Keats Part 10

--"O for some sunny spell To dissipate the shadows of this h.e.l.l":--

or at the conclusion of a piteous sonnet:--

"Yourself--your soul--in pity give me all, Withhold no atom's atom or I die, Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall, Forget, in the mist of idle misery, Life's purposes,--the palate of the mind Losing its gust, and my ambition blind."

That he might win peace by marriage with the object of his pa.s.sion does not seem to have occurred to Keats as possible in the present state of his fortunes. "However selfishly I may feel," he had written to her some months earlier, "I am sure I could never act selfishly." The Brawnes on their part were comfortably off, but what his instincts of honour and independence forbade him to ask, hers of tenderness could perhaps hardly be expected to offer. As the autumn wore into winter, Keats's sufferings, disguise them as he might, could not escape the notice of his affectionate comrade Brown. Without understanding the cause, Brown was not slow to perceive the effect, and to realise how vain were the a.s.surances Keats had given him at Winchester, that the pressure of real troubles would stiffen him against troubles of imagination, and that he was not and would not allow himself to be unhappy.

"I quickly perceived," writes Brown, "that he was more so than I had feared; his abstraction, his occasional la.s.situde of mind, and, frequently, his a.s.sumed tranquillity of countenance gave me great uneasiness. He was unwilling to speak on the subject; and I could do no more than attempt, indirectly, to cheer him with hope, avoiding that word however.... All that a friend could say, or offer, or urge, was not enough to heal his many wounds. He listened, and in kindness, or soothed by kindness, showed tranquillity, but nothing from a friend could relieve him, except on a matter of inferior trouble. He was too thoughtful, or too unquiet, and he began to be reckless of health.

Among other proofs of recklessness, he was secretly taking, at times, a few drops of laudanum to keep up his spirits. It was discovered by accident, and without delay, revealed to me. He needed not to be warned of the danger of such a habit; but I rejoiced at his promise never to take another drop without my knowledge; for nothing could induce him to break his word when once given,--which was a difficulty.

Still, at the very moment of my being rejoiced, this was an additional proof of his rooted misery"[64].

Some of the same symptoms were observed by Haydon, and have been described by him with his usual reckless exaggeration, and love of contrasting another's weakness with his own strength[65]. To his friends in general Keats bore himself as affectionately as ever, but they began to notice that he had lost his cheerfulness. One of them, Severn, at this time competed for and carried off (December 9, 1819) the annual gold medal of the Academy for a historical painting, which had not been adjudged for several years. The subject was Spenser's 'Cave of Despair.' We hear of Keats flinging out in anger from among a company of elder artists where the deserts of the winner were disparaged; and we find him making an appointment with Severn to go and see his prize picture,--adding, however, parenthetically from his troubled heart, "You had best put me into your Cave of Despair." In December his letters to his sister make mention several times of ill health, and once of a suggestion which had been made to him by Mr Abbey, and which for a moment he was willing to entertain, that he should take advantage of an opening in the tea-broking line in connection with that gentleman's business. Early in January, 1820, George Keats appeared on a short visit to London. He was now settled with his wife and child in the far West, at Louisville on the Ohio. Here his first trading adventure had failed, owing, as he believed, to the dishonesty of the naturalist Audubon who was concerned in it; and he was brought to England by the necessity of getting possession, from the reluctant Abbey, of a further portion of the scanty funds still remaining to the brothers from their grandmother's gift. His visit lasted only three weeks, during which John made no attempt to unbosom himself to him as of old. "He was not the same being," wrote George, looking back on the time some years afterwards; "although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, he did not speak with his former openness and unreserve, he had lost the reviving custom of venting his griefs." In a letter which the poet wrote to his sister-in-law while her husband was in England, he attempts to keep up the old vein of lively affectionate fun and spirits, but soon falls involuntarily into one of depression and irritation against the world. Of his work he says nothing, and it is clear from Brown's narrative that both his morning and his evening task--the _Cap and Bells_ and the _Vision_--had been dropped some time before this[66], and left in the fragmentary state in which we possess them.

