Chapter 15
The first important poem to which Keats sets his hand after finishing "Endymion" was "Isabella, or The Pot of Basil." This was completed by April 27, 1818, the same month in which "Endymion" was published. Hamilton Reynolds had suggested the project of producing a volume of tales in verse, founded upon stories in Boccaccio's "Decameron"; some of the tales would have been executed by Reynolds himself, who did in fact produce on this plan the two poems named collectively "The Garden of Florence." As it turned out, however, Keats's tale appeared in a volume of his own, 1820, and Reynolds's two came out independently in the succeeding year.
"The Eve of St. Agnes" was written in the winter beginning the year 1819. Then came "Hyperion," of which two versions remain, both fragmentary. The first version (begun perhaps as early as October or September 1818), the only one which Keats himself published, is in all respects by far the better. He was much under the spell of Milton while he wrote it; and finally he gave it up in September 1819, declaring that "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." He went so far as to say in a letter written in the same month that "the 'Paradise Lost,' though so fine in itself, is a corruption of our language--a northern dialect accommodating itself to Greek and Latin inversions and intonations." "Hyperion" was included in Keats's third volume at the request of the publishers, contrary to the author's own preference. One may readily infer that it was to "Hyperion" that he referred when, in the preface to "Endymion," he spoke of returning to Grecian mythology for another subject: the full length of the poem was to have been ten books.
"Lamia" was the last poem of considerable length which Keats brought to completion and published. It seems to have been begun towards the summer of 1819, and was written with great care, after a heedful study of Dryden's methods of composition. On September 18, 1819, Keats wrote: "I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way, give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensations." The subject was taken from Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," in which there is a reference to the "Life of Apollonius" by Philostratus as the original source of the legend.
The volume--entitled "Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems"--came out towards the beginning of July 1820, when the malady of Keats had reached an advanced and alarming stage. At the beginning of September Keats wrote to Brown--"The sale of my book is very slow, though it has been very highly rated." I am not aware that there is any other record to show how far the publication may ultimately have approached towards becoming a commercial success; nor indeed would it be altogether easy to define the date at which Keats became a recognized and uncontested poet of high rank, and his works a solid property. His early death, at the beginning of 1821, must have formed a turning-point--not to speak of the favourable notice of "Endymion," and subordinately of the "Lamia" volume, which appeared in _The Edinburgh Review_, Jeffrey being the critic, in August 1820. Perhaps Jeffrey's praise may have facilitated an arrangement which Keats made in September 1820--the sale of the copyright of "Endymion" to Messrs. Taylor and Hessey for £100; no second edition of the poem appeared, however, while he was alive. I should presume that, within five or six years after Keats's decease, ridicule and rancour were already much in the minority; and that, by some such date as 1835 to 1840, they had finally "hidden their diminished heads," living only, with too persistent a life, in the retributive memory of men.
Some of the shorter poems in the "Lamia" volume must receive brief mention here. The "Ode to Psyche" was written in February 1819, and was termed by Keats the first poem with which he had taken pains--"I have for the most part dashed off my lines in a hurry." "To Autumn," the "Ode on Melancholy," and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," succeeded. The "Ode to a Nightingale" was composed at Hampstead in the spring of 1819 _after breakfast_, forming two or three hours' work: thus we see that the nocturnal imagery of the ode was a general or a particular reminiscence, not actual to the very moment of composition. This poem and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" were recited by Keats to Haydon in a chaunting tone in Kilburn meadows, and were published in the serial entitled "Annals of the Fine Arts." The urn thus immortalized may probably be one preserved in the garden of Holland House.
With the "Lamia" volume we have come to the close of what Keats published during his lifetime. Something remains to be said of other writings of his--almost all of them earlier in date than the publication of that volume--which remained imprinted or uncollected at the time of his death.
