Part 6 (1/2)

Indeed, the letters are so pleasant and amusing in the way they exhibit minor traits, habits, prejudices, and the like, that it is a temptation to dwell upon these things. How we love a man's weaknesses--if we share them! I do not know that Keats would have given occasion for an anecdote like that told of a certain book-loving actor, whose best friend, when urged to join the chorus of praise that was quite universally sung to this actor's virtues, acquiesced by saying amiably, 'Mr. Blank undoubtedly has genius, but he can't spell;' yet there are comforting evidences that Keats was no servile follower of the 'monster Conventionality' even in his spelling, while in respect to the use of capitals he was a law unto himself. He sprinkled them through his correspondence with a lavish hand, though at times he grew so economical that, as one of his editors remarks, he would spell Romeo with a small _r_, Irishman with a small _i_, and G.o.d with a small _g_.

It is also a pleasure to find that, with his other failings, he had a touch of book-madness. There was in him the making of a first-cla.s.s bibliophile. He speaks with rapture of his black-letter Chaucer, which he proposes to have bound 'in Gothique,' so as to unmodernize as much as possible its outward appearance. But to Keats books were literature or they were not literature, and one cannot think that his affections would twine about ever so bookish a volume which was merely 'curious.'

One reads with sympathetic amus.e.m.e.nt of Keats's genuine and natural horror of paying the same bill twice, 'there not being a more unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others).' The necessity of preserving adequate evidence that a bill had been paid was uppermost in his thought quite frequently; and once when, at Leigh Hunt's instance, sundry packages of papers belonging to that eminently methodical and businesslike man of letters were to be sorted out and in part destroyed, Keats refused to burn any, 'for fear of demolis.h.i.+ng receipts.'

But the reader will chance upon few more humorous pa.s.sages than that in which the poet tells his brother George how he cures himself of the blues, and at the same time spurs his flagging powers of invention: 'Whenever I find myself growing vaporish I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean s.h.i.+rt, 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.' The virtues of a clean s.h.i.+rt have often been sung, but it remained for Keats to show what a change of linen and a general _adonizing_ could do in the way of furnis.h.i.+ng poetic stimulus. This is better than coffee, brandy, absinthe, or falling in love; and it prompts one to think anew that the English poets, taking them as a whole, were a marvelously healthy and sensible breed of men.

It is, however, in respect to the light they throw upon the poet's literary life that the letters are of highest significance. They gratify to a reasonable extent that natural desire we all have to see authors.h.i.+p in the act. The processes by which genius brings things to pa.s.s are so mysterious that our curiosity is continually piqued; and our failure to get at the real thing prompts us to be more or less content with mere externals. If we may not hope to see the actual process of making poetry, we may at least study the poet's ma.n.u.script.

By knowing of his habits of work we flatter ourselves that we are a little nearer the secret of his power.

We must bear in mind that Keats was a boy, always a boy, and that he died before he quite got out of boyhood. To be sure, most boys of twenty-six would resent being described by so juvenile a term. But one must have successfully pa.s.sed twenty-six without doing anything in particular to understand how exceedingly young twenty-six is. And to have wrought so well in so short a time, Keats must have had from the first a clear and n.o.ble conception of the nature of his work, as he must also have displayed extraordinary diligence in the doing of it.

Perhaps these points are too obvious, and of a sort which would naturally occur to any one; but it will be none the less interesting to see how the letters bear witness to their truth.

In the first place, Keats was anything but a loafer at literature. He seems never to have dawdled. A fine healthiness is apparent in all allusions to his processes of work. 'I read and write about eight hours a day,' he remarks in a letter to Haydon. Bailey, Keats's Oxford friend, says that the fellow would go to his writing-desk soon after breakfast, and stay there until two or three o'clock in the afternoon.

He was then writing _Endymion_. His stint was about 'fifty lines a day, ... and he wrote with as much regularity, and apparently with as much ease, as he wrote his letters.... Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. But he never forced himself.' Bailey quotes, in connection with this, Keats's own remark to the effect that poetry would better not come at all than not to come 'as naturally as the leaves of a tree.' Whether this spontaneity of production was as great as that of some other poets of his time may be questioned; but he would never have deserved Tom Nash's sneer at those writers who can only produce by 'sleeping betwixt every sentence.' Keats had in no small degree the 'fine extemporal vein' with 'invention quicker than his eye.'