George left for Liverpool on Friday Jan. 28. A few days later Keats was seized by the first overt attack of the fatal mischief which had been set up in his const.i.tution by the exertions of his Scotch tour, and which recent agitations, and perhaps imprudences, had aggravated.

"One night," writes Brown--it was on the Thursday Feb. 3--"at eleven o'clock, he came into the house in a state that looked like fierce intoxication. Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible[67]; it therefore was the more fearful. I asked hurriedly, 'What is the matter? you are fevered?' 'Yes, yes,' he answered, 'I was on the outside of the stage this bitter day till I was severely chilled,--but now I don't feel it. Fevered!--of course, a little.' He mildly and instantly yielded, a property in his nature towards any friend, to my request that he should go to bed. I followed with the best immediate remedy in my power. I entered his chamber as he leapt into bed. On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say,--'That is blood from my mouth.'

I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. 'Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.' After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,--'I know the colour of that blood;--it is arterial blood;--I cannot be deceived in that colour;--that drop of blood is my death-warrant;--I must die.' I ran for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and, at five in the morning, I left him after he had been some time in a quiet sleep."

Keats knew his case, and from the first moment had foreseen the issue truly. He survived for twelve months longer, but the remainder of his life was but a life-in-death. How many are there among us to whom such _lacrymae rerum_ come not home? Happy at least are they whose lives this curse consumption has not darkened with sorrow unquenchable for losses past, with apprehensions never at rest for those to come,--who know not what it is to watch, in some haven of delusive hope, under Mediterranean palms, or amid the glittering winter peace of Alpine snows, their dearest and their brightest perish. The malady in Keats's case ran through the usual phases of deceptive rally and inevitable relapse. The doctors would not admit that his lungs were injured, and merely prescribed a lowering regimen and rest from mental excitement. The weakness and nervous prostration of the patient were at first excessive, and he could bear to see n.o.body but Brown, who nursed him affectionately day and night. After a week or so he was able to receive little daily visits from his betrothed, and to keep up a constant interchange of notes with her. A hint, which his good feelings wrung from him, that under the circ.u.mstances he ought to release her from her engagement, was not accepted, and for a time he became quieter and more composed. To his sister at Walthamstow he wrote often and cheerfully from his sickbed, and pleasant letters to some of his men friends: among them one to James Rice, which contains this often quoted and touching picture of his state of mind:--

"I may say that for six months before I was taken ill I had not pa.s.sed a tranquil day. Either that gloom overspread me, or I was suffering under some pa.s.sionate feeling, or if I turned to versify that acerbated the poison of either sensation. The beauties of nature had lost their power over me. How astonishingly (here I must premise that illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive things in a truer light),--how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us!

Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a super-human fancy."

The greatest pleasure he had experienced in life, Keats said at another time, was in watching the growth of flowers: and in a discussion on the literary merits of the Bible he once, says Hazlitt, found fault with the Hebrew poetry for saying so little about them. What he wants to see again, he writes now further from his sickbed, are 'the simple flowers of our spring.' And in the course of April, after being nearly two months a prisoner, he began gradually to pick up strength and get about. Even as early as the twenty-fifth of March, we hear of him going into London, to the private view of Haydon's 'Entry into Jerusalem,' where the painter tells how he found him and Hazlitt in a corner, 'really rejoicing.'

