VKEATS

Most men who write in praise of Shakespeare write in praise of themselves. Shakespeare is their mirror. Respectable middle-aged professors generally think of him as the respectable middle-aged man of the Stratford bust. Mr. Frank Harris sees him as Mr. Frank Harris with a difference. Mr. Charles Whibley imagines him as a Whibleyesque Tory with a knotted whip ever ready for the back of democracy. After readingThe John Keats Memorial Volume, consisting of appreciations in prose and verse from all manner of contributors, great and little, one comes to the conclusion that most men interpret Keats in the same easy-going way. Thus, Mr. Bernard Shaw notes that the poet of theOde to a Nightingaleand theOde on Melancholywas “a merry soul, a jolly fellow, who could not only carry his splendid burthen of genius, but swing it round, toss it up and catch it again, and whistlea tune as he strode along,” and he discovers in three verses ofThe Pot of Basil“the immense indictment of the profiteers and exploiters with which Marx has shaken capitalistic civilisation to its foundations, even to its overthrow in Russia.” To Dr. Arthur Lynch, on the other hand, Keats is primarily a philosopher, whose philosophic principles “account for his Republicanism as well as for his criticisms of poetry.” Mr. Arthur Symons takes an opposite view. “John Keats,” he tells us, “at a time when the phrase had not yet been invented, practised the theory of art for art’s sake.... Keats had something feminine and twisted in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves ... which it is now the fashion to call decadent.” To Sir Ian Hamilton (who contributes a beautiful comment, saved by its passion from the perils of high-flownness) Keats was the prototype of the heroic youth that sacrificed itself in the war. Did he not once declare his willingness to “jump down Etna for any great public good”; and did he not write:

The Patriot shall feelMy stern alarum and unsheath his steel?

The Patriot shall feel

My stern alarum and unsheath his steel?

And, if we dip into the thousands of other things that have been written about Keats, including the centenary appreciations, we shall find thispersonal emphasis on the part of the critic again and again.

Lord Houghton even did his best to raise Keats a step nearer in the social scale by associating him with “the upper rank of the middle class”—an exaggeration, however, which is no more inaccurate than the common view that Keats was brought up on the verge of pauperdom. As a matter of fact, Keats’s father was an ostler who married his employer’s daughter, and his grandfather, the livery stable keeper of Finsbury Pavement, left a fortune of £13,000. But it is not only with regard to his birth that attempts to bring Keats into the fold of respectability are common. His character, and the character of his genius, are unconsciously doctored to suit the tastes of those who do not apparently care for Keats as he actually was. The Keats who thrashed the butcher is more important for them than the Keats who fell in love with Fanny Brawne. They prefer canonising Keats to knowing him, and the logical consequence of their attitude is that the Keats who might have been means more to them than the Keats who was. I do not deny that a great deal that is said about Keats on all sides is true: possibly most of it is true. But much of it is true only as an argument. The manly Keats is the trueanswer to the effeminate Keats, as the effeminate Keats is the true answer to the manly Keats. The Keats who said: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,” and the Keats who was “snuffed out by an article” similarly answer one another; and the Keats ofThe Fall of Hyperionis the perfect critic of the Keats of theOde on Indolence, andvice versa. Keats was a score of Keatses. He was luxurious and ascetic, heroic and self-indulgent, ambitious and diffident, an artist and a thinker, vulgar and an æsthete, perfect in phrase and gauche in phrase, melancholy and merry, sensual and spiritual, a cynic about women and one of the great lovers, a teller of heart-easing tales and a would-be redeemer. The perfect portrait of Keats will reveal him in all these contradictory lights, and we shall never understand Keats if we merely isolate one group of facts, such as the thrashing of the butcher, or another group, such as that he thought for a moment of abandoningHyperionas a result of the hostile reviews ofEndymion. Keats’s life was not that of a planet beautifully poised as it wheels on its lonely errand. He was a man torn by conflicting demons—a martyr to poetry and love and, ultimately, to ideals of truth and goodness.

