Chapter 23

1A long-popular song from Arne’s operaArtaxerxes.2Unless Brown had transcribed ‘morning’ for ‘moving’ in error; and this was probably the case, though there is a tempting sonority in the juxtaposition of the nearly identical broad vowel sounds in his version.3Reminiscences of a Literary Life, by Charles Macfarlane: London, John Murray, 1917, pp. 12-15.—Keats in his letters is apt enough to talk of cant and flummery, but not of humbug, and I suspect the word, though not the thought, is put into his mouth. With reference to Mr Macfarlane’s account of Keats generally as ‘one of the most cheery and plucky little fellows I ever knew,’ and as a man to have stood with composure a whole broadside of Blackwood and Quarterly articles, and to have faced a battery by the side of any friend, it is difficult to conjecture at what date the writer can have seen enough of Keats to form these impressions. From January 1816, when he was in his seventeenth year, to 1827, young Macfarlane seems to have lived entirely at Naples, except for some excursions to the Levant and a short visit to England in 1820, when Keats was a consumptive patient already starting or started for Italy.4Act v, Sc. iii. See Harrison S. Morris inBulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, 1913, p. 30.

1A long-popular song from Arne’s operaArtaxerxes.

2Unless Brown had transcribed ‘morning’ for ‘moving’ in error; and this was probably the case, though there is a tempting sonority in the juxtaposition of the nearly identical broad vowel sounds in his version.

3Reminiscences of a Literary Life, by Charles Macfarlane: London, John Murray, 1917, pp. 12-15.—Keats in his letters is apt enough to talk of cant and flummery, but not of humbug, and I suspect the word, though not the thought, is put into his mouth. With reference to Mr Macfarlane’s account of Keats generally as ‘one of the most cheery and plucky little fellows I ever knew,’ and as a man to have stood with composure a whole broadside of Blackwood and Quarterly articles, and to have faced a battery by the side of any friend, it is difficult to conjecture at what date the writer can have seen enough of Keats to form these impressions. From January 1816, when he was in his seventeenth year, to 1827, young Macfarlane seems to have lived entirely at Naples, except for some excursions to the Levant and a short visit to England in 1820, when Keats was a consumptive patient already starting or started for Italy.

4Act v, Sc. iii. See Harrison S. Morris inBulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, 1913, p. 30.

CHAPTER XVII

EPILOGUE

Hopes and fears at home—Fanny Brawne: Leigh Hunt—Supposed effect of reviews—Shelley misled and inspired—Adonais—ABlackwoodParody—False impressions confirmed—Death of Shelley—Hazlitt and Severn—Brown at Florence—Inscription for Keats’s grave—Severn and Walter Scott—Slow growth of Keats’s fame—Its beginnings at Cambridge—Opinion in the early ‘forties—Would-be biographers at odds—Taylor and Brown: Brown and Dilke—A solution: Monckton Milnes—The old circle: Hunt and Haydon—John Hamilton Reynolds—Haslam, Severn, Bailey—Flaws and slips in Milnes’s work—Its merit and timeliness—Its reception—The Pre-Raphaelites—Rossetti and Morris—The battle won: Later critics—Keats and Shelley—Pitfalls and prejudices—Arnold and Palgrave—Mr. Buxton Forman and others—Latest eulogists—Risks to permanence of fame—His will conquer—Youth and its storms—The might-have-been—Guesses and a certainty.

Thefriends of Keats at home had in their love for him tried hard after his departure to nurse some sparks of hope for his recovery. John Hamilton Reynolds, answering from Exmouth a letter in which Taylor told him of the poet’s having sailed, wrote, ‘I amverymuch pleased at what you tell me. I cannot now but hold a hope of his refreshed health, which I confess his residence in England greatly discouraged.... Keats, then, by this is at sea fairly—with England and one or two sincere friends behind him,—and with a warm clime before his face! If ever I wished well to Man, I wish well to him!’ Haslam in a like strain of feeling wrote in December to Severn at Rome:—‘The climate, however, will, I trust, avail him. Keep him quiet, get the winter through; an opening year in Italy will perfect everything. Erethis reaches you, I trust Doctor Clark will have confirmed the most sanguine hopes of his friends in England; and to you, my friend, I hope he will have given what you stand much in need of—a confidence amounting to a faith.... Keats must get himself well again, Severn, if but for us. I, for one, cannot afford to lose him. If I know what it is to love, I truly love John Keats.’ The letters written by Severn to this faithful friend during the voyage and from beside the sick-bed were handed round and eagerly scanned among the circle. Brown, when they came into his hands, used to read passages from them at his discretion to the Brawne ladies next door, keeping the darkest from the daughter by her mother’s wish. Mrs Brawne, evidently believing her child’s heart to be deeply engaged, dealt in the same manner with Severn’s letters to herself. The girl seems to have divined none the less that her lover’s condition was past hope, and her demeanour, according to Brown’s account as follows, to have been human and natural. Keats, writes Brown in a broken style,—

