Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
by Sidney Colvin · English · Gutenberg #36356 · 1,333,569 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
Author: Sidney Colvin
Release date: June 8, 2011 [eBook #36356]
Language: English
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Transcriber's notes:
(1) Characters following a carat (^) were printed in superscript.
(2) Macrons and breves above letters and dots below letters were not
inserted.
(3) The following typographical errors have been corrected:
Page 39: "The shield and helmet of Diomed, with the accompanying
simile, in the opening of the third book; and the prodigious
description of Neptune's passage to the Achive ships, in the
thirteenth book:" 'Achive' amended to 'Argive'.
Page 146: "And his references to this passage are frequent in his
letters.--But in those exquisite stanzas," 'references' amended from
'reference'.
Page 478: "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." 'considered' amended from
'considerd'.
Page 480: "... 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 ..." 'of' amended from
'af'.
Page 490: "... we are like a Quartett of fighting cocks this
morning." 'Quartett' amended from 'Quratett'.
[Illustration: PL. I]
JOHN KEATS
HIS LIFE AND POETRY
HIS FRIENDS CRITICS
AND
AFTER-FAME
BY
SIDNEY COLVIN
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1917
COPYRIGHT
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
S. C.
TO
F. C.
PREFACE
To the name and work of Keats our best critics and scholars have in
recent years paid ever closer attention and warmer homage. But their
studies have for the most part been specialized and scattered, and there
does not yet exist any one book giving a full and connected account of
his life and poetry together in the light of our present knowledge and
with help of all the available material. Ever since it was my part, some
thirty years ago, to contribute the volume on Keats to the series of
short studies edited by Lord Morley, (the _English Men of Letters_
series), I have hoped one day to return to the subject and do my best to
supply this want. Once released from official duties, I began to prepare
for the task, and through the last soul-shaking years, being over age
for any effectual war-service, have found solace and occupation in
carrying it through.
The following pages, timed to appear in the hundredth year after the
publication of Keats's first volume, are the result. I have sought in
them to combine two aims not always easy to be reconciled, those of
holding the interest of the general reader and at the same time of
satisfying, and perhaps on some points even informing, the special
student. I have tried to set forth consecutively and fully the history
of a life outwardly remarkable for nothing but its tragic brevity, but
inwardly as crowded with imaginative and emotional experience as any on
record, and moreover, owing to the open-heartedness of the man and to
the preservation and unreserved publication of his letters, lying bare
almost more than any other to our knowledge. Further, considering for
how much friendship counted in Keats's life, I have tried to call up the
group of his friends about him in their human lineaments and relations,
so far as these can be recovered, more fully than has been attempted
before. I believe also that I have been able to trace more closely than
has yet been done some of the chief sources, both in literature and in
works of art, of his inspiration. I have endeavoured at the same time to
make felt the critical and poetical atmosphere, with its various and
strongly conflicting currents, amid which he lived, and to show how his
genius, almost ignored in its own day beyond the circle of his private
friends, was a focus in which many vital streams of poetic tendency from
the past centred and from which many radiated into the future. To
illustrate this last point it has been necessary, by way of epilogue, to
sketch, however briefly, the story of his posthumous fame, his after
life in the minds and hearts of English writers and readers until
to-day. By English I mean all those whose mother language is English. To
follow the extension of Keats's fame to the Continent is outside my aim.
He has not yet, by means of translation and comment in foreign
languages, become in any full sense a world-poet. But during the last
thirty years the process has begun, and there would be a good deal to
say, did my scheme admit it, of work upon Keats done abroad, especially
in France, where our literature has during the last generation been
studied with such admirable intelligence and care.
In an attempt of this scope, I have necessarily had to repeat matters of
common knowledge and to say again things that others have said well and
sufficiently already. But working from materials hitherto in part
untouched, and taking notice of such new lights as have appeared while
my task was in progress, I have drawn from them some conclusions, both
biographical and critical, which I believe to be my own and which I hope
may stand. I have not shrunk from quoting in full poems and portions of
poems which everybody knows, in cases where I wanted the reader to have
their text not merely in memory but actually before him, for re-studying
with a fresh comment or in some new connexion. I have also quoted very
largely from the poet's letters, even now not nearly as much read as
things so full of genius should be, both in order that some of his story
may be told in his own words and for the sake of that part of his
mind--a great and most interesting part--which is expressed in them but
has not found its way into his poems. It must be added that when I found
things in my former small book which I did not see my way to better and
which seemed to fit into the expanded scale of this one, I have not
hesitated sometimes to incorporate them--to the amount perhaps of forty
or fifty pages in all.
I wish I could hope that my work will be found such as to justify the
amount and variety of friendly help I have had in its preparation.
Thanks for such help are due in more quarters than I can well call to
mind. First and foremost, to Lord Crewe for letting me have free and
constant access to his unrivalled collection of original documents
connected with the subject, both those inherited from his father
(referred to in the notes as 'Houghton MSS.') and those acquired in
recent years by himself (referred to as 'Crewe MSS.'). Speaking
generally, it may be assumed that new matter for which no authority is
quoted is taken from these sources. To Miss Henrietta Woodhouse of
Weston Lea, Albury, I am indebted for valuable documentary and other
information concerning her uncle Richard Woodhouse. Next in importance
among collections of Keats documents to that of Lord Crewe is that of Mr
J. P. Morgan in New York, the chief contents of which have by his leave
been transcribed for me with the kindliest diligence by his librarian
Miss Greene. For other illustrative documents existing in America, I
believe of value, I should like to be able to thank their owners, Mr Day
and Mr Louis Holman of Boston: but these gentlemen made a condition of
their help the issue of a limited edition _de luxe_ of the book
specially illustrated from their material, a condition the publishers
judged it impossible to carry out, at any rate in war-time.
Foremost among my scholarly helpers at home has been my friend Professor
W. P. Ker. For information and suggestions in answer to enquiries of one
kind or another I am indebted to Professor Israel Gollancz and Mr Henry
Bradley; to Professor Ernest Weekley, the best living authority on
surnames; to Mr A. H. Bullen; to Mr Falconer Madan and Mr J. W. Mackail;
to Mr Thomas J. Wise; to Mr H. C. Shelley; to Mr J. D. Milner, Director
of the National Portrait Gallery; and to my former colleague Mr A. H.
Smith, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. Mr
George Whale supplied me with full copies of and comments on the entries
concerning Keats in the books of Guy's Hospital. Dr Hambley Rowe of
Bradford put at my disposal the results, unfortunately not yet
conclusive, of the researches made by him as a zealous Cornishman on
Keats's possible Cornish descent. I must not omit thanks to Mr Emery
Walker for his skill and pains in preparing the illustrations for my
book. With reference to these, I may note that the head from the
portrait painted by Severn in 1859 and now in Lord Crewe's possession
was chosen for colour reproduction as frontispiece because it is the
fullest in colouring and, though done from memory so long after the
poet's death, to my mind the most satisfying and convincing in general
air of any of the extant portraits. Of the miniature done by Severn from
life in 1818, copied and recopied by himself, Charles Brown and others,
and made familiar by numberless reproductions in black and white, the
original, now deposited by the Dilke Trustees in the National Portrait
Gallery, has the character of a monochrome touched with sharp notes or
suggestions of colour in the hair, lips, hands, book, etc. I have
preferred not to repeat either this or the equally well known--nay,
hackneyed--and very distressing death-bed drawing made by Severn at
Rome. The profile from Haydon's life-mask of the poet is taken, not,
like most versions of the same mask, from the plaster, but from an
electrotype made many years ago when the cast was fresh and showing the
structure and modellings of the head more subtly, in my judgment, than
the original cast itself in its present state. Both cast and electrotype
are in the National Portrait Gallery. So is the oil-painting of Keats
seated reading, begun by Severn soon after the poet's death and finished
apparently two years later, which I have reproduced, well known though
it is, partly for its appositeness to a phrase in one of his letters to
his sister. Besides the portraits of Keats, I have added from
characteristic sources those of the two men who most influenced him at
the outset of his career, Leigh Hunt and Haydon. A new feature in my
book is provided by the reproductions of certain works of art, both
pictures and antiques, which can be proved or surmised to have struck
and stimulated his imagination. The reproductions of autographs, one of
his own and one of Haydon's, speak for themselves.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
1795-1815: BIRTH AND PARENTAGE: SCHOOLDAYS AND APPRENTICESHIP 1
CHAPTER II
OCTOBER 1815-MARCH 1817: HOSPITAL STUDIES: POETICAL AMBITIONS:
LEIGH HUNT 27
CHAPTER III
WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST
FOR POETRY 59
CHAPTER IV
THE 'POEMS' OF 1817 85
CHAPTER V
APRIL-DECEMBER 1817: WORK ON _ENDYMION_ 130
CHAPTER VI
_ENDYMION._--I. THE STORY: ITS SOURCES, PLAN, AND SYMBOLISM 164
CHAPTER VII
_ENDYMION._--II. THE POETRY: ITS QUALITIES AND AFFINITIES 206
CHAPTER VIII
DECEMBER 1817-JUNE 1818: HAMPSTEAD AND TEIGNMOUTH: EMIGRATION
OF GEORGE KEATS 242
CHAPTER IX
JUNE-AUGUST 1818: THE SCOTTISH TOUR 272
CHAPTER X
SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1818: BLACKWOOD AND THE QUARTERLY: DEATH OF
TOM KEATS 297
CHAPTER XI
DECEMBER 1818-JUNE 1819: KEATS AND BROWN HOUSE-MATES: FANNY
BRAWNE: WORK AND IDLENESS 321
CHAPTER XII
JUNE 1819-JANUARY 1820: SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, HAMPSTEAD: TROUBLE
AND HEALTH FAILURE 358
CHAPTER XIII
WORK OF 1818, 1819.--I. THE ACHIEVEMENTS 385
CHAPTER XIV
WORK OF 1818, 1819.--II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS 424
CHAPTER XV
FEBRUARY-AUGUST 1820: HAMPSTEAD AND KENTISH TOWN: PUBLICATION
OF _LAMIA_ VOLUME 455
CHAPTER XVI
AUGUST 1820-FEBRUARY 1821: VOYAGE TO ITALY: LAST DAYS AND DEATH
AT ROME 485
CHAPTER XVII
EPILOGUE 513
APPENDIX 551
INDEX 559
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE PAGE
I. HEAD OF KEATS _Frontispiece_
From a posthumous oil painting by Joseph Severn in the
possession of the Marquis of Crewe, K.G.
II. PORTRAIT OF JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT 46
From an engraving by Mayer after a drawing by J. Hayter.
III. PORTRAIT OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON 62
From an engraving by Thomson after Haydon.
IV. LIFE-MASK OF KEATS 144
From an electrotype in the National Portrait Gallery.
V. 'ONWARD THE TIGER AND THE LEOPARD PANTS, WITH ASIAN
ELEPHANTS' 230
From an engraving after a sarcophagus relief at Woburn Abbey.
VI. A SACRIFICE TO APOLLO 264
From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.
VII. THE ENCHANTED CASTLE 266
From an engraving by Vivares and Woollett after Claude.
VIII. 'AND THERE I'D SIT AND READ ALL DAY LIKE A PICTURE OF
SOMEBODY READING' 338
From an oil painting by Joseph Severn in the National
Portrait Gallery
IX. 'FIGURES ON A GREEK VASE--A MAN AND TWO WOMEN' 342
From an etching in Piranesi's _Vasi e Candelabri_.
X. PAGE FROM _ISABELLA; OR, THE POT OF BASIL_ 394
From an autograph by Keats in the British Museum.
XI. THE SOSIBIOS VASE: PROFILE AND FRIEZE 416
From an engraving in the _Musee Napoleon_.
XII. 'WHAT PIPES AND TIMBRELS? WHAT WILD ECSTASY?' 418
Bacchanalian friezes, (A) from the Townley Vase in the British
Museum, (B) from the Borghese Vase in the Louvre.
XIII. PAGE FROM A LETTER OF HAYDON TO ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1834 532
CHAPTER I
1795-1815: BIRTH AND PARENTAGE: SCHOOLDAYS AND APPRENTICESHIP
Obscure family history--The Finsbury livery stable--The surname
Keats--Origin probably Cornish--Character of parents--Traits of
childhood--The Enfield School--The Edmonton home--The Pymmes
Brook--Testimonies of schoolmates--Edward Holmes--Charles Cowden
Clarke--New passion for reading--Left an orphan--Apprenticed to a
surgeon--Relations with his master--Readings in the poets--The _Faerie
Queene_--The Spenser fever--Other poetic influences--Influences of
nature--Early attempts in verse--Early sympathizers--George Felton
Mathew--Move to London.
For all the study and research, that have lately been spent on the life
and work of Keats, there is one point as to which we remain as much in
the dark as ever, and that is his family history. He was born at an hour
when the gradually re-awakened genius of poetry in our race, I mean of
impassioned and imaginative poetry, was ready to offer new forms of
spiritual sustenance, and a range of emotions both widened and deepened,
to a generation as yet only half prepared to receive them. If we
consider the other chief poets who bore their part in that great
revival, we can commonly recognize either some strain of power in their
blood or some strong inspiring quality in the scenery and traditions of
their home, or both together. Granting that the scenic and legendary
romance of the Scottish border wilds were to be made live anew for the
delight of the latter-day world, we seem to see in Walter Scott a man
predestined for the task alike by origin, association, and opportunity.
Had the indwelling spirit of the Cumbrian lakes and mountains, and their
power upon the souls and lives of those living among them, to be newly
revealed and interpreted to the general mind of man, where should we
look for its spokesman but in one of Wordsworth's birth and training?
What, then, it may be asked, of Byron and Shelley, the two great
contrasted poets of revolution, or rather of revolt against the
counter-revolution, in the younger generation,--the one worldly,
mocking, half theatrically rebellious and Satanic, the other unworldly
even to unearthliness, a loving alien among men, more than half truly
angelic? These we are perhaps rightly used to count as offspring of
their age, with its forces and ferments, its violent actions and
reactions, rather than of their ancestry or upbringing. And yet, if we
will, we may fancy Byron inspired in literature by demons of the same
froward brood that had urged others of his lineage on lives of adventure
or of crime, and may conceive that Shelley drew some of his instincts
for headlong, peremptory self-guidance, though in directions most
opposite to the traditional, from the stubborn and wayward stock of
colonial and county aristocracy whence he sprang.
Keats, more purely and exclusively a poet than any of these, and
responding more intuitively than any to the spell alike of ancient
Greece, of mediaeval romance, and of the English woods and fields, was
born in a dull and middling walk of London city life, and 'if by
traduction came his mind',--to quote Dryden with a difference,--it was
through channels hidden from our search. From his case less even than
from Shakespeare's can we draw any argument as to the influence of
heredity or environment on the birth and growth of genius. His origin,
in spite of much diligent inquiry, has not been traced beyond one
generation on the father's side and two on the mother's. His father,
Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to London, and while
still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery-stable
kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Seven or eight years later,
about the beginning of 1795, he married his employer's daughter, Frances
Jennings, then in her twentieth year. Mr Jennings, who had carried on a
large business in north-eastern London and the neighbouring suburbs, and
was a man of substance, retired about the same time to live in the
country, at Ponder's End near Edmonton, leaving the management of the
business in the hands of his son-in-law. At first the young couple lived
at the stable, at the sign of the Swan and Hoop, Finsbury Pavement,
facing the then open space of Lower Moorfields. Here their eldest child,
the poet JOHN KEATS, was born prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of
October, 1795. A second son, named George, followed on February 28,
1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, 1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in
infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the 3rd of June, 1803, a daughter,
Frances Mary. In the meantime the family had moved from the stable to a
house in Craven Street, City Road, half a mile farther north.
The Keats brothers as they grew up were remarked for their intense
fraternal feeling and strong vein of family pride. But it was a pride
that looked forward and not back: they were bent on raising the family
name and credit, but seem to have taken no interest at all in its
history, and have left no record or tradition concerning their forbears.
Some of their friends believed their father to have been a Devonshire
man: their sister, who long survived them, said she remembered hearing
as a child that he came from Cornwall, near the Land's End.
There is no positive evidence enabling us to decide the question. The
derivation of English surnames is apt to be complicated and obscure, and
'Keats' is no exception to the rule. It is a name widely distributed in
various counties of England, though not very frequent in any. It may in
some cases be a possessive form derived from the female Christian name
Kate, on the analogy of Jeans from Jane, or Maggs from Margaret: but the
source accepted as generally probable for it and its several variants is
the Middle-English adjective 'kete', a word of Scandinavian origin
meaning bold, gallant. In the form 'Keyte' the name prevails principally
in Warwickshire: in the variants Keat (or Keate) and Keats (or
Keates[1]) it occurs in many of the midland, home, and southern,
especially the south-western, counties.
Mr Thomas Hardy tells me of a Keats family sprung from a horsedealer of
Broadmayne, Dorsetshire, members of which lived within his own memory as
farmers and publicans in and near Dorchester, one or two of them
bearing, as he thought, a striking likeness to the portrait of the poet.
One Keats family of good standing was established by the mid-eighteenth
century in Devon, in the person of a well-known headmaster of Blundell's
school, Tiverton, afterwards rector of Bideford. His son was one of
Nelson's bravest and most famous captains, Sir Richard Godwin Keats of
the 'Superb', and from the same stock sprang in our own day the lady
whose tales of tragic and comic west-country life, published under the
pseudonym 'Zack', gave promise of a literary career which has been
unhappily cut short. But with this Bideford stock the Keats brothers can
have claimed no connexion, or as schoolboys they would assuredly have
made the prowess of their namesake of the 'Superb' their pride and
boast, whereas in fact their ideal naval hero was a much less famous
person, their mother's brother Midgley John Jennings, a tall lieutenant
of marines who served with some credit on Duncan's flagship at
Camperdown and by reason of his stature was said to have been a special
mark for the enemy's musketry. In the form Keat or Keate the name is
common enough both in Devon, particularly near Tiverton, and in
Cornwall, especially in the parishes of St Teath and Lanteglos,--that is
round about Camelford,--and also as far eastward as Callington and
westward as St Columb Major: the last named parish having been the seat
of a family of the name entitled to bear arms and said to have come
originally from Berkshire.
But neither the records of the Dorsetshire family, nor search in the
parish registers of Devon and Cornwall, have as yet yielded the name of
any Thomas Keat or Keats as born in 1768, the birth-year of our poet's
father according to our information. A 'Thomas Keast', however, is
registered as having been born in that year in the parish of St Agnes,
between New Quay and Redruth. Now Keast is a purely Cornish name,
limited to those parts, and it is quite possible that, borne by a
Cornishman coming to London, it would get changed into the far commoner
Keats (a somewhat similar phonetic change is that of Crisp into Cripps).
