Life of John Keats Part 26

The thought here is curiously antic.i.p.ated in a pa.s.sage of Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_, itself reminiscent of a well known line in Theocritus. Is the coincidence a coincidence merely, or had the lines from Browne been working unconsciously in Keats's mind?

True Fame is ever liken'd to our shade, He sooneth misseth her, that most hath made To overtake her; who so takes his wing, Regardless of her, she'll be following: Her true proprieties she thus discovers, 'Loves her contemners and contemns her Lovers.'[10]

Two days earlier Keats had copied out in his letter for America, side by side with the words for a commonplace operatic chorus of the _Fairies of the Four Elements_, and as though it were of no greater value, that masterpiece of romantic and tragic symbolism on the wasting power of Love, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. This t.i.tle had already been haunting Keats's imagination when he wrote the _Eve of St Agnes_. He calls by it the air to which Porphyro touches his lute beside the sleeping Madeline.

It is the t.i.tle of a cold allegoric dialogue of the old French court poet Alan Chartier, which Keats knew in the translation traditionally ascribed to Chaucer. But except the t.i.tle, Keats's new poem has nothing in common with the French or the Chaucerian _Belle Dame_. The form, the poetic mould, he chooses is that of a ballad of the 'Thomas the Rhymer'

cla.s.s, in which a mortal pa.s.ses for a time into the abode and under the power of a being from the elfin world. Into this mould Keats casts--with suchlike imagery he invests--all the famine and fever of his private pa.s.sion, fusing and alchemising by his art a remembered echo from William Browne, 'Let no bird sing,' and another from Wordsworth, 'Her eyes are wild,' into twelve stanzas of a new ballad music vitally his own and as weirdly ominous and haunting as the music of words can be.

The metrical secret lies in shortening the last line of each stanza from four feet[11] to two, the two to take in reading the full time of four, whereby the movement is made one of awed and bodeful slowness--but let us shrink from the risk of laying an a.n.a.lytic finger upon the methods of a magic that calls to be felt, not dissected. Known as it is by heart to all lovers of poetry, I will print the piece again here, partly for the reason that in some of the most accessible and authoritative recent editions it is unfortunately given with changes which rob it of half its magic:--

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing!

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel's granary is full, And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever dew; And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast withereth too--

I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery's child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild--

I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan--

I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery's song--

She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew; And sure in language strange she said, I love thee true--

She took me to her elfin grot, And there she gazed and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild, wild eyes With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dreamed, ah woe betide, The latest dream I ever dreamed On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall.'

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke, and found me here On the cold hill side.

And this is why I sojourn here Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing.

Keats of course gives his brother no hint of what to us seems so manifest, the application of these verses to his own predicament, and only adds a light and laughing comment on one of the rime-words. Closing his packet a few days later (May 3) he adds, as the last poem he has written, the _Ode to Psyche_. He wrote, as is well known, four other odes this spring, those _On Indolence_, _On a Grecian Urn_, _To a Nightingale_ and _To Melancholy_. The _Ode to Psyche_ has commonly been taken to be the latest of the five. I take it, on the contrary, to have been the first. Had he been ready with any of the others when he finished his letter, I think he would almost certainly have copied and sent on one or more of them also. Coupled with his re-iterated a.s.sertion of complete poetic idleness,--'the idle fever of two months without any fruit,'--lasting from mid-February until well past mid-April, the absence of all the four other odes from this packet must count as evidence that the _Ode to Psyche_ represents the first wave of a new tide of inspiration--inspiration this time not narrative and creative but lyric and meditative--and that the rest of the odes followed and were composed in the course of May. Personally I am convinced that this was the case. I make no exception in regard to the ode _On Indolence_, although, seeing that it embodies just such a relaxed mood of mind and body as we have found recorded by Keats in his letter to his brother under date March 19, and embodies it with the self-same imagery, it is usually a.s.sumed to have been written at or very nearly about the same date. But Keats in the ode itself expressly tells us otherwise, calling his mood at the hour of writing one of 'summer indolence' and defining the season as May-time, when the outdoor vines are newly bursting into leaf. Of course, it may be answered, a poet writing in March may perfectly well choose to advance the season to May by a poetic fiction.

