Life of John Keats Part 9

Oft in this speechless language, glance on glance, When mute the tongue, how voluble the heart!

_Oberon_, c. vi, st. 17.

No utter'd syllable, or woe betide!

But to her heart her heart was voluble.

_The Eve of St Agnes_, st. 23.

[2] March 1816 according to Woodhouse.

[3] _The Prelude_, book v.

[4] See above, p. 68.

[5] Particularly Sonnet XII:--

Voi che portate la sembianza umile, Cogli occhi ba.s.si mostrando dolore.

It would have been easy to suppose that Keats had learnt something of the _Vita Nuova_ through Leigh Hunt: but they were not yet acquainted when he wrote the Leander sonnet, so that the resemblance is most likely accidental.

[6] In the earlier editions this sonnet is headed _On a picture of Leander_. A note of Woodhouse (Houghton MSS., Transcripts III) puts the matter right and gives the date. Which particular Leander gem of Ta.s.sie's Keats had before him it is impossible to tell. The general catalogue of Ta.s.sie's reproductions gives a list of over sixty representing Leander swimming either alone or with Hero looking down at him from her tower. Most of them were not from true antiques but from later imitations.

[7] Here, for instance, are verses of Keats that have often been charged with c.o.c.kneyism and Huntism:--

And revelled in a chat that ceased not When at nightfall among our books we got.

The silence when some rimes are coming out, And when they're come, the very pleasant rout.

Well, but had not Drayton written in his _Epistle to Henry Reynolds_?--

My dearly loved friend how oft have we In winter evenings (meaning to be free) To some well-chosen place used to retire, And there with moderate meat, and wine, and fire, Have past the hour contentedly with chat, Now talked of this and then discoursed of that, Spoke our own verses 'twixt ourselves, if not Other men's lines, which we by chance had got.

And Milton in the _Vacation Exercise_?--

I have some lively thoughts that rove about, And loudly knock to have their pa.s.sage out.

[8] It is to be remembered that in his famous volume of 1820 Keats prints first the poem he had last written, _Lamia_.

[9] So Wordsworth in his famous sonnet:--

This sea that bares its bosom to the moon.

[10] In Lord Houghton's and nearly all editions of Keats, including, I am sorry to say, my own, this phrase has been corrected, quite without cause, into the trite 'ugly cubs.'

CHAPTER V

APRIL-DECEMBER 1817: WORK ON _ENDYMION_

'Poems' fall flat--Reviews by Hunt and others--Change of publishers--New friends: Bailey and Woodhouse--Begins _Endymion_ at Carisbrooke--Moves to Margate--Hazlitt and Southey--Hunt and Haydon--Ambition and self-doubt--Stays at Canterbury--Joins brothers at Hampstead--Dilke and Brown--Visits Bailey at Oxford--Work on _Endymion_--Bailey's testimony--Talk on Wordsworth--Letters from Oxford--To his sister f.a.n.n.y--To Jane and J.H. Reynolds--Return to Hampstead--Friends at loggerheads--Stays at Burford Bridge--Correspondence--Confessions--Speculations--Imagination and truth--Composes various lyrics--'O love me truly'--'In drear-nighted December'--Dryden and Swinburne--_Endymion_ finished--An Autumnal close--Return to Hampstead.

Keats's first volume had been launched, to quote the words of Cowden Clarke, 'amid the cheers and fond antic.i.p.ations of all his circle.

Everyone of us expected (and not unreasonably) that it would create a sensation in the literary world.' The magniloquent Haydon words these expectations after his manner:--'I have read your _Sleep and Poetry_--it is a flash of lightning that will rouse men from their occupations and keep them trembling for the crash of thunder that _will_ follow.'

Sonnets poured in on the occasion, and not from intimates only. I have already quoted (p. 75) one which Reynolds, familiar with the contents of the forthcoming book, wrote a few days before its publication to welcome it and at the same time to congratulate Keats on his sonnet written in Clarke's copy of the _Floure and the Lefe_. Leigh Hunt, always delighted to repay compliment with compliment, replied effusively in kind to the sonnet in which Keats had dedicated the volume to him. Richard Woodhouse, of whom we shall soon hear more but who was as yet a stranger, in the closing lines of a sonnet addressed to Apollo, welcomed Keats as the last born son of that divinity and the herald of his return to lighten the poetic darkness of the land:--

Have these thy glories perish'd? or in scorn Of thankless man hath thy race ceased to quire?

