Life of John Keats.
by Sidney Colvin.
PREFACE
To the name and work of Keats our best critics and scholars have in recent years paid ever closer attention and warmer homage. But their studies have for the most part been specialized and scattered, and there does not yet exist any one book giving a full and connected account of his life and poetry together in the light of our present knowledge and with help of all the available material. Ever since it was my part, some thirty years ago, to contribute the volume on Keats to the series of short studies edited by Lord Morley, (the _English Men of Letters_ series), I have hoped one day to return to the subject and do my best to supply this want. Once released from official duties, I began to prepare for the task, and through the last soul-shaking years, being over age for any effectual war-service, have found solace and occupation in carrying it through.
The following pages, timed to appear in the hundredth year after the publication of Keats"s first volume, are the result. I have sought in them to combine two aims not always easy to be reconciled, those of holding the interest of the general reader and at the same time of satisfying, and perhaps on some points even informing, the special student. I have tried to set forth consecutively and fully the history of a life outwardly remarkable for nothing but its tragic brevity, but inwardly as crowded with imaginative and emotional experience as any on record, and moreover, owing to the open-heartedness of the man and to the preservation and unreserved publication of his letters, lying bare almost more than any other to our knowledge. Further, considering for how much friendship counted in Keats"s life, I have tried to call up the group of his friends about him in their human lineaments and relations, so far as these can be recovered, more fully than has been attempted before. I believe also that I have been able to trace more closely than has yet been done some of the chief sources, both in literature and in works of art, of his inspiration. I have endeavoured at the same time to make felt the critical and poetical atmosphere, with its various and strongly conflicting currents, amid which he lived, and to show how his genius, almost ignored in its own day beyond the circle of his private friends, was a focus in which many vital streams of poetic tendency from the past centred and from which many radiated into the future. To ill.u.s.trate this last point it has been necessary, by way of epilogue, to sketch, however briefly, the story of his posthumous fame, his after life in the minds and hearts of English writers and readers until to-day. By English I mean all those whose mother language is English. To follow the extension of Keats"s fame to the Continent is outside my aim.
He has not yet, by means of translation and comment in foreign languages, become in any full sense a world-poet. But during the last thirty years the process has begun, and there would be a good deal to say, did my scheme admit it, of work upon Keats done abroad, especially in France, where our literature has during the last generation been studied with such admirable intelligence and care.
In an attempt of this scope, I have necessarily had to repeat matters of common knowledge and to say again things that others have said well and sufficiently already. But working from materials. .h.i.therto in part untouched, and taking notice of such new lights as have appeared while my task was in progress, I have drawn from them some conclusions, both biographical and critical, which I believe to be my own and which I hope may stand. I have not shrunk from quoting in full poems and portions of poems which everybody knows, in cases where I wanted the reader to have their text not merely in memory but actually before him, for re-studying with a fresh comment or in some new connexion. I have also quoted very largely from the poet"s letters, even now not nearly as much read as things so full of genius should be, both in order that some of his story may be told in his own words and for the sake of that part of his mind--a great and most interesting part--which is expressed in them but has not found its way into his poems. It must be added that when I found things in my former small book which I did not see my way to better and which seemed to fit into the expanded scale of this one, I have not hesitated sometimes to incorporate them--to the amount perhaps of forty or fifty pages in all.
I wish I could hope that my work will be found such as to justify the amount and variety of friendly help I have had in its preparation.
Thanks for such help are due in more quarters than I can well call to mind. First and foremost, to Lord Crewe for letting me have free and constant access to his unrivalled collection of original doc.u.ments connected with the subject, both those inherited from his father (referred to in the notes as "Houghton MSS.") and those acquired in recent years by himself (referred to as "Crewe MSS."). Speaking generally, it may be a.s.sumed that new matter for which no authority is quoted is taken from these sources. To Miss Henrietta Woodhouse of Weston Lea, Albury, I am indebted for valuable doc.u.mentary and other information concerning her uncle Richard Woodhouse. Next in importance among collections of Keats doc.u.ments to that of Lord Crewe is that of Mr J. P. Morgan in New York, the chief contents of which have by his leave been transcribed for me with the kindliest diligence by his librarian Miss Greene. For other ill.u.s.trative doc.u.ments existing in America, I believe of value, I should like to be able to thank their owners, Mr Day and Mr Louis Holman of Boston: but these gentlemen made a condition of their help the issue of a limited edition _de luxe_ of the book specially ill.u.s.trated from their material, a condition the publishers judged it impossible to carry out, at any rate in war-time.