Keats's friends, in whose minds his image had always been a.s.sociated with the ideas of intense vitality and of fame in store, could not bring themselves to believe but that he would recover. Brown had arranged to start early in May on a second walking-tour in Scotland, and the doctor actually advised Keats to go with him: a folly on which he knew his own state too well to venture. He went with Brown on the smack as far as Gravesend, and then returned; not to Hampstead, but to a lodging in Wesleyan Place, Kentish Town. He had chosen this neighbourhood for the sake of the companionship of Leigh Hunt, who was living in Mortimer Street close by. Keats remained at Wesleyan Place for about seven weeks during May and June, living an invalid life, and occasionally taking advantage of the weather to go to an exhibition in London or for a drive on Hampstead Heath. During the first weeks of his illness he had been strictly enjoined to avoid not only the excitement of writing, but even that of reading, poetry. About this time he speaks of intending to begin (meaning begin again) soon on the _Cap and Bells_. But in fact the only work he really did was that of seeing through the press, with some slight revision of the text, the new volume of poems which his friends had at last induced him to put forward. This is the immortal volume containing _Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St Agnes_, _Hyperion_, and the _Odes_. Of the poems written during Keats's twenty months of inspiration from March 1818 to October 1819, none of importance are omitted except the _Eve of St Mark_, the _Ode on Indolence_, and _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. The first Keats no doubt thought too fragmentary, and the second too unequal: La Belle Dame sans Merci he had let Hunt have for his periodical _The Indicator_, where it was printed (with alterations not for the better) on May 20, 1820. _Hyperion_, as the publishers mention in a note, was only at their special desire included in the book: it is given in its original shape, the poet's friends, says Brown, having made him feel that they thought the re-cast no improvement. The volume came out in the first week of July. An admirably kind and discreet review by Leigh Hunt appeared in the _Indicator_ at the beginning of August[68]: and in the same month Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh Review_ for the first time broke silence in Keats's favour. The impression made on the more intelligent order of readers may be inferred from the remarks of Crabb Robinson in his _Diaries_ for the following December[69]. "My book has had good success among the literary people," wrote Keats a few weeks after its appearance, "and I believe has a moderate sale."

But had the success been even far greater than it was, Keats was in no heart and no health for it to cheer him. Pa.s.sion with lack of hope were working havoc in his blood, and frustrating any efforts of nature towards recovery. The relapse was not long delayed. Fresh haemorrhages occurring on the 22nd and 23rd of June, he moved from his lodgings in Wesleyan Place to be nursed by the Hunts at their house in Mortimer Street. Here everything was done that kindness could suggest to keep him amused and comforted: but all in vain: he "would keep his eyes fixed all day," as he afterwards avowed, on Hampstead; and once when at Hunt's suggestion they took a drive in that direction, and rested on a seat in Well Walk, he burst into a flood of unwonted tears, and declared his heart was breaking. In writing to f.a.n.n.y Brawne he at times cannot disguise nor control his misery, but breaks into piteous outcries, the complaints of one who feels himself chained and desperate while mistress and friends are free, and whose heart is racked between desire and helplessness, and a thousand daily pangs of half-frantic jealousy and suspicion. "Hamlet's heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, 'Go to a nunnery, go, go!'"

Keats when he wrote thus was not himself, but only in his own words, 'a fever of himself:' and to seek cause for his complaints in anything but his own distempered state would be unjust equally to his friends and his betrothed. Wound as they might at the time, we know from her own words that they left no impression of unkindness on her memory[70].

Such at this time was Keats's condition that the slightest shock unmanned him, and he could not bear the entrance of an unexpected person or stranger. After he had been some seven weeks with the Hunts, it happened on the 12th of August, through the misconduct of a servant, that a note from f.a.n.n.y Brawne was delivered to him opened and two days late. This circ.u.mstance, we are told, so affected him that he could not endure to stay longer in the house, but left it instantly, intending to go back to his old lodgings in Well Walk. The Brawnes, however, would not suffer this, but took him into their own home and nursed him. Under the eye and tendance of his betrothed, he found during the next few weeks some mitigation of his sufferings. Haydon came one day to see him, and has told, with a painter's touch, how he found him "lying in a white bed, with white quilt, and white sheets, the only colour visible was the hectic flush of his cheeks. He was deeply affected and so was I[71]." Ever since his relapse at the end of June, Keats had been warned by the doctors that a winter in England would be too much for him, and had been trying to bring himself to face the prospect of a journey to Italy. The Sh.e.l.leys had heard through the Gisbornes of Keats's relapse, and Sh.e.l.ley now wrote in terms of the most delicate and sympathetic kindness inviting him to come and take up his residence with them at Pisa. This letter reached Keats immediately after his return to Hampstead. He replied in an uncertain tone, showing himself deeply touched by the Sh.e.l.leys' friendship, but as to the _Cenci_, which had just been sent him, and generally as to Sh.e.l.ley's and his own work in poetry, finding nothing very cordial or much to the purpose to say.

