Life of John Keats Part 24

And again about the same time to Reynolds:--

I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a Woman has haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverish relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has conquered--I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life--I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality.

What he calls the abstractions into which he had plunged for relief were the conceptions of the fallen t.i.tans, 'the characters of Saturn and Ops'

at the beginning of _Hyperion_. Those conceptions were just beginning to clothe themselves in his mind in the verses which every English reader knows, verses of a cadence as majestic and pathetic almost as any in the language, yet scarcely more charged with high emotion or more pregnant with the sense and pressure of destiny than some of the prose of his familiar letters written about the same time. His only other attempt in poetry during those weeks was a translation from a sonnet of Ronsard, whose works Taylor had lent him and from whom he got some hints for the names and characters of his t.i.tans. As the autumn wore on the task of the watcher grew ever more sorrowful and absorbing, he was obliged to desist from poetry for the time. But his correspondence shows no flagging. Towards the middle of October he began, marking it as A, the first of the series of journal-letters to his brother and sister in America, which give us during the next fifteen months a picture of his outward and inward being fuller and richer than we possess from any other poet, and except in one single particular absolutely unreserved.

Despatching the packet on his birthday, that is October 29 or 31, he explains why it is not longer (it is over 7,000 words): 'Tom is rather more easy than he has been: but is still so nervous that I cannot speak to him of these Matters--indeed it is the care I have had to keep his mind aloof from feelings too acute that has made this letter so short a one--I did not like to write before him a letter he knew was to reach your hands--I cannot even now ask him for any Message--his heart speaks to you. Be as happy as you can.' Keats had begun by warning George and his wife, in language of beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to prepare their minds for the worst, and a.s.suring them of the comfort he took in the thoughts of them:--'I have f.a.n.n.y and I have you--three people whose Happiness to me is sacred--and it does annul that selfish sorrow which I should otherwise fall into, living as I do with poor Tom who looks upon me as his only comfort--the tears will come into your Eyes--let them--and embrace each other--thank heaven for what happiness you have, and after thinking a moment or two that you suffer in common with all Mankind hold it not a sin to regain your cheerfulness.' Between the opening and the closing note of tenderness, the letter runs through a wide range of subject and feeling; gossip about the Dilkes and other acquaintances; an account of the humours of his sea-pa.s.sage from Inverness to London; the unruffled allusion to the Tory reviews from which we have already quoted; two long and curious s.e.x-haunted pa.s.sages, one expressing his admiration of the same East Indian cousin of the Reynoldses, 'not a Cleopatra, but at least a Charmian,' whom we have found mentioned already in a letter to Reynolds, the other telling what promised to be an equivocal adventure, but turned out quite conventionally and politely, with a mysterious lady acquaintance met once before at Hastings; a rambling discussion on the state of home and foreign politics; a rhapsody, or as he would have called it rant, in a mounting strain of verse which rings like a boy's voice singing in alt, prophesying that the child to be born to George and his wife shall be the first American poet; then more babble about friends and acquaintances; then, as if he knew that the invincible thing, the love-G.o.d whose spell he had always at once dreaded and longed for, were hovering and about to swoop, he tries to re-a.s.sure himself by calling up the reasons why marriage and the life domestic are not for him. The Charmian pa.s.sage and the pa.s.sage in which he seeks to stave off the approach of love are among the best known in his letters, but nevertheless the most necessary to quote:--

She has a rich eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any Man who may address her--from habit she thinks that nothing _particular_. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or on a tremble. I forget myself entirely because I live in her. You will by this time think I am in love with her; so before I go further I will tell you I am not--she kept me awake one Night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amus.e.m.e.nt than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman the very 'yes'

and 'no' of whose Lips is to me a Banquet. I don't cry to take the Moon home with me in my Pocket nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her and her like because one has no _sensations_--what we both are is taken for granted. You will suppose I have by this had much talk with her--no such thing--there are the Miss Reynoldses on the look out. They think I don't admire her because I did not stare at her. They call her a flirt to me. What a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in such a Manner that a Man is drawn towards her with a magnetic Power. This they call flirting! They do not know things.

