Life of John Keats Part 28

Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism, A heresy and schism, Foisted into the canon law of love;-- No,--wine is only sweet to happy men; More dismal cares Seize on me unawares,-- Where shall I learn to get my peace again?

To banish thoughts of that most hateful land, Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life; That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour, Ever from their sordid urns unto the sh.o.r.e, Unown'd of any weedy-haired G.o.ds, Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods, Ic'd in the great lakes, to afflict mankind; Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbag'd meads Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds; There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song, And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

With that image of the sea-bird winging untroubled its chosen way over the waves, and as free as they, the poet sheds a real light on his own psychology in happier days, while the later lines figure direfully the obsession that now seems to make him think of even his friendships as wrecked and darkened, and of love as a ghastly error in nature, no joy but a scourge that blights and devastates. 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 at the present ebb-tide of his fortune. 'However selfishly I 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, he was not able to disguise his plight from his affectionate companion Brown, though he shrank from speaking of its causes. Looking back upon the time after ten years Brown records the impression it left upon him thus:--

It was evident from the letters he had sent me, even in his self-deceived a.s.surance that he was 'as far from being unhappy as possible,' that he was unhappy. I quickly perceived 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.

Brown then tells of his morning and evening work on _The Cap and Bells_ and the revised _Hyperion_ and, in the vague terms I have quoted, of its cessation. And then, seeming to a.s.sign to money troubles an even greater part than they really bore in causing Keats's distress of mind, Brown goes on--

He could not resume his employment, and he became dreadfully unhappy.

His hopes of fame, and other more tender hopes were blighted. His patrimony, though much consumed in a profession he was compelled to relinquish, might have upheld him through the storm, had he not imprudently lost a part of it in generous loans.... He possessed the n.o.ble virtues of friendship and generosity to excess; and they, in this world, may chance to spoil a man of independent feeling, till he is dest.i.tute. Even the 'immediate cash,' of which he spoke in the extracts I have given from his letters, was lent, with no hope of its speedy repayment, and he was left worse than pennyless. 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.

Where Brown hints of his being 'careless of health,' Haydon, referring apparently to this time of his life in particular, declares roundly and crudely as follows:--

Unable to bear the sneers of ignorance or the attacks of envy, not having strength of mind enough to buckle himself together like a porcupine, and present nothing but his p.r.i.c.kles to his enemies, he began to despond, and flew to dissipation as a relief, which after a temporary elevation of spirits plunged him into deeper despondency than ever. For six weeks he was scarcely sober, and--to show what a man does to gratify his appet.i.tes, when once they get the better of him--once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the 'delicious coldness of claret in all its glory,'--his own expression.

If Keats really told Haydon that silly, and I should suppose impossible, story about the claret and cayenne it was probably only a piece of such 'rhodomontade' as his friends describe, invented on the spur of the moment to scandalize Haydon or under the provocation of one of his preachments. That he may at moments during these unhappy months have sought relief in dissipation of one kind or another, as Brown tells us he did in drug-taking, is likely: that he was now or at any time habitually given to drink is disproved by the explicit testimony of all his friends as well as of Brown, his closest intimate. In his few letters of the time his secret misery is betrayed only by a single phrase. Early in December he writes arranging to go with Severn to see the picture with which Severn was competing for, and eventually won, the annual gold medal of the Academy for historical painting. The subject was 'The Cave of Despair' from Spenser. Keats in making the appointment adds parenthetically from his troubled heart, 'you had best put me into your Cave of Despair.' A little later we hear of him flinging out in a fit of angered loyalty from a company of elder artists, Hilton, De Wint and others, where the deserts of the winner were disparaged and his success put down to favouritism.

It would seem that as late as November 17th he was still, or had quite lately been, going on with _The Cap and Bells_. He writes on that date to Taylor depreciating what he has recently been about and indicating in what direction his thoughts, when he could bend them seriously upon work at all, were inclined to turn:--

As the marvellous is the most enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers I have been endeavouring to persuade myself to untether Fancy and to let her manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all. Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men and women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto.

The little dramatic skill I may as yet have however badly it might show in a Drama would I think be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes eve throughout a poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such Poems, if G.o.d should spare me, written in the course of the next six years, would be a famous gradus ad Parna.s.sum altissimum. I mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine Plays--my greatest ambition--when I do feel ambitious. I am sorry to say that is very seldom. The subject we have once or twice talked of appears a promising one, The Earl of Leicester's history. I am this morning reading Holingshed's _Elizabeth_.

