Chapter XI (1)

DECEMBER 1818-JUNE 1819: KEATS AND BROWN HOUSEMATES: FANNY BRAWNE: WORK AND IDLENESS

Removal to Wentworth Place--Work on _Hyperion_--The insatiable
Haydon--The Misses Porter--A mingled yarn--Charles Lamb and
punning--Hunt and his satellites--Fanny Brawne--A sudden
enslavement--Severn's impressions--Visit to Hampshire--_The Eve of St.
Agnes_--Return and engagement--Ode to Fanny--Love and jealousy--Haydon
again--Letters to Fanny Keats--Two months' idleness--Praise of
claret--Bailey's love-affairs--Fit of languor--Fight with a
butcher--Sonnet-confessions--Reflections ethical and cosmic--Meeting
with Coleridge--The same according to the sage--A tactful
review--Sonnets on fame--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--The right version
quoted--The five Odes--Their date and order--A fruitful
May--Indecision and anxiety--A confidential letter--Departure for
Shanklin.

Dilke and Brown, as has been said already, had built for themselves a joint block of two houses in a garden near the bottom of John Street, Hampstead, and had called the property Wentworth Place, after a name hereditary in the Dilke family. Dilke and his wife occupied the larger of the two houses forming the block, and Brown, who was a bachelor, the smaller house, standing to the west.[1] The accommodation in Brown's quarters included a front and back sitting-room on the ground floor, with a front and back bedroom over them, and a small spare bedroom or 'crib' where a bachelor guest could be put up for the night. The arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses, occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. His move to his new quarters does not seem to have been quite so immediate as Brown represents it. Beginning a new journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law a week or two after Tom's death, Keats writes, 'With Dilke and Brown I am quite thick--with Brown indeed I am going to domesticate, that is, we shall keep house together. I shall have the front parlour and he the back one, by which I shall be able to avoid the noise of Bentley's Children--and be better able to go on with my studies--which have been greatly interrupted lately, so that I have not a shadow of an idea for books in my head, and my pen seems to have grown gouty for verse.'

This phase of poetical stagnation, which had naturally set in as his cares for his dying brother grew more engrossing towards the end, passed away quickly. By about the middle of December Keats was settled at Wentworth Place, whither his ex-landlord, Bentley the postman, we are told, carried down his little library of some hundred and fifty books in a clothes-basket from Well Walk. In spite of the noisy children Keats parted not without regret from the Bentleys, and speaks feelingly of Mrs Bentley's kindness and attention during his late trouble. As soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friendship had in some measure softened his grief, he plunged once more into poetry, his special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had already begun to work before his brother died. But he never got into a quite happy or uninterrupted flow of work on it. Once and again we find him moved to lay it aside for a bout of brotherly gossip with George and Georgiana in America. 'Just now I took out my poem to go on with it--but the thought of my writing so little to you came upon me and I could not get on--so I have begun at random and I have not a word to say--and yet my thoughts are so full of you that I can do nothing else.' And again: 'I have no thought pervading me so constantly and frequently as that of you--my Poem cannot frequently drive it away--you will retard it much more than you could by taking up my time if you were in England. I never forget you except after seeing now and then some beautiful woman--but that is a fever--the thought of you both is a passion with me, but for the most part a calm one.'

This letter, covering some three weeks from mid-December to January 4, enables us, like others to the same correspondents, to lay our finger on almost every strand in the 'mingled yarn' of Keats's life and doings. Of one tiresome interruption which befell him about Christmas he tells nothing, doubtless in order to spare his brother anxiety. This was a request for money from the insatiable Haydon. The correspondence on the matter cannot be read without anger against the elder man and admiring affection for the generous lad--yet not foolishly or recklessly generous--on whom he sponged. Haydon's only excuses are a recent eye-trouble which had hindered his work, and his inflated belief, which had so far successfully imposed both upon himself and his friends, in his own huge importance to art and to his country. Keats writes, showing incidentally how last year's critical rebuffs had changed, more or less permanently, his attitude in regard to the public and public recognition:--

Believe me Haydon I have that sort of fire in my heart that would
sacrifice everything I have to your service--I speak without any
reserve--I know you would do so for me--I open my heart to you in a
few words. I will do this sooner than you shall be distressed: but let
me be the last stay--Ask the rich lovers of Art first--I'll tell you
why--I have a little money which may enable me to study, and to
travel for three or four years. I never expect to get anything by my
Books: and moreover I wish to avoid publishing--I admire Human Nature
but I do not like _Men_. I should like to compose things honourable to
Man--but not fingerable over by Men. So I am anxious to exist without
troubling the printer's devil or drawing upon Men's or Women's
admiration--in which great solitude I hope God will give me strength
to rejoice. Try the long purses--but do not sell your drawings or I
shall consider it a breach of friendship.

