Chapter XI (2)

Last Sunday I took a walk towards Highgate and in the lane that winds
by the side of Lord Mansfield's park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator
at Guy's[8] in conversation with Coleridge--I joined them, after
enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable--I walked with him
at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In
those two Miles he broached a thousand things--let me see if I can
give you a list--Nightingales, Poetry--on Poetical
Sensation--Metaphysics--Different genera and species of
Dreams--Nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single
and double touch--a dream related--First and second consciousness--the
difference explained between will and Volition--so say metaphysicians
from a want of smoking the second consciousness--Monsters--the
Kraken--Mermaids--Southey believes in them--Southey's belief too much
diluted--a Ghost story--Good morning--I heard his voice as he came
towards me--I heard it as he moved away--I had heard it all the
interval--if it may be called so. He was civil enough to ask me to
call on him at Highgate.

It is amusing to note how the time and distance covered by his own encyclopaedic volubility shrank afterwards in Coleridge's memory. In his _Table Talk_ taken down thirteen years later his account of the meeting is recorded as follows (with the name of his companion left blank: I fill it in from Keats's letter): 'A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "There is death in that hand," I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.' The story of Coleridge's observation after the handshake is no doubt exact: the 'not well-dressed' in his description of Keats may very well be so too: but the 'loose' and 'slack' applied to his appearance must have been drawn from the sage's inward eye, as all accounts are agreed as to Keats's well-knit compactness of person. One cannot but regret that Keats failed to follow up the introduction by going, as invited, to see Coleridge at Highgate: but in all cases save those of Hunt and Haydon, his contact with distinguished seniors seems thus to have stopped short at kindly and respectful acquaintance and not to have been pushed to intimacy.

Another, somewhat divergent, account of the meeting taken down, also from Coleridge's lips, by Mr John Frere three years earlier has only lately been published. Its inaccuracy in details is evident, but there is much sense as well as kindness in Coleridge's remarks on the reviews and their effect:--

_C._ Poor Keats, I saw him once. Mr Green, whom you have heard me
mention, and I were walking out in these parts, and we were overtaken
by a young man of a very striking countenance whom Mr Green recognised
and shook hands with, mentioning my name; I wish Mr Green had
introduced me, for I did not know who it was. He passed on, but in a
few moments sprung back and said, 'Mr Coleridge, allow me the honour
of shaking your hand.' I was struck by the energy of his manner, and
gave him my hand. He passed on and we stood still looking after him,
when Mr Green said, 'Do you know who that is? That is Keats, the
poet.' 'Heavens!' said I, 'when I shook him by the hand there was
death!' This was about two years before he died.

_F._ But what was it?

_C._ I cannot describe it. There was a heat and a dampness in the
hand. To say that his death was caused by the Review is absurd, but at
the same time it is impossible adequately to conceive the effect
which it must have had on his mind. It is very well for those who have
a place in the world and are independent to talk of these things, they
can bear such a blow, so can those who have a strong religious
principle; but all men are not born Philosophers, and all men have not
those advantages of birth and education. Poor Keats had not, and it is
impossible I say to conceive the effect which such a Review must have
had upon him, knowing as he did that he had his way to make in the
world by his own exertions, and conscious of the genius within him.[9]

In the Leigh Hunt circle it had always been the fashion to regard with contempt, mingled with regret, Wordsworth's more childishly worded poems and ballads of humble life such as _The Idiot Boy_ and _Alice Fell_. The announcement of his forthcoming piece, _Peter Bell_, now drew from John Hamilton Reynolds an anonymous skit in the shape of an adroit and rather stinging anticipatory parody, which Taylor and Hessey published in the course of this April despite a strong letter of protest addressed to them by Coleridge when he heard of their intention: a protest greatly to his credit considering his and Wordsworth's recent estrangement. Keats copies for his brother the draft of a notice which at Reynolds's request he has been writing of this skit for the _Examiner_, taking care to turn it compatibly with due reverence for the sublimer works of the master parodied. The thing is quite deftly and tactfully done, and seems to show that Keats might have made himself, could he have bent his mind to it, a skilled hand at newspaper criticism. 'You will call it a little politic,' he says to his brother--'seeing I keep clear of all parties--I say something for and against both parties--and suit it to the tone of the _Examiner_--I mean to say I do not unsuit it--and I believe I think what I say--I am sure I do--I and my conscience are in luck to-day--which is an excellent thing.'

