Part 6 (1/2)

As the best criticism on Keats's _Endymion_ is in his own preface, so its best defence is in a letter he wrote six months after it was printed. ”It is as good,” he says, ”as I had power to make it by myself.” Hunt had warned him against the risks of a long poem, and Sh.e.l.ley against those of hasty publication. From much in his performance that was exuberant and crude the cla.s.sical training and now ripening taste of Sh.e.l.ley might doubtless have saved him, had he been willing to listen. But he was determined that his poetry should at all times be the true spontaneous expression of his mind. ”Had I been nervous,” he goes on, ”about its being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over every page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble. I will write independently. I have written independently _without judgment_. I may write independently and _with judgment_ hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself.”

How well Keats was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work out, as he says, its own salvation, we shall see when we come to consider his next labours.

CHAPTER VI.

Northern Tour--The _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ reviews--Death of Tom Keats--Removal to Wentworth Place--f.a.n.n.y Brawne--Excursion to Chichester--Absorption in Love and Poetry--Haydon and Money Difficulties--Family Correspondence--Darkening Prospects--Summer at Shanklin and Winchester--Wise Resolutions--Return from Winchester.

[June 1818-October, 1819.]

While Keats in the spring of 1818 was still at Teignmouth, with _Endymion_ on the eve of publication, he had been wavering between two different plans for the immediate future. One was to go for a summer's walking tour through Scotland with Charles Brown. ”I have many reasons,” he writes to Reynolds, ”for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather. I'll have leather b.u.t.tons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, 'over the hills we go.' If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.” A fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an over-mastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the flight of poetry:--

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

After he had come back to Hampstead in May, however, Keats allowed himself to be persuaded, no doubt partly by considerations of health, and the recollection of his failure to stand the strain of solitary thought a year before, to resume his original intention. It was agreed between him and Brown that they should accompany George Keats and his bride as far as Liverpool, and then start on foot from Lancaster. They left London accordingly on Monday, June 22[37]. The coach stopped for dinner the first day at Redbourn near St Albans, where Keats's friend of medical-student days, Mr Stephens, was in practice. He came to shake hands with the travelling party at the poet's request, and many years afterwards wrote an account of the interview, the chief point of which is a description of Mrs George Keats. ”Rather short, not what might be strictly called handsome, but looked like a being whom any man of moderate sensibility might easily love. She had the imaginative poetical cast. Somewhat singular and girlish in her attire.... There was something original about her, and John seemed to regard her as a being whom he delighted to honour, and introduced her with evident satisfaction[38].” With no other woman or girl friend was Keats ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy as with this 'Nymph of the downward smile and side-long glance' of his early sonnet--'Sister George' as she had now become; and for that reason, and on account of the series of charming playful affectionate letters he wrote to her afterwards in America, the portrait above quoted, such as it is, seems worth preserving.

The farewells at Liverpool over, Keats and Brown went on by coach to Lancaster, and thence began their walk, Keats taking for his reading one book only, the little three-volume edition of Cary's _Dante_. ”I cannot,”

writes Brown, ”forget the joy, the rapture of my friend when he suddenly, and for the first time, became sensible to the full effect of mountain scenery. It was just before our descent to the village of Bowness, at a turn of the road, when the lake of Windermere at once came into view....

All was enchantment to us both.” Keats in his own letters says comparatively little about the scenery, and that quite simply and quietly, not at all with the descriptive enthusiasm of the modern picturesque tourist; nor indeed with so much of that quality as the sedate and fastidious Gray had shown in his itineraries fifty years before. The truth is that an intensely active, intuitive genius for nature like his needs not for its exercise the stimulus of the continued presence of beauty, but on a minimum of experience can summon up and multiply for itself spirit sunsets, and glories of dream and lake and mountain, richer and more varied than the mere receptive lover of scenery, eager to enjoy but impotent to create, can witness in a life-time of travel and pursuit.

Moreover, whatever the effect on him of that first burst of Windermere, it is evident that as Keats proceeded northwards he found the scenery somewhat foreign to his taste. Besides the familiar home beauties of England, two ideals of landscape, cla.s.sic and mediaeval, haunted and allured his imagination almost equally; that of the sunny and fabled south, and that of the shadowed and adventurous north; and the Scottish border, with its bleak and moorish, rain-swept and cloud-empurpled hills, and its unhomely cold stone villages, struck him at first as answering to neither. ”I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish.”

A change, besides, was coming over Keats's thoughts and feelings whereby scenery altogether was beginning to interest him less, and his fellow-creatures more. In the acuteness of childish and boyish sensation, among the suburban fields or on sea-side holidays, he had unconsciously absorbed images of nature enough for his faculties to work on through a life-time of poetry; and now, in his second chamber of Maiden-thought, the appeal of nature yields in his mind to that of humanity. ”Scenery is fine,” he had already written from Devons.h.i.+re in the spring, ”but human nature is finer.” In the Lake country, after climbing Skiddaw one morning early, and walking to Treby the same afternoon, where they watched with amus.e.m.e.nt the exercises in a country dancing-school: ”There was as fine a row of boys and girls,” says Keats, ”as you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.” The same note recurs frequently in letters of a later date.

