Chapter 18

the firm of Taylor and Hessey) that it expressed his opinion of the Tory Ministry then in office:--

"There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel; who unpen Their baaing vanities to browse away The comfortable green and juicy hay From human pastures; or, oh torturing fact! Who through an idiot blink will see unpacked Fire-branded foxes to scar up and singe Our gold and ripe-eared hopes. With not one tinge Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight Able to face an owl's, they still are dight By the blear-eyed nations in empurpled vests, And crowns and turbans. With unladen breasts, Save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount To their spirit's perch, their being's high account, Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones, Amid the fierce intoxicating tones Of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums, And sudden cannon."

A rather more sensible embodiment of his political feelings is a stanza which he wrote, perhaps in 1818, at the close of canto 5, book ii. of "The Faery Queen." In this stanza the revolutionary Giant, who had been suppressed by Artegall and Talus, is represented as being pieced together again by Typographus, the Printing-press, and so trained up as to become more than a match for his former victors. There is also, in a letter to George Keats dated in September 1819, a rather long and detailed passage on politics covering a wide period in English and European history, on the oscillations of governmental and popular power &c., and on the writer's sympathy with the enlightenment and progress of the people. It closes with an admiring description of Sandt, the assassin of Kotzebue, as pourtrayed in a profile likeness. As to Hunt, some expressions in a letter from George Keats to Dilke are decidedly strong:--"I should be extremely sorry that poor John's name should go down to posterity associated with the littlenesses of Leigh Hunt--an association of which he was so impatient in his lifetime. He speaks of him patronizingly; that he would have defended him against the reviewers if he had known his nervous irritation at their abuse of him, and says that on that point only he was reserved to him. The fact was, he more dreaded Hunt's defence than their abuse. You know all this as well as I do."

Apart from his own special capability for poetry, Keats had a mind both active and capacious. The depth, pregnancy, and incisiveness, of many of the remarks in his letters, glancing along a considerable range of subject-matter, are highly noticeable. If some one were to take the pains of extracting and classifying them, he would do a good service to readers. It does not appear, however, that Keats took much interest in any kind of knowledge which could not be made applicable or subservient to the purposes of poetry. Many will remember the anecdote, proper to Haydon's "immortal dinner" (December 1817), of Keats's joining with Charles Lamb in denouncing Sir Isaac Newton for having destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours; the whole company had to drink "Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics." This was a freak, yet not so mere a freak but that the poet--in one of his most elaborated and heedful compositions, "Lamia"--could revert to the same idea--

"Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture--she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomèd mine, Unweave a rainbow."

In a letter to his brother, December 1817, Keats observes:--

"The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth. Examine 'King Lear,' and you will find this exemplified throughout.... It struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean _negative capability_; that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This, pursued through volumes, would perhaps take us no further than this: that with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."

Keats did not very often in his letters remark upon the work of his poetic contemporaries. We have just read a reference to Coleridge. In another letter addressed to Haydon, January 1818, he shows that his admiration of Wordsworth's "Excursion" was great, coupling that poem with Haydon's pictures, and with "Hazlitt's depth of taste," as "three things to rejoice at in this age."

Soon afterwards, February 1818, while "Endymion" was passing through the press, he wrote to Mr. Taylor:--

"In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. 1st, I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. 2nd, Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting, of imagery, should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it. And this leads me to another axiom--That, if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all."

Keats held that the melody of verse is founded on the adroit management of open and close vowels. He thought that vowels can be as skilfully combined and interchanged as differing notes of music, and that monotony should only be allowed when it subserves some special purpose.

The following, from a letter to Mr. Woodhouse, October 1818 (soon after the abusive reviews had appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The Quarterly_), is a remarkable piece of self-analysis. As we read it, we should bear in mind what Haydon said of Keats's want of decision of character. I am not indeed clear that Keats has here pourtrayed himself with marked accuracy. It may appear that he ascribes to himself too much of absorption into the object or the personage which he contemplates; whereas it might, with fully as much truth, be advanced that he was wont to assimilate the personage or the object to himself. I greatly doubt whether in Keats's poems we see the object or the personage the clearer because his faculty transpires through them: rather, we see the object or the personage through the haze of Keats. His range was not extremely extensive (whatever it might possibly have become, with a longer lease of life), nor was his personality by any means occulted. But in any event his statement here is of great importance as showing what he thought of the poetic phase of mind and working.

"As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a member--that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing _per se_, and stands alone), it is not itself--it has no self. It is everything, and nothing--it has no character. It enjoys light, and shade. It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated--it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity: he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute: the poet has none, no identity. He is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. How can it when I have _no_ nature? When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated. Not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of children."