It does not seem clear whether his idea about Leicester was to use the subject for a narrative poem or for a play. Scott's _Kenilworth_, be it remembered, had not yet been written.

In December he writes to his sister f.a.n.n.y of the trouble his throat keeps giving him or threatening him with on exertion or cold, and says that he has been ordering a thick great coat and thick shoes on the advice of his doctor. He also mentions that he has begun to prepare a volume of poems to come out in the spring, and that he is touching up his and Brown's tragedy in order to brighten its interest. It had been accepted, he tells her, by Drury Lane, but only with the promise of coming out next season, and as that is not soon enough they intend either to insist on its being brought out this season or else to transfer it to Covent Gardens. He has been anxiously expecting, and has just now received, news of George; and has promised to dine with Mrs Dilke in London on Christmas day. Whether he was able to keep this engagement we do not learn; but Brown at any rate was there, and between him and Dilke there arose a challenge on which Keats among others was called to adjudicate. The conversation, writes Mrs Dilke, 'turned on fairy tales--Brown's forte--Dilke not liking them. Brown said he was sure he could beat Dilke, and to let him try they betted a beefsteak supper, and an allotted time was given. They had been read by the persons fixed on--Keats, Reynolds, Rice, and Taylor--and the wager was decided the night before last in favour of Dilke. Next Sat.u.r.day night the supper is to be given,--Beefsteaks and punch--the food of the "c.o.c.kney School."'

So life went on for the friends, on the surface, pretty much as usual, into the new year (1820). Early in January George Keats came for a short visit to England to try and advance his affairs and get possession of more capital for his business. He seems not to have realized at all fully the true state of his brother's health or heart. He noticed, indeed, a change, and looking back on the time some years afterwards writes, 'he was not the same being; although his reception of me was as warm as heart could wish, he did not speak with former openness and unreserve, he had lost the reviving custom of venting his griefs.'

George was probably too full of his own affairs to enquire very closely into John's, or he would never have allowed John, as he did, to strip himself practically bare of future means of subsistence in fulfilment of the brotherly promises of help conveyed, as we have seen, in his letter from Winchester the previous September. 'It was not fair of him, was it?' John is recorded to have said a little later from his sick-bed, referring to George's action in so taking him at his word; and Brown from this circ.u.mstance conceived of George a bitter bad opinion which nothing afterwards would shake. Nevertheless there is ample evidence of George's honourable and affectionate character, and it seems clear that in striving for commercial success he had his brother's ultimate benefit in view as much as his own, and that in the meantime he believed he had reason to take for granted the willingness and ability of John's many friends to keep him afloat.

On January 13th, a week after George's arrival, John took up his pen to try and write to his sister-in-law a journal letter in the old chatty affectionate style. If he had the means, he says, he would like to come and pay them a visit in America for a few months. 'I should not think much of the time, or my absence from my books; or I have no right to think, for I am very idle. But then I ought to be diligent, or at least to keep myself within reach of the materials for diligence. Diligence, that I do not mean to say; I should say dreaming over my books, or rather over other people's books.' He gossips about friends and acquaintances, less good-naturedly than usual, as he seems to be aware when he says, 'any third person would think I was addressing myself to a lover of scandal. But we know we do not love scandal, but fun; and if scandal happens to be fun, that is no fault of ours.' He tells how George is making copies of his verses, including the ode to the Nightingale; lets his inward embitterment show through for an instant when he says, 'If you should have a boy, do not christen him John, and persuade George not to let his partiality for me come across: 'tis a bad name, and goes against a man;' describes a dance he has been to at the Dilkes, and among a good deal of rather irritable and wry-mouthed social satire, to which he tries to give a colour of pleasantry and playfulness, strikes into sharp definition with the fewest possible words the characters of some of his friends and acquaintances:--

I know three witty people, all distinct in their excellence--Rice, Reynolds, and Richards. Rice is the wisest, Reynolds the playfullest, Richards the out-o'-the-wayest. The first makes you laugh and think, the second makes you laugh and not think, the third puzzles your head.

I admire the first, I enjoy the second, I stare at the third.... I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see him at all though he were six feet high.--I bear the first, I forbear the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel, the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.