Keats is present to me everywhere and at all times—he now seems sitting by my side and looking hard in my face, though I have taken the opportunity of writing this in company—for I scarcely believe I could do it alone. Much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely he was wound about my heart. Mrs Brawne was greatly agitated when I told her of—and her daughter—I don’t know how—for I was not present—yet she bears it with great firmness, mournfully but without affectation. I understand she says to her mother, ‘I believe he must soon die, and when you hear of his death, tell me immediately. I am not a fool!’

As the news grew worse, it seems to have been more and more kept back from her, injudiciously as Brown thought, and in a mutilated letter he gives glimpses of moods in her, apparently hysterical, of alternate forced gaiety and frozen silence. A letter or two which she had written to her dying lover were withheld from him, as we have seen, by reason of the terrible agitation into which the mere sight of her handwriting threw him. We hear in the meantime of her being in close correspondencewith his young sister at Walthamstow. When the news of the end came, Brown writes,—‘I felt at the moment utterly unprepared for it. Thenshe—she was to have it told her, and the worst had been concealed from her knowledge ever since your December letter. It is now five days since she heard it. I shall not speak of the first shock, nor of the following days,—it is enough she is now pretty well,—and thro’out she has shown a firmness of mind which I little expected from one so young, and under such a load of grief.’

Leigh Hunt had written in these days a letter to Severn which did not reach Rome until after Keats’s death. I must quote it as showing yet again the strength of the hold which Keats had on the hearts of his friends, and how he, in a second degree only to Shelley, had struck on something much deeper in Hunt’s nature than the sunny, kindly, easy-going affectionateness which was all that in most relations he had to bestow:—

Judge how often I thought of Keats, and with what feelings. Mr Brown tells me he is comparatively calm now. If he can bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it all already, and can put it in better language than any man. I hear he does not like to be told that he may get better, nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not thrive. But if this persuasion should happen no longer to be so strong upon him, or if he can now put up with such attempts to console him, remind him of what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour I swear) think always, that I have seen too many cases of recovery from apparently desperate cases of consumption, not to indulge in hope to the very last. If he still cannot bear this, tell him—tell that great poet and noble-hearted man that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious part of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it as our loves do. Or if this will trouble his spirit, tell him that we shall never cease to remember and love him, and that Christian or Infidel, the most sceptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think that all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and the same place, and shall meet somehow or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only before us on the road, as he was in everything else; or whether you tell him the latter or no, tellhim the former, and add, that we shall never forget that he was so, and that we are coming after him. The tears are again in my eyes, and I must not afford to shed them.

During Keats’s year of illness and dejection at home, and until the end and after it, the general impression among his friends and acquaintances was that the cause of all his troubles was the agony of mind into which the hostile reviews had thrown him. Severn in the course of his tendance discovered, as we have seen, that this was not so, and learnt the full share which was due to the pangs of unsatisfied, and in a worldly sense hopeless, passion in a consumptive constitution. Brown on his part, although he knew the secret of the heart which Keats so jealously guarded, yet attributed the chief part of his friend’s distress to the fear of impending poverty—truly another contributing cause—and conceived a fierce and obstinate indignation against George for having, as he quite falsely imagined, deliberately fleeced his brother, as well as against other friends who had borrowed money from the poet and failed to pay it back. But most of those who knew Keats less intimately, seeing his sudden fall from robustness and high spirits,—having never thought of him as a possible consumptive subject,—and being themselves white-hot with anger againstBlackwoodand theQuarterly,—inferred the poet’s feelings from their own, and at the same time added fuel to their wrath against the critics, by taking it for granted that it was their cruelty which was killing him.

To no one was this impression conveyed in a more extravagant form than to Shelley, presumably through his friends the Gisbornes. In that letter of remonstrance to Gifford, as editor of theQuarterly, which he drafted in the autumn of 1820 but never sent, Shelley writes:—

Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review, which I am, persuaded, was not written with any intention of producing the effect, to which it has, at least, greatly contributed, of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery. The firsteffects are described to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, and the usual process of consumption appears to have begun.

