Life of John Keats Part 2

I cannot but think the Indian maiden of this story must have been still lingering in Keats's imagination when he devised the episode of that other Indian maiden in the fourth book of _Endymion_.[4]

Besides these records, we have an actual tangible relic to show how Keats's attention in the lecture room was now fixed and now wandered, in the shape of a notebook in which some other student has begun to put down anatomy notes and Keats has followed. Beginning from both ends, he has made notes of an anatomical and also of a surgical course, which are not those of a lax or inaccurate student, but full and close as far as they go; only squeezed into the margins of one or two pages there are signs of flagging attention in the shape of sketches, rather prettily touched, of a pansy and other flowers.[5]

After the first weeks of autumn gloom spent in solitary lodgings in the dingiest part of London, Keats expresses, in a rimed epistle to Felton Mathew, the fear lest his present studies and surroundings should stifle the poetic faculty in him altogether. About the same time he takes pains to get into touch again with Cowden Clarke, who had by this time left Enfield and was living with a brother-in-law in Clerkenwell. In a letter unluckily not dated, but certainly belonging to these first autumn weeks in London, Keats writes to Clarke:--'Although the Borough is a beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings, yet No 8, Dean Street, is not difficult to find; and if you would run the gauntlet over London Bridge, take the first turning to the right, and, moreover, knock at my door, which is nearly opposite a meeting, you would do me a charity, which, as St Paul saith, is the father of all the virtues. At all events, let me hear from you soon: I say, at all events, not excepting the gout in your fingers.' Clarke seems to have complied promptly with this pet.i.tion, and before many months their renewed intercourse had momentous consequences.

Keats's fear that the springs of poetry would dry up in him was not fulfilled, and he kept trying his prentice hand in various modes of verse. Some of the sonnets recorded to have belonged to the year 1815, as _Woman, when I behold thee, Happy is England_, may have been written in London at the close of that year: a number of others, showing a gradually strengthening touch, belong, we know, to the spring and early summer of the next. For his brother George to send to his _fiancee_, Miss Georgiana Wylie, on Valentine's day, Feb. 14, 1816, he wrote the pleasant set of heptasyllabics beginning 'Hadst thou lived in days of old.' In the same month was published Leigh Hunt's poem _The Story of Rimini_, and by this, working together with his rooted enthusiasm for Spenser, Keats was immediately inspired to begin an attempt at a chivalrous romance of his own, _Calidore_; which went no farther than an Induction and some hundred and fifty opening lines.

Cowden Clarke had kept up his acquaintance with Leigh Hunt, and was in the habit of going up to visit him at the cottage where he was now living at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health. Some time in the late spring of 1816 Clarke made known to Hunt first some of Keats's efforts in poetry and then Keats himself. Both Clarke and Hunt have told the story, both writing at a considerable, and Clarke at a very long, interval after the event. In their main substance the two accounts agree, but both are in some points confused, telescoping together, as memory is apt to do, circ.u.mstances really separated by an interval of months. One firm fact we have to start with,--that Hunt printed in his paper, the _Examiner_, for May 5th, 1816, Keats's sonnet, _O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell_. This was Keats's first appearance in print, and a decisive circ.u.mstance in his life. Clarke, it appears, had taken up the 'Solitude' sonnet and a few other ma.n.u.script verses of Keats to submit to Leigh Hunt for his opinion,[6] and had every reason to be gratified at the result. Here is his story of what happened.

I took with me two or three of the poems I had received from Keats. I could not but antic.i.p.ate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and indeed approvingly, of the compositions--written, too, by a youth under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had read twenty lines of the first poem. Horace Smith happened to be there on the occasion, and he was not less demonstrative in his appreciation of their merits.... After making numerous and eager inquiries about him personally, and with reference to any peculiarities of mind and manner, the visit ended in my being requested to bring him over to the Vale of Health.