So the identification of this Thomas Keast of St Agnes as the father of
our Keats is not to be excluded. The Jennings connexion is of itself a
circumstance which may be held to add to the likelihood of a Cornish
origin for the poet, Jennings being a name frequent in the Falmouth
district and occurring as far westward as Lelant. Children are
registered as born in and after 1770 of the marriage of a John Jennings
to a Catherine Keate at Penryn; and it is a plausible conjecture (always
remembering it to be a conjecture and no more) that the prosperous
London stable-keeper Jonn Jennings was himself of Cornish origin, and
that between him and the lad Thomas Keats, whom he took so young first
as head stableman and then as son-in-law, there existed some previous
family connexion or acquaintance. These, however, are matters purely
conjectural, and all we really know about the poet's parents are the
dates above mentioned, and the fact that they were certainly people
somewhat out of the ordinary. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time
as a man of sense, spirit, and conduct: 'of so remarkably fine a
commonsense and native respectability,' writes Cowden Clarke, in whose
father's school the poet and his brother were brought up, 'that I
perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanour used to be
canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys.' And
again:--'I have a clear recollection of his lively and energetic
countenance, particularly when seated on his gig and preparing to drive
his wife home after visiting his sons at school. In feature, stature,
and manner John resembled his father.' Of Frances Keats, the poet's
mother, we learn more vaguely that she was 'tall, of good figure, with
large oval face, and sensible deportment': and again that she was a
lively, clever, impulsive woman, passionately fond of amusement, and
supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some
imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of
her family as follows:--'my grandfather Mr Jennings was very well off,
as his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible
would have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with
enthusiasm of his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never
saw a woman of the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my
mother.'
As to the grandmother and her estimable qualities all accounts are
agreed, but of the mother the witness quoted himself tells a very
different tale. This Mr Richard Abbey was a wholesale tea-dealer in
Saint Pancras Lane and a trusted friend of Mr and Mrs Jennings. In a
memorandum written long after their death he declares that both as girl
and woman their daughter, the poet's mother, was a person of unbridled
temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways and
was no credit to her family.[2] Whatever truth there may be in these
charges, it is certain that she lived to the end under her mother's roof
and was in no way cut off from her children. The eldest boy John in
particular she is said to have held in passionate affection, by him
passionately returned. Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be
left quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping
watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in.
Haydon, an artist who loved to lay his colours thick, gives this
anecdote of the sword a different turn:--'He was when an infant a most
violent and ungovernable child. At five years of age or thereabouts, he
once got hold of a naked sword and shutting the door swore nobody should
go out. His mother wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously
she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through the
window saw her position and came to the rescue.' Another trait of the
poet's childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, on the authority of a gammer
who had known him from his birth, is that when he was first learning to
speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of making a rime to
the last word people said and then laughing.
The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send
them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school
kept by a Mr John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats,
including the boys' admired uncle, the lieutenant of marines, had been
educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of
exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. The school-house had
been originally built for a rich West India merchant, in the finest
style of early Georgian classic architecture, and stood in a spacious
garden at the lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was
used for a railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to
stand: but later it was taken down, and the central part of the facade,
with its fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was
transported to the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum,
and is still preserved there as a choice example of the style. It is
evident that Mr Clarke was a kind and excellent schoolmaster, much above
the standards of his time, and that lads with any bent for literature or
scholarship had their full chance under him. Still more was this the
case when his son Charles Cowden Clarke, a genial youth with an ardent
and trained love of books and music, grew old enough to help him as
usher in the school-work. The brothers John and George Keats were mere
children when they were put under Mr Clarke's care, John not much over
and George a good deal under eight years old, both still dressed, we are
told, in the childish frilled suits which give such a grace to groups of
young boys in the drawings of Stothard and his contemporaries.
Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, whose
horse fell and threw him in the City Road as he rode home late one night
after dining at Southgate, perhaps on his way home from the Enfield
School. His skull was fractured: he was picked up unconscious about one
o'clock and died at eight in the morning. This was on the 16th of April,
1804. Within twelve months his widow had taken a second husband--one
William Rawlings, described as 'of Moorgate in the city of London,
stable-keeper,' presumably therefore the successor of her first husband
in the management of her father's business. (It may be noted
incidentally that Rawlings, like Jennings, is a name common in Cornwall,
especially in and about the parish of Madron). This marriage must have
turned out unhappily, for it was soon followed by a separation, under
what circumstances or through whose fault we are not told. In the
correspondence of the Keats brothers after they were grown up no mention
is ever made of their stepfather, of whom the family seem soon to have
lost all knowledge. Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live at
Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about
this time left a widow. The family was well enough provided for, Mr
Jennings (who died March 8, 1805) having left a fortune of over L13,000,
of which, in addition to other legacies, he bequeathed a capital
yielding L200 a year to his widow absolutely; one yielding L50 a year to
his daughter Frances Rawlings, with reversion to her Keats children
after her death; and L1000 to be separately held in trust for the said
children and divided among them on the coming of age of the youngest.
Between the home, then, in Church Street, Edmonton, and the neighbouring
Enfield school, where the two elder brothers were in due time joined by
the youngest, the next five years of Keats's boyhood (1806-1811) were
passed in sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain
the years, or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and
almost the only recollections he has left of his own early days refer to
holiday times in his grandmother's house at Edmonton. They are conveyed
in some rimes which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to
amuse his young sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to
little boys not of genius, for dabbling by the brookside and keeping
small fishes in tubs,--
There was a naughty boy Tittlebat
And a naughty boy was he Not over fat,
He kept little fishes Minnow small
In washing tubs three As the stal
In spite Of a glove
Of the might Not above
Of the Maid, The size
Nor afraid Of a nice
Of his Granny-good Little Baby's
He often would Little finger--
Hurly burly O he made
Get up early 'Twas his trade
And go Of Fish a pretty kettle
By hook or crook A kettle--
To the brook A kettle--
And bring home Of Fish a pretty kettle
Miller's thumb, A kettle!
In a later letter to his sister he makes much the same confession in a
different key, when he bids her ask him for any kind of present she
fancies, only not for live stock to be kept in captivity, 'though I will
not now be very severe on it, remembering how fond I used to be of
Goldfinches, Tomtits, Minnows, Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, Cock salmons and
all the whole tribe of the Bushes and the Brooks.' Despite the changes
which have overbuilt and squalidly or sprucely suburbanized all those
parts of Middlesex, the Pymmes brook still holds its course across half
the county, is still bridged by the main street of Edmonton, and runs
countrywise, clear and open, for some distance along a side street on
its way to join the Lea. Other memories of it, and of his childish
playings and musings beside it, find expression in Keats's poetry where
he makes the shepherd-prince Endymion tell his sister Peona how one of
his love-sick vagaries has been to sit on a stone and bubble up the
water through a reed,--
So reaching back to boy-hood: make me ships
Of moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips,
With leaves stuck in them; and the Neptune be
Of their petty ocean.
If we learn little of Keats's early days from his own lips, we have
sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school
companions; which was that of a fiery, generous little fellow, handsome
and passionate, vehement both in tears and laughter, and as placable and
loveable as he was pugnacious. But beneath this bright and mettlesome
outside there lay deep in his nature, even from the first, a strain of
painful sensibility making him subject to moods of unreasonable
suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was accustomed to
conceal from all except his brothers, to whom he was attached by the
very closest of fraternal ties. George, the second brother, had all
John's spirit of manliness and honour, with a less impulsive disposition
and a cooler blood. From a boy he was the bigger and stronger of the
two: and at school found himself continually involved in fights for, and
not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery senior. Tom, the
youngest, was always delicate, and an object of protecting care as well
as the warmest affection to the other two.
Here are some of George Keats's recollections, written after the death
of his elder brother, and referring partly to their school days and
partly to John's character after he was grown up:
I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of
his heart and the nobleness of his spirit, before we left school we
quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my
schoolfellows will bear witness that John's temper was the cause of
all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are.
From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and
fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure
relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible
spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He
avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and
often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him
relief.
Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to
their confirmation in the words of two of Keats's school friends; and
first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards a musical critic
of note and author of a well-known _Life of Mozart_:--
Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His _penchant_ was for
fighting. He would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his
brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him. Jennings their
sailor relation was always in the thoughts of the brothers, and they
determined to keep up the family reputation for courage; George in a
passive manner; John and Tom more fiercely. The favourites of John
were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed to prefer
them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour. I recollect at this
moment his delight at the extraordinary gesticulations and pranks of a
boy named Wade who was celebrated for this.... He was a boy whom any
one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty might easily
fancy would become great--but rather in some military capacity than in
literature. You will remark that this taste came out rather suddenly
and unexpectedly. Some books of his I remember reading were _Robinson
Crusoe_ and something about Montezuma and the Incas of Peru. He must
have read Shakespeare as he thought that 'no one would care to read
_Macbeth_ alone in a house at two o'clock in the morning.' This seems
to me a boyish trait of the poet. His sensibility was as remarkable as
his indifference to be thought well of by the master as a 'good boy'
and to his tasks in general.... He was in every way the creature of
passion.... The point to be chiefly insisted on is that he was _not
literary--his love of books and poetry manifested itself chiefly about
a year before he left school_. In all active exercises he excelled.
The generosity and daring of his character with the extreme beauty and
animation of his face made I remember an impression on me--and being
some years his junior I was obliged to woo his friendship--in which I
succeeded, but not till I had fought several battles. This violence
and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of disposition--in
passions of tears or outrageous fits of laughter--always in
extremes--will help to paint Keats in his boyhood. Associated as they
were with an extraordinary beauty of person and expression, these
qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more popular.[3]
Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given by a school
friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation
and encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first became
aware of his own vocation for poetry. This was the aforementioned
Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the head master, who towards the close
of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature and of
his generation in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of Keats:--
He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a
highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most
picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw. One of the
transports of that marvellous actor, Edmund Kean--whom, by the way, he
idolized--was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very
dissimilar in face and figure. Upon one occasion when an usher, on
account of some impertinent behaviour, had boxed his brother Tom's
ears, John rushed up, put himself into the received posture of
offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who could, so to say,
have put him in his pocket. His passion at times was almost
ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the taller
and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing
when John was 'in one of his moods,' and was endeavouring to beat him.
It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an
intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the
most trying occasions. He was not merely the favourite of all, like a
pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his highmindedness,
his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his
generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never
heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had
known him.[4]
The same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in
his earlier school days Keats showed no particular signs of an
intellectual bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did.
But during his last few terms, that is in his fifteenth and sixteenth
years, he suddenly became a passionate student and a very glutton of
books. Let us turn again to Cowden Clarke's words:--
My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing
prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of
voluntary work; and such was Keats's indefatigable energy for the last
two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that,
upon each occasion, he took the first prize by a considerable
distance. He was at work before the first school-hour began, and that
was at seven o'clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation
were so devoted; and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at
play, he would be in the school--almost the only one--at his Latin or
French translation; and so unconscious and regardless was he of the
consequences of so close and persevering an application, that he never
would have taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes
driven out for the purpose by one of the masters....
One of the silver medals awarded to Keats as a school prize in these
days exists in confirmation of this account and was lately in the
market. Cowden Clarke continues:--
In the latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he
remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading.
Thus, his _whole_ time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive
memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those
last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted
principally of abridgements of all the voyages and travels of any
note; Mavor's collection, also his _Universal History_; Robertson's
histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss
Edgeworth's productions, together with many other books equally well
calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly
recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's
_Classical Dictionary_, which he appeared to _learn_, and Spence's
_Polymetis_. This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with
the Greek mythology; here was he 'suckled in that creed outworn;' for
his amount of classical attainment extended no farther than the
_AEneid_, with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before
leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a
considerable portion....
He must have gone through all the better publications in the school
library, for he asked me to lend him some of my own books; and, in my
'mind's eye,' I now see him at supper (we had our meals in the
schoolroom), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding the
folio volume of Burnet's _History of his Own Time_ between himself and
the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's
_Examiner_--which my father took in, and I used to lend to Keats--no
doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty.
In the midst of these ardent studies of Keats's latter school days
befell the death of his mother, who had been for some time in failing
health. First she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell
into a rapid consumption, which carried her off at the age of
thirty-five in February 1810. We are told with what devotion her eldest
boy attended her sick-bed,--'he sat up whole nights with her in a great
chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine, or even cook her food,
but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease,'--and how
bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,--'he gave way to such
impassioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook under the
master's desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in all who
saw him.'
From her, no doubt, came that predisposition to consumption which showed
itself in her youngest son from adolescence and carried him off at
nineteen, and with the help of ill luck, over-exertion, and distress of
mind, wrecked also before twenty-five the robust-seeming frame and
constitution of her eldest, the poet. Were the accounts of her character
less ambiguous, or were the strands of human heredity less inveterately
entangled than they are, it would be tempting, when we consider the deep
duality of Keats's nature, the trenchant contrast between the two selves
that were in him, to trace to the mother the seeds of one of those
selves, the feverishly over-sensitive and morbidly passionate one, and
to his father the seeds of the other, the self that was all manly good
sense and good feeling and undisturbed clear vision and judgment. In the
sequel we shall see this fine virile self in Keats continually and
consciously battling against the other, trying to hold it down, and
succeeding almost always in keeping control over his ways and dealings
with his fellow-men, though not over the inward frettings of his spirit.
In the July following her daughter's death, Mrs Jennings, being desirous
to make the best provision she could for her orphan grand-children, 'in
consideration of the natural love and affection which she had for them,'
executed a deed putting them under the care of two guardians, to whom
she made over, to be held in trust for their benefit from the date of
the instrument, the chief part of the property which she derived from
her late husband under his will.[5] The guardians were Mr Rowland
Sandell, merchant, who presently renounced the trust, and the aforesaid
Mr Richard Abbey, tea-dealer. Mrs Jennings survived the execution of
this deed more than four years,[6] but Mr Abbey seems at once to have
taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his authority John
Keats was withdrawn from school at the end of the summer term, 1811,
when he was some months short of sixteen, and made to put on harness for
the practical work of life. With no opposition, so far as we learn, on
his own part, he was bound apprentice to a Mr Thomas Hammond, a surgeon
and apothecary of good repute at Edmonton, for the customary term of
five years.[7]
The years between the sixteenth and twentieth of his age are the most
critical of a young man's life, and in these years, during which our
other chief London-born poets, Spenser, Milton, Gray, were profiting by
the discipline of Cambridge and the Muses, Keats had no better or more
helpful regular training than that of an ordinary apprentice, apparently
one of several, in a suburban surgery. But he had the one advantage, to
him inestimable, of proximity to his old school, which meant free
access to the school library and continued encouragement and advice in
reading from his affectionate senior, the head master's son. The fact
that it was only two miles' walk from Edmonton to Enfield helped much,
says Cowden Clarke, to reconcile him to his new way of life, and his
duties at the surgery were not onerous. As laid down in the ordinary
indentures of apprenticeship in those times, they were indeed chiefly
negative, the apprentice binding himself 'not to haunt taverns or
playhouses, not to play at dice or cards, nor absent himself from his
said master's service day or night unlawfully, but in all things as a
faithful apprentice he shall behave himself towards the said master and
all his during the said term.'
Keats himself, it is recorded, did not love talking of his apprentice
days, and has left no single written reference to them except the
much-quoted phrase in a letter of 1819, in which, speaking of the
continual processes of change in the human tissues, he says, 'this is
not the same hand which seven years ago clenched itself at Hammond.' It
was natural that the same fiery temper which made him as a small boy
square up against an usher on behalf of his brother,--an offence which
the headmaster, according to his son Cowden Clarke, 'felt he could not
severely punish,'--it was natural that this same temper should on
occasion flame out against his employer the surgeon. If Keats's words
are to be taken literally, this happened in the second year of his
apprenticeship. Probably it was but the affair of a moment: there is no
evidence of any habitual disagreement or final breach between them, and
Keats was able to put in the necessary testimonial from Mr Hammond when
he presented himself in due course for examination before the Court of
Apothecaries. A fellow-apprentice in after years remembered him as 'an
idle loafing fellow, always writing poetry.' This, seeing that he did
not begin to write till he was near eighteen, must refer to the last two
years of his apprenticeship and probably represents an unlettered view
of his way of employing his leisure, rather (judging by his general
character) than any slackness in the performance of actual duty. One of
the very few glimpses we have of him from outside is from Robert Hengist
Horne ('Orion' Horne), another alumnus of the Enfield school who lived
to make his mark in literature. Horne remembered Mr Hammond driving on a
professional visit to the school one winter day and leaving Keats to
take care of the gig. While Keats sat in a brown study holding the
reins, young Horne, remembering his school reputation as a boxer, in
bravado threw a snowball at him and hit, but made off into safety before
Keats could get at him to inflict punishment. The story suggests a
picture to the eye but tells nothing to the mind.
Our only real witness for this time of Keats's life is Cowden Clarke. He
tells us how the lad's newly awakened passion for the pleasures of
literature and the imagination was not to be stifled, and how at
Edmonton he plunged back into his school occupations of reading and
translating whenever he could spare the time. He finished at this time
his prose version of the _Aeneid_, and on free afternoons and evenings,
five or six times a month or oftener, was in the habit of walking over
to Enfield,--by that field path where Lamb found the stiles so many and
so hard to tackle,--to see his friend Cowden Clarke and bring away or
return borrowed books. Young Clarke was an ardent liberal and disciple
of Leigh Hunt both in political opinions and literary taste. In summer
weather he and Keats would sit in a shady arbour in the old school
garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks
and exclamations of delight. From the nature of Keats's imitative first
flights in verse, it is clear that though he hated the whole 'Augustan'
and post-Augustan tribe of social and moral essayists in verse, and
Pope, their illustrious master, most of all, yet his mind and ear had
become familiar, in the course of his school and after-school reading,
with Thomson, Collins, Gray, and all the more romantically minded poets
of the middle and later eighteenth century. But the essential service
Clarke did him was in pressing upon his attention the poetry of the
great Elizabethan and Jacobean age, from _The Shepheard's Calendar_ down
to _Comus_ and _Lycidas_,--'our older and nobler poetry,' as a few had
always held it to be even through the Age of Reason and the reign of
Pope and his followers, and as it was now loudly proclaimed to be by all
the innovating critics, with Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt among the foremost.