But would Keats in this case have felt any need or impulse to do so? I doubt it. Moreover a reference to the poem by Keats in a letter of early June shows that phrases of it were still hanging freshly in his memory and seems to imply that it was a thing then lately written. What happened, I take it, was either that Keats let the March vision, with its imagery of symbolic figures following one another as on a Greek sculptured urn, ripen in his mind until he was ready to compose upon it, and then attributed the vision itself to the season when he was actually putting it into verse; or else that, having fallen some time in May into a second mood of drowsiness and relaxation nearly repeating that of March, the same imagery for its expression arose naturally again in his mind.

The ode _On a Grecian Urn_ is obviously of kindred, and probably of contemporary, inspiration with that _On Indolence_, and if the one belongs to May so doubtless does the other. That this is true of the Nightingale ode we know. Some time early in May, nightingales heard both in the Wentworth Place garden and in the grove beside the Spaniards inn at the upper end of the heath set Keats brooding on the contrast between the age-long permanence of that bird-song, older than history, and the fleeting lives of the generations of men that have listened to it; and one morning he took his chair out under a plum-tree in the garden and wrote down the immortal verses, in and out and back and forth on a couple of loose sheets which Brown, two hours after seeing him go out, found him folding away carelessly behind some books in his room. This discovery, says Brown, made him search for more such neglected sc.r.a.ps; and Keats acquiesced in the search, and moreover gave Brown leave to make copies of anything he might find.[12] Haydon tells how Keats recited the new ode to him, 'in his low, tremulous under-tone,' as they walked together in the Hampstead meadows; and it was no doubt on Haydon's suggestion that Keats let James Elmes, a subservient ally of Haydon's in all his battles with the academic powers, have it for publication in his periodical, the _Annals of the Fine Arts_, during the following July. For the date of the _Ode on Melancholy_ the clues are less definite. Burton's _Anatomy_ has clearly to do with inspiring it, but of this, and especially of the sections on the cure of Love-Melancholy, Keats's letters and some of his verses furnish evidence that he had been much of a reader all the spring. Particular phrases, however, in letters of May and early June expressing a very similar strain of feeling to that of the ode, besides its general resemblance to the rest of the group both as to form and mood, may be taken as approximately dating it.

Following these so fruitful labours (if I am right as to the dates) of May, came a month of strained indecision and anxiety during which Keats again could do no work. Questions of his own fortune and future were weighing heavily on his mind. For the time being he could not touch such small remainder of his grandmother's legacy as was still unexpended. A lawsuit threatened by the widow of his uncle Captain Jennings against his guardian Mr Abbey, in connexion with the administration of the trust, had had the effect for the time being of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very gently asked Haydon to make an effort to repay his recent loan; who not only made none--'he did not,' says Keats, 'seem to care much about it, but let me go without my money almost with nonchalance.' This was too much even for Keats's patience, and he declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend again. Nevertheless he by and by let old affection resume its sway, and entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as kindly as ever. Apart from Mrs Jennings's bequest, there was a not inconsiderable sum which, as we know, had been left invested by Mr Jennings for the direct benefit of his Keats grandchildren; but this sum could not be divided until f.a.n.n.y Keats came of age, and there seems to have been no thought of John's antic.i.p.ating his reversionary share.

Indeed it is doubtful if the very existence of these and other funds lying by for them had not at this time been forgotten.[13]

In this predicament Keats began very seriously to entertain the idea, which we have seen broached by him several times already, of seeking the post of surgeon on an East Indiaman as at least a temporary means of livelihood. He mentions the idea not only to George and to his young sister, but he debates it with a new correspondent, one of the Miss Jeffrey's of Teignmouth, whom he suddenly now addresses in terms of confidence which show how warm must have been their temporary friends.h.i.+p the year before:--