That was a 'red-letter day' in the young poet's life, and one which will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and expression of Keats's features would arrest even the casual pa.s.senger in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that I could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention, with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter and receive. As we approached the Heath, there was the rising and accelerated step, with the gradual subsidence of all talk. The interview, which stretched into three 'morning calls,' was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about Caen Wood and its neighbourhood; for Keats was suddenly made a familiar of the household, and was always welcomed.

In connexion with this, take Hunt's own account of the matter, as given about ten years after the event in his volume, _Lord Byron and his Contemporaries_:

To Mr Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance with him. I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me, and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young poet's heart as warm as his imagination. We read and walked together, and used to write verses of an evening on a given subject. No imaginative pleasure was left unnoticed by us, or unenjoyed, from the recollections of the bards and patriots of old to the luxury of a summer's rain at our window or the clicking of the coal in winter-time.

Some inquirers, in interpreting these accounts, have judged that the personal introduction did not take place in the spring or early summer at all, but only after Keats's return from his holiday at the end of September. I think it is quite clear, on the contrary, that Clarke had taken Keats up to Hampstead by the end of May or some time in June.

Unmistakeable impressions of summer strolls there occur in his poetry of the next few months. The 'happy fields' where he had been rambling when he wrote the sonnet to Charles Wells on June the 29th were almost certainly the fields of Hampstead, and there is no reason to doubt Hunt's statement that the 'little hill' from which Keats drank the summer view and air, as told at the opening of his poem _I stood tiptoe_, was one of the swells of ground towards the Caen wood side of the Heath. At the same time it would seem that their intercourse in these first weeks did not extend beyond a few walks and talks, and that it was not until after Keats's return from his summer holiday that the acquaintance ripened into the close and delighted intimacy which we find subsisting by the autumn.

For part of August and September he had been away at Margate, apparently alone. A couple of rimed epistles addressed during this holiday to his brother George and to Cowden Clarke breathe just such a heightened joy of life and happiness of antic.i.p.ation as would be natural in one who had lately felt the first glow of new and inspiriting personal sympathies.

To George, besides the epistle, he addressed a pleasant sonnet on the wonders he has seen, the sea, the sunsets, and the world of poetic glories and mysteries vaguely evoked by them in his mind. The epistle to George is dated August: that to Cowden Clarke followed in September. In it he explains, in a well-conditioned and affectionate spirit of youthful modesty, why he has. .h.i.therto been shy of addressing any of his own attempts in verse to a friend so familiar with the work of the masters; and takes occasion, in a heartfelt pa.s.sage of autobiography, to declare all he has owed to that friend's guidance and encouragement.

Thus have I thought; and days on days have flown Slowly, or rapidly--unwilling still For you to try my dull, unlearned quill.

Nor should I now, but that I've known you long; That you first taught me all the sweets of song: The grand, the sweet, the terse, the free, the fine; What swell'd with pathos, and what right divine: Spenserian vowels that elope with ease, And float along like birds o'er summer seas; Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness, Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness.

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

Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load?

Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram?

Show'd me that epic was of all the king, Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring?

You too upheld the veil from Clio's beauty, And pointed out the patriot's stern duty; The might of Alfred, and the shaft of Tell; The hand of Brutus, that so grandly fell Upon a tyrant's head. Ah! had I never seen, Or known your kindness, what might I have been?

What my enjoyments in my youthful years, Bereft of all that now my life endears?

And can I e'er these benefits forget?

And can I e'er repay the friendly debt?

No doubly no;--yet should these rhymings please, I shall roll on the gra.s.s with two-fold ease: For I have long time been my fancy feeding With hopes that you would one day think the reading Of my rough verses not an hour misspent; Should it e'er be so, what a rich content!

Some of these lines are merely feeble and boyish, but some show a fast ripening, nay an almost fully ripened, critical feeling for the poetry of the past. The couplet about Spenser's vowels could scarcely be happier, and the next on Milton antic.i.p.ates, though without at all approaching in craftsmanship, the 'Me rather all that bowery loneliness'

of Tennyson's famous alcaic stanzas to the same effect.

