Life of John Keats Part 25

Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe Voluptuous visions into the warm air; Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath, Be like an April day, Smiling and cold and gay, A temperate lily, temperate as fair; Then, Heaven! there will be A warmer June for me.

Ah! if you prize my subdu'd soul above The poor, the fading, brief pride of an hour; Let none profane my Holy See of Love, Or with a rude hand break The sacramental cake: Let none else touch the just new-budded flower: If not--may my eyes close, Love! on their last repose.

In both of these poems Keats soothes himself with thoughts of dying, and they are doubtless among the things he had in mind when two or three months later, in the ode _To a Nightingale_, he speaks of having invoked Death by soft names 'in many a mused rhyme.'

Fearing the intrusion of what in another sonnet of the time he calls 'The dragon-world and all its hundred eyes,' he was intensely jealous in guarding his secret from friends and acquaintances; and in writing even to those dearest to him he lets slip no word that might betray it. To his brother he merely says, 'Miss Brawne and I have now and then a chat and a tiff,' while to his young sister he writes on February 27th that he wishes he could come to her at Walthamstow for a month or so, packing off Mrs Abbey to town, and get her to teach him 'a few common dancing steps,'--for what reason, to us too pathetically evident, he of course gives no hint.

On February 14th, about a fortnight after his return from Hamps.h.i.+re, and on the very day when according to Woodhouse he began _The Eve of St Mark_, Keats had put pen to a new journal-letter for America. A straw showing how the wind was blowing with him is his mention that the Reynolds sisters, whose company used to be among his chief pleasures, are staying at the Dilkes next door and that he finds them 'very dull.'

So, we may guess, will they on their parts have found him. His only other correspondents in these weeks are Haydon and his young sister f.a.n.n.y. Early in March Haydon returned to the charge about the loan. 'My dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised a.s.sistance.... Before the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst.' Keats had intended for Haydon's relief some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share in their grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over to him at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were raised, and for some time after the new year he had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. When by-and-by Haydon writes, in the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with his promise and his failure to keep it, Keats replies without loss of temper, explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting possession of his money. Moreover he finds that much less remains of his small inheritance than he had supposed, and even if all he had were laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live on for two years. Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent sums to various friends amounting in all to near 200, of which he expects the repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds which he could very ill spare.

To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are charming.

He lets her perceive nothing of his anxieties, and is full of brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of interest in her preparation for her approaching confirmation; of regrets that she is kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey, with humorous admonitions to patience under that lady's 'unfeeling and ignorant gabble'; and of plans for coming over to see her when the weather and his throat allow or when he is in cash to pay the coach fare. On one day he is serious, begging her to lean on him in all things:--'We have been very little together: but you have not the less been with me in thought. You have no one else in the world besides me who would sacrifice anything for you--I feel myself the only Protector you have. In all your little troubles think of me with the thought that there is at least one person in England who if he could would help you out of them--I live in hopes of being able to make you happy.' Another day he is all playfulness, thinking of various little presents to please her, a selection of Ta.s.sie's gems, flowers from the Tottenham nursery garden, drawing materials--and here follows the pa.s.sage above quoted (p. 10) against keeping live birds or fishes:--

They are better in the trees and the water,--though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome globe of gold-fish--then I would have it hold ten pails of water and be fed continually fresh through a cool pipe with another pipe to let through the floor--well ventilated they would preserve all their beautiful silver and crimson. Then I would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round with Myrtles and j.a.ponicas. I should like the window to open on to the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. VIII

_From a posthumous portrait by Joseph Severn

in the National Portrait Gallery

Emery Walker ph &c._]

For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a constant anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the distant Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices been bound. Pending such news, he keeps writing up his journal for them, and for nearly four months it grew and grew. Still in February, he promises to send in the next packet his '_Pot of Basil_, _St Agnes' Eve_, and if I should have finished it, a little thing called the _Eve of St Mark_. You see what fine Mother Radcliffe names I have--it is not my fault--I do not search for them. I have not gone on with _Hyperion_, for to tell the truth I have not been in great cue for writing lately--I must wait for the spring to rouse me up a little!'

