Chapter VIII

I must next proceed to offer some account of Keats's person, character, and turn of mind.

As I have already said, Keats was a very small man, barely more than five feet in height. He was called "Little Keats" by his surgical fellow-students. Archdeacon Bailey has left a good description of him in brief:--

"There was in the character of his countenance the femineity
which Coleridge thought to be the mental constitution of true
genius. His hair was beautiful, and, if you placed your hand upon
his head, the curls fell round it like a rich plumage. I do not
particularly remember the thickness of the upper lip so generally
described; but the mouth was too wide, and out of harmony with
the rest of his face, which had a peculiar sweetness of
expression, with a character of mature thought, and an almost
painful sense of suffering."

Leigh Hunt should also be heard:--

"His lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper, but
neat and well-turned. His shoulders were very broad for his
size. He had a face in which energy and sensibility were
remarkably mixed up--an eager power checked and made impatient by
ill-health. Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately
alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth,
which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. His
face was rather long than otherwise. The upper lip projected a
little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the
eyes mellow and glowing--large, dark, and sensitive. At the
recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought, they would
suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled. In this there was
ill-health as well as imagination, for he did not like these
betrayals of emotion; and he had great personal as well as moral
courage. His hair, of a brown colour, was fine, and hung in
natural ringlets. The head was a puzzle for the phrenologists,
being remarkably small in the skull; a singularity which he had
in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on.
Keats was sensible of the disproportion above noticed between his
upper and lower extremities; and he would look at his hand, which
was faded, and swollen in the veins, and say it was the hand of a
man of fifty."

Cowden Clarke confirms Hunt in stating that Keats's hair was brown, and he assigns the same colour, or dark hazel, to his eyes: confuting the "auburn" and "blue" of which Mrs. Procter had spoken. It is rather remarkable that, while Hunt speaks of the projection of the _upper_ lip--a detail which is fully verified in a charcoal drawing by Severn--Lord Houghton observes upon "the undue prominence of the _lower_ lip," which point I cannot trace clearly in any one of the portraits. Keats himself, in one of his love-letters (August 1819), says, "I do not think myself a fright." According to Clarke, John Keats was the only one of the family who resembled the father in person and feature, while the other three resembled the mother. George Keats does not wholly coincide in this, for he says, "My mother resembled John very much in the face;" at the same time he would not have been qualified to deny a likeness to the father, of whom he remembered nothing except that he had dark hair. The lady who saw Keats's hair and eyes of the wrong colour saw at any rate his face to some effect, having left it recorded thus: "His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight." In a like spirit, Haydon speaks of Keats as having "an eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." His voice was deep and grave.

Let us now turn to the portraits, which are as numerous and as good as could fairly be expected under the circumstances.

The earliest in date, and certainly one of the best from an art point of view, is a sketch in profile done by Haydon preparatory to introducing Keats's head into the picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. The sketch dates in November 1816, just after Keats had come of age. The picture is in Philadelphia, and I cannot speak of the head as it appears there. In the sketch we see abundant wavy hair; a forehead and nose sloping forward to the nasal tip in a nearly uniform curve; a dark, set, speaking eye; a mouth tolerably well moulded, the upper lip being fully long enough, and noticeably overhanging the lower lip, upon which the chin--large, full, and rounded--closely impinges. The whole face partakes of the Raphaelesque cast of physiognomy. At some time, which may have been the autumn of 1817, some one, most probably Haydon, took a mask of the face of Keats. In respect of actual form, this is necessarily the final test of what the poet was like--but masks are often only partially true to the _impression_ of a face. This mask confirms Haydon's sketch markedly; allowing only for the points that Haydon has rather emphasized the length of the nose, and attenuated (so far as one can judge from a profile) its thickness, and has given very much more of the overhanging of the upper lip--but this last would, by the very conditions of mask-taking, be there reduced to a minimum. On the whole we may say that, after considering reciprocally Haydon's sketch and the mask, we know very adequately what Keats's face was--he had ample reason for acquitting himself of being "a fright." We come still closer to a firm conclusion upon taking into account, along with these two records, two of the portraits left to us by Severn. One is a miniature, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819, and which we may surmise to have been painted in that year, or late in 1818: the well-known likeness which represents Keats in three-quarters face, looking earnestly forwards, and resting his chin upon his left hand. Here the eyes are larger than in Haydon's sketch, and the upper lip shorter, while the forehead seems straighter; but, as to those matters of lip and forehead, a profile tells the plainer tale. The whole aspect of the face is not greatly unlike Byron's. There is also the earlier charcoal drawing by Severn, the best of all for enabling us to judge of the beautiful rippling long hair; it is a profile, and extremely like Haydon's profile, except for the greater straightness of the forehead, and the decided smallness of the chin, points on which the mask shows conclusively that Haydon was in the right. Most touching of all as a reminiscence is the Indian-ink drawing which Severn made of his dying friend on "28 Jan^y. 1821, 3 o'clock morn^g.," as he lay asleep, with the death-damp on his dark hair. It exhibits the attenuation of disease, but without absolute painfulness, and produces, fully as much as any of the other portraits, the impression of a fine and distinguished mould of face. Severn left yet other likenesses of Keats--posthumous, and of inferior interest. There is moreover a chalk drawing by the painter Hilton, who used to meet Keats at the house of the publisher Mr. Taylor. It has an artificial air, and conveys a notion of the general character of the face different from the other records, but may assist us towards estimating what Keats was like about, or very soon before, the commencement of his fatal illness. Lastly, though the list of extant portraits is not even thus exhausted, I mention the medallion by Girometti, which is to all appearance a posthumous performance. Its lines correspond pretty well with the profile sketch by Haydon, while in character it assimilates more to Hilton's drawing. To me it seems of very little importance as a document, but Hamilton Reynolds thought it the best likeness of all. Mrs. Llanos was in favour of the mask; Mr. Cowden Clarke, of the crayon drawing by Severn--which, indeed, conveys a bright impression of eager, youthful impulsiveness.