On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden Clarke introduced him for the first
time to Spenser, reading him the _Epithalamion_ in the afternoon and at
his own eager request lending him the _Faerie Queene_ to take away the
same evening. With Spenser's later imitators, playful or serious, as
Shenstone and Thomson, Beattie and the more recent Mrs Tighe, Keats, we
know, was already familiar; indeed he owned later to a passing phase of
boyish delight in Beattie's _Minstrel_ and Tighe's languorously romantic
_Psyche_. But now he found himself taken to the fountain head, and was
enraptured. It has been said, and truly, that no one who has not had the
good fortune to be attracted to the _Faerie Queene_ in boyhood can ever
quite wholeheartedly and to the full enjoy it. The maturer student,
appreciate as he may its innumerable beauties and noble ethical temper,
can hardly fail to be critically conscious also of its arbitrary forms
of rime and language, and sated by its melodious redundance: he will
perceive its faults now of scholastic pedantry and now of flagging
inspiration, the perplexity and discontinuousness of the allegory, and
the absence of real and breathing humanity amidst all that luxuriance of
symbolic and decorative invention, and prodigality of romantic incident
and detail. It is otherwise with the greedy and indiscriminate
imaginative appetite of boyhood. I speak as one of the fortunate who
know by experience that for a boy there is no poetical revelation like
the _Faerie Queene_, no pleasure equal to the pleasure of being rapt for
the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by those rivers
and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive with glancing
figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and
Saracen,--with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous
shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in
distress. Through the new world thus opened to him Keats went ranging
with delight: 'ramping' is Cowden Clarke's word: he showed moreover his
own instinct for the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm
on epithets of special felicity or power. For instance, says his friend,
'he hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, "What
an image that is--_sea-shouldering whales_!"'
Spenser has been often proved not only a great awakener of the love of
poetry in youth, but a great fertilizer of the germs of original
poetical power where they exist; and Charles Brown, Keats's most
intimate companion during the two last years of his life, states
positively that it was to the inspiration of the _Faerie Queene_ that
his first notion of attempting to write was due. 'Though born to be a
poet, he was ignorant of his birthright until he had completed his
eighteenth year. It was the _Faerie Queene_ that awakened his genius. In
Spenser's fairy-land he was enchanted, breathed in a new world, and
became another being; till enamoured of the stanza, he attempted to
imitate it, and succeeded. This account of the sudden development of his
poetic powers I first received from his brothers and afterwards from
himself. This, his earliest attempt, the _Imitation of Spenser_, is in
his first volume of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting to those
acquainted with his history.' Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years
earlier, but his memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest. We may
fairly take Brown to be on this point the better informed of the two,
and may assume that it was some time in the second year after he left
school that the Spenser fever took hold on Keats, and with it the
longing to be himself a poet. But it was not with Spenser alone, it was
with other allegoric and narrative poets as well, his followers or
contemporaries, that Keats was in these days gaining acquaintance. Not
quite in his earliest, but still in his very early, attempts, we find
clear traces of familiarity with the work both of William Browne of
Tavistock and of Michael Drayton, and we can conceive how in that
charming ingenuous retrospect of Drayton's on his boyish vocation to
poetry, addressed to his friend Henry Reynolds, Keats will have smiled
to find an utterance of the same passion that had just awakened in his
own not very much maturer self.
Let it be remembered moreover that the years of Keats's school days and
apprenticeship were also those of the richest and most stimulating
outburst of the new poetry in England. To name only their chief
products,--the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Coleridge and Wordsworth had come
while he was only a child: during his school days had appeared
Wordsworth's still richer and not less challenging volumes of 1807, and
the succession of Scott's romantic lays (but these last, in spite of
their enormous public success, it was in circles influenced by Leigh
Hunt not much the fashion to admire): during his apprentice years at
Edmonton, the two first cantos of Byron's _Childe Harold_ and the still
more overwhelmingly successful series of his Eastern tales: and finally
Wordsworth's _Excursion_, with which almost from the first Keats was
profoundly impressed. But it was not, of course, only by reading poetry
that he was learning to be a poet. Nature was quite as much his teacher
as books; and the nature within easy reach of him, tame indeed and
unimpressive in comparison with Wordsworth's lakes and mountains, had
quite enough of vital English beauty to afford fair seed-time to his
soul. Across the levels of the Lea valley, not then disfigured as they
are now by factories and reservoir works and the squalor of sprawling
suburbs, rose the softly shagged undulations of Epping forest, a region
which no amount of Cockney frequentation or prosaic vicinity can ever
quite strip of its primitive romance. Westward over Hornsey to the
Highgate and Hampstead heights, north-westward through Southgate towards
the Barnets, and thence in a sweep by the remains of Enfield Chase, was
a rich tract of typically English country, a country of winding
elm-shadowed lanes, of bosky hedge and thicket and undulating
pasture-land charmingly diversified with parks and pleasaunces. Nearly
such I can myself remember it some sixty years ago, and even now, off
the tram-frequented highways and between the devastating encroachments
of bricks and mortar, forlorn patches of its ancient pastoral self are
still to be found lurking.
It was in his rambles afield in these directions and in his habitual
afternoon and evening strolls to Enfield and back, that a delighted
sense of the myriad activities of nature's life in wood and field and
brook and croft and hedgerow began to possess Keats's mind, and to blend
with the beautiful images that already peopled it from his readings in
Greek mythology, and to be enhanced into a strange supernatural thrill
by the recurring magic of moonlight. It is only in adolescence that such
delights can be drunk in, not with conscious study and observation but
passively and half unaware through all the pores of being, and no youth
ever drank them in more deeply than Keats. Not till later came for him,
or comes for any man, the time when the images so absorbed, and the
emotions and sympathies so awakened, define and develop themselves in
consciousness and discover with effort and practice the secret of
rightly expressing themselves in words.
After Keats, under the stimulus of Spenser, had taken his first plunge
into verse, he went on writing occasional sonnets and other pieces:
secretly and shyly at first like all other young poets: at least it was
not until some two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed
anything that he had written to his friend and confidant Cowden Clarke.
This was a sonnet on the release of Leigh Hunt after serving a two
years' sentence of imprisonment for a political offence. Clarke relates
how he was walking in to London from Enfield to call on and congratulate
the ex-prisoner, whom he not only revered as a martyr in the cause of
liberty but knew and admired personally, when Keats met him and turned
back to accompany him part of the way. 'At the last field-gate, when
taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled _Written on the day that Mr
Leigh Hunt left prison_. This I feel to be the first proof I had
received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I
remember the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it!
There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with
life.' About a score of the pieces which Keats had written and kept
secret during the preceding two years are preserved, and like the work
of almost all beginners are quite imitative and conventional, failing to
express anything original or personal to himself. They include the
aforesaid Spenserian stanzas, which in fact echo the cadences of
Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_ much more than those of Spenser himself;
an ode to Hope, quite in the square-toed manner of eighteenth century
didactic verse, and another to Apollo, in which style and expression owe
everything to Gray; a set of octosyllabics recording, this time with
some touch of freshness, a momentary impression of a woman's beauty
received one night at Vauxhall, and so intense that it continued to
haunt his memory for years; two sets of verses addressed in a vein of
polite parlour compliment to lady friends at the seaside; and several
quite feeble sonnets in the Wordsworthian form, among them one on the
peace of Paris in 1814, one on Chatterton and one on Byron.
Of Keats's outward ways and doings during these days when he was growing
to manhood we know nothing directly except from Cowden Clarke, and can
only gather a little more by inference. It is clear that he enjoyed a
certain amount of liberty and holiday, more, perhaps, than would have
fallen to the lot of a more zealous apprentice, and that he spent part
of his free time in London in the society of his brother George, at this
time a clerk in Mr Abbey's counting-house, and of friends to whom George
made him known. Among these were the family of an officer of marines
named Wylie, to whose charming daughter, Georgiana, George Keats a
little later became engaged, and another family of prosperous
tradespeople named Mathew. Here too there were daughters, Caroline and
Ann, who made themselves pleasant to the Keats brothers, and to whom
were addressed the pair of complimentary jingles already mentioned. One
of the sisters, asked in later life for her recollections of the time,
replied in a weariful strain of evangelical penitence for the
frivolities of those days, and found nothing more to the purpose to say
of Keats than this:--'I cannot go further than say I always thought he
had a very beautiful countenance and was very warm and enthusiastic in
his character. He wrote a great deal of poetry at our house but I do not
recollect whether I ever had any of it, I certainly have none now; Ann
had many pieces of his.' A cousin of this family, one George Felton
Mathew, was a youth of sensibility and poetical leanings, and became for
a time an intimate friend of Keats, and next to his brothers and Cowden
Clarke the closest confidant of his studies and ambitions. Their
intimacy began in the Edmonton days and lasted through the earlier
months of his student life in London. Looking back upon their relations
after some thirty years, Mr Felton Mathew, then a supernumerary official
of the Poor Law Board, struggling meekly under the combined strain of a
precarious income, a family of twelve children, and a turn for the
interpretation of prophecy, wrote as follows:--
Keats and I though about the same age, and both inclined to
literature, were in many respects as different as two individuals
could be. He enjoyed good health--a fine flow of animal spirits--was
fond of company--could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities
of life--and had great confidence in himself. I, on the other hand was
languid and melancholy--fond of repose--thoughtful beyond my
years--and diffident to the last degree. But I always delighted in
administering to the happiness of others: and being one of a large
family, it pleased me much to see him and his brother George enjoy
themselves so much at our little domestic concerts and dances.... He
was of the sceptical and republican school. An advocate for the
innovations which were making progress in his time. A faultfinder with
everything established. I, on the contrary, hated controversy and
dispute--dreaded discord and disorder--loved the institutions of my
country.... But I respected Keats' opinions, because they were
sincere--refrained from subjects on which we differed, and only asked
him to concede with me the imperfection of human knowledge, and the
fallibility of human judgment: while he, on his part, would often
express regret on finding that he had given pain or annoyance by
opposing with ridicule or asperity the opinions of others.
Of Keats's physical appearance and poetical preferences the same witness
writes further:--
A painter or a sculptor might have taken him for a study after the
Greek masters, and have given him 'a station like the herald Mercury,
new lighted on some heaven-kissing hill.' His eye admired more the
external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse. He
delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description,
but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. He used to
spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never observed the tears
in his eyes nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme
sensibility. These indeed were not the parts of poetry which he took
pleasure in pointing out.
This last, it should be noted, seems in pretty direct contradiction with
one of Cowden Clarke's liveliest recollections as follows:--'It was a
treat to see as well as hear him read a pathetic passage. Once when
reading _Cymbeline_ aloud, I saw his eyes fill with tears, and his voice
faltered when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen saying
she would have watched him--
Till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay follow'd him till _he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air_; and then
Have turn'd mine eye and wept.'
Early in the autumn of 1815, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday,
Keats left the service of Mr Hammond, his indentures having apparently
been cancelled by consent, and went to live in London as a student at
the hospitals, then for teaching purposes united, of Guy's and St
Thomas's. What befell him during the eighteen months that followed, and
how his career as a student came to an end, will be told in the next two
chapters.[8]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Between the forms with and without the final 's' there is no hard
and fast line to be drawn, one getting changed into the other either
regularly, by the normal addition of the possessive or patronymic
suffix, or casually, through our mere English habit of phonetic
carelessness and slipshod pronunciation. I learn from a correspondent
belonging to the very numerous St Teath stock, and signing and known
only as Keat, that other members of his family call themselves Keats.
And my friend Mr F. B. Keate, working-man poet and politician of
Bristol, whose forbears came from Tiverton and earlier probably from
St Teath, assures me that he is addressed Keates in speech and
writing as often as not. There are several families in Bristol, most
of them coming from Wilts or (as the famous flogging headmaster of
Eton came) from Somerset, whose names are spelt and spoken Keat or
Keats and Keate or Keates indifferently.
[2] This document, a memorandum written for the information of
Keats's friend and publisher, John Taylor, was sold in London in
1907. I saw and took rough note of it before the sale, meaning to
follow it up afterwards: but circumstances kept me otherwise fully
occupied, and later I found that the buyer, a well known and friendly
bookseller, had unfortunately mislaid it: neither has he since been
able to recover it from among the chronic congestion of his shelves.
[3] Houghton MSS.
[4] Charles Cowden Clarke,_ Recollection of Writers_, 1878.
[5] _Rawlings v. Jennings._
[6] She was buried at St Stephen's, Colman Street, Decr. 19, 1814,
aged 78.
[7] Mistakes have crept into the received statements (my own
included) as to the dates when Keats's apprenticeship began and
ended. The witnesses on whom we have chiefly to depend wrote from
thirty to fifty years after the events they were trying to recall,
and some of them, Cowden Clarke especially, had avowedly no memory
for dates. The accepted date of Keats's leaving school and going as
apprentice to Mr Hammond at Edmonton has hitherto been the autumn of
1810, the end of his fifteenth year. It should have been the late
summer of 1811, well on in his sixteenth, as is proved by the
discovery of a copy of Bonnycastle's _Astronomy_ given him as a prize
at the end of the midsummer term that year (see _Bulletin of the
Keats-Shelley Memorial_, Rome, 1913, p. 23). On the other hand we
have material evidence of his having left by the following year, in
the shape of an Ovid presented to him from the school and inscribed
with a fine writing-master's flourish, 'JOHN KEATS, emer: 1812;'
_emer_, added in a fainter ink, is of course for _emeritus_, a boy
who has left school. This book is in the Dilke collection of Keats
relics at Hampstead, and the inscription has been supposed to be
Keats's own, which it manifestly is not. Another school-book of
Keats's, of five years' earlier date, has lately been presented to
the same collection: this is the French-English grammar of
Duverger,--inscribed in much the same calligraphy with his name and
the date 1807. He must have studied it to some purpose, if we may
judge by the good reading knowledge of French which he clearly
possessed when he was grown up.
[8] Surmise, partly founded on the vague recollections of former
fellow-students, has hitherto dated this step a year earlier, in the
autumn of 1814. But the publication of the documents relating to
Keats from the books of the hospital show that this is an error. He
was not entered as a student at Guy's till October 1, 1815. If he had
moved to London, as has been supposed, a year earlier, he would have
had nothing to do there, nor is it the least likely that his guardian
would have permitted such removal. That he came straight from Mr
Hammond's to Guy's, without any intermediate period of study
elsewhere, is certain both from a note to that effect against the
entry of his name in the hospital books, and from the explicit
statement of his fellow-student and sometime housemate, Mr Henry
Stephens. It results that the period of his life as hospital student
in a succession of London lodgings must be cut down from the supposed
two years and a half, October 1814-April 1817, to one year and a
half, Oct. 1815-April 1817. There is no difficulty about this, and I
think that both as to his leaving school and his going to London the
facts and dates set forth in the present chapter may be taken as well
established.
CHAPTER II
OCTOBER 1815-MARCH 1817: HOSPITAL STUDIES: POETICAL AMBITIONS: LEIGH
HUNT
Hospital days: summary--Aptitudes and ambitions--Teachers--Testimony
of Henry Stephens--Pride and other characteristics--Evidences of a
wandering mind--Services of Cowden Clarke--Introduction to Leigh
Hunt--Summer walks at Hampstead--Holiday epistles from Margate--Return
to London--First reading of Chapman's Homer--Date of the Chapman
sonnet--Intimacy with Leigh Hunt--The _Examiner_: Hunt's
imprisonment--His visitors in captivity--His occupations--_The Feast
of the poets_--Hunt's personality and charm--His ideas of poetical
reform--_The story of Rimini_--Its popularity--Dante and
namby-pamby--Hunt's life at Hampstead--Hunt and Keats compared--Keats
at Hunt's cottage--Prints in the library--The intercoronation
scene--Sonnets of Hunt to Keats--Sonnets of Keats to Hunt--Keats's
penitence.
The external and technical facts of Keats's life as a medical student
are these. His name, as we have said, was entered at Guy's as a six
months' student (surgeon's pupil) on October 1, 1815, a month before his
twentieth birthday. Four weeks later he was appointed dresser to one of
the hospital surgeons, Mr Lucas. At the close of his first six months'
term, March 3, 1816, he entered for a further term of twelve months. On
July 25, 1816, he presented himself for examination before the Court of
Apothecaries and obtained their licence to practise. He continued to
attend lectures and live the regular life of a student; but early in the
spring of 1817, being now of age and on the eve of publishing his first
volume of verse, he determined to abandon the pursuit of medicine for
that of poetry, declared his intention to his guardian, and ceased
attending the hospitals without seeking or receiving the usual
certificate of proficiency. For the first two or three months of this
period, from the beginning of October 1815 till about the new year of
1816, Keats lodged alone at 8 Dean Street, Borough, and then for half a
year or more with several other students over the shop of a tallow
chandler named Markham[1] in St Thomas's Street. Thence, in the summer
or early autumn of 1816, leaving the near neighbourhood of the
hospitals, he went to join his brothers in rooms in The Poultry, over a
passage leading to the Queen's Head Tavern. Finally, early in 1817, they
all three moved for a short time to 76 Cheapside. For filling up this
skeleton record, we have some traditions of the hospital concerning
Keats's teachers, some recollections of fellow students,--of one, Mr
Henry Stephens, in particular,--together with further reminiscences by
Cowden Clarke and impressions recorded in after years by one and another
of a circle of acquaintances which fast expanded. Moreover Keats begins
during this period to tell something of his own story, in the form of a
few poems of a personal tenor and a very few letters written to and
preserved by his friends.
As to his hospital work, it is clear that though his heart was not in it
and his thoughts were prone to wander, and though he held and declared
that poetry was the only thing worth living for, yet when he chose he
could bend his mind and will to the tasks before him. The operations
which as dresser he performed or assisted in are said to have proved him
no fumbler. When he went up for examination before the Court of
Apothecaries he passed with ease and credit, somewhat to the surprise of
his fellow students, who put his success down to his knowledge of Latin
rather than of medicine. Later, after he had abandoned the profession,
he was always ready to speak or act with a certain authority in cases of
illness or emergency, and though hating the notion of practice
evidently did not feel himself unqualified for it so far as knowledge
went. He could not find in the scientific part of the study a satisfying
occupation for his thoughts; and though a few years later, when he had
realized that there is no kind of knowledge but may help to nourish a
poet's mind, he felt unwilling to lose hold of what he had learned as
apprentice and student, he was never caught by that special passion of
philosophical curiosity which laid hold for a season on Coleridge and
Shelley successively, and drew them powerfully towards the study of the
mechanism and mysteries of the human frame. The practical
responsibilities of the profession at the same time weighed upon him,
and he was conscious of a kind of absent uneasy wonder at his own skill.