As to the plan of wintering in Italy, Keats had by this time made up his mind to try it, "as a soldier marches up to a battery." His hope was that Brown would accompany him, but the letters he had written to that friend in the Highlands were delayed in delivery, and the time for Keats's departure was fast approaching while Brown still remained in ignorance of his purpose. In the meantime another companion offered himself in the person of Severn, who having won, as we have seen, the gold medal of the Royal Academy the year before, determined now to go and work at Rome with a view to competing for the travelling studentship. Keats and Severn accordingly took pa.s.sage for Naples on board the ship 'Maria Crowther,'

which sailed from London on Sept. 18[72]. Several of the friends who loved Keats best went on board with him as far as Gravesend, and among them Mr Taylor, who had just helped him with money for his journey by the purchase for 100 of the copyright of _Endymion_. As soon as the ill news of his health reached Brown in Scotland, he hastened to make the best of his way south, and for that purpose caught a smack at Dundee, which arrived in the Thames on the same evening as the 'Maria Crowther' sailed: so that the two friends lay on that night within hail of one another off Gravesend unawares.

The voyage at first seemed to do Keats good, and Severn was struck by his vigour of appet.i.te and apparent cheerfulness. The fever of travel and change is apt to produce this deceptive effect in a consumptive patient, and in Keats's case, aided by his invincible spirit of pleasantness to those about him, it was sufficient to disguise his sufferings, and to raise the hopes of his companion throughout the voyage and for some time afterwards. Contrary winds held them beating about the Channel, and ten days after starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where Keats landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at Bedhampton. On board ship in the Solent immediately afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever confided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of itself, his pa.s.sion, he says would prevent it. "The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state? I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even these pains, which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but Death is the great divorcer for ever."

On the night when Keats wrote these words (Sept. 28) Brown was staying with the Dilkes at Chichester, so that the two friends had thus narrowly missed seeing each other once more. The ship putting to sea again, still with adverse winds, there came next to Keats that day of momentary calm and lightening of the spirit of which Severn has left us the record, and the poet himself a testimony in the last and one of the most beautiful of his sonnets. They landed on the Dorsetshire coast, apparently near Lulworth, and spent a day exploring its rocks and caves, the beauties of which Keats showed and interpreted with the delighted insight of one initiated from birth into the secrets of nature. On board ship the same night he wrote the sonnet which every reader of English knows so well; placing it, by a pathetic choice or chance, opposite the heading a _Lover's Complaint_, on a blank leaf of the folio copy of Shakespeare's poems which had been given him by Reynolds, and which in marks, notes, and under-scorings bears so many other interesting traces of his thought and feeling:--

"Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 cold ablution round earth's human sh.o.r.es, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-- No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd 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."

These were Keats's last verses. With the single exception of the sonnet beginning 'The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,' composed probably immediately after his return from Winchester, they are the only love-verses in which his pa.s.sion is attuned to tranquillity; and surely no death-song of lover or poet came ever in a strain of more unfevered beauty and tenderness, or with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity.