The character of Keats appears to me not a very easy one to expound. To begin with, it stands to reason that a man who died at the age of twenty-five can only have half evolved and evinced himself; there must have been a great deal which time and trial, had these been granted, would have developed, but which untimely fate left to conjecture. We are thus compelled to judge of an apprentice in the severe school of life as if he had gone through its full course; many things about him may, in their real nature, have been fleeting and tentative, which to us pass for final and established. This difficulty has to be allowed for, but cannot be got over; the only Keats with whom we have to deal is the Keats who had not completed his twenty-sixth year. For him, as for other youths, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had budded apace; the fruit remained for ever unmatured. Another gravely deflecting force in our estimation of the character of Keats consists in the fact that what we really care for in him is his poetry. We admire his poetry, and condole his inequitable treatment, and his hard and premature fate, and are disposed to see his life in the light of his verse and his sufferings. Hence arises a facile and perhaps vapid enthusiasm, with an inclination to praise through thick and thin, or to ignore such points as may not be susceptible of praise. The sympathetic biographer is a very pleasant fellow; but the truthful biographer also has something to say for himself in the long run. I aspire to the part of the truthful biographer, duly sympathetic.

We have already seen that Keats in early childhood was vehement and ungovernable. His sensibility displayed itself in the strongest contrasts, and he would be convulsed with laughter or with tears, rapidly interchanged. At school his skill in bodily exercises, and his marked generosity of spirit, made him very popular--his comrades surmising that he would turn out superior in some active career, such as soldiering. To be rated as a good boy was not his ambition; but, as previously stated, he settled down into a very attentive scholar. Later on, his friend Bailey liked "the simplicity of his character," and his winning affectionate manner. "Simplicity" means, I suppose, frankness or straightforwardness; for I cannot see that Keats's character was at any time particularly simple--I should rather say that it was complex and many-sided.

The one great craving of Keats, before the love for Miss Brawne engrossed him, was the desire to become an excellent poet; to do great things in poesy, and leave a name among the immortals. At times he was conscious of some presumption in this craving; but mostly it seems to have held such plenary possession of him that the question of presumption or otherwise hardly arose. Whether he felt very strongly upon any matters of intellectual or general concern other than poetic ones may admit of some doubt. In Book II. of "Endymion" he openly proclaims that poetic love-making is the one thing needful to the susceptible mind; the Athenian admiral and his auspicious owl, the Indian expeditions of Alexander, Ulysses and the Cyclops, the death-day of empires, are as nothing to Juliet's passion, Hero's tears, Imogen's swoon, and Pastorella in the bandits' den. He does indeed, in one of his letters (April 1818), aver "I would jump down AEtna for any great public good"; but it may perhaps be permissible to think that he would at all events have postponed the Empedoclean feat until he had written and ensured the publishing of some poem upon which he could be content to stake his claim to permanent poetic renown. His tension of thought was great. In a letter which he addressed in May 1817 to Leigh Hunt there is a little passage which may be worth quoting here, along with Mr. Dilke's comment upon it:

"I went to the Isle of Wight. Thought so much about poetry so
long together that I could not get to sleep at night; and
moreover, I know not how it was, I could not get wholesome food.
By this means, in a week or so, I became not over-capable in my
upper stories, and set off pell-mell for Margate, at least a
hundred and fifty miles, because forsooth I fancied that I should
like my old lodging here, and could continue to do without trees.
Another thing, I was too much in solitude, and consequently was
obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only
resource."

This passage Mr. Dilke considered "an exact picture of the man's mind and character," adding: "He could at any time have 'thought himself out,' mind and body. Thought was intense with him, and seemed at times to assume a reality that influenced his conduct, and, I have no doubt, helped to wear him out."

Whether Keats should be regarded as a young man tolerably regular in his mode of life, or manifestly tending to the irregular, is a question not entirely clear. We have seen something of a sexual misadventure in Oxford, and of six weeks of hard drinking, attested by Haydon; and it should be added that two or three of Keats's minor poems have a certain unmistakable twang of erotic laxity. Lord Houghton thought that in the winter of 1817-18 the poet had indulged somewhat "in that dissipation which is the natural outlet for the young energies of ardent temperaments;" but he held that it all amounted to no more than "a little too much rollicking" (Keats's own phrase), and he would not allow that either drinking or gaming had proceeded to any serious extent, "for, in his letters to his brothers, he speaks of having drunk too much as a rare piece of joviality, and of having won L10 at cards as a great hit." Medical students, it may be added, are not, as a rule, conspicuous for mortifying the flesh; Keats, however, according to Mr. Stephens, did not indulge in any vice during his term of studentship. He was eminently open, as his writings evidence, to impressions of enjoyment; and one may not unnaturally suppose that the joys of sense numbered him, no less than the average of young men, among their votaries--not indeed among their slaves. He had not, I think, any taste for those "manly recreations" which consist chiefly in making the lower animals uncomfortable, or in putting a quietus to their comforts and discomforts along with their lives. I only observe one occasion on which he went out with a gun. He then (towards the close of 1818) accompanied Mr. Dilke in shooting on Hampstead Heath, and his trophy was a solitary tomtit.