In the preface toAdonais, composed at San Giuliano, near Pisa, in the June following Keats’s death in the next year, Shelley repeats the same delusion in different words, adding the still less justified statement,—probably founded by his informant, Colonel Finch, on expressions used by Brown to Severn about George Keats and other borrowers,—that Keats’s misery had been ‘exasperated by the bitter sense of unrequited benefits:—the poor fellow seems to have been hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he had wasted the promise of his genius, than those on whom he had lavished his fortune and his care.’ Of the critical attacks upon Keats, Shelley seems not to have known theBlackwoodlampoons, and to have put down all the mischief (as did Byron following him) to theQuarterlyalone. With his heart and soul full of passionate poetic regret for what the world had lost in the death of the author ofHyperion, and of passionate human indignation against the supposed agents of his undoing, Shelley wrote that lament for Keats which is the best of his longer poems and next toLycidasthe noblest of its class in the language. Like Milton, Shelley chose to conform to a consecrated convention and link his work to a long tradition by going back to the precedent of the Sicilian pastoral elegies, those beautiful examples of a form even in its own day conventional and literary. He took two masterpieces of that school, the dirge or ritual chant of Bion on the death of Adonis and the elegy of Moschus on the death of Bion, and into strains directly caught and blended from both of these wove inseparably a new strain of imagery and emotion entirely personal and his own.

The human characteristics of the lamented person, the flesh and blood realities of life, are not touched or thoughtupon. A rushing train of abstractions, such as were at all times to Shelley more inspiring and more intensely realized than persons and things,—a rushing train of beautiful and sorrowful abstractions sweeps by, inAdonais, to a strain of music so entrancing that at a first, or even at a twentieth, reading it is perhaps more to the music of the poem than to its imagery that the spiritual sense of the reader attends. Nevertheless he will find at last that the imagery, all unsubstantial as it is, has been floated along the music into his mental being to haunt and live with him: he will be conscious of a possession for ever in that invocation of the celestial Muse to awake and weep for the youngest of her sons,—that pageant of the dead poet’s own dreams and imaginations conceived as gathering ‘like mist over an autumnal stream’ to attend upon his corpse,—the voice of Echo silenced (again a direct adaptation from the Greek) since she has no longer words of his to repeat and awaken the spring withal,—the vision of the coming of Urania to the death chamber,—her lament, with its side-shafts of indignation against the wolves and ravens who have made her youngest-born their prey—the approach and homage of the other ‘mountain shepherds,’ Byron, Shelley himself, Moore, Leigh Hunt, all figured, especially Shelley, in a guise purely abstract and mythologic and yet after its own fashion passionately true,—the bitter ironic application to the reviewers of the verses from Moschus used as a motto to the poem,—

Our Adonais has drunk poison—oh!What deaf and viperous murderer could crownLife’s early cup with such a draught of woe?—

Our Adonais has drunk poison—oh!

What deaf and viperous murderer could crown

Life’s early cup with such a draught of woe?—

the swift change to a consolatory strain exhorting the mourners to cease their grief and recognise that the lost poet is made one with Nature and that it is Death who is dead, not he,—the invitation to the beautiful burial-place at Rome,—the high strain of Platonic meditation on the transcendental permanence of the One while the Many change and pass,—the final vision by the raptspirit of Shelley of the soul of his brother poet beckoning like a star from the abode of the Eternals.

Looking upon his own work in his modest and unsanguine way, Shelley could not suppress the hope that this time he had written something that should not be utterly neglected. He had the poem printed at Pisa, whence a small number of copies only were sent to England. One immediate effect was to instigate the last and silliest—happily, perhaps, also the least remembered—of theBlackwoodblackguardries. Not even the tragic experiences of the preceding winter had cured the conductors of that journal of their taste for savage ribaldry. John Scott, the keen-witted and warm-hearted editor, formerly of theChampionand latterly of Taylor’s and Hessey’sLondon Magazine, had denounced the ‘Z’ papers, and demanded a disclosure of Lockhart’s share in them and in the management of the magazine, in terms so peremptory and scathing that the threat of a challenge from Lockhart followed as an inevitable consequence. The clumsy, well meant intromission of third parties had only the effect of substituting Lockhart’s friend Christie in the broil for Lockhart himself. The duel was fought on January 16, 1821, exactly a week before Keats’s death, and Scott was killed. None the less, when late in the summer of the same year copies ofAdonaisreached England, remarks on it outdoing all previous outbreaks in folly and insolence were contributed toBlackwoodby a comparatively new recruit, the learned and drunken young Dublin scholar William Maginn. Professing absurdly to regard the cockney school as a continuation of the ‘Della Cruscan’ school laughed out of existence by Gifford some five-and-twenty years earlier, the writer includes Shelley of all men (forgetting former laudations of him) among the cockneys, flings up a heel at the memory of Keats as ‘a young man who had left a decent calling for the melancholy trade of cockney-poetry and has lately died of a consumption after having written two or three little books of verse much neglected by thepublic’; and proceeds to give a comic analysis ofAdonais, with some specimens of parody upon it, which were afterwards re-published without shame under Maginn’s name.