Getting clear of the Channel at last, the vessel was caught by a violent storm in the Bay of Biscay; and Severn waking at night, and finding the water rushing through their cabin, called out to Keats "half fearing he might be dead," and to his relief was answered cheerfully with the first line of Arne's long-popular song from _Artaxerxes_--'Water parted from the sea.' As the storm abated Keats began to read the shipwreck canto of _Don Juan_, but found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and presently flung the volume from him in disgust. A dead calm followed: after which the voyage proceeded without farther incident, except the dropping of a shot across the ship's bow by a Portuguese man-of-war, in order to bring her to and ask a question about privateers. After a voyage of over four weeks, the 'Maria Crowther' arrived in the Bay of Naples, and was there subjected to ten days' quarantine; during which, says Keats, he summoned up, 'in a kind of desperation,' more puns than in the whole course of his life before. A Miss Cotterill, consumptive like himself, was among his fellow-pa.s.sengers, and to her Keats showed himself full of cheerful kindness from first to last, the sight of her sufferings inwardly preying all the while on his nerves, and contributing to aggravate his own. He admits as much in writing from Naples harbour to Mrs Brawne: and in the same letter says, "O what an account I could give you of the Bay of Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world--I feel a spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly." The effort he constantly made to keep bright, and to show an interest in the new world of colour and cla.s.sic beauty about him, partly imposed on Severn; but in a letter he wrote to Brown from Naples on Nov. 1, soon after their landing, his secret anguish of sense and spirit breaks out terribly:--

"I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her.... Oh G.o.d! G.o.d! G.o.d!

Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see her--I hear her.... Oh Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart is capable of so much misery."

At Naples Keats and Severn stayed at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and received much kindness and hospitality from a brother of Miss Cotterill's who was there to meet her. The political state and servile temper of the people--though they were living just then under the const.i.tutional forms imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and it was the sight, in the theatre, of sentries actually posted on the stage during a performance that one evening determined him suddenly to leave the place. He had received there another letter from Sh.e.l.ley, who since he last wrote had read the _Lamia_ volume, and was full of generous admiration for _Hyperion_. Sh.e.l.ley now warmly renewed his invitation to Keats to come to Pisa. But his and Severn's plans were fixed for Rome. On their drive thither (apparently in the second week of November) Keats suffered seriously from want of proper food: but he was able to take pleasure in the beauty of the land, and of the autumn flowers which Severn gathered for him by the way. Reaching Rome, they settled at once in lodgings which Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark had taken for them in the Piazza di Spagna, in the first house on the right going up the steps to Sta Trinita dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were left pretty much to shift for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and at first they were ill served by the _trattora_ from which they got their meals, until Keats mended matters by one day coolly emptying all the dishes out of window, and handing them back to the messenger; a hint, says Severn, which was quickly taken. One of Severn's first cares was to get a piano, since nothing soothed Keats's pain so much as music. For a while the patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit these alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the Pincian close by. The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the air, says Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. In Severn's absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid Lieutenant Elton. In their walks on the Pincian these two often met the famous beauty Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing--but not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who was tall and handsome, presently affected Keats's nerves, and made them change the direction of their walks. Sometimes, instead of walking, they would ride a little way on horseback while Severn was working among the ruins.

It is related by Severn that Keats in his first days at Rome began reading a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the words, too sadly applicable to himself:--

"Misera me! sollievo a me non resta Altro che 'l pianto, _ed il pianto e delitto_."

Notwithstanding signs like this, his mood was on the whole more cheerful.