In the next pa.s.sage, almost as the young priest Ion in the Greek play clings to his ministration in the temple of Apollo, so we find Keats cleaving exultingly to his high vocation and to the idea of a life dedicated to poetry alone. But a great spiritual flaw in his nature--or was it only a lack of fortunate experience?--betrays itself in his conception of the alternative from which he shrinks. The imagery under which he figures marriage joys gives no hint of their power to discipline and inspire and sustain, and is trivially sensuous and material.

Notwithstanding your Happiness and your recommendation I hope I shall never marry. Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk; though the Carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning Clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet's down; the food Manna, the Wine beyond Claret, the Window opening on Windermere, I should not feel--or rather my Happiness would not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described there is a sublimity to welcome me home. The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the windowpane are my Children.

The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness--an amiable wife and sweet Children I contemplate as a part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard--then 'Tragedy with sceptered pall comes sweeping by.' According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost Soul upon the Stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone. These things, combined with the opinion I have of the generality of women--who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar Plum than my time, form a barrier against Matrimony which I rejoice in.

Throughout November Keats was so fully absorbed in attendance on his dying brother as to be unfit for poetry or correspondence. On the night of December 1 the end came. 'Early the next morning,' writes Brown, 'I was awakened in bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, who came to tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we both remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,--"Have nothing more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! Had you not better live with me?" He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied, "I think it would be better." From that moment he was my inmate.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Houghton MSS.

[2] The source is the Spanish _sangrador_, blood-letter; which Le Sage in _Gil Blas_ converts into a proper name, Sangrado.

[3] The old _Scots Magazine_ lately re-started under a new name; see above, p. 132.

CHAPTER XI

DECEMBER 1818-JUNE 1819: KEATS AND BROWN HOUSEMATES: f.a.n.n.y BRAWNE: WORK AND IDLENESS

Removal to Wentworth Place--Work on _Hyperion_--The insatiable Haydon--The Misses Porter--A mingled yarn--Charles Lamb and punning--Hunt and his satellites--f.a.n.n.y Brawne--A sudden enslavement--Severn's impressions--Visit to Hamps.h.i.+re--_The Eve of St.

Agnes_--Return and engagement--Ode to f.a.n.n.y--Love and jealousy--Haydon again--Letters to f.a.n.n.y Keats--Two months' idleness--Praise of claret--Bailey's love-affairs--Fit of languor--Fight with a butcher--Sonnet-confessions--Reflections ethical and cosmic--Meeting with Coleridge--The same according to the sage--A tactful review--Sonnets on fame--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--The right version quoted--The five Odes--Their date and order--A fruitful May--Indecision and anxiety--A confidential letter--Departure for Shanklin.

Dilke and Brown, as has been said already, had built for themselves a joint block of two houses in a garden near the bottom of John Street, Hampstead, and had called the property Wentworth Place, after a name hereditary in the Dilke family. Dilke and his wife occupied the larger of the two houses forming the block, and Brown, who was a bachelor, the smaller house, standing to the west.[1] The accommodation in Brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them, and a small spare bedroom or 'crib' where a bachelor guest could be put up for the night. The arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses, occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. His move to his new quarters does not seem to have been quite so immediate as Brown represents it. Beginning a new journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law a week or two after Tom's death, Keats writes, 'With Dilke and Brown I am quite thick--with Brown indeed I am going to domesticate, that is, we shall keep house together. I shall have the front parlour and he the back one, by which I shall be able to avoid the noise of Bentley's Children--and be better able to go on with my studies--which have been greatly interrupted lately, so that I have not a shadow of an idea for books in my head, and my pen seems to have grown gouty for verse.'