Eight years later, as we shall see, it was on the enthusiasm of a band of young Cambridge men forAdonaisthat the fame of Keats began to be spread abroad among our younger generation in England. In the meantime the chief effect of the poem was to confirm in the minds of the few readers whom it reached the sentimental view of Keats as an over-sensitive weakling whom the breath of hostile criticism had withered up. And when two years later Byron printed in the eleventh canto ofDon Juanhis patronizing semi-palinode, part laudatory part contemptuous, on Keats, his closing couplet,

Strange that the mind, that very fiery particle,Should let itself be snuffed out by an article,

Strange that the mind, that very fiery particle,

Should let itself be snuffed out by an article,

stamped that impression for good on the minds of men in far wider circles, until the publication of Monckton Milnes’s memoir after five-and-twenty years brought evidence to modify if not to efface it.

None of Keats’s friends at home did anything in the days following his death to counteract such impression. Some of them, as we have said, fully shared and helped to propagate it. Haydon, writing to Miss Mitford soon after the news of the death reached England, says ‘Keats was a victim of personal abuse and want of nerve to bear it. Ought he to have sunk in that way because a few quizzers told him he was an apothecary’s apprentice?... Fiery, impetuous, ungovernable and undecided, he expected the world to bow at once to his talents as his friends had done, and he had not patience to bear the natural irritation of envy at the undoubted proof he gave of strength.’ In his private journal Haydon treats the events in the same spirit, not forgetting to imply a contrast between Keats’s weakness and his own power of stubbornly presenting his prickles to his enemies. Reynolds, it would seem, had moreexcuse than others for adopting the same view, inasmuch as Keats had said to him on his sick-bed, in one of his extremely rare allusions to the subject,—‘If I die, you must ruin Lockhart.’ In the summer following Keats’s death, Reynolds published a little volume of verse dedicated to the young bride at whose bidding he was abandoning literature for law, and included in it the two versified tales from Boccaccio which he had originally planned for printing together with Keats’sIsabella: as to which pieces he says,—

They were to have been associated with tales from the same source, intended to have been written by a friend, but illness on his part, and distracting engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our plan at the time; and Death now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated it for ever! He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I possessed, and yet he was not kinder perhaps to me, than to others. His intense mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have done the world some service, had his life been spared—but he was of too sensitive a nature—and thus he was destroyed!

Later in the same summer, 1822, befell the tragedy of Shelley’s own death, such a tragedy of a poet’s death as a poet might have loved to invent with all its circumstances,—the disappearance of the boat in a squall; the recovery of the body with the volume of Keats’s poems in the coat-pocket; its consumption on a funeral pyre by the Tuscan shore in the presence of Leigh Hunt, newly come to Italy on Shelley’s invitation, of Byron, and of the Cornish sea-rover and social rebel Trelawny, a personage who might well have been a creation of Byron’s brain; the snatching of the heart from the flames; the removal of the ashes to Rome, and their deposit in a new Protestant burial-ground adjacent to the old, where the remains of Trelawny were to be laid beside them after the lapse of nearly sixty years.

Two years later again, when Byron had himself died during the struggle for the liberation of Greece, Hazlitt took occasion to criticize Shelley’s posthumous poems in theEdinburgh Review, and having his own bitter grounds of quarrel with theBlackwoodgang, strainedthe bonds of prose in an outburst of half-lyric indignation on behalf of Keats as follows:—

Mr Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr Keats’s poetry grasped with one hand in his bosom! These are two out of four poets, patriots and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years, both of whom have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. Keats died young; and ‘yet his infelicity had years too many.’ A canker had blighted the tender bloom that o’erspread a face in which youth and genius strove with beauty; the shaft was sped—venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and followed him to his grave. And yet there are those who could trample on the faded flower—men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of merriment—who laugh loud over the silent urn of Genius, and play out their game of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of their victims!