Once when Cowden Clarke asked him about his prospects and feelings in
regard to his profession, he frankly declared his own sense of his
unfitness for it; with reasons such as this, that 'the other day, during
the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole
troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to
Oberon and fairy-land.' 'My last operation,' he once told another
friend, 'was the opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the
utmost nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the
time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet
again.'
The surgeon to whom he was specially assigned as pupil, Mr Lucas, seems
to have had few qualifications as a teacher. We have the following
lively character of him from a man afterwards highly honoured in the
profession, John Flint South, who walked the hospitals at the same time
as Keats:--'A tall ungainly awkward man, with stooping shoulders and a
shuffling walk, as deaf as a post, not overburdened with brains, but
very good natured and easy, and liked by everyone. His surgical
acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly
performed, and accompanied with much bungling, if not worse.' But the
teacher from whom Keats will really, as all witnesses agree, have
learnt the best of what he knew was the great dissector and anatomist,
Astley Cooper, then almost in the zenith of his power as a lecturer and
of his popular fame and practice. He is described as one of the
handsomest and most ingratiating of men, as well as one of the most
indefatigable and energetic, with an admirable gift of exposition made
racy by a strong East Anglian accent; and it is on record that he took
an interest in young Keats, and recommended him to the special care of
his own dresser and namesake, George Cooper. It was in consequence of
this recommendation that Keats left his solitary lodging in Dean Street
and went to live as housemate in St Thomas's Street with three other
students, the aforesaid George Cooper, one George Wilson Mackereth, and
Henry Stephens, the last-named afterwards a surgeon in good repute as
well as a dabbler in dramatic literature. It is from Stephens that we
get much the fullest picture of Keats in these student days. I give the
pith of his reminiscences, partly as quoted from his conversation by an
intimate friend in the same profession, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson,[2]
partly as written down by himself for Lord Houghton's information in
1847.[3]
Whether it was in the latter part of the year 1815 or the early part
of the year 1816 that my acquaintance with John Keats commenced I
cannot say. We were both students at the united hospitals of St
Thomas's and Guy's, and we had apartments in a house in St Thomas's
Street, kept by a decent respectable woman of the name of Mitchell I
think. [After naming his other fellow students, the witness goes
on]--John Keats being alone, and to avoid the expense of having a
sitting room to himself, asked to join us, which we readily acceded
to. We were therefore constant companions, and the following is what I
recollect of his previous history from conversation with him. Of his
parentage I know nothing, for upon that subject I never remember his
speaking, I think he was an orphan. He had been apprenticed to a Mr
Hammond surgeon of Southgate from whence he came on the completion of
his time to the hospitals. His passion, if I may so call it, for
poetry was soon manifested. He attended lectures and went through the
usual routine but he had no desire to excel in that pursuit.... He was
called by his fellow students 'little Keats,' being at his full growth
no more than five feet high.... In a room, he was always at the
window, peering into space, so that the window-seat was spoken of by
his comrades as Keats's place.... In the lecture room he seemed to sit
apart and to be absorbed in something else, as if the subject
suggested thoughts to him which were not practically connected with
it. He was often in the subject and out of it, in a dreamy way.
He never attached much consequence to his own studies in medicine, and
indeed looked upon the medical career as the career by which to live
in a workaday world, without being certain that he could keep up the
strain of it. He nevertheless had a consciousness of his own powers,
and even of his own greatness, though it might never be recognised....
Poetry was to his mind the zenith of all his aspirations: the only
thing worthy the attention of superior minds: so he thought: all other
pursuits were mean and tame. He had no idea of fame or greatness but
as it was connected with the pursuits of poetry, or the attainment of
poetical excellence. The greatest men in the world were the poets and
to rank among them was the chief object of his ambition. It may
readily be imagined that this feeling was accompanied with a good deal
of pride and conceit, and that amongst mere medical students he would
walk and talk as one of the Gods might be supposed to do when mingling
with mortals. This pride exposed him, as may be readily imagined, to
occasional ridicule, and some mortification.
Having a taste and liking for poetry myself, though at that time but
little cultivated, he regarded me as something a little superior to
the rest, and would gratify himself frequently by showing me some
lines of his writing, or some new idea which he had struck out. We had
frequent conversation on the merits of particular poets, but our
tastes did not agree. He was a great admirer of Spenser, his _Faerie
Queene_ was a great favourite with him. Byron was also in favour, Pope
he maintained was no poet, only a versifier. He was fond of imagery,
the most trifling similes appeared to please him. Sometimes I ventured
to show him some lines which I had written, but I always had the
mortification of hearing them condemned, indeed he seemed to think it
presumption in me to attempt to tread along the same pathway as
himself at however humble a distance.
He had two brothers, who visited him frequently, and they worshipped
him. They seemed to think their brother John was to be exalted, and
to exalt the family name. I remember a student from St Bartholomew's
Hospital who came often to see him, as they had formerly been
intimate, but though old friends they did not cordially agree.
Newmarsh or Newmarch (I forget which was his name) was a classical
scholar, as was Keats, and therefore they scanned freely the
respective merits of the Poets of Greece and Rome. Whenever Keats
showed Newmarch any of his poetry it was sure to be ridiculed and
severely handled.
Newmarch was a light-hearted and merry fellow, but I thought he was
rather too fond of mortifying Keats, but more particularly his
brothers, as their praise of their brother John amounted almost to
idolatry, and Newmarch and they frequently quarrelled. Whilst
attending lectures he would sit and instead of copying out the
lecture, would often scribble some doggrel rhymes among the notes of
Lecture, particularly if he got hold of another student's syllabus. In
my syllabus of chemical lectures he scribbled many lines on the paper
cover. This cover has been long torn off, except one small piece on
which is the following fragment of doggrel rhyme:--
Give me women, wine and snuff
Until I cry out, 'hold! enough'
You may do so, sans objection
Until the day of resurrection.
This is all that remains, and is the only piece of his writing which
is now in my possession. He was gentlemanly in his manners and when he
condescended to talk upon other subjects he was agreeable and
intelligent. He was quick and apt at learning, when he chose to give
his attention to any subject. He was a steady quiet and well behaved
person, never inclined to pursuits of a low or vicious character.
The last words need to be read in the light of the convivial snatch of
verse quoted just above. Keats in these days was no rake, indeed, but
neither was he a puritan: his passions were strong in proportion to the
general intensity of his being: and his ardent absorption in poetry and
study did not save him from the risks and slips incident to appetite and
hot blood.
Another fellow student relates:--'even in the lecture room of St
Thomas's I have seen Keats in a deep poetic dream; his mind was on
Parnassus with the Muses. And here is a quaint fragment which he one
evening scribbled in our presence, while the precepts of Sir Astley
Cooper fell unheeded on his ear.' The fragment tells how Alexander the
Great saw and loved a lady of surpassing beauty on his march through
India, and reads like the beginning of an attempt to tell the story of
the old French _Lai d'Aristote_ in the style and spelling of an
early-printed English prose romance,--possibly the _Morte d'Arthure_.
Into his would-be archaic prose, luxuriantly describing the lady's
beauty, Keats works in tags taken direct from Spenser and Shakespeare
and Milton, all three. He no doubt knew this favourite mediaeval
tale--that of the Indian damsel whose charms enslaved first Alexander in
the midst of his conquests and then his tutor Aristotle--either in the
eighteenth-century prose version of Le Grand or the recent English verse
translation by G. L. Way, who turns the tale in couplets of this
style:--
At the first glance all dreams of conquest fade
And his first thought is of his Indian maid.
I cannot but think the Indian maiden of this story must have been still
lingering in Keats's imagination when he devised the episode of that
other Indian maiden in the fourth book of _Endymion_.[4]
Besides these records, we have an actual tangible relic to show how
Keats's attention in the lecture room was now fixed and now wandered, in
the shape of a notebook in which some other student has begun to put
down anatomy notes and Keats has followed. Beginning from both ends, he
has made notes of an anatomical and also of a surgical course, which are
not those of a lax or inaccurate student, but full and close as far as
they go; only squeezed into the margins of one or two pages there are
signs of flagging attention in the shape of sketches, rather prettily
touched, of a pansy and other flowers.[5]
After the first weeks of autumn gloom spent in solitary lodgings in the
dingiest part of London, Keats expresses, in a rimed epistle to Felton
Mathew, the fear lest his present studies and surroundings should stifle
the poetic faculty in him altogether. About the same time he takes pains
to get into touch again with Cowden Clarke, who had by this time left
Enfield and was living with a brother-in-law in Clerkenwell. In a letter
unluckily not dated, but certainly belonging to these first autumn weeks
in London, Keats writes to Clarke:--'Although the Borough is a beastly
place in dirt, turnings, and windings, yet No 8, Dean Street, is not
difficult to find; and if you would run the gauntlet over London Bridge,
take the first turning to the right, and, moreover, knock at my door,
which is nearly opposite a meeting, you would do me a charity, which, as
St Paul saith, is the father of all the virtues. At all events, let me
hear from you soon: I say, at all events, not excepting the gout in your
fingers.' Clarke seems to have complied promptly with this petition, and
before many months their renewed intercourse had momentous consequences.
Keats's fear that the springs of poetry would dry up in him was not
fulfilled, and he kept trying his prentice hand in various modes of
verse. Some of the sonnets recorded to have belonged to the year 1815,
as _Woman, when I behold thee, Happy is England_, may have been written
in London at the close of that year: a number of others, showing a
gradually strengthening touch, belong, we know, to the spring and early
summer of the next. For his brother George to send to his _fiancee_,
Miss Georgiana Wylie, on Valentine's day, Feb. 14, 1816, he wrote the
pleasant set of heptasyllabics beginning 'Hadst thou lived in days of
old.' In the same month was published Leigh Hunt's poem _The Story of
Rimini_, and by this, working together with his rooted enthusiasm for
Spenser, Keats was immediately inspired to begin an attempt at a
chivalrous romance of his own, _Calidore_; which went no farther than an
Induction and some hundred and fifty opening lines.
Cowden Clarke had kept up his acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, and was in
the habit of going up to visit him at the cottage where he was now
living at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health. Some time in the late spring
of 1816 Clarke made known to Hunt first some of Keats's efforts in
poetry and then Keats himself. Both Clarke and Hunt have told the story,
both writing at a considerable, and Clarke at a very long, interval
after the event. In their main substance the two accounts agree, but
both are in some points confused, telescoping together, as memory is apt
to do, circumstances really separated by an interval of months. One firm
fact we have to start with,--that Hunt printed in his paper, the
_Examiner_, for May 5th, 1816, Keats's sonnet, _O Solitude, if I with
thee must dwell_. This was Keats's first appearance in print, and a
decisive circumstance in his life. Clarke, it appears, had taken up the
'Solitude' sonnet and a few other manuscript verses of Keats to submit
to Leigh Hunt for his opinion,[6] and had every reason to be gratified
at the result. Here is his story of what happened.
I took with me two or three of the poems I had received from Keats. I
could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and
indeed approvingly, of the compositions--written, too, by a youth
under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating
and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty
lines of the first poem. Horace Smith happened to be there on the
occasion, and he was not less demonstrative in his appreciation of
their merits.... After making numerous and eager inquiries about him
personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind and
manner, the visit ended in my being requested to bring him over to the
Vale of Health.
That was a 'red-letter day' in the young poet's life, and one which
will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and
expression of Keats's features would arrest even the casual passenger
in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I
could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him
from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention,
with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter
and receive. As we approached the Heath, there was the rising and
accelerated step, with the gradual subsidence of all talk. The
interview, which stretched into three 'morning calls,' was the prelude
to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its
neighbourhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the
household, and was always welcomed.
In connexion with this, take Hunt's own account of the matter, as given
about ten years after the event in his volume, _Lord Byron and his
Contemporaries_:
To Mr Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance with him. I shall
never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of
genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise
of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We
became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet's heart as
warm as his imagination. We read and walked together, and used to
write verses of an evening on a given subject. No imaginative pleasure
was left unnoticed by us, or unenjoyed, from the recollections of the
bards and patriots of old to the luxury of a summer's rain at our
window or the clicking of the coal in winter-time.
Some inquirers, in interpreting these accounts, have judged that the
personal introduction did not take place in the spring or early summer
at all, but only after Keats's return from his holiday at the end of
September. I think it is quite clear, on the contrary, that Clarke had
taken Keats up to Hampstead by the end of May or some time in June.
Unmistakeable impressions of summer strolls there occur in his poetry of
the next few months. The 'happy fields' where he had been rambling when
he wrote the sonnet to Charles Wells on June the 29th were almost
certainly the fields of Hampstead, and there is no reason to doubt
Hunt's statement that the 'little hill' from which Keats drank the
summer view and air, as told at the opening of his poem _I stood
tiptoe_, was one of the swells of ground towards the Caen wood side of
the Heath. At the same time it would seem that their intercourse in
these first weeks did not extend beyond a few walks and talks, and that
it was not until after Keats's return from his summer holiday that the
acquaintance ripened into the close and delighted intimacy which we find
subsisting by the autumn.
For part of August and September he had been away at Margate, apparently
alone. A couple of rimed epistles addressed during this holiday to his
brother George and to Cowden Clarke breathe just such a heightened joy
of life and happiness of anticipation as would be natural in one who had
lately felt the first glow of new and inspiriting personal sympathies.
To George, besides the epistle, he addressed a pleasant sonnet on the
wonders he has seen, the sea, the sunsets, and the world of poetic
glories and mysteries vaguely evoked by them in his mind. The epistle to
George is dated August: that to Cowden Clarke followed in September. In
it he explains, in a well-conditioned and affectionate spirit of
youthful modesty, why he has hitherto been shy of addressing any of his
own attempts in verse to a friend so familiar with the work of the
masters; and takes occasion, in a heartfelt passage of autobiography, to
declare all he has owed to that friend's guidance and encouragement.
Thus have I thought; and days on days have flown
Slowly, or rapidly--unwilling still
For you to try my dull, unlearned quill.
Nor should I now, but that I've known you long;
That you first taught me all the sweets of song:
The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine;
What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine:
Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,
And float along like birds o'er summer seas;
Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness,
Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness.
Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly
Up to its climax and then dying proudly?
Who found for me the grandeur of the ode,
Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load?
Who let me taste that more than cordial dram,
The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram?
Show'd me that epic was of all the king,
Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring?
You too upheld the veil from Clio's beauty,
And pointed out the patriot's stern duty;
The might of Alfred, and the shaft of Tell;
The hand of Brutus, that so grandly fell
Upon a tyrant's head. Ah! had I never seen,
Or known your kindness, what might I have been?
What my enjoyments in my youthful years,
Bereft of all that now my life endears?
And can I e'er these benefits forget?
And can I e'er repay the friendly debt?
No doubly no;--yet should these rhymings please,
I shall roll on the grass with two-fold ease:
For I have long time been my fancy feeding
With hopes that you would one day think the reading
Of my rough verses not an hour misspent;
Should it e'er be so, what a rich content!
Some of these lines are merely feeble and boyish, but some show a fast
ripening, nay an almost fully ripened, critical feeling for the poetry
of the past. The couplet about Spenser's vowels could scarcely be
happier, and the next on Milton anticipates, though without at all
approaching in craftsmanship, the 'Me rather all that bowery loneliness'
of Tennyson's famous alcaic stanzas to the same effect.
Coming back from the seaside about the end of September to take up his
quarters with his brothers in their lodging in the Poultry, Keats was
soon to be indebted to Clarke for another and invaluable literary
stimulus: I mean his first knowledge of Chapman's translation of Homer.
This experience, as every reader knows, was instantly celebrated by him
in a sonnet, classical now almost to triteness, which is his first high
achievement, and one of the masterpieces of our language in this form.
The question of its exact date has been much discussed: needlessly,
seeing that Keats himself signed and dated it in full, when it was
printed in the _Examiner_ for the first of December following, 'Oct^r
1816, JOHN KEATS.' The doubts expressed have been due partly to the
overlooking of this fact and partly to a mistake in Cowden Clarke's
account of the matter written many years later. After quoting Keats's
invitation of October 1815 to come and find him at his lodging in the
Borough, Clarke goes on:--
This letter having no date but the week's day, and no postmark,
preceded our first symposium; and a memorable night it was in my
life's career. A beautiful copy of the folio edition of Chapman's
translation of _Homer_ had been lent me. It was the property of Mr.
Alsager, the gentleman who for years had contributed no small share of
celebrity to the great reputation of the _Times_ newspaper by the
masterly manner in which he conducted the money-market department of
that journal....
Well then, we were put in possession of the _Homer_ of Chapman, and to
work we went, turning to some of the 'famousest' passages, as we had
scrappily known them in Pope's version. There was, for instance, that
perfect scene of the conversation on Troy wall of the old Senators
with Helen, who is pointing out to them the several Greek Captains;
with the Senator Antenor's vivid portrait of an orator in Ulysses,
beginning at the 237th line of the third book:--
But when the prudent Ithacus did to his counsels rise,
He stood a little still, and fix'd upon the earth his eyes,
His sceptre moving neither way, but held it formally,
Like one that vainly doth affect. Of wrathful quality,
And frantic (rashly judging), you would have said he was;
But when out of his ample breast he gave his great voice pass,
And words that flew about our ears like drifts of winter's snow,
None thenceforth might contend with him, though naught admired for
show.
The shield and helmet of Diomed, with the accompanying simile, in the
opening of the third book; and the prodigious description of Neptune's
passage to the Achive ships, in the thirteenth book:--
The woods and all the great hills near trembled beneath the weight
Of his immortal-moving feet. Three steps he only took,
Before he far-off AEgas reach'd, but with the fourth, it shook
With his dread entry.
One scene I could not fail to introduce to him--the shipwreck of
Ulysses, in the fifth book of the _Odysseis_, and I had the reward of
one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:--
Then forth he came, his both knees falt'ring, both
His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth
His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.
_The sea had soak'd his heart through_; all his veins
His toils had rack'd t'a labouring woman's pains.
Dead-weary was he.
On an after-occasion I showed him the couplet, in Pope's translation,
upon the same passage:--
From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran,
And _lost in lassitude lay all the man_. (!!!)
Chapman supplied us with many an after-treat; but it was in the
teeming wonderment of this his first introduction, that, when I came
down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter
with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, _On First Looking into
Chapman's Homer_. We had parted, as I have already said, at
day-spring, yet he contrived that I should receive the poem from a
distance of, may be, two miles by ten o'clock.