As it fell out, he never went on either with _Hyperion_ or with the _Eve of St Mark_, the romance just so promisingly begun. For fully two months after breaking off the latter fragment (February 17th or 18th) he was quite out of cue for writing, and produced nothing except the ode _To f.a.n.n.y_ (if I am right as to its date) and a few personal sonnets. Many causes, we can feel, were working together to check for the time being the creative impulse within him: the mere disturbing influence of the spring season for one thing; discouragement at the public reception of his work for another, though this was a motive external and relatively secondary; the results of a deliberate mental stock-taking of his own powers and performances for a third; and more deep-seated and compulsive, though unexpressed, than any of these, the love-pa.s.sion by which three-fourths of his soul and consciousness had come to be absorbed. Here, from a letter to Haydon of March 8, is an example of what I mean by his mental stock-taking. The resolution it expresses is of course more a matter of mood than of fixed purpose:--

I have come to this resolution--never to write for the sake of writing or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge or experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me; otherwise I will be dumb. What imagination I have I shall enjoy, and greatly, for I have experienced the satisfaction of having great conceptions without the trouble of sonnetteering. I will not spoil my love of gloom by writing an Ode to Darkness.

With respect to my livelihood, I will not write for it,--for I will not run with that most vulgar of all crowds, the literary. Such things I ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental weights, as it were. I am three and twenty, with little knowledge and middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine pa.s.sages; but that is not the thing.

Some five weeks later, about mid-April, we find that Haydon himself has been a contributing cause to Keats's poetic inactivity by his behaviour in regard to the loan which Keats had hoped but so far been unable to make him. The failure he writes, has not been his fault:--

I am doubly hurt at the slightly reproachful tone of your note and at the occasion of it,--for it must be some other disappointment; you seem'd so sure of some important help when last I saw you--now you have maimed me again; I was whole, I had begun reading again--when your note came I was engaged in a Book. I dread as much as a Plague the idle fever of two months more without any fruit. I will walk over the first fine day: then see what aspect your affairs have taken, and if they should continue gloomy walk into the City to Abbey and get his consent for I am persuaded that to me alone he will not concede a jot.

In the journal-letter of these weeks to his brother and sister-in-law, mentioning how he had been asked to join Woodhouse over a bottle of claret at his coffee-house, he breaks into a rhapsody over the virtues and wholesomeness of that beverage and adds 'this same claret is the only palate-pa.s.sion I have--I forgot game--I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the back-bone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant, and a Woodc.o.c.k _pa.s.sim_.' Turning to his own affairs, he says,--

I am in no despair about them--my poem has not at all succeeded; in the course of a year or so I think I shall try the public again--in a selfish point of view I should suffer my pride and my contempt of public opinion to hold me silent--but for yours and f.a.n.n.y's sake I will pluck up a spirit and try again. I have no doubt of success in a course of years if I persevere--but it must be patience--for the Reviews have enervated and made indolent men's minds--few think for themselves. These Reviews are getting more and more powerful, especially the Quarterly--they are like a superst.i.tion which the more it prostrates the Crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness. I was in hopes that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and iniquity of these Plagues they would scout them, but no, they are like the spectators at the Westminster c.o.c.k-pit--they like the battle--and do not care who wins or who loses.

Among other matters he has a long story to tell about his friend Bailey's fickleness in love. It appears that Bailey, after a first unfortunate love-affair, had during the past year been paying his addresses to Mariane Reynolds, begging that she would take time to consider her answer, and that while her decision was still uncertain Bailey, to the great indignation of all the Reynolds family and a little to Keats's own, had engaged himself in Scotland to the sister of his friend Gleig, afterwards well known as author of _The Subaltern_ and Chaplain General to the Forces. Next Keats begins quoting with a natural zest of admiration, almost in full, that incomparable piece of studied and sustained invective, Hazlitt's _Letter to William Gifford Esqr._, beside which Gifford's own controversial virulences seem relatively blunt and boorish. Half way through Keats has to say he will copy the rest tomorrow,--

for the candles are burnt down and I am using the wax taper--which has a long snuff on it--the fire is at its last click--I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet--I am writing this on the Maid's tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure.

