Part 6 (2/2)

on the 'c.o.c.kney School of Poetry,' was printed in the August number of the magazine. The previous articles of the same series, as well as a letter similarly signed, had been directed against Leigh Hunt, in a strain of insult so preposterous as to be obviously inspired by the mere wantonness of partisan licence. It is not quite certain who wrote them, but they were most probably the work either of Lockhart or of Wilson, suggested and perhaps revised by the publisher William Blackwood, at this time his own sole editor. Not content with attacking Hunt's opinions, or his real weaknesses as a writer or a man, his Edinburgh critics must needs heap on him the grossest accusations of vice and infamy. In the course of these articles allusion had several times been made to 'Johnny Keats' as an 'amiable bardling' and puling satellite of the arch-offender and king of c.o.c.kaigne, Hunt. When now Keats's own turn came, his treatment was mild in comparison with that of his supposed leader. The strictures on his work are idle and offensive, but not more so than is natural to unsympathetic persons full of prejudice and wis.h.i.+ng to hurt. 'c.o.c.kney' had been in itself a fair enough label for a hostile critic to fasten upon Hunt; neither was it altogether inapplicable to Keats, having regard to the facts of his origin and training: that is if we choose to forget that the measure of a man is not his experience, but the use he is able to make of it. The worst part of the Keats review was in its personalities,--”so back to the shop, Mr John, stick to 'plasters, pills, ointment boxes,'

&c.”--and what made these worse was the manner in which the materials for them had been obtained. Keats's friend Bailey had by this time taken his degree, and after publis.h.i.+ng a friendly notice of _Endymion_ in the _Oxford Herald_ for June, had left the University and gone to settle in a curacy in c.u.mberland. In the course of the summer he staid at Stirling, at the house of Bishop Gleig; whose son, afterwards the well-known writer and Chaplain-general to the forces, was his friend, and whose daughter (a previous love-affair with one of the Reynolds sisters having fallen through) he soon afterwards married. Here Bailey met Lockhart, then in the hey-day of his brilliant and bitter youth; lately admitted to the intimacy of Scott; and earning, on the staff of _Blackwood_ and otherwise, the reputation and the nickname of 'Scorpion.' Bailey, anxious to save Keats from the sort of treatment to which Hunt had already been exposed, took the opportunity of telling Lockhart in a friendly way his circ.u.mstances and history, explaining at the same time that his attachment to Leigh Hunt was personal and not political; pleading that he should not be made an object of party denunciation; and ending with the request that at any rate what had been thus said in confidence should not be used to his disadvantage. To which Lockhart replied that certainly it should not be so used by _him_. Within three weeks the article appeared, making use to all appearance, and to Bailey's great indignation, of the very facts he had thus confidentially communicated.

To the end of his life Bailey remained convinced that whether or not Lockhart himself wrote the piece, he must at any rate have prompted and supplied the materials for it[41]. It seems in fact all but certain that he actually wrote it[42]. If so, it was a felon stroke on Lockhart's part, and to forgive him we must needs remember all the grat.i.tude that is his due for his filial allegiance to and his immortal biography of Scott. But even in that connection our grudge against him revives again; since in the party violence of the time and place Scott himself was drawn into encouraging the savage polemics of his young Edinburgh friends; and that he was in some measure privy to the c.o.c.kney School outrages seems certain.

Such, at least, was the impression prevailing at the time[43]; and when Severn, who did not know it, years afterwards innocently approached the subject of Keats and his detractors in conversation with Scott at Rome, he observed both in Scott and his daughter signs of pain and confusion which he could only interpret in the same sense[44]. It is hard to say whether the thought of the great-hearted Scott, the soul most free from jealousy or harshness, thus a.s.sociated with an act of stupid cruelty to genius, is one to make us the more indignant against those who so misled him, or the more patient of mistakes committed by commoner spirits among the distracting cries and blind collisions of the world.