He bowed before altars that, even when hebowed, he seems to have known were altars of the lesser gods. Not that he blasphemed the greater gods in doing so. He believed that the altar at the foot of the hill was a stage in the poet’s progress to the altar at the summit. As he grew older, however, his vision of the summit became more intense, and a greater Muse announced to him:

None can usurp this heightBut those to whom the miseries of the worldAre miseries and will not let them rest.

None can usurp this height

But those to whom the miseries of the world

Are miseries and will not let them rest.

He was exchanging the worship of Apollo for the worship of Zeus and, like Tolstoy, he seemed to condemn his own past work as a denial of the genius of true art. Even here, however, Keats was still tortured by conflicting allegiances, and it is on Apollo, not on Zeus, he calls in his condemnation of Byron inThe Fall of Hyperion:

Apollo! faded! O far-flown Apollo!Where is thy misty pestilence to creepInto the dwellings, through the door cranniesOf all mock lyrists, large self-worshippersAnd careless Hectorers in proud bad verse?Though I breathe death with them it will be lifeTo see them sprawl before me into graves.

Apollo! faded! O far-flown Apollo!

Where is thy misty pestilence to creep

Into the dwellings, through the door crannies

Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers

And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse?

Though I breathe death with them it will be life

To see them sprawl before me into graves.

But he was Zeus’s child, as he lay dying, and the very epitaph he left for himself, remembering a phrase inThe Maid’s Tragedyof Beaumont andFletcher, “Here lies one whose name is writ in water,” was a last farewell to an Apollo who seemed to have failed him.

The Keats who achieved perfection in literature, however, was Apollo’s Keats—Apollo’s and Aphrodite’s. His odes, written out of a genius stirred to its depths for the first time by his passion for Fanny Brawne—he does not seem to have been subject to love, as most poets are, in his boyhood—were but the perfect expression of that idolatry that had stammered inEndymion. Keats in his masterpieces is still the Prince breaking through the wood to the vision of the Sleeping Beauty. He has not yet touched her into life. He almost prefers to remain a spectator, not an awakener. He loves the picture itself more than the reality, though he guesses all the while at the reality behind. That, perhaps, is why men do not go to Keats for healing, as they go to Wordsworth, or for hope, as they go to Shelley. Keats enriches life rather with a sense of a loveliness for ever vanishing, and with a dream of what life might be if the loveliness remained. Regret means more to him than hope:

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?To what green altar, O mysterious priest,Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?What little town by river or sea-shore,Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?And, little town, thy streets for evermoreWill silent be; and not a soul to tellWhy thou art desolate, can e’er return.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea-shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

The world at its most beautiful is for Keats a series of dissolving pictures—of “fair attitudes” that only the artist can make immortal. His indolence is the indolence of a man under the spell of beautiful shapes. His energy is the energy of a man who would drain the whole cup of worship in a beautiful phrase. His æsthetic attitude to life—as æsthetic in its way as the early Pater’s—appears in that letter in which he writes:

I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a field-mouse peeping out of the withered grass—the creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city, and I see a Man hurrying along—to what? The Creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.

In this very letter, no doubt, the disinterested philosopher as well as the æsthete speaks, but it is Keats’s longing for philosophy, not his philosophy itself, that touches us most profoundlyin his greatest work. Our knowledge of his sufferings gives his work a background of

Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self

against which the exquisite images he wrought have a tragic and spiritual appeal beyond that of any other poet of his kind. The Keats we love is more than the Keats of the poems—more even than the Keats of the letters. It is the Keats of these and of the life—that proud and vehement spirit, that great-hearted traveller in the realms of gold, caught in circumstances and done to death in the very temples where he had worshipped.

