And chiefly of the veils that from her brow Hung pale, and curtain'd her in mysteries, That made my heart too small to hold its blood. This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face, Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd By an immortal sickness which kills not; It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to; deathwards progressing To no death was that visage; it had past The lilly and the snow; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face. But for her eyes I should have fled away; They held me back with a benignant light, Soft, mitigated by divinest lids Half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd Of all external things; they saw me not, But in blank splendour beam'd, like the mild moon, Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast.

The aspirant now adoringly entreats her to disclose the tragedy that he perceives to be working in her brain: she consents, and from this point begins the original Hyperion re-cast and narrated as a vision within the main vision, with comments put into the mouth of the prophetess. But the scheme, which under no circumstances, one would say, could have been a prosperous one, was soon abandoned, and this, the last of Keats's great fragments, breaks off near the beginning of the second book.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Carm. iii. 4, which probably Keats knew also at first hand.

[2] The daughter of Styx is Victory, and 'halecret' is a corslet.

[3] The passage ending, 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.'

[4] With duller steel than the Persean sword They cut away no formless monster's head.

[5] See the letter to Taylor quoted above, pp. 380, 381.

[6] Auctores Mythographi Latini, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742. Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and passed after his death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey (Houghton MSS.). The passage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats's mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus.

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Chapter XV

FEBRUARY-AUGUST 1820: HAMPSTEAD AND KENTISH TOWN: PUBLICATION OF LAMIA VOLUME.

Letters from the sick-bed--To Fanny Brawne--To James Rice--Barry Cornwall--Hopes of returning health--Haydon's private view--Improvement not maintained--Summer at Kentish Town--Kindness of Leigh Hunt--Misery and jealousy--Severn and Mrs Gisborne--Invitation from Shelley--Keats on The Cenci--La Belle Dame published--A disfigured version--The Lamia volume published--Charles Lamb's appreciation--The New Monthly--Other favourable reviews--Taylor and Blackwood--A skirmish--Impenitence--And impertinence--Jeffrey in the Edinburgh--Appreciation full though tardy--Fury of Byron--Shelley on Hyperion--And on Keats in general--Impressions of Crabb Robinson.

Such and so gloomy, although with no ignoble gloom, had been Keats's deeper thoughts on poetry and life, and such the imagery under which he figured them, during the last weeks when the state of his health enabled his mind to work with anything approaching its natural power. From the night of his seizure on February 3rd 1820, which was three months after his twenty-fourth birthday, he never wrote verse again: unless indeed the lines found on the margin of his manuscript of The Cap and Bells were written from his sick-bed and in a moment of bitterness addressed in his mind to Fanny Brawne: but from a certain pitch and formality of style in them, I should take them rather to be meant for putting into the mouth of one of the characters in some such historical play as he had been meditating in the weeks before Christmas:--

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm'd--see here it is-- I hold it towards you.

For several days after the haemorrhage he was kept to his room and his bed, and for nearly two months had to lead a strictly invalid life. At first he could bear no one in the room except the doctor and Brown. 'While I waited on him day and night,' testifies Brown, 'his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance of his eye, a motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment.' (How often have these words come home to the heart of the present writer in days when he used to be busy about the mute sick-bed of another of these shining ones!) Severn, nursing Keats later under conditions even more trying and hopeless, bears similar testimony to his unabated charm and sweetness in suffering. Almost from the first he was able to write little letters to his sister Fanny, and is careful to give them a cheering and re-assuring turn. When after some days he is down on a sofa-bed made up for him in the front parlour he tells her what an improvement it is:--

Besides I see all that passes-for instance now, this morning--if I had been in my own room I should not have seen the coals brought in. On Sunday between the hours of twelve and one I descried a Pot boy. I conjectured it might be the one o'clock beer--Old women with bobbins and red cloaks and unpresuming bonnets I see creeping about the heath. Gipseys after hare skins and silver spoons. Then goes by a fellow with a wooden clock under his arm that strikes a hundred and more. Then comes the old French emigrant (who has been very well to do in France) with his hands joined behind on his hips, and his face full of political schemes. Then passes Mr David Lewis, a very good-natured, good-looking old gentleman who has been very kind to Tom and George and me. As for those fellows the Brick-makers they are always passing to and fro. I mustn't forget the two old maiden Ladies in Well Walk who have a Lap dog between them that they are very anxious about. It is a corpulent Little beast whom it is necessary to coax along with an ivory-tipp'd cane. Carlo our Neighbour Mrs Brawne's dog and it meet sometimes. Lappy thinks Carlo a devil of a fellow and so do his Mistresses.

Very soon his betrothed was allowed to pay him little visits from next door, and he was able to take pleasure in these and in a constant interchange of notes with her. He tells her of his thoughts and some of his words (which are not quite the same as Brown puts in his mouth) at the moment of his seizure:--

You must believe--you shall, you will--that I can do nothing, say nothing, think nothing of you but what has its spring in the Love which has so long been my pleasure and torment. On the night I was taken ill--when so violent a rush of blood came to my Lungs that I felt nearly suffocated--I assure you I felt it possible I might not survive, and at that moment thought of nothing but you. When I said to Brown 'this is unfortunate' I thought of you. 'Tis true that since the first two or three days other subjects have entered my head.

On the whole his love-thoughts keep peaceable and contented, and his jealousies are for the moment at rest. But he has to struggle with the sense that considering his health and circumstances he is bound in fairness to release her from her engagement: an idea which to her credit she seems steadily to have refused to entertain.

My greatest torment since I have known you has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid; but that suspicion I dismiss utterly and remain happy in the surety of your Love, which I assure you is as much a wonder to me as a delight. Send me the words 'Good night' to put under my pillow....

You know our situation--what hope is there if I should be recovered ever so soon--my very health will not suffer me to make any great exertion. I am recommended not even to read poetry, much less write it. I wish I had even a little hope. I cannot say forget me--but I would mention that there are impossibilities in the world. No more of this. I am not strong enough to be weaned--take no notice of it in your good night.

The healthier and more tranquil tenor of his thoughts and feelings for the time is beautifully expressed in the often quoted letter written to James Rice a fortnight after his attack:--

I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not passed a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering under some passionate feeling, or if I turned to versify, that acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive things in a truer light),--how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble', I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again.

Some time in the month he owns to his beloved that the thoughts of what he had hoped to do in poetry mingle with his thoughts of her:--

How illness stands as a barrier betwixt me and you! Even if I was well--I must make myself as good a Philosopher as possible. Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. 'If I should die,' said I to myself, 'I have left no immortal work behind me--nothing to make my friends proud of my memory--but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.' Thoughts like these came very feebly whilst I was in health and every pulse beat for you--now you divide with this (may I say it?) 'last infirmity of noble minds' all my reflection.

Presently we learn from his letters that Reynolds, Dilke, and one or two other friends have been dropping in to see him. He expresses himself touched by the courtesy of a new poetical acquaintance of much more prosperous worldly connexions than his own, Mr Bryan Waller Procter ('Barry Cornwall') in sending him copies of his volumes lately published. Keats does not mention that one of these contains a version, The Sicilian Story, of the same tale from Boccaccio as his own as yet unpublished Isabella: but he cannot quite conceal his perception of those qualities in Barry Cornwall's work, its prevailing strain of fluent imitative common-place, its affectations and exaggerations of Hunt's and his own leanings towards over-lusciousness, which Shelley, as we shall see, found so exasperating. 'However,' he adds, 'that is nothing--I think he likes poetry for its own sake not his.'[1] Before the end of the month we find him taking pleasure, as in earlier Februaries, in the song of the thrush, which portends, he hopes, an end of the north-east wind. The month of March brings signs of gradually returning strength. Brown, he says, declares he is getting stout; and having in the first weeks of his illness avowed that he was so feeble he could be flattered into a hope in which faith had no part, he now begins really to believe in his own recovery and to let his thoughts run again on fame and poetry. He writes to Fanny Brawne the most trustful and least agitated of all his love letters:--

You uttered a half complaint once that I only lov'd your Beauty. Have I nothing else then to love in you but that? Do not I see a heart naturally furnish'd with wings imprison itself with me? No ill prospect has been able to turn your thoughts a moment from me. This perhaps should be as much a subject of sorrow as joy--but I will not talk of that. Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you: how much more deeply then must I feel for you knowing you love me. My Mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it. I never felt my Mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment--upon no person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of window: you always concentrate my whole senses. The anxiety shown about our Loves in your last note is an immense pleasure to me: however you must not suffer such speculations to molest you any more: nor will I any more believe you can have the least pique against me.

And again: 'let me have another opportunity of years and I will not die without being remember'd. Take care of yourself dear that we may both be well in the summer.'

He began to get about again, and by the 25th of March was well enough to go into town to the private view of Haydon's huge picture, finished at last, of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. This was the occasion which Haydon in his autobiography describes in language so vivid and with a self-congratulation so boisterous and contagious that it is impossible in reading not to share his sense of the day's triumph. As in the case of the Elgin marbles three years earlier, he had achieved his object in the face of a thousand difficulties and enmities, living the while on the bounty of friends, some of them rich, others, as we know, the reverse, whom his ardour and importunity had whipped up to his help. At the last moment he had contrived to scrape together money enough to stop the mouths of his creditors and to pay the cost of hiring the Egyptian Hall and hanging up his gigantic canvas there, with the help of three gigantic guardsmen, his models and assistants; and the world of taste and fashion, realising how Haydon had been right and the established dilettanti wrong in regard to the Elgin marbles, were determined to be on the safe side this time in case he should turn out to be right also about the merits of his own work.

Some exalted and many distinguished personages had been to see the picture in his studio, and now, on the opening day, the hall was thronged in answer to his invitations. 'All the ministers and their ladies, all the foreign ambassadors, all the bishops, all the beauties in high life, all the geniuses in town, and everybody of any note, were invited and came.... The room was full. Keats and Hazlitt were up in a corner, really rejoicing.' Hazlitt expressed in the Edinburgh Review for the following August a tempered, far from undiscriminating admiration of certain qualities in the painting. Keats himself merely mentions to his sister Fanny, without comment, the fact of his having been there. One wonders whether he witnessed the scene which Haydon goes on in his effective way to narrate.