This was written on January 17th. Ten days later George started on his return journey, and John, having forgotten to hand him for delivery at home the budget he had been writing, was obliged to send it after him by post. A week later again, on February 3rd, came the crash towards which, as we can now see, Keats's physical const.i.tution had been hastening ever since the over exertion of his Scottish tour twenty months before. The weather had been very variable, almost sultry in mid-January, then bitter cold with frost and sleet, then a thaw, whereby Keats was tempted to leave off his greatcoat. Coming from London to Hampstead outside the stage coach on the night of Thursday February 3rd, the chill of the thaw caught him. Everyone knows the words in which Brown relates the sequel:--

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; 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 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 lived for twelve months longer, but it was only, in his own words, a life in death. Before narrating the end, let us pause and consider his work of the two preceding years, 1818 and 1819, on which his fame as a great English poet is chiefly founded.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Local tradition, I am informed, used to identify the house as one called Eglantine Villa, now demolished. The existing 'Keats Crescent'

was so named, not as indicating the special neighbourhood where the poet lodged, but only by way of general commemoration of his sojourn.

[2]

--and now his heart Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength Glories--.

Milton, _Par. Lost_, i. 581.

[3] Morgan MSS.

CHAPTER XIII

WORK OF 1818, 1819.--I. THE ACHIEVEMENTS

Minor achievements--_Bards of Pa.s.sion and of Mirth_--_Fancy_--The tales--_Isabella_--Story and metre--Influence of Chaucer--Apostrophes and invocations--Horror turned to beauty--The digging scene--Its quality--_The Eve of St Agnes_--Variety of sources--Boccaccio's _Filocolo_--Poetic scope and method--Examples--The unrobing scene--The feast of fruits--A rounded close--_Lamia_--Sources: and a comparison--Metre and quality--Beauties and faults--Perplexing moral--The sage denounced: why?--Comments of Leigh Hunt--The odes: _To Psyche_--Sources: Burton and Apuleius--Qualities: A questionable claim--_On Indolence_--_On a Grecian Urn_--Sources: a composite--Spheres of art and life contrasted--Play between the two spheres--The Nightingale ode--_Ode on Melancholy_--A grand close--The last of the odes--_To Autumn_.

The work of Keats's two mature years (if any poet or man in his twenty-third and twenty-fourth years can be called mature) seems to divide itself naturally into two main groups or cla.s.ses. One cla.s.s consists of his finished achievements, things successfully carried through in accordance with his first intention; the other of his fragments and experiments, things begun and broken off either from external causes or because in the execution the poet changed his mind or his inspiration failed to sustain itself. I shall ask the reader to consider the two cla.s.ses separately, the achievements first: not because there may not be even finer work in some of the fragments, but because a thing incomplete, a torso, however splendid in power and promise, cannot be judged on the same terms or with the same approach to finality as a thing of which the whole is before us. One finished thing only, the play of _Otho the Great_, I shall turn over to the second or experimental cla.s.s, seeing that an experiment it essentially was, and one tried under conditions which made it impossible for Keats to be his true self.

The cla.s.s of achievements will include, then, besides a score of sonnets and a few minor pieces of various form, the three completed tales in verse, _Isabella or the Pot of Basil_, _The Eve of St Agnes_, and _Lamia_; with the six odes, _To Psyche_, _On Indolence_ (not published in Keats's lifetime), _On a Grecian Urn_, _To a Nightingale_, _To Melancholy_, and _To Autumn_. Beginning with the minor things,--the sonnets, being mostly occasional and autobiographical, have been sufficiently touched on in our narrative chapters, and so have several of the shorter lyrics, _In drear-nighted December_, _Meg Merrilies_, and _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_. There remains chiefly the batch of pieces in the seven-syllable couplet metre printed in the _Lamia_ volume between the odes _To Psyche_ and _To Autumn_. Two of these, _Lines on the Mermaid Tavern_ and _Robin Hood_, were written, as we have seen, at the beginning of 1818, in the months when Keats was living alone in Well Walk and resting after his labour on _Endymion_. Both are easy, spirited, and intensely English in feeling; both, for all their gay lightness of touch, are marked with that vivid imaginative life in single phrases which almost from the first, amidst all the rawnesses of his youth, stamps Keats for a poet of the great lineage. Already two years earlier, in the valentine 'Hadst thou liv'd in days of old,' he had shown a fair command of this metre, and now we can feel that he has an ear well trained in its cadences by familiarity with the finest early models, from Fletcher (in the _Faithful Shepherdess_) and Ben Jonson (in the masque of _The Satyr_, the songs _To Celia_, and the _Charis_ lyrics) down to _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_.