This phase of poetical stagnation, which had naturally set in as his cares for his dying brother grew more engrossing towards the end, pa.s.sed away quickly. By about the middle of December Keats was settled at Wentworth Place, whither his ex-landlord, Bentley the postman, we are told, carried down his little library of some hundred and fifty books in a clothes-basket from Well Walk. In spite of the noisy children Keats parted not without regret from the Bentleys, and speaks feelingly of Mrs Bentley's kindness and attention during his late trouble. As soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friends.h.i.+p had in some measure softened his grief, he plunged once more into poetry, his special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had already begun to work before his brother died. But he never got into a quite happy or uninterrupted flow of work on it. Once and again we find him moved to lay it aside for a bout of brotherly gossip with George and Georgiana in America. 'Just now I took out my poem to go on with it--but the thought of my writing so little to you came upon me and I could not get on--so I have begun at random and I have not a word to say--and yet my thoughts are so full of you that I can do nothing else.' And again: 'I have no thought pervading me so constantly and frequently as that of you--my Poem cannot frequently drive it away--you will r.e.t.a.r.d it much more than you could by taking up my time if you were in England. I never forget you except after seeing now and then some beautiful woman--but that is a fever--the thought of you both is a pa.s.sion with me, but for the most part a calm one.'

This letter, covering some three weeks from mid-December to January 4, enables us, like others to the same correspondents, to lay our finger on almost every strand in the 'mingled yarn' of Keats's life and doings. Of one tiresome interruption which befell him about Christmas he tells nothing, doubtless in order to spare his brother anxiety. This was a request for money from the insatiable Haydon. The correspondence on the matter cannot be read without anger against the elder man and admiring affection for the generous lad--yet not foolishly or recklessly generous--on whom he sponged. Haydon's only excuses are a recent eye-trouble which had hindered his work, and his inflated belief, which had so far successfully imposed both upon himself and his friends, in his own huge importance to art and to his country. Keats writes, showing incidentally how last year's critical rebuffs had changed, more or less permanently, his att.i.tude in regard to the public and public recognition:--

Believe me Haydon I have that sort of fire in my heart that would sacrifice everything I have to your service--I speak without any reserve--I know you would do so for me--I open my heart to you in a few words. I will do this sooner than you shall be distressed: but let me be the last stay--Ask the rich lovers of Art first--I'll tell you why--I have a little money which may enable me to study, and to travel for three or four years. I never expect to get anything by my Books: and moreover I wish to avoid publis.h.i.+ng--I admire Human Nature but I do not like _Men_. I should like to compose things honourable to Man--but not fingerable over by Men. So I am anxious to exist without troubling the printer's devil or drawing upon Men's or Women's admiration--in which great solitude I hope G.o.d will give me strength to rejoice. Try the long purses--but do not sell your drawings or I shall consider it a breach of friends.h.i.+p.

Haydon answers in a gush of grandiloquent grat.i.tude, promising to try every corner first, but intimating pretty clearly that he knew his wealthier habitual helpers were for the present tired out with him. One of his phrases is a treasure. 'Ah Keats, this is sad work for one of my soul and Ambition. The truest thing you ever said of mortal was that I had a touch of Alexander in me! I have, I know it, and the World shall know it, but this is a purgative drug I must first take.' 'This' means his own perpetual need and habit of living on other people. In the next letter Haydon of course accepts Keats's offer, and in the Christmas weeks, when he should have been wholly engrossed in _Hyperion_, Keats had much and for some time fruitless ado with bankers, lawyers, and guardian in endeavouring to fulfil his promise. To his brother he only says he has been dining with Haydon and otherwise seeing much of him; mentions the painter's eye-trouble; and quotes him as describing vividly at second hand the sufferings of Captain (afterwards Sir John) Ross and his party on their voyage in search of the North-West pa.s.sage.

From Ross in Baffin's Bay the same letter rambles to Ritchie in the deserts of Morocco, and thence to gossip about the best way of keeping his own and George's brotherly intimacy unbroken across the ocean; about the 'sickening stuff' printed in Hunt's new _Literary Pocket Book_ (it was when he was seeing most of Haydon that Keats was always most inclined to harsh criticism of Hunt); about Mrs Dilke's cats, and about G.o.dwin's novels and Hazlitt's opinion of them, and the rare pleasure he has had at Haydon's in looking through a book of engravings after early Italian frescoes in a church at Milan. 'Milan' must be a mistake, for there are no such engravings,[2] and what Keats saw must certainly have been the fine series by Lasinio, published in 1814, after the frescoes of Orcagna, Benozzo Gozzoli, and the rest in the Campo Santo at Pisa. 'I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare. Full of romance and the most tender feeling--magnificence of draperies beyond everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael's. But Grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole--even finer to me than more accomplished works--as there was left so much room for Imagination.' It is interesting to find Keats thus vividly awake, as very few yet were either by instinct or fas.h.i.+on, to the charm of the Italian primitives, and to remember how it was a copy of this same book of prints, in the possession of young John Everett Millais thirty years later, which first aroused the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm in him and his a.s.sociates Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt (the last-named is our witness for the fact).