Beside this volume of Beaumont and Fletcher--there are on the table two volumes of Chaucer and a new work of Tom Moore's called _Tom Cribb's Memorial to Congress_,--nothing in it. These are trifles but I require nothing so much of you but that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me. Could I see that same thing done of any great Man long since dead it would be a great delight: As to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began 'To be or not to be'--such things become interesting from distance of time or place. I hope you are both now in that sweet sleep which no two beings deserve more than you do--I must fancy you so--and please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing over you and your lives--G.o.d bless you--I whisper good night in your ears and you will dream of me.

This is on the 13th of March. Six days later he gives another picture, this time of his state of body rather than of mind:--

This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely careless--I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_--my pa.s.sions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness.

If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor, but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pa.s.s by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase--a Man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguis.e.m.e.nt. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body over-powering the Mind.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. IX

'Figures on a Greek vase: a man and two women'

FROM AN ETCHING IN PIRANESI'S VASI E CANDELABRI]

The criticism is foolish which sees in this pa.s.sage the expression of a languid, self-indulgent nature, and especially foolish considering the footnote in which Keats observes that at the moment he has a black eye.

The black eye was no doubt the mark of the fight in which he had lately well thrashed a young blackguard of a butcher whom he found tormenting a kitten. That the said fight took place just about this time is clear by the following evidences. Cowden Clarke, in his recollections communicated privately to Lord Houghton, writes, 'The last time I saw Keats was during his residence with Mr Brown. I spent the day with him; and he read to me the poem he had last finished--_The Eve of St Agnes_.

Shortly after this I removed many miles from London, and was spared the sorrow of beholding the progress of the disease that was to take him from us. When I last saw him he was in fine health and spirits; and he told me that he had, not long before our meeting, had an encounter with a fellow who was tormenting a kitten, or puppy, and who was big enough to have eaten him; that they fought for nearly an hour; and that his opponent was led home.'[7] The reading of the _Eve of St Agnes_ fixes the date of Clarke's visit as after Keats's return from Chichester at the end of January, and a remark of Keats, writing to his brother between February the 14th and 19th, that he has not seen Clarke 'for G.o.d knows how long', further fixes it as after mid-February; while the latest limit is set by the fact that by Easter Clarke had gone away to live with his family at Ramsgate, where they had settled after his father had given up the Enfield school. What the 'effeminacy' pa.s.sage really expresses is of course no more than a pa.s.sing mood of la.s.situde, gratefully welcomed as a relief from the strain of feelings habitually more acute than nature could well bear. Ambition he was schooling, or trying to school, himself to cherish in moderation, but it was not often or for long that the stings either of poetry or of love abated for him the least jot of their bitter-sweet intensity, or that antic.i.p.ations of poverty or the fever of incipient disease relaxed their grip.

Though Keats's letters to his brother and sister-in-law contain no confidence on the subject, some of the verses he encloses betray in abstract form the strain of pa.s.sion under which he was living; notably the fine weird sonnet on a dream which came to him after reading the Paolo and Francesca pa.s.sage in Dante, and the other sonnet beginning 'Why did I laugh to-night?' In copying this last, he adds careful and considerate words of re-a.s.surance lest his brother should take alarm for his sake:

I am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet--but Look over the two last pages and ask yourselves whether I have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with no Agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but Knowledge when pushed to the point though the first steps to it were through my human pa.s.sions--and perhaps I must confess a little bit of my heart--

Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell: No G.o.d, no Demon of severe response Deigns to reply from Heaven or from h.e.l.l.-- Then to my human heart I turn at once-- Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone; Say wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain!

O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan To question Heaven and h.e.l.l and Heart in vain!

Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease; My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: Yet could I on this very midnight cease And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds.

Verse, fame and Beauty are intense indeed But Death intenser--Death is Life's High meed.