His thoughts even turned again towards verse, and he meditated a poem on the subject of Sabrina. Severn began to believe he would get well, and wrote encouragingly to his friends in England; and on Nov. 30 Keats himself wrote to Brown in a strain much less despondent than before. But suddenly on these glimmerings of hope followed despair. On Dec. 10 came a relapse which left no doubt of the issue. Haemorrhage followed haemorrhage on successive days, and then came a period of violent fever, with scenes the most piteous and distressing. Keats at starting had confided to his friend a bottle of laudanum, and now with agonies of entreaty begged to have it, in order that he might put an end to his misery: and on Severn's refusal, "his tender appeal turned to despair, with all the power of his ardent imagination and bursting heart." It was no unmanly fear of pain in Keats, Severn again and again insists, that prompted this appeal, but above all his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend. "He explained to me the exact procedure of his gradual dissolution, enumerated my deprivations and toils, and dwelt upon the danger to my life and certainly to my fortune of my continued attendance on him." Severn gently persisting in refusal, Keats for a while fiercely refused his friend's ministrations, until presently the example of that friend's patience and his own better mind made him ashamed. In religion Keats had been neither a believer nor a scoffer, respecting Christianity without calling himself a Christian, and by turns clinging to and drifting from the doctrine of immortality. Contrasting now the behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, he acknowledged anew the power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to him from Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_, strove to pa.s.s the remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy.

By degrees the tumult of his soul abated. His sufferings were very great, partly from the nature of the disease itself, partly from the effect of the disastrous lowering and starving treatment at that day employed to combat it. Shunned and neglected as the sick and their companions then were in Italy, the friends had no succour except from the a.s.siduous kindness of Dr and Mrs Clark, with occasional aid from a stranger, Mr Ewing. At one moment, their stock of money having run out, they were in danger of actual dest.i.tution, till a remittance from Mr Taylor arrived just in time to save them. The devotion and resource of Severn were infinite, and had their reward. Occasionally there came times of delirium or half-delirium, when the dying man would rave wildly of his miseries and his ruined hopes, till his companion was almost exhausted with "beating about in the tempest of his mind;" and once and again some fresh remembrance of his love, or the sight of her handwriting in a letter, would pierce him with too intolerable a pang. But generally, after the first few weeks, he lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, one of the little tokens she had given him at starting, while his companion soothed him with reading or music. His favourite reading was still Jeremy Taylor, and the sonatas of Haydn were the music he liked Severn best to play to him. Of recovery he would not hear, but longed for nothing except the peace of death, and had even weaned, or all but weaned, himself from thoughts of fame. "I feel," he said, "the flowers growing over me," and it seems to have been gently and without bitterness that he gave the words for his epitaph:--"here lies one whose name was writ in water." Ever since his first attack at Wentworth Place he had been used to speak of himself as living a posthumous life, and now his habitual question to the doctor when he came in was, "Doctor, when will this posthumous life of mine come to an end?" As he turned to ask it neither physician nor friend could bear the pathetic expression of his eyes, at all times of extraordinary power, and now burning with a sad and piercing unearthly brightness in his wasted cheeks. Loveable and considerate to the last, "his generous concern for me," says Severn, "in my isolated position at Rome was one of his greatest cares." His response to kindness was irresistibly winning, and the spirit of poetry and pleasantness was with him to the end. Severn tells how in watching Keats he used sometimes to fall asleep, and awakening, find they were in the dark. "To remedy this one night I tried the experiment of fixing a thread from the bottom of a lighted candle to the wick of an unlighted one, that the flame might be conducted, all which I did without telling Keats. When he awoke and found the first candle nearly out, he was reluctant to wake me and while doubting suddenly cried out, 'Severn, Severn, here's a little fairy lamplighter actually lit up the other candle.'" And again "Poor Keats has me ever by him, and shadows out the form of one solitary friend: he opens his eyes in great doubt and horror, but when they fall on me they close gently, open quietly and close again, till he sinks to sleep."

Such tender and harrowing memories haunted all the after life of the watcher, and in days long subsequent it was one of his chief occupations to write them down. Life held out for two months and a half after the relapse, but from the first days of February the end was visibly drawing near. It came peacefully at last. On the 23rd of that month, writes Severn, "about four, the approaches of death came on. 'Severn--I--lift me up--I am dying--I shall die easy; don't be frightened--be firm, and thank G.o.d it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sank into death, so quiet, that I still thought he slept." Three days later his body was carried, attended by several of the English in Rome who had heard his story, to its grave in that retired and verdant cemetery which for his sake and Sh.e.l.ley's has become a place of pilgrimage to the English race for ever. It was but the other day that the remains of Severn were laid in their last resting-place beside his friend[73].

