Chapter 13

We have now reached the close of a melancholy history--that of the extinction, in a space of less than twenty-six years, of a bright life foredoomed by inherited disease. We turn to another subject--the intellectual development and the writings of Keats, what they were, and how they were treated. Here again there are some sombre tints.

A minute anecdote, apparently quite authentic, shows that a certain propensity to the jingle of rhyme was innate in Keats: Haydon is our informant. "An old lady (Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury) told his brother George--when, in reply to her question what John was doing, he told her he had determined to become a poet--that this was very odd; because when he could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh." This, however, is the only rhyming-anecdote that we hear of Keats's childhood or mere boyhood: there is nothing to show that at school he made the faintest attempt at verse-spinning. The earliest known experiment of his is the "Imitation of Spenser"--four Spenserian stanzas, beginning--

"Now Morning from her orient chamber came,"

and very poor stanzas they are. This Imitation was written while he was living at Edmonton, in his nineteenth year, and thus there was nothing singularly precocious in Keats, either in the age at which he began versifying, or in the skill with which he first addressed himself to the task. I might say more of other verses, juvenile in the amplest sense of the term, but such remarks would belong more properly to a later section of this volume. I will therefore only observe here that the earliest poems of his in which I can discern anything even distantly approaching to poetic merit or to his own characteristic style (and these distantly indeed) are the lines "To ----"

"Hadst thou lived in days of old,"

and "Calidore, a Fragment,"

"Young Calidore is paddling o'er the lake."

The dates of these two compositions are not stated, but they were probably later than the opening of 1815, and if so Keats would have been nearly or quite twenty when he wrote them--and this is far remote from precocity. Let us say then, once for all, that, whatever may be the praise and homage due to Keats for ranking as one of the immortals when he died aged twenty-five, no sort of encomium can be awarded to him on the ground that, when he first began, he began early and well. All his rawest attempts, be it added to his credit, appear to have been kept to himself; for Cowden Clarke, who was certainly his chief literary confidant in those tentative days, says that until Keats produced to him his sonnet "written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison" the youth's attempts at verse-writing were to him unknown. The 3rd of February 1815 was the day of Hunt's liberation, so that the endeavour had by this time been going on in silence for something like a year or more.

It was not till 1816--or let us say when he was just of age--that Keats produced a truly excellent thing. This is the sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer." A copy of Chapman's translation had been lent to Cowden Clarke; he and Keats sat up till daylight reading it, the young poet shouting with delight, and by ten o'clock on the following morning Keats sent the sonnet to Clarke. It was therefore a sudden immediate inspiration, a little rill of lava flowing out of a poetic volcano, solidified at once. This is not only the first excellent thing written by Keats--it is the _only_ excellent thing contained in his first volume of verse.

This volume came out (as already mentioned) in the early spring of 1817. The sonnet dedicating the book to Leigh Hunt, written off at a moment's notice "when the last proof-sheet was brought from the printer," was evidently composed in winter-time. The title of the volume is "Poems by John Keats." The motto on its title-page is from Spenser--

"What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty?"

--a motto embodying with considerable completeness the feeling which is predominant in the volume, and generally in Keats's poetic works. We always feel "delight" to be his true element, whatever may be the undertone of pathos opposed to it by poetic development and treatment, and by adverse fate. "Liberty" also--a free flight of the faculties, a rejection of conventional trammels, whether in life or in verse--was highly characteristic of him; and perhaps the youthful friend of Hunt intended the word "liberty" to be understood by his readers as having a certain political flavour as well. In addition to some writings just specified, the volume contained "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill"; the three epistles "To George Felton Mathew" (who was a gentleman of literary habits, afterwards employed in administering the Poor Law), "To my brother George," and "To Charles Cowden Clarke"; sixteen sonnets; and "Sleep and Poetry." The question of the poetic deservings of these compositions belongs more properly to our final chapter. I shall here give only a few details bearing upon the circumstances of their production. The poem "I stood tiptoe" &c. was written beside a gate near Caen Wood, Highgate. It must have been begun in a summer, no doubt that of 1816, and was still uncompleted in the middle of December of that year. "The Epistle to Mathew," dated November 1815, testifies to the early admiration of Keats for Thomas Chatterton; though the dedication of "Endymion," "Inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton," was but poorly forestalled by such lines as the following--

"Where we may soft humanity put on, And sit and rhyme, and think on Chatterton, And that warm-hearted Shakspeare sent to meet him Four laurelled spirits heavenward to entreat him."