Your advice about the Indiaman is a very wise advice, because it just suits me, though you are a little in the wrong concerning its destroying the energies of Mind: on the contrary it would be the finest thing in the world to strengthen them--to be thrown among people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies forces the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its speculations of the differences of human character and to cla.s.s them with the calmness of a Botanist. An Indiaman is a little world. One of the great reasons that the English have produced the finest writers in the world is, that the English world has ill-treated them during their lives and foster'd them after their deaths. They have in general been trampled aside into the bye paths of life and seen the festerings of Society. They have not been treated like the Raphaels of Italy. And where is the Englishman and Poet who has given a magnificent Entertainment at the christening of one of his Hero's Horses as Boyardo did? He had a Castle in the Appenine. He was a n.o.ble Poet of Romance; not a miserable and mighty Poet of the human heart. The middle age of Shakespeare was all clouded over; his days were not more happy than Hamlet's who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in his common every day Life than any other of his Characters--Ben Johnson was a common Soldier and in the Low Countries in the face of two armies, fought a single combat with a French Trooper and slew him--For all this I will not go on board an Indiaman, nor for example's sake run my head into dark alleys: I daresay my discipline is to come, and plenty of it too. I have been very idle lately, very averse to writing; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying Pet-lamb. I have put no more in Print or you should have had it. You will judge of my 1819 temper when I tell you that the thing I have most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence.

The reader will have noticed in the phrase about 'versifying Pet-lamb' a repet.i.tion from this very ode _On Indolence_. Here is another confidence imparted to the same correspondent concerning his present mood and disposition:--

I have been always till now almost as careless of the world as a fly--my troubles were all of the Imagination--My brother George always stood between me and any dealings with the world. Now I find I must buffet it--I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to fight--I must choose between despair and Energy--I choose the latter though the world has taken on a quakerish look with me, which I once thought was impossible--

'Nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the gra.s.s and glory in the flower.'

I once thought this a Melancholist's dream.

His immediate object in writing had been to ask, in case he should decide against the Indiaman project and in favour of another attempt at the literary life, for the address of a cheap lodging somewhere in the Teign valley, the beauties of which, seen in glimpses through the rain, he had sung in some doggrel stanzas the year before. Brown, more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and promise of his friend's genius, was dead against the Indiaman scheme and in the end persuaded Keats to accept an advance of money for his present needs and to devote the summer to work in the country. Part of such work was to be upon a tragedy to be written by the two in collaboration and on a basis of half profits. Brown had not less belief in Keats's future than affection for his person, and it was the two combined that made him ready and eager, as he frankly told Keats, to sail in the same boat with him. In the end the Devons.h.i.+re idea gave place to a new plan, that of joining the invalid James Rice for a stay at Shanklin. 'I have given up the idea of the Indiaman', Keats writes to his young sister on June 9; 'I cannot resolve to give up my favourite studies: so I propose to retire once more. A friend of Mine who has an ill state of health called on me yesterday and proposed to spend a little time with him at the back of the Isle of Wight where he said we might live cheaply. I agreed to his proposal.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Later occupants re-named the place Lawn Bank and threw the two semi-detached houses into one, making alterations and additions the exact nature of which were pointed out to me in 1885 by Mr William Dilke, the then surviving brother of Keats's friend. This gentleman also showed me a house across the road which he himself had built in early life, occupied for a while, and then let on a sixty years'

lease: 'which lease,' he added, as though to outlive a sixty years'

agreement contracted at thirty were the most ordinary occurrence in the world, 'fell in a year or two ago.' He died shortly afterwards, aged 93. He and Mrs Procter, the widow of Barry Cornwall the poet--staunchest, wittiest, and youngest-hearted defier of Time that she was--were the only two persons I have known and spoken to who had known and spoken to Keats.

[2] The only set of engravings existing in Keats's time after pictures at Milan was the Raccolta, etc., of G. Zanconi (1813), which gives only panels and canvases by masters of the full Renaissance in private collections.

[3] The fullest and, it must be said, least favourable account we have of her is in the retrospect of a cousin who had frequented her mother's house as a young boy about 1819-20, and seventy years later gave his impressions as follows (_New York Herald_, April 12, 1889).