Keats tells moreover how an unknown admirer from the west country had sent him a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a further tribute in the shape of a 25 note; how he had been both pleased and displeased,--'if I had refused it I should have behaved in a very braggadocio dunderheaded manner, and yet the present galls me a little'; and again how he has received through Woodhouse a glowing letter of sympathy and encouragement from Miss Jane Porter, the then famous auth.o.r.ess of _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and _The Scottish Chiefs_, who desires his acquaintance on her own behalf and that of her sister Anna Maria, almost equally popular at the hour by her romance of _The Hungarian Brothers_. By all this, says Keats, he feels more obliged than flattered--'so obliged that I will not at present give you an extravaganza of a Lady Romancer. I will be introduced to them if it be merely for the pleasure of writing to you about it--I shall certainly see a new race of People.' Pity he failed to carry out his purpose: pen-portraits satirical and other are not lacking of these admired sisters, the tall and tragical Jane, the blonde and laughing Anna Maria, 'La Penserosa' and 'L'Allegra,' but a sketch by Keats would have been an interesting addition to them. Still in the same letter, he complains of the sore throat which he finds it hard to shake off, and tells how he has given up or all but given up taking snuff (nearly everybody in that generation snuffed), and how he has been shooting with Dilke on Hampstead Heath and shot a tomt.i.t,--a feat which for a moment calls up this divine poet to our minds in the guise of one of the c.o.c.kney sportsmen of Seymour's caricatures. Never mind: he can afford it.

From an enquiry about the expected baby in America,--'will the little bairn have made his entrance before you have this? Kiss it for me, and when it can first know a cheese from a Caterpillar show it my picture twice a week,'--from this he pa.s.ses to the re-a.s.suring statement that the attack upon him in the Quarterly has in some quarters done him actual service. He tells how constrained and out of his element he feels in ordinary society; a common experience of genius, and part of the price it pays for living at a different level and temperature of thought and feeling from the herd. 'I am pa.s.sing a Quiet day--which I have not done for a long while--and if I do continue so, I feel I must again begin with my poetry--for if I am not in action of mind or Body I am in pain--and from that I suffer greatly by going into parties where from the rules of society and a natural pride I am obliged to smother my Spirit and look like an Idiot--because I feel my impulses given way to would too much amaze them--I live under an everlasting restraint--never relieved except when I am composing--so I will write away.' And resuming apparently on Christmas Day:--'I think you knew before you left England, that my next subject would be "the fall of Hyperion." I went on a little with it last night, but it will take some time to get into the vein again. I will not give you any extracts, because I wish the whole to make an impression. I have however a few Poems which you will like, and I will copy out on the next sheet.' Nearly a week later he adds, 'I will insert any little pieces I may write--though I will not give any extracts from my large poem which is scarce began.' The phrase about _Hyperion_ must be taken as indicating on how great a scale he had conceived the poem rather than how little he had yet written of it. In point of fact all we have of this mighty fragment must have been written either by his brother's bedside in September-October 1818 (but then certainly only a little) or else in these Christmas weeks from mid-December to mid-January 1818-19. The short poems he sends are the spirited sets of heptasyllabics, _Fancy_, and _Lines on the Mermaid Tavern_, the former one of the best things in the second and lighter cla.s.s of his work: and with them the fragment written for music, 'I had a dove.' In relation to these he says 'It is my intention to wait a few years before I publish any minor poems--and then I hope to have a volume of some worth--and which those people will relish who cannot bear the burthen of a long poem.'