O no! thou hear'st! for lo! the beamed morn Chases our night of song: and, from the lyre Waking long dormant sounds, Keats, thy last born, To the glad realm proclaims the coming of his sire.

Sonnets are not often addressed by publishers to their clients: but one has been found in the handwriting of Charles Ollier, and almost certainly composed by him, expressing admiration for Keats's work. The brothers Ollier, it will be remembered, were Sh.e.l.ley's publishers, and for a while also Leigh Hunt's and Lamb's, and Charles was the poetry-loving and enthusiastic brother of the two, and himself a writer of some accomplishment in prose and verse. But in point of fact, outside the immediate Leigh Hunt circle, the volume made extremely little impression, and the public was as far as possible from being roused from its occupations or made tremble. 'Alas!' continues Cowden Clarke, 'the book might have emerged in Timbuctoo with far stronger chance of fame and appreciation. The whole community as if by compact, seemed determined to know nothing about it.'

Clarke here somewhat exaggerates the facts. Leigh Hunt kept his own review of the volume back for some three months, very likely with the just idea that praise from him might prejudice Keats rather than serve him. At length it appeared, in three numbers of the _Examiner_ for June and July, the first number setting forth the aims and tendencies of the new movement in poetry with a conscious clearness such as to those taking part in a collective, three-parts instinctive effort of the kind comes usually in retrospect only and not in the thick of the struggle.

In the second and third notices Hunt speaks of the old graces of poetry reappearing, warns 'this young writer of genius' against disproportionate detail and a too revolutionary handling of metre, and after quotation winds up by calling the volume 'a little luxuriant heap of

Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream.'

Two at least of the established critical reviews noticed the book at length, Constable's _Scots and Edinburgh Magazine_, and the _Eclectic Review_, the chief organ of lettered nonconformity, owned and edited by the busy dissenting poet and bookseller Josiah Conder. Both criticisms are of the preaching and admonishing kind then almost universally in fashion. The Scottish reviewer recognizes in the new poet a not wholly unsuccessful disciple of Spenser, but warns him against 'the appalling doom which awaits the faults of mannerism or the ambition of a sickly refinement,' and with reference to his a.s.sociation with the person and ideas of Hazlitt and Hunt declares that 'if Mr Keats does not forthwith cast off the uncleanness of this school, he will never make his way to the truest strain of poetry in which, taking him by himself, it appears he might succeed.' The preachment of the _Eclectic_ is still more pompous and superior. There are mild words of praise for some of the sonnets, but none for that on Chapman's Homer. _Sleep and Poetry_, declares the critic, would seem to show of the writer that 'he is indeed far gone, beyond the reach of the efficacy of either praise or censure, in affectation and absurdity. Seriously, however, we regret that a young man of vivid imagination and fine talents should have fallen into so bad hands as to have been flattered into the resolution to publish verses, of which a few years hence he will be glad to escape from the remembrance.'

Notices such as this could not help a new writer to fame or his book to sale. But before they appeared Keats and his brothers, or they for him, had begun to fret at the failure of the volume and to impute it, as authors and their friends will, to some mishandling by the publishers.

George in John's absence wrote to the Olliers taking them to task pretty roundly, and received the often-quoted reply drafted, let us hope, not by the sonneteer but by James Ollier, his business brother, and alleging of the work that--

By far the greater number of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offered to take it back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it. In fact, it was only on Sat.u.r.day last that we were under the mortification of having our own opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a gentleman, who told us he considered it 'no better than a take in.'

Meanwhile Keats had found other publishers ready to take up his next work, and destined to become his staunch and generous friends. These were Messrs Taylor and Hessey of 93 Fleet Street. John Taylor, the chief partner, was a man of high character and considerable attainments, who had come up from Nottinghamshire to open a business in London ten years earlier. He was already noted as an authority on Junius and was to be a little later the editor as well as publisher of the _London Magazine_, and the good friend and frequent entertainer (in the back parlour of the publishing house in Fleet Street) of his most distinguished contributors. How and through whom Keats was introduced to his firm is not quite clear: probably through Benjamin Bailey, a new acquaintance whom we know to have been a friend of Taylor's. Bailey was an Oxford man five years older than Keats. He had been an undergraduate of Trinity and was now staying up at Magdalen Hall to read for orders. He was an ardent student of poetry and general literature as well as of theology, a devout worshipper of Milton, and scarcely less of Wordsworth, with whom he had some personal acquaintance. Of his appet.i.te for books Keats wrote when they had come to know each other well: 'I should not like to be pages in your way; when in a tolerably hungry mood you have no mercy.