Coming back from the seaside about the end of September to take up his quarters with his brothers in their lodging in the Poultry, Keats was soon to be indebted to Clarke for another and invaluable literary stimulus: I mean his first knowledge of Chapman's translation of Homer.

This experience, as every reader knows, was instantly celebrated by him in a sonnet, cla.s.sical now almost to triteness, which is his first high achievement, and one of the masterpieces of our language in this form.

The question of its exact date has been much discussed: needlessly, seeing that Keats himself signed and dated it in full, when it was printed in the _Examiner_ for the first of December following, 'Oct^r 1816, JOHN KEATS.' The doubts expressed have been due partly to the overlooking of this fact and partly to a mistake in Cowden Clarke's account of the matter written many years later. After quoting Keats's invitation of October 1815 to come and find him at his lodging in the Borough, Clarke goes on:--

This letter having no date but the week's day, and no postmark, preceded our first symposium; and a memorable night it was in my life's career. A beautiful copy of the folio edition of Chapman's translation of _Homer_ had been lent me. It was the property of Mr.

Alsager, the gentleman who for years had contributed no small share of celebrity to the great reputation of the _Times_ newspaper by the masterly manner in which he conducted the money-market department of that journal....

Well then, we were put in possession of the _Homer_ of Chapman, and to work we went, turning to some of the 'famousest' pa.s.sages, as we had sc.r.a.ppily known them in Pope's version. There was, for instance, that perfect scene of the conversation on Troy wall of the old Senators with Helen, who is pointing out to them the several Greek Captains; with the Senator Antenor's vivid portrait of an orator in Ulysses, beginning at the 237th line of the third book:--

But when the prudent Ithacus did to his counsels rise, He stood a little still, and fix'd upon the earth his eyes, His sceptre moving neither way, but held it formally, Like one that vainly doth affect. Of wrathful quality, And frantic (rashly judging), you would have said he was; But when out of his ample breast he gave his great voice pa.s.s, And words that flew about our ears like drifts of winter's snow, None thenceforth might contend with him, though naught admired for show.

The shield and helmet of Diomed, with the accompanying simile, in the opening of the third book; and the prodigious description of Neptune's pa.s.sage to the Achive ships, in the thirteenth book:--

The woods and all the great hills near trembled beneath the weight Of his immortal-moving feet. Three steps he only took, Before he far-off aegas reach'd, but with the fourth, it shook With his dread entry.

One scene I could not fail to introduce to him--the shipwreck of Ulysses, in the fifth book of the _Odysseis_, and I had the reward of one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:--

Then forth he came, his both knees falt'ring, both His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.

_The sea had soak'd his heart through_; all his veins His toils had rack'd t'a labouring woman's pains.

Dead-weary was he.

On an after-occasion I showed him the couplet, in Pope's translation, upon the same pa.s.sage:--

From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran, And _lost in la.s.situde lay all the man_. (!!!)

Chapman supplied us with many an after-treat; but it was in the teeming wonderment of this his first introduction, that, when I came down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no other enclosure than his famous sonnet, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_. We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring, yet he contrived that I should receive the poem from a distance of, may be, two miles by ten o'clock.

The whole of the above is a typical case of what I have called the telescoping action of memory. Recollections not of one, but of many, Homer readings are here compressed into a couple of paragraphs. They will have been readings carried on at intervals through the autumn and winter of 1816-17: an inspiring addition to the other intellectual gains and pleasures which fell to Keats's lot during those months. There is no reason to doubt the exactness of Clarke's account of the first night the friends spent together over Chapman and its result in the shape of the sonnet which lay on his table the next morning. His error is in remembering these circ.u.mstances as having happened when he and Keats first foregathered in London in the autumn of 1815, whereas Keats's positive evidence above quoted shows that they did not really happen until a year later, after his return from his summer holiday in 1816.[7]