He had tried to treat the head of Christ unconventionally, had painted and repainted it, and was nervous and dissatisfied over the result. The crowd seemed doubtful too. 'Everybody seemed afraid, when in walked, with all the dignity of her majestic presence, Mrs Siddons, like a Ceres or a Juno. The whole room remained dead silent, and allowed her to think. After a few minutes Sir George Beaumont, who was extremely anxious, said in a very delicate manner, "How do you like the Christ?" Everybody listened for her reply. After a moment, in a deep, loud, tragic tone she said, "It is completely successful." I was then presented with all the ceremonies of a levee, and she invited me to her house in an awful tone.'... I think it is not recorded whether Northcote's acid comment in a different sense, 'Mr Haydon, your ass is the Saviour of your picture', was made on this famous occasion or privately. Certainly the ass, judging by photographs of the picture as it now hangs in a wrecked condition at Cincinnati, is the object that first takes the eye with its black ears and shoulders strongly relieved against the white drapery of Christ, and what looks like the realistic treatment of the creature in contrast with the 'ideal,' that is the vapidly pompous and pretentious, portraiture of geniuses past and present, Newton, Voltaire, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Keats, introduced among the crowd in the foreground.[2]

In the course of April the improvement in Keats's health failed to maintain itself. We find him complaining much of nervous irritability and general weakness. He is recommended, one would like to know by whom, to avoid the excitement of writing or even reading poetry and turn to the study of geometry--of all things!--as a sedative. He has no strength for the walk to Walthamstow to see his young sister, and even shrinks from the fatigue of going by coach. Brown having arranged to let his house again and go for another tramp through Scotland--not, one would have said under the circumstances, the course of a very considerate or solicitous friend, but he was probably misled by Keats's apparent improvement the month before--Brown having made this arrangement, Keats, also on the recommendation of the doctors, thinks of sailing with him on the packet and returning alone, in hopes of getting strength from the sea-trip to Scotland and back. This plan, when it came to the point, he gave up, and only accompanied his friend down the river as far as Gravesend. Having to turn out of Wentworth Place in favour of Brown's summer tenants, he thought of taking a lodging a few doors from the house where Leigh Hunt was then living in Kentish Town, then still a village on the way between London and Hampstead. Almost at the same time he writes to Dilke in regard to his future course of life, 'My mind has been at work all over the world to find out what to do. I have my choice of three things, or at least two, South America, or surgeon to an Indiaman; which last, I think, will be my fate.' For the present he moved as he had proposed to Kentish Town (2 Wesleyan Place). Here he stayed for six or seven weeks (approximately May 6-June 23), and then, having suffered a set-back in the shape of two slight returns of haemorrhage from the lung, moved for the sake of better nursing into the household of the ever kind and affectionate, but not less ever feckless and ill-managing, Leigh Hunts at 13 Mortimer Terrace. With them he remained for another period of about seven weeks, ending on August 12th.

Those three months in Kentish Town were to Keats a time of distressing weakness and for the most part of terrible inward fretfulness and despondency. Early in the time he speaks of intending soon to begin (meaning begin again) on The Cap and Bells. When we read those vivid stanzas quoted above (p. 446) describing the welcome by the crowd of princess Bellanaine after her aerial journey, we are inevitably reminded of an event--the triumphal approach and entry of Queen Caroline into London from Dover--which happened on the 9th of June this same year. It would be tempting to suppose that Keats may have witnessed the event and been thereby inspired to his description. But he was too ill for such outings, and moreover the earlier of the two stanzas comes well back in the poem (sixty-fourth out of eighty-eight) and it is impossible to suppose that in his then state he could have added so much to the fragment as that would imply. So we must credit the stanzas to imagination only, and take it as certain that his only real occupation with poetry in these days was in passing through the press the new volume of poems (Lamia, Isabella, etc.,) which his friends had at last persuaded him to put forward. Even on this task his hold must have been loose, seeing that the publishers put in without his knowledge a note which he afterwards sharply disowned, to the effect that his reason for dropping Hyperion had been the ill reception of Endymion by the critics.

His only outing, so far as we hear, was to an exhibition of English historical portraits at the British Institution, of which he writes to Brown with some interest and vividness. He tells at the same time of an invitation, which he was not well enough to accept, to meet Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Haydon, and some others at supper. Leigh Hunt, despite his engrossing literary and editorial occupations and a recent trying illness of his own, did his best, while Keats was his inmate, to keep him interested and amused. Keats in writing to his sister gratefully acknowledges as much. 'Mr Hunt does everything in his power to make the time pass as agreeably with me as possible. I read the greatest part of the day and generally take two half-hour walks a day up and down the terrace which is very much pester'd with cries, ballad singers, and street music.' But the obsession of his passion, its consuming jealousy and hopelessness, gave him little respite. He would keep his eyes fixed all day, as he afterwards avowed, on Hampstead; and once when, at Hunt's suggestion, they took a drive as far as the Heath, he burst into a flood of unwonted tears and declared his heart was breaking.

His letters to his beloved in these same months are too agonizing to read. He is so little himself in them, so merely and utterly, to borrow words of his own, 'a fever of himself,' that many of us could not endure, when they were first published, the thought of this Keats-that-is-no-Keats being exposed before a hastily reading and carelessly judging after-world, and even now cannot but regret it. All the morbid self-torturing elements of his nature, which in health it had been a main part of the battle of his life to subdue, and of which he never suffered those about him to see a sign, now burst from control and flamed out against the girl he loved and the friends he loved next best to her. Once only, at the beginning of the time, he could write contentedly, telling her that he is marking for her the most beautiful passages in Spenser, 'comforting myself in being somewhat occupied to give you however small a pleasure. It has lightened my time very much. God bless you.' His other letters are in a tortured, almost frenzied, strain of jealous suspicion and reproach against her and against those of his intimates who had, as he imagined, disapproved their attachment, or pried into or made light of it, or else had shown her too marked attentions. Among the former were Reynolds and his sisters, from whom for the time being he was tacitly estranged. Among the latter he includes Brown and Dilke, with especial bitterness against Brown. Between them all they had made, he vows, a football of his heart, and again, 'Hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is when he cried to Ophelia, "Go to a Nunnery, go, go!".' That these were but the half-delirious promptings of his fevered blood is clear from the fact that a very few weeks both before and after such outbreaks he wrote to Brown as though counting him as much a friend as ever. As for his betrothed, wound as his reproaches might at the time, we know from her own words that they left no lasting impression of unkindness on her memory. Writing in riper years to Medwin, who had asked her whether the accounts current in Rome of Keats's violence of nature were true, she says:--

That his sensibility was most acute, is true, and his passions were very strong, but not violent, if by that term, violence of temper is implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn on himself than on others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his friends. Violence such as the letter describes, was quite foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting England, I saw him every day, often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, much less a violent one, to any human being.[3]

These words of Fanny Brawne, then Mrs Lindon, to Medwin are not well known, and it is only fair to quote them as proving that if in youth the lady had not been willing to sacrifice her gaieties and her pleasure in admiration for the sake of her lover's peace of mind, she showed at any rate in after life a true and loyal understanding of his character.

While Keats was staying in Kentish Town Severn went often to see him, and in the second week of July writes to Haslam struggling to keep up his hopes for their friend in spite of appearances and of Keats's own conviction:--'It will give you pleasure to say I trust he will still recover. His appearance is shocking and now reminds me of poor Tom and I have been inclined to think him in the same way. For himself--he makes sure of it--and seems prepossessed that he cannot recover--now I seem more than ever not to think so and I know you will agree with me when you see him--are you aware another volume of Poems was published last week--in which is "Lovely Isabel--poor simple Isabel"? I have been delighted with this volume and think it will even please the million.' During the same period Shelley's friends the Gisbornes twice met him at Leigh Hunt's. The first time was on June 23. Mrs Gisborne writes in her journal that having lately been ill he spoke little and in a low tone: 'the Endymion was not mentioned, this person might not be its author; but on observing his countenance and eyes I persuaded myself that he was the very person.' It is always Keats's eyes that strangers thus notice first: the late Mrs Procter, who met him only once, at a lecture of Hazlitt's, remembered them to the end of her long life as like those of one 'who had been looking at some glorious sight.' This first time Keats and Mrs Gisborne had some talk about music and singing, but some three weeks later, on July 12th, the same lady notes, 'drank tea at Mr Hunt's; I was much pained by the sight of poor Keats, under sentence of death from Dr Lamb. He never spoke and looks emaciated.'

Doubtless it was under the impression of this last meeting that Mr Gisborne sent Shelley the account of Keats's state of health which moved Shelley to write in his own and his wife's name urging that Keats should come to Italy to avoid the English winter and take up his quarters with or near them at Pisa. Shelley repeats nearly the same kind and just opinion of Endymion as he had previously expressed in writing to the Olliers; saying he has lately read it again, 'and ever with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion. This people in general will not endure, and that is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold. I feel persuaded that you are capable of the greatest things, so you but will.' At the same time Shelley sends Keats a copy of his Cenci. Keats's answer shows him touched and grateful for the kindness offered, but nevertheless, as always where Shelley is in question, in some degree embarrassed and ungracious. He says nothing of the invitation to Pisa, though he was already considering the possibility of going to winter in Italy. As to Endymion, he says he would willingly unwrite it did he care so much as once about reputation, and as to The Cenci, and The Prometheus announced as forthcoming, he makes the well-known, rather obscurely worded criticism of which the main drift is that to his mind Shelley pours out new poems too quickly and does not concentrate enough upon the purely artistic aims and qualities of his work. These, Keats goes on, are 'by many spirits nowadays considered the Mammon. A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose which may be the God. An artist must serve Mammon; he must have 'self-concentration'--selfishness, perhaps. You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.'

Keats in these admonitions was no doubt remembering views of Shelley's such as are expressed in his words 'I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.' Judging by them, his mind would seem to have veered back from the convictions which inspired the pre-amble to the revised Hyperion the autumn before, insisting, in language which might almost seem borrowed from the preface to Alastor, on the doom that awaits poets who play their art in selfishness instead of making it their paramount aim to 'pour balm' upon the miseries of mankind. With reference to the promised Prometheus he adds, 'could I have my own wish effected, you would have it still in manuscript, or be but now putting an end to the second act. I remember your advising me not to publish my first blights, on Hampstead Heath. I am returning advice upon your hands.' Finally, mentioning that he is sending out a copy of his lately published Lamia volume, he says that most of its contents have been written above two years (a slip of memory, the statement being only true of Isabella and of one or two minor pieces) and would never have been published now but for hope of gain.

Shelley's letter was written from Pisa on the 27th of July and received by Keats on the 13th of August. On the previous day he had fled suddenly from under the Leigh Hunts' roof, having been thrown into a fit of uncontrollable nervous agitation by the act of a discharged servant, who kept back a letter to him from Fanny Brawne and on quitting the house left it to be delivered, opened and two days late, by one of the children. His first impulse on leaving the Hunts' was to go back to his old lodging with Bentley the postman, but this Mrs Brawne would not hear of, and took him into her own house, where she and her daughter for the next few weeks nursed him and did all they could for his comfort.

During those unhappy months at Kentish Town Keats's best work was given to the world. First, in Leigh Hunt's Indicator for May 20, La Belle Dame sans Merci, signed, obviously in bitterness, 'Caviare' (Hamlet's 'caviare to the general'), and unluckily enfeebled by changes for which we find no warrant either in Keats's autograph or in extant copies made by his friends Woodhouse and Brown. Keats's judgment in revising his own work had evidently by this time become unsure. We have seen how in recasting Hyperion the previous autumn he changed some of the finest of his original lines for the worse: and it is conceivable that in the case of La Belle Dame he may have done so again of his own motion, but much more likely, I should say, that the changes, which are all in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt's suggestion and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference, or perhaps even from that very sense of lack of sympathy in most readers which made him sign 'Caviare.' Hunt introduced the piece with some commendatory words, showing that he at all events felt nothing amiss with it in its new shape, and added a short account of the old French poem by Alain Chartier from which the title was taken. It is to be deplored that in some recent and what should be standard editions of Keats the poem stands as thus printed in the Indicator, instead of in the original form rightly given by Lord Houghton from Brown's transcript, in which it had become a classic of the language.[4]

It is surely a perversion in textual criticism to perpetuate the worse version merely because it happens to be the one printed in Keats's lifetime. No sensitive reader but must feel that 'wretched wight' is a vague and vapid substitute for the clear image of the 'knight-at-arms,' while 'sigh'd full sore' is ill replaced by 'sighed deep,' and 'wild wild eyes' still worse by 'wild sad eyes': that the whimsical particularity of the 'kisses four,' removed in the new version, gives the poem an essential part of its savour (Keats was fond of these fanciful numberings, compare the damsels who stand 'by fives and sevens' in the Induction to Calidore, and the 'four laurell'd spirits' in the Epistle to George Felton Matthew): and again, that the loose broken construction--'So kissed to sleep' is quite uncharacteristic of the poet: and yet again, that the phrase 'And there we slumbered on the moss,' is what any amateur rimester might write about any pair of afternoon picknickers, while the phrase which was cancelled for it, 'And there she lulled me asleep,' falls with exactly the mystic cadence and hushing weight upon the spirit which was required. The reader may be interested to hear the effect which these changes had upon the late William Morris, than whom no man had a better right to speak. Mr Sydney Cockerell writes me:--

In February 1894 the last sheets of the Kelmscott Press Keats, edited by F. S. Ellis, were being printed. A specimen of each sheet of every book was brought in to Morris as soon as it came off the press. I was with him when he happened to open the sheet on which La Belle Dame sans Merci was printed. He began to read it and was suddenly aware of unfamiliar words, 'wretched wight' for 'knight at arms,' verses 4 and 5 transposed, and several changes in verse 7. Great was his indignation. He swiftly altered the words and then read the poem to me, remarking that it was the germ from which all the poetry of his group had sprung--The sheet was reprinted and the earlier and better version restored--I still have the cancelled sheet with his corrections.