It is an interesting fact that most of the writers who use words like artificers have been townsmen. Milton and Gray, Keats and Lamb, were all Londoners. It is as though to some extent words took the place of natural scenes in the development of the townsman’s genius. The town boy finds the Muse in a book rather than by a stream. He hears her voice first, perhaps, in a beautiful phrase. It would be ridiculous to speak as though the country-bred poet were uninfluenced by books or the town-bred poet uninfluenced bybird and tree, by winds and waters. All I suggest is that in the townsman the influence of literature is more dominant, and frequently leads to an excitement over phrases almost more intense than his excitement over things.

Milton was thus a stylist in a sense in which Shakespeare was not. Keats was a stylist in a sense in which Shelley was not. Not that Milton and Keats used speech more felicitously, but they used it more self-consciously. Theirs, at their greatest, was the magic of art rather than of nature. They had not, in the same measure as Shakespeare and Shelley, the freedom of the air—the bird-like flight or the bird-like song.

The genius of Keats, we know, was founded on the reading of books. He did not even begin writing till he was nearly eighteen, when Cowden Clarke lent him the treasures of his library, includingThe Faëry Queene. The first of his great poems was written after reading Chapman’sHomer, and to the end of his life he was inspired by works of art to a greater degree than any other writer of genius in the England of his time.

This may help to explain why he was, as Mr. John Bailey has pointed out, the poet of stillness. Books, pictures, and Grecian urns are still. They fix life for us in the wonder of a trance, and, ifKeats saw Cortes “silent upon a peak in Darien,” and

grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,Still as the silence round about his lair;

grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,

Still as the silence round about his lair;

and figure after figure in the same sculptured stillness, may this not have been due to the fact that his genius fed so largely on the arts?

Keats, however, was the poet of trance, even apart from his stay in the trance-world of the artists. One of his characteristic moods was an ecstatic indolence, like that of a man who has tasted an enchanted herb. He was a poet, indeed, whose soul escaped in song as on the drowsy wings of a dream. He may be said to have turned from the fever of life to the intoxication of poetry. He loved poetry—“my demon poesy”—as a thing in itself, as, perhaps, no other poet equally great has done. This was his quest: this was his Paradise. He prayed, indeed:

That I may die a deathOf luxury, and my young spirit followThe morning sunbeams to the great ApolloLike a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bearThe o’erwhelming sweets, ’twill bring me to the fairVisions of all places: a bowery nookWill be elysium—an eternal bookWhence I may copy many a lovely sayingAbout the leaves and flowers—about the playingOf nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shadeKeeping a silence round a sleeping maid.

That I may die a death

Of luxury, and my young spirit follow

The morning sunbeams to the great Apollo

Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear

The o’erwhelming sweets, ’twill bring me to the fair

Visions of all places: a bowery nook

Will be elysium—an eternal book

Whence I may copy many a lovely saying

About the leaves and flowers—about the playing

Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade

Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid.

This was the mood in which he wrote his greatest work. At the same time Keats was not an unmixed æsthete. He recognised from the first, as we see in this early poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” that the true field of poetry is not the joys of the senses, but the whole of human life:

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,Where I may find the agonies, the strifeOf human hearts.

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?

Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,

Where I may find the agonies, the strife

Of human hearts.

Modern critics, reading these lines, are tempted to disparage the work Keats actually accomplished in comparison with the work that he might have accomplished, had he not died at twenty-five. They prefer “The Fall of Hyperion,” that he might have written, to “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the “Nightingale,” and the “Grecian Urn” that he did write. They love the potential middle-aged Keats more than the perfect youthful Keats.

This seems to me a perversity, but the criticism has value in reminding us how rich and deep was the nature that expressed itself in the work evenof the young Keats. Keats was an æsthete, but he was always something more. He was a man continually stirred by a divine hunger for things never to be attained by the ecstasies of youth—for knowledge, for truth, for something that might heal the sorrows of men. His nature was continually at war with itself. His being was in tumult, even though his genius found its perfect hour in stillness.