Before printing the Chapman sonnet, Leigh Hunt had the satisfaction of hearing his own opinion of it and of some other ma.n.u.script poems of Keats confirmed by good judges. I quote his words for the sake of the excellent concluding phrase. 'Not long afterwards, having the pleasure of entertaining at dinner Mr G.o.dwin, Mr Hazlitt, and Mr Basil Montague, I showed them the verses of my young friend, and they were p.r.o.nounced to be as extraordinary as I thought them. One of them was that n.o.ble sonnet on first reading Chapman's _Homer_, which terminates with so energetic a calmness, and which completely announced the new poet taking possession.' But by this time Keats had become an established intimate in the Leigh Hunt household, and was constantly backwards and forwards between London and the Hampstead cottage.

This intimacy was really the opening of a new chapter both in his intellectual and social life. At first it was a source of unmixed encouragement and pleasure, but seeing that it carried with it in the sequel disadvantages and penalties which gravely affected Keats's career, it is necessary that we should fix clearly in our mind Hunt's previous history and the place held by him in the literary and political life of the time. He was Keats's senior by eleven years: the son of an eloquent and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher, sprung from a family long settled in Barbadoes, who having married a lady from Philadelphia had migrated to England and exercised his vocation in the northern suburbs of London. Brought up at Christ's Hospital about a dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, Leigh Hunt gained at sixteen a measure of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile poems which gave evidence of great fluency and, for a boy, of wide and eager reading. A few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being then a clerk in the War Office: an occupation which he abandoned at twenty-four (in 1808) in order to take part in the conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper, then just founded by his brother John Hunt. For nearly five years the brothers Hunt, as manager and editor of that journal, helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of tense grapple with the Corsican ogre abroad and stiff re-action and repression at home, with a dexterous brisk audacity and an unflinching sincerity of conviction. So far they had escaped the usual penalty of such courage. Several prosecutions directed against them failed, but at last, late in 1812, they were caught tripping. To go as far as was safely possible in satire of the follies and vices of the Prince Regent was a tempting exercise to the reforming spirits of the time. Provoked by the grovelling excesses of some of the Prince's flatterers, the _Examiner_ at last broke bounds and denounced him as 'a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the grat.i.tude of his country or the respect of posterity.' This attack followed within a few weeks of another almost as stinging contributed anonymously by Charles Lamb. Under the circ.u.mstances the result of a prosecution could not be doubtful: and the two Hunts were condemned to a fine of 500 each and two years imprisonment in separate jails. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with cheerful fort.i.tude, suffering severely in health but flagging little in spirits or industry. He decorated his apartment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol with a rose-trellis paper and a ceiling to imitate a summer sky, so that it looked, said Charles Lamb, like a room in a fairy tale, and spent money which he had not got in converting its backyard into a garden of shrubs and flowers.

Very early in life Hunt had been received into a family called Kent at the instance of an elder daughter who greatly admired him. Not long afterwards he engaged himself to her younger sister, then almost a child, and married her soon after the _Examiner_ was started. She proved a prolific, thriftless woman and ill housekeeper, but through all the rubs and pinches of his after years he was ever an affectionate husband and father. His wife was allowed to be with him in prison, and there they received the visits of many friends old and new. Liberal statesmen, philosophers, and writers, including characters so divers as Bentham and Byron, Brougham and Hazlitt, James Mill and Miss Edgeworth, Tom Moore and Wilkie the painter, pressed to offer this victim of political persecution their sympathy and society. Charles Lamb and his sister were the most constant of all his visitors. Tom Moore, who both before and after the sentence on the brothers Hunt managed in his series of verse skits, _The Twopenny Post Bag_, to go on playing with impunity the game of Prince-Regent-baiting,--the light-hearted Tom Moore joined in deepest earnest the chorus of sympathy with the prisoners:--

Yet go--for thoughts as blessed as the air Of Spring or Summer flowers await you there: Thoughts such as He, who feasts his courtly crew In rich conservatories, _never_ knew; Pure self-esteem--the smiles that light within-- The Zeal, whose circling charities begin With the few lov'd ones Heaven has plac'd it near, And spread, till all Mankind are in its sphere; The Pride, that suffers without vaunt or plea, And the fresh Spirit, that can warble free, Through prison-bars, its hymn to Liberty!