Elsewhere Keats says, November 1817: "Nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights; or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel."

For painting Keats had a good deal of taste, largely fostered, no doubt, by his intimacy with Haydon. This came to him gradually. Towards the beginning of 1818 he was, according to his own account, quite unable to appreciate Raphael's Cartoons, but afterwards gained an insight into them through contrasting them with some maudlin saints by Guido. It is interesting to find him entering warmly into the beauties of the earlier Italian art, as indicated in a book of prints from some church in Milan (so he says, but perhaps it should rather be Pisa or Florence). "I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance and the most tender feeling; magnificence of drapery 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."

Here is a small trait of character, recorded by Keats in a letter to George, from Winchester, September 1819. "I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and in fact adonize as if I were going out; then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief."

Haydon, as we have seen, said that Keats had an exquisite sense of humour. There are few things more difficult to analyse than the sense of humour; few points as to which different people will vary more in opinion than the possession, by any particular man, of a sense of humour, or the account, good or bad, to which he turned this sense. Certainly there is a large amount of jocularity in the familiar writings of Keats--often a quick perception of the ridiculous or the risible, sometimes a telling jest or _jeu d'esprit_. I confess, however, that to myself most of Keats's fun appears forced or inept, wanting in fineness of taste and manner, and tending towards the vulgar; a jangling jingle of word and notion. Punning plays a large part in it, as it did in Leigh Hunt's familiar converse. Some specimens of Keats's funning or punning seem to me a humiliating exhibition, as, for instance, a letter, January 1819, which Armitage Brown addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, with interpolations by Keats. No doubt both the friends were resolutely bent upon being silly on that occasion; but to be silly is not fully tantamount to being "a fellow of infinite jest," or having an exquisite sense of humour. There is some very exasperating writing also in a letter to Reynolds (May 1818), about "making Wordsworth and Colman play at leap-frog, or keeping one of them down a whole half-holiday at fly-the-garter," &c., &c. A feeling for the inappropriate is perhaps one element of jocoseness; if so, Keats may have been genuinely jocose when (as he wrote in his very last letter to Brown) he "at his worst, even in quarantine [in Naples Harbour], summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of his life." He had a good power of mimicry, as well as of dramatic recital. He did indisputably, towards September 1819, play off one practical joke--Brown was the victim--with eminent success; pretending that a certain Mr. Nathan Benjamin, who was then renting Brown's house at Hampstead, had written a letter complaining of illness--gravel, caused by some lime-tainted water on the premises. But the success depended upon a very singular coincidence, viz., that by mere chance Keats had happened to give the tenant's name correctly. The angry reply of Brown to the angry supposititious letter of Benjamin, and the astonishment of Benjamin upon receiving Brown's retort, are fertile of laughter.

Keats does not appear to have ever made any pretence to defined religious belief of any sort, nor seriously to have debated the subject, or troubled his mind about it one way or the other. He was certainly not a Christian. His early friend, Mr. Felton Mathew, speaks of him as "of the sceptical and republican school." On Christmas Eve, 1816, soon after he had come of age, he wrote the following sonnet--

"The church-bells toll a melancholy round, Calling the people to some other prayers, Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares, More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound. Surely the mind of man is closely bound In some black spell: seeing that each one tears Himself from fireside joys and Lydian airs, And converse high of those with glory crowned.

Still, still they toll: and I should feel a damp, A chill as from a tomb, did I not know That they are dying like an outburnt lamp,-- That 'tis their sighing, wailing, ere they go Into oblivion,--that fresh flowers will grow, And many glories of immortal stamp."

His sonnet on Ben Nevis, 1818, is also an utterance of scepticism--speaking of heaven and hell as misty surmises, and of "the world of thought and mental might" as a realm of nebulosity. A letter to Leigh Hunt, May 1817, contains a phrase arraigning the God of Christians. To the clerical student Bailey, September 1818, he spoke out: "You know my ideas about religion. I do not think myself more in the right than other people, that nothing in this world is proveable." The latter clause appears to be carelessly elliptical in expression, the real meaning being "I think [not "I do _not_ think"] that nothing in this world is proveable." To Fanny Brawne, towards May 1820, he appealed "by the blood of that Christ you believe in." Haydon tells a noticeable anecdote--the only one, I think, which exhibits Keats as an admirer of that anti-imaginative order of intellect of which Voltaire was a prototype--

"He had a tending to religion when first I knew him [autumn of 1816], but Leigh Hunt soon forced it from his mind. Never shall I forget Keats once rising from his chair, and approaching my last picture, Entry into Jerusalem. He went before the portrait of Voltaire, placed his hand on his heart, and, bowing low,

'In reverence done, as to the power That dwelt within, whose presence had infused Into the plant sciential sap derived From nectar, drink of gods,'

(as Milton says of Eve after she had eaten the apple), 'That's the being to whom _I_ bend,' said he; alluding to the bending of the other figures in the picture, and contrasting Voltaire with our Saviour, and his own adoration with that of the crowd."