The whole of the above is a typical case of what I have called the
telescoping action of memory. Recollections not of one, but of many,
Homer readings are here compressed into a couple of paragraphs. They
will have been readings carried on at intervals through the autumn and
winter of 1816-17: an inspiring addition to the other intellectual gains
and pleasures which fell to Keats's lot during those months. There is no
reason to doubt the exactness of Clarke's account of the first night the
friends spent together over Chapman and its result in the shape of the
sonnet which lay on his table the next morning. His error is in
remembering these circumstances as having happened when he and Keats
first foregathered in London in the autumn of 1815, whereas Keats's
positive evidence above quoted shows that they did not really happen
until a year later, after his return from his summer holiday in 1816.[7]
Before printing the Chapman sonnet, Leigh Hunt had the satisfaction of
hearing his own opinion of it and of some other manuscript poems of
Keats confirmed by good judges. I quote his words for the sake of the
excellent concluding phrase. 'Not long afterwards, having the pleasure
of entertaining at dinner Mr Godwin, Mr Hazlitt, and Mr Basil Montague,
I showed them the verses of my young friend, and they were pronounced to
be as extraordinary as I thought them. One of them was that noble sonnet
on first reading Chapman's _Homer_, which terminates with so energetic a
calmness, and which completely announced the new poet taking
possession.' But by this time Keats had become an established intimate
in the Leigh Hunt household, and was constantly backwards and forwards
between London and the Hampstead cottage.
This intimacy was really the opening of a new chapter both in his
intellectual and social life. At first it was a source of unmixed
encouragement and pleasure, but seeing that it carried with it in the
sequel disadvantages and penalties which gravely affected Keats's
career, it is necessary that we should fix clearly in our mind Hunt's
previous history and the place held by him in the literary and political
life of the time. He was Keats's senior by eleven years: the son of an
eloquent and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable
preacher, sprung from a family long settled in Barbadoes, who having
married a lady from Philadelphia had migrated to England and exercised
his vocation in the northern suburbs of London. Brought up at Christ's
Hospital about a dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, Leigh Hunt
gained at sixteen a measure of precocious literary reputation with a
volume of juvenile poems which gave evidence of great fluency and, for a
boy, of wide and eager reading. A few years later he came into notice as
a theatrical critic, being then a clerk in the War Office: an occupation
which he abandoned at twenty-four (in 1808) in order to take part in the
conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper, then just founded by his brother
John Hunt. For nearly five years the brothers Hunt, as manager and
editor of that journal, helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism,
in those days of tense grapple with the Corsican ogre abroad and stiff
re-action and repression at home, with a dexterous brisk audacity and an
unflinching sincerity of conviction. So far they had escaped the usual
penalty of such courage. Several prosecutions directed against them
failed, but at last, late in 1812, they were caught tripping. To go as
far as was safely possible in satire of the follies and vices of the
Prince Regent was a tempting exercise to the reforming spirits of the
time. Provoked by the grovelling excesses of some of the Prince's
flatterers, the _Examiner_ at last broke bounds and denounced him as 'a
violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a
despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man
who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the
gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.' This attack
followed within a few weeks of another almost as stinging contributed
anonymously by Charles Lamb. Under the circumstances the result of a
prosecution could not be doubtful: and the two Hunts were condemned to a
fine of L500 each and two years imprisonment in separate jails. Leigh
Hunt bore himself in his captivity with cheerful fortitude, suffering
severely in health but flagging little in spirits or industry. He
decorated his apartment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol with a rose-trellis
paper and a ceiling to imitate a summer sky, so that it looked, said
Charles Lamb, like a room in a fairy tale, and spent money which he had
not got in converting its backyard into a garden of shrubs and flowers.
Very early in life Hunt had been received into a family called Kent at
the instance of an elder daughter who greatly admired him. Not long
afterwards he engaged himself to her younger sister, then almost a
child, and married her soon after the _Examiner_ was started. She proved
a prolific, thriftless woman and ill housekeeper, but through all the
rubs and pinches of his after years he was ever an affectionate husband
and father. His wife was allowed to be with him in prison, and there
they received the visits of many friends old and new. Liberal statesmen,
philosophers, and writers, including characters so divers as Bentham and
Byron, Brougham and Hazlitt, James Mill and Miss Edgeworth, Tom Moore
and Wilkie the painter, pressed to offer this victim of political
persecution their sympathy and society. Charles Lamb and his sister were
the most constant of all his visitors. Tom Moore, who both before and
after the sentence on the brothers Hunt managed in his series of verse
skits, _The Twopenny Post Bag_, to go on playing with impunity the game
of Prince-Regent-baiting,--the light-hearted Tom Moore joined in deepest
earnest the chorus of sympathy with the prisoners:--
Yet go--for thoughts as blessed as the air
Of Spring or Summer flowers await you there:
Thoughts such as He, who feasts his courtly crew
In rich conservatories, _never_ knew;
Pure self-esteem--the smiles that light within--
The Zeal, whose circling charities begin
With the few lov'd ones Heaven has plac'd it near,
And spread, till all Mankind are in its sphere;
The Pride, that suffers without vaunt or plea,
And the fresh Spirit, that can warble free,
Through prison-bars, its hymn to Liberty!
Among ardent young men who brought their tributes was Cowden Clarke with
a basket of fruit and flowers from his father's garden; and this was
followed up by a weekly offering in the same kind. 'Libertas, the loved
Libertas,' was the name found for Hunt by such fond young spirits and
adopted by Keats.
During his captivity Hunt was allowed the full use of his library, and
his chief reading was in the fifty volumes of the _Parnaso Italiano_. As
a result he acquired and retained for life a really wide and familiar
knowledge of Italian poetry. He continued to edit the _Examiner_ from
prison and occupied himself moreover with three small volumes in verse.
One of these was _The Descent of Liberty, A Mask_, celebrating the
downfall of Napoleon in 1814, and embodying gracefully enough the
Liberal's hope against hope that with that catastrophe there might
return to Europe not only peace but freedom. (We have told already how
Keats at Edmonton tried his boyish hand at a sonnet on the same occasion
and to the same purpose.) Another of his prison tasks was the writing of
his poem, _The Story of Rimini_; a third, the recasting and annotating
of his _Feast of the Poets_, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse
first printed two years before and modelled on the precedent of several
rimed skits of the Caroline age such as Suckling's _Session of the
Poets_ and the Duke of Buckinghamshire's _Election of a Poet Laureate_.
It represented Apollo as convoking the contemporary British poets, or
pretenders to the poetical title, to a session, or rather to a supper.
Some of those who present themselves the god rejects with scorn, others
he cordially welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. In
revising this skit while he was in prison, Hunt modified some of his
earlier verdicts, but in the main he let them stand. Moore and Campbell
fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof;
Coleridge and Wordsworth admonished (but Wordsworth in much more lenient
terms than in the first edition) and dismissed. Hunt's notes are of
still living interest as setting forth, at that pregnant moment of our
literary history, the considered judgments of a kindly and accomplished
critic on his contemporaries. Seen at a distance of a hundred years
they look short-sighted enough, as almost all contemporary judgments
must, and are coloured as a matter of course with party feeling, though
not so grossly as was the habit of the hour. Since Coleridge, Southey
and Wordsworth had been transformed, first by the Terror and then by the
aggressions of Bonaparte, from ardent revolutionary idealists into
vehement partisans of reaction both at home and abroad, the bitterness
of the 'Lost Leader' feeling, common to all liberals, accounts for much
of Hunt's disparagement of them; while besides sharing the prejudice of
his party in general against Scott as a known high Tory and friend to
kings, he had ignorantly and peevishly conceived a special grudge
against that great generous and chivalrous spirit on account of his
lenient handling of Charles II in his _Life of Dryden_. Hunt in his new
notes fully acknowledged the genius, while he condemned the defection
and also what he thought the poetical perversities, of Wordsworth; but
his treatment of Scott, as little more than a mere money-making
manufacturer of pinchbeck northern lays in a sham antique ballad
dialect, is idly flippant and patronizing. The point is of importance in
Keats's history, for hence, as we shall see in the sequel, came probably
a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem paradoxical rancour
with which the genial Hunt, and Keats as his friend and supposed
follower, were by-and-by to be persecuted in Blackwood.
When Hunt's ordeal was over in the first days of February 1815, he
issued from it a butt for savage and vindictive obloquy to the
reactionary half of the lettered world, but little less than a hero and
martyr to the reforming half. He retained the private friendship of many
of those who had sought him out from public sympathy. Tall, straight,
slender, charmingly courteous and vivacious, with glossy black hair,
bright jet-black eyes, full, relishing nether lip, and 'nose of taste,'
Leigh Hunt was one of the most winning of companions, full of kindly
smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and ideas, with an infinity of
pleasant things to say of his own and a beautiful caressing voice to say
them in, yet the most sympathetic and deferential of listeners. To the
misfortune of himself and his friends, he had no notion of even
attempting to balance income and expenditure, and was perfectly
light-hearted in the matter of money obligations, which he shrank
neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circumstances made him
almost invariably a receiver. But men of sterner fibre and better able
to order their affairs have often been much more ready than he was to
sacrifice conviction to advantage, and his friends found more to admire
in his smiling steadfastness under obloquy and persecution than to blame
in his chronic incapacity to pay his way. Hardly anyone had warmer
well-wishers or requited them, so far as the depth of his nature went,
with truer loyalty and kindness. His industry as a writer was incessant,
hardly less than that of Southey himself. The titles he gave to the
several journals he conducted, _The Examiner_, _The Reflector_, _The
Indicator_, define accurately enough his true vocation as a guide to the
pleasures of literature. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy
penetration, and flowing unobtrusive felicity, most remote from those
faults to which De Quincey and even the illustrious Coleridge, with
their more philosophic powers and method, were subject, the faults of
roundaboutness and over-laboured profundity.
[Illustration: PL. II
JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY MAYER AFTER J. HAYTER]
The weakness of Leigh Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. 'Matchless,'
according to Lamb's well-known phrase, 'as a fire-side companion,' it
was his misfortune to carry too much of a fire-side or parlour tone, and
sometimes, it must be owned, a very second-rate parlour tone, into
literature. He could not walk by the advice of Polonius, and in aiming
at the familiar was apt, rarely in prose but sadly often in verse, to
slip into an underbred strain of airy and genteel vulgarity, hard to
reconcile with what we are told of his acceptable social qualities in
real life.[8] He was as enthusiastic a student of our sixteenth and
seventeenth century literature as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had
more appreciation than they of the characteristic excellencies of what
he always persists in calling the 'French school,' the school of
polished artifice and convention which came in after Dryden and swore by
the precepts of Boileau, he was not less bent on seeing it overthrown.
In English poetry his predilection was for the older writers from
Chaucer to Dryden, and above all others for Spenser: in Italian for
Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and the later writers of the chivalrous-fanciful
epic style. He insisted that such writers were much better models for
English poets to follow than the French, and fought as hard as anyone
for the return of English poetry from the urbane conventions of the
eighteenth century to the paths of nature and of freedom. But he had his
own conception of the manner in which this return should be effected. He
did not admit that Wordsworth with his rustic simplicities and his
recluse philosophy had solved the problem. 'It was his intention,' he
wrote in prison, 'by the beginning of next year to bring out a piece of
some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce to practice his own
ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate
harmony of the English heroic.' The result of this intention was the
_Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and published a year
after his release, in February or March, 1816. 'With the endeavour,' so
he repeated himself in the preface, 'to recur to a freer spirit of
versification, I have joined one of still greater importance,--that of
having a free and idiomatic cast of language.'
We shall have to consider Hunt's effort to revive the old freedom of the
English heroic metre when we come to the study of Keats's first volume,
written much under Hunt's influence. As to his success with his 'ideas
of what is natural in style,' and his free and idiomatic--or as he
elsewhere says 'unaffected, contemporaneous'--cast of language to
supersede the styles alike of Pope and Wordsworth, let us take a sample
of _Rimini_ at its best and worst. Relating the gradual obsession of
Paolo's thoughts by the charm of his sister-in-law,--
And she became companion of his thought;
Silence her gentleness before him brought,
Society her sense, reading her books,
Music her voice, every sweet thing her looks,
Which sometimes seemed, when he sat fixed awhile,
To steal beneath his eyes with upward smile;
And did he stroll into some lonely place,
Under the trees, upon the thick soft grass,
How charming, would he think, to see her here!
How heightened then, and perfect would appear
The two divinest things this world has got,
A lovely woman in a rural spot!
The first few lines are skilfully modulated, and in an ordinary domestic
theme might be palatable enough; but what a couplet, good heavens! for
the last. At the climax, Hunt's version of Dante is an example of
milk-and-water in conditions where milk-and-water is sheer poison:--
As thus they sat, and felt with leaps of heart
Their colour change, they came upon the part
Where fond Genevra, with her flame long nurst,
Smiled upon Launcelot when he kissed her first:--
That touch, at last, through every fibre slid;
And Paulo turned, scarce knowing what he did,
Only he felt he could no more dissemble,
And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble.
The taste, we see, which guided Hunt so well in appreciating the work of
others could betray him terribly in original composition. The passages
of light narrative in _Rimini_ are often vivacious and pleasant enough,
those of nature description genuinely if not profoundly felt, and
written with an eye on the object: but they are the only tolerable
things in the poem. Hunt's idea of a true poetical style was to avoid
everything strained, stilted, and conventional, and to lighten the
stress of his theme with familiar graces and pleasantries in the manner
of his beloved Ariosto. But he did not realize that while any style,
from that of the _Book of Job_ to that of Wordsworth's _Idiot Boy_, may
become poetical if only there is strength and intensity of feeling
behind it, nothing but the finest social instinct and tradition can
impart the tact for such light conversational graces as he attempted,
and that to treat a theme of high tragic passion in the tone and
vocabulary of a suburban tea-party is intolerable. Contemporaries,
welcoming as a relief any change from the stale conventions and
tarnished glitter of eighteenth century poetic rhythm and diction, and
perhaps sated for the moment with the rush and thrill of new romantic
and exotic sensation they had owed in recent years, first to Scott's
metrical tales of the Border and the Highlands, then to Byron's of
Greece and the Levant,--contemporaries found something fresh and
homefelt in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_, and sentimental ladies and gentlemen
wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine as though they had been
their own. No less a person than Byron, to whom the poem was dedicated,
writes to Moore:--'Leigh Hunt's poem is a devilish good one--quaint here
and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about
it that will stand the test. I do not say this because he has inscribed
it to me.' And to Leigh Hunt himself Byron reports praise of the poem
from Sir Henry Englefield the dilettante, 'a mighty man in the blue
circles, and a very clever man anywhere,' from Hookham Frere 'and all
the arch _literati_,' and says how he had left his own sister and cousin
'in fixed and delighted perusal of it.' Byron's admiration cooled
greatly in the sequel, with or even before the cooling of his regard
for the author. But it is an instructive comment on standards of taste
and their instability that cultivated readers should at any time have
endured to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and
Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like that of the above
quotations. When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer
poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the
attempt to add a familiar ease of manner to variety of movement in this
metre, Shelley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into
Hunt's faults of triviality and under-breeding: but Keats was only too
apt to be betrayed into them.
Hunt had spent the first months after his release in London, but by the
end of 1815, some time before the publication of _Rimini_, had settled
at Hampstead, where he soon made himself a sort of self-crowned laureate
of the beauties of the place, and continued to vary his critical and
political labours with gossiping complimentary verses to his friends in
the form both of sonnet and epistle. The gravest of the epistles is one
addressed in a spirit of good-hearted loyalty to Byron in that
disastrous April when, after four years spent in the full blaze of
popularity and fashion, he was leaving England under the storm of
obloquy aroused by the scandals attending his separation from his wife.
This is in Hunt's reformed heroic couplet: the rest are in a chirruping
and gossiping anapaestic sing-song which is perhaps the writer's most
congenial vein. Here is a summer picture of Hampstead from a letter to
Tom Moore:--
And yet how can I touch, and not linger a while,
On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile?
On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades,
Dark pines, and white houses, and long-allied shades,
With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees
The hills up above him with roofs in the trees?
Now too, while the season,--half summer, half spring,--
Brown elms and green oaks--makes one loiter and sing;
And the bee's weighty murmur comes by us at noon,
And the cuckoo repeats his short indolent tune,
And little white clouds lie about in the sun,
And the wind's in the west, and hay-making begun?--
and here an autumn night-sketch, from a letter expressing surprise that
the wet weather has not brought a visit from Charles Lamb, that
inveterate lover of walking in the rain:--
We hadn't much thunder and lightning, I own;
But the rains might have led you to walk out of town;
And what made us think your desertion still stranger,
The roads were so bad, there was really no danger;
At least where I live; for the nights were so groping,
The rains made such wet, and the paths are so sloping,
That few, unemboldened by youth or by drinking,
Came down without lanthorns,--nor then without shrinking.
And really, to see the bright spots come and go,
As the path rose or fell, was a fanciful shew.
Like fairies they seemed, pitching up from their nooks,
And twinkling upon us their bright little looks.
Such were Leigh Hunt's antecedents, and such his literary performances
and reputation, when Keats at the age of twenty-one became his intimate.
So far as opinions and public sympathies were concerned, those of Keats
had already, as we have seen, been largely formed in boyhood by
familiarity, under the lead of Cowden Clarke, with Leigh Hunt's writings
in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed Voltairian and sceptic as to
revealed religion, and supplied its place with a private gospel of
cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his
own invincibly sunny temperament and partly by the hopeful doctrines of
eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural
sympathy of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and kind-hearted view of
things, and he had a mind naturally unapt for dogma: ready to entertain
and appreciate any set of ideas according as his imagination recognized
their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing
ultimate truth. In matters of poetic feeling and fancy the two men had
up to a certain point not a little in common. Like Hunt, Keats at this
time was given to 'luxuriating' too effusively and fondly over the
'deliciousness' of whatever he liked in art, books, or nature. To the
every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt brought in a
lower degree the same alertness of perception and acuteness of enjoyment
which in Keats were intense beyond parallel. In his lighter and
shallower way Hunt also truly felt with Keats the perennial charm and
vitality of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about this
time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some,
less adequate, of Homer. But behind such pleasant faculties in Hunt
nothing deeper or more potent lay hidden. Whereas with Keats, as time
went on, delighted sensation became more and more surely and
instantaneously transmuted and spiritualized into imaginative emotion;
his words and cadences came every day from deeper sources within him and
more fully charged with the power of far-reaching and symbolic
suggestion. Hence, as this profound and passionate young genius grew, he
could not but be aware of what was shallow in the talent of his senior
and cloying and distasteful in his ever-voluble geniality. But for many
months the harmony of their relations was complete.