The _Quarterly_ article on _Endymion_ followed in the last week of September (in the number dated April), and was in an equally contemptuous strain; the writer professing to have been unable to read beyond the first canto, or to make head or tail of that. In this case again the question of authors.h.i.+p must remain uncertain: but Gifford, as editor, and an editor who never shrank from cutting a contributor's work to his own pattern, must bear the responsibility with posterity. The review is quite in his manner, that of a man insensible to the higher charm of poetry, incapable of judging it except by mechanical rule and precedent, and careless of the pain he gives. Considering the perfect modesty and good judgment with which Keats had in his preface pointed out the weaknesses of his own work, the attacks are both alike inexcusable. They had the effect of promptly rousing the poet's friends in his defence. Reynolds published a warm rejoinder to the Quarterly reviewer in a west-country paper, the _Alfred_; an indignant letter on the same side appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_ with the initials J. S.--those probably of John Scott, then editor of the _London Magazine_, and soon afterwards killed by a friend of Lockhart's in a duel, arising out of these very Blackwood brawls, in which it was thought that Lockhart himself ought to have come forward. Leigh Hunt reprinted Reynolds's letter, with some introductory words, in the _Examiner_, and later in his life regretted that he had not done more. But he could not have done more to any purpose. He was not himself an enthusiastic admirer of _Endymion_, and had plainly said so to Keats and to his friends. Reynolds's piece, which he reprinted, was quite effective and to the point; and moreover any formal defence of Keats by Hunt would only have increased the virulence of his enemies, as they both perfectly well knew; folly and spite being always ready to cry out that praise of a friend by a friend must needs be interested or blind.

Neither was Keats's demeanour under the lash such as could make his friends suppose him particularly hurt. Proud in the extreme, he had no irritable vanity; and aiming in his art, if not always steadily, yet always at the highest, he rather despised than courted such success as he saw some of his contemporaries enjoy:--”I hate,” he says, ”a mawkish popularity.” Even in the hopes of permanent fame which he avowedly cherished, there was nothing intemperate or impatient; and he was conscious of perceiving his own shortcomings at least as clearly as his critics. Accordingly he took his treatment at their hands more coolly than older and less sensitive men had taken the like. Hunt had replied indignantly to his Blackwood traducers, repelling scorn with scorn.

Hazlitt endeavoured to have the law of them. Keats at the first sting declared, indeed, that he would write no more poetry, but try to do what good he could to the world in some other way. Then quickly recovering himself, he with great dignity and simplicity treated the annoyance as one merely temporary, indifferent, and external. When Mr Hessey sent for his encouragement the extracts from the papers in which he had been defended, he wrote:--

”I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part.

As for the rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what 'Blackwood' or the 'Quarterly' could possibly inflict: and also when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine.”

And again:--”There have been two letters in my defence in the 'Chronicle,' and one in the 'Examiner,' copied from the Exeter paper, and written by Reynolds. I don't know who wrote those in the 'Chronicle.' This is a mere matter of the moment: I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death. Even as a matter of present interest, the attempt to crush me in the 'Quarterly' has only brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among book-men, 'I wonder the 'Quarterly' should cut its own throat.'”

In point of fact an unknown admirer from the west country sent Keats about this time a letter and sonnet of sympathy, with which was enclosed a further tribute in the shape of a 25 note. Keats was both pleased and displeased: ”if I had refused it,” he says, ”I should have behaved in a very braggadocio dunderheaded manner; and yet the present galls me a little.” About the same time he received, through his friend Richard Woodhouse, a young barrister who acted in some sort as literary adviser or a.s.sistant to Messrs Taylor and Hessey[45], a glowing letter of sympathy and encouragement from Miss Porter, 'of Romance celebrity': by which he shows himself in his reply not more flattered than politeness demands.

Keats was really living, during the stress of these _Blackwood_ and _Quarterly_ storms, under the pressure of another and far more heartfelt trouble. His Hampstead friends, before they heard of his intended return from Scotland, had felt reluctantly bound to write and summon him home on account of the alarming condition of his brother Tom. He had left the invalid behind in their lodgings at Well Walk, and found that he had grown rapidly worse during his absence. In fact the case was desperate, and for the next few months Keats's chief occupation was the harrowing one of watching and ministering to this dying brother. In a letter written in the third week of September, he speaks thus of his feelings and occupations:--”I wish I could say Tom was better. His ident.i.ty presses upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out--and although I had intended to have given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, and feebleness--so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine 'the hateful siege of contraries'--if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and yet I must do so or suffer.” And again about the same time to Reynolds:--”I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days--at such a time when the relief, the feverous relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This morning poetry has conquered--I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life--I feel escaped from a new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am thankful for it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality.” As the autumn wore on, the task of the watcher grew ever more sorrowful and absorbing[46]. On the 29th of October Keats wrote to his brother and sister-in-law in America, warning them, in language of a beautiful tender moderation and sincerity, to be prepared for the worst.