Haydon answers in a gush of grandiloquent gratitude, promising to try every corner first, but intimating pretty clearly that he knew his wealthier habitual helpers were for the present tired out with him. One of his phrases is a treasure. 'Ah Keats, this is sad work for one of my soul and Ambition. The truest thing you ever said of mortal was that I had a touch of Alexander in me! I have, I know it, and the World shall know it, but this is a purgative drug I must first take.' 'This' means his own perpetual need and habit of living on other people. In the next letter Haydon of course accepts Keats's offer, and in the Christmas weeks, when he should have been wholly engrossed in _Hyperion_, Keats had much and for some time fruitless ado with bankers, lawyers, and guardian in endeavouring to fulfil his promise. To his brother he only says he has been dining with Haydon and otherwise seeing much of him; mentions the painter's eye-trouble; and quotes him as describing vividly at second hand the sufferings of Captain (afterwards Sir John) Ross and his party on their voyage in search of the North-West passage.

From Ross in Baffin's Bay the same letter rambles to Ritchie in the deserts of Morocco, and thence to gossip about the best way of keeping his own and George's brotherly intimacy unbroken across the ocean; about the 'sickening stuff' printed in Hunt's new _Literary Pocket Book_ (it was when he was seeing most of Haydon that Keats was always most inclined to harsh criticism of Hunt); about Mrs Dilke's cats, and about Godwin's novels and Hazlitt's opinion of them, and the rare pleasure he has had at Haydon's in looking through a book of engravings after early Italian frescoes in a church at Milan. 'Milan' must be a mistake, for there are no such engravings,[2] and what Keats saw must certainly have been the fine series by Lasinio, published in 1814, after the frescoes of Orcagna, Benozzo Gozzoli, and the rest in the Campo Santo at Pisa. 'I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare. Full of romance and the most tender feeling--magnificence of draperies 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.' It is interesting to find Keats thus vividly awake, as very few yet were either by instinct or fashion, to the charm of the Italian primitives, and to remember how it was a copy of this same book of prints, in the possession of young John Everett Millais thirty years later, which first aroused the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm in him and his associates Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt (the last-named is our witness for the fact).

Keats tells moreover how an unknown admirer from the west country had sent him a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a further tribute in the shape of a L25 note; how he had been both pleased and displeased,--'if I had refused it I should have behaved in a very braggadocio dunderheaded manner, and yet the present galls me a little'; and again how he has received through Woodhouse a glowing letter of sympathy and encouragement from Miss Jane Porter, the then famous authoress of _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and _The Scottish Chiefs_, who desires his acquaintance on her own behalf and that of her sister Anna Maria, almost equally popular at the hour by her romance of _The Hungarian Brothers_. By all this, says Keats, he feels more obliged than flattered--'so obliged that I will not at present give you an extravaganza of a Lady Romancer. I will be introduced to them if it be merely for the pleasure of writing to you about it--I shall certainly see a new race of People.' Pity he failed to carry out his purpose: pen-portraits satirical and other are not lacking of these admired sisters, the tall and tragical Jane, the blonde and laughing Anna Maria, 'La Penserosa' and 'L'Allegra,' but a sketch by Keats would have been an interesting addition to them. Still in the same letter, he complains of the sore throat which he finds it hard to shake off, and tells how he has given up or all but given up taking snuff (nearly everybody in that generation snuffed), and how he has been shooting with Dilke on Hampstead Heath and shot a tomtit,--a feat which for a moment calls up this divine poet to our minds in the guise of one of the cockney sportsmen of Seymour's caricatures. Never mind: he can afford it.

From an enquiry about the expected baby in America,--'will the little bairn have made his entrance before you have this? Kiss it for me, and when it can first know a cheese from a Caterpillar show it my picture twice a week,'--from this he passes to the re-assuring statement that the attack upon him in the Quarterly has in some quarters done him actual service. He tells how constrained and out of his element he feels in ordinary society; a common experience of genius, and part of the price it pays for living at a different level and temperature of thought and feeling from the herd. 'I am passing a Quiet day--which I have not done for a long while--and if I do continue so, I feel I must again begin with my poetry--for if I am not in action of mind or Body I am in pain--and from that I suffer greatly by going into parties where from the rules of society and a natural pride I am obliged to smother my Spirit and look like an Idiot--because I feel my impulses given way to would too much amaze them--I live under an everlasting restraint--never relieved except when I am composing--so I will write away.' And resuming apparently on Christmas Day:--'I think you knew before you left England, that my next subject would be "the fall of Hyperion." I went on a little with it last night, but it will take some time to get into the vein again. I will not give you any extracts, because I wish the whole to make an impression. I have however a few Poems which you will like, and I will copy out on the next sheet.' Nearly a week later he adds, 'I will insert any little pieces I may write--though I will not give any extracts from my large poem which is scarce began.' The phrase about _Hyperion_ must be taken as indicating on how great a scale he had conceived the poem rather than how little he had yet written of it. In point of fact all we have of this mighty fragment must have been written either by his brother's bedside in September-October 1818 (but then certainly only a little) or else in these Christmas weeks from mid-December to mid-January 1818-19. The short poems he sends are the spirited sets of heptasyllabics, _Fancy_, and _Lines on the Mermaid Tavern_, the former one of the best things in the second and lighter class of his work: and with them the fragment written for music, 'I had a dove.' In relation to these he says 'It is my intention to wait a few years before I publish any minor poems--and then I hope to have a volume of some worth--and which those people will relish who cannot bear the burthen of a long poem.'