Severn, living on at Rome in the halo of sympathy and regard with which the story of his friend’s death and his own devotion had justly surrounded him, seems to have done nothing to remove from the minds of the English colony through successive years an impression which he knew to have been only in a very partial measure true. And even Brown, when in the year after Keats’s death he came out with his natural son, a child of a few years, to make his home in Italy, in his turn let himself fall in with the view of Keats’s sufferings and of their origin which had taken such strong hold on the minds of most persons interested and commended itself so naturally to the tender-hearted and the righteously indignant. Brown did not come to Rome, but established himself first at Pisa and afterwards at Florence. At Pisa he saw something both of Trelawny and of Byron, who took to him kindly; and made several contributions to theLiberalduring the brief period while Hunt continued to conduct that journal at Pisa after Shelley’s death and before his final rupture with Byron and departure from Italy. The Greek adventure having in 1823 carried off Trelawny for a season and Byron never to return, Brown settled at Florence and became for some years a popular member of the lettered Englishcolony in Tuscany, living in intimacy with Seymour Kirkup, the artist and man of fortune who was for many years the centre of that circle, and before long admitted to the regard and hospitality of Walter Savage Landor in his beautiful Fiesolan villa. Landor, as readers will hardly need to be reminded, was an early, firm, and just admirer of Keats’s poetry.

It was not until some five years after Byron’s death in Greece that Trelawny came back to settle for a while again in Tuscany. Then, in 1829, he and Brown being at the time housemates, Brown helped him in preparing for the press his autobiographical romance,The Adventures of a Younger Son, and especially by supplying mottoes in verse for its chapter-headings, chiefly from the unpublished poems of Keats in his possession. One day Trelawny said to him that ‘Brown’ was no right distinguishing name for a man, or even for a family, but merely the name of a tribe: whereupon and whenceforward, adding to his own Christian name one that had been borne by a deceased brother, he took to styling himself, not always in familiar but regularly in formal signatures, Charles Armitage Brown. It is both anachronism and pedantry to give him these names, as is often done, in writing of him in connexion with Keats, to whom he was never anything but plain Charles Brown.

Of Keats Brown’s thoughts had in the meantime remained full. From his first arrival in Italy he had been in close communication with Severn as to the memorial stone and inscription to be placed over the poet’s grave at Rome and as to the biography to be written of him. He let the wish expressed by Keats that his epitaph should be ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’ stand for him as an absolute command, and studied how to combine those words with others explaining their choice as due to the poet’s sense of neglect by his countrymen. In the end the result agreed on between him and Severn was that which, despite much after-regret on Severn’s and some on Brown’s part andmany proposals of change, still stands, having been carefully re-cut and put in order more than half a century after the poet’s death:—namely a design of a lyre with only two of its strings strung, and an inscription perpetuating the idea of the poet having been a victim to the malice of his enemies:—

THIS GRAVECONTAINS ALL THAT WAS MORTALOF AYOUNG ENGLISH POETWHOON HIS DEATH BED,IN THE BITTERNESS OF HIS HEART,AT THE MALICIOUS POWER OF HIS ENEMIES,DESIREDTHESE WORDS TO BE ENGRAVEN ON HIS TOMB STONE“HERE LIES ONEWHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.”

February 24th, 1821.

Severn in his correspondence with Brown at Florence, and with Haslam and other friends at home, shows himself always loyally anxious to attribute to his connexion with Keats the social acceptance and artistic success which he found himself enjoying from the first at Rome, and to which in fact his own actively amiable nature, his winning manners and facile, suave pictorial talent, in a great measure contributed. Though the general feeling towards the memory of Keats among English residents and visitors was sympathetic, there were not lacking voices to repeat the stock gibe,—‘”his name was writ in water”; yes, and his poetry in milk and water.’ Severn eagerly notes any signs of increasing appreciation of his friend’s poetry, or of changed opinion on the part of scoffers, that came under his notice. One touching incident he recorded in later life as having happened in the spring of 1832, the eleventh year after Keats’s death. Sir Walter Scott, stricken with premature decrepitude from the labour and strain of mind undergone in his six years’colossal effort to clear himself of debt after the Constable crash, had come abroad with his daughter Anne in the hope of regaining some measure of health and strength from rest and southern air.1He spent a spring month at Rome, surrounded with attentions and capable of some sight-seeing, but could not shake off his grief for what he had lost in the death there two years earlier of his beloved Lady Northampton, whose beauty and charm and gift for verse and song (her singing portrait by Raeburn is one of the most beautiful in the world) had endeared her to him from childhood in her island home in Mull. Scott’s distress in thinking of her was pitiable, and he found some relief in pouring himself out to the sympathetic Severn, who had known her well.