For the next month his time was almost wholly taken up by the sickbed, and in the first week of December the end came. ”Early one morning,” writes Brown, ”I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, who came to tell me that his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we both remained silent for a while, my hand fast locked in his. At length, my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said,--'Have nothing more to do with those lodgings,--and alone too! Had you not better live with me?' He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied,--'I think it would be better.' From that moment he was my inmate[47].”

Brown, as has been said already, had built, and lived in, one part--the smaller eastern part--of the block of two semi-detached houses near the bottom of John Street, Hampstead, to which Dilke, who built and occupied the other part, had given the name of Wentworth Place[48]. 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. The arrangement with Keats was that he should share household expenses, occupying the front sitting-room for the sake of quiet at his work. As soon, relates Brown, as the consolations of nature and friends.h.i.+p had in some measure alleviated his grief, Keats became gradually once more absorbed in poetry: his special task being _Hyperion_, at which he had already begun to work before his brother died. But not wholly absorbed; for there was beginning to wind itself about his heart a new spell more powerful than that of poetry itself. It was at this time that the flame caught him, which he had always presciently sought to avoid 'lest it should burn him up.' With his quick self-knowledge he had early realised, not to his satisfaction, his own peculiar mode of feeling towards womankind. Chivalrously and tremulously devoted to his mind's ideal of the s.e.x, he found himself only too critical of the real women that he met, and too ready to perceive or suspect faults in them. Conscious at the same time of the fire of sense and blood within him, he had thought himself partly fortunate in being saved from the entanglements of pa.s.sion by his sense of this difference between the reality and his ideal. The set of three sonnets in his first volume, beginning 'Woman, when I beheld thee flippant, vain,' had given expression half gracefully, half awkwardly, to this state of mind. Its persistency is affirmed often in his letters.

”I am certain,” he wrote to Bailey from Scotland, ”I have not a right feeling towards women--at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure G.o.ddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality. I thought them ethereal, above men. I find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small.... Is it not extraordinary?--when among men, I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen; I feel free to speak or to be silent; I can listen, and from every one I can learn; my hands are in my pockets, I am free from all suspicion, and comfortable. When I am among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak, or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone.... I must absolutely get over this--but how?”

In a fine pa.s.sage of a letter to his relatives in America, he alleges this general opinion of women, and with it his absorption in the life, or rather the hundred lives, of imagination, as reasons for hoping that he will never marry:--

”The roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my window-panes are my children; the mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things, I have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's Bodyguard: ”then Tragedy with scepter'd pall comes sweeping by.” According to my state of mind, I am with Achilles shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating those lines, ”I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage,” I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content to be alone. These things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony that I rejoice in.”

But now Keats's hour was come. Since his return from Scotland, in the midst of his watching by his brother's sick-bed, we have seen him confessing himself haunted already by the shape of a woman. This was a certain Miss Charlotte c.o.x, a West-Indian cousin of Reynolds's, to whom he did not think the Reynolds sisters were quite kind. A few days later he writes again how he has been attracted by her rich Eastern look and grace.

Very soon, however, the attraction pa.s.sed, and this 'Charmian' left him fancy-free; but only to find his fate elsewhere. A Mrs Brawne, a widow lady of some little property, with a daughter just grown up and two younger children, had taken Brown's house for the summer while he was away in Scotland. Here the Brawnes had naturally become acquainted with the Dilkes, living next door: the acquaintance was kept up when they moved from Brown's house to one in Downs.h.i.+re Street close by: and it was at the Dilkes' that Keats met Miss f.a.n.n.y Brawne after his return. Her ways and presence at first irritated and after a little while completely fascinated him. From his first sarcastic account of her written to his brother, as well as from Severn's mention of her likeness to the draped figure in t.i.tian's picture of Sacred and Profane Love, and from the full-length silhouette of her that has been preserved, it is not difficult to realise her aspect and presence. A brisk and blooming, very young beauty, of the far from uncommon English hawk blonde type, with aquiline nose and retreating forehead, sharp-cut nostril and gray-blue eye, a slight, shapely figure rather short than tall, a taking smile, and good hair, carriage and complexion,--such was f.a.n.n.y Brawne externally, but of her character we have little means of judging. She was certainly high-spirited, inexperienced, and self-confident: as certainly, though kind and constant to her lover in spite of prospects that before long grew dark, she did not fully realise what manner of man he was. Both his men and women friends, without thinking unkindly of her, were apparently of one opinion in holding her no mate for him either in heart or mind, and in regarding the attachment as unlucky.