Presently Charles Lamb comes for a moment upon the scene. 'I have seen Lamb lately--Brown and I were taken by Hunt to Novello's--there we were devastated and excruciated with bad and repeated puns--Brown don't want to go again.' Punning, like snuffing, was the all but universal fas.h.i.+on of that age, as those of us can best realize who are old enough to remember grandfathers that belonged to it; and judging by the specimens Brown and Keats have themselves left, puns too bad for them are scarce imaginable. Novello is of course the distinguished organist, composer and music-publisher, Vincent Novello, whose Sunday evening musical parties were frequented by all the Lamb and Hunt circle, and whose eldest daughter, Mary Victoria, was married some ten years later to Cowden Clarke. At this time she was but a child of ten, but writing many years afterwards she has left a vivid reminiscence of Keats at her father's house, 'with his picturesque head, leaning against the instruments, one foot raised on his knee and smoothed beneath his hands'

(an att.i.tude said to have been perpetuated in a lost portrait by Severn). Is the above a memory of the one evening only which Keats himself mentions, or of others when his love of music may have drawn him to the Novellos' house in spite of the puns and of company for the moment not much to his taste? For the ways of Hunt and some of his circle, their mutual flatteries, their habit of trivial, chirping ecstasy over the things they liked, their superfluity of glib, complacent comment rubbing the bloom off sacred beauties of art and poetry and nature, were jarring on Keats's nerves just now; and though perfectly aware of Hunt's essential virtues of kind-heartedness and good comrades.h.i.+p, he writes with some irritability of impatience:--

Hunt has asked me to meet Tom Moore some day so you shall hear of him.

The night we went to Novello's there was a complete set-to of Mozart and punning. I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow my own inclinations I should never meet any one of that set again, not even Hunt who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are with him--but in reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in matters of taste and in morals. He understands many a beautiful thing; but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself professes--he begins an explanation in such a curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually.

Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts--and many a glorious thing when a.s.sociated with him becomes a nothing. This distorts one's mind--makes one's thoughts bizarre--perplexes one in the standard of Beauty.

A little later he improvises a sample, not more than mildly satirical, from a comedy he professes to be planning on the ways and manners of Hunt and his satellites.

In the same letter a new personage makes her momentous entry on the scene. 'Mrs Brawne who took Brown's house for the summer still resides at Hampstead--she is a very nice woman--and her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fas.h.i.+onable, and strange--we have a little tiff now and then, and she behaves better, or I must have sheered off.' This Mrs Brawne was a widow lady of West Indian connexions and some little fortune, with a daughter, f.a.n.n.y, just grown up and two younger children. She had rented Brown's house while he and Keats were away in Scotland, and had naturally become acquainted with the Dilkes living next door and sharing a common garden. After Brown's return Mrs Brawne moved with her family to a house in Downs.h.i.+re Street close by. The acquaintance with the Dilkes was kept up, and it was through them, not long after he came back from Scotland, that Keats first met f.a.n.n.y Brawne. His next words about her are these:--

Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort--she manages to make her hair look well--her nostrils are fine--though a little painful--her mouth is bad and good--her Profile is better than her full-face which indeed is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone. Her shape is very graceful and so are her movements--her Arms are good, her hands bad-ish her feet tolerable--she is not seventeen--but she is ignorant--monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term _Minx_--this is I think not from any innate vice but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am however tired of such style and shall decline any more of it.

An attraction which has begun by repulsion is ever the most dangerous of all. The heightened emotional strain of his weeks of tendance on his dying brother had laid Keats open to both influences at their fullest power; he was ripe, as several pa.s.sages from his letters have made us feel, for the tremendous adventure of love; and the 'new, strange, and threatening sorrow' from which he had with relief declared himself escaped when the momentary lure of the East-Indian Charmian left him fancy-free, was about to fall on him in good earnest now. Before many weeks he was hopelessly enslaved, and pa.s.sion teaching him a sensitive secretiveness and reserve, he says to brother and sister no word more of his enslaver except by way of the lightest pa.s.sing allusion. From his first semi-sarcastic account of her above quoted, as well as from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in t.i.tian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is possible to realise something of her aspect and presence.