At intervals throughout these two months Keats asserts and re-asserts the strength of the hold which idleness has laid upon him so far as poetry is concerned. Thus on March 13 to his brother and sister-in-law:--'I know not why poetry and I have been so distant lately; I must make some advances or she will cut me entirely': and again to the same on April 15, 'I am still at a standstill in versifying, I cannot do it yet with any pleasure.' To his young sister Fanny he had written two days earlier that his idleness had been growing upon him of late, 'so that it will require a great shake to get rid of it. I have written nothing and almost read nothing--but I must turn over a new leaf.' Within the next two weeks the dormant impulse began to re-awake in him with power. As we have seen, he had never quite stopped writing personal sonnets. Towards the end of the month we find him trying, not very successfully, to invent a new sonnet form, but soon reverting to his accustomed Shakespearean type of three quatrains closed by a couplet. Here is the better of two sonnets which he wrote on April 30 to express the present abatement of his former hot desire for fame:--

Fame, like a wayward Girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless Boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsy, will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gipsy is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards, repay her scorn for scorn,
Ye Artists lovelorn, madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

The thought here is curiously anticipated in a passage of Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_, itself reminiscent of a well known line in Theocritus. Is the coincidence a coincidence merely, or had the lines from Browne been working unconsciously in Keats's mind?

True Fame is ever liken'd to our shade,
He sooneth misseth her, that most hath made
To overtake her; who so takes his wing,
Regardless of her, she'll be following:
Her true proprieties she thus discovers,
'Loves her contemners and contemns her Lovers.'[10]

Two days earlier Keats had copied out in his letter for America, side by side with the words for a commonplace operatic chorus of the _Fairies of the Four Elements_, and as though it were of no greater value, that masterpiece of romantic and tragic symbolism on the wasting power of Love, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. This title had already been haunting Keats's imagination when he wrote the _Eve of St Agnes_. He calls by it the air to which Porphyro touches his lute beside the sleeping Madeline. It is the title of a cold allegoric dialogue of the old French court poet Alan Chartier, which Keats knew in the translation traditionally ascribed to Chaucer. But except the title, Keats's new poem has nothing in common with the French or the Chaucerian _Belle Dame_. The form, the poetic mould, he chooses is that of a ballad of the 'Thomas the Rhymer' class, in which a mortal passes for a time into the abode and under the power of a being from the elfin world. Into this mould Keats casts--with suchlike imagery he invests--all the famine and fever of his private passion, fusing and alchemising by his art a remembered echo from William Browne, 'Let no bird sing,' and another from Wordsworth, 'Her eyes are wild,' into twelve stanzas of a new ballad music vitally his own and as weirdly ominous and haunting as the music of words can be. The metrical secret lies in shortening the last line of each stanza from four feet[11] to two, the two to take in reading the full time of four, whereby the movement is made one of awed and bodeful slowness--but let us shrink from the risk of laying an analytic finger upon the methods of a magic that calls to be felt, not dissected. Known as it is by heart to all lovers of poetry, I will print the piece again here, partly for the reason that in some of the most accessible and authoritative recent editions it is unfortunately given with changes which rob it of half its magic:--

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing!

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too--

I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild--

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan--

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery's song--

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true--

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gazed and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dreamed, ah woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall.'

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill side.