So it a.s.suredly was: so probably under the circ.u.mstances must any pa.s.sion for a woman have been. Stroke on stroke of untoward fortune had in truth begun to fall on Keats, as if in fulfilment of the const.i.tutional misgivings of his darker moods. First the departure of his brother George had deprived him of his chief friend, to whom almost alone he had from boyhood been accustomed to turn for relief in hours of despondency. Next the exertions of his Scotch tour had over-taxed his strength, and unchained, though as yet he knew it not, the deadly hereditary enemy in his blood. Coming back, he had found the grasp of that enemy closed inexorably upon his brother Tom, and in nursing him had lived in spirit through all his pains. 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. Last were 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 pa.s.sion wrought fiercely in his already fevered blood; its alternations of doubt and torment and tantalising rapture sapped his powers, and redoubled every strain to which bereavement, shaken health, and antic.i.p.ations of poverty, exposed them. Within a year the combined a.s.sault proved too much for his strength, and he broke down. But in the meantime he showed a brave face to the world, and while anxiety gnawed and pa.s.sion wasted him, was able to throw himself into the labours of his art with a fruitful, if a fitful, energy. During the first few weeks of winter following his brother's death, he wrote indeed, as he tells Haydon, ”only a little now and then: but nothing to speak of--being discontented and as it were moulting.” Yet such work as Keats did at this time was done at the very height of his powers, and included parts both of _Hyperion_ and _The Eve of St Agnes_.

Within a month of the date of the above extract the latter piece was finished, having been written out during a visit which Keats and Brown paid in Suss.e.x in the latter part of January (1819). They stayed for a few days with the father of their friend Dilke in Chichester, and for nearly a fortnight with his sister and brother-in-law, the Snooks, at Bedhampton close by. Keats liked his hosts and received pleasure from his visit; but his health kept him much indoors, his only outings being to 'a couple of dowager card-parties,' and to a gathering of country clergy on a wet day, at the consecration of a chapel for converted Jews. The latter ceremony jarred on his nerves, and caused him to write afterwards to his brother an entertaining splenetic diatribe on the clerical character and physiognomy.

During his stay at Chichester he also seems to have begun, or at any rate conceived, the poem on the _Eve of St Mark_, which he never finished, and which remains so interesting a pre-Raphaelite fragment in his work.

Returning at the beginning of February, Keats resumed his life at Hampstead under Brown's roof. He saw much less society than the winter before, the state of his throat compelling him, for one thing, generally to avoid the night air. But the chief cause of his seclusion was no doubt the pa.s.sion which was beginning to engross him, and to deaden his interest in the other relations of life. The stages by which it grew on him we cannot follow. His own account of the matter to f.a.n.n.y Brawne was that he had written himself her va.s.sal within a week of their first meeting. His real first feeling for her, as we can see by his letters written at the time, had been one, the most perilous indeed to peace of mind, of strong mixed attraction and aversion. He might seem to have got no farther by the 14th of February, when he writes to his brother and sister-in-law in America, ”Miss Brawne and I have every now and then a chat and a tiff;”

but this is rather to be taken as an instance of his extreme general reticence on the subject, and it is probable that by this time, if not sooner, the attachment was in fact avowed and the engagement made. The secret violence of Keats's pa.s.sion, and the restless physical jealousy which accompanied it, betray themselves in the verses addressed _To f.a.n.n.y_, which belong apparently to this date. They are written very unequally, but with his true and brilliant felicity of touch here and there. The occasion is the presence of his mistress at some dance:--

”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.”

If Keats thus found in verse occasional relief from the violence of his feelings, he sought for none in his correspondence either with his brother or his friends. Except in the lightest pa.s.sing allusion, he makes no direct mention of Miss Brawne in his letters; partly, no doubt, from mere excess of sensitiveness, dreading to profane his treasure; partly because he knew, and could not bear the thought, that both his friends and hers, in so far as they guessed the attachment, looked on it unfavourably. Brown after a little while could hardly help being in the secret, inasmuch as when the Dilkes left Hampstead in April, and went to live at Westminster, the Brawnes again took their house; so that Keats and Brown thenceforth had the young lady and her family for next-door neighbours. Dilke himself, but apparently not till many months later, writes, ”It is quite a settled thing between John Keats and Miss Brawne, G.o.d help them. It's a bad thing for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and her only hope is that it will go off. He don't like any one to look at her or speak to her.”

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