From Lancaster the travellers walked first to Ambleside; from Ambleside to the foot of Helvellyn, where they slept, having called by the way on Wordsworth at Rydal, and been disappointed to find him away electioneering. From Helvellyn to Keswick, whence they made the circuit of Derwent.w.a.ter; Keswick to Treby, Treby to Wigton, and Wigton to Carlisle, where they arrived on the 1st of July. Thence by coach to Dumfries, visiting at the latter place the tomb and house of Burns, to whose memory Keats wrote a sonnet, by no means in his best vein. From Dumfries they started southwestwards for Galloway, a region little frequented even now, and then hardly at all, by tourists. Reaching the Kirkcudbrights.h.i.+re coast, with its scenery at once wild and soft, its embosomed inlets and rocky tufted headlands, its views over the glimmering Solway to the hazy hills of Man, Brown bethought him that this was Guy Mannering's country, and began to tell Keats about Meg Merrilies. Keats, who according to the fas.h.i.+on of his circle was no enthusiast for Scott's poetry, and of the Waverley novels had read the _Antiquary_ but not _Guy Mannering_, was much struck; and presently, writes Brown,--”there was a little spot, close to our pathway. 'There,' he said, 'in that very spot, without a shadow of doubt, has old Meg Merrilies often boiled her kettle.' It was among pieces of rock, and brambles, and broom, ornamented with a profusion of honeysuckles and roses, and foxgloves, and all in the very blush and fulness of blossom.” As they went along, Keats composed on Scott's theme the spirited ballad beginning 'Old Meg, she was a gipsy,' and stopping to breakfast at Auchencairn, copied it out in a letter which he was writing to his young sister at odd moments, and again in another letter which he began at the same place to Tom. It was his way on his tour, and indeed always, thus to keep by him the letters he was writing, and add sc.r.a.ps to them as the fancy took him. The systematic Brown, on the other hand, wrote regularly and uniformly in the evenings. ”He affronts my indolence and luxury,” says Keats, ”by pulling out of his knapsack, first his paper; secondly his pens; and last, his ink. Now I would not care if he would change a little. I say now, why not take out his pens first sometimes? But I might as well tell a hen to hold up her head before she drinks, instead of afterwards.”

From Kirkcudbright they walked on July 5,--skirting the wild moors about the Water of Fleet, and pa.s.sing where Cairnsmore looks down over wooded slopes to the steaming estuary of the Cree,--as far as Newton Stewart: thence across the Wigtons.h.i.+re levels by Glenluce to Stranraer and Portpatrick. Here they took the Donaghadee packet for Ireland, with the intention of seeing the Giant's Causeway, but finding the distances and expense exceed their calculation, contented themselves with a walk to Belfast, and crossed again to Portpatrick on the third day. In letters written during and immediately after this excursion, Keats has some striking pa.s.sages of human observation and reflection:--

”These Kirk-men have done Scotland good. They have made men, women, old men, young men, old women, young women, hags, girls, and infants, all careful; so they are formed into regular phalanges of savers and gainers.... These Kirk-men have done Scotland harm; they have banished puns, love, and laughing. To remind you of the fate of Burns:--poor, unfortunate fellow! his disposition was Southern! How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged, in self-defence, to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable, that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not!... I would sooner be a wild deer, than a girl under the dominion of the Kirk; and I would sooner be a wild hog, than be the occasion of a poor creature's penance before those execrable elders.”

”On our return from Belfast we met a sedan--the d.u.c.h.ess of Dunghill.

It was no laughing matter though. Imagine the worst dog-kennel you ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved from a scarcity of biscuit in its pa.s.sage from Madagascar to the Cape, with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a history of her life and sensations!”--.

From Stranraer the friends made straight for Burns's country, walking along the coast by Ballantrae, Girvan, Kirkoswald, and Maybole, to Ayr, with the lonely ma.s.s of Ailsa Crag, and presently the mountains of Arran, looming ever above the Atlantic floor on the left: and here again we find Keats taking a keen pleasure in the mingled richness and wildness of the coast scenery. They went to Kirk Alloway, and he was delighted to find the home of Burns amid scenes so fair. He had made up his mind to write a sonnet in the cottage of that poet's birth, and did so, but was worried by the prate of the man in charge--”a mahogany-faced old jacka.s.s who knew Burns: he ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him”--”his gab hindered my sublimity: the flat dog made me write a flat sonnet.” And again, as they journeyed on toward Glasgow he composed with considerable pains (as Brown particularly mentions) the lines beginning 'There is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain.' They were meant to express the temper in which his pilgrimage through the Burns country had been made, but in spite of an occasional striking breadth and concentration of imagery, are on the whole forced and unlike himself.