In February 1818 Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Shelley, undertook to write a sonnet each upon the river Nile. In order of merit, the three sonnets are the reverse of what one might have been willing to forecast. I at least am clearly of opinion that Hunt's sonnet is the best (though with a weak ending), Keats's the second, and Shelley's a decidedly bad third. The leading thought in each sonnet is characteristic of its author. Keats adheres to the simple natural facts of the case, while Hunt and Shelley turn the Nile into a moral or intellectual symbol. Keats says essentially that to associate the Nile with ideas of antique desolation is but a delusion of ignorance, for this river is really rich and fresh like others. Hunt makes the Egyptian stream an emblem of history tending towards the progress of the individual and the race; while Shelley reads into the Nile a lesson of the good and the evil inhering in knowledge.
"The Eve of St. Mark"--a fragment which very few of Keats's completed poems can rival in point of artist-like feeling and writing--belongs to the years 1818-9. I find nothing in print to account for his leaving it unfinished.
In May 1819 Keats had an idea of inventing a new structure of sonnet-rhyme; and he sent to his brother and sister-in-law a sonnet composed accordingly, beginning--
"If by dull rhymes our English must be chained."
He wrote: "I have been endeavouring to discover a better sonnet-stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the pouncing rhymes. The other appears too elegiac, and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect. I do not pretend to have succeeded." Keats's experiment reads agreeably. It comprises five rhymes altogether; the first rhyme being repeated thrice at arbitrary intervals; and the last rhyme twice in lines twelve and fourteen.
The tragedy of "Otho the Great" was written by Keats (as already referred to) in July and August 1819, in co-operation with Armitage Brown. The diction of the play is, it would appear, Keats's entirely; whereas the invention and development of plot in the first four acts is wholly due to Brown. The two friends sat together; Brown described each successive scene, and Keats turned it into verse, without troubling his head as to the subject-matter for the scene next ensuing. When it came to the fifth act, however, Keats inquired what would be the conclusion of the play; and, not being satisfied with Brown's project which he deemed too humorous and too melodramatic, he both invented and wrote a fifth act for himself. He felt sure that "Otho the Great" was "a tolerable tragedy," and set his heart upon getting it acted--Kean was well inclined to take the principal character, Prince Ludolph; and it became his greatest ambition to write fine plays. "Otho" was in fact accepted for Drury Lane Theatre, on the offer of Brown, who left Keats's authorship in the background; but, as both the writers were impatient of delay, Brown, in February 1820, took away the MS., and Covent Garden Theatre was thought of instead--without any practical result. As soon as "Otho" was finished, Brown suggested King Stephen as the subject of another drama; and Keats, without any further collaboration from his friend, composed the few scenes of it which remain. "One of my ambitions" (writes Keats to Bailey in August 1819), "is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting."
The ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci," than which Keats did nothing more thrilling or more perfect, may perhaps have been written in the earlier half of 1819; it was published in 1820, in Hunt's _Indicator_ for May 10th, under the signature "Caviare"; the same signature which was adopted for the sonnet, "A dream, after reading Dante's episode of Paolo and Francesca." Keats may probably have meant to imply, in some bitterness of spirit, that his poems were "caviare to the general." The title of this ballad was suggested to Keats by seeing it at the head of a translation from Alain Chartier in a copy of Chaucer. As to the "Dream" sonnet he wrote in April 1819:--
"The 5th canto of Dante pleases me more, and more; it is that one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca. I had passed many days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life. I floated about the wheeling atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed for an age; and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was warm. Ever-flowery tree-tops sprang up, and we rested on them, sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind blew us away again. I tried a sonnet on it; there are fourteen lines in it, but nothing of what I felt. Oh that I could dream it every night!"