But it was the tumult of love, not the tumult of noble ideals, that led to the production of his greatest work. Fanny Brawne, that beautiful minx in her teens, is denounced for having murdered Keats; but she certainly did not murder his genius. It was after meeting her that he wrote the Odes and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” There has been too much cursing of Fanny. She may have been the cause of Keats’s greatest agony, but she was also the cause of his greatest ecstasy. The world is in Fanny’s debt, as Keats was. It was Fanny’s Keats, in a very real sense, who wrote the immortal verse that all the world now honours.

“My dear Brown,” wrote the dying Keats, with Fanny Brawne in his thoughts, in almostthe last of his surviving letters, “for my sake, be her advocate for ever.” “You think she has many faults,” he had written a month earlier, when leaving England; “but, for my sake, think she has none.” Thus did Keats bequeath the perfect image of Fanny Brawne to his friend. And the bequest is not only to his friend but to posterity. We, too, must study her image in the eyes of Keats, and hang the portrait of the lady who had no faults in at least as good a position on the wall with those other portraits of the flawed lady—the minx, the flirt, the siren, the destroyer.

Sir Sidney Colvin, in his noble and monumental biography of Keats, found no room for this idealised portrait. He was scrupulously fair to Fanny Brawne as a woman, but he condemned her as the woman with whom Keats happened to fall in love. To Sir Sidney she was not Keats’s goddess, but Keats’s demon. Criticising the book on its first appearance, I pointed out that almost everything that is immortal in the poetry of Keats was written when he was under the influence of his passion for Fanny Brawne, and I urged that, had it not been for the ploughing and harrowing of love, we should probably never have had the rich harvest of his genius. Sir Sidney has now added a few pages to his preface,in which he replies to this criticism, and declares that to write of Fanny Brawne in such a manner is “to misunderstand Keats’s whole career.” He admits that “most of Keats’s best work was done after he had met Fanny Brawne,” but it was done, he insists, “not because of her, but in spite of her.” “At the hour when his genius was naturally and splendidly ripening of itself,” he writes, “she brought into his life an element of distracting unrest, of mingled pleasure and torment, to use his own words, but of torment far more than of pleasure.... In writing to her or about her he never for a moment suggests that he owed to her any of his inspiration as a poet.... In point of fact, from the hour when he passed under her spell he could never do any long or sustained work except in absence from her.” Now all this means little more than that Fanny Brawne made Keats suffer. On that point everybody is agreed. The only matter in dispute is whether this suffering was a source of energy or of destruction to Keats’s genius.

Keats has left us in one of his letters his own view of the part suffering plays in the making of a soul. Scoffing at the conception of the world as a “vale of tears,” he urges that we should regard it instead as “the vale of soul-making,” and asks: “Do you not see how necessary a world of painand troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Thus, according to his own philosophy, there is no essential contradiction between a love that harrows and a love that enriches. As for his never having suggested that he owed any of his inspiration to his love for Fanny, he may not have done this in so many words, but he makes it clear enough that she stirred his nature to the depths for the first time and awakened in him that fiery energy which is one of the first conditions of genius in poetry. “I cannot think of you,” he wrote, “without some sort of energy—thoughmal à propos. Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of you would uncrystallise and dissolve me. I must not give way to it—but turn to my writing again—if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy—I must forget them.” Sir Sidney would read this letter as a confession that love and genius were at enmity in Keats. It seems to me a much more reasonable view that in the heat of conflict Keats’s genius became doubly intense, and that, had there been no struggle, there would have been no triumph. It is not necessary to believe that Fanny Brawne was the ideal woman for Keats to have loved: the point is that his love of her was the supreme event in his life. “Inever,” he told her, “felt my mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment—upon no person but you.” “I have been astonished,” he wrote in another letter, “that men could die martyrs for religion—I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more—I could be martyr’d for my religion—love is my religion—I could die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet.” And still earlier he had written: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks—your loveliness and the hour of my death. O, that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.... I will imagine you Venus to-night and pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen.” It is out of emotional travail such as we find in these letters that poetry is born. Is it possible to believe that, if Keats had never fallen in love—and he had never been in love till he met Fanny—he would have been the great poet we know?