Six weeks later, in the first days of July, appeared the volume Lamia, Isabella, and other Poems in right of which Keats's name is immortal. La Belle Dame was not in it, nor In drear-nighted December, nor any sonnets, nor any of the verses composed on the Scotch tour, nor the fragment of The Eve of St Mark, nor, happily, The Cap and Bells: but it included all the odes except that on Indolence and the fragment To Maia, as well as nearly all the other minor pieces of any account written since Endymion, such as Fancy, the Mermaid Tavern and Robin Hood lines, with the three finished Tales, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Lamia, and the great fragment of Hyperion in its original, not its recast, form. Keats was too far gone in illness and the hopelessness of passion to be much moved by the success or failure of his new venture. But the story of its first reception is part of his biography, and shall be briefly told in this place.

The first critic in the field was the best: no less a master than Charles Lamb, who within a fortnight of the appearance of the volume contributed to the New Times a brief notice, anonymous but marked with all the charm and authority of his genius.[5] He begins by quoting the four famous stanzas picturing Madeline at her prayers in the moonlit chamber, and comments--'Like the radiance, which comes from those old windows upon the limbs and garments of the damsel, is the almost Chaucer-like painting, with which this poet illumes every subject he touches. We have scarcely anything like it in modern description. It brings us back to ancient days and "Beauty making-beautiful old rhymes."' 'The finest thing,' Lamb continues, 'in the volume is The Pot of Basil.' Noting how the anticipation of the assassination is wonderfully conceived in the one epithet of 'the murder'd man,' he goes on to quote the stanzas telling the discovery of and digging for the corpse, 'than which,' he says. 'there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer or in Spenser.' It is to be noted that Lamb, who loved things Gothic better than things Grecian, ignores Hyperion, which most critics in praising the volume pitched on to the neglect of the rest, and proceeds to tell of Lamia, winding up with a return to The Pot of Basil:--

More exuberantly rich in imagery and painting is the story of the Lamia. It is of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of. Her first appearance in serpentine form--

--A beauteous wreath with melancholy eyes--

her dialogue with Hermes, the Star of Lethe, as he is called by one of these prodigal phrases which Mr Keats abounds in, which are each a poem in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a picture, all the dim regions and their inhabitants, and the sudden coming of a celestial among them; the charming of her into woman's shape again by the God; her marriage with the beautiful Lycius; her magic palace, which those who knew the street, and remembered it complete from childhood, never remembered to have seen before; the few Persian mutes, her attendants,

--who that same year Were seen about the markets: none knew where They could inhabit;--

the high-wrought splendours of the nuptial bower, with the fading of the whole pageantry, Lamia, and all, away, before the glance of Apollonius,--are all that fairy land can do for us. They are for younger impressibilities. To us an ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies, rather than acknowledge she is fair.

Leigh Hunt, who during all this time was in all ways loyally doing his best for Keats's encouragement and comfort, and had just dedicated his translation of Tasso's Aminta to him as to one 'equally pestered by the critical and admired by the poetical,'--Leigh Hunt within a month of the appearance of the volume reviewed and quoted from it with full appreciation in two numbers of the Indicator. His notice contained those judicious remarks which we have already cited on the philosophical weakness of Lamia, praising at the same time the gorgeousness of the snake description, and saying, of the lines on the music being the sole support of the magical palace-roof, 'this is the very quintessence of the romantic.' 'When Mr Keats errs in his poetry,' says Hunt in regard to the Pot of Basil, 'it is from the ill-management of a good thing--exuberance of ideas'; and, comparing the contents of this volume with his earlier work, concludes as follows:--

The author's versification is now perfected, the exuberances of his imagination restrained, and a calm power, the surest and loftiest of all power, takes place of the impatient workings of the younger god within him. The character of his genius is that of energy and voluptuousness, each able at will to take leave of the other, and possessing, in their union, a high feeling of humanity not common to the best authors who can less combine them. Mr Keats undoubtedly takes his seat with the oldest and best of our living poets.

But Leigh Hunt's praise of one of his own supposed disciples of the Cockney School would carry little weight outside the circle of special sympathizers. A better index to the way the wind was beginning to blow was the treatment of the volume in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, of which the poet Thomas Campbell had lately been appointed editor, with the excellent Cyrus Redding as acting editor under him:--'These poems are very far superior', declares the critic, 'to any which the author has previously committed to the press. They have nothing showy, or extravagant, or eccentric about them; but are pieces of calm beauty, or of lone and self-supported grandeur.' In Lamia, 'there is a mingling of Greek majesty with fairy luxuriance which we have not elsewhere seen.' Isabella is compared with Barry Cornwall's Sicilian Story: 'the poem of Mr Keats has not the luxury of description, nor the rich love-scenes, of Mr Cornwall; but he tells the tale with a naked and affecting simplicity which goes irresistibly to the heart. The Eve of St Agnes is 'a piece of consecrated fancy', in which 'a soft religious light is shed over the whole story.' In Hyperion 'the picture of the vast abode of Cybele and the Titans is 'in the sublimest style of AEschylus': and in conclusion the critic takes leave of Mr Keats 'with wonder at the gigantic stride which he has taken, and with the good hope that if he proceeds in the high and pure style which he has now chosen, he will attain an exalted and a lasting station among English poets.' Of the other chief literary reviews in England, the old-established Monthly begins in a strain scarcely less laudatory, but wavers and becomes admonitory before the end, while Keats's dismal monitor of three years before, the sententious Eclectic Review, acknowledging in him 'a young man possessed of an elegant fancy, a warm and lively imagination, and something above the average talents of persons who take to writing poetry', proceeds to warn him against regarding imagination as the proper organ of poetry, to lecture him on his choice of subjects, his addiction to the Greek mythology, and to poetry for poetry's sake ('poetry, after all, if pursued as an end, is but child's play'). The British Critic, more contemptuous even than Blackwood or the Quarterly in its handling of Endymion, this time prints a kind of palinode, admitting that 'Mr Keats is a person of no ordinary genius', and prophesying that if he will take Spenser and Milton for models instead of Leigh Hunt he 'need not despair of attaining to a very high and enviable place in the public esteem'.

Writing to Brown from Hampstead in the latter half of August, Keats seems aware that the critics are being kinder to him than before. 'My book,' he says, 'has had good success among the literary people, and I believe has a moderate sale;' and again, 'the sale of my book has been very slow, but it has been very highly rated.' The great guns of Scottish criticism had not yet spoken. Constable's Edinburgh (formerly the Scots) Magazine, which never either hit or bit hard, and whose managers had preferred the ways of prudence when Bailey urged them two years before boldly to denounce the outrages of the 'Z' gang in Blackwood, in due course praised Keats's new volume, but cautiously, saying that 'it must and ought to attract attention, for it displays the ore of true poetic genius, though mingled with a large portion of dross.... He is continually shocking our ideas of poetical decorum, at the very time when we are acknowledging the hand of genius. In thus boldly running counter to old opinions, however, we cannot conceive that Mr Keats merits bitter contempt or ridicule; the weapons which are too frequently employed when liberal discussion and argument would be unsuccessful.' As to Blackwood's Magazine itself, we are fortunate in having an amusing first-hand narrative of an encounter of its owner and manager with Keats's publisher which preceded the appearance of Keats's new volume. The excellent Taylor, staunch to his injured young friend and client even at some risk, as in his last words he shows himself aware, to his own interests, writes from Fleet Street on the last day of August to his partner Hessey:--

I have had this day a call from Mr Blackwood. We shook hands and went into the Back Shop. After asking him what was new at Edinburgh, and talking about Clare, the Magazine, Baldwin, Peter Corcoran and a few other subjects,[6] I observed that we had published another Volume of Keats's Poems on which his Editors would have another opportunity of being witty at his expense. He said they were disposed to speak favourably of Mr K. this time--and he expected that the article would have appeared in this month's mag.

'But can they be so inconsistent?' 'There is no inconsistency in praising him if they think he deserves it.' 'After what has been said of his talents I should think it very inconsistent.' 'Certainly they found fault with his former Poems but that was because they thought they deserved it.' 'But why did they attack him personally?' 'They did not do so.'

'No? Did not they speak of him in ridicule as Johnny Keats, describe his appearance while addressing a Sonnet to Ailsa Crag, and compare him as a (?) hen to Shelley as a Bird of Paradise, besides, what can you say to that cold blooded passage when they say they will take care he shall never get L50 again for a vol. of his Poems--what had he done to deserve such attacks as these?'

'Oh, it was all a joke, the writer meant nothing more than to be witty. He certainly thought there was much affectation in his Poetry, and he expressed his opinion only--It was done in the fair spirit of criticism.'

'It was done in the Spirit of the Devil, Mr Blackwood. So if a young man is guilty of affectation while he is walking the streets it is fair in another Person because he dislikes it to come and knock him down.'

'No,' says B., 'but a poet challenges public opinion by printing his book, but I suppose you would have them not criticized at all?'

'I certainly think they are punished enough by neglect and by the failure of their hopes and to me it seems very cruel to abuse a man merely because he cannot give us as much pleasure as he wishes. But you go even beyond his ...(?) you strike a man when he is down. He gets a violent blow from the Quarterly--and then you begin.'

'I beg your pardon,' says B., 'we were the first.'

'I think not, but if you were the first, you continued it after, for that truly diabolical thrust about the L50 appeared after the critique in the Quarterly.'

'You mistake that altogether,' said B., 'the writer does not like the Cockney School, so he went on joking Mr K. about it.'

'Why should not the manners of gentlemen continue to regulate their conduct when they are writing of each other as much as when they are in conversation? No man would insult Mr Keats in this manner in his company, and what is the difference between writing and speaking of a person except that the written attack is the more base from being made anonymously and therefore at no personal risk.--I feel regard for Mr Keats as a man of real Genius, a Gentleman, nay more, one of the gentlest of Human Beings. He does not resent these things himself, he merely says of his Opponents "They don't know me." Now this mildness(?) his friends feel the more severely when they see him ill used. But this feeling is not confined to them. I am happy to say that the Public Interest is awakened to the sense of the Injustice which has been done him and the attempts to ruin him will have in the end a contrary effect.' Here I turned the conversation to another subject by asking B. if he read the Abbot, and in about 10 minutes more he made his Exit with a formal Bow and a Good Morning.

