Keats Part 12

June 22, 1818. Hampstead" [The date and place are added by Woodhouse in red ink, presumably from the post-mark].

p. 120, note 1. In the concluding lines quoted in my text, Mr Buxton Forman has noticed the failure of rhyme between 'All the magic of the place' and the next line, 'So saying, with a spirit's glance,' and has proposed, by way of improvement, to read 'with a spirit's grace'. I find the true explanation in Woodhouse MSS. A., where the poem is continued thus in pencil after the word 'place'.

"'Tis now free to stupid face, To cutters, and to fashion boats, To cravats and to petticoats:-- The great sea shall war it down, For its fame shall not be blown At each farthing Quadrille dance.

So saying with a spirit's glance He dived"--.

Evidently Keats was dissatisfied with the first six of these lines (as he well might be), and suppressed them in copying the piece both for his correspondents and for the press: forgetting at the same time to give any indication of the hiatus so caused.

p. 128, note 1. Lord Houghton says, "On returning to the south, Keats found his brother alarmingly ill, and immediately joined him at Teignmouth." It is certain that no such second visit to Teignmouth was made by either brother. The error is doubtless due to the misdating of Keats's March letter to Bailey: see last note but two, p. 225.

p. 138, note 1. Keats in this letter proves how imperfect was his knowledge of his own affairs, and how much those affairs had been mismanaged. At the time when he thus found himself near the end of the capital on which he had hitherto subsisted, there was another resource at his disposal of which it is evident he knew nothing. Quite apart from the provision made by Mrs Jennings for her grandchildren after her husband's death, and administered by Mr Abbey, there were the legacies Mr Jennings himself had left them by will; one of 1000 direct; the other, of a capital to yield 50 a year, in reversion after their mother's death (see p. 5). The former sum was invested by order of the Court in Consols, and brought 1550. 7_s._ 10_d._ worth of that security at the price at which it then stood. 1666. 13_s_. 4_d._ worth of the same stock was farther purchased from the funds of the estate in order to yield the income of 50 a year. The interest on both these investments was duly paid to Frances Rawlings during her life: but after her death in 1810 both investments lay untouched and acc.u.mulating interest until 1823; when George Keats, to whose knowledge their existence seems then to have been brought for the first time, received on application to the Court a fourth share of each, with its acc.u.mulations. Two years afterwards f.a.n.n.y Keats received in like manner on application the remaining three shares (those of her brothers John and Tom as well as her own), the total amount paid to her being 3375. 5_s._ 7_d._, and to George 1147. 5_s._ 1_d._ It was a part of the ill luck which attended the poet always that the very existence of these funds must have been ignored or forgotten by his guardian and solicitors at the time when he most needed them.

p. 148, note 1. Landor's letter to Lord Houghton on receipt of a presentation copy of the _Life and Letters_, in 1848, begins characteristically as follows:--

"Bath, Aug. 29.

Dear Milnes,

On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks' absence, I find your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, excepting Shakspeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity. He has not indeed overcome so great a difficulty as Sh.e.l.ley in his _Cenci_, nor united so many powers of the mind as Southey in _Kehama_--but there is an effluence of power and light pervading all his work, and a freshness such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.--"

p. 152, note 1. I think there is no doubt that _Hyperion_ was begun by Keats beside his brother's sickbed in September or October 1818, and that it is to it he alludes when he speaks in those days of 'plunging into abstract images,' and finding a 'feverous relief' in the 'abstractions' of poetry. Certainly these phrases could hardly apply to so slight a task as the translation of Ronsard's sonnet, _Nature ornant Ca.s.sandre_, which is the only specific piece of work he about the same time mentions. Brown says distinctly, of the weeks when Keats was first living with him after Tom's death in December--"It was then he wrote _Hyperion_"; but these words rather favour than exclude the supposition that it had been already begun. In his December-January letter to America Keats himself alludes to the poem by name, and says he has been 'going on a little' with it: and on the 14th of February, 1819, says 'I have not gone on with _Hyperion_.'

During the next three months he was chiefly occupied on the _Odes_, and whether he at the same time wrote any more of _Hyperion_ we cannot tell.