Your teeth are the Rock Tarpeian down which you capsize epic poems like mad. I would not for forty shillings be Coleridge's Lays [i.e. _Lay Sermons_] in your way.' Bailey was intimate with John Hamilton Reynolds and his family, and at this time a suitor for the hand of his sister Marianne. In the course of the winter 1816-17 Reynolds had written to him enthusiastically of Keats's poetical promise and personal charm.

When at the beginning of March Keats's volume came out, Bailey was much struck, and on a visit to London called to make the new poet's acquaintance. Though it was not until a few months later that this acquaintance ripened into close friendship, it may well have been Bailey who recommended Keats and Taylor to each other.

Relations of business or friendship with Taylor necessarily involved relations with Richard Woodhouse, a lettered and accomplished young solicitor of twenty-nine who was an intimate friend of Taylor's and at this time apparently the regular reader and adviser to the firm.

Woodhouse was sprung from an old landed stock in Herefordshire, some of whose members were now in the wine-trade (his father, it seems, was owner or part owner of the White Hart at Bath). He had been educated at Eton but not at the university: his extant correspondence, as well as notes and version-books in his hand, show him to have been a good linguist in Spanish and Italian and a man of remarkably fine literary taste and judgment. He afterwards held a high position as a solicitor and was one of the founders of the Law Life Insurance Society.

These three new friendships, with Benjamin Bailey, John Taylor, and Richard Woodhouse, formed during the six weeks between the publication of his book (March 3) and the mid-April following, turned out to be among the most valuable of Keats's life, and were the best immediate results the issue of his first volume brought him. During this interval he and his brothers were lodging at 17 Cheapside, having left their old quarters in the Poultry. Some time in March it was decided, partly on Haydon's urging, that John should for the sake of quiet and self-improvement go and spend some time by himself in the country, and try to get to work upon his great meditated _Endymion_ poem. He writes as much to Reynolds, concluding with an adaptation from Falstaff expressive of anxiety for the health of some of those dear to him--probably his brother Tom and James Rice:--

My brothers are anxious that I should go by myself into the country--they have always been extremely fond of me, and now that Haydon has pointed out how necessary it is that I should be alone to improve myself, they give up the temporary pleasure of living with me continually for a great good which I hope will follow. So I shall soon be out of Town. You must soon bring all your present troubles to a close, and so must I, but we must, like the Fox, prepare for a fresh swarm of flies. Banish money--Banish sofas--Banish Wine--Banish Music; but right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health--Banish Health and banish all the world.

On the 14th of April Keats took the night mail for Southampton, whence he writes next day a lively letter to his brothers. By the 17th, having looked at Shanklin and decided against it, he was installed in a lodging at Carisbrooke. Writing to Reynolds he gives the reasons for his choice, mentioning at the same time that he is feeling rather nervous from want of sleep, and enclosing the admirable sonnet _On the Sea_ which he has just composed--

It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate sh.o.r.es, etc.--

It was the intense haunting of the lines in the scene on Dover Cliff in _King Lear_ beginning 'Do you not hear the sea,' which moved him, he says, to this effort. He was reading and re-reading his Shakespeare with pa.s.sion, and phrases from the plays come up continually in his letters, not only, as in the following extract, in the form of set quotations, but currently, as though they were part of his own mind and being.

Having found in the lodging-house pa.s.sage an engraved head of Shakespeare which pleased him and hung it up in his room (his landlady afterwards made him a present of it), he bethinks him of the approaching anniversary, April 23:--

I'll tell you what--on the 23d was Shakespeare born. Now if I should receive a letter from you, and another from my Brothers on that day 'twould be a parlous good thing. Whenever you write say a word or two on some Pa.s.sage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you, which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the same Play forty times--for instance, the following from the Tempest never struck me so forcibly as at present,

Urchins _Shall, for the vast of night that they may work_, All exercise on thee--

How can I help bringing to your mind the line--