As to strength or stability of character, it is rather amusing to find Keats picking a hole in Haydon, while Haydon could probe a joint in the armour of Keats. In November 1817 Haydon had been playing rather fast and loose (so at least it seemed to Keats and to his friend Bailey) with a pictorial aspirant named Cripps, and Keats wrote to Bailey in the following terms:

"To a man of your nature such a letter as Haydon's must have been
extremely cutting.... As soon as I had known Haydon three days, I
had got enough of his character not to have been surprised at
such a letter as he has hurt you with. Nor, when I knew it, was
it a principle with me to drop his acquaintance, although with
you it would have been an imperious feeling.... I must say one
thing that has pressed upon me lately, and increased my humility
and capability of submission, and that is this truth: _Men of
genius_ are great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on a
mass of neutral intellect; but they _have not any individuality,
any determined character_."

The following also, from a letter of January 1818 to the same correspondent, relates partly to Haydon:

"The sure way, Bailey, is first to know a man's faults, and then
be passive. If after that he insensibly draws you towards him,
then you have no power to break the link."

Haydon's verdict upon Keats is no doubt extremely important. I give here the whole entry in his diary, 29th of March 1821, omitting only two passages which have been already extracted in their more essential context:--

"Keats, too, is gone! He died at Rome, the 23rd February, aged
twenty-five. A genius more purely poetical never existed. In
fireside conversation he was weak and inconsistent, but he was in
his glory in the fields. The humming of a bee, the sight of a
flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature
tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheeks glowed, his mouth
quivered. 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 was haughty, and
had a fierce hatred of rank [this corresponds with Hunt's remark,
that Keats looked upon a man of birth as his natural enemy], but
he had a kind, gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune
with any man who wanted it. His classical knowledge was
inconsiderable, but he could feel the beauties of the classical
writers. He had an exquisite sense of humour, and too refined a
notion of female purity to bear the little sweet arts of love
with patience. _He had no decision of character_, and, having no
object upon which to direct his great powers, was at the mercy of
every pretty theory Hunt's ingenuity might start. One day he was
full of an epic poem; the next day epic poems were splendid
impositions on the world. Never for two days did he know his own
intentions.... The death of his brother wounded him deeply, and
it appeared to me that he began to droop from that hour. I was
much attracted to Keats, and he had a fellow-feeling for me. I
was angry because he would not bend his great powers to some
definite object, and always told him so. Latterly he grew
irritated because I would shake my head at his irregularities,
and tell him that he would destroy himself.... Poor dear Keats!
had nature given you firmness as well as fineness of nerve, you
would have been glorious in your maturity as great in your
promise. May your kind and gentle spirit be now mingling with
those of Shakespeare and Milton, before whose minds you have so
often bowed! May you be considered worthy of admission to share
their musings in heaven, as you were fit to comprehend their
imaginations on earth! Dear Keats, hail and adieu for some six or
seven years, and I shall meet you. I have enjoyed Shakespeare
more with Keats than with any other human creature."

In writing to Miss Mitford, Haydon added:

"His ruin was owing to _his want of decision of character, and
power of will_, without which genius is a curse."

It will be seen that Haydon's character of Keats is in some respects very highly laudatory: he speaks of the poet's unselfishness and generosity in terms which may possibly run into excess, but cannot assuredly have fallen short. What he remarks as to "irregularities" seems to show that these had (at least in Haydon's opinion) taken somewhat firm root with Keats, and had not merely come and gone with a spurt, as a relief from feelings of depression or mortification; nor can we altogether forget the statement that, on the night of February 3, 1820, which closed with the first attack of blood-spitting, Keats "returned home in a state of strange physical excitement--it might have appeared to those who did not know him one of fierce intoxication." Physical excitement which looks like fierce intoxication, without being really anything of the sort, can be but a comparatively rare phaenomenon; nor do I suppose that an impending attack of blood-spitting would account for such an appearance. Brown, however, was still more positive than Lord Houghton in excluding the idea of intoxication on that occasion; he even says, "Such a state in him, I knew, was impossible"--an assertion which we have to balance against the general averments of Haydon. Keats's irritation at the remonstrances which Haydon addressed to him upon irregularities, real or assumed, is mentioned by the painter without any seeming knowledge of the fact that Keats had (as shown by his letter of September 20, 1819, already cited, to his brother George) cooled down very greatly in his cordiality to his monitor; and he may perhaps have received the remonstrances in a spirit of stubbornness, or of apparent irritation, more because he was out of humour with Haydon than because he could not confute the allegations, had he been so minded. As to the charge of want of decision of character, want of power of will, we must try to understand what is the exact sense in which Haydon applies these terms. He appears from the context to refer more to indefiniteness of literary aim, combined with sensitiveness to critical detraction and ridicule, than to anything really affecting the basis of a man's character in his general walk of life and commerce with the world. A few words on both these aspects of the question will not be wasted. We need not, however, recur to the allegation of over-sensitiveness to criticism, or of being "snuffed out by an article," which has already been sufficiently debated.