It was certainly finished, all but the revision, by some time in April, as in that month Woodhouse had the MS. to read, and notes (see Buxton Forman, _Works_, vol. II. p. 143) that "it contains 2 books and 1/2--(about 900 lines in all):" the actual length of the piece as published being 883 lines and a word, and that of the draft copied by Woodhouse before revision 891 and a word (see below, note to p. 164). When Keats, after nearly a year's interruption of his correspondence with Bailey, tells him in a letter from Winchester in August or September, "I have also been writing parts of my _Hyperion_," this must not be taken as meaning that he has been writing them lately, but only that he has been writing them,--like _Isabella_ and the _Eve of St Agnes_, which he mentions at the same time,--since the date of his last letter.

p. 164, note 1. The version of _The Eve of St Agnes_ given in Woodhouse MSS. A. is copied almost without change from the corrected state of the original MS. in the possession of Mr F. Locker-Lampson; which is in all probability that actually written by Keats at Chichester (see p. 133). The readings of the MS. in question are given with great care by Mr Buxton Forman (_Works_, vol. II. p. 71 foll.), but the first seven stanzas of the poem as printed are wanting in it. Students may therefore be glad to have, from Woodhouse's transcript, the following table of the changes in those stanzas made by the poet in the course of composition:--

Stanza I.: line 1, for "chill" stood "cold": line 4, for "was" stood "were": line 7, for "from" stood "in": line 9 (and Stanza II., line 1), for "prayer" stood "prayers". Stanza III.: line 7, for "went" stood "turn'd": line 8, for "Rough" stood "Black". After stanza III. stood the following stanza, suppressed in the poem as printed.

4.

But there are ears may hear sweet melodies, And there are eyes to brighten festivals, And there are feet for nimble minstrelsies, And many a lip that for the red wine calls-- Follow, then follow to the illumined halls, Follow me youth--and leave the eremite-- Give him a tear--then trophied bannerals And many a brilliant ta.s.seling of light Shall droop from arched ways this high baronial night.

Stanza V.; line 1, for "revelry" stood "revellers": lines 3-5, for--

"Numerous as shadows haunting fairily The brain new-stuff'd in youth with triumphs gay Of old romance. These let us wish away,"--

stood the following:--

"Ah what are they? the idle pulse scarce stirs, The muse should never make the spirit gay; Away, bright dulness, laughing fools away."

p. 166, note 1. At what precise date _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ was written is uncertain. As of the _Ode to Melancholy_, Keats makes no mention of this poem in his correspondence. In Woodhouse MSS. A. it is dated 1819. That Woodhouse made his transcripts before or while Keats was on his Shanklin-Winchester expedition in that year, is I think certain both from the readings of the transcripts themselves, and from the absence among them of _Lamia_ and the _Ode to Autumn_. Hence it is to the first half of 1819 that _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ must belong, like so much of the poet's best work besides. The line quoted in my text shows that the theme was already in his mind when he composed the _Eve of St Agnes_ in January. Mr Buxton Forman is certainly mistaken in supposing it to have been written a year later, after his critical attack of illness (_Works_, vol. II. p. 357, note).

p. 186, note 1. The relation of _Hyperion, A Vision_, to the original _Hyperion_ is a vital point in the history of Keats's mind and art, and one that has been generally misunderstood. The growth of the error is somewhat interesting to trace. The first mention of the _Vision_ is in Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_, ed. 1848, Vol. I. p. 244. Having then doubtless freshly in his mind the pa.s.sage of Brown's MS. memoir quoted in the text, Lord Houghton stated the matter rightly in the words following his account of _Hyperion_:--"He afterwards published it as a fragment, and still later re-cast it into the shape of a Vision, which remains equally unfinished." When eight years later the same editor printed the piece for the first time (in _Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society_, Vol. III.

1856-7) from the MS. given him by Brown, he must have forgotten Brown's account of its origin, and writes doubtfully: "Is it the original sketch out of which the earlier part of the poem was composed, or is it the commencement of a reconstruction of the whole? I have no external evidence to decide this question:" and further,--"the problem of the priority of the two poems--both fragments, and both so beautiful--may afford a wide field for ingenious and critical conjecture." Ten years later again, when he brought out the second edition of the _Life and Letters_, Lord Houghton had drifted definitely into a wrong conclusion on the point, and printing the piece in his Appendix as 'Another Version,' says in his text (p. 206) "on reconsideration, I have no doubt that it was the first draft."

Accordingly it is given as 'an earlier version' in Mr W. M. Rossetti's edition of 1872, as 'the first version' in Lord Houghton's own edition of 1876; and so on, positively but quite wrongly, in the several editions by Messrs Buxton Forman, Speed, and W. T. Arnold. The obvious superiority of _Hyperion_ to the _Vision_ no doubt at first sight suggested the conclusion to which these editors, following Lord Houghton, had come. In the mean time at least two good critics, Mr W. B. Scott and Mr. R.