From Ayr Keats and Brown tramped on to Glasgow, and from Glasgow by Dumbarton through the _Lady of the Lake_ country, which they found vexatiously full of tourists, to Inverary, and thence by Loch Awe to Oban.

At Inverary Keats was amused and exasperated by a performance of _The Stranger_ to an accompaniment of bagpipe music. Bathing in Loch Fyne the next morning, he got horribly bitten by gadflies, and vented his smart in a set of doggrel rhymes. The walk along the sh.o.r.es of Loch Awe impressed him greatly, and for once he writes of it something like a set description, for the benefit of his brother Tom. At the same point occur for the first time complaints, slight at first, of fatigue and discomfort.

At the beginning of his tour Keats had written to his sister of its effects upon his sleep and appet.i.te: telling her how he tumbled into bed ”so fatigued that when I am asleep you might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town, like a hoop, without waking me. Then I get so hungry a ham goes but a very little way and fowls are like larks to me.... I can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do bull's eyes.”

Presently he writes that he is getting used to it, and doing his twenty miles or more a day without inconvenience. But now in the remoter parts of the Highlands the coa.r.s.e fare and accommodation, and rough journeys and frequent drenchings, begin to tell upon both him and Brown, and he grumbles at the perpetual diet of oatcake and eggs. Arrived at Oban, the friends undertook one journey in especial which proved too much for Keats's strength. Finding the regular tourist route by water to Staffa and Iona too expensive, they were persuaded to take the ferry to the hither side of the island of Mull, and then with a guide cross on foot to the farther side opposite Iona: a wretched walk, as Keats calls it, of some thirty-seven miles over difficult ground and in the very roughest weather.

By good luck the sky lifted at the critical moment, and the travellers had a favourable view of Staffa. By the power of the past and its a.s.sociations in the one 'ill.u.s.trious island,' and of nature's architecture in the other, Keats shows himself naturally much impressed. Fingal's cave in especial touched his imagination, and on it and its profanation by the race of tourists he wrote, in the seven-syllable metre which no writer since Ben Jonson has handled better or more vigorously, the lines beginning 'Not Aladdin Magian.' Avoiding mere epithet-work and description, like the true poet he is, he begins by calling up for comparison the visions of other fanes or palaces of enchantment, and then, bethinking himself of Milton's cry to Lycidas,

”--where'er thy bones are hurl'd, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides”--

imagines that lost one to have been found by the divinity of Ocean, and put by him in charge of this cathedral of his building. In his priestly character Lycidas tells his latter-day visitant of the religion of the place, complains of the violation of its solitude, and ends, with a fine abruptness which is the most effective stroke of art in the piece:--

”So for ever I will leave Such a taint, and soon unweave All the magic of the place![39]

So saying, with a spirit's glance He dived--.”

From the exertion and exposure which he underwent on his Scotch tour, and especially in this Mull expedition, are to be traced the first distinct and settled symptoms of failure in Keats's health, and of the development of his hereditary tendency to consumption. In the same letter to his brother Tom which contains the transcript of the Fingal poem, he speaks of a 'slight sore throat,' and of being obliged to rest for a day or two at Oban. Thence they pushed on in bad weather to Fort William, made the ascent of Ben Nevis in a dissolving mist, and so by the 6th of August to Inverness. Keats's throat had in the meantime been getting worse: the ascent, and especially the descent, of Ben Nevis had, as he confesses, tried him: feverish symptoms set in, and the doctor whom he consulted at Inverness thought his condition threatening, and forbade him to continue his tour. Accordingly he took pa.s.sage on the 8th or 9th of August from the port of Cromarty for London, leaving his companion to pursue his journey alone,--”much lamenting,” to quote Brown's own words, ”the loss of his beloved intelligence at my side.” Keats in some degree picked up strength during a nine days' sea pa.s.sage, the humours of which he afterwards described pleasantly in a letter to his brother George. But his throat trouble, the premonitory sign of worse, never really or for any length of time left him afterwards. On the 18th of August he arrived at Hampstead, and made his appearance among his friends the next day, ”as brown and as shabby as you can imagine,” writes Mrs Dilke, ”scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell what he looked like.” When he found himself seated, for the first time after his hards.h.i.+ps, in a comfortable stuffed chair, we are told how he expressed a comic enjoyment of the sensation, quoting at himself the words in which Quince the carpenter congratulates his gossip the weaver on his metamorphosis[40].

Simultaneously, almost, with Keats's return from the North appeared attacks on him in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_. The _Blackwood_ article, being No. IV. of a series bearing the signature 'Z'