The above is the Substance and as clearly as possible the words, I made use of. His replies were a little more copious than I have stated but to the same effect. I have written this conversation down on the day it took place because I suspect some allusion may hereafter be made to it in the Mag. and I fully expect that whatever Books we publish will be received with reference to the feeling it is calculated to excite in the bosoms of these freebooting....[7]

In the upshot, the Blackwood critics took no direct notice of the Lamia volume at all, but made occasion during the autumn to say their new say about Keats in a review of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. This time the hand is unmistakably that of Wilson. For the last year or more Wilson, following a hint given him by De Quincey, had chosen to take Shelley boisterously under his patronage as a poet of true genius, for whom scarcely any praise would be too high could he only be weaned from his impious opinions. Now, after rebutting a current and really gratuitous charge that the magazine praised Shelley from the knowledge that he was a man of means and family, and denounced Hunt and Keats because they were poor and struggling, the critic blusters characteristically on, in a strain half apologetic in one breath and in the next as odiously insolent as ever:--

As for Mr Keats, we are informed that he is in a very bad state of health, and that his friends attribute a great deal of it to the pain he has suffered from the critical castigation his Endymion drew down on him in this magazine. If it be so, we are most heartily sorry for it, and have no hesitation in saying, that had we suspected that young author, of being so delicately nerved, we should have administered our reproof in a much more lenient shape and style. The truth is, we from the beginning saw marks of feeling and power in Mr Keats's verses, which made us think it very likely, he might become a real poet in England, provided he could be persuaded to give up all the tricks of Cockneyism, and forswear for ever the thin potations of Mr Leigh Hunt. We, therefore, rated him as roundly as we decently could do, for the flagrant affectations of those early productions of his. In the last volume he has published we find more beauties than in the former, both of language and of thought, but we are sorry to say, we find abundance of the same absurd affectations also, and superficial conceits, which first displeased us in his writings;--and which we are again very sorry to say, must in our opinion, if persisted in, utterly and entirely prevent Mr Keats from ever taking his place among the pure and classical poets of his mother tongue. It is quite ridiculous to see how the vanity of these Cockneys makes them overrate their own importance, even in the eyes of us, that have always expressed such plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all, a contempt too calm and profound, to admit of any admixture of anything like anger or personal spleen. We should just as soon think of being wroth with vermin, independently of their coming into our apartment, as we should of having any feelings at all about any of these people, other than what are excited by seeing them in the shape of authors. Many of them, considered in any other character than that of authors, are, we have no doubt, entitled to be considered as very worthy people in their own way. Mr Hunt is said to be a very amiable man in his own sphere, and we believe him to be so willingly. Mr Keats we have often heard spoken of in terms of great kindness, and we have no doubt his manners and feelings are calculated to make his friends love him. But what has all this to do with our opinion of their poetry? What, in the name of wonder, does it concern us, whether these men sit among themselves, with mild or with sulky faces, eating their mutton steaks, and drinking their porter at Highgate, Hampstead, or Lisson Green?... Last of all, what should forbid us to announce our opinion, that Mr Shelley, as a man of genius, is not merely superior, either to Mr Hunt, or to Mr Keats, but altogether out of their sphere, and totally incapable of ever being brought into the most distant comparison with either of them.

The critical utterance on Keats's side likely to tell most with general readers was that of Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review. A year earlier Keats had written from Winchester expressing impatience at what he thought the cowardice of the Edinburgh in keeping silence as to Endymion in face of the Quarterly attack. 'They do not know what to make of it, and they will not praise it for fear. They are as shy of it as I should be of wearing a Quaker's hat. The fact is they have no real taste. They dare not compromise their judgments on so puzzling a question. If on my next publication they should praise me, and so lug in Endymion, I will address them in a manner they will not at all relish. The cowardliness of the Edinburgh is more than the abuse of the Quarterly'. Exactly what Keats had anticipated now took place. Jeffrey's natural taste in poetry was conservative, and favoured the correct, the classical and traditional: but in this case, whether from genuine and personal opinion, or to please influential well-wishers of Keats on his own side in politics and criticism like Sir James Mackintosh, he on the appearance of the new volume took occasion to print, now when Keats was far past caring about it, an article on his work which was mainly in eulogy of Endymion: eulogy not unmixed with reasonable criticism, but in a strain, on the whole, gushing almost to excess:--

We had never happened to see either of these volumes till very lately--and have been exceedingly struck with the genius they display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their extravagance. That imitation of our older writers, and especially of our older dramatists, to which we cannot help flattering ourselves that we have somewhat contributed, has brought on, as it were, a second spring in our poetry;--and few of its blossoms are either more profuse of sweetness or richer in promise than this which is now before us. Mr Keats, we understand, is still a very young man; and his whole works, indeed, bear evidence enough of the fact. They are full of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at originality, interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. They manifestly require, therefore, all the indulgence that can be claimed for a first attempt: but we think it no less plain that they deserve it; for they are flushed all over with the rich lights of fancy, and so coloured and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry, that even while perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is impossible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly present. The models upon which he has formed himself, in the Endymion, the earliest and by much the most considerable of his poems, are obviously the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson;--the exquisite metres and inspired diction of which he has copied, with great boldness and fidelity--and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart to the whole piece that true rural and poetical air which breathes only in them and in Theocritus--which is at once homely and majestic, luxurious and rude, and sets before us the genuine sights and sounds and smells of the country, with all the magic and grace of Elysium.

Then, after acknowledgment of the confusedness of the narrative and the fantastic wilfulness of some of the incidents and style, the critic goes on:--

There is no work, accordingly, from which a malicious critic could cull more matter for ridicule, or select more obscure, unnatural, or absurd passages. But we do not take that to be our office:--and just beg leave, on the contrary, to say, that any one who, on this account, would represent the whole poem as despicable, must either have no notion of poetry, or no regard to truth. It is, in truth, at least is full of genius as of absurdity; and he who does not find a great deal in it to admire and to give delight, cannot in his heart see much beauty in the two exquisite dramas to which we have already alluded, or find any great pleasure in some of the finest creations of Milton and Shakespeare. There are many such persons, we verily believe, even among the reading and judicious part of the community--correct scholars we have no doubt many of them, and, it may be, very classical composers in prose and in verse--but utterly ignorant of the true genius of English poetry, and incapable of estimating its appropriate and most exquisite beauties. With that spirit we have no hesitation in saying that Mr K. is deeply imbued--and of those beauties he has presented us with many striking examples. We are very much inclined indeed to add, that we do not know any book which we would sooner employ as a test to ascertain whether anyone had in him a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm.

One immediate result of the Edinburgh criticism was to provoke an almost incredible outburst of jealous fury on the part of the personage then most conspicuous on the stage of England's, nay of the world's, poetry, Lord Byron. Byron, with next to no real critical power, could bring dazzling resources of wit and rhetoric to the support of any random opinion, traditional or revolutionary, he might happen by whim or habit to entertain. In these days he was just entering the lists as a self-appointed champion of Pope, the artificial school, and eighteenth century critical tradition in general, against Pope's latest editor and depreciator, the clerical sonneteer William Lisle Bowles. Ever since the Pope-Boileau passage in Keats's Sleep and Poetry it had been Byron's pleasure to regard Keats with gratuitous contempt and aversion. When Murray sent him the Lamia volume with a parcel of other books to Ravenna, he wrote back, 'Pray send me no more poetry but what is rare and decidedly good. There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables that I am ashamed to look at them.... No more Keats, I entreat;--flay him alive; if some of you don't I must skin him myself; there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.' A month later, evidently not having read a word of Keats's book, he comes across Jeffrey's praise of it in the Edinburgh Review, and thereupon falls into a fit of anger so foul-mouthed and outrageous that his latest, far from squeamish editors have had to mask its grossness under a cloud of asterisks. A little later he repeats the same disgusting obscenities in cool blood: his only quotable remark on the subject being as follows:--'Of the praises of that little dirty blackguard Keates in the Edinburgh, I shall observe as Johnson did when Sheridan the actor got a pension: "What, has he got a pension? Then it is time I should give up mine." Nobody could be prouder of the praises of the Edinburgh than I was, or more alive to their censure. At present all the men they have ever praised are degraded by that insane article.' By and by he proceeded to administer his own castigation to 'Mr John Ketch' in a second letter written for the Pope-Bowles controversy: but Keats having died meanwhile he withheld this from publication, and a little later, perhaps at the prompting of his own better mind, but more probably through the good influence of Shelley, took in Don Juan the altered tone about Keats which all the world knows, and having been at first thus savagely bent on hunting with the hounds, turned and chose to run part of the way, as far as suited him, with the hare.

Shelley, of course, judged for himself; was incapable of a thought towards a brother poet that was not generous; and had moreover a feeling of true and particular kindness towards Keats. We have seen how wisely and fairly he judged Endymion. Were we to take merely his own words written at the time, we might think that he failed to do justice to the new volume as a whole. His first impression of it, coupled with a wildly overdrawn picture which had reached him of Keats's sufferings under the stings of the reviewers, apparently determined him to sit down and draft that indignant letter to Gifford, never completed or delivered, pleading against the repetition of any such treatment of his new volume as Endymion had received from the Quarterly. In this Shelley speaks of Hyperion as though it were the one thing he admired in the book: and writing about the same time to Peacock, he says 'Among modern things which have reached me is a volume of poems by Keats; in other respects insignificant enough, but containing the fragment of a poem called Hyperion. I dare say you have not time to read it; but it certainly is an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats which I confess I had not before.' And again, 'Among your anathemas of modern poetry, do you include Keats's Hyperion? I think it very fine. His other poems are worth little; but if the Hyperion be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.' In considering these utterances we should remember that they were addressed to correspondents bound to be unsympathetic. Gifford would be so as a matter of course: while Peacock had from old Marlow days been a disbeliever in Keats and his poetry, and had lately adopted a public attitude of disbelief in modern poetry altogether. We must also remember that Shelley had himself been wrought into a mood of unwonted intolerance of certain fashions in poetry by some of Barry Cornwall's recent performances, which he held to be an out-Hunting of Hunt and out-Byroning of Byron.[8] There is a statement of Medwin's which, if Medwin were ever a witness much to be trusted, we would rather take as representing Shelley's ripened and permanent opinion of the contents of the Lamia volume than his own words to Gifford or Peacock. 'He perceived', says Medwin, 'in every one of these productions a marked and continually progressing improvement, and hailed with delight his release from his leading strings, his emancipation from what he called a "perverse and limited school". The Pot of Basil and The Eve of St Agnes he read and re-read with ever new delight, and looked upon Hyperion as almost faultless, grieving that it was but a fragment and that Keats had not been encouraged to complete a work worthy of Milton.' At all events Shelley, apart from the immortal tribute of Adonais, has left other words of his own which may content us, addressed to a different correspondent, as to what he felt about Keats and his work and promise on the whole, without reference to one poem rather than another. I mean those in which he expresses to Mrs Leigh Hunt his hope to see and take care of Keats in Italy:--'I consider his a most valuable life, and I am deeply interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician both of his body and of his soul, to keep the one warm, and to teach the other Greek and Spanish. I am aware, indeed, in part, that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me; and this is an additional motive, and will be an added pleasure.'