And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Keats of course gives his brother no hint of what to us seems so manifest, the application of these verses to his own predicament, and only adds a light and laughing comment on one of the rime-words. Closing his packet a few days later (May 3) he adds, as the last poem he has written, the _Ode to Psyche_. He wrote, as is well known, four other odes this spring, those _On Indolence_, _On a Grecian Urn_, _To a Nightingale_ and _To Melancholy_. The _Ode to Psyche_ has commonly been taken to be the latest of the five. I take it, on the contrary, to have been the first. Had he been ready with any of the others when he finished his letter, I think he would almost certainly have copied and sent on one or more of them also. Coupled with his re-iterated assertion of complete poetic idleness,--'the idle fever of two months without any fruit,'--lasting from mid-February until well past mid-April, the absence of all the four other odes from this packet must count as evidence that the _Ode to Psyche_ represents the first wave of a new tide of inspiration--inspiration this time not narrative and creative but lyric and meditative--and that the rest of the odes followed and were composed in the course of May. Personally I am convinced that this was the case. I make no exception in regard to the ode _On Indolence_, although, seeing that it embodies just such a relaxed mood of mind and body as we have found recorded by Keats in his letter to his brother under date March 19, and embodies it with the self-same imagery, it is usually assumed to have been written at or very nearly about the same date. But Keats in the ode itself expressly tells us otherwise, calling his mood at the hour of writing one of 'summer indolence' and defining the season as May-time, when the outdoor vines are newly bursting into leaf. Of course, it may be answered, a poet writing in March may perfectly well choose to advance the season to May by a poetic fiction. But would Keats in this case have felt any need or impulse to do so? I doubt it. Moreover a reference to the poem by Keats in a letter of early June shows that phrases of it were still hanging freshly in his memory and seems to imply that it was a thing then lately written. What happened, I take it, was either that Keats let the March vision, with its imagery of symbolic figures following one another as on a Greek sculptured urn, ripen in his mind until he was ready to compose upon it, and then attributed the vision itself to the season when he was actually putting it into verse; or else that, having fallen some time in May into a second mood of drowsiness and relaxation nearly repeating that of March, the same imagery for its expression arose naturally again in his mind.

The ode _On a Grecian Urn_ is obviously of kindred, and probably of contemporary, inspiration with that _On Indolence_, and if the one belongs to May so doubtless does the other. That this is true of the Nightingale ode we know. Some time early in May, nightingales heard both in the Wentworth Place garden and in the grove beside the Spaniards inn at the upper end of the heath set Keats brooding on the contrast between the age-long permanence of that bird-song, older than history, and the fleeting lives of the generations of men that have listened to it; and one morning he took his chair out under a plum-tree in the garden and wrote down the immortal verses, in and out and back and forth on a couple of loose sheets which Brown, two hours after seeing him go out, found him folding away carelessly behind some books in his room. This discovery, says Brown, made him search for more such neglected scraps; and Keats acquiesced in the search, and moreover gave Brown leave to make copies of anything he might find.[12] Haydon tells how Keats recited the new ode to him, 'in his low, tremulous under-tone,' as they walked together in the Hampstead meadows; and it was no doubt on Haydon's suggestion that Keats let James Elmes, a subservient ally of Haydon's in all his battles with the academic powers, have it for publication in his periodical, the _Annals of the Fine Arts_, during the following July. For the date of the _Ode on Melancholy_ the clues are less definite. Burton's _Anatomy_ has clearly to do with inspiring it, but of this, and especially of the sections on the cure of Love-Melancholy, Keats's letters and some of his verses furnish evidence that he had been much of a reader all the spring. Particular phrases, however, in letters of May and early June expressing a very similar strain of feeling to that of the ode, besides its general resemblance to the rest of the group both as to form and mood, may be taken as approximately dating it.

Following these so fruitful labours (if I am right as to the dates) of May, came a month of strained indecision and anxiety during which Keats again could do no work. Questions of his own fortune and future were weighing heavily on his mind. For the time being he could not touch such small remainder of his grandmother's legacy as was still unexpended. A lawsuit threatened by the widow of his uncle Captain Jennings against his guardian Mr Abbey, in connexion with the administration of the trust, had had the effect for the time being of stopping his supplies from that quarter altogether. Thereupon he very gently asked Haydon to make an effort to repay his recent loan; who not only made none--'he did not,' says Keats, 'seem to care much about it, but let me go without my money almost with nonchalance.' This was too much even for Keats's patience, and he declares that he shall never count Haydon a friend again. Nevertheless he by and by let old affection resume its sway, and entered into the other's interests and endured his exhortations as kindly as ever. Apart from Mrs Jennings's bequest, there was a not inconsiderable sum which, as we know, had been left invested by Mr Jennings for the direct benefit of his Keats grandchildren; but this sum could not be divided until Fanny Keats came of age, and there seems to have been no thought of John's anticipating his reversionary share. Indeed it is doubtful if the very existence of these and other funds lying by for them had not at this time been forgotten.[13]