Garnett, had always held on internal evidence that the _Vision_ was not a first draft, but a recast attempted by the poet in the decline of his powers: an opinion in which Mr Garnett was confirmed by his recollection of a statement to that effect in the lost MS. of Woodhouse (see above, Preface, p. v, and W. T. Arnold, _Works_ &c. p. xlix, note). Brown's words, quoted in my text, leave no doubt whatever that these gentlemen were right. They are confirmed from another side by Woodhouse MSS. A, which contains the copy of a real early draft of _Hyperion_. In this copy the omissions and alterations made in revising the piece are all marked in pencil, and are as follows, (taking the number of lines in the several books of the poem as printed).

BOOK I. After line 21 stood the cancelled lines--

"Thus the old Eagle, drowsy with great grief, Sat moulting his weak plumage, never more To be restored or soar against the sun; While his three sons upon Olympus stood."

In line 30, for "stay'd Ixion's wheel" stood "eased Ixion's toil". In line 48, for "tone" stood "tune". In line 76, for "gradual" stood "sudden". In line 102, after the word "Saturn," stood the cancelled words--

"What dost think?

Am I that same? O Chaos!"

In line 156, for "yielded like the mist" stood "gave to them like mist."

In line 189, for "Savour of poisonous bra.s.s" stood "A poison-feel of bra.s.s." In line 200 for "When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers" stood "When an earthquake hath shook their city towers." After line 205 stood the cancelled line "Most like a rose-bud to a fairy's lute." In line 209, for "And like a rose" stood "Yes, like a rose." In line 268, for "Suddenly" stood "And, sudden."

BOOK II. In line 128, for "vibrating" stood "vibrated." In line 134 for "starry Ura.n.u.s" stood "starr'd Ura.n.u.s" (some friend doubtless called Keats's attention to the false quant.i.ty).

BOOK III. After line 125 stood the cancelled lines:--

"Into a hue more roseate than sweet pain Gives to a ravish'd nymph, when her warm tears Gush luscious with no sob; or more severe."

In line 126, for "most like" stood "more like."

In these omissions and corrections, two things will be apparent to the student: first, that they are all greatly for the better; and second, that where a corrected pa.s.sage occurs again in the _Vision_, it in every case corresponds to the printed _Hyperion_, and not to the draft of the poem preserved by Woodhouse. This of itself would make it certain that the _Vision_ was not a first version of _Hyperion_, but a recast of the poem as revised (in all probability at Winchester) after its first composition.

Taken together with the statement of Brown, which is perfectly explicit as to time, place, and circ.u.mstances, and the corresponding statement of Woodhouse as recollected by Mr Garnett, the proof is from all sides absolute: and the 'first version' theory must disappear henceforward from editions of and commentaries on our poet.

p. 193, note 2. A more explicit refutation of Haydon's account was given, some years after its appearance, by Cowden Clarke (see Preface, no. 10), not, indeed, from personal observation at the time in question, but from general knowledge of the poet's character:--

"I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which that ill-ordered being, Haydon, the artist, left behind him in his 'Diary'

respecting the idolised object of his former intimacy, John Keats" ...

"Haydon's detraction was the more odious because its object could not contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against him of c.o.c.kney ostentation and display. The most mean-spirited and trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that Keats was so far gone in sensual excitement as to put cayenne pepper on his tongue when taking his claret. In the first place, if the stupid trick were ever played, I have not the slightest belief in its serious sincerity. During my knowledge of him Keats never purchased a bottle of claret; and from such observation as could not escape me, I am bound to say that his domestic expenses never would have occasioned him a regret or a self-reproof; and, lastly, I never perceived in him even a tendency to imprudent indulgence."

p. 198, note 1. In Medwin's _Life of Sh.e.l.ley_ (1847), pp. 89-92, are some notices of Keats communicated to the writer by f.a.n.n.y Brawne (then Mrs Lindon), to whom Medwin alludes as his 'kind correspondent.' Medwin's carelessness of statement and workmanship is well known: he is perfectly casual in the use of quotation marks and the like: but I think an attentive reading of the paragraph, beginning on p. 91, which discusses Mr Finch's account of Keats's death, leaves no doubt that it continues in substance the quotation previously begun from Mrs Lindon. "That his sensibility," so runs the text, "was most acute, is true, and his pa.s.sions were very strong, but not violent; if by that term, violence of temper is implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn on himself than others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his friends. Violence such as the letter" [of Mr Finch] "describes, was quite foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting England, I saw him every day", [this would be true of f.a.n.n.y Brawne from Oct. 1819 to Sept. 1820, if we except the Kentish Town period in the summer, and is certainly more nearly true of her than of anyone else,] "I often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, much less a violent one, to any human being." The above pa.s.sage has been overlooked by critics of Keats, and I am glad to bring it forward, as serving to show a truer and kinder appreciation of the poet by the woman he loved than might be gathered from her phrase in the letter to Dilke so often quoted.