The opinions of neither of these two famous men, Byron and Shelley, will have had any immediate effect in England. Murray could not possibly disseminate Byron's private obscenities, and Byron's own intended public castigation of Keats in a second letter to Bowles was, as we have seen, withheld. On the other side Shelley made no public use of the draft of his indignant letter to Gifford, and Peacock would not be by way of saying much about his private expressions of enthusiasm for Hyperion. But we can gather the impression current in sympathetic circles about Keats's future from a couple of entries in the December diaries of Crabb Robinson. He tells how he has been reading out some of the new volume, first Hyperion and then The Pot of Basil, to his friends the Aders', and adds,--'There is a force, wildness, and originality in the works of this young poet which, if his perilous journey to Italy does not destroy him, promise to place him at the head of our next generation of poets. Lamb places him next to Wordsworth--not meaning any comparison, for they are dissimilar' ... and again, 'I am greatly mistaken if Keats do not soon take a high place among our poets. Great feeling and a powerful imagination are shown in this little volume.' Had his health held out, such recognition would have been all and more than all Keats asked for or would have thought he had yet earned. But praise and dispraise were all one to him before now, and we must go back and follow the tragedy of his personal history to its close.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A letter of Procter's to Keats shows that he had been among Keats's visitors during the weeks that followed his attack of haemorrhage (see Buxton Forman, Complete Works, v. 163). Whether they had been much or at all acquainted before then seems uncertain, but Procter's impressions of Keats recorded almost half a century later read as though he had known him while still in health:--

'I saw him only two or three times before his departure for Italy. I was introduced to him by Leigh Hunt, and found him very pleasant, and free from all affectation in manner and opinion. Indeed, it would be difficult to discover a man with a more bright and open countenance. He was always ready to hear and to reply; to discuss, to reason, to admit; and to join in serious talk or common gossip. It has been said that his poetry was affected and effeminate. I can only say that I never encountered a more manly and simple young man. In person he was short, and had eyes large and wonderfully luminous, and a resolute bearing; not defiant, but well sustained.'

[2] As against this judgment, formed from photographs of the wrecked picture and from the general character of Haydon's work, let it be remembered that Hazlitt, no mean judge, declares that the head of Wordsworth is of all his portraits 'the most like his drooping weight of thought and expression.' Lamb's complimentary punning address, In tabulam eximii pictoris, with its English translation, may be taken as exercises in friendly congratulation rather than in criticism. The picture in its present state is reproduced and discussed by Mr Louis A. Holman in the New York Bookman, Feb. 1913, pp. 608 sqq.

[3] Medwin's carelessness of statement and workmanship are well known: he is perfectly casual in the use of quotation marks and the like, and in the original edition of his untrustworthy Life of Shelley it was difficult to be sure that these words were quoted as textually Mrs Lindon's own. But in re-editing the book from its author's revised and expanded copy, Mr Buxton Forman has left no doubt on the matter.

[4] I allude to the various editions issued in recent years by the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, to whom I would hereby appeal to let the piece be cancelled on the plates and the earlier text re-established.

[5] The recognition of this review and its inclusion in the canon of Lamb's works is one of the many services for which thanks are due to his never-enough-to-be-praised editor, Mr E. V. Lucas (The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. I, pp. 200, 470).

[6] Clare is John Clare, the distressed peasant poet, in whom many kindly people fancied they had discovered an English Burns, and on whose behalf, at the same time as on Keats's, Taylor was exerting himself to raise a fund. 'Peter Corcoran' refers to a brilliant medley called The Fancy lately published anonymously by John Hamilton Reynolds, and purporting to tell the fortunes and sample the poetical remains of an ill-starred youth so-named, lured away from fair prospects in love and literature by a passion for the prize ring. The gaps and queries in this letter, the MS. of which is in America, indicate places which its friendly transcriber found illegible.

[7] Morgan MSS. Some words at the end have baffled the transcriber.

[8] Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Ingpen, vol. ii, p. 839.

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Chapter XVI

AUGUST 1820-FEBRUARY 1821: VOYAGE TO ITALY: LAST DAYS AND DEATH AT ROME

Resolve to winter in Italy--Severn as companion--The 'Maria Crowther'--Fellow passengers--Storm in the Channel--Held up in the Solent--Landing near Lulworth--The 'Bright Star' sonnets--The voyage resumed--A meditated poem--Incidents at sea--Quarantine at Naples--Letters from Keats and Haslam--Lady passengers described--A cry of agony--Neapolitan impressions--On the road to Rome--Life at Rome--Apparent improvement--Relapse and despair--Severn's ministrations--His letters from the sickroom--The same continued--Tranquil last days--Choice of epitaph--Spirit of charm and pleasantness--The end.

In telling of the critical reception of Keats's Lamia volume I have anticipated by three or four months the course of time. Returning to his personal condition and doings, we find that by or before the date of his move from Kentish Town to be under the care of the Brawne ladies at Wentworth Place, that is by mid-August, he had accepted the verdict of the doctors that a winter in Italy would be the only thing to give him a chance of recovery. He determined accordingly, not without sore gain-giving and agitation of mind, to make the attempt. In his letter to Shelley acknowledging receipt of The Cenci and answering Shelley's invitation to Pisa, he writes:--'there is no doubt that an English winter would put an end to me, and do so in a lingering, hateful, manner. Therefore, I must either voyage or journey to Italy, as a soldier marches up to a battery'. And again, using the same phrase, he writes to Taylor on August 14th:--'This journey to Italy wakes me at daylight every morning, and haunts me horribly. I shall endeavour to go, though it will be with the sensation of marching against a battery. The first step towards it is to know the expense of a journey and a year's residence, which if you will ascertain for me, and let me know early, you will greatly serve me.' The next day he sends Taylor a note of his wish that in case of his death his books should be divided among his friends and that any assets arising or to arise from the sale of his poems should be devoted to paying his debts--those to Brown and to Taylor himself ranking first. The good publisher promptly bestirred himself to enquire about sailings and make provision for ways and means. For the latter purpose he bought the copyright of Endymion for L100, furnished Keats at starting with a bill on London for L120, and procured promises of eventual help to the extent of L100 more by subscription among persons interested in the poet's fate; James Rice and the painters Hilton and De Wint being among guarantors of L10 each and Lord Fitzwilliam closing the list with a promise of L50.

The vessel chosen for the voyage was a merchant brigantine, the 'Maria Crowther,' having berth accommodation for a few passengers and due to sail from London about the middle of September. The four intervening weeks were spent by the invalid in comparative respite from suffering and distress under the eye and tendance of his beloved. By his desire Haydon came one day to see him, and has told, with a painter's touch, how he found him 'lying in a white bed, with white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic flush of his cheeks.' Haydon's vehement, self-confident and self-righteous manner of admonition to friends in trouble seems to have had an effect the reverse of consolatory, and elsewhere he amplifies this account of his last sight of Keats, saying, 'He seemed to be going out of life with a contempt for this world and no hopes of the other. I told him to be calm, but he muttered that if he did not soon get better he would destroy himself. I tried to reason against such violence, but it was no use; he grew angry, and I went away deeply affected.' Writing about the same time to his young sister, Keats shows himself, as ever, thoughtful and wise on her behalf and does his best to be re-assuring on his own:--

Now you are better, keep so. Do not suffer your Mind to dwell on unpleasant reflexions--that sort of thing has been the destruction of my health. Nothing is so bad as want of health--it makes one envy scavengers and cinder sifters. There are enough real distresses and evils in wait for every one to try the most vigorous health. Not that I would say yours are not real--but they are such as to tempt you to employ your imagination on them, rather than endeavour to dismiss them entirely. Do not diet your mind with grief, it destroys the constitution; but let your chief care be of your health, and with that you will meet your share of Pleasure in the world--do not doubt it. If I return well from Italy I will turn over a new leaf for you. I have been improving lately, and have very good hopes of 'turning a Neuk' and cheating the consumption.

For a companion on his journey, Keats's first thoughts turned to Brown, who was still away on his second tramp through the Highlands. But the letter he wrote asking whether Brown could go with him missed its destination, and he was left with the prospect of having either to give up his journey or venture on it alone, a thing hardly to be thought of in his state of health. At this juncture Haslam, always the most useful of friends in an emergency, betook himself to Severn, whose prospects in London, in spite of the practice he had found as a miniature-painter and of his success in winning the gold medal of the Academy the previous December, seemed far from bright, and urged him to go out with Keats to Rome. Severn at once consented, his immediate impulse of devotion to his friend being strengthened, on reflection, both by the lure of Rome itself and by the idea that he might be able while there to work for, and perhaps win, the travelling studentship of the Royal Academy. He made his arrangements on the shortest possible notice, while Haslam undertook the business of procuring passports and the like. A weird incident marked Severn's departure from his home. His father, passionately attached to him but resenting his resolve to go to Italy now as fiercely as he had before resented his change of profession, on being asked to lend a hand in moving his trunk, in an uncontrollable fit of anger struck and felled him. How and with what rending of the heart Keats took his own farewell from the home of his joy and torment at Hampstead--of this we hear, and may be thankful to hear, nothing. He spent his last days in England with Taylor in Fleet Street, having gone thither on Wednesday September 13th to be at hand for the day and hour when the 'Maria Crowther' might be ready to sail. On the evening of Sunday the 17th of September he and Severn went on board at the London docks. Here the kind Taylor and the serviceable Haslam took leave of them, and their ship weighed anchor and slipped down tide as far as Gravesend, where she came to moorings for the night. Moored close by her was a smack from Dundee, and on board this smack, by one of the minor perversities of fate, who should be a passenger but Charles Brown? He had caught this means of conveyance as the first available when he at last got news of Keats's plans, and had hoped to reach London in time to bid him farewell. But it was all unknowingly that the friends lay that night within earshot of one another.

One lady passenger, a Miss Pidgeon, had come aboard at the docks: a pleasing person, the friends thought at first, but found reason to change their minds later. At Gravesend early the next morning there came another, a pretty and gentle Miss Cotterell, as far gone in consumption as Keats himself. Keats was in lively spirits and exerted himself with Severn to welcome and amuse the new comer. In the course of the day Severn went ashore to buy medicines and other needments for the voyage, and among them, at Keats's special request, a bottle of laudanum. The captain, by name Thomas Walsh, was kind and attentive and did his best, unsuccessfully, to find a goat for the supply of goat's milk to the invalids while on board ship. That evening they put to sea, and Keats's health and spirits seemed to rise with the first excitements of the voyage. The events of the next days are best told in the words of the journal-letter written at the time by Severn to Haslam; vagueness of memory having made much less trustworthy the several accounts of the voyage which he wrote and rewrote in after years. Severn was innocent of all stops save dashes, and I print exactly as he wrote:--

19th Sept. Tuesday, off Dover Castle, etc.

I arose at day break to see the glorious eastern gate--Keats slept till 7--Miss C. was rather ill this morning I prevailed on her to walk the deck with me at half past 6 she recovered much--Keats was still better this morning and Mrs Pidgeon looked and was the picture of health--but poor me! I began to feel a waltzing on my stomach at breakfast when I wrote the note to you I was going it most soundly--Miss Cotterell followed me--then Keats who did it in the most gentlemanly manner--and then the saucy Mrs Pidgeon who had been laughing at us--four faces bequeathing to the mighty deep their breakfasts--here I must change to a minor key Miss C. fainted--we soon recovered her--I was very ill nothing but lying down would do for me. Keats ascended his bed--from which he dictated surgically like Esculapius of old in basso-relievo through him Miss C. was recovered we had a cup of tea each and no more went to bed and slept until it was time to go to bed--we could not get up again--and slept in our clothes all night--Keats the King--not even looking pale.