The last long work which Keats undertook, and he wrote it with extreme facility, was "The Cap and Bells; or The Jealousies, a Fairy Tale," in the Spenserian stanza. What remains is probably far less than Keats intended the tale to amount to, but it is enough to enable us to pronounce upon its merits. The poem was begun soon after Keats's first attack of blood-spitting in February 1820. It seems singular that under such depressing conditions he should have written in so frivolous and jaunty a spirit, and provoking that his last long work (the last, that is, if we except the recast of "Hyperion") should be about the most valueless which he produced, at any date after commencing upon "Endymion." This poem has been said to be written in the spirit of Ariosto; a statement which, in justice to the brilliant Italian, cannot be admitted. It may well be, however, as Lord Houghton suggests, that the general notion was suggested by Brown, who had translated the first five cantos (not indeed of Ariosto, but) of the "Orlando Innamorato" of Bojardo. "The Cap and Bells" appears to be destitute of distinct plan, though some sort of satirical allusion to the marital and extra-marital exploits of George IV. is traceable in it; meagre and purposeless in invention; a poor farrago of pumped-up and straggling jocosity. Perhaps a hearty laugh has never been got out of it; although there are points here and there at which a faint snigger may be permissible, and the concluding portion improves somewhat. Keats seems to have intended to publish it under a pseudonym, Lucy Vaughan Lloyd; and Hunt gave, in _The Indicator_ of August 23, 1820, some taste of its quality, possibly meaning to print more of it anon.
The last verses which Keats ever wrote formed the sonnet here ensuing. He composed this late in September 1820, after landing on the Dorsetshire coast, probably near Lulworth, and returning to the ship which bore him to his doom in Italy; and he wrote it down on a blank page in Shakespeare's Poems, facing "A Lover's Complaint."
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art; Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:-- No, yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest; Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever--or else swoon to death."
Of poetic projects which remained unfulfilled when Keats died we hear--leaving out of count the works which he had begun and left uncompleted--of only one. During his voyage to Naples he often spoke of wishing to write the story of Sabrina, as indicated in Milton's "Comus," connecting it with some points in English history and character.
In prose--apart from his letters, which are noticeably various in mood, matter, and manner, and contain many admirable things--Keats wrote extremely little. In a weekly paper with which Reynolds was connected, _The Champion_, December 1817, he published two articles on "Kean as a Shakespearean Actor:" they are not remarkable. With the above-named articles are now associated some "Notes on Shakespeare," not written with a view to publication; these appear to me somewhat strained and bloated. There are also some "Notes on Milton's 'Paradise Lost.'" On September 22, 1819, Keats addressed to Mr. Dilke a letter, which however does not appear to have been actually sent off. As it shows a definite intention of writing in prose for regular publication and for an income, a few sentences are worth quoting.
"It concerns a resolution I have taken to endeavour to acquire something by temporary writing in periodical works. You must agree with me how unwise it is to keep feeding upon hopes which, depending so much on the state of temper and imagination, appear gloomy or bright, near or afar off, just as it happens.... You may say I want tact; that is easily acquired.... I should, a year or two ago, have spoken my mind on every subject with the utmost simplicity. I hope I have learned a little better, and am confident I shall be able to cheat as well as any literary Jew of the market, and shine up an article on anything without much knowledge of the subject--aye, like an orange. I would willingly have recourse to other means. I cannot; I am fit for nothing but literature.... Notwithstanding my 'aristocratic' temper, I cannot help being very much pleased with the present public proceedings. I hope sincerely I shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the question before I die."
On the following day Keats wrote to Brown on the same subject--
"I will write on the liberal side of the question for whoever will pay me. I have not known yet what it is to be diligent. I purpose living in town in a cheap lodging, and endeavouring, for a beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper.... I shall apply to Hazlitt, who knows the market as well as any one, for something to bring me in a few pounds as soon as possible. I shall not suffer my pride to hinder me. The whisper may go round--I shall not hear it. If I can get an article in _The Edinburgh_, I will. One must not be delicate."
In pursuance of this plan, Keats did, for a few days in October, take a lodging in Westminster. He then reverted to Hampstead, and finally the scheme came to nothing, principally perhaps because his fatal illness began, and everything had to be given up which was not directly controlled by considerations of health.