The 'little cottage' in the Vale of Health must have been fairly
overcrowded, one would suppose, with Hunt's fast-growing family of young
children, but a bed was made up for Keats on a sofa, 'in a parlour no
bigger than an old mansion's closet,' says Hunt, which nevertheless
served him for a library and had prints after Stothard hung on the walls
and casts of the heads of poets and heroes crowning the bookshelves.
Here the young poet was made always welcome. The sonnet beginning 'Keen,
fitful gusts are whispering here and there' records a night of October
or November 1816, when, instead of staying to sleep, he preferred to
walk home under the stars, his head full of talk about Petrarch and the
youth of Milton, to the city lodgings where he lived with his brothers
the life affectionately described in that other pleasant sonnet written
on Tom's birthday, November 18, beginning 'Small, busy flames play
through the fresh-laid coals.' The well-known fifty lines at the end of
_Sleep and Poetry_, a poem on which Keats put forth the best of his
half-fledged strength this winter, give the fullest and most engaging
account of the pleasure and inspiration he drew from Hunt's
hospitality:--
The chimes
Of friendly voices had just given place
To as sweet a silence, when I 'gan retrace
The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease.
It was a poet's house who keeps the keys
Of pleasure's temple. Round about were hung
The glorious features of the bards who sung
In other ages--cold and sacred busts
Smiled at each other. Happy he who trusts
To clear Futurity his darling fame!
Then there were fauns and satyrs taking aim
At swelling apples with a frisky leap
And reaching fingers, 'mid a luscious heap
Of vine-leaves. Then there rose to view a fane
Of liny marble, and thereto a train
Of nymphs approaching fairly o'er the sward:
One, loveliest, holding her white hand toward
The dazzling sun-rise: two sisters sweet
Bending their graceful figures till they meet
Over the trippings of a little child:
And some are hearing, eagerly, the wild
Thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.
See, in another picture, nymphs are wiping
Cherishingly Diana's timorous limbs;--
A fold of lawny mantle dabbling swims
At the bath's edge, and keeps a gentle motion
With the subsiding crystal: as when ocean
Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o'er
Its rocky marge, and balances once more
The patient weeds; that now unshent by foam
Feel all about their undulating home...
Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green,
Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean
His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they!
For over them was seen a free display
Of out-spread wings, and from between them shone
The face of Poesy: from off her throne
She overlook'd things that I scarce could tell.
It is easy from the above and from some of Keats's later work to guess
at most of the prints which had caught his attention on Hunt's walls and
in his portfolios and worked on his imagination afterwards:--Poussin's
'Empire of Flora' for certain: several, probably, of his various
'Bacchanals,' with the god and his leopard-drawn car, and groups of
nymphs dancing with fauns or strewn upon the foreground to right or
left: the same artist's 'Venus and Adonis': Stothard's 'Bathers' and
'Vintage,' his small print of Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura
and her friend; Raphael's 'Poetry' from the Vatican; and so forth. These
things are not without importance in the study of Keats, for he was
quicker and more apt than any of our other poets to draw inspiration
from works of art,--prints, pictures, or marbles,--that came under his
notice, and it is not for nothing that he alludes in this same poem to
--the pleasant flow
Of words on opening a portfolio.
A whole treatise might be written on matters which I shall have to
mention briefly or not at all,--how such and such a descriptive phrase
in Keats has been suggested by this or that figure in a picture; how
pictures by or prints after old masters have been partly responsible for
his vision alike of the Indian maiden and the blind Orion; what various
originals, paintings or antiques or both, we can recognize as blending
themselves into his evocation of the triumph of Bacchus or his creation
of the Grecian Urn.
On December the 1st, 1816, Hunt, as has been said, did Keats the new
service of printing the Chapman sonnet as a specimen of his work in an
essay in the _Examiner_ on 'Young Poets,' in which the names of Shelley
and Reynolds were bracketed with his as poetical beginners of high
promise. With reference to the custom mentioned by Hunt of Keats and
himself sitting down of an evening to write verses on a given subject,
Cowden Clarke pleasantly describes one such occasion on December 30 of
the same year, when the chosen theme was _The Grasshopper and the
Cricket_:--'The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such
occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my
affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and
perfectly unpretentious encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at
the first line:--
The poetry of earth is never dead.
"Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth and
eleventh lines:--
On a lone winter morning, when the frost
Hath wrought a silence--
"Ah that's perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation on
the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and torpidity.'
The affectionate enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself,
be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another's company and
verses sometimes took forms which to the mind of the younger and wiser
of the two soon came to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817)
the whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves 'after the
manner of the elder bards.' Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy,
Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so
adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they
were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came
in--conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more
anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs Thomas Hood, Marianne, and their young sister
Charlotte. When visitors were announced Hunt took off his wreath and
suggested that Keats should do the same: he, however, 'in his
enthusiastic way, declared he would not take off his crown for any human
being,' and accordingly wore it as long as the visit lasted.[9] Here
are Hunt's pair of sonnets, which are about as good as any he ever
wrote, and which he not long afterwards printed:--
A crown of ivy! I submit my head
To the young hand that gives it,--young, 'tis true,
But with a right, for 'tis a poet's too.
How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread
With their broad angles, like a nodding shed
Over both eyes! and how complete and new,
As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew
My sense with freshness,--Fancy's rustling bed!
Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes
Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks,
And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old
Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes,--
And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent,
Bacchus,--whose bride has of his hand fast hold.
It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind,
Thus to be topped with leaves;--to have a sense
Of honour-shaded thought,--an influence
As from great Nature's fingers, and be twined
With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind,
As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence
A head that bows to her benevolence,
Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind.
'Tis what's within us crowned. And kind and great
Are all the conquering wishes it inspires,--
Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods,
Love of love's self, and ardour for a state
Of natural good befitting such desires,
Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes.
Keats had the good sense not to print his efforts of the day; they are
of slight account poetically, but have a real biographical interest:--
ON RECEIVING A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT
Minutes are flying swiftly, and as yet
Nothing unearthly has enticed my brain
Into a delphic labyrinth--I would fain
Catch an immortal thought to pay the debt
I owe to the kind poet who has set
Upon my ambitious head a glorious gain.
Two bending laurel sprigs--'tis nearly pain
To be conscious of such a coronet.
Still time is fleeting, and no dream arises
Gorgeous as I would have it--only I see
A trampling down of what the world most prizes,
Turbans and crowns and blank regality;
And then I run into most wild surmises
Of all the many glories that may be.
TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED
What is there in the universal earth
More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree?
Haply a halo round the moon--a glee
Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth;
And haply you will say the dewy birth
Of morning roses--ripplings tenderly
Spread by the halcyon's breast upon the sea--
But these comparisons are nothing worth.
Then there is nothing in the world so fair?
The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?
Or June that breathes out life for butterflies?
No, none of these can from my favourite bear
Away the palm--yet shall it ever pay
Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes.
Here we have expressed in the first sonnet the same mood as in some of
the holiday rimes of the previous summer, the mood of ardent expectancy
for an inspiration that declines (and no wonder considering the
circumstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu
should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats's
mind, and the sestet of this sonnet is interesting as containing in its
first four lines the germs of the well-known passage at the beginning of
the third book of _Endymion_,--
There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel--
and in its fifth a repetition of the 'wild surmise' phrase of the
Chapman sonnet. The second sonnet has a happy line or two in its list of
delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interrogative
formula of the opening lines of _Sleep and Poetry_, Keats's chief
venture in verse this winter.
Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is
Hunt's, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of
it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own
name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode
to Apollo:--
God of the golden bow,
And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
And of the golden fire,
Charioteer
Of the patient year,
Where--where slept thine ire,
When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,
Thy laurel, thy glory,
The light of thy story,
Or was I a worm--too low crawling, for death?
O Delphic Apollo!
And so forth: the same half-amused spirit of penitence is expressed in a
letter of a few weeks later to his brother George: and later still he
came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on those days as
a time when he had been content to play the part of 'A pet-lamb in a
sentimental farce.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Another account says Mitchell.
[2] In _The Asclepiad_, April 1884.
[3] Houghton MSS.
[4] Le Grand: _Fabliaux ou Contes, 1781_. G. L. Way: _Fabliaux or
Tales_, London, 1800; 2nd ed. 1815. See Appendix I.
[5] This note-book is in the collection bequeathed by the late Sir
Charles Dilke to the public library at Hampstead.
[6] In a review of Keats's first book written the next year
(_Examiner_, July 9, 1817) Hunt says that when he printed the
'Solitude' sonnet he knew no more of Keats than of any other
anonymous correspondent: but this probably only means that he had not
yet met Keats personally.
[7] Putting day-break in early October at a little before six, there
would have been fully time enough for Keats to walk to the Poultry,
composing as he went, and to commit his draft to paper and send it to
Clerkenwell by ten o'clock. The longer walk to and from the Borough,
had the date been a year earlier, would have made the feat more
difficult. Moreover the feat itself becomes less of a miracle when we
recognize it as performed not at the end of the poet's twentieth year
but at the end of his twenty first. But in view of Keats's own
explicit dating of the piece, the point seems to need no labouring:
or else it might be pointed out that if Clarke had really introduced
him to Chapman in October 1815 Chapman would assuredly not have been
left out of the list of masters whom he quotes as having known
through Clarke in his epistle of the following August quoted above
(pp. 37, 38).
[8] Both Byron and Barry Cornwall have expressed their sense of
contrast between certain vulgarities of Hunt's diction and his
personal good breeding. Byron before their quarrel declared
emphatically that he was 'not a vulgar man'; and Barry Cornwall,
admitting that he 'indulged himself occasionally in pet words, some
of which struck me as almost approaching to the vulgar,' goes on to
say that 'he was essentially a gentleman in conduct, in demeanour, in
manner, in his consideration for others,' and to praise him for his
'great fund of positive active kindness,' his freedom from all
irritable vanity, his pleasure and liberality in praising (Bryan
Walter Procter, _An Autobiographical Fragment_, 1877, pp. 197-200).
[9] This reconstruction of the scene is founded on a comparison of
the sonnets themselves with Woodhouse's note on Keats's subsequent
palinode, _A Hymn to Apollo_. Woodhouse says the friends were both
crowned with laurel, but it seems more likely that he should have
made this mistake than that a similar performance should have been
twice repeated (Houghton MSS.).
CHAPTER III
WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST FOR POETRY
Haydon and the Elgin marbles--Haydon as painter and writer--Vanity,
pugnacity, and piety--Haydon on Leigh Hunt--Keats and Haydon meet--An
enthusiastic friendship--Keats and the Elgin marbles--Sonnets and
protestations--Hazlitt and Lamb--Friendship of Hunt and Shelley--Lamb
and Hazlitt on Shelley--Haydon and Shelley: a battle royal--Keats and
Shelley--A cool relation--John Hamilton Reynolds--His devotion to
Keats--The Reynolds sisters--James Rice--Charles Wells--William
Haslam--Joseph Severn--Keats judged by his circle--Described by
Severn--His range of sympathies--His poetic ambition--The die is
cast--First volume goes to press.
So much for the relations of Keats with Hunt himself in these first six
months of their intimacy. Next of the other intimacies which he formed
with friends to whom Hunt introduced him. One of the first of these, and
for a while the most stimulating and engrossing, was with the painter
Haydon. This remarkable man, now just thirty, had lately been victorious
in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a
temporary semblance of victory in the other. For the last eight years he
had fought and laboured to win national recognition for the deserts of
Lord Elgin in his great work of salvage--for such under the conditions
of the time it was--in bringing away the remains of the Parthenon
sculptures from Athens. By dint of sheer justice of conviction and power
of fight, and then only when he had been reinforced in the campaign by
foreigners of indisputable authority like the archaeologist Visconti and
the sculptor Canova, he had succeeded in getting the pre-eminence of
these marbles among all works of the sculptor's art acknowledged, and
their acquisition for the nation secured, in the teeth of powerful and
bitterly hostile cliques. His opponents included both the
sentimentalists who took their cue from Byron's _Curse of Minerva_ in
shrieking at Elgin as a vandal, and the dilettanti who, blinded to the
true Greek touch by familiarity with smoothed and pumiced Roman copies,
had declared the Parthenon sculptures to be works of the age of Hadrian.
Haydon's victory over these antagonists is his chief title, and a title
both sound and strong, to the regard of posterity. His other and
life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to take him
at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the crown of
heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His high-flaming
energy and industry, his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the
clamour of his indomitable self-assertion and of his ceaseless conflict
with the academic powers, even his unabashed claims for pecuniary
support on friends, patrons, and society at large, had won for him much
convinced or half convinced attention and encouragement, both in the
world of art and letters and in that of dilettantism and fashion. His
first and second great pictures, 'Dentatus' and 'Macbeth,' had been
dubiously received; his third, the 'Judgment of Solomon,' with
acclamation. This had been finished after his victory in the matter of
the Elgin marbles. He was now busy on one larger and more ambitious than
all, 'Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,' in which it was his purpose to
include among the crowd of lookers-on portraits of many famous men both
historical and contemporary. While as usual sunk deep in debt, he was
perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in truth a man
whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of the gifts
of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he possessed
completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch
of feeling and aspiration. 'Never,' wrote he about this time, 'have I
had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have
been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and ether in his
soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of
energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and shot across
me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God.' But for
all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of genius,
the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties which it
is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to Haydon. Its
vision and originality, its gift of 'heavenly alchemy' for transmuting
and new-creating the materials offered it by experience, its sovereign
inability to see with any eyes or create to any pattern but its own,
were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an occasional
bold conception, a trick of colour or craftsmanship not too obviously
caught from greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid
siege to immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the
kingdom not of true great art but of imitative pictorial posturing and
empty pictorial bombast.
As a draughtsman especially, Haydon's touch is surprisingly loose,
empty, and inexpressive. Even in drawing from the Elgin marbles, as he
did with passionate industry, covering reams, he fails almost wholly to
render the qualities which he so ardently perceived, and loses every
distinction and every subtlety of the original.[1] Infinitely better is
his account of them in words: for in truth Haydon's chief intellectual
power was as an observer, and his best instrument the pen. Readers of
his journals and correspondence know how vividly and tellingly he can
relate an experience or touch off a character. In this gift of striking
out a human portrait in words he stood second in his age, if second, to
Hazlitt alone, and in our later literature there has been no one to beat
him except Carlyle. But passion and pugnacity, vanity and the spirit of
self-exaltation, at the same time as they intensify vision, are bound to
discolour and distort it; and the reader must always bear in mind that
Haydon's pen portraits of his contemporaries are apt to be not less
untrustworthy than they are unforgettable. Moreover in this, the
literary, form of expression also, where he aims higher, leaving
description and trying to become imaginative and impressive, we find
only the same self-satisfied void turgidity, and proof of spiritual
hollowness disguised by temperamental fervour, as in his paintings.
But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those
he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his character, and not
his essential commonness of gift and faculty, that impressed his
associates as they impressed himself. Sturdy, loud-voiced, eloquent,
high of colour, with a bald perpendicular forehead surmounting a set of
squarely compressed, pugnacious features,--eyes, lips and jaw all
prominent and aggressive together,--he was a dominating, and yet a
welcome, presence in some of the choicest circles of his day. Wordsworth
and Wordsworth's firm ally, the painter-baronet Sir George Beaumont,
Hazlitt, Horace Smith, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Mary
Mitford, were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by
him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others
after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of
purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit
of thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour
and protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for
deliverance from 'pecuniary emergencies,' and the like. 'I always rose
up from my knees,' he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, 'with a
refreshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling
that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of
life.' And he was prone to hold himself up as a model to his friends in
both particulars, lecturing them loftily on faith and conduct while
he was living without scruple on their bounty.
[Illustration: PL. III
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY THOMSON AFTER HAYDON]
In October 1816, the first month of Keats's intimacy with Hunt, Haydon
also made a short stay at Hampstead. He and Hunt were already
acquainted, and Hunt had published in the _Examiner_ the very able,
cogent and pungent letter with which Haydon a few months before had
clenched the Elgin marble controversy and practically brought it to an
end. Hunt had congratulated Haydon in a sonnet on the occasion, closing
with a gentle hint that, fine as such a victory was, he was himself
devoted to a mission finer still, as
One of the spirits chosen by heaven to turn
The sunny side of things to human eyes.
Their intercourse was now warmly resumed, though never without latent
risk of antagonism and discord. The following letter of Haydon to
Wilkie, more just and temperate than usual, is good for filling in our
picture both of Hunt and of Haydon himself, as well as for adding
another to the number of bewildering contemporary estimates of _Rimini_.
27 October, 1816.
I have been at Hampstead this fortnight for my eyes, and shall return
with my body much stronger for application. The greater part of my
time has been spent in Leigh Hunt's society, who is certainly one of
the most delightful companions. Full of poetry and art, and amiable
humour, we argue always with full hearts on everything but religion
and Buonaparte, and we have resolved never to talk of these,
particularly as I have been recently examining Voltaire's opinions
concerning Christianity, and turmoiling my head to ascertain fully my
right to put him into my picture!
Though Leigh Hunt is not deep in knowledge, moral, metaphysical, or
classical, yet he is intense in feeling, and has an intellect for ever
on the alert. He is like one of those instruments on three legs,
which, throw it how you will, always pitches on two, and has a spike
sticking for ever up and ever ready for you. He 'sets' at a subject
with a scent like a pointer. He is a remarkable man, and created a
sensation by his independence, his courage, his disinterestedness in
public matters, and by the truth, acuteness, and taste of his dramatic
criticisms he raised the rank of newspapers, and gave by his example
a literary feeling to the weekly ones more especially.
As a poet, I think him full of the genuine feeling. His third canto in
_Rimini_ is equal to anything in any language of that sweet sort.
Perhaps in his wishing to avoid the monotony of the Pope school, he
may have shot into the other extreme, and his invention of obscure
words to express obscure feelings borders sometimes on affectation.
But these are trifles compared with the beauty of the poem, the
intense painting of the scenery, and the deep burning in of the
passion which trembles in every line. Thus far as a critic, an editor,
and a poet. As a man, I know none with such an affectionate heart, if
never opposed in his opinions. He has defects of course: one of his
great defects is getting inferior people about him to listen, too fond
of shining at any expense in society, and a love of approbation from
the darling sex bordering on weakness; though to women he is
delightfully pleasant, yet they seem more to dandle him as a delicate
plant. I don't know if they do not put a confidence in him which to me
would be mortifying.
He is a man of sensibility tinged with morbidity, and of such
sensitive organisation of body that the plant is not more alive to
touch than he. I remember once, walking in a field, we came to a muddy
place concealed by grass. The moment Hunt touched it, he shrank back,
saying, 'It's muddy!' as if he meaned that it was full of adders....