20th Sept. Wednesday off Brighton. Beautiful morning--we all breakfasted on deck and recovered as we were could enjoy it--about 10 Keats said a storm was hatching--he was right--the rain came on and we retired to our cabin--it abated and once more we came on deck--at 2 storm came on furiously--we retired to our beds. The rolling of the ship was death to us--towards 4 it increased and our situation was alarming--the trunks rolled across the cabin--the water poured in from the sky-light and we were tumbled from one side to the other of our beds--my curiosity was raised to see the storm--and my anxiety to see Keats for I could only speak to him when in bed--I got up and fell down on the floor from my weakness and the rolling of the ship. Keats was very calm--the ladies were much frightened and would scarce speak--when I got up to the deck I was astounded--the waves were in mountains and washed the ship--the watery horizon was like a mountainous country--but the ship's motion was beautifully to the sea falling from one wave to the other in a very lovely manner--the sea each time crossing the deck and one side of the ship being level with the water--this when I understood gave me perfect ease--I communicated below and it did the same--but when the dusk came the sea began to rush in from the side of our cabin from an opening in the planks--this made us rather long faced--for it came by pail-fulls--again I got out and said to Keats 'here's pretty music for you'--with the greatest calmness he answered me only by 'Water parted from the sea.'[1] I staggered up again and the storm was awful--the Captain and Mate soon came down--for our things were squashing about in the dark--they struck a light and I succeeded in getting my desk off the ground--with clothes and books, etc. The Captain finding it could not be stopped--tacked about from our voyage--and the sea ceased to dash against the cabin for we were sailing against wind and tide--but the horrible agitation continued in the ship lengthways--here were the pumps working--the sails squalling the confused voices of the sailors--the things rattling about in every direction and us poor devils pinn'd up in our beds like ghosts by daylight--except Keats he was himself all the time--the ladies suffered the most--but I was out of bed a dozen times to wait on them and tell them there was no danger--my sickness made me get into bed very soon each time--but Keats this morning brags of my sailorship--he says could I have kept on my legs in the water cabin I should have been a standing miracle.

20th Sept.

I caught a sight of the moon about 3 o'clock this morning--and ran down to tell the glad tidings--but the surly rolling of the sea was worse than the storm--the ship trembled to it--and the sea was scarcely calmed by daylight--so that we were kept from 2 o'clock yesterday until 6 this morning without anything--well it has done us good, we are like a Quartett of fighting cocks this morning. The morning is serene we are now back again some 20 miles--waiting for a wind--but full of spirits--Keats is without even complaining and Miss Cottrell has a colour in her face--the sea has done his worst upon us. I am better than I have been for years. Farewell my dear fellow.

J. SEVERN--show this to my family with my love to them.

When you read this you will excuse the manner--I am quite beside myself--and have written the whole this morning Thursday on the deck after a sleepless night and with a head full of care--you shall have a better the next time.

The storm had driven them back from off Brighton more than half way to the Downs, and then abated enough to let them land for a scramble on the shingles at Dungeness, where they excited the suspicions of the coast guard, and to get the above letter posted from Romney. After this calms and contrary airs kept them beating about the channel for many more days yet. At Portsmouth they were held up again, and to pass the time Keats landed and went to call on Dilke's sister Mrs Snook at Bedhampton; again by ill chance barely missing Brown, whom he supposed to be still in Scotland but who was actually only ten miles away, having run down to stay with Dilke's father at Chichester. The next day, while the ship was still hanging in the Solent off Yarmouth, Keats wrote unbosoming himself to Brown of his inward agony more fully than he had ever done in speech:--

I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much--there is one I must mention and have done with it. Even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state? I dare say you will be able to guess on what subject I am harping--you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought has passed through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is passed. I often wish for you that you might flatter me with the best. I think without my mentioning it for my sake you would be a friend to Miss Brawne when I am dead. You think she has many faults--but, for my sake, think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a state at present in which woman merely as woman can have no more power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to Miss Brawne and my sister is amazing. The one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in America. The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me--I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

That night, (September 28) adds Keats, they expected to put into Portland Roads; but calms again held them up, and again they were allowed to land, having made only some few miles' headway down the Dorsetshire coast. The day of this landing was for Keats one of transitory calm and lightening of the spirit. The weather was fine, and 'for a moment,' says Severn, 'he became like his former self. He was in a part that he already knew, and showed me the splendid caverns and grottoes with a poet's pride, as though they had been his birthright.' These are vivid phrases, that about the caverns and grottoes certainly a little over-coloured for the scene, which was Lulworth Cove and the remarkable, but scarcely splendid, rock tunnels and fissures of Stair Hole and Durdle Door. When Severn says that Keats knew the ground, one half wonders whether the Dorsetshire Keatses may really have been kindred of his to whom he had at some time paid an unrecorded visit: or otherwise, whether in travelling to and from Teignmouth in 1818, taking, as we know he did, the southern route from Salisbury by Bridport and Axminster, he may have broken the journey at Dorchester and visited the curiosities of the coast. But in truth, to understand and possess beauties of nature as a birthright, Keats needed not to have seen them before. On board ship the same night Keats borrowed the copy of Shakespeare's Poems which he had given Severn a few days before, and wrote out fair and neatly for him, on the blank page opposite the heading A Lover's Complaint, the beautiful sonnet which every lover of English knows so well:--

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-- No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Severn in later life clearly cherished the impression that the sonnet had been actually composed for him on the day of the Dorsetshire landing. Lord Houghton in his Life and Literary Remains distinctly asserts as much, and it had seemed to us all a beautiful and consolatory circumstance, in the tragedy of Keats's closing days, that his last inspiration in poetry should have come in a strain of such unfevered beauty and tenderness, and with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity. But in point of fact the sonnet was work of an earlier date, and the autograph given to Severn is on the face of it no draught but a fair copy. Its original form had been this--

Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art! Not in lone splendour hung amid the night; Not watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's devout sleepless Eremite, The morning waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores; Or, gazing on the new soft fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:-- No;--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Cheek-pillow'd on my Love's white ripening breast, To touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell, Awake, for ever, in a sweet unrest; To hear, to feel her tender-taken breath, Half passionless, and so swoon on to death.

The sonnet is copied in this form by Charles Brown, under date 1819, in the collection of transcripts from Keats's fugitive verses which from the spring of that year he regularly made as soon after they were written as he could lay hands on them. His dates I have found always trustworthy, and I have shown reason (above, p. 334) for holding the sonnet to have been written in the last week of February, 1819, and the first days of Keats's engagement to Fanny Brawne. All that Keats can actually have done during that evening of tranquillity off Lulworth was to return to it in thought and recopy it for Severn with changes which in the second line heightened the remoteness of the star; in the fourth made an inverted metrical stress normal by substituting 'patient' for 'devout'; in the fifth changed the word 'morning' into 'moving,'[2] in the tenth cancelled one of his defining and arresting compound participles in favour of a simpler phrase; and in the four concluding lines varied a little the mood and temperature of the longing expressed, calling for death not as the sequel to his longing's fulfilment, but as the alternative for it. In Severn's first mention of the subject, which is in a letter written from Rome a few weeks after Keats's death, he shows himself aware that Brown might be in possession already of a version of the sonnet, which of course could only have been the case if it had been composed before Keats left Hampstead. 'Do you know,' he writes, 'the sonnet beginning Bright Star etc., he wrote this down in the ship--it is one of his most beautiful things. I will send it, if you have it not.'

The rest of the voyage, after getting clear of the English Channel, was quick but uncomfortable, the weather variable and often squally. Signs of improvement in Keats's health alternated with alarming returns of haemorrhage, and the painful symptoms of his fellow-traveller Miss Cotterell preyed sometimes severely on his nerves and spirits. At other times his thoughts ran pleasantly on poems yet to be written, and especially on one he had planned on the story of Sabrina. 'He mentioned to me many times in our voyage', writes Severn within a few weeks of the poet's death, 'his desire to write this story and to connect it with some points in the English history and character. He would sometimes brood over it with immense enthusiasm, and recite the story from Milton's Comus in a manner that I will remember to the end of my days.' It is good to think of Keats being thus able to occupy and soothe his fevered spirit with the lovely cadences that tell how Nereus pitied the rescued nymph,

And gave her to his daughters to imbathe In nectar'd lavers strew'd with Asphodel,

or with those that invoke her in the prayer,--

Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,--

it is good to think of this and to try and conceive what Keats while he was in health might have made of this English theme which haunted his imagination now and afterwards at Rome, when the power to shape and almost the power to live and breathe had left him.

Severn took during the voyage an opportunity to make a new drawing of Keats as he lay propped and resting on his berth. Such a drawing would have been an invaluable addition to our memorials of the poet: it remained long in the possession first of one and then of another of Severn's sons, but has of late years unluckily disappeared: stolen, thinks its latest owner, Mr Arthur Severn: let us hope that this mention may perhaps lead to its recognition and recovery. During some rough weather in the Bay of Biscay Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of Don Juan, but presently found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and flung the volume from him in disgust. Perhaps something of his real feelings, but certainly nothing of his way of expressing them, is preserved in Severn's account of the matter written five-and-twenty years later:--

Keats threw down the book and exclaimed: 'this gives me the most horrid idea of human nature, that a man like Byron should have exhausted all the pleasures of the world so completely that there was nothing left for him but to laugh and gloat over the most solemn and heart-rending scenes of human misery, this storm of his is one of the most diabolical attempts ever made upon our sympathies, and I have no doubt it will fascinate thousands into extreme obduracy of heart--the tendency of Bryon's poetry is based on a paltry originality, that of being new by making solemn things gay and gay things solemn.'

In a calm off Cape St Vincent, Keats was delighted with the play of silken colours on the sea, and interested in watching the movement of a whale. The next day there came an alarm: a shot was fired over the bows of the 'Maria Crowther' from one of two Portuguese men of war becalmed close by; but drifting within hail one of the Portuguese captains explained that there were supposed to be privateers in those waters and that he only wanted to learn whether the Englishman had sighted any such.

On October 21, thirty-four days out from London, the 'Maria Crowther' reached Naples harbour and was promptly put in quarantine. In that predicament her passengers sweltered and fumed for ten full days, their number having been increased by the addition of a lieutenant and six seamen, who were despatched from an English man-of-war in the harbour to enquire as to the vessel's name and status, and having thoughtlessly gone on board her were forbidden by the port authorities to go off again. The friends found some alleviation from the tedium of the time through the kindness of Miss Cotterell's brother, a banker in Naples, who kept them supplied with all manner of dainties and luxuries, and especially with abundance of fruit and flowers. 'Keats', says Severn, 'was never tired of admiring (not to speak of eating) the beautiful clusters of grapes and other fruits, and was scarce less enthusiastic over the autumn flowers, though I remember his saying once that he would gladly give them all for a wayside dog-rose bush covered with pink blooms.' The time of detention passed with a good deal of merriment, songs from the man-of-war's men on board, songs, laughter, and gibes from the Neapolitan boatmen swarming round. In all this Keats would join, feverishly enough it is evident, and declared afterwards that he had made more puns in the course of those ten days than in any whole year of his life beside. Once he flashed into a characteristic heat of righteous wrath, when the seamen took to trolling obscene catches in full hearing of the ladies. On the fourth day of their detention he wrote to Mrs Brawne, (to Fanny he dared not write, nor suffer his thoughts to dwell on her at all), saying what he thought of his own state:--

We have to remain in the vessel ten days and are at present shut in a tier of ships. The sea air has been beneficial to me about to as great extent as squally weather and bad accommodations and provisions has done harm. So I am about as I was. Give my love to Fanny and tell her, if I were well there is enough in this Port of Naples to fill a quire of Paper--but it looks like a dream--every man who can row his boat and walk and talk seems a different being from myself. I do not feel in the world.