We uncritically feel that it could hardly have been otherwise in the case of one with whom poetry was a pa.s.sion. Keats had an infinite hunger and thirst for good poetry. His poetical life, both in the receptive and productive phases of it, was intense. Poetry was meat and drink to him. He could even urge his friend Reynolds to talk about it to him, much as one might beg a trusted friend to talk about one's lady-love, and with the confidence that only the fitting thing would be spoken. 'Whenever you write, say a word or two on some pa.s.sage in Shakespeare which may have come rather new to you,'--a sentence which shows his faith in the many-sidedness of the great poetry. Shakespeare was forever 'coming new' to _him_, and he was 'haunted' by particular pa.s.sages. He loved to fill the cup of his imagination with the splendors of the best poets until the cup overflowed. 'I find I cannot exist without Poetry,--without eternal Poetry; half the day will not do,--the whole of it; I began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan.' He tells Leigh Hunt, in a letter written from Margate, that he thought so much about poetry, and 'so long together,' that he could not get to sleep at night. Whether this meant in working out ideas of his own, or living over the thoughts of other poets, is of little importance; the remark shows how deeply the roots of his life were imbedded in poetical soil. He loved a debauch in the verse of masters of his art. He could intoxicate himself with Shakespeare's sonnets. He rioted in 'all their fine things said unconsciously.' We are tempted to say, by just so much as he had large reverence for these men, by just so much he was of them.

Undoubtedly, this ability to be moved by strong imaginative work may be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment.

Keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses.

He knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than mere ambition could. He understood the limits of ambition as a force in literature. Keats's ambition trembled in the presence of Keats's conception of the magnitude of the poetic office. 'I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is.' Yet he had honest confidence. One cannot help liking him for the fine audacity with which he p.r.o.nounces his own work good,--better even than that of a certain other great name in English literature; one cannot help loving him for the sweet humility with which he accepts the view that, after all, success or failure lies entirely without the range of self-choosing. There is a point of view from which it is folly to hold a poet responsible even for his own poetry, and when _Endymion_ was spoken of as 'slipshod' Keats could reply, 'That it is so is no fault of mine.... The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man.... That which is creative must create itself. In _Endymion_ I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green sh.o.r.e, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.'

Well might a man who could write that last sentence look upon poetry not only as a responsible, but as a dangerous pursuit. Men who aspire to be poets are gamblers. In all the lotteries of the literary life none is so uncertain as this. A million chances that you don't win the prize to one chance that you do. It is a curious thing that ever so thoughtful and conscientious an author may not know whether he is making literature or merely writing verse. He conforms to all the canons of taste in his own day; he is devout and reverent; he shuns excesses of diction, and he courts originality; his verse seems to himself and to his unflattering friends instinct with the spirit of his time, but twenty years later it is old-fas.h.i.+oned. Keats, with all his feeling of certainty, stood with head uncovered before that power which gives poetical gifts to one, and withholds them from another.

Above all would he avoid self-delusion in these things. 'There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter one's self into an idea of being a great Poet.'

Keats, if one may judge from a letter written to John Taylor in February, 1818, had little expectation that his _Endymion_ was going to be met with universal plaudits. He doubtless looked for fair treatment. He probably had no thought of being sneeringly addressed as 'Johnny,' or of getting recommendations to return to his 'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.' In fact, he looked upon the issue as entirely problematical. He seemed willing to take it for granted that in _Endymion_ he had but moved into the go-cart from the leading-strings. 'If _Endymion_ serves me for a pioneer, perhaps I ought to be content, for thank G.o.d I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths; and I have, I am sure, many friends who if I fail will attribute any change in my life to humbleness rather than pride,--to a cowering under the wings of great poets rather than to bitterness that I am not appreciated.' And for evidence of any especial bitterness because of the las.h.i.+ng he received one will search the letters in vain. Keats was manly and good-humored, most of his morbidity being referred directly to his ill health. The trouncing he had at the hands of the reviewers was no more violent than the one administered to Tennyson by Professor Wilson. Critics, good and bad, can do much harm. They may terrorize a timid spirit. But a greater terror than the fear of the reviewers hung over the head of John Keats. He stood in awe of his own artistic and poetic sense. He could say with truth that his own domestic criticism had given him pain without comparison beyond what _Blackwood_ or the _Quarterly_ could possibly inflict. If he had had any terrible heart-burning over their malignancy, if he had felt that his life was poisoned, he could hardly have forborne some allusion to it in his letters to his brother, George Keats. But he is almost imperturbable. He talks of the episode freely, says that he has been urged to publish his _Pot of Basil_ as a reply to the reviewers, has no idea that he can be made ridiculous by abuse, notes the futility of attacks of this kind, and then, with a serene conviction that is irresistible, adds, 'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death!'

Such egoism of genius is magnificent; the more so as it appears in Keats because it runs parallel with deep humility in the presence of the masters of his art. Naturally, the masters who were in their graves were the ones he reverenced the most and read without stint.

But it was by no means essential that a poet be a dead poet before Keats did him homage. It is impossible to think that Keats's att.i.tude towards Wordsworth was other than finely appreciative, in spite of the fact that he applauded Reynolds's _Peter Bell_, and inquired almost petulantly why one should be teased with Wordsworth's 'Matthew with a bough of wilding in his hand.' But it is also impossible that his sense of humor should not have been aroused by much that he found in Wordsworth. It was Wordsworth he meant when he said, 'Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peac.o.c.k over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself,'--a sentence, by the way, quite as unconsciously funny as some of the things he laughed at in the works of his great contemporary.

It will be pertinent to quote here two or three of the good critical words which Keats scattered through his letters. Emphasizing the use of simple means in his art, he says, 'I think that 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.'