Indefiniteness of literary aim must be assessed in relation to a man's faculties, and in especial to his age and experience. A beginner is naturally indefinite in aim, in the sense that he tries his hand at various things, and only after making several experiments does he learn which things he can manage well, and which less than well. Keats, in his first two volumes, was but a beginner, and a youthful beginner. If they show indefiniteness of aim--though indeed they hardly _do_ show that in any marked degree--one cannot regard the fact as derogatory to the author. With his third volume, he was getting some assurance of the direction in which his power lay. It is certainly true that, after producing one epic (if such it can be called), "Endymion," and after commencing another, "Hyperion," he laid the second aside, for whatever reason; partly, it would seem, because the harsh reception of "Endymion" discouraged him, and partly because he considered the turn of diction too obviously Miltonic; and no doubt, as his mood varied, he must have expressed to Haydon very divergent opinions as to the expediency of writing epics. But, apart from this special matter, the third volume shows no uncertainty or infirmity of purpose. It contains three narrative poems--"Isabella," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Lamia"--some odes, and a few minor lyrics. The very fact that he continued writing poetry so persistently, maugre _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The Quarterly Review_, speaks to some decision of character and power of will in literary matters; and the immense advance in executive force tells the same tale aboundingly. Therefore, while laying great stress upon Haydon's view so far as it concerns certain shifting currents of thought and of talk, I cannot find that Keats is fairly open to the charge of want of decision or of will in the literary relation. Then as to the larger question of his character generally, Keats appears to me to have been eminently wilful, and somewhat wayward to boot. He had the temperament of a man of genius, liable to sudden and sharp impressions, and apt to go considerable lengths at the beck of an impulse, or even of a caprice. Wilfulness along with waywardness is certainly not quite the same thing as "power of will," but it testifies to a will which can exert itself steadily if it likes. The very short duration of Keats's life, and the painful conjuncture of circumstances which made his last year a despairing struggle between a passionate love and an inexorable disease, preclude our forming a very distinct opinion of what his power of will might naturally have become. If I may venture a surmise, I would say that he had within him the stuff of ample determination and high-heartedness in any matters upon which he was in earnest, mingled however with deficient self-control, and with a perilous facility for seeing the seamy side of life.

Lord Houghton gives an attractive picture of Keats at what was probably his happiest time, the winter of 1817-18, when "Endymion" was preparing for the press. I cannot condense it to any purpose, and certainly cannot improve it, so I reproduce the passage as it stands:

"Keats passed the winter of 1817-18 at Hampstead, gaily enough
among his friends. His society was much sought after, from the
delightful combination of earnestness and pleasantry which
distinguished his intercourse with all men. There was no effort
about him to say fine things, but he _did_ say them most
effectively, and they gained considerably by his happy transition
of manner. He joked well or ill as it happened, and with a laugh
which still echoes sweetly in many ears; but at the mention of
oppression or wrong, or at any calumny against those he loved, he
rose into grave manliness at once, and seemed like a tall man.
His habitual gentleness made his occasional looks of indignation
almost terrible. On one occasion, when a gross falsehood
respecting the young artist, Severn, was repeated and dwelt upon,
he left the room, declaring 'he should be ashamed to sit with men
who could utter and believe such things.'"

Severn himself avers that Keats never spoke of any one unless by way of saying something in his favour.

Cowden Clarke's anecdote tells in the same direction, that once, when some local tyranny was being discussed, Keats amused the party by shouting: "Why is there not a human dust-hole into which to tumble such fellows?" His own Carlylean phrase seems to have tickled Keats as well as others, for he repeated it in a field walk with Haydon: "Haydon, what a pity it is there is not a human dust-hole!"

To this may be added a few words from a letter addressed from Teignmouth by Keats to Mr. Taylor in April 1818:--

"I know nothing, I have read nothing: and I mean to follow
Solomon's directions, 'Get learning, get understanding.' I find
earlier days are gone by; I find that I can have no enjoyment in
the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no
worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some
do it with their society, some with their wit, some with their
benevolence, some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and
good humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful
to the command of great Nature. There is but one way for me: the
road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue
it; and for that end purpose retiring for some years. I have been
hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the
luxurious and a love for philosophy. Were I calculated for the
former, I should be glad; but, as I am not, I shall turn all my
soul to the latter."

This "exquisite sense of the luxurious" must have prompted an interjection of Keats in a rather earlier letter to Bailey (November 1817): "Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!"

One does not usually associate the suspicious character with the unselfish and generous character. Even apart from Haydon's, there is ample evidence to show that Keats was generous, and, in a sense, unselfish; although a man of creative or productive genius, intent upon his own work, and subordinating everything else to it, is seldom unselfish in the fullest ordinary sense of the term. But he was certainly suspicious. Of this temper we have already seen some painful ebullitions in his letters to Fanny Brawne. These might be ascribed mainly to the acute feelings of a lover, the morbid impressions of an invalid. But, in truth, Keats always was and had been suspicious. In a letter to his brothers, dated in January 1818, he refers, in a tone of some soreness, to objections which Hunt had raised against points of treatment in the first Book of "Endymion," adding: "The fact is, he and Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously; and, from several hints I have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made." Still earlier, writing to Haydon, he had confessed to "a horrid morbidity of temperament." In a letter of June 1818 to Bailey he says: "You have all your life (I think so) believed everybody: I have suspected everybody." By January 1820 he has got into a condition of decided _ennui_, not far removed from misanthropy, and the company of acquaintances, and even of friends, is a tedium to him. This was a month before the beginning of his fatal illness. It is true, he was then in love. He writes to Mrs. George Keats:--

"I dislike mankind in general.... The worst of men are those
whose self-interests are their passions; the next, those whose
passions are their self-interest. Upon the whole, I dislike
mankind. Whatever people on the other side of the question may
advance, they cannot deny that we are always surprised at hearing
of a good action, and never of a bad one.... If you were in
England, I dare say you would be able to pick out more amusement
from society than I am able to do. To me it is as dull as
Louisville is to you. [Then follow several remarks on Hunt,
Haydon, the Misses Reynolds, and Dilke.] 'Tis best to remain
aloof from people, and like their good parts, without being
eternally troubled with the dull processes of their everyday
lives. When once a person has smoked the vapidness of the routine
of society, he must have either some self-interest or the love of
some sort of distinction to keep him in good humour with it. All
I can say is that, standing at Charing Cross, and looking east,
west, north, and south, I see nothing but dulness."