Moreover, the first of his youthful sonnets is addressed to Chatterton. The "Epistle to George," August 1816, opens with a reference to "many a dreary hour" which John Keats has passed, fearing he would never be able to write good poetry, however much he might gaze on sky, honey-bees, and the beauty of woman. The "Epistle to Clarke," September 1816, pays ample tribute to the guidance which he had afforded to Keats into the realms of poetry, and contains a couplet which has of late been very often quoted--

"Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly Up to its climax, and then dying proudly?"

The sonnet--

"O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell,"

is the first thing that Keats ever published. It had previously appeared in _The Examiner_ for May 5, 1816, and is clearly one of the best of these early sonnets. The sonnet which begins with the unmetrical line--

"How many bards gild the lapses of time"

was included in the very first batch of verses by Keats which Cowden Clarke showed to Leigh Hunt. Hunt expressed "unhesitating and prompt admiration" of some other one among the compositions; and Horace Smith, who was present, reading out the sonnet now before us, praised as "a well-condensed expression" the contorted and inefficient line--

"That distance of recognizance bereaves,"

_i.e._ [sounds] which distance bereaves of recognizance, or, in plain English, which are too distant to be recognized. Two other sonnets are addressed to Haydon in a tone of glowing laudation.

"Sleep and Poetry" is (if we except the sonnet upon Chapman's Homer) by far the most important poem in the volume. It was written partly in Leigh Hunt's cottage at Hampstead, in the library-room, where a sofa-bed had on one occasion been made up for Keats's convenience, and the latter lines in the poem refer to objects of art which were kept in the room. Apart from the impressive line which all readers remember, saying of poetry--

"'Tis might half-slumbering on its own right arm,"

there are several passages interesting as showing Keats's enthusiasm for the art in which he was now a beginner, soon to be an adept--

"Oh for ten years that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy!"

also

"The great end Of poesy, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man;"

and again

"They shall be accounted poet-kings Who simply tell the most heart-easing things"--

both of these being definitions in which we might imagine Leigh Hunt to have borne his part, or at least notified his concurrence. The following well-known diatribe is also important, and should be kept in mind when we come to speak of the reception accorded to Keats by established critics, more or less of the old school. He has been dilating on the splendours of British poetry of the great era, say Spenser to Milton, and then proceeds--

"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force They swayed about upon a rocking-horse, And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal-souled! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled Its gathering waves--ye felt it not; the blue Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer-night collected still to make The morning precious. Beauty was awake-- Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of--were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compass vile; so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smoothe, inlay, and chip, and fit, Till--like the certain wands of Jacob's wit-- Their verses tallied. Easy was the task; A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated impious race, That blasphemed the bright lyrist to his face, And did not know it! No, they went about Holding a poor decrepit standard out Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large The name of one Boileau."

Zeal is generally pardonable. Keats's was manifestly honest zeal, and flaming forth in the right direction. Yet it would have been well for him to remember and indicate that amid his "school of dolts," bearing the flag of Boileau, there had been some very strong and capable men, notably Dryden and Pope, who could do several things besides inlaying and clipping; nor could it be said that the beauty of the world had been wholly blinked by so pre-eminently descriptive a poet as Thomson; and, if we were to read Boileau--which few of us do now-a-days, and I daresay Keats was not one of the few--we should probably find that his "mottoes" were much less concerned with inlaying and clipping than with solid meaning and studious congruity--qualities not totally contemptible, but (be it acknowledged) very largely contemned by Keats in that first slender performance of his adolescence named "Poems, 1817."

It has been said that this volume hardly went beyond the circle of Keats's personal friends; nor do I think this statement can be far wrong, although one inquirer avers that the book was "constantly alluded to in the prominent periodicals." The dictum of Keats himself stands thus: "It was read by some dozen of my friends, who liked it; and some dozen whom I was unacquainted with, who did not." Shelley cannot have been among the friends who liked the volume, for he had recommended Keats not to give it to the press. At any rate the publishers, Messrs. Ollier, would after a very short while sell it no more. Their letter to George Keats--who seems to have been acting for John during the absence of the latter in the Isle of Wight or at Margate--is too amusing to be omitted:--

"We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to acquiesce in undertaking it. We are, however, much obliged to you for relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any further connexion with it, which we must have done, as we think the curiosity is satisfied and the sale has dropped. By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms that we have in many cases offered to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has time after time been showered upon it. In fact, it was only on Sunday last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman who told us he considered it 'no better than a take-in.' These are unpleasant imputations for any one in business to labour under; but we should have borne them and concealed their existence from you had not the style of your note shown us that such delicacy would be quite thrown away. We shall take means without delay for ascertaining the number of copies on hand, and you shall be informed accordingly.

"3 Welbeck Street, 29th April 1817."

I do not find that the after-fate of the "Poems" is recorded: probably they were handed over to Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who undertook the publication of "Endymion."