'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.... Poetry should be great and un.o.btrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.' Or as Ruskin has put the thing with respect to painting, 'Entirely first-rate work is so quiet and natural that there can be no dispute over it.'

Keats appears to have been in no sense a hermit. With the exception of Byron, he was perhaps less of a recluse than any of his poetical contemporaries. With respect to society he frequently practiced total abstinence; but the world was amusing, and he liked it. He was fond of the theatre, fond of whist, fond of visiting the studios, fond of going to the houses of his friends. But he would run no risks; he was shy and he was proud. He dreaded contact with the ultra-fas.h.i.+onables.

Naturally, his opportunities for such intercourse were limited, but he cheerfully neglected his opportunities. I doubt if he ever bewailed his humble origin; nevertheless, the const.i.tution of English society would hardly admit of his forgetting it. He had that pardonable pride which will not allow a man to place himself among those who, though outwardly fair-spoken, offer the insult of a hostile and patronizing mental att.i.tude.

Most of his friends.h.i.+ps were with men, and this is to his credit. The man is spiritually warped who is incapable of a deep and abiding friends.h.i.+p with one of his own s.e.x; and to go a step farther, that man is utterly to be distrusted whose only friends are among women. We may not be prepared to accept the radical position of a certain young thinker, who proclaims, in season, but defiantly, that 'men are the idealists, after all;' yet it is easy to comprehend how one may take this point of view. The friends.h.i.+ps of men are a vastly more interesting and poetic study than the friends.h.i.+ps of men and women.

This is in the nature of the case. It is the usual victory of the normal over the abnormal. As a rule, it is impossible for a friends.h.i.+p to exist between a man and woman, unless the man and woman in question be husband and wife. Then it is as rare as it is beautiful. And with men, the most admirable spectacle is not always that where attendant circ.u.mstances prompt to heroic display of friends.h.i.+p, for it is often so much easier to die than to live. But you may see young men pledging their mutual love and support in this difficult and adventurous quest of what is n.o.blest in the art of living. Such love will not urge to a theatrical posing, and it can hardly find expression in words. Words seem to profane it. I do not say that Keats stood in such an ideal relation to any one of his many friends whose names appear in the letters. He gave of himself to them all, and he received much from each. No man of taste and genius could have been other than flattered by the way in which Keats approached him. He was charming in his att.i.tude toward Haydon; and when Haydon proposed sending Keats's sonnet to Wordsworth, the young poet wrote, 'The Idea of your sending it to Wordsworth put me out of breath--you know with what Reverence I would send my well wishes to him.'

But interesting as a chapter on Keats's friends.h.i.+ps with men would be, we are bound to confess that in dramatic intensity it would grow pale when laid beside that fiery love pa.s.sage of his life, his acquaintance with f.a.n.n.y Brawne. The thirty-nine letters given in the fourth volume of Buxton Forman's edition of _Keats's Works_ tell the story of this affair of a poet's heart. These are the letters which Mr. William Watson says he has never read, and at which no consideration shall ever induce him to look. But Mr. Watson reflects upon people who have been human enough to read them when he compares such a proceeding on his own part (were he able to be guilty of it) to the indelicacy of 'listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall.' This is not a just ill.u.s.tration. The man who takes upon himself the responsibility of being the first to open such intimate letters, and adds thereto the infinitely greater responsibility of publis.h.i.+ng them in so attractive a form that he who runs will stop running in order to read,--such an editor will need to satisfy Mr. Watson that in so doing he was not listening at a keyhole or spying over a wall. For the general public, the wall is down, and the door containing the keyhole thrown open.

Perhaps our duty is not to look. I, for one, wish that great men would not leave their love letters around. Nay, I wish you a better wish than that: it is that the perfect taste of the gentleman and scholar who gave us in its present form the correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, the early and later letters of Carlyle, and the letters of Lowell might have control of the private papers of every man of genius whose teachings the world holds dear. He would need for this an indefinite lease upon life; but since I am wis.h.i.+ng, let me wish largely. There is need of such wis.h.i.+ng. Many editors have been called, and only two or three chosen.

But why one who reads the letters of Keats to f.a.n.n.y Brawne should have any other feeling than that of pity for a poor fellow who was so desperately in love as to be wretched because of it I do not see. Even a cynic will grant that Keats was not disgraced, since it is very clear that he did not yield readily to what Dr. Holmes calls the great pa.s.sion. He had a complacent boyish superiority of att.i.tude with respect to all those who are weak enough to love women. 'Nothing,' he says, 'strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love.

A man in love I do think cuts the sorryest 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.'

Then he speaks of that dinner party of stutterers and squinters described in the _Spectator_, and says that it would please him more 'to sc.r.a.pe together a party of lovers.' If this letter be genuine and the date of it correctly given, it was written three months after he had succ.u.mbed to the attractions of f.a.n.n.y Brawne. Perhaps he was trying to brave it out, as one may laugh to conceal embarra.s.sment.