"I carry all things to an extreme," he had written to Bailey in July 1818, "so that when I have any little vexation it grows in five minutes into a theme fit for Sophocles. Then and in that temper if I write to any friend, I have so little self-possession that I give him matter for grieving, at the very time perhaps when I am laughing at a pun." A phrase which Keats used in a letter of the 24th of October 1820, addressed to Mrs. Brawne, may also be, in the main, a true item of self-portraiture: "If ever there was a person born without the faculty of hoping, I am he." Too much weight, however, should not be given to this, as the poet's disease had then brought him far onward towards his grave. Severn does not seem to have regarded such a tendency as innate in Keats, for he wrote, at a far later date, "No mind was ever more exultant in youthful feeling."

Keats's sentiment towards women appears to have been that of a shy youth who was at the same time a critical man. Miss Brawne enslaved him, but did not inspire him with that tender and boundless confidence which the accepted and engaged lover of a virtuous girl naturally feels. With one woman, Miss Cox, he seems to have been thoroughly at his ease; and one can gather from his expressions that this unusual result depended upon a fair counterbalance of claims. While she was self-centred in her beauty and attractiveness, he was self-centred in his intellect and aspirations. There is an early poem of his--the reverse of a good one--which seems worth quoting here. I presume he may have been in his twenty-first year or so when he wrote it:--

"Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain,
Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies;
Without that modest softening that enhances
The downcast eye, repentant of the pain
That its mild light creates to heal again;
E'en then elate my spirit leaps and prances,
E'en then my soul with exultation dances,
For that to love so long I've dormant lain.
But, when I see thee meek and kind and tender,
Heavens! how desperately do I adore
Thy winning graces! To be thy defender
I hotly burn--to be a Calidore,
A very Red-cross Knight, a stout Leander--
Might I be loved by thee like these of yore.

Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair,
Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast,
Are things on which the dazzled senses rest
Till the fond fixed eyes forget they stare.
From such fine pictures, Heavens! I cannot dare
To turn my admiration, though unpossessed
They be of what is worthy--though not dressed
In lovely modesty and virtues rare.
Yet these I leave as thoughtless as a lark;
These lures I straight forget--e'en ere I dine
Or thrice my palate moisten. But, when I mark
Such charms with mild intelligences shine,
My ear is open like a greedy shark
To catch the tunings of a voice divine.

Ah who can e'er forget so fair a being?
Who can forget her half-retiring sweets?
God! she is like a milk-white lamb that bleats
For man's protection. Surely the All-seeing,
Who joys to see us with His gifts agreeing,
Will never give him pinions who entreats
Such innocence to ruin--who vilely cheats
A dove-like bosom. In truth there is no freeing
One's thoughts from such a beauty. When I hear
A lay that once I saw her hand awake,
Her form seems floating palpable and near.
Had I e'er seen her from an arbour take
A dewy flower, oft would that hand appear,
And o'er my eyes the trembling moisture shake."

From the opening lines of this poem I gather that Keats, when he wrote it, had never been in love; but that he had a feeling towards pure, sweet-minded, lovely women, which made him, in idea, their champion and votary. Later on, in June 1818, he wrote to Bailey that his love for his brothers had "always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon him." And in July of the same year, also to Bailey:--

"I am certain that our fair friends [_i.e._ the Misses Reynolds]
are glad I should come for the mere sake of my coming; but I am
certain I bring with me a vexation they are better without.... I
am certain I have not a right feeling towards women: at this
moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it
because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I
was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind
was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew
it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality. I
thought them ethereal--above men; I find them perhaps
equal--great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted
in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being
insulted does not like to _think_ an insult against another. I do
not like to think insults in a lady's company; I commit a crime
with her which absence would not have known.... When I am among
women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be
silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing;
I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all
this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood....
After all, I do think better of womankind than to suppose they
care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or
not."

In his letter about Miss Cox as "Charmian," written perhaps just before he knew Miss Brawne, Keats said: "I hope I shall never marry.... The mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things I have stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart.... These things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in."

We have seen, in one of Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, that he shrank from the thought of having their mutual love made known to any of their friends. But he went further than this. As well after as before he had fallen in love with Miss Brawne, and had become engaged to her, he could express a contrary state of feeling. Thus, in addressing Mr. Taylor, on August 23, 1819, he says: "I equally dislike the favour of the public with the love of a woman; they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence." And to his brother George, September 17, 1819: "Nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love. A man in love, I do think, cuts the sorriest figure in the world. Even when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, I could burst out laughing in his face; his pathetic visage becomes irresistible." The letters to George, in fact, give no hint of any love for Miss Brawne, still less of an engagement.