He is a composition, as we all are, of defects and delightful
qualities, indolently averse to worldly exertion, because it harasses
the musings of his fancy, existing only by the common duties of life,
yet ignorant of them, and often suffering from their neglect.
A few days later, on October 31, we find Keats writing to Cowden Clarke
of his pleasure at 'the thought of seeing so soon this glorious Haydon
and all his creations.' The introduction was arranged to take place at
Leigh Hunt's cottage, where they met for dinner. Haydon, the sublime
egoist, could be rapturously sympathetic and genuinely kind to those who
took him at his own valuation, and there was much to attract the spirits
of eager youth about him as a leader. Keats and he were mutually
delighted at first sight: each struck fire from the other, and they
quickly became close friends and comrades. After an evening of high talk
at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th of November, 1816,
the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his name with those
of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:--
Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the
following:--
Great spirits now on earth are sojourning:
He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,
Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake,
Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing:
He of the rose, the violet, the spring,
The social smile, the chain for Freedom's sake,
And lo! whose steadfastness would never take
A meaner sound than Raphael's whispering.
And other spirits there are standing apart
Upon the forehead of the age to come;
These, these will give the world another heart,
And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings in some distant mart?
Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb.
Haydon was at no time of his life unused to compliments of this kind.
About the same time as Keats another young member of Hunt's circle, John
Hamilton Reynolds, also wrote him a sonnet of eager sympathy and
admiration; and the three addressed to him some years later by
Wordsworth are well known. In his reply to Keats he proposed to hand on
the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which 'puts me,' answers
Keats, 'out of breath--you know with what reverence I would send my
well-wishes to him.' Haydon suggested moreover the needless, and as it
seems to me regrettable, mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out the
words after 'workings' in the last line but one. The poet, however,
accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision.
Some time after the turn of the year we find Keats presented with a copy
of Goldsmith's _Greek History_ 'from his ardent friend, B. R. Haydon.'
All the winter and early spring the two met frequently, sometimes at
Haydon's studio in Great Marlborough Street, sometimes in the rooms of
the Keats brothers in the Poultry or in those of their common
acquaintance, and discussed with passionate eagerness most things in
heaven and earth, and especially poetry and painting. 'I have enjoyed
Shakespeare,' declares Haydon, 'with John Keats more than with any other
human being.' Both he and Keats's other painter friend, Joseph Severn,
have testified that Keats had a fine natural sense for the excellencies
of painting and sculpture. Both loved to take him to the British Museum
and expatiate to him on the glories of the antique; and it would seem
that through Haydon he must have had access also to the collection of
one at least of the great dilettanti noblemen of the day. After a first
visit to the newly acquired Parthenon marbles with Haydon at the
beginning of March 1817, Keats tried to embody his impressions in a
couple of sonnets, which Hunt promptly printed in the _Examiner_. It is
characteristic of his unfailing sincerity with his art and with himself
that he allows himself to break into no stock raptures, but strives
faithfully to get into words the confused sensations of spiritual
infirmity and awe that have overpowered him:--
My spirit is too weak--mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time--with a billowy main--
A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.
He sends this with a covering sonnet to Haydon asking pardon for its
immaturity and justly praising the part played by Haydon in forcing the
acceptance of the marbles upon the nation:--
Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak
Definitely on these mighty things;
Forgive me that I have not Eagle's wings--
That what I want I know not where to seek;
And think that I would not be over meek
In rolling out upfollow'd thunderings,
Even to the steep of Heliconian springs,
Were I of ample strength for such a freak--
Think too, that all those numbers should be thine;
Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture's hem?
For when men star'd at what was most divine
With browless idiotism--o'erwise phlegm--
Thou hadst beheld the Hesperian shine
Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them.
Haydon's acknowledgment is of course enthusiastic, but betrays his
unfortunate gift for fustian in the following precious expansion of
Keats's image of the sick eagle:--
Many thanks, my dear fellow, for your two noble sonnets. I know not a
finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high
feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have
remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams,
in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then passing angels,
on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless
wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on
objects of their seeking....
In Haydon's journal about the same date there is an entry which reads
with ironical pathos in the light of after events:--'Keats is a man
after my own heart. He sympathises with me, and comprehends me. We saw
through each other, and I hope are friends for ever. I only know that,
if I sell my picture, Keats shall never want till another is done, that
he may have leisure for his effusions: in short he shall never want all
his life.' To Keats himself, more hyperbolically still, and in terms
still more suited to draw the pitying smile of the ironic gods, Haydon
writes a little later:--
Consider this letter a sacred secret.--Often have I sat by my fire
after a day's effort, as the dusk approached and a gauzy veil seemed
dimming all things--and mused on what I had done, and with a burning
glow on what I would do till filled with fury I have seen the faces of
the mighty dead crowd into my room, and I have sunk down and prayed
the great Spirit that I might be worthy to accompany these immortal
beings in their immortal glories, and then I have seen each smile as
it passes over me, and each shake his hand in awful encouragement. My
dear Keats, the Friends who surrounded me were sensible to what talent
I had,--but no one reflected my enthusiasm with that burning ripeness
of soul, my heart yearned for sympathy,--believe me from my soul, in
you I have found one,--you add fire, when I am exhausted, and excite
fury afresh--I offer my heart and intellect and experience--at first I
feared your ardor might lead you to disregard the accumulated wisdom
of ages in moral points--but the feelings put forth lately have
delighted my soul. God bless you! Let our hearts be buried on each
other.
Familiar visitors at this time of Haydon in the Marlborough Street
studio and of Hunt in the Hampstead cottage were two men of finer gift
than either, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. With both of these
seniors (Lamb was forty-one and Hazlitt thirty-eight) Keats now became
acquainted without becoming intimate. Unluckily neither of them has left
any but the slightest personal impression of the young poet, whose
modesty probably kept him somewhat in the background when they were by.
Haydon used to complain that it was only after Keats's death that he
could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius; but Lamb, as we shall see,
with his unerring critical touch, paid to Keats's best work while he was
still living a tribute as splendid as it was just. Keats on his part,
after the publication of Hazlitt's lectures on the characters of
Shakespeare in 1817, reckoned his 'depth of taste' one of the things
most to rejoice at in his age, and was a diligent attendant at his next
course on the English poets. But he never frequented, presumably for
lack of invitation, those Wednesday and Thursday evening parties at the
Lambs of which Talfourd and B. W. Procter have left us such vivid
pictures; and when he met some of the same company at the Novello's, the
friends of his friend Cowden Clarke, he enjoyed it, as will appear
later, less than one would have hoped. He has left no personal
impression of Hazlitt, and of Lamb only the slightest and most casual.
Fortunately we know them both so well from other sources that we can
almost see and hear them: Hazlitt with his unkempt black hair and
restless grey eyes, lean, slouching, splenetic, an Ishmaelite full of
mistrust and suspicion, his habitual action of the hand within the
waistcoat apt in his scowling moments to suggest a hidden dagger; but
capable withal, in company where he felt secure, of throwing into his
talk much the same fine mixture as distinguishes his writing of
impetuous fullness and variety with incisive point and critical
lucidity: Lamb noticeable in contrast by his neat, sombrely clad small
figure on its spindle legs and his handsome romantic head; by his
hurried, stammering utterance and too often, alas! his vinous flush and
step almost as titubant as his tongue; but most of all by that airy
genius of insight and caprice, of deep tenderness and freakish wisdom,
quick to break from him in sudden, illuminating phrases at any moment
and in any manner save the expected.
Yet another acquaintance brought about by Hunt in these days was that
between Keats and Shelley, who was Keats's senior by only three years
and with whom Hunt himself was now first becoming intimate. When Hunt
was sentenced for sedition four years earlier, Shelley, then barely
twenty, had been eager to befriend him and had sent him an offer of
money help; which for once, not being then in immediate need, Hunt had
honourably declined. Since then they had held only slight communication;
but when Hunt included Shelley on the strength of his poem _Alastor_,
among the young poets praised in his _Examiner_ essay (December 1,
1816), a glowing correspondence immediately followed, and a few days
later Shelley came up from Bath to stay at the Hampstead cottage. The
result of a week's visit was an immediate intimacy and enthusiastic
mutual regard, with a prompt determination on Shelley's part to rescue
Hunt from the slough of debt (something like L1400) into which during
and since his imprisonment he had cheerfully muddled himself.
It was the eve of the most harrowing crisis in Shelley's life, when his
principle of love a law to itself entailed in action so dire a
consequence, and his obedience to his own morality brought him into such
harsh collision with the world's. First came the news of the suicide of
his deserted wife Harriet (December 14) and three months later the
sentence of Lord Eldon which deprived him of the custody of his and
Harriet's children. On the day of the first tragic news he writes to
Mary Godwin, whom he had left at Bath, 'Leigh Hunt has been with me all
day, and his delicate and tender attentions to me, his kind speeches of
you, have sustained me against the weight of horror of this event.' In
the interval between the shock of Harriet's death and that of the
judgment sequestering his children Shelley was a frequent guest in the
Vale of Health, sometimes alone and sometimes with Mary, now legally his
wife. Neither in these first days nor later could Hunt persuade his old
intimates Hazlitt and Lamb to take kindly to his new friend Shelley
either as man or poet. Lamb, who seems only to have seen him once, said
after his death, 'his voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was
tormented with'; of his poetry, that it was 'thin sown with profit or
delight'; and of his 'theories and nostrums,' that 'they are oracular
enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is miching malice and
mischief in 'em.' Hazlitt, opening the most studied of his several
attacks on Shelley's poetry and doctrine, gives one of his vivid
portraits, saying 'he has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a
maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech.... He is
sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced.... His bending, flexible form
appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the
world about him, but flows from it like a river.' Still less was a good
understanding possible between Shelley and Haydon, who met him more than
once in these early days at the Vale of Health. He tells how, on the
evening of their first meeting, Shelley, looking hectically frail and
girlish, opened the conversation at dinner with the words, 'as to that
detestable religion, the Christian,'--and how he, Haydon, a man at all
times stoutly and vociferously orthodox, waited till the meal was over
and then, 'like a stag at bay and resolved to gore without mercy,'
struck his hardest on behalf of the established faith, while Hunt in his
airily complacent way kept skirmishing in on Shelley's side, until the
contention grew hot and stormy. The heat and noise, Haydon owns, were
chiefly on his side, and we might guess as much without his admission,
for we have abundant evidence of the unfailing courtesy and sweetness of
manner with which Shelley would in that high-pitched feminine voice of
his advance the most staggering propositions and patiently encounter the
arguments of his adversaries.
Such contentions, victorious as he always held himself to be in them,
annoyed Haydon. The queer blend, in the atmosphere of the Hampstead
cottage, of eager kindness and hospitality and a graceful, voluble
enthusiasm for the 'luxuries' of poetry, art, and nature with slatternly
housekeeping and a spirit of fervent or flippant anti-Christianity,
became distasteful to him, and he afterwards dated from these days his
gradual estrangement from Hunt and his circle. At the same time he began
to try and draw away Keats from Hunt's influence.
Keats, we are told, though much inclining in these days towards the
Voltairian views of his host, would take little part in such debates as
that above narrated, and once even supported another young member of the
circle, Joseph Severn, in a defence of Christianity against Hunt and
Shelley. To Shelley himself, his senior by three years, his relation was
from the first and remained to the end one of friendly civility and
little more. He did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him,
says Hunt, and adds the comment: 'Keats, being a little too sensitive on
the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a
sort of natural enemy.' 'He was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of
rank,' says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his pride had not been
aroused by anticipation, Keats, as we have seen, was eagerly
open-hearted to new friendships, and it may well be that the reserve he
maintained towards Shelley was assumed at first by way of defence
against the possibility of social patronage on the other's part. But he
must soon have perceived that from Shelley, a gentleman of gentlemen,
such an attitude was the last thing to be apprehended, and the cause of
his standing off was much more likely his knowledge that nearly all
Shelley's literary friends were his pensioners,--from Godwin, the
greediest, to Leigh Hunt, the lightest-hearted,--and a fear that he too
might be supposed to expect a similar bounty. It would seem that in his
spirit of independence he gave Shelley the impression of being much
better off than he was,--or possibly instances of his only too ready
generosity in lending from his modest means to his intimates when they
were hard pressed may have come to Shelley's knowledge: at all events a
few months later we find Shelley casting about for persons able to help
him in helping Hunt, and writing under a false impression, 'Keats
certainly can.'
These two young poets, equally and conjointly beloved by posterity, were
in truth at many points the most opposite-natured of men. Pride and
sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not
easy between them. Keats, with the rich elements of earthly clay in his
composition, his lively vein of every-day common-sense and humour, his
keen, tolerant delight and interest in the aspects and activities of
nature and human nature as he found them, may well have been as much
repelled as attracted by Shelley, Shelley the 'Elfin knight,' the spirit
all air and fire, with his passionate repudiation of the world's ways
and the world's law, his passionate absorption in his vision of a
happier scheme of things, a vision engendered in humanitarian dreams
from his readings of Rousseau and Godwin and Plato,--or was it rather
one brought with him from some ante-natal sojourn among the radiances
and serenities of the sunset clouds? Leigh Hunt's way of putting it is
this:--'Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary
flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of
_Hyperion_, was so far inferior in universality to his great
acquaintance, that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with
nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own
hands.' Of the incidents and results of their intercourse at Hampstead
we know little more than that Shelley, wisely enough in the light of his
own headlong early experiments, tried to dissuade Keats from premature
publication; and that Keats on his part declined, 'in order that he
might have his own unfettered scope,' a cordial invitation from Shelley
to come and stay with him at Great Marlow. Keats, though he must have
known that he could learn much from Shelley's trained scholarship and
fine literary sense, was doubtless right in feeling that whatever power
of poetry might be in him must work its own way to maturity in freedom
and not in leading-strings. To these scanty facts Shelley's cousin
Medwin adds the statement that the two agreed to write in friendly
rivalry the long poems each was severally meditating for his summer's
work, Shelley _Laon and Cythna_, afterwards called _The Revolt of
Islam_, and Keats _Endymion_. This may very well have been the case, but
Medwin was a man so lax of memory, tongue, and pen that his evidence,
unconfirmed, counts for little. Of the influence possibly exercised on
Keats by Shelley's first important poem, _Alastor_, or by his _Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty_ printed in the _Examiner_ during the January of
their intercourse at Hunt's, it will be time to speak later on.
A much closer intimacy sprang up between Keats and the other young
poetic aspirant whom Hunt in his December essay in the _Examiner_ had
bracketed with him and Shelley. This was John Hamilton Reynolds, of
whom we have as yet heard only the name. He was a handsome, witty,
enthusiastic youth a year younger than Keats, having been born at
Shrewsbury in September 1796. Part of his boyhood was spent in
Devonshire near Sidmouth, a countryside to which he remained always
deeply attached; but he was still quite young when his father came and
settled in London as mathematical master and head writing master at
Christ's Hospital. The elder Reynolds and his wife were people of
literary leanings and literary acquaintance, and seem to have been
characters in their way: both Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were
frequenters of their house in Little Britain, and Mrs Reynolds is
reported as holding her own well among the talkers at Lamb's evenings.
Their son John was educated at St Paul's school and showed talent and
inclinations which drew him precociously into the literary movement of
the time. At eighteen he wrote an Eastern tale in verse in the Byronic
manner, _Safie_, of which Byron acknowledged the presentation copy in a
kind and careful letter several pages long. Two years later, just about
the time of his first introduction to Keats at Leigh Hunt's, the
youngster had the honour of receiving a similar attention from
Wordsworth in reply to a presentation of another poem, _The Naiad_
(November 1816). Neither of these two youthful volumes, nor yet a third,
_The Eden of Imagination_, showed much more than a quick susceptibility
to nature and romance, and a gift of falling in readily and gracefully
now with one and now with another of the poetic fashions of the hour.
Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt were alternately his models.
The same gift of adaptiveness which Reynolds showed in serious work made
him when he chose a deft, sometimes even a masterly, parodist in the
humourous vein, and his work done in this vein a few years later in
collaboration with Thomas Hood holds its own well beside that of his
associate. Partly owing to the persuasions of the lady to whom he was
engaged, Reynolds early gave up the hope of a literary career and went
into business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell sonnet to
the Muses in a copy of Shakespeare which he gave to Keats, and in 1821
he writes again
As time increases
I give up drawling verse for drawing leases.
In point of fact he continued to write occasionally for some years, and
in the end failed somewhat tragically to prosper in the profession of
law. During these early years he was not only one of the warmest friends
Keats had but one of the wisest, to whom Keats could open his innermost
mind with the certainty of being understood, and who once at least saved
him from a serious mistake. A sonnet written by him within three months
of their first meeting proves with what warmth of affection as well as
with what generosity of admiration the one young aspirant from the first
regarded the other. Keats one day, calling on Cowden Clarke and finding
him asleep over Chaucer, passed the time by writing on the blank space
at the end of _The Floure and the Lefe_, a poem with which he was
already familiar, the sonnet beginning 'This pleasant tale is like a
little copse.'[2] Reynolds's comment after reading it is as follows:--
Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves,
Or white flowers pluck'd from some sweet lily bed;
They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed
The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eyes,
O'er the excited soul.--Thy genius weaves
Songs that shall make the age be nature-led,
And win that coronal for thy young head
Which time's strange hand of freshness ne'er bereaves.
Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way,
Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung;
Be thou companion of the summer day,
Roaming the fields and older woods among:--
So shall thy muse be ever in her May
And thy luxuriant spirit ever young.
Reynolds had two sisters, Marianne and Jane, older than himself, and a
third, Charlotte, several years younger. With the elder two Keats was
soon on terms of almost brotherly intimacy and affection, seeing them
often at the family home in Little Britain, exchanging lively letters
with them in absence, and contributing to Jane's album sets of verses
some of which have only through this means been preserved. A little
later the piano-playing of the youngest sister, Charlotte, was often a
source of great pleasure to him.
Outside his own family Reynolds had an inseparable friend with whom
Keats also became quickly intimate: this was James Rice, a young
solicitor of literary tastes and infinite jest, chronically ailing or
worse in health, but always, in Keats's words, 'coming on his legs again
like a cat'; ever cheerful and willing in spite of his sufferings, and
indefatigable in good offices to those about him: 'dear noble generous
James Rice,' records Dilke,--'the best, and in his quaint way one of the
wittiest and wisest men I ever knew.' It was through Rice that there
presently came to Reynolds that uncongenial business opening which in
worldly wisdom he held himself bound to accept. Besides Reynolds,
another and more insignificant young versifying member, or satellite, of
Hunt's set when Keats first joined it was one Cornelius Webb, remembered
now, if remembered at all, by the derisory quotation in _Blackwood's
Magazine_ of his rimes on Byron and Keats, as well as by a disparaging
allusion in one of Keats's own later letters. He disappeared early from
the circle, but not before he had caught enough of its spirit to write
sonnets and poetical addresses which might almost be taken for the work
of Hunt, or even for that of Keats himself in his weak moments; and for
some years afterwards served as press-reader in the printing-office of
Messrs. Clowes, being charged especially with the revision of the
_Quarterly_ proofs.