It is impossible to describe exactly in what state of health I am--at this moment I am suffering from indigestion very much, which makes such stuff of this Letter. I would always wish you to think me a little worse than I really am; not being of a sanguine disposition I am likely to succeed. If I do not recover your regret will be softened--if I do your pleasure will be doubled. I dare not fix my Mind upon Fanny, I have not dared to think of her. The only comfort I have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver-case--the hair in a Locket--and the Pocket Book in a gold net. Show her this. I dare say no more. Yet you must not believe I am so ill as this Letter may look, for if ever there was a person born without the faculty of hoping I am he. Severn is writing to Haslam, and I have just asked him to request Haslam to send you his account of my health. O what an account I could give you of the Bay of Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world--I feel a spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly--O what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints!

Once released from quarantine and landed at Naples Severn wrote to Haslam fully his impressions of the voyage and of its effects on his friend.

Naples, Nov. 1 1820.

My dear Haslam,

We are just released from the loathsome misery of quarantine--foul weather and foul air for the whole 10 days kept us to the small cabin--surrounded by about 2,000 ships in a wretched hole not sufficient for half the number, yet Keats is still living--may I not have hopes of him? He has passed what I must have thought would kill myself. Now that we are on shore and feel the fresh air, I am horror struck at his sufferings on this voyage, all that could be fatal to him in air and diet--with the want of medicine and conveniences he has weather'd it, if I may call his poor shattered frame and broken heart weathering it. For myself I have stood it firmly until this morning when in a moment my spirits dropt at the sight of his suffering--a plentiful shower of tears (which he did not see) has relieved me somewhat--what he passed still unnerves me. But now we are breathing in a large room with Vesuvius in our view--Keats has become calm and thinks favourably of this place for we are meeting with much kind treatment on every side--more particularly from an English gentleman here (brother to Miss Cottrell one of our lady passengers) who has shown unusually humane treatment to Keats--unasked--these with very good accommodation at our Inn (Villa de Londra) have kept him up through dinner--but on the other hand Dr Milner is at Rome (whither Keats is proposing to go) the weather is now cold wet and foggy, and we find ourselves on the wrong side for his hope for recovery (for the present I will talk to him--he is disposed to it. I will talk him to sleep for he has suffered much fatigue).

Nov. 2.

Keats went to bed much recovered--I took every means to remove from him a heavy grief that may tend more than anything to be fatal--he told me much--very much--and I don't know whether it was more painful for me or himself--but it had the effect of much relieving him--he went very calm to bed.

Poor fellow! he is still sleeping at half past nine, if I can but ease his mind I will bring him back to England well--but I fear it never can be done in this world--the grand scenery here affects him a little--but he is too infirm to enjoy it--his gloom deadens his sight to everything--and but for intervals of something like ease he must soon end it--

You will like to know how I have managed in respect to self. I have had a most severe task full of contrarieties what I did one way was undone another. The lady passenger though in the same state as Keats--yet differing in constitution required almost everything the opposite to him--for instance if the cabin windows were not open she would faint and remain entirely insensible 5 or 6 hours together--if the windows were open poor Keats would be taken with a cough (a violent one--caught from this cause) and sometimes spitting of blood, now I had this to manage continually for our other passenger is a most consumate brute--she would see Miss Cottrell stiffened like a corpse--I have sometimes thought her dead--nor ever lend the least aid--full a dozen times I have recovered this lady and put her to bed--sometimes she would faint 4 times in a day yet at intervals would seem quite well--and was full of spirits--she is both young and lively--and but for her we should have had more heaviness--though much less trouble. She has benefited by Keats's advice--I used to act under him--and reduced the fainting each time--she has recovered very much and gratefully ascribes it to us--her brother the same.

The Captain has behaved with great kindness to us all--but more particularly Keats--everything that could be got or done--was at his service without asking--he is a good-natured man to his own injury--strange for a captain I won't say so much for his ship--it's a black hole--5 sleeping in one cabin--the one you saw--the only one--during the voyage I have been frequently sea-sick--sometimes severely--2 days together. We have had only one real fright on the seas--not to mention continued squalls--and a storm. 'All's well that ends well,' and these ended well. Our fright was from two Portugese ships of war--they brought us to with a shot--which passed close under our stern--this was not pleasant for us you will allow--nor was it decreased when they came up--for a more infernal set I never could imagine--after some trifling questions they allowed us to go on to our no small delight--our captain was afraid they would plunder the ship--this was in the Bay of Biscay--over which we were carried by a good wind.

Keats has written to Brown--and in quarantine another to Mrs Brawne--he requests you will tell Mrs Brawne what I think of him--for he is too bad to judge of himself--this morning he is still very much better. We are in good spirits and I may say hopeful fellows--at least I may say as much for Keats--he made an Italian pun to-day--the rain is coming down in torrents.

The confession Keats had made to Severn was of course that of the effects of the passion which had so long been racking and wasting him, and the violence of which he had shrunk till now from disclosing to friend or brother. Writing on the same day to Brown, he could not control or disguise the anguish of his heart.

Naples, 1 November 1820.

My dear Brown,

Yesterday we were let out of Quarantine, during which my health suffered more from bad air and the stifled cabin than it had done the whole voyage. The fresh air revived me a little, and I hope I am well enough this morning to write to you a short calm letter;--if that can be called one, in which I am afraid to speak of what I would fainest dwell upon. As I have gone thus far into it, I must go on a little; perhaps it may relieve the load of WRETCHEDNESS which presses upon me. The persuasion that I will see her no more will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her. O, God! God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see her--I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I was in England; I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again--Now!--O that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her--to receive a letter from her--to see her handwriting would break my heart--even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? Where can I look for consolation or ease?

I cannot say a word about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties around me. I am afraid to write to her--I should like her to know that I do not forget her. Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery. Was I born for this end? God bless her, and her mother, and my sister, and George, and his wife, and you, and all!

During the four days they remained at Naples Keats received a second invitation in the kindest possible terms from Shelley to come and settle near him in Pisa, but determined to carry out his original plan of wintering at Rome, where he was to place Taylor's bill to his credit at Torlonia's and whither he carried a special introduction to Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark. Severn was also the bearer of one from Sir Thomas Lawrence to Canova. Keats attempted to amuse himself reading Clarissa Harlowe, and also seeing some of the sights of Naples. After almost a century there has lately come to light a record, set down at second-hand and probably touched up in the telling, of some things noticed and words spoken by the stricken poet in drives about the city and suburbs in the friendly company of Mr Charles Cotterell, the brother of his invalid fellow-passenger. Keats was driving, says the narrator, Mr Charles Macfarlane,--

--he was driving with Charles Cottrell from the Bourbon Museum, up the beautiful open road which leads up to Capo di Monte and the Ponte Rossi. On the way, in front of a villa or cottage, he was struck and moved by the sight of some rose trees in full bearing. Thinking to gratify the invalid, Cottrell, a ci-devant officer in the British Navy, jumped out of the carriage, spoke to somebody about the house or garden, and was back in a trice with a bouquet of roses. 'How late in the year! What an exquisite climate!' said the Poet; but on putting them to his nose, he threw the flowers down on the opposite seat, and exclaimed: 'Humbugs! they have no scent! What is a rose without its fragrance? I hate and abhor all humbug, whether in a flower or in a man or woman!' And having worked himself strongly up in the anti-humbug humour, he cast the bouquet out on the road. I suppose that the flowers were China roses, which have little odour at any time, and hardly any at the approach of winter.

Returning from that drive, he had intense enjoyment in halting close to the Capuan Gate, and in watching a group of lazzaroni or labouring men, as, at a stall with fire and cauldron by the roadside in the open air, they were disposing of an incredible quantity of macaroni, introducing it in long unbroken strings into their capacious mouths, without the intermediary of anything but their hands. 'I like this,' said he; 'these hearty fellows scorn the humbug of knives and forks. Fingers were invented first. Give them some carlini that they may eat more! Glorious sight! How they take it in!'[3]

But the political state and servile temper of the Neapolitan people--though they were living just then under the constitutional forms imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and misinterpreting at the theatre the sight of a couple of armed sentries posted (as was the custom of the time and country) on the stage, he broke into a fit of anger and determined suddenly to leave the place. Accordingly on the 4th or 5th of November the friends set out for Rome in a small hired carriage, which jogged so loiteringly on the road that Severn was able to walk beside it almost all the way. Keats suffered seriously at the stopping-places from bad quarters and bad food, and was for the most part listless and dispirited, but would become animated 'when an unusually fine prospect opened before us, or the breeze bore to us exquisite hill fragrances or breaths from the distant blue seas, and particularly when I literally filled the little carriage with flowers. He never tired of these, and they gave him a singular and almost fantastic pleasure which was at times almost akin to a strange joy.' Entering Rome by the Lateran gate they settled at once in lodgings which Dr Clark, to whom Keats had written from Naples, had already secured for them, in the first house on the right going up the steps from the Piazza di Spagna to Sta Trinita dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were left pretty much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and at first they were ill served by the trattoria from which they got their meals, until Keats, having bidden Severn see how he would mend matters, one day coolly emptied all the dishes out of the window, and handed them back to the porter: a hint, says Severn, which was quickly taken. For a while the patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit these alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the Pincian close by.

The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the air, says Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. Clark gave Severn an introduction to Gibson, the then famous American sculptor, and Keats insisted on his delivering it at once and losing no opportunity of making acquaintances in Rome that might be useful to him, and no time in getting to work on his projected competition picture, 'The Death of Alcibiades.' In Severn's absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid Lieutenant Elton. In their walks on the Pincian these two often met the famous beauty Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing--but not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who was tall and handsome, presently affected Keats's nerves, and made them change the direction of their walks. Sometimes, instead of walking, they would take short invalid rides, on hired mounts suited to their respective statures, about the Pincian or outside the Porta del Popolo, while Severn was working among the ruins.

The mitigation of Keats's sufferings lasted for some five weeks, and filled the anxious heart of Severn with hope. Nevertheless he could not but be aware of the deep-seated dejection in his friend which found expression now and again in word or act, as when he began reading a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the lines, too sadly applicable to himself:--

Misera me! sollievo a me non resta Altro che 'l pianto, ed il pianto e delitto.

Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more placid. Severn had hired a piano for their lodgings, and the patient often allowed himself to be soothed with music. His thoughts even turned towards verse, and he again meditated and spoke of his proposed poem on the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and on November 30 Keats himself wrote to Brown in a strain far from cheerful, indeed, but much less desperate than before.

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been--but it appears to me--however, I will not speak of that subject. I must have been at Bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to me from Chichester--how unfortunate--and to pass on the river too! There was my star predominant! I cannot answer anything in your letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any handwriting of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse, and, at my worst, even in quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life. There is one thought enough to kill me; I have been well, healthy, alert, etc., walking with her, and now the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach. There, you rogue, I put you to the torture; but you must bring your philosophy to bear, as I do mine, really, or how should I be able to live? Dr Clark is very attentive to me; he says there is very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George, for it runs in my head we shall all die young. I have not written to Reynolds yet, which he must think neglectful; being anxious to send him a good account of my health, I have delayed it from week to week. If I recover, I will do all in my power to correct the mistakes made during sickness; and if I should not, all my faults will be forgiven. Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember me to all friends, and tell Haslam I should not have left London without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind. Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister--who walks about my imagination like a ghost--she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always make an awkward bow.