From all these details it would appear that Keats was by no means an ardent devotee of the feminine type of character. He thought there was but little congruity between the Ideal and the Real of womanhood. He parted company, in this regard, with Shakespeare and Shelley, and adhered rather to Milton. So it was before he was in love; and to be in love was not the occasion of any essential alteration of view. He ascribed to Fanny Brawne the same volatile appetite for amusement, the same propensity for flirtation, the same comparative shallowness of heart-affection, which he imputed to her sex in general. He loved her passionately: he believed in her not passionately, nor even intensely. That he was hard hit by the blind and winged archer was a patent fact; but he still knew the archer to be blind.

In a room, says Keats's surgical fellow-student, Mr. Stephens, he was always at the window peering out into space, and it was customary to call the window-seat "Keats's place." In his last illness he told Severn that the intensest of his pleasures had been to watch the growth of flowers; and, after lying quiet one day, he whispered, "I feel the daisies [or "the flowers"] growing over me." In an early stage of his fatal illness, February 16, 1820, he had written pathetically to James Rice: "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 superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hot-houses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see again." Music was another of his great enjoyments. He would sit for hours while Miss Charlotte Reynolds played to him on the pianoforte; and a wrong note in an orchestra has been known to rouse his pugnacity, and make him wish to "go down and smash all the fiddles." Haydn's symphonies were among his prime favourites, and Purcell's songs from Shakespeare. "Give me," he wrote from Winchester to his sister, in August 1819, "books, fruit, French wine, and fine weather, and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know, and I can pass a summer very quietly." He would also listen long to Severn's playing, following the air with a low kind of recitative; and could himself "produce a pleasing musical effect, though possessing hardly any voice."

Closely though he was mixed up with Leigh Hunt and his circle, Keats had, in fact, not much sympathy with their ideas on literary topics, nor with Hunt's own poetry, still less with their views on political matters of the time, in which he took but very faint interest. Cowden Clarke thought that the poet's "whole civil creed was comprised in the master-principle of universal liberty, viz., equal and stern justice to all, from the duke to the dustman." He was, however, a liberal by temperament, and, I suppose, by conviction as well. One of the really puerile and nonsensical passages in "Endymion" is that which opens book iii. He told his friend Richard Woodhouse (a barrister, connected with the firm of Taylor and Hessey) that it expressed his opinion of the Tory Ministry then in office:--

"There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men
With most prevailing tinsel; who unpen
Their baaing vanities to browse away
The comfortable green and juicy hay
From human pastures; or, oh torturing fact!
Who through an idiot blink will see unpacked
Fire-branded foxes to scar up and singe
Our gold and ripe-eared hopes. With not one tinge
Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight
Able to face an owl's, they still are dight
By the blear-eyed nations in empurpled vests,
And crowns and turbans. With unladen breasts,
Save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount
To their spirit's perch, their being's high account,
Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones,
Amid the fierce intoxicating tones
Of trumpets, shoutings, and belaboured drums,
And sudden cannon."

A rather more sensible embodiment of his political feelings is a stanza which he wrote, perhaps in 1818, at the close of canto 5, book ii. of "The Faery Queen." In this stanza the revolutionary Giant, who had been suppressed by Artegall and Talus, is represented as being pieced together again by Typographus, the Printing-press, and so trained up as to become more than a match for his former victors. There is also, in a letter to George Keats dated in September 1819, a rather long and detailed passage on politics covering a wide period in English and European history, on the oscillations of governmental and popular power &c., and on the writer's sympathy with the enlightenment and progress of the people. It closes with an admiring description of Sandt, the assassin of Kotzebue, as pourtrayed in a profile likeness. As to Hunt, some expressions in a letter from George Keats to Dilke are decidedly strong:--"I should be extremely sorry that poor John's name should go down to posterity associated with the littlenesses of Leigh Hunt--an association of which he was so impatient in his lifetime. He speaks of him patronizingly; that he would have defended him against the reviewers if he had known his nervous irritation at their abuse of him, and says that on that point only he was reserved to him. The fact was, he more dreaded Hunt's defence than their abuse. You know all this as well as I do."

Apart from his own special capability for poetry, Keats had a mind both active and capacious. The depth, pregnancy, and incisiveness, of many of the remarks in his letters, glancing along a considerable range of subject-matter, are highly noticeable. If some one were to take the pains of extracting and classifying them, he would do a good service to readers. It does not appear, however, that Keats took much interest in any kind of knowledge which could not be made applicable or subservient to the purposes of poetry. Many will remember the anecdote, proper to Haydon's "immortal dinner" (December 1817), of Keats's joining with Charles Lamb in denouncing Sir Isaac Newton for having destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours; the whole company had to drink "Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics." This was a freak, yet not so mere a freak but that the poet--in one of his most elaborated and heedful compositions, "Lamia"--could revert to the same idea--

"Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture--she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine,
Unweave a rainbow."

In a letter to his brother, December 1817, Keats observes:--

"The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making
all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close
relationship with beauty and truth. Examine 'King Lear,' and you
will find this exemplified throughout.... It struck me what
quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in
literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean
_negative capability_; that is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a
fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of
mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with
half-knowledge. This, pursued through volumes, would perhaps take
us no further than this: that with a great poet the sense of
beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates
all consideration."

Keats did not very often in his letters remark upon the work of his poetic contemporaries. We have just read a reference to Coleridge. In another letter addressed to Haydon, January 1818, he shows that his admiration of Wordsworth's "Excursion" was great, coupling that poem with Haydon's pictures, and with "Hazlitt's depth of taste," as "three things to rejoice at in this age."