In this predicament Keats began very seriously to entertain the idea, which we have seen broached by him several times already, of seeking the post of surgeon on an East Indiaman as at least a temporary means of livelihood. He mentions the idea not only to George and to his young sister, but he debates it with a new correspondent, one of the Miss Jeffrey's of Teignmouth, whom he suddenly now addresses in terms of confidence which show how warm must have been their temporary friendship the year before:--

Your advice about the Indiaman is a very wise advice, because it just
suits me, though you are a little in the wrong concerning its
destroying the energies of Mind: on the contrary it would be the
finest thing in the world to strengthen them--to be thrown among
people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies forces
the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its
speculations of the differences of human character and to class them
with the calmness of a Botanist. An Indiaman is a little world. One of
the great reasons that the English have produced the finest writers in
the world is, that the English world has ill-treated them during their
lives and foster'd them after their deaths. They have in general been
trampled aside into the bye paths of life and seen the festerings of
Society. They have not been treated like the Raphaels of Italy. And
where is the Englishman and Poet who has given a magnificent
Entertainment at the christening of one of his Hero's Horses as
Boyardo did? He had a Castle in the Appenine. He was a noble Poet of
Romance; not a miserable and mighty Poet of the human heart. The
middle age of Shakespeare was all clouded over; his days were not more
happy than Hamlet's who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in
his common every day Life than any other of his Characters--Ben
Johnson was a common Soldier and in the Low Countries in the face of
two armies, fought a single combat with a French Trooper and slew
him--For all this I will not go on board an Indiaman, nor for
example's sake run my head into dark alleys: I daresay my discipline
is to come, and plenty of it too. I have been very idle lately, very
averse to writing; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets
and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a
Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying
Pet-lamb. I have put no more in Print or you should have had it. You
will judge of my 1819 temper when I tell you that the thing I have
most enjoyed this year has been writing an ode to Indolence.

The reader will have noticed in the phrase about 'versifying Pet-lamb' a repetition from this very ode _On Indolence_. Here is another confidence imparted to the same correspondent concerning his present mood and disposition:--

I have been always till now almost as careless of the world as a
fly--my troubles were all of the Imagination--My brother George always
stood between me and any dealings with the world. Now I find I must
buffet it--I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to
fight--I must choose between despair and Energy--I choose the latter
though the world has taken on a quakerish look with me, which I once
thought was impossible--

'Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass and glory in the flower.'

I once thought this a Melancholist's dream.

His immediate object in writing had been to ask, in case he should decide against the Indiaman project and in favour of another attempt at the literary life, for the address of a cheap lodging somewhere in the Teign valley, the beauties of which, seen in glimpses through the rain, he had sung in some doggrel stanzas the year before. Brown, more than ever impressed during these last months with the power and promise of his friend's genius, was dead against the Indiaman scheme and in the end persuaded Keats to accept an advance of money for his present needs and to devote the summer to work in the country. Part of such work was to be upon a tragedy to be written by the two in collaboration and on a basis of half profits. Brown had not less belief in Keats's future than affection for his person, and it was the two combined that made him ready and eager, as he frankly told Keats, to sail in the same boat with him. In the end the Devonshire idea gave place to a new plan, that of joining the invalid James Rice for a stay at Shanklin. 'I have given up the idea of the Indiaman', Keats writes to his young sister on June 9; 'I cannot resolve to give up my favourite studies: so I propose to retire once more. A friend of Mine who has an ill state of health called on me yesterday and proposed to spend a little time with him at the back of the Isle of Wight where he said we might live cheaply. I agreed to his proposal.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Later occupants re-named the place Lawn Bank and threw the two
semi-detached houses into one, making alterations and additions the
exact nature of which were pointed out to me in 1885 by Mr William
Dilke, the then surviving brother of Keats's friend. This gentleman
also showed me a house across the road which he himself had built in
early life, occupied for a while, and then let on a sixty years'
lease: 'which lease,' he added, as though to outlive a sixty years'
agreement contracted at thirty were the most ordinary occurrence in
the world, 'fell in a year or two ago.' He died shortly afterwards,
aged 93. He and Mrs Procter, the widow of Barry Cornwall the
poet--staunchest, wittiest, and youngest-hearted defier of Time that
she was--were the only two persons I have known and spoken to who had
known and spoken to Keats.