Presently Charles Lamb comes for a moment upon the scene. 'I have seen Lamb lately--Brown and I were taken by Hunt to Novello's--there we were devastated and excruciated with bad and repeated puns--Brown don't want to go again.' Punning, like snuffing, was the all but universal fashion of that age, as those of us can best realize who are old enough to remember grandfathers that belonged to it; and judging by the specimens Brown and Keats have themselves left, puns too bad for them are scarce imaginable. Novello is of course the distinguished organist, composer and music-publisher, Vincent Novello, whose Sunday evening musical parties were frequented by all the Lamb and Hunt circle, and whose eldest daughter, Mary Victoria, was married some ten years later to Cowden Clarke. At this time she was but a child of ten, but writing many years afterwards she has left a vivid reminiscence of Keats at her father's house, 'with his picturesque head, leaning against the instruments, one foot raised on his knee and smoothed beneath his hands' (an attitude said to have been perpetuated in a lost portrait by Severn). Is the above a memory of the one evening only which Keats himself mentions, or of others when his love of music may have drawn him to the Novellos' house in spite of the puns and of company for the moment not much to his taste? For the ways of Hunt and some of his circle, their mutual flatteries, their habit of trivial, chirping ecstasy over the things they liked, their superfluity of glib, complacent comment rubbing the bloom off sacred beauties of art and poetry and nature, were jarring on Keats's nerves just now; and though perfectly aware of Hunt's essential virtues of kind-heartedness and good comradeship, he writes with some irritability of impatience:--

Hunt has asked me to meet Tom Moore some day so you shall hear of him.
The night we went to Novello's there was a complete set-to of Mozart
and punning. I was so completely tired of it that if I were to follow
my own inclinations I should never meet any one of that set again, not
even Hunt who is certainly a pleasant fellow in the main when you are
with him--but in reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in
matters of taste and in morals. He understands many a beautiful thing;
but then, instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of
perception as he himself professes--he begins an explanation in such a
curious manner that our taste and self-love is offended continually.
Hunt does one harm by making fine things petty and beautiful things
hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white
Busts--and many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a
nothing. This distorts one's mind--makes one's thoughts
bizarre--perplexes one in the standard of Beauty.

A little later he improvises a sample, not more than mildly satirical, from a comedy he professes to be planning on the ways and manners of Hunt and his satellites.

In the same letter a new personage makes her momentous entry on the scene. 'Mrs Brawne who took Brown's house for the summer still resides at Hampstead--she is a very nice woman--and her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and strange--we have a little tiff now and then, and she behaves better, or I must have sheered off.' This Mrs Brawne was a widow lady of West Indian connexions and some little fortune, with a daughter, Fanny, just grown up and two younger children. She had rented Brown's house while he and Keats were away in Scotland, and had naturally become acquainted with the Dilkes living next door and sharing a common garden. After Brown's return Mrs Brawne moved with her family to a house in Downshire Street close by. The acquaintance with the Dilkes was kept up, and it was through them, not long after he came back from Scotland, that Keats first met Fanny Brawne. His next words about her are these:--

Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height with a fine style
of countenance of the lengthened sort--she manages to make her hair
look well--her nostrils are fine--though a little painful--her mouth
is bad and good--her Profile is better than her full-face which indeed
is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone. Her shape is
very graceful and so are her movements--her Arms are good, her hands
bad-ish her feet tolerable--she is not seventeen--but she is
ignorant--monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions,
calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the
term _Minx_--this is I think not from any innate vice but from a
penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am however tired of such
style and shall decline any more of it.

An attraction which has begun by repulsion is ever the most dangerous of all. The heightened emotional strain of his weeks of tendance on his dying brother had laid Keats open to both influences at their fullest power; he was ripe, as several passages from his letters have made us feel, for the tremendous adventure of love; and the 'new, strange, and threatening sorrow' from which he had with relief declared himself escaped when the momentary lure of the East-Indian Charmian left him fancy-free, was about to fall on him in good earnest now. Before many weeks he was hopelessly enslaved, and passion teaching him a sensitive secretiveness and reserve, he says to brother and sister no word more of his enslaver except by way of the lightest passing allusion. From his first semi-sarcastic account of her above quoted, as well as from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in Titian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is possible to realise something of her aspect and presence.