I went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep. Sane I went to bed and sane I arose.

This is yet another of those invocations to friendly Death to which he himself refers in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ written a few weeks later, and in its phrase 'on this very midnight cease' antic.i.p.ates one of the great lines of the ode itself.

No letter of Keats--or of any one--is richer than this of February to May 1819 in variety of mood and theme and interest. It contains two of the freshest and most luminous of his discursive pa.s.sages of meditation on life and on the nature of the soul and the meaning of things: pa.s.sages showing a native power of thought untrained indeed, but also unhampered, by academic knowledge and study, and hardly to be surpa.s.sed for their union of steady human common-sense with airy ease and play of imaginative speculation. In one, starting from reflections on the unforeseen way in which circ.u.mstances, like clouds, gather and burst, reflections suggested by the expected death of the father of his friend Haslam, he calls up a series of pictures of the instinctiveness with which men, like animals,--the hawk, the robin, the stoat, the deer,--go about their purposes; considers the rarity of the exceptional human beings whose disinterestedness helps on the progress of the world; and then turns his thoughts on himself with the comment,--

Even here, though I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of, I am, however young, writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one a.s.sertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin? May there not be superior beings, amused with any graceful, though instinctive, att.i.tude my mind may fall into as I am entertained with the alertness of the Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer?

In the other pa.s.sage he disposes of all Rousseau-G.o.dwin theories of human perfectibility by a consideration of the physical frame and order of the world we live in, the flaws and violences which mar and jar it, and which its human offspring are likely to derive from and share with it until the end; and, provisionally accepting the doctrine of immortality, he broaches of his own a scheme of the spiritual discipline for the sake of which, as he suggests, the life of men on this so imperfect earth may have been designed.

In marked, not always entirely pleasant contrast with these pa.s.sages of thought and beauty Keats sends his brother such things as a summary of a satiric fairy story of Brown's and an impromptu comic tale of his own in verse, much in Brown's manner, about a princess, a mule, and a dwarf: both of them apparently to his mind amusing, but to us rather silly and the former a little coa.r.s.e: also some friendly satiric verses of his own on Brown in the Spenserian stanza. He tells how he has been turning over the love-letters palmed off by way of hoax upon his brother Tom by Charles Wells in the character of a pretended 'Amena', and vows fiercely to make Wells suffer for his heartlessness; gossips further of Dilke and his overstrained parental anxiety about his boy at school; asks a string of playful questions about his sister-in-law and her daily doings; and in another place gives us, in the mention of a casual walk and talk with Coleridge, the liveliest record we have of the astonis.h.i.+ng variety of matters and mysteries over which that philosopher was capable, in a short hour's conversation, of ranging without pause or taking breath:--

Last Sunday I took a walk towards Highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield's park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator at Guy's[8] in conversation with Coleridge--I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable--I walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In those two Miles he broached a thousand things--let me see if I can give you a list--Nightingales, Poetry--on Poetical Sensation--Metaphysics--Different genera and species of Dreams--Nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single and double touch--a dream related--First and second consciousness--the difference explained between will and Volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness--Monsters--the Kraken--Mermaids--Southey believes in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a Ghost story--Good morning--I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he moved away--I had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so. He was civil enough to ask me to call on him at Highgate.

It is amusing to note how the time and distance covered by his own encyclopaedic volubility shrank afterwards in Coleridge's memory. In his _Table Talk_ taken down thirteen years later his account of the meeting is recorded as follows (with the name of his companion left blank: I fill it in from Keats's letter): 'A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "There is death in that hand," I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.' The story of Coleridge's observation after the handshake is no doubt exact: the 'not well-dressed' in his description of Keats may very well be so too: but the 'loose' and 'slack' applied to his appearance must have been drawn from the sage's inward eye, as all accounts are agreed as to Keats's well-knit compactness of person. One cannot but regret that Keats failed to follow up the introduction by going, as invited, to see Coleridge at Highgate: but in all cases save those of Hunt and Haydon, his contact with distinguished seniors seems thus to have stopped short at kindly and respectful acquaintance and not to have been pushed to intimacy.