God bless you!

But on the glimmering hopes of these first weeks at Rome there suddenly followed despair. On Dec. 10, 'when he was going on in good spirits, quite merrily,' says Severn, came a relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Haemorrhage followed haemorrhage on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes the most piteous and distressing. To put an end to his misery, Keats with agonies of entreaty begged to have the bottle of laudanum which Severn had by his desire bought at Gravesend: and on Severn's refusal, 'his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his ardent imagination and bursting heart.' It was no unmanly fear of pain in Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend. 'He explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued attendance on him.' Severn gently holding firm, Keats for a while fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed.

From these relapses until the end Severn had no respite from his devoted ministrations. Writing to Mrs Brawne a week after the crisis, he says 'Not a moment can I be from him. I sit by his bed and read all day, and at night I humour him in all his wanderings. He has just fallen asleep, the first sleep for eight nights, and now from mere exhaustion.' By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great, partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to combat it. His diet was at one time reduced to one anchovy and a small piece of toast a day, so that he endured cruel pangs of actual hunger. Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from the assiduous kindness of Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr Ewing. The devotion and resource of Severn were infinite, and had their reward. Occasionally there came times of delirium or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and his ruined hopes, and of all that he would have done in poetry had life and the fruition of his love been granted him, till his companion was almost exhausted with 'beating about in the tempest of his mind'; and once and again some fresh remembrance of his betrothed, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the first days of storm, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his companion soothed him with reading or music. The virulence of the reviewers, which most of his friends supposed to be what was killing him, was a matter, Severn declares, scarcely ever on his lips or in his mind at all. Gradually he seemed to mend and gather a little strength again, till Severn actually began to dream that he might even yet recover, though he himself would admit no such hope. 'He says the continued stretch of his imagination has already killed him. He will not hear of his good friends in England, except for what they have done; and this is another load; but of their high hopes of him, his certain success, his experience, he will not hear a word. Then the want of some kind of hope to feed his voracious imagination'--This is from a letter to Mr Taylor which Severn began on Christmas Eve and never finished. On the 11th January, in one conveying to Mrs Brawne the reviving hopes he was beginning on the slenderest grounds to cherish, Severn writes:--

Now he has changed to calmness and quietude, as singular as productive of good, for his mind was most certainly killing him. He has now given up all thoughts, hopes, or even wish for recovery. His mind is in a state of peace from the final leave he has taken of this world and all its future hopes; this has been an immense weight for him to rise from. He remains quiet and submissive under his heavy fate. Now, if anything will recover him, it is this absence of himself. I have perceived for the last three days symptoms of recovery. Dr Clark even thinks so. Nature again revives in him--I mean where art was used before; yesterday he permitted me to carry him from his bedroom to our sitting-room--to put clean things on him--and to talk about my painting to him. This is my good news--don't think it otherwise, my dear madam, for I have been in such a state of anxiety and discomfiture in this barbarous place, that the least hope of my friend's recovery is a heaven to me.

For three weeks I have never left him--I have sat up all night--I have read to him nearly all day, and even in the night--I light the fire--make his breakfast, and sometimes am obliged to cook--make his bed, and even sweep the room. I can have these things done, but never at the time when they must and ought to be done--so that you will see my alternative; what enrages me most is making a fire--I blow--blow for an hour--the smoke comes fuming out--my kettle falls over on the burning sticks--no stove--Keats calling me to be with him--the fire catching my hands and the door-bell ringing: all these to one quite unused and not at all capable--with the want of even proper material--come not a little galling. But to my great surprise I am not ill--or even restless--nor have I been all the time; there is nothing but what I will do for him--there is no alternative but what I think and provide myself against--except his death--not the loss of him--I am prepared to bear that--but the inhumanity, the barbarism of these Italians....

O! I would my unfortunate friend had never left your Wentworth Place--for the hopeless advantages of this comfortless Italy. He has many, many times talked over 'the few happy days at your house, the only time when his mind was at ease.' I hope still to see him with you again. Farewell, my dear madam. One more thing I must say--poor Keats cannot see any letters, at least he will not--they affect him so much and increase his danger. The two last I repented giving, he made me put them into his box--unread.

The complaint about the barbarity of Rome and of Italian law was due to a warning Severn had received that on the death of his friend every stick and shred of furniture in the house would have to be burnt. Within a few days the last thread of hope was snapped by fresh returns of haemorrhage and utter prostration, with renewed feverish agitations of the tortured spirit. Writing to Haslam on January the 15th, Severn shows himself almost broken down by the imminence of money difficulties about to add themselves to his other cares:--

Poor Keats has just fallen asleep--I have watched him and read to him--to his very last wink--he has been saying to me 'Severn I can see under your quiet look--immense twisting and contending--you don't know what you are reading--you are enduring for me more than I'd have you--O that my last hour was come--what is it puzzles you now--what is it happens--' I tell him that 'nothing happens--nothing worries me beyond his seeing--that it has been the dull day.' Getting from myself to his recovery--and then my painting--and then England--and then--but they are all lies--my heart almost leaps to deny them--for I have the veriest load of care--that ever came upon these shoulders of mine. For Keats is sinking daily--perhaps another three weeks may lose me him for ever--this alone would break down the most gallant spirit--I had made sure of his recovery when I set out. I was selfish and thought of his value to me--and made a point of my future success depend on his candor to me--this is not all--I have prepared myself to bear this now--now that I must and should have seen it before--but Torlonias the bankers have refused any more money--the bill is returned unaccepted--'no effects' and I tomorrow must--aye must--pay the last solitary crown for this cursed lodging place--yet more should our unfortunate friend die--all the furniture will be burnt--bed sheets--curtains and even the walls must be scraped--and these devils will come upon me for L100 or L150--the making good--but above all this noble fellow lying on the bed is dying in horror--no kind hope smoothing down his suffering--no philosophy--no religion to support him--yet with all the most gnawing desire for it--yet without the possibility of receiving it....

Now Haslam what do you think of my situation--for I know not what may come with tomorrow--I am hedg'd in every way that you look at me--if I could leave Keats for a while every day I could soon raise money by my face painting--but he will not let me out of his sight--he cannot bear the face of a stranger--he has made me go out twice and leave him solus. I'd rather cut my tongue out than tell him that money I must get--that would kill him at a word--I will not do anything that may add to his misery--for I have tried on every point to leave for a few hours in the day but he wont unless he is left alone--this won't do--nor shall not for another minute whilst he is John Keats.

Yet will I not bend down under these--I will not give myself a jot of credit unless I stand firm--and will too--you'd be rejoiced to see how I am kept up--not a flinch yet--I read, cook, make the beds--and do all the menial offices--for no soul comes near Keats except the doctor and myself--yet I do all this with a cheerful heart--for I thank God my little but honest religion stays me up all through these trials. I'll pray to God tonight that He may look down with mercy on my poor friend and myself. I feel no dread of what more I am to bear but look to it with confidence.

In religion Keats had been neither a believer nor by any means (except in the earliest days of his enthusiasm for Leigh Hunt) a scoffer; respecting Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by turns clinging to and drifting from the doctrine of human immortality. Now, on his death-bed, says Severn, among the most haunting and embittering of his distresses was the thought that not for him were those ready consolations of orthodoxy which were within the reach of every knave and fool. After a time, contrasting the steadfast behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to him from Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying and Holy Living, strove to pass the remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy.

The danger of money trouble must have been due to a pure misunderstanding, as the credit at Torlonia's was in fact not exhausted, and a fresh communication from Mr Taylor removed all anxiety on that score. One day Keats was seized with a desire for books and was able for a time to take pleasure in reading those which Severn procured for him. Another and continual pleasure was Severn's playing on the piano, and especially his playing of Haydn's sonatas. 'With all his suffering and consciousness of approaching death,' wrote Severn in after years, 'he never quite lost the play of his cheerful and elastic mind, yet these happier moments were but slight snatches from his misery, like the flickering rays of the sun in a smothering storm. Real rays of sunshine they were, all the same, such as would have done honour to the brightest health and the happiest mind: yet the storm of sickness and death was always going on, and I have often thought that these bursts of wit and cheerfulness were called up of set purpose--were, in fact, a great effort on my account.'

Neither patient nor watcher thought any more of recovery. For a few days Severn had the help of an English nurse. It was doubtless then that Keats made his friend go and see the place chosen for his burial. 'He expressed pleasure at my description of the locality of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, about the grass and the many flowers, particularly the innumerable violets--also about a flock of goats and sheep and a young shepherd--all these intensely interested him. Violets were his favourite flowers, and he joyed to hear how they overspread the graves. He assured me that he seemed already to feel the flowers growing over him': and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he gave for his epitaph the words, partly taken from a phrase in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster,[4]--'here lies one whose name was writ in water.' Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual question to the doctor when he came in was, 'Doctor, when will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?'. As he turned to ask it neither physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. Once or twice he was torn again by too sharp a reminder of vanished joys and hopes. Severn handed him a letter which he supposed to be from Mrs Brawne, but which was really from her daughter. 'The glance of that letter tore him to pieces. The effects were on him for many days--he did not read it--he could not, but requested me to place it in his coffin together with a purse and a letter (unopened) of his sister's--since which time he has requested me not to place that letter, but only his sister's purse and letter with some hair.' Loveable and considerate to the last, 'his generous concern for me,' reiterates Severn, 'in my isolated position at Rome was one of his greatest cares.' His response to kindness was irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with him to the end. Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. 'To remedy this one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while doubting suddenly cried out, "Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy lamp-lighter actually lit up the other candle."' And again: 'Poor Keats has me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep.'

Life held out for six weeks after the second relapse, but from the first days of February the end was visibly drawing near. On one of his nights of vigil Severn occupied himself in making that infinitely touching death-bed drawing in black and white of his friend with which all readers are familiar. Between the 14th and 22nd of February Severn wrote letters to Brown, to Mrs Brawne, and to Haslam to prepare them for the worst and to tell them of the reconciled and tranquil state into which the dying man had fallen. Death came very peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes Severn, 'about four, the approaches of death came on. 'Severn--I--lift me up--I am dying--I shall die easy; don't be frightened--be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept.' Three days later his body was carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his sake and Shelley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the English-speaking world for ever.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A long-popular song from Arne's opera Artaxerxes.

[2] Unless Brown had transcribed 'morning' for 'moving' in error; and this was probably the case, though there is a tempting sonority in the juxtaposition of the nearly identical broad vowel sounds in his version.

[3] Reminiscences of a Literary Life, by Charles Macfarlane: London, John Murray, 1917, pp. 12-15.--Keats in his letters is apt enough to talk of cant and flummery, but not of humbug, and I suspect the word, though not the thought, is put into his mouth. With reference to Mr Macfarlane's account of Keats generally as 'one of the most cheery and plucky little fellows I ever knew,' and as a man to have stood with composure a whole broadside of Blackwood and Quarterly articles, and to have faced a battery by the side of any friend, it is difficult to conjecture at what date the writer can have seen enough of Keats to form these impressions. From January 1816, when he was in his seventeenth year, to 1827, young Macfarlane seems to have lived entirely at Naples, except for some excursions to the Levant and a short visit to England in 1820, when Keats was a consumptive patient already starting or started for Italy.

[4] Act v, Sc. iii. See Harrison S. Morris in Bulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, 1913, p. 30.

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