By Scott’s desire Severn went every morning to see him, generally bringing some picture or sketch to amuse him. One morning Severn having innocently shown him the portrait of Keats reproduced at page 338 of this book, and said something about his genius and fate, observed Anne Scott turn away flushed and embarrassed, while Scott took Severn’s hand to close the interview, and said falteringly, ‘yes, yes, the world finds out these things for itself at last.’ The story has been commonly, but without reason, scouted as though it implied a guilty conscience in Scott himself as to theBlackwoodlampoons. It implies nothing of the kind. Scott had indeed had nothing to do with these matters: but one of his nearest and dearest had. The current belief that the death of Keats had been caused or hastened by Lockhart’s attack inBlackwood, with the tragic circumstances of theChristie-Scott duel, however little he may have said about them, will assuredly have left in a heart so great and tender an abiding regret and pain, and his manner and words on being reminded of them, as recorded by Severn, are perfectly in character.

By degrees the signs of admiration for Keats’s work noted by Severn become more frequent. Young Mr Gladstone, coming fresh from Oxford to Rome in this same year 1832, seeks him out because of his friendship for the poet. Another year a group of gentlemen and ladies in the English colony propose to give an amateur performance of the unpublishedOtto the Great, a proposal never, it would seem, carried out. But despite the loyal enthusiasm of special English circles abroad and the untiring tributes of Leigh Hunt and other friends and admirers at home, his repute among the reading public in general was of extraordinarily slow growth. In the interval of some score of years between the death of Byron and the establishment—itself slow and contested—of Tennyson’s position, Byron and Scott held with most even of open-minded judges an uncontested sovereignty among recent English poets; while among a growing minority the fame of Wordsworth steadily grew, and the popular and sentimental suffrage was given to writers of the calibre of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, feminine talents and temperaments truly not to be despised, however ephemeral has proved their fame.

So small was the demand for Keats’s poetry that the remaining stock of his original three volumes sufficed throughout nearly this score of years to supply it. The yeast was nevertheless working. We know of one famous instance, so far back as 1825, when a gift of the original volumes of Keats and Shelley inspired the recipient—the lad Robert Browning, then aged fourteen—with a fervent and wholly new conception, as he used afterwards to declare, of the scope and power of poetry. Young John Sterling, writing in 1828 in theAthenaeum, of which his friend and senior Frederick Denison Maurice was for the time being editor, showed which way thewind was beginning to blow at Cambridge when he said, ‘Keats, whose memory they (theBlackwoodgroup) persevered only a few months back in spitting upon, was, as everyone knows who has read him, among the most intense and delightful English poets of our day.’2But no reprint of Keats’s poems was published until 1829, and then only by the Paris house of Galignani, who printed for the continental market, in a single tall volume with double columns, a collective edition of the poems of Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats.3The same year saw the reprint ofAdonaison the initiative of Arthur Hallam and his group of undergraduate friends at Cambridge, and the visit of three of the group, Hallam himself, Monckton Milnes, and Sunderland, to uphold in debate at Oxford the opinion that Shelley was a greater poet than Byron. Their enthusiasm forAdonaisimplied enthusiasm for its subject, Keats, as a matter of course.

Alfred Tennyson was a close associate of this group; and from the first, among recent influences, it was that of Keats which did most to colour his style in poetry and make him strive to ‘load every rift of a subject with ore.’ His friend Edward FitzGerald shared the same admiration to the full. But these young pioneer spirits still stood, except for the surviving band of Keats’s early friends, almost alone. Wilson, it is true, with whom consistency counted for nothing, had by this time shown signs of wavering, and in his character as Christopher North speaks of Keats’s ‘genius’ being shown to best advantage inLamiaandIsabella,—but does so, we feel, less for the sake of praising Keats than of getting in a dig at Jeffrey for having praised him tardily and indiscriminately.4TheQuarterlyremained quite impenitent, and in a review of Tennyson’s second volume of 1832 writes of him with viciously laboured irony as ‘a new prodigy of genius—another and brighter star ofa galaxy ormilky wayof poetry, of which the lamented Keats was the harbinger’; and then follows a gibing testimony, to be read in the same inverted sense, of the vast popularity whichEndymionhas notoriously attained.5So far as popularity was concerned, theQuarterlygibe remained justified. It was not until 1840 that there appeared in England the first separate reprint of Keats’s collected poems:6what is sad to relate is that even this edition found a scanty sale, and that before long ‘remainder’ copies of it were being bound up by the booksellers with the ‘remainders’ of another unsuccessful issue of the day, the series ofBells and Pomegranatesby Robert Browning.