A brisk and blooming young beauty of a little over eighteen (Keats's 'not seventeen' is a mistake) with blonde hair and vivid palish colouring, a somewhat sharply cut aquiline cast of features, a slight, shapely figure rather short than tall, a liveliness of manner bordering on the boisterous, and no doubt some taking air and effluence of youth and vitality and s.e.x,--such was f.a.n.n.y Brawne externally, but of her character we have scant means of judging. Neither she nor her mother can have been worldly-minded, or they would never have encouraged the attentions of a youth like Keats, whose prospects were problematical or null. It is clear that, though certainly high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident, she was kind and in essentials constant to her lover, and patient and unresentful under his occasional wild outbursts of jealousy and suspicion. But it seems equally clear that she did not half realise what manner of man he was, nor how high and privileged was the charge committed to her. She had no objection to the prospect of a long engagement, and despite her lover's remonstrances held herself free in the meantime to enjoy to the full the pleasures of her age and the admiration of other men.[3] One day early in the new year Keats took the devoted Severn to call on his new friends. Severn was much pleased with the mother, who seems to have been in truth a cultivated kind and gentle person; but he did not take to the daughter or even much admire her looks, and though perceiving her attraction for Keats did not then or till long afterwards realise the fatal strength of its hold upon him.

'That poor idle Thing of Womankind to whom he has so unaccountably attached himself'--so she is styled by Reynolds in a letter to Taylor a year and a half later. Brown, who knew her much better, and whose friends.h.i.+p with her sometimes showed itself in gallantries at which Keats writhed in secret, writes of her always in terms of kindness and respect, but never very explicitly. The very few of Keats's friends who came to be in his confidence, including Dilke and his wife, seem to have been agreed, although they bore her no ill will, in regarding the attachment as a misfortune for him.

So it a.s.suredly was: so probably under the circ.u.mstances must any pa.s.sion for a woman have been. Blow on blow had in truth begun to fall on Keats, as though in fulfilment of the const.i.tutional misgivings to which he was so often secretly a prey. First the departure of his brother George had deprived him of his closest friend, to whom alone he had from boyhood been accustomed to confide those obsessions of his darker hours and in confiding to find relief from them. Next the exertions of his Scottish tour had proved too much for his strength, and laid him open to the attacks of his hereditary enemy, consumption.

Coming back, he had found his brother Tom almost at his last gasp in the clutch of that enemy, and in nursing him had both lived in spirit through all his pains and breathed for many weeks a close atmosphere of infection. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his practical hopes from literature. Now were to be added the pangs of love,--love requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even love disdained might have made him suffer less. The pa.s.sion took him, as it often takes consumptives, in its fiercest form: Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there is no withstanding, never harried a more helpless victim.[4]

By what stages the coils closed on him we can only guess. His own account of the matter to f.a.n.n.y Brawne was that he had written himself her va.s.sal within a week of their first meeting: which took place, we know, some time during the period of watching by Tom's sick-bed. After he went to live with Brown in December they must have met frequently.

Probably it was this new attraction, as well as his chronic throat trouble and his concern over Haydon's affairs, which made him postpone a promised visit to Dilke's relations in Hamps.h.i.+re from Christmas until mid-January. He then carried out his promise, going to join Brown at Bedhampton, the home of Dilke's brother-in-law Mr John Snook. He liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit, but was unwell and during a stay of a fortnight only once went outside the garden. This was to a gathering of country clergy reinforced by two bishops, at the consecration of a chapel built by a great Jew-convertor, a Mr Way. The ceremony got on his nerves and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. He spent also a few days with Dilke's father in Chichester, and went out twice to dowager card parties. These social pleasures were naught to him, and his spirits, like his health, were low. But his genius was never more active. We have seen in the midst of what worries and interruptions he had worked before and during Christmas at _Hyperion_, the fragment which in our language stands next in epic quality to _Paradise Lost_. At Bedhampton in January, on some thin sheets of thin paper brought down for the purpose, he wrote the _Eve of St Agnes_, for its author merely 'a little poem,' for us a masterpiece aglow in every line with the vital quintessence of romance.