I hold that it is not. Hence I still maintain the truth of the statement which Sir Sidney Colvin sets out to controvert, that, while Fanny “may have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man, she was his good fairy as a poet.”

Keats’s misfortune in love was a personal misfortune, not a misfortune to his genius. He was too poor to marry, and, in his own phrase, he“trembled at domestic cares.” He was ill and morbid: he had longed for the hour of his death before ever he set eyes on Fanny. Add to this that he was young and sensual and as jealous as Othello. His own nature had in it all the elements of tragic suffering, even if Fanny had been as perfect as St. Cecilia. And she was no St. Cecilia. He had called her “minx” shortly after their first meeting in the autumn of 1818, and described her as “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange.” Even then, however, he was in love with her. “The very first week I knew you,” he told her afterwards, “I wrote myself your vassal.... If you should ever feel for man at the first sight what I did for you, I am lost.” It is clear from this that his heart and his head quarrelled about Fanny. At the same time, after those first censures, he never spoke critically of her again, even to his most intimate friends. Some of his friends evidently disliked Fanny and wished to separate the lovers. He refers to this in a letter in which he speaks angrily of “these laughers who do not like you, who envy you for your beauty,” and writes of himself as “one who, if he never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory.” But Keats himself could not be certain that she was a saint. “My greatest tormentsince I have known you,” he tells her, “has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid.” He is so jealous that, when he is ill, he tells her that she must not even go into town alone till he is well again, and says: “If you would really what is called enjoy yourself at a party—if you can smile in people’s faces, and wish them to admire younow—you never have nor ever will love me.” But he adds a postscript: “No, my sweet Fanny—I am wrong—I do not wish you to be unhappy—and yet I do, I must while there is so sweet a beauty—my loveliest, my darling! Good-bye! I kiss you—O the torments!” In a later letter he returns to his jealousy, and declares: “Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’” He tells this fragile little worldly creature that she should be prepared to suffer on the rack for him, accuses her of flirting with Brown, and, in one of the most painful of his letters, cries out:

I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in: Do not write to me if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to have seen. You may have altered—if you have not—if you still believe in dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you—I do not want to live—if you have done so I wish the coming night may be my last. I cannotlive without you, and not only you, butchaste you, virtuous you.... Be serious! Love is not a plaything—and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience.

Poor Keats! Poor Fanny! That Fanny loved Keats is obvious. In this at least she showed herself unworldly. She cannot have been dazzled by his fame, for at that time he was to all appearance merely a minor poet who had been laughed at. He was of humble birth, and he had not even the prospect of being able to earn a living. Add to this that he was an all but chronic invalid. Her love must, in the circumstances, have been a very real and unselfish affair, and there is no evidence to suggest that, for all her taste for dancing and for going into town, it was fickle. Keats asked too much of her. He wished to enslave her as she had enslaved him. He knew in his saner moments that he was unfair to her. “At times,” he wrote, “I feel bitterly sorry that ever I made you unhappy.” There was unhappiness on both sides—the unhappiness of an engagement that could come to nothing. “There are,” as Keats mournfully wrote, “impossibilities in the world.” It was Fate, not Fanny, that wrecked the life of Keats. “My dear Brown,” he wrote near the end, “I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well.” That is not the commenta man makes on a woman whom he regards as his destroying angel. Nor is it a destroying angel that Keats pictures when he writes to Fanny: “You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you passed my window home yesterday, I was filled with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time.” Love such as this is not the enemy of poetry. Without it there would be no poetry but that of patriots, saints and hermits. A biography of Keats should not be a biography without a heroine. That would beHamletwithout Ophelia. Sir Sidney Colvin’s is a masterly life which is likely to take a permanent place in English biographical literature. But it has one flaw. Sir Sidney did not see how vital a clue Keats left us to the interpretation of his life and genius in that last despairing appeal: “My dear Brown, for my sake be her advocate for ever.”

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