A brisk and blooming young beauty of a little over eighteen (Keats's 'not seventeen' is a mistake) with blonde hair and vivid palish colouring, a somewhat sharply cut aquiline cast of features, a slight, shapely figure rather short than tall, a liveliness of manner bordering on the boisterous, and no doubt some taking air and effluence of youth and vitality and sex,--such was Fanny Brawne externally, but of her character we have scant means of judging. Neither she nor her mother can have been worldly-minded, or they would never have encouraged the attentions of a youth like Keats, whose prospects were problematical or null. It is clear that, though certainly high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident, she was kind and in essentials constant to her lover, and patient and unresentful under his occasional wild outbursts of jealousy and suspicion. But it seems equally clear that she did not half realise what manner of man he was, nor how high and privileged was the charge committed to her. She had no objection to the prospect of a long engagement, and despite her lover's remonstrances held herself free in the meantime to enjoy to the full the pleasures of her age and the admiration of other men.[3] One day early in the new year Keats took the devoted Severn to call on his new friends. Severn was much pleased with the mother, who seems to have been in truth a cultivated kind and gentle person; but he did not take to the daughter or even much admire her looks, and though perceiving her attraction for Keats did not then or till long afterwards realise the fatal strength of its hold upon him. 'That poor idle Thing of Womankind to whom he has so unaccountably attached himself'--so she is styled by Reynolds in a letter to Taylor a year and a half later. Brown, who knew her much better, and whose friendship with her sometimes showed itself in gallantries at which Keats writhed in secret, writes of her always in terms of kindness and respect, but never very explicitly. The very few of Keats's friends who came to be in his confidence, including Dilke and his wife, seem to have been agreed, although they bore her no ill will, in regarding the attachment as a misfortune for him.

So it assuredly was: so probably under the circumstances must any passion for a woman have been. Blow on blow had in truth begun to fall on Keats, as though in fulfilment of the constitutional misgivings to which he was so often secretly a prey. First the departure of his brother George had deprived him of his closest friend, to whom alone he had from boyhood been accustomed to confide those obsessions of his darker hours and in confiding to find relief from them. Next the exertions of his Scottish tour had proved too much for his strength, and laid him open to the attacks of his hereditary enemy, consumption. Coming back, he had found his brother Tom almost at his last gasp in the clutch of that enemy, and in nursing him had both lived in spirit through all his pains and breathed for many weeks a close atmosphere of infection. At the same time the gibes of the reviewers, little as they might touch his inner self, came to teach him the harshness and carelessness of the world's judgments, and the precariousness of his practical hopes from literature. Now were to be added the pangs of love,--love requited indeed, but having no near or sure prospect of fruition: and even love disdained might have made him suffer less. The passion took him, as it often takes consumptives, in its fiercest form: Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there is no withstanding, never harried a more helpless victim.[4]

By what stages the coils closed on him we can only guess. His own account of the matter to Fanny Brawne was that he had written himself her vassal within a week of their first meeting: which took place, we know, some time during the period of watching by Tom's sick-bed. After he went to live with Brown in December they must have met frequently. Probably it was this new attraction, as well as his chronic throat trouble and his concern over Haydon's affairs, which made him postpone a promised visit to Dilke's relations in Hampshire from Christmas until mid-January. He then carried out his promise, going to join Brown at Bedhampton, the home of Dilke's brother-in-law Mr John Snook. He liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit, but was unwell and during a stay of a fortnight only once went outside the garden. This was to a gathering of country clergy reinforced by two bishops, at the consecration of a chapel built by a great Jew-convertor, a Mr Way. The ceremony got on his nerves and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy. He spent also a few days with Dilke's father in Chichester, and went out twice to dowager card parties. These social pleasures were naught to him, and his spirits, like his health, were low. But his genius was never more active. We have seen in the midst of what worries and interruptions he had worked before and during Christmas at _Hyperion_, the fragment which in our language stands next in epic quality to _Paradise Lost_. At Bedhampton in January, on some thin sheets of thin paper brought down for the purpose, he wrote the _Eve of St Agnes_, for its author merely 'a little poem,' for us a masterpiece aglow in every line with the vital quintessence of romance.