CHAPTER IX.

Character and Genius.

The touching circ.u.mstances of Keats's illness and death at Rome aroused naturally, as soon as they were known, the sympathy of every generous mind. Foremost, as all the world knows, in the expression of that sympathy was Sh.e.l.ley. He had been misinformed as to the degree in which the critics had contributed to Keats's sufferings, and believing that they had killed him, was full both of righteous wrath against the offenders, and of pa.s.sionate regret for what the world had lost. Under the stress of that double inspiration Sh.e.l.ley wrote,--

"And a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres."

As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, _Adonas_ is unsurpa.s.sed in literature: with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effort of Sh.e.l.ley's art: while its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his character and fate is erroneous. A similar false impression was at the same time conveyed, to a circle of readers incommensurably wider than that reached by Sh.e.l.ley, in the well-known stanza of _Don Juan_. In regard to Keats Byron tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare.

When the _Edinburgh_ praised him, he was furious, and on receipt of the Lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to Murray:--"No more Keats, I entreat:--flay him alive;--if some of you don't, I must skin him myself."

Then after his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, he turns against the latter, and cries:--"I would not be the person who wrote that homicidal article for all the honour and glory of the world." In the _Don Juan_ pa.s.sage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers and at the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the same breath.

Taken together with the notion of 'Johnny Keats' to which _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_ had previously given currency, the _Adonas_ and the _Don Juan_ pa.s.sage alike tended to fix in the public mind an impression of Keats's character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of detraction had been poison. It was long before his friends, who knew that he was 'as like Johnny Keats as the Holy Ghost,' did anything effectual to set his memory right. Brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in the end wrote only the brief memoir, still in ma.n.u.script, which has been quoted so often in the above pages. For anything like a full biography George Keats in America could alone have supplied the information; but against him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in the hour of need, (having been in truth simply unable to do so,) Brown had unluckily conceived so harsh a prejudice that friendly communication between them became impossible. Neither was Dilke, who alone among Keats's friends in England took George's part, disposed under the circ.u.mstances to help Brown in his task. For a long time George himself hoped to superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his occupations in the West, prevented him. Mr Taylor, the publisher, also at one time wished to be Keats's biographer, and with the help of Woodhouse collected materials for the purpose; but in the end failed to use them.

The same wish was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose literary skill, and fine judgment and delicacy, should have made him of all the poet's friends the most competent for the work. But of these many projects not one had been carried out, when five-and-twenty years after Keats's death a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task,--the Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton freshly remembered by us all,--and with help from nearly all Keats's surviving friends, and by the grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every student is familiar.

Keats had indeed enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all, inherited disease, which killed him. He had a nature all tingling with pride and sensitiveness: he had the perilous capacity and appet.i.te for pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own 'exquisite sense of the luxurious': and with it the besetting tendency to self-torment which he describes as his 'horrid morbidity of temperament.' The greater his credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self-indulgence, and that on the other he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued him. To the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way when he speaks of the 'violence of his temperament, continually smothered up.' Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but that of apprenticeship in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such generosity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely better trained and less hardly tried. His hold over himself gave way, indeed, under the stress of pa.s.sion, and as a lover he betrays all the weak places of his nature. But we must remember his state of health when the pa.s.sion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him, as well as the lack there was in her who caused it,--not indeed, so far as we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of the woman's finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under another kind of trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, he bore himself with true dignity: and if the practical consequences preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his fortunes justified.