Among ardent young men who brought their tributes was Cowden Clarke with a basket of fruit and flowers from his father's garden; and this was followed up by a weekly offering in the same kind. 'Libertas, the loved Libertas,' was the name found for Hunt by such fond young spirits and adopted by Keats.

During his captivity Hunt was allowed the full use of his library, and his chief reading was in the fifty volumes of the _Parnaso Italiano_. As a result he acquired and retained for life a really wide and familiar knowledge of Italian poetry. He continued to edit the _Examiner_ from prison and occupied himself moreover with three small volumes in verse.

One of these was _The Descent of Liberty, A Mask_, celebrating the downfall of Napoleon in 1814, and embodying gracefully enough the Liberal's hope against hope that with that catastrophe there might return to Europe not only peace but freedom. (We have told already how Keats at Edmonton tried his boyish hand at a sonnet on the same occasion and to the same purpose.) Another of his prison tasks was the writing of his poem, _The Story of Rimini_; a third, the recasting and annotating of his _Feast of the Poets_, an airily presumptuous trifle in verse first printed two years before and modelled on the precedent of several rimed skits of the Caroline age such as Suckling's _Session of the Poets_ and the Duke of Buckinghamshire's _Election of a Poet Laureate_.

It represented Apollo as convoking the contemporary British poets, or pretenders to the poetical t.i.tle, to a session, or rather to a supper.

Some of those who present themselves the G.o.d rejects with scorn, others he cordially welcomes, others he admits with reserve and admonition. In revising this skit while he was in prison, Hunt modified some of his earlier verdicts, but in the main he let them stand. Moore and Campbell fare the best; Southey and Scott are accepted but with reproof; Coleridge and Wordsworth admonished (but Wordsworth in much more lenient terms than in the first edition) and dismissed. Hunt's notes are of still living interest as setting forth, at that pregnant moment of our literary history, the considered judgments of a kindly and accomplished critic on his contemporaries. Seen at a distance of a hundred years they look short-sighted enough, as almost all contemporary judgments must, and are coloured as a matter of course with party feeling, though not so grossly as was the habit of the hour. Since Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth had been transformed, first by the Terror and then by the aggressions of Bonaparte, from ardent revolutionary idealists into vehement partisans of reaction both at home and abroad, the bitterness of the 'Lost Leader' feeling, common to all liberals, accounts for much of Hunt's disparagement of them; while besides sharing the prejudice of his party in general against Scott as a known high Tory and friend to kings, he had ignorantly and peevishly conceived a special grudge against that great generous and chivalrous spirit on account of his lenient handling of Charles II in his _Life of Dryden_. Hunt in his new notes fully acknowledged the genius, while he condemned the defection and also what he thought the poetical perversities, of Wordsworth; but his treatment of Scott, as little more than a mere money-making manufacturer of pinchbeck northern lays in a sham antique ballad dialect, is idly flippant and patronizing. The point is of importance in Keats's history, for hence, as we shall see in the sequel, came probably a part at least of the peculiar and as it might seem paradoxical rancour with which the genial Hunt, and Keats as his friend and supposed follower, were by-and-by to be persecuted in Blackwood.