No word of Keats's own or of his friends prepares us for this new achievement or informs when he began first to think of the subject. It must of course have been ripening in his mind some good while before he thus suddenly and swiftly cast it into shape. When he wrote three months earlier of having to seek relief beside the sick-bed of his brother by 'plunging into abstract images,' were they images of primeval Greek gods and Titans only, or were these contrasted figures and colours of mediaeval romance beginning to occupy his imagination at the same time? Had the subject perhaps come into his mind as long ago as the preceding March, when Hunt and Reynolds and he were having the talks about Boccaccio which resulted in Keats's _Isabella_ and Reynolds's _Garden of Florence_ and _Ladye of Provence_? We shall see that Boccaccio counts for something in Keats's treatment of the St Agnes' Eve story, so that the supposition is at least plausible. Or may it even have been of this story and not, as is commonly assumed, of _Hyperion_ that he was thinking as far back as September 1817 when he wrote to Haydon from Oxford of the 'new romance' he had in his mind? Woodhouse does not throw much light on such questions when he tells us that 'the subject was suggested by Mrs Jones.' This name, uncongenial to the muse (excepting the muse of Wordsworth) is otherwise unknown in connexion with Keats. Did the same lady also tell him of the tradition concerning St Mark's day (April 25th), and so become the 'only begetter' of that remarkable fragment _The Eve of St Mark_, which he wrote (Woodhouse again is the authority for the dates) between the 13th and 17th of February after his return to Hampstead? In connexion with Keats few stones have been left unturned for further personal or critical research, but here is one.

Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of January and it must have been very soon afterwards that he became the declared and accepted lover of Fanny Brawne, savouring intensely thenceforward all the tantalising sweets and bitters of that estate, though nothing was said to friends about the engagement. From the first he suffered severely from the sense of her freedom to enjoy pleasures and excitements for which neither his health nor his social habits and inclinations fitted him. The tale of the _Eve of St Mark_, begun and broken off just at this time, may possibly, as Rossetti thought, have been designed to turn on the remorse of a young girl for sufferings of a like kind inflicted on her lover and ending in his death. However that may be, we have two direct cries from his heart, one of pure love-yearning, the other of racking jealousy, which were written, if I read the evidences aright, almost immediately after the engagement and can be dated almost to a day. These are the first version, which has only lately become known, of the 'Bright Star' sonnet, and the ode _To Fanny_ published posthumously by Lord Houghton. Both carry internal evidence of having been written before the winter was out: the sonnet in the words which invoke the star as watching the moving waters,

Or gazing at the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;

the ode in the lines,

I come, I see thee as thou standest there,
Beckon me not into the wintry air.[5]

Now it happens that this year there was frost and rough weather late in February, with snowfalls on the afternoon of the 24th and again the following morning. I imagine both sonnet and ode to have been written while the cold spell lasted, the sonnet probably before dawn on the actual morning of the 25th.[6] As slightly changed in form a year and a half later this sonnet has been long endeared to us all as one of the most beautiful in the language: I shall defer its discussion till we come to the date of this recast. The ode has flaws, for to make good or even bearable poetry out of that humiliating and grotesque passion of physical jealousy is a hard matter. It begins poorly, with a sense of discord, in the first stanza, between the choking violence of feeling expressed and the artificial form into which its expression is cast. But if we leave out this stanza, and also the fifth and sixth, which are a little common and unequal, we get an appeal as painful, indeed, as it is passionate, yet lacking neither in courtesy nor dignity, and conveyed in a strain of verse almost without fault:--

Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears,
And hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,--
To-night, if I may guess, thy beauty wears
A smile of such delight,
As brilliant and as bright,
As when with ravished, aching, vassal eyes,
Lost in soft amaze,
I gaze, I gaze!

Who now, with greedy looks, eats up my feast?
What stare outfaces now my silver moon?
Ah! keep that hand unravished at the least;
Let, let the amorous burn--
But, pr'ythee, do not turn
The current of your heart from me so soon.
O! save, in charity,
The quickest pulse for me.

Save it for me, sweet love! though music breathe
Voluptuous visions into the warm air;
Though swimming through the dance's dangerous wreath,
Be like an April day,
Smiling and cold and gay,
A temperate lily, temperate as fair;
Then, Heaven! there will be
A warmer June for me.

Ah! if you prize my subdu'd soul above
The poor, the fading, brief pride of an hour;
Let none profane my Holy See of Love,
Or with a rude hand break
The sacramental cake:
Let none else touch the just new-budded flower:
If not--may my eyes close,
Love! on their last repose.

In both of these poems Keats soothes himself with thoughts of dying, and they are doubtless among the things he had in mind when two or three months later, in the ode _To a Nightingale_, he speaks of having invoked Death by soft names 'in many a mused rhyme.'

Fearing the intrusion of what in another sonnet of the time he calls 'The dragon-world and all its hundred eyes,' he was intensely jealous in guarding his secret from friends and acquaintances; and in writing even to those dearest to him he lets slip no word that might betray it. To his brother he merely says, 'Miss Brawne and I have now and then a chat and a tiff,' while to his young sister he writes on February 27th that he wishes he could come to her at Walthamstow for a month or so, packing off Mrs Abbey to town, and get her to teach him 'a few common dancing steps,'--for what reason, to us too pathetically evident, he of course gives no hint.