'Miss f.a.n.n.y Brawne was very fond of admiration. I do not think she cared for Keats, although she was engaged to him. She was very much affected when he died, because she had treated him so badly. She was very fond of dancing, and of going to the opera and to b.a.l.l.s and parties. Miss Brawne's mother had an extensive acquaintance with gentlemen, and the society in which they mingled was musical and literary. Through the Dilkes, Miss Brawne was invited out a great deal, and as Keats was not in robust health enough to take her out himself (for he never went with her), she used to go with military men to the Woolwich b.a.l.l.s and to b.a.l.l.s in Hampstead; and she used to dance with these military officers a great deal more than Keats liked. She did not seem to care much for him. Mr Dilke, the grandfather of the present Sir Charles Dilke, admired her very much in society, and although she was not a great beauty she was very lively and agreeable. I remember that among those frequenting Mrs Brawne's house in Hampstead were a number of foreign gentlemen. Keats could not talk French as they could, and their conversation with his fiancee in a language he could not understand was a source of continual disagreement between them. Keats thought that she talked and flirted and danced too much with them, but his remonstrances were all unheeded by Miss Brawne.' Against these impressions should be set Brown's testimony, contained in letters of the time to Severn and others, to her signs of acute distress on the news coming from Italy of the hopelessness of her lover's condition and finally of his death: and stronger still, her own words written in later years to Medwin, which seem to show a true, and even tender, understanding of his character if not of his genius (see below p. 465).

[4]

[Greek: eros d' aute m' ho lysimeles donei glykypikron amachanon orpeton.]--Sappho, Fr. 40.

[5] There is no autograph of this ode, only transcripts by friends, and Mr Buxton Forman was most likely right in suggesting that the true reading for 'not' should be 'out.'

[6] Keats was staying that night and two more at Mr Taylor's in London: but there is nothing against my theory in this: he might have composed the sonnet as well in Fleet Street as at Hampstead.

[7] In his printed account of the matter Clarke calls the victim definitely a kitten, and says of Keats: 'He thought he should be beaten, for the fellow was the taller and stronger; but like an authentic pugilist, my young poet found that he had planted a blow which "told" upon his antagonist; in every succeeding round therefore (for they fought nearly an hour), he never failed of returning to the weak point, and the contest ended in the hulk being led home.'

[8] Joseph Henry Green, afterwards F.R.S. and Professor of Anatomy to the Royal Academy; distinguished alike as a teacher in his own profession and as a disciple and interpreter of Coleridge's philosophy.

[9] _Cornhill Magazine_, April 1917: 'A Talk with Coleridge,' edited by Miss E. M. Green.

[10] [Greek: kai pheugei phileonta kai ou phileonta diokei.] Theocr.

Idyll. vi. 27.

[11] I use the foot nomenclature for convenience, because to count by stresses seems to make the point less immediately clear, while to count by syllables would involve pointing out that in the last lines of stanzas ii, iv, ix and xi the movement is varied by resolving the light first syllable into two that take the time of one.

[12] Brown, writing many years after the events, must be a little out here, seeing that already on April 30th Keats tells his brother that Brown is busy 'rummaging out his Keats's old sins, that is to say sonnets.' (Note that Keats mentions no odes). Brown is in like manner wrong in remembering the draft of the Nightingale ode as written on 'four or five sc.r.a.ps' when it was in fact written on two, as became apparent when it appeared in the market thirteen years ago (see _Monthly Review_, March 1903). It is now in the collection of Lord Crewe.

[13] When in 1823-4 their existence was disclosed and they were divided on the order of the Court of Chancery between George Keats and his sister, they amounted with acc.u.mulations of interest to a little over 4500.

CHAPTER XII

JUNE 1819-JANUARY 1820: SHANKLIN, WINCHESTER, HAMPSTEAD: TROUBLE AND HEALTH FAILURE

Work on _Otho_ and _Lamia_--Letters to f.a.n.n.y Brawne--Keats as lover--An imagined future--Change to Winchester--Work and fine weather--Ill news from George--A run to town--A talk with Woodhouse--Woodhouse as critic--Alone at Winchester--Spirited letters: to his brother--To Reynolds, Brown, and Dilke--Hopes and resolutions--Will work for the press--Attempt and breakdown--Return to Wentworth Place--Morning and evening tasks--Cries of pa.s.sion--Signs of despondency--Testimony of Brown--Haydon's exaggerations--Schemes and doings--Visit of George Keats--Pleasantry and bitterness--Beginning of the end.