[2] The only set of engravings existing in Keats's time after
pictures at Milan was the Raccolta, etc., of G. Zanconi (1813), which
gives only panels and canvases by masters of the full Renaissance in
private collections.

[3] The fullest and, it must be said, least favourable account we
have of her is in the retrospect of a cousin who had frequented her
mother's house as a young boy about 1819-20, and seventy years later
gave his impressions as follows (_New York Herald_, April 12, 1889).
'Miss Fanny Brawne was very fond of admiration. I do not think she
cared for Keats, although she was engaged to him. She was very much
affected when he died, because she had treated him so badly. She was
very fond of dancing, and of going to the opera and to balls and
parties. Miss Brawne's mother had an extensive acquaintance with
gentlemen, and the society in which they mingled was musical and
literary. Through the Dilkes, Miss Brawne was invited out a great
deal, and as Keats was not in robust health enough to take her out
himself (for he never went with her), she used to go with military
men to the Woolwich balls and to balls in Hampstead; and she used to
dance with these military officers a great deal more than Keats
liked. She did not seem to care much for him. Mr Dilke, the
grandfather of the present Sir Charles Dilke, admired her very much
in society, and although she was not a great beauty she was very
lively and agreeable. I remember that among those frequenting Mrs
Brawne's house in Hampstead were a number of foreign gentlemen. Keats
could not talk French as they could, and their conversation with his
fiancee in a language he could not understand was a source of
continual disagreement between them. Keats thought that she talked
and flirted and danced too much with them, but his remonstrances were
all unheeded by Miss Brawne.' Against these impressions should be set
Brown's testimony, contained in letters of the time to Severn and
others, to her signs of acute distress on the news coming from Italy
of the hopelessness of her lover's condition and finally of his
death: and stronger still, her own words written in later years to
Medwin, which seem to show a true, and even tender, understanding of
his character if not of his genius (see below p. 465).

[4]
[Greek: eros d' aute m' ho lysimeles donei
glykypikron amachanon orpeton.]--Sappho, Fr. 40.

[5] There is no autograph of this ode, only transcripts by friends,
and Mr Buxton Forman was most likely right in suggesting that the
true reading for 'not' should be 'out.'

[6] Keats was staying that night and two more at Mr Taylor's in
London: but there is nothing against my theory in this: he might have
composed the sonnet as well in Fleet Street as at Hampstead.

[7] In his printed account of the matter Clarke calls the victim
definitely a kitten, and says of Keats: 'He thought he should be
beaten, for the fellow was the taller and stronger; but like an
authentic pugilist, my young poet found that he had planted a blow
which "told" upon his antagonist; in every succeeding round therefore
(for they fought nearly an hour), he never failed of returning to the
weak point, and the contest ended in the hulk being led home.'

[8] Joseph Henry Green, afterwards F.R.S. and Professor of Anatomy to
the Royal Academy; distinguished alike as a teacher in his own
profession and as a disciple and interpreter of Coleridge's
philosophy.

[9] _Cornhill Magazine_, April 1917: 'A Talk with Coleridge,' edited
by Miss E. M. Green.

[10] [Greek: kai pheugei phileonta kai ou phileonta diokei.] Theocr.
Idyll. vi. 27.

[11] I use the foot nomenclature for convenience, because to count by
stresses seems to make the point less immediately clear, while to
count by syllables would involve pointing out that in the last lines
of stanzas ii, iv, ix and xi the movement is varied by resolving the
light first syllable into two that take the time of one.

[12] Brown, writing many years after the events, must be a little out
here, seeing that already on April 30th Keats tells his brother that
Brown is busy 'rummaging out his Keats's old sins, that is to say
sonnets.' (Note that Keats mentions no odes). Brown is in like manner
wrong in remembering the draft of the Nightingale ode as written on
'four or five scraps' when it was in fact written on two, as became
apparent when it appeared in the market thirteen years ago (see
_Monthly Review_, March 1903). It is now in the collection of Lord
Crewe.

[13] When in 1823-4 their existence was disclosed and they were
divided on the order of the Court of Chancery between George Keats
and his sister, they amounted with accumulations of interest to a
little over L4500.