On February 14th, about a fortnight after his return from Hampshire, and on the very day when according to Woodhouse he began _The Eve of St Mark_, Keats had put pen to a new journal-letter for America. A straw showing how the wind was blowing with him is his mention that the Reynolds sisters, whose company used to be among his chief pleasures, are staying at the Dilkes next door and that he finds them 'very dull.' So, we may guess, will they on their parts have found him. His only other correspondents in these weeks are Haydon and his young sister Fanny. Early in March Haydon returned to the charge about the loan. 'My dear Keats--now I feel the want of your promised assistance.... Before the 20th if you could help me it would be nectar and manna and all the blessings of gratified thirst.' Keats had intended for Haydon's relief some of the money due to him from his brother Tom's share in their grandmother's gift; which he expected his guardian to make over to him at once on his application. But difficulties of all sorts were raised, and for some time after the new year he had the annoyance of finding himself unable to do as he had hoped. When by-and-by Haydon writes, in the true borrower's vein, reproaching him with his promise and his failure to keep it, Keats replies without loss of temper, explaining that he had supposed himself to have the necessary means in his hand, but has been baffled by unforeseen difficulties in getting possession of his money. Moreover he finds that much less remains of his small inheritance than he had supposed, and even if all he had were laid on the table, the intended loan would leave him barely enough to live on for two years. Incidentally he mentions that he has already lent sums to various friends amounting in all to near L200, of which he expects the repayment late if ever. The upshot of the matter was that Keats contrived somehow to lend Haydon thirty pounds which he could very ill spare.

To his young sister Keats's letters during the same period are charming. He lets her perceive nothing of his anxieties, and is full of brotherly tenderness and careful advice; of interest in her preparation for her approaching confirmation; of regrets that she is kept so much from him by the scruples of Mr and Mrs Abbey, with humorous admonitions to patience under that lady's 'unfeeling and ignorant gabble'; and of plans for coming over to see her when the weather and his throat allow or when he is in cash to pay the coach fare. On one day he is serious, begging her to lean on him in all things:--'We have been very little together: but you have not the less been with me in thought. You have no one else in the world besides me who would sacrifice anything for you--I feel myself the only Protector you have. In all your little troubles think of me with the thought that there is at least one person in England who if he could would help you out of them--I live in hopes of being able to make you happy.' Another day he is all playfulness, thinking of various little presents to please her, a selection of Tassie's gems, flowers from the Tottenham nursery garden, drawing materials--and here follows the passage above quoted (p. 10) against keeping live birds or fishes:--

They are better in the trees and the water,--though I must confess
even now a partiality for a handsome globe of gold-fish--then I would
have it hold ten pails of water and be fed continually fresh through a
cool pipe with another pipe to let through the floor--well ventilated
they would preserve all their beautiful silver and crimson. Then I
would put it before a handsome painted window and shade it all round
with Myrtles and Japonicas. I should like the window to open on to the
Lake of Geneva--and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of
somebody reading.

_From a posthumous portrait by Joseph Severn

in the National Portrait Gallery

Emery Walker ph &c._]

For some time, in these letters to his sister, Keats expresses a constant anxiety at getting no news from their brother George at the distant Kentucky settlement whither he and his bride had at their last advices been bound. Pending such news, he keeps writing up his journal for them, and for nearly four months it grew and grew. Still in February, he promises to send in the next packet his '_Pot of Basil_, _St Agnes' Eve_, and if I should have finished it, a little thing called the _Eve of St Mark_. You see what fine Mother Radcliffe names I have--it is not my fault--I do not search for them. I have not gone on with _Hyperion_, for to tell the truth I have not been in great cue for writing lately--I must wait for the spring to rouse me up a little!'

As it fell out, he never went on either with _Hyperion_ or with the _Eve of St Mark_, the romance just so promisingly begun. For fully two months after breaking off the latter fragment (February 17th or 18th) he was quite out of cue for writing, and produced nothing except the ode _To Fanny_ (if I am right as to its date) and a few personal sonnets. Many causes, we can feel, were working together to check for the time being the creative impulse within him: the mere disturbing influence of the spring season for one thing; discouragement at the public reception of his work for another, though this was a motive external and relatively secondary; the results of a deliberate mental stock-taking of his own powers and performances for a third; and more deep-seated and compulsive, though unexpressed, than any of these, the love-passion by which three-fourths of his soul and consciousness had come to be absorbed. Here, from a letter to Haydon of March 8, is an example of what I mean by his mental stock-taking. The resolution it expresses is of course more a matter of mood than of fixed purpose:--

I have come to this resolution--never to write for the sake of writing
or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge or
experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me;
otherwise I will be dumb. What imagination I have I shall enjoy, and
greatly, for I have experienced the satisfaction of having great
conceptions without the trouble of sonnetteering. I will not spoil my
love of gloom by writing an Ode to Darkness.

With respect to my livelihood, I will not write for it,--for I will
not run with that most vulgar of all crowds, the literary. Such things
I ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental
weights, as it were. I am three and twenty, with little knowledge and
middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have
been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing.