After an interval of thirteen years, John Sterling must still, in 1841, write to Julius Hare as follows:—

Lately I have been reading again some of Alfred Tennyson’s second volumes, and with profound admiration of his truly lyric and idyllic genius. There seems to me to have been more epic power in Keats, that fiery beautiful meteor; but they are two most true and great poets. When one thinks of the amount of recognition they have received, one may well bless God that poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind or left alone in its own magic hermitage.7

So late as 1844, Jeffrey, who in spite of the justice he had been induced to do to Keats in his lifetime, had no real belief in the new poetry and was an instinctive partisan of the conventional eighteenth-century style, could write that the ‘rich melodies’ of Keats and Shelley were passing out of public memory, and that the poets of their age destined to enduring fame were Campbell and Rogers. De Quincey in 1845 could grotesquely insult the memory and belittle the work of Keats in a passage pouring scorn onEndymion, treatingHyperionas his only achievement that counted, andending,—‘Upon this mother tongue, upon this English language has Keats trampled as with the hoofs of a buffalo. With its syntax, with its prosody, with its idiom, he has played such fantastic tricks as could only enter the heart of a barbarian, and for which only the anarchy of Chaos could furnish a forgiving audience. Verily it requiredHyperionto weigh against the deep treason of these unparalleled offences.’8

In the meantime none of Keats’s friends had succeeded in doing anything to strengthen his reputation or make his true character known by the publication either of a personal memoir or of his poetry that remained in manuscript. Several of them had fully desired and intended to do both these things. But mutual jealousies and dislikes, such as are but too apt to break out among the surviving intimates of a man of genius, had prevented any such purpose taking effect. Taylor and Woodhouse had been first in the field, collecting what material for a memorial volume they could, including the transcripts zealously made by Woodhouse from Keats’s papers while he was alive, and others, both verse and correspondence, which they had borrowed from Reynolds. But help both from Brown and from George Keats would have been necessary to give anything like completeness to their work; and Brown, who himself desired to be his friend’s biographer, looked askance at them and their project. As for information or material from George Keats, Brown on his part was debarred from seeking it by his obstinate conviction, reiterated in all companies and on all occasions and naturally resented by its subject, that George was a traitor, cheat, and villain. When Fanny Keats came of age in 1824, the duty devolved on Dilke of going into the family accounts and putting pressure on Abbey, who had proved a muddler both of his wards’ affairs and of his own, to make over the residue of the estate which he held in trust.In the discharge of this duty Dilke satisfied himself, as a practical man of business, that George’s conduct had been strictly upright and his motives honourable. But Brown refused to let his prejudices be shaken; and he and Dilke, though they met both in Italy and later in England, were never again on their old terms of friendship and mutual regard. Brown, criticizing Dilke in his influential position as editor of theAthenaeumafter 1830 and as a learned and recognized authority on various problems of literary history, declares that he has become dogmatic and arrogant from success. Dilke, writing confidentially of Brown, scouts the notion which had got abroad of his having been a ‘generous benefactor’ to Keats, and insists that he had always expected to profit by a literary partnership with the poet, and after his death had demanded and received from the estate payment in full, with interest, of all advances made by him.

So much—and the reader may hold it more than enough—in order to explain why no sufficient memoir of Keats or collection of his remains could be published by his surviving friends. Brown, indeed, wrote some ten years after Keats’s death the brief memoir of which I have freely made use in these pages, and tried some editors with it, but in vain. Destiny had provided otherwise and better. One of the Cambridge group of Shelley-Keats enthusiasts of 1830, Richard Monckton Milnes, being in Italy with his family not long after his degree, visited Rome and Florence in 1833 and 1834, and with his genius for knowing, liking, and being liked by everybody, made immediate friends with Severn at Rome, and at Florence soon found his way to Landor’s home at the Villa Gherardesca, and there met and was quickly on good terms with Brown. Some two or three years later Brown left Tuscany for good and established himself at Laira Green, near Plymouth, where he lived the life of amateur in letters, a busy local lecturer and contributor to local journals, and published his very ingenious interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets as acryptic autobiography of the poet, continuing the while to nurse the hope and desire of being Keats’s biographer. He had all but concluded an arrangement for the publication of his memoir in theMonthly Chronicle, when one day near the end of 1840, having heard a lecture on the prospects of the then young colony of New Zealand, he determined suddenly to emigrate thither with his son, who had been in training as a civil engineer; and before he left designated Monckton Milnes, with whom he had not ceased to keep in touch, as the fit man to do justice to Keats’s memory, and handed to him all his own cherished material.