In all ordinary relations of life, his character was conspicuous alike for manly spirit and sweetness. No man who ever lived has inspired in his friends a deeper or more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have heard little in this history[74], wrote while the poet lay dying: "Keats must get himself again, Severn, if but for me--I cannot afford to lose him: if I know what it is to love I truly love John Keats." The following is from a letter of Brown written also during his illness:--"he is present to me every where and at all times,--he now seems sitting here at my side, and looking hard into my face.... So much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely he was wound about my heart[75]." Elsewhere, speaking of the time of his first attack, Brown says:--"while I waited on him his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance of his eye, or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like this, Severn his last nurse, observed to me[76]:" and we know in fact how the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend's death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. When Lord Houghton's book came out in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon to thank the writer for doing merited honour to one "whose genius I did not, and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the _Man_[77]." The points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two. First his high good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for many. "He had a soul of n.o.ble integrity," says Bailey: "and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was, in the best sense, manly." Next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of sympathy. This is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed, requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it nothing,--but with charm only, and when the trial comes, refusing to friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. But when genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all the ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it, then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. And this is what his companions found in Keats. "He was the sincerest friend," cries Reynolds, "the most loveable a.s.sociate,--the deepest listener to the griefs and distresses of all around him,--'That ever lived in this tide of times[78].'" To the same effect Haydon:--"He was the most unselfish of human creatures: unadapted to this world, he cared not for himself, and put himself to any inconvenience for the sake of his friends.... He had a kind gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who wanted it." And again Bailey:--

"With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew, than was John Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit.... In his letters he talks of _suspecting_ everybody. It appeared not in his conversation. On the contrary he was uniformly the apologist for poor frail human nature, and allowed for people's faults more than any man I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation[79]."

Lastly, "he had no fears of self," says George Keats, "through interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed, defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and purse."

In this chorus of admiring affection, Haydon alone must a.s.sert his own superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. When he laments over Keats's dissipations, he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show, idly and calumniously. When on the other hand he speaks of the poet's "want of decision of character and power of will," and says that "never for two days did he know his own intentions," his criticism is deserving of more attention. This is only Haydon's way of describing a fact in Keats's nature of which no one was better aware than himself. He acknowledges his own "unsteady and vagarish disposition." What he means is no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in regard to himself. "The Celtic instability," a reader may perhaps surmise who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet's descent. Whether the quality was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar complexion of Keats's genius. Or rather it was an expression in character of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance, namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. Acute as was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. He realised clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility to external impressions was apt to overpower in him, not practical consistency only, but even the sense of a personal ident.i.ty.

"As to the poetic character itself," he writes, "(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.

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no ident.i.ty; he is continually in for, and filling, some other body.... 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."

"Even now," he says on another occasion, "I am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live." Keats was often impatient of this Protean quality of his own mind. "I would call the head and top of those who have a proper self," he says, "men of power": and it is the men of power, the men of trenchant individuality and settled aims, that in the sphere of practical life he most admires. But in the sphere of thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the instinctive bent of his own genius. In that sphere he is impatient, in turn, of all intellectual narrowness, and will not allow that poetry should make itself the exponent of any single creed or given philosophy. Thus in speaking of what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work of Wordsworth:--

"For the sake," he asks, "of a few fine imaginative or domestic pa.s.sages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peac.o.c.k over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing.... We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and un.o.btrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul."

This is but one of many pa.s.sages in which Keats proclaims the necessity, for a poet, of an all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind. His critics sometimes speak as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise of art and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the world. If the foregoing pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware that no criticism can be more mistaken. At the creation, the revelation, of beauty Keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty wherever its elements existed:--"I have loved," as he says, "the principle of beauty in all things." His conception of the kingdom of poetry was Shaksperean, including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the soul and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he lived long enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, those that by their manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit of youth. Would he have been able to make the rest also his own? Would the faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of nature, to divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the spell of the Middle Age,--would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the mysteries of the heart, and, still in obedience to the law of beauty, to illuminate and harmonize the great struggles and problems of human life?