Some five weeks later, about mid-April, we find that Haydon himself has been a contributing cause to Keats's poetic inactivity by his behaviour in regard to the loan which Keats had hoped but so far been unable to make him. The failure he writes, has not been his fault:--

I am doubly hurt at the slightly reproachful tone of your note and at
the occasion of it,--for it must be some other disappointment; you
seem'd so sure of some important help when last I saw you--now you
have maimed me again; I was whole, I had begun reading again--when
your note came I was engaged in a Book. I dread as much as a Plague
the idle fever of two months more without any fruit. I will walk over
the first fine day: then see what aspect your affairs have taken, and
if they should continue gloomy walk into the City to Abbey and get his
consent for I am persuaded that to me alone he will not concede a jot.

In the journal-letter of these weeks to his brother and sister-in-law, mentioning how he had been asked to join Woodhouse over a bottle of claret at his coffee-house, he breaks into a rhapsody over the virtues and wholesomeness of that beverage and adds '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 back-bone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant, and a Woodcock _passim_.' Turning to his own affairs, he says,--

I am in no despair about them--my poem has not at all succeeded; in
the course of a year or so I think I shall try the public again--in a
selfish point of view I should suffer my pride and my contempt of
public opinion to hold me silent--but for yours and Fanny's sake I
will pluck up a spirit and try again. I have no doubt of success in a
course of years if I persevere--but it must be patience--for the
Reviews have enervated and made indolent men's minds--few think for
themselves. These Reviews are getting more and more powerful,
especially the Quarterly--they are like a superstition which the more
it prostrates the Crowd and the longer it continues the more powerful
it becomes just in proportion to their increasing weakness. I was in
hopes that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and
iniquity of these Plagues they would scout them, but no, they are like
the spectators at the Westminster cock-pit--they like the battle--and
do not care who wins or who loses.

Among other matters he has a long story to tell about his friend Bailey's fickleness in love. It appears that Bailey, after a first unfortunate love-affair, had during the past year been paying his addresses to Mariane Reynolds, begging that she would take time to consider her answer, and that while her decision was still uncertain Bailey, to the great indignation of all the Reynolds family and a little to Keats's own, had engaged himself in Scotland to the sister of his friend Gleig, afterwards well known as author of _The Subaltern_ and Chaplain General to the Forces. Next Keats begins quoting with a natural zest of admiration, almost in full, that incomparable piece of studied and sustained invective, Hazlitt's _Letter to William Gifford Esqr._, beside which Gifford's own controversial virulences seem relatively blunt and boorish. Half way through Keats has to say he will copy the rest tomorrow,--

for the candles are burnt down and I am using the wax taper--which has
a long snuff on it--the fire is at its last click--I am sitting with
my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other
with the heel a little elevated from the carpet--I am writing this on
the Maid's tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure.
Beside this volume of Beaumont and Fletcher--there are on the table
two volumes of Chaucer and a new work of Tom Moore's called _Tom
Cribb's Memorial to Congress_,--nothing in it. These are trifles but I
require nothing so much of you but that you will give me a like
description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to
me. Could I see that same thing done of any great Man long since dead
it would be a great delight: As to know in what position Shakespeare
sat when he began 'To be or not to be'--such things become interesting
from distance of time or place. I hope you are both now in that sweet
sleep which no two beings deserve more than you do--I must fancy you
so--and please myself in the fancy of speaking a prayer and a blessing
over you and your lives--God bless you--I whisper good night in your
ears and you will dream of me.

This is on the 13th of March. Six days later he gives another picture, this time of his state of body rather than of mind:--

This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent and supremely
careless--I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's _Castle of
Indolence_--my passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till
nearly eleven, and weakened the animal fibre all over me, to a
delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness.
If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it
languor, but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of
effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest
of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of
enticement and pain no unbearable power. Neither Poetry, nor Ambition,
nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they
seem rather like figures on a Greek vase--a Man and two women whom no
one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the
only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body
over-powering the Mind.

'Figures on a Greek vase: a man and two women'

FROM AN ETCHING IN PIRANESI'S VASI E CANDELABRI]