Within a year Brown had died in New Zealand of an apoplectic stroke. Monckton Milnes was faithful to his trust, but not swift or prompt in fulfilling it. That was more than could well have been expected of a man of so many interests and pursuits and so eager in them all,—poet, politician, orator, wit, entertainer, athirst and full of relish for every varied cup of experience and every social or intellectual pleasure or activity, or opportunity for help or kindness, that life had to offer him. It was not until the fifth year after Brown’s departure that he buckled to his task. He began by collecting, with some measure of secretarial help from Coventry Patmore, further information and material from all the surviving friends of Keats whom he could hear of. George Keats had died at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1842, leaving an honoured memory among his fellow citizens; and his widow had taken a second husband, a Mr Jeffrey, who on Milnes’s request sent him among other material copies, unluckily very imperfect, of Keats’s incomparable journal-letters to George and to herself. From Cowden Clarke, the happiest of all Keats’s friends in after-life, happy in a perfect marriage, the sunniest of dispositions, and a sustained success in the congenial occupation of a public reader in and lecturer on Shakespeare and other poets,—from Cowden Clarke and from Keats’s younger school friend Edward Holmes, Milnes drew the information about Keats’s school days which I have quotedabove almost in full. Leigh Hunt, the friend whom Keats owed to Clarke and who had had the most decisive influence on his life, had passed with advancing years, not indeed out of his lifelong, lightly borne condition of debt and poverty and embarrassment and household worry, but out of the old atmosphere of obloquy and contention into one of peace, and of affectionate regard all but universal as the most genial and companionable, the most versatile, industrious and sweet-natured of literary veterans, praised and admired, to a pitch almost of generous passion, even by the growler Carlyle, who had nothing but a gibe of contempt to bestow upon the weaknesses of a Lamb or a Keats. In regard to Keats, Hunt had said his say, personal and critical, long ago, in the unwise but in its day grossly over-reviled bookLord Byron and some of his Contemporaries(1828), as well as in many incidental notes and observations through thirty years, and especially in that masterpiece in his own vein of criticism,Imagination and Fancy(1844). Accordingly he had now little that was fresh to tell the biographer. As for Haydon, the destiny he had in the old days been used to prophesy for Hunt,—even such a destiny, and worse, had in the irony of things befallen himself. That tragic gulf which existed in him between ambition and endowment, between temperament and faculty, had led him through ever fiercer contentions and deeper and more desperate difficulties to the goal of suicide. This had happened in the days when the biographer of Keats was just setting hand to his task; hence such accounts of the poet as I have quoted from Haydon were not at Milnes’s disposal, but are drawn from later posthumous publications of the painter’s journals and correspondence. By way of farewell to this ill-starred overweening half-genius, I add here the facsimile of a page from a letter he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett in 1834, describing a scene of rather squalid tragi-comedy which he and Keats had witnessed at Hunt’s Hampstead cottage seventeen years before, and adding from memory a sketch of Keats’s profile,with an answer to his correspondent’s conjecture that the poet’s expression had been ‘too subtle for the brush.’

Among Keats’s other intimate friends and associates, Mr Taylor let Monckton Milnes have the loan of the notes and transcripts bequeathed him by Woodhouse, who had died in 1834. Reynolds heard by accident of the intended biography, and never having quite abandoned his own purpose in the matter, wrote at first complainingly, resenting that use should be made of those letters of Keats to himself which he had allowed Woodhouse to copy. But a gracious answer quickly won him over, and he made the new biographer welcome to all his material. His own career had been a rather melancholy failure. He had never quite given up literature in accordance with the purpose he had declared on marriage. Indeed it was not until six years after that declaration, in 1825, that his best piece of work was done, in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Thomas Hood: I mean the anonymous volume of humorous poems, not inferior toRejected Addresses, calledOdes and Addresses to Great People, which Coleridge confidently declared to be the work of Lamb. In later years Reynolds was a not infrequent contributor to theEdinburgh Reviewand to theAthenaeumunder the editorship of Dilke. For some unspecified reason he did not prosper in the place which his friend Rice had found for him with the eminent firm of solicitors, the Fladgates; and in later life he was glad to accept a small piece of patronage as deputy clerk of the County Court at Newport in the Isle of Wight. Here, if the latest mention of him is to be trusted, he fell into self-neglecting habits and consequent disrepute.9In one of his letters to Milnes he speaks about ‘that poor, obscure, baffled thing, myself’: in another he declares his entire confidence in his correspondent, and his unfading admiration and affection for his lost friend, as follows:—

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