Soon afterwards, February 1818, while "Endymion" was passing through the press, he wrote to Mr. Taylor:--

"In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am
from their centre. 1st, I think poetry should surprise by a fine
excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a
wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a
remembrance. 2nd, Its touches of beauty should never be half-way,
thereby making the reader breathless instead of content. The
rise, the progress, the setting, of imagery, should, like the
sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly
although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight.
But it is easier to think what poetry should be than to write it.
And this leads me to another axiom--That, if poetry comes not as
naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at
all."

Keats held that the melody of verse is founded on the adroit management of open and close vowels. He thought that vowels can be as skilfully combined and interchanged as differing notes of music, and that monotony should only be allowed when it subserves some special purpose.

The following, from a letter to Mr. Woodhouse, October 1818 (soon after the abusive reviews had appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and _The Quarterly_), is a remarkable piece of self-analysis. As we read it, we should bear in mind what Haydon said of Keats's want of decision of character. I am not indeed clear that Keats has here pourtrayed himself with marked accuracy. It may appear that he ascribes to himself too much of absorption into the object or the personage which he contemplates; whereas it might, with fully as much truth, be advanced that he was wont to assimilate the personage or the object to himself. I greatly doubt whether in Keats's poems we see the object or the personage the clearer because his faculty transpires through them: rather, we see the object or the personage through the haze of Keats. His range was not extremely extensive (whatever it might possibly have become, with a longer lease of life), nor was his personality by any means occulted. But in any event his statement here is of great importance as showing what he thought of the poetic phase of mind and working.

"As to the poetical character itself (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. What shocks the virtuous
philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its
relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste
for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet
is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has
no identity: he is continually in for, and filling, some other
body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are
creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an
unchangeable attribute: the poet has none, no identity. He is
certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. 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. How can it when I have _no_
nature? When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from
speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes
home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins
to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time
annihilated. Not only among men; it would be the same in a
nursery of children."

Elsewhere Keats says, November 1817: "Nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights; or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel."

For painting Keats had a good deal of taste, largely fostered, no doubt, by his intimacy with Haydon. This came to him gradually. Towards the beginning of 1818 he was, according to his own account, quite unable to appreciate Raphael's Cartoons, but afterwards gained an insight into them through contrasting them with some maudlin saints by Guido. It is interesting to find him entering warmly into the beauties of the earlier Italian art, as indicated in a book of prints from some church in Milan (so he says, but perhaps it should rather be Pisa or Florence). "I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance and the most tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael's, but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as there was left so much room for imagination."

Here is a small trait of character, recorded by Keats in a letter to George, from Winchester, September 1819. "I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and in fact adonize as if I were going out; then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief."

Haydon, as we have seen, said that Keats had an exquisite sense of humour. There are few things more difficult to analyse than the sense of humour; few points as to which different people will vary more in opinion than the possession, by any particular man, of a sense of humour, or the account, good or bad, to which he turned this sense. Certainly there is a large amount of jocularity in the familiar writings of Keats--often a quick perception of the ridiculous or the risible, sometimes a telling jest or _jeu d'esprit_. I confess, however, that to myself most of Keats's fun appears forced or inept, wanting in fineness of taste and manner, and tending towards the vulgar; a jangling jingle of word and notion. Punning plays a large part in it, as it did in Leigh Hunt's familiar converse. Some specimens of Keats's funning or punning seem to me a humiliating exhibition, as, for instance, a letter, January 1819, which Armitage Brown addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, with interpolations by Keats. No doubt both the friends were resolutely bent upon being silly on that occasion; but to be silly is not fully tantamount to being "a fellow of infinite jest," or having an exquisite sense of humour. There is some very exasperating writing also in a letter to Reynolds (May 1818), about "making Wordsworth and Colman play at leap-frog, or keeping one of them down a whole half-holiday at fly-the-garter," &c., &c. A feeling for the inappropriate is perhaps one element of jocoseness; if so, Keats may have been genuinely jocose when (as he wrote in his very last letter to Brown) he "at his worst, even in quarantine [in Naples Harbour], summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of his life." He had a good power of mimicry, as well as of dramatic recital. He did indisputably, towards September 1819, play off one practical joke--Brown was the victim--with eminent success; pretending that a certain Mr. Nathan Benjamin, who was then renting Brown's house at Hampstead, had written a letter complaining of illness--gravel, caused by some lime-tainted water on the premises. But the success depended upon a very singular coincidence, viz., that by mere chance Keats had happened to give the tenant's name correctly. The angry reply of Brown to the angry supposititious letter of Benjamin, and the astonishment of Benjamin upon receiving Brown's retort, are fertile of laughter.

Keats does not appear to have ever made any pretence to defined religious belief of any sort, nor seriously to have debated the subject, or troubled his mind about it one way or the other. He was certainly not a Christian. His early friend, Mr. Felton Mathew, speaks of him as "of the sceptical and republican school." On Christmas Eve, 1816, soon after he had come of age, he wrote the following sonnet--

"The church-bells toll a melancholy round,
Calling the people to some other prayers,
Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
In some black spell: seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crowned.

Still, still they toll: and I should feel a damp,
A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp,--
That 'tis their sighing, wailing, ere they go
Into oblivion,--that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp."