Another, somewhat divergent, account of the meeting taken down, also from Coleridge's lips, by Mr John Frere three years earlier has only lately been published. Its inaccuracy in details is evident, but there is much sense as well as kindness in Coleridge's remarks on the reviews and their effect:--

_C._ Poor Keats, I saw him once. Mr Green, whom you have heard me mention, and I were walking out in these parts, and we were overtaken by a young man of a very striking countenance whom Mr Green recognised and shook hands with, mentioning my name; I wish Mr Green had introduced me, for I did not know who it was. He pa.s.sed on, but in a few moments sprung back and said, 'Mr Coleridge, allow me the honour of shaking your hand.' I was struck by the energy of his manner, and gave him my hand. He pa.s.sed on and we stood still looking after him, when Mr Green said, 'Do you know who that is? That is Keats, the poet.' 'Heavens!' said I, 'when I shook him by the hand there was death!' This was about two years before he died.

_F._ But what was it?

_C._ I cannot describe it. There was a heat and a dampness in the hand. To say that his death was caused by the Review is absurd, but at the same time it is impossible adequately to conceive the effect which it must have had on his mind. It is very well for those who have a place in the world and are independent to talk of these things, they can bear such a blow, so can those who have a strong religious principle; but all men are not born Philosophers, and all men have not those advantages of birth and education. Poor Keats had not, and it is impossible I say to conceive the effect which such a Review must have had upon him, knowing as he did that he had his way to make in the world by his own exertions, and conscious of the genius within him.[9]

In the Leigh Hunt circle it had always been the fas.h.i.+on to regard with contempt, mingled with regret, Wordsworth's more childishly worded poems and ballads of humble life such as _The Idiot Boy_ and _Alice Fell_. The announcement of his forthcoming piece, _Peter Bell_, now drew from John Hamilton Reynolds an anonymous skit in the shape of an adroit and rather stinging antic.i.p.atory parody, which Taylor and Hessey published in the course of this April despite a strong letter of protest addressed to them by Coleridge when he heard of their intention: a protest greatly to his credit considering his and Wordsworth's recent estrangement. Keats copies for his brother the draft of a notice which at Reynolds's request he has been writing of this skit for the _Examiner_, taking care to turn it compatibly with due reverence for the sublimer works of the master parodied. The thing is quite deftly and tactfully done, and seems to show that Keats might have made himself, could he have bent his mind to it, a skilled hand at newspaper criticism. 'You will call it a little politic,' he says to his brother--'seeing I keep clear of all parties--I say something for and against both parties--and suit it to the tone of the _Examiner_--I mean to say I do not unsuit it--and I believe I think what I say--I am sure I do--I and my conscience are in luck to-day--which is an excellent thing.'

At intervals throughout these two months Keats a.s.serts and re-a.s.serts the strength of the hold which idleness has laid upon him so far as poetry is concerned. Thus on March 13 to his brother and sister-in-law:--'I know not why poetry and I have been so distant lately; I must make some advances or she will cut me entirely': and again to the same on April 15, 'I am still at a standstill in versifying, I cannot do it yet with any pleasure.' To his young sister f.a.n.n.y he had written two days earlier that his idleness had been growing upon him of late, 'so that it will require a great shake to get rid of it. I have written nothing and almost read nothing--but I must turn over a new leaf.' Within the next two weeks the dormant impulse began to re-awake in him with power. As we have seen, he had never quite stopped writing personal sonnets. Towards the end of the month we find him trying, not very successfully, to invent a new sonnet form, but soon reverting to his accustomed Shakespearean type of three quatrains closed by a couplet. Here is the better of two sonnets which he wrote on April 30 to express the present abatement of his former hot desire for fame:--

Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish knees, But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy, And dotes the more upon a heart at ease; She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those Who have not learnt to be content without her; A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close, Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her; A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born, Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar; Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn, Ye Artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are!

Make your best bow to her and bid adieu, Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.