The criticism is foolish which sees in this passage the expression of a languid, self-indulgent nature, and especially foolish considering the footnote in which Keats observes that at the moment he has a black eye. The black eye was no doubt the mark of the fight in which he had lately well thrashed a young blackguard of a butcher whom he found tormenting a kitten. That the said fight took place just about this time is clear by the following evidences. Cowden Clarke, in his recollections communicated privately to Lord Houghton, writes, 'The last time I saw Keats was during his residence with Mr Brown. I spent the day with him; and he read to me the poem he had last finished--_The Eve of St Agnes_. Shortly after this I removed many miles from London, and was spared the sorrow of beholding the progress of the disease that was to take him from us. When I last saw him he was in fine health and spirits; and he told me that he had, not long before our meeting, had an encounter with a fellow who was tormenting a kitten, or puppy, and who was big enough to have eaten him; that they fought for nearly an hour; and that his opponent was led home.'[7] The reading of the _Eve of St Agnes_ fixes the date of Clarke's visit as after Keats's return from Chichester at the end of January, and a remark of Keats, writing to his brother between February the 14th and 19th, that he has not seen Clarke 'for God knows how long', further fixes it as after mid-February; while the latest limit is set by the fact that by Easter Clarke had gone away to live with his family at Ramsgate, where they had settled after his father had given up the Enfield school. What the 'effeminacy' passage really expresses is of course no more than a passing mood of lassitude, gratefully welcomed as a relief from the strain of feelings habitually more acute than nature could well bear. Ambition he was schooling, or trying to school, himself to cherish in moderation, but it was not often or for long that the stings either of poetry or of love abated for him the least jot of their bitter-sweet intensity, or that anticipations of poverty or the fever of incipient disease relaxed their grip.

Though Keats's letters to his brother and sister-in-law contain no confidence on the subject, some of the verses he encloses betray in abstract form the strain of passion under which he was living; notably the fine weird sonnet on a dream which came to him after reading the Paolo and Francesca passage in Dante, and the other sonnet beginning 'Why did I laugh to-night?' In copying this last, he adds careful and considerate words of re-assurance lest his brother should take alarm for his sake:

I am ever afraid that your anxiety for me will lead you to fear for
the violence of my temperament continually smothered down: for that
reason I did not intend to have sent you the following sonnet--but
Look over the two last pages and ask yourselves whether I have not
that in me which will bear the buffets of the world. It will be the
best comment on my sonnet; it will show you that it was written with
no Agony but that of ignorance; with no thirst of anything but
Knowledge when pushed to the point though the first steps to it were
through my human passions--and perhaps I must confess a little bit of
my heart--

Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell:
No God, no Demon of severe response
Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.--
Then to my human heart I turn at once--
Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone;
Say wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain!
O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan
To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain!
Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease;
My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads:
Yet could I on this very midnight cease
And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds.
Verse, fame and Beauty are intense indeed
But Death intenser--Death is Life's High meed.

I went to bed and enjoyed uninterrupted sleep. Sane I went to bed and
sane I arose.

This is yet another of those invocations to friendly Death to which he himself refers in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ written a few weeks later, and in its phrase 'on this very midnight cease' anticipates one of the great lines of the ode itself.

No letter of Keats--or of any one--is richer than this of February to May 1819 in variety of mood and theme and interest. It contains two of the freshest and most luminous of his discursive passages of meditation on life and on the nature of the soul and the meaning of things: passages showing a native power of thought untrained indeed, but also unhampered, by academic knowledge and study, and hardly to be surpassed for their union of steady human common-sense with airy ease and play of imaginative speculation. In one, starting from reflections on the unforeseen way in which circumstances, like clouds, gather and burst, reflections suggested by the expected death of the father of his friend Haslam, he calls up a series of pictures of the instinctiveness with which men, like animals,--the hawk, the robin, the stoat, the deer,--go about their purposes; considers the rarity of the exceptional human beings whose disinterestedness helps on the progress of the world; and then turns his thoughts on himself with the comment,--

Even here, though I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as
the veriest human animal you can think of, I am, however young,
writing at random, straining at particles of light in the midst of a
great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of
any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin? May there not
be superior beings, amused with any graceful, though instinctive,
attitude my mind may fall into as I am entertained with the alertness
of the Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer?

In the other passage he disposes of all Rousseau-Godwin theories of human perfectibility by a consideration of the physical frame and order of the world we live in, the flaws and violences which mar and jar it, and which its human offspring are likely to derive from and share with it until the end; and, provisionally accepting the doctrine of immortality, he broaches of his own a scheme of the spiritual discipline for the sake of which, as he suggests, the life of men on this so imperfect earth may have been designed.

In marked, not always entirely pleasant contrast with these passages of thought and beauty Keats sends his brother such things as a summary of a satiric fairy story of Brown's and an impromptu comic tale of his own in verse, much in Brown's manner, about a princess, a mule, and a dwarf: both of them apparently to his mind amusing, but to us rather silly and the former a little coarse: also some friendly satiric verses of his own on Brown in the Spenserian stanza. He tells how he has been turning over the love-letters palmed off by way of hoax upon his brother Tom by Charles Wells in the character of a pretended 'Amena', and vows fiercely to make Wells suffer for his heartlessness; gossips further of Dilke and his overstrained parental anxiety about his boy at school; asks a string of playful questions about his sister-in-law and her daily doings; and in another place gives us, in the mention of a casual walk and talk with Coleridge, the liveliest record we have of the astonishing variety of matters and mysteries over which that philosopher was capable, in a short hour's conversation, of ranging without pause or taking breath:--