His sonnet on Ben Nevis, 1818, is also an utterance of scepticism--speaking of heaven and hell as misty surmises, and of "the world of thought and mental might" as a realm of nebulosity. A letter to Leigh Hunt, May 1817, contains a phrase arraigning the God of Christians. To the clerical student Bailey, September 1818, he spoke out: "You know my ideas about religion. I do not think myself more in the right than other people, that nothing in this world is proveable." The latter clause appears to be carelessly elliptical in expression, the real meaning being "I think [not "I do _not_ think"] that nothing in this world is proveable." To Fanny Brawne, towards May 1820, he appealed "by the blood of that Christ you believe in." Haydon tells a noticeable anecdote--the only one, I think, which exhibits Keats as an admirer of that anti-imaginative order of intellect of which Voltaire was a prototype--

"He had a tending to religion when first I knew him [autumn of
1816], but Leigh Hunt soon forced it from his mind. Never shall I
forget Keats once rising from his chair, and approaching my last
picture, Entry into Jerusalem. He went before the portrait of
Voltaire, placed his hand on his heart, and, bowing low,

'In reverence done, as to the power
That dwelt within, whose presence had infused
Into the plant sciential sap derived
From nectar, drink of gods,'

(as Milton says of Eve after she had eaten the apple), 'That's
the being to whom _I_ bend,' said he; alluding to the bending of
the other figures in the picture, and contrasting Voltaire with
our Saviour, and his own adoration with that of the crowd."

Notwithstanding the general vagueness or indifference of his mind in religious matters, Keats seems to have been at most times a believer in the immortality of the soul. Following that phrase of his already quoted (from a letter to Bailey, November 1817) "Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!" he proceeds: "It is 'a vision in the form of youth,' a shadow of reality to come. And this consideration has further convinced me--for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine--that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we call happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger, as you do, after truth. Adam's dream will do here: and seems to be a conviction that imagination, and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life, and its spiritual repetition." This allusion to "Adam's dream" refers back to a fine phrase which had occurred shortly before in the same letter--"Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream; he awoke, and found it truth." In a letter written to George Keats and his wife, shortly after the death of Tom, comes a very positive assertion--"I have a firm belief in immortality, and so had Tom." This firm belief, however, must certainly have faltered later on; for, as we have already seen, one of Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, written in 1820, contains the phrase "I long to believe in immortality." The reader may also refer to the letter to Armitage Brown, September 1820, extracted in a previous page. Of superstitious feeling I observe only one instance in Keats. After Tom's death, a white rabbit appeared in the garden of Mr. Dilke, and was shot by him: Keats would have it that this rabbit was the spirit of Tom, and he persisted in the fancy with not a little earnestness.

Of Keats's fondness for wine--his appreciation of it as a flavour grateful to the palate, and to the abstract sense of enjoyment--there are numerous traces throughout his writings. We all remember the famous lines in his "Ode to a Nightingale"--

"Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,...
Oh for a beaker full of the warm South!" &c.--

lines which seem a little forced into their context, and of which the only tangible meaning there is that the luxury and dreamy inspiration of wine-drinking would relieve the poet's mind from the dull and painful realities of life, and assist his imagination into the dim vocal haunts of the nightingale. There is also in "Lamia" a conspicuous passage celebrating "The happy vintage--merry wine, sweet wine." On claret--as to which we have heard the evidence of Haydon--there is a long tirade in a letter addressed to George Keats and his wife in February 1819. I give it in a condensed form:--

"I never drink above three glasses of wine, and never any
spirits and water.... How I like claret! When I can get claret, I
must drink it. 'Tis the only palate affair that I am at all
sensual in.... It fills one's mouth with a gushing
freshness--then goes down cool and feverless: then you do not
feel it quarrelling with one's liver.... Other wines of a heavy
and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus: this makes
him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an
Ariadne.... I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I
have: I forgot game. I must plead guilty to the breast of a
partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing
and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock _passim_."

At a rather later date, October 1819, Keats had "left off animal food, that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs by nature." But I presume this form of abstinence did not last long.

I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement; with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism; longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be one; resolute to be a man--unselfish, kindly, and generous. But, though kindly, he was irritable; though unselfish and generous, wilful and suspicious. An affront was what he would not bear; and, when he found himself affronted in a form--that of press ridicule and detraction--which could not be resented in person, nor readily retaliated in any way, it is abundantly probable that the indignity preyed upon his mind and spirits, and contributed to embitter the days cut short by disease, the messenger of despair to that passionate love which had become the single intense interest of his life. The single intense interest, along with poetry--both of them hurrying without fruition to the grave. Keats seems to me to have been naturally a man of complex character, many-mooded, with a tendency to perverse self-conflict. The circumstances of his brief career--his poetic ambition, his want of any definite employment, his association with men of literary occupation or taste whom he only half approved, the critical venom poured forth against him, his love thwarted by a mortal malady--all these things tended to bring out the unruly or morbid, and to deplete the many fine and solid, elements in his nature. With the personal character of Keats, as with his writings, we may perhaps deal most fairly by saying that his outburst and his reserve of faculty were such that, in the narrow space allotted to him, youth had not advanced far enough to disentangle the rich and various material. But his latest years, which enabled his poetry to find full and deathless voice, were so loaded with suffering and perturbation as to leave the character less lucidly and harmoniously developed than even in the days of adolescence. From "Endymion" to "Lamia" and the "Eve of St. Mark," we have, in poetry, advanced greatly towards the radiant meridian: in life, from 1818 to 1821, we have receded to a baffling dusk.