When Hunt's ordeal was over in the first days of February 1815, he issued from it a b.u.t.t for savage and vindictive obloquy to the reactionary half of the lettered world, but little less than a hero and martyr to the reforming half. He retained the private friendship of many of those who had sought him out from public sympathy. Tall, straight, slender, charmingly courteous and vivacious, with glossy black hair, bright jet-black eyes, full, relishing nether lip, and 'nose of taste,'

Leigh Hunt was one of the most winning of companions, full of kindly smiles and jests, of reading, gaiety, and ideas, with an infinity of pleasant things to say of his own and a beautiful caressing voice to say them in, yet the most sympathetic and deferential of listeners. To the misfortune of himself and his friends, he had no notion of even attempting to balance income and expenditure, and was perfectly light-hearted in the matter of money obligations, which he shrank neither from receiving nor conferring,--only circ.u.mstances made him almost invariably a receiver. But men of sterner fibre and better able to order their affairs have often been much more ready than he was to sacrifice conviction to advantage, and his friends found more to admire in his smiling steadfastness under obloquy and persecution than to blame in his chronic incapacity to pay his way. Hardly anyone had warmer well-wishers or requited them, so far as the depth of his nature went, with truer loyalty and kindness. His industry as a writer was incessant, hardly less than that of Southey himself. The t.i.tles he gave to the several journals he conducted, _The Examiner_, _The Reflector_, _The Indicator_, define accurately enough his true vocation as a guide to the pleasures of literature. His manner in criticism has at its best an easy penetration, and flowing un.o.btrusive felicity, most remote from those faults to which De Quincey and even the ill.u.s.trious Coleridge, with their more philosophic powers and method, were subject, the faults of roundaboutness and over-laboured profundity.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. II

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY MAYER AFTER J. HAYTER]

The weakness of Leigh Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. 'Matchless,'

according to Lamb's well-known phrase, 'as a fire-side companion,' it was his misfortune to carry too much of a fire-side or parlour tone, and sometimes, it must be owned, a very second-rate parlour tone, into literature. He could not walk by the advice of Polonius, and in aiming at the familiar was apt, rarely in prose but sadly often in verse, to slip into an underbred strain of airy and genteel vulgarity, hard to reconcile with what we are told of his acceptable social qualities in real life.[8] He was as enthusiastic a student of our sixteenth and seventeenth century literature as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the characteristic excellencies of what he always persists in calling the 'French school,' the school of polished artifice and convention which came in after Dryden and swore by the precepts of Boileau, he was not less bent on seeing it overthrown.

In English poetry his predilection was for the older writers from Chaucer to Dryden, and above all others for Spenser: in Italian for Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and the later writers of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style. He insisted that such writers were much better models for English poets to follow than the French, and fought as hard as anyone for the return of English poetry from the urbane conventions of the eighteenth century to the paths of nature and of freedom. But he had his own conception of the manner in which this return should be effected. He did not admit that Wordsworth with his rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. 'It was his intention,' he wrote in prison, 'by the beginning of next year to bring out a piece of some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate harmony of the English heroic.' The result of this intention was the _Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and published a year after his release, in February or March, 1816. 'With the endeavour,' so he repeated himself in the preface, 'to recur to a freer spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater importance,--that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language.'

We shall have to consider Hunt's effort to revive the old freedom of the English heroic metre when we come to the study of Keats's first volume, written much under Hunt's influence. As to his success with his 'ideas of what is natural in style,' and his free and idiomatic--or as he elsewhere says 'unaffected, contemporaneous'--cast of language to supersede the styles alike of Pope and Wordsworth, let us take a sample of _Rimini_ at its best and worst. Relating the gradual obsession of Paolo's thoughts by the charm of his sister-in-law,--

And she became companion of his thought; Silence her gentleness before him brought, Society her sense, reading her books, Music her voice, every sweet thing her looks, Which sometimes seemed, when he sat fixed awhile, To steal beneath his eyes with upward smile; And did he stroll into some lonely place, Under the trees, upon the thick soft gra.s.s, How charming, would he think, to see her here!

How heightened then, and perfect would appear The two divinest things this world has got, A lovely woman in a rural spot!