The other two pieces in the same form, _Bards of Pa.s.sion and of Mirth_ and _Fancy_, date from nearly a year later, when Keats had settled under Brown's roof after Tom's death, and were copied by him for his brother in a letter dated January 2nd 1819. In the _Mermaid Tavern_ lines he had followed in fancy the poet-guests of that hostelry to the Elysian fields and asked them if they found there any finer entertainment than in their old haunt. In _Bards of Pa.s.sion and of Mirth_, which he wrote on a blank page in Dilke's copy of Beaumont and Fletcher, Keats singles out this particular pair of poet-partners to follow beyond the grave, and in a strain somewhat more serious tells of the double lives they lead,--their souls left here on earth in their writings, and themselves--

Seated on Elysian lawns Brows'd by none but Dian's fawns ...

Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine, melodious truth; Philosophic numbers smooth; Tales and golden histories Of heaven and its mysteries.

In the affirmation with which the piece concludes,--

Bards of Pa.s.sion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on Earth!

Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-liv'd in regions new!--

in this affirmation it seems, as Mr Buxton Forman has pointed out, as though Keats were gaily countering the view of Wordsworth in the well-known stanzas where, declaring how the power of Burns survives 'deep in the general heart of men,' he goes on to ask what need has the poet for any other kind of Elysian after-life.[1]

Following an eighteenth-century practice, Keats calls this set of heptasyllabics an ode, a form which in strictness it no way resembles. A higher place is taken in his work by the longest poem he sends his brother in the same metre, _Fancy_. He calls it a rondeau, again rather at random; but he had already called the Bacchus lyric in _Endymion_ a roundelay, and seems to have thought that the name might apply to any set of verses returning upon itself at the end with a repet.i.tion of its beginning. In the present case he both opens and closes his poem with the same idea as has been condensed by a later writer in the two-line refrain--

But every poet, born to stray, Still feeds upon the far-away.

The opening lines run,--

Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home: At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth, Like to bubbles when rain pelteth; Then let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind's cage-door, She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

O sweet Fancy! let her loose; Summer's joys are spoilt by use, And the enjoying of the Spring Fades as does its blossoming; Autumn's red-lipp'd fruitage too, Blushing through the mist and dew, Cloys with tasting: What do then?

The answer is that the thing to do is to sit by the chimney corner while Fancy goes ranging abroad to find and bring home a harvest of incompatible and contradictory delights; and after the evocation of a number of such the poem comes round at the end to a slightly altered repet.i.tion of its opening couplet,--

Let the winged Fancy roam Pleasure never is at home.

I like to think that Keats may have drawn his impulse to writing this poem from the fine pa.s.sage in Fuller's _Holy State_ quoted by Lamb in his brief 'Specimens' of that author[2]:--

_Fancy._--It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul ... it digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without wings, builds without charges, fights without bloodshed; in a moment striding from the centre to the circ.u.mference of the world; by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating things in an instant; and things divorced in Nature are married in Fancy as in a lawless place.

At any rate Keats's poem, in its best and central part, is a delightful embroidery on the ideas here expressed. The notion, or vision, of a lawless place where all manner of things divorced in nature abide together and happily jostle, was one that often haunted him, as witness his verse-epistle to Reynolds from Teignmouth, the fragment he calls _The Castle Builder_, and again the piece beginning 'Welcome joy and welcome sorrow,' to which there has been posthumously given the t.i.tle _A Song of Opposites_. The lines evoking such a vision in this poem, _Fancy_, are almost his happiest in his lighter vein, and are written in the true Elizabethan tradition: the predominant influence in the handling of the measure being, to my ear, that of Ben Jonson, who is wont to give it a certain weight and slowness of movement by the free use of long syllables in the unaccented places; even so Keats, in the pa.s.sage quoted above, puts in such places words like 'sweet,' 'rain,'

'still,' 'cage,' 'dart,' 'lipp'd.'