No word of Keats's own or of his friends prepares us for this new achievement or informs when he began first to think of the subject. It must of course have been ripening in his mind some good while before he thus suddenly and swiftly cast it into shape. When he wrote three months earlier of having to seek relief beside the sick-bed of his brother by 'plunging into abstract images,' were they images of primeval Greek G.o.ds and t.i.tans only, or were these contrasted figures and colours of mediaeval romance beginning to occupy his imagination at the same time?

Had the subject perhaps come into his mind as long ago as the preceding March, when Hunt and Reynolds and he were having the talks about Boccaccio which resulted in Keats's _Isabella_ and Reynolds's _Garden of Florence_ and _Ladye of Provence_? We shall see that Boccaccio counts for something in Keats's treatment of the St Agnes' Eve story, so that the supposition is at least plausible. Or may it even have been of this story and not, as is commonly a.s.sumed, of _Hyperion_ that he was thinking as far back as September 1817 when he wrote to Haydon from Oxford of the 'new romance' he had in his mind? Woodhouse does not throw much light on such questions when he tells us that 'the subject was suggested by Mrs Jones.' This name, uncongenial to the muse (excepting the muse of Wordsworth) is otherwise unknown in connexion with Keats.

Did the same lady also tell him of the tradition concerning St Mark's day (April 25th), and so become the 'only begetter' of that remarkable fragment _The Eve of St Mark_, which he wrote (Woodhouse again is the authority for the dates) between the 13th and 17th of February after his return to Hampstead? In connexion with Keats few stones have been left unturned for further personal or critical research, but here is one.

Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of January and it must have been very soon afterwards that he became the declared and accepted lover of f.a.n.n.y Brawne, savouring intensely thenceforward all the tantalising sweets and bitters of that estate, though nothing was said to friends about the engagement. From the first he suffered severely from the sense of her freedom to enjoy pleasures and excitements for which neither his health nor his social habits and inclinations fitted him. The tale of the _Eve of St Mark_, begun and broken off just at this time, may possibly, as Rossetti thought, have been designed to turn on the remorse of a young girl for sufferings of a like kind inflicted on her lover and ending in his death. However that may be, we have two direct cries from his heart, one of pure love-yearning, the other of racking jealousy, which were written, if I read the evidences aright, almost immediately after the engagement and can be dated almost to a day. These are the first version, which has only lately become known, of the 'Bright Star'

sonnet, and the ode _To f.a.n.n.y_ published posthumously by Lord Houghton.

Both carry internal evidence of having been written before the winter was out: the sonnet in the words which invoke the star as watching the moving waters,

Or gazing at the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;

the ode in the lines,

I come, I see thee as thou standest there, Beckon me not into the wintry air.[5]

Now it happens that this year there was frost and rough weather late in February, with snowfalls on the afternoon of the 24th and again the following morning. I imagine both sonnet and ode to have been written while the cold spell lasted, the sonnet probably before dawn on the actual morning of the 25th.[6] As slightly changed in form a year and a half later this sonnet has been long endeared to us all as one of the most beautiful in the language: I shall defer its discussion till we come to the date of this recast. The ode has flaws, for to make good or even bearable poetry out of that humiliating and grotesque pa.s.sion of physical jealousy is a hard matter. It begins poorly, with a sense of discord, in the first stanza, between the choking violence of feeling expressed and the artificial form into which its expression is cast. But if we leave out this stanza, and also the fifth and sixth, which are a little common and unequal, we get an appeal as painful, indeed, as it is pa.s.sionate, yet lacking neither in courtesy nor dignity, and conveyed in a strain of verse almost without fault:--

Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears, And hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,-- To-night, if I may guess, thy beauty wears A smile of such delight, As brilliant and as bright, As when with ravished, aching, va.s.sal eyes, Lost in soft amaze, I gaze, I gaze!

Who now, with greedy looks, eats up my feast?

What stare outfaces now my silver moon?

Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least; Let, let the amorous burn-- But, pr'ythee, do not turn The current of your heart from me so soon.

O! save, in charity, The quickest pulse for me.