Notwithstanding the general vagueness or indifference of his mind in religious matters, Keats seems to have been at most times a believer in the immortality of the soul. Following that phrase of his already quoted (from a letter to Bailey, November 1817) "Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!" he proceeds: "It is 'a vision in the form of youth,' a shadow of reality to come. And this consideration has further convinced me--for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine--that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we call happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger, as you do, after truth. Adam's dream will do here: and seems to be a conviction that imagination, and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life, and its spiritual repetition." This allusion to "Adam's dream" refers back to a fine phrase which had occurred shortly before in the same letter--"Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream; he awoke, and found it truth." In a letter written to George Keats and his wife, shortly after the death of Tom, comes a very positive assertion--"I have a firm belief in immortality, and so had Tom." This firm belief, however, must certainly have faltered later on; for, as we have already seen, one of Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, written in 1820, contains the phrase "I long to believe in immortality." The reader may also refer to the letter to Armitage Brown, September 1820, extracted in a previous page. Of superstitious feeling I observe only one instance in Keats. After Tom's death, a white rabbit appeared in the garden of Mr. Dilke, and was shot by him: Keats would have it that this rabbit was the spirit of Tom, and he persisted in the fancy with not a little earnestness.

Of Keats's fondness for wine--his appreciation of it as a flavour grateful to the palate, and to the abstract sense of enjoyment--there are numerous traces throughout his writings. We all remember the famous lines in his "Ode to a Nightingale"--

"Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,... Oh for a beaker full of the warm South!" &c.--

lines which seem a little forced into their context, and of which the only tangible meaning there is that the luxury and dreamy inspiration of wine-drinking would relieve the poet's mind from the dull and painful realities of life, and assist his imagination into the dim vocal haunts of the nightingale. There is also in "Lamia" a conspicuous passage celebrating "The happy vintage--merry wine, sweet wine." On claret--as to which we have heard the evidence of Haydon--there is a long tirade in a letter addressed to George Keats and his wife in February 1819. I give it in a condensed form:--

"I never drink above three glasses of wine, and never any spirits and water.... How I like claret! When I can get claret, I must drink it. 'Tis the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in.... It fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness--then goes down cool and feverless: then you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver.... Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus: this makes him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an Ariadne.... I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have: I forgot game. I must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock _passim_."

At a rather later date, October 1819, Keats had "left off animal food, that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs by nature." But I presume this form of abstinence did not last long.

I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement; with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism; longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be one; resolute to be a man--unselfish, kindly, and generous. But, though kindly, he was irritable; though unselfish and generous, wilful and suspicious. An affront was what he would not bear; and, when he found himself affronted in a form--that of press ridicule and detraction--which could not be resented in person, nor readily retaliated in any way, it is abundantly probable that the indignity preyed upon his mind and spirits, and contributed to embitter the days cut short by disease, the messenger of despair to that passionate love which had become the single intense interest of his life. The single intense interest, along with poetry--both of them hurrying without fruition to the grave. Keats seems to me to have been naturally a man of complex character, many-mooded, with a tendency to perverse self-conflict. The circumstances of his brief career--his poetic ambition, his want of any definite employment, his association with men of literary occupation or taste whom he only half approved, the critical venom poured forth against him, his love thwarted by a mortal malady--all these things tended to bring out the unruly or morbid, and to deplete the many fine and solid, elements in his nature. With the personal character of Keats, as with his writings, we may perhaps deal most fairly by saying that his outburst and his reserve of faculty were such that, in the narrow space allotted to him, youth had not advanced far enough to disentangle the rich and various material. But his latest years, which enabled his poetry to find full and deathless voice, were so loaded with suffering and perturbation as to leave the character less lucidly and harmoniously developed than even in the days of adolescence. From "Endymion" to "Lamia" and the "Eve of St. Mark," we have, in poetry, advanced greatly towards the radiant meridian: in life, from 1818 to 1821, we have receded to a baffling dusk.