To turn to other close associates of Keats during the same period, known
to him not through Hunt but through his brothers,--a word may suffice
for Charles Wells, to whom we find him addressing in the summer of 1816
a sonnet of thanks for a gift of roses. Wells had been a schoolmate of
Tom Keats and R.H. Horne, and is described as in those days a small,
red-headed, snub-nosed, blue-eyed youth of irrepressible animal spirits.
Now or somewhat later he formed an intimacy, never afterwards broken,
with Hazlitt. Keats's own regard for Wells was short-lived, being
changed a year or so later into fierce indignation when Wells played off
a heartless practical joke upon the consumptive Tom in the shape of a
batch of pretended love-letters from an imaginary 'Amena.' It was after
Keats's death that Wells earned a place of his own in literature with
the poetic drama _Joseph and his Brethren_, dead-born in its first
anonymous form and re-animated after many years, but still during the
life-time of its author, through the enthusiasm which its qualities of
intellect and passion inspired in Rossetti and Swinburne.
Of far different importance were two other acquaintanceships, which
Keats owed to his brother George and which in the same months were
ripening into affection, one of them into an affection priceless in the
sequel. The first was with a young solicitor called William Haslam (it
is odd how high a proportion of Keats's intimates were of this
profession). Of him no personal picture has come down to us, but in the
coming days we find him, of all the set, the most prompt and serviceable
on occasions of practical need or urgency: 'our oak friend' he is called
in one such crisis by Joseph Severn. It was as the friend of Haslam, and
through Haslam of his brother George, that Keats first knew Joseph
Severn, whose name is now inseparable from his own. He was two years
Keats's senior, the son of a music-master sprung from an old
Gloucestershire stock and having a good connexion in the northern
suburbs of London. The elder Severn seems to have been much of a
domestic tyrant, and in all things headstrong and hot-headed, but
blessed with an admirable wife whom he appreciated and who contrived to
make the household run endurably if not comfortably. Joseph, the son,
showing a precocious talent for drawing, was apprenticed to a stipple
engraver, but the perpetual task of 'stabbing copper' irked him too
sorely: his ambition was to be a painter, and against the angry
opposition of his father he contrived to attend the Royal Academy
schools, picking up meanwhile for himself what education in letters he
could. He had a hereditary talent for music, an untrained love for books
and poetry, and doubtless some touch already of that engaging social
charm which Ruskin noted in him when they first met five and twenty
years later in Rome. He was beginning to get a little practice as a
miniature painter and to make private attempts in history-painting when
he met the brilliant young poet-student of Guy's, with whom he was shy
and timid at first, as with a sort of superior being. But before long he
became used to drinking in with delight all that Keats, in communicative
hours, was moved to pour out from the play of his imagination or the
stores--infinite as to the innocent Severn they appeared--of his reading
in poetry and history. What especially, he recorded in after life, used
to enrapture him was Keats's talk on the meaning and beauty of the Greek
polytheism as a 'religion of joy.' On his own part he was proud to act
as cicerone to Keats in the British Museum or the British Institution
(the National Gallery as yet was not), and deferentially to point out to
him the glories of the antique or of Titian and Claude and Poussin.
Thus our obscurely-born and half-schooled young medical student, the
orphan son of a Finsbury stable-keeper, found himself at twenty-one,
before the end of his second winter in London, fairly launched in a
world of art, letters, and liberal aspirations and living in familiar
intimacy with some, and friendly acquaintance with others, of the most
gifted spirits of his time. The power and charm of genius already shone
from him, and impressed alike his older and his younger companions.
Portraits of him verbal and other exist in abundance. A small, compact,
well-turned figure, broad-chested for its height, which was barely an
inch over five feet; a shapely head set off by thickly clustering
gold-brown hair and carried with an eager upward and forward thrust from
the shoulders; the features powerful, finished, and mobile, with an
expression at once bold and sensitive; the forehead sloping and not
high, but broad and strong: the brows well arched above hazel-brown,
liquid flashing eyes, 'like the eyes of a wild gypsy maid in colour, set
in the face of a young god,' Severn calls them. To the same effect
Haydon,--'an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a
Delphian priestess who saw visions': and again Leigh Hunt,--'the eyes
mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a
noble action or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears and
his mouth tremble.' In like manner George Keats,--'John's eyes moistened
and his lip quivered at the relation of any tale of generosity or
benevolence or noble daring, or at sights of loveliness or distress.'
And once more Haydon,--'Keats was the only man I ever met who seemed and
looked conscious of a high calling, except Wordsworth.... He was in his
glory in the fields. The humming of a bee, the sight of a flower, the
glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble, then his eyes
flashed, his cheek glowed and his mouth quivered.' 'Nothing seemed to
escape him,'--I now quote paragraphs compiled by the late Mr William
Sharp from many jotted reminiscences of Severn's,--
Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undernote of
response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing
of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the
wind--just how it took certain tall flowers and plants--and the
wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of passing
tramps, the colour of one woman's hair, the smile on one child's face,
the furtive animalism below the deceptive humanity in many of the
vagrants, even the hats, clothes, shoes, wherever these conveyed the
remotest hint as to the real self of the wearer. Withal, even when in
a mood of joyous observance, with flow of happy spirits, he would
suddenly become taciturn, not because he was tired, not even because
his mind was suddenly wrought to some bewitching vision, but from a
profound disquiet which he could not or would not explain.
Certain things affected him extremely, particularly when 'a wave was
billowing through a tree,' as he described the uplifting surge of air
among swaying masses of chestnut or oak foliage, or when, afar off, he
heard the wind coming across woodlands. 'The tide! the tide!' he would
cry delightedly, and spring on to some stile, or upon the low bough of
a wayside tree, and watch the passage of the wind upon the meadow
grasses or young corn, not stirring till the flow of air was all
around him, while an expression of rapture made his eyes gleam and his
face glow till he 'would look sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for
some cry from the forest depths,' or like 'a young eagle staring with
proud joy before taking flight.'...
Though small of stature, not more than three-quarters of an inch over
five feet, he seemed taller, partly from the perfect symmetry of his
frame, partly from his erect attitude and a characteristic backward
poise (sometimes a toss) of the head, and, perhaps more than anything
else, from a peculiarly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on
the face of some seamen....
The only time he appeared as small of stature was when he was reading,
or when he was walking rapt in some deep reverie; when the chest fell
in, the head bent forward as though weightily overburdened, and the
eyes seemed almost to throw a light before his face....
The only thing that would bring Keats out of one of his fits of
seeming gloomful reverie--the only thing, during those
country-rambles, that would bring the poet 'to himself again' was the
motion 'of the inland sea' he loved so well, particularly the violent
passage of wind across a great field of barley. From fields of oats or
barley it was almost impossible to allure him; he would stand, leaning
forward, listening intently, watching with a bright serene look in his
eyes and sometimes with a slight smile, the tumultuous passage of the
wind above the grain. The sea, or thought-compelling images of the
sea, always seemed to restore him to a happy calm.
In regard to Keats's social qualities, he is said, and owns himself, to
have been not always quite well conditioned or at his ease in the
presence of women, but in that of men all accounts agree that he was
pleasantness itself: quiet and abstracted or brilliant and voluble by
turns, according to his mood and company, but thoroughly amiable and
unaffected. His voice was rich and low, and when he joined in
discussion, it was usually with an eager but gentle animation, while his
occasional bursts of fierce indignation at wrong or meanness bore no
undue air of assumption, and failed not to command respect. 'In my
knowledge of my fellow beings,' says Cowden Clarke, 'I never knew one
who so thoroughly combined the sweetness with the power of gentleness,
and the irresistible sway of anger, as Keats. His indignation would have
made the boldest grave; and they who had seen him under the influence of
injustice and meanness of soul would not forget the expression of his
features--"the form of his visage was changed."'
In lighter moods his powers of mimicry and dramatic recital are
described as great and never used unkindly. He loved the exhibition of
any kind of energy, and was as almost as keen a spectator of the rough
and violent as of the tender and joyous aspects and doings of life and
nature. 'Though a quarrel in the streets,' he says, 'is a thing to be
hated the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a
grace in his quarrel.' His yearning love for the old polytheism and
instinctive affinity with the Greek spirit did not at all blunt his
relish of actualities. To complete our picture and illustrate the wide
and unfastidious range of his contact with life and interest in things,
let us take Cowden Clarke's account of the way he could enjoy and
re-enact such a scene of brutal sport and human low-life as our
refinement no longer tolerates:--
His perception of humour, with the power of transmitting it by
imitation, was both vivid and irresistibly amusing. He once described
to me having gone to see a bear-baiting. The performance not having
begun, Keats was near to, and watched, a young aspirant, who had
brought a younger under his wing to witness the solemnity, and whom he
oppressively patronized, instructing him in the names and qualities of
all the magnates present. Now and then, in his zeal to manifest and
impart his knowledge, he would forget himself, and stray beyond the
prescribed bounds into the ring, to the lashing resentment of its
comptroller, Mr William Soames, who, after some hints of a practical
nature to 'keep back' began laying about him with indiscriminate and
unmitigable vivacity, the Peripatetic signifying to his pupil. 'My
eyes! Bill Soames giv' me sich a licker!' evidently grateful, and
considering himself complimented upon being included in the general
dispensation. Keats's entertainment with and appreciation of this
minor scene of low life has often recurred to me. But his concurrent
personification of the baiting, with his position,--his legs and arms
bent and shortened till he looked like Bruin on his hind legs, dabbing
his fore paws hither and thither, as the dogs snapped at him, and now
and then acting the gasp of one that had been suddenly caught and
hugged--his own capacious mouth adding force to the personation, was a
remarkable and as memorable a display.
Thus stamped by nature, and moving in such a circle as we have
described, Keats found among those with whom he lived nothing to check,
but rather everything to foster, his hourly growing, still diffident and
half awe-stricken, passion for the poetic life. Poetry and the love of
poetry were at this period in the air. It was a time when even people of
business and people of fashion read: a time of literary excitement,
expectancy, discussion, and disputation such as England has not known
since. Fortunes, even, had been made or were being made in poetry; by
Scott, by Byron, by Moore, whose _Irish Melodies_ were an income to him
and who was known to have just received a cheque of L3000 in advance for
_Lalla Rookh_. In such an atmosphere Keats, having enough of his
inheritance left after payment of his school and hospital expenses to
live on for at least a year or two, soon found himself induced to try
his luck and his powers with the rest. The backing of his friends was
indeed only too ready and enthusiastic. His brothers, including the
business member of the family, the sensible and practical George, were
as eager that John should become a famous poet as he was himself. So
encouraged, he made up his mind to give up the pursuit of surgery for
that of literature, and declared his decision, being now of age, firmly
to his guardian; who naturally but in vain opposed it to the best of his
power. The consequence was a quarrel, which Mr Abbey afterwards related,
in a livelier manner than we should have expected from him, in the same
document, now unfortunately gone astray, to which I have already
referred as containing his character of the poet's mother. The die was
cast. In the Marlborough Street studio, in the Hampstead cottage, in the
City lodgings of the three brothers and the social gatherings of their
friends, it was determined that John Keats (or according to his
convivial _alias_ 'Junkets') should put forth a volume of his poems.
Leigh Hunt brought on the scene a firm of publishers supposed to be
sympathetic, the brothers Charles and James Ollier, who had already
published for Shelley and who readily undertook the issue. The volume
was printed, and the last proof-sheets were brought one evening to the
author amid a jovial company, with the intimation that if a dedication
was to be added the copy must be furnished at once. Keats going to one
side quickly produced the sonnet _To Leigh Hunt Esqr_, with its
excellent opening and its weak conclusion:--
Glory and Loveliness have pass'd away;
For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathed incense do we see upborne
Into the East to meet the smiling day:
No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young and gay,
In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,
Roses and pinks, and violets, to adorn
The shrine of Flora in her early May.
But there are left delights as high as these,
And I shall ever bless my destiny,
That in a time when under pleasant trees
Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please,
With these poor offerings, a man like thee.
With this confession of a longing retrospect towards the beauty of the
old pagan world and of gratitude for present friendship, the young
poet's first venture was sent forth, amid the applauding expectations of
all his circle, in the first days of March 1817.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] These drawings are preserved in the Department of Prints and
Drawings at the British Museum.
[2] Cowden Clarke, writing many years later, suggests that this was
Keats's first acquaintance with Chaucer. He is certainly mistaken. It
was on Feb. 27, 1817, that Keats called and found him asleep as
related in the text. Within a week was published the volume of
_Poems_, with the principal piece, _Sleep and Poetry_, partly
modelled on the _Floure and the Lefe_ itself and headed with a
quotation from it. It is needless to add that later criticism does
not admit _The Floure and Lefe_ into the canon of Chaucer's works.
CHAPTER IV
THE 'POEMS' OF 1817
Spirit and chief contents of the volume--Sonnets and rimed
heroics--The Chapman sonnet--The 'How many bards' sonnet--The
sex-chivalry group--The Leigh Hunt group--The Haydon pair--The Leander
sonnet--Epistles--History of the 'heroic' couplet--The closed and free
systems--Marlowe--Drayton--William Browne--Chapman and Sandys--Decay
of the free system--William Chamberlayne--Milton and
Marvell--Waller--Katherine Philips--Dryden--Pope and his
ascendency--Reaction: The Brothers Warton--Symptoms of
Emancipation--Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott--Leigh Hunt and couplet
reform--Keats to Mathew: influence of Browne--_Calidore_: influence of
Hunt--Epistle to George Keats--Epistle to Cowden Clarke--_Sleep and
Poetry_ and _I stood tiptoe_--Analysis of _Sleep and Poetry_--Double
invocation--Vision of the Charioteer--Battle-cry of the new
poetry--Its strength and weakness--Challenge and
congratulation--Encouragements acknowledged--Analysis of _I stood
tiptoe_--Intended induction to _Endymion_--Relation to
Elizabethans--Relation to contemporaries--Wordsworth and Greek
Mythology--_Tintern Abbey_ and the three stages--Contrasts of
method--Evocation _versus_ Exposition.
The note of Keats's early volume is accurately struck in the motto from
Spenser which he prefixed to it:--
What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?
The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of
release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true
nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered.
And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight:
delight in the beauty and activities of nature, in the vividness of
sensation, in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of
friendship and affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the
exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these
joys.
Technically considered, the volume consists almost entirely of
experiments in two metrical forms: the one, the Italian sonnet of octave
and sestet, not long fully re-established in England after being
disused, with some exceptions, since Milton: the other, the decasyllabic
or five-stressed couplet first naturalized by Chaucer, revived by the
Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative, dramatic, didactic,
elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and employed ever since as the predominant
English metre outside of lyric and drama. The only exceptions in the
volume are the boyish stanzas in imitation of Spenser,--truly rather of
Spenser's eighteenth century imitators; the _Address to Hope_ of
February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth century style and
diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient; the two copies
of verses _To some Ladies_ and _On receiving a curious Shell from some
Ladies_, composed for the Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in
the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles from the days of
Prior to those of Tom Moore; and the set of seven-syllabled couplets
drafted in February 1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss
Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call for little
remark. Both the sea-shell verses and the valentine spring from a brain,
to quote a phrase of Keats's own,
--new stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay
Of old romance,--
especially with chivalric images and ideas from Spenser. Of the second
set of shell stanzas it may perhaps be noted that they seem to suggest
an acquaintance with Oberon and Titania not only through the _Midsummer
Night's Dream_ but through Wieland's _Oberon_, a romance poem which
Sotheby's translation had made well known in England and in which the
fairy king and queen are divided by a quarrel far deeper and more
durable than in Shakespeare's play.[1]
Taking first the score or so of sonnets in the volume, we find that none
of them are love-sonnets and that few are written in any high mood of
passion or exaltation. They are for the most part of the class called
'occasional',--records of pleasant experience, addresses of friendly
greeting or invocation, or compact meditations on a single theme. They
bespeak a temper cordial and companionable as well as enthusiastic,
manifest sincerity in all expressions of personal feeling, and contain
here and there a passage of fine mature poetry. These, however, are
seldom sustained for more than a single quatrain. The great exception of
course is the sonnet, almost too well known to quote,--but I will quote
it nevertheless,--on Chapman's _Homer_. That walk in the morning
twilight from Clerkenwell to the Borough had enriched our language with
what is by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a
close unsurpassed for the combined qualities of serenity and
concentration: concentration twofold, first flashing on our mind's eye
the human vision of the explorer and his companions with their looks and
gestures, then symbolically evoking through that vision a whole
world-wide range of the emotions of discovery.
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer rul'd as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The 'realms of gold' lines in the Chapman sonnet, recording Keats's
range of reading in our older poetry, had been in a measure anticipated
in this other, written six months earlier[2]:--
How many bards gild the lapses of time!
A few of them have ever been the food
Of my delighted fancy,--I could brood
Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime:
And often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
These will in throngs before my mind intrude:
But no confusion, no disturbance rude
Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime.
So the unnumber'd sounds that evening store;
The songs of birds--the whisp'ring of the leaves--
The voice of waters--the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound,--and thousand others more,
That distance of recognizance bereaves,
Make pleasing music, and not wild uproar.
Technical points worth attention here are the bold reversal of the
regular accentual stress twice over in the first line, and the strained
use of 'store' for 'fill' and 'recognizance' for 'recognition.' But the
main interest of the sonnet is its comparison of the working of Keats's
miscellaneous poetic reading in his mind and memory with the effect of
the confused but harmonious sounds of evening on the ear,--a frank and
illuminating comment by himself on those stray echoes and reminiscences
of the older poets which we catch now and again throughout his work.
Such echoes and reminiscences are always permitted to genius, because
genius cannot help turning whatever it takes into something new of its
own: and Keats showed himself from the first one of those chartered
borrowers who have the right to draw inspiration as they please, whether
direct from nature or, in the phrase of Wordsworth,
From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty poets.[3]
Compare Shelley in the preface to _Prometheus Unbound_:--'One great poet
is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but
must study.'
Most of the remaining sonnets can best b
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