Foremost among my scholarly helpers at home has been my friend Professor W. P. Ker. For information and suggestions in answer to enquiries of one kind or another I am indebted to Professor Israel Gollancz and Mr Henry Bradley; to Professor Ernest Weekley, the best living authority on surnames; to Mr A. H. Bullen; to Mr Falconer Madan and Mr J. W. Mackail; to Mr Thomas J. Wise; to Mr H. C. Sh.e.l.ley; to Mr J. D. Milner, Director of the National Portrait Gallery; and to my former colleague Mr A. H.
Smith, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. Mr George Whale supplied me with full copies of and comments on the entries concerning Keats in the books of Guy"s Hospital. Dr Hambley Rowe of Bradford put at my disposal the results, unfortunately not yet conclusive, of the researches made by him as a zealous Cornishman on Keats"s possible Cornish descent. I must not omit thanks to Mr Emery Walker for his skill and pains in preparing the ill.u.s.trations for my book. With reference to these, I may note that the head from the portrait painted by Severn in 1859 and now in Lord Crewe"s possession was chosen for colour reproduction as frontispiece because it is the fullest in colouring and, though done from memory so long after the poet"s death, to my mind the most satisfying and convincing in general air of any of the extant portraits. Of the miniature done by Severn from life in 1818, copied and recopied by himself, Charles Brown and others, and made familiar by numberless reproductions in black and white, the original, now deposited by the Dilke Trustees in the National Portrait Gallery, has the character of a monochrome touched with sharp notes or suggestions of colour in the hair, lips, hands, book, etc. I have preferred not to repeat either this or the equally well known--nay, hackneyed--and very distressing death-bed drawing made by Severn at Rome. The profile from Haydon"s life-mask of the poet is taken, not, like most versions of the same mask, from the plaster, but from an electrotype made many years ago when the cast was fresh and showing the structure and modellings of the head more subtly, in my judgment, than the original cast itself in its present state. Both cast and electrotype are in the National Portrait Gallery. So is the oil-painting of Keats seated reading, begun by Severn soon after the poet"s death and finished apparently two years later, which I have reproduced, well known though it is, partly for its appositeness to a phrase in one of his letters to his sister. Besides the portraits of Keats, I have added from characteristic sources those of the two men who most influenced him at the outset of his career, Leigh Hunt and Haydon. A new feature in my book is provided by the reproductions of certain works of art, both pictures and antiques, which can be proved or surmised to have struck and stimulated his imagination. The reproductions of autographs, one of his own and one of Haydon"s, speak for themselves.
CHAPTER I
1795-1815: BIRTH AND PARENTAGE: SCHOOLDAYS AND APPRENTICESHIP
Obscure family history--The Finsbury livery stable--The surname Keats--Origin probably Cornish--Character of parents--Traits of childhood--The Enfield School--The Edmonton home--The Pymmes Brook--Testimonies of schoolmates--Edward Holmes--Charles Cowden Clarke--New pa.s.sion for reading--Left an orphan--Apprenticed to a surgeon--Relations with his master--Readings in the poets--The _Faerie Queene_--The Spenser fever--Other poetic influences--Influences of nature--Early attempts in verse--Early sympathizers--George Felton Mathew--Move to London.
For all the study and research, that have lately been spent on the life and work of Keats, there is one point as to which we remain as much in the dark as ever, and that is his family history. He was born at an hour when the gradually re-awakened genius of poetry in our race, I mean of impa.s.sioned and imaginative poetry, was ready to offer new forms of spiritual sustenance, and a range of emotions both widened and deepened, to a generation as yet only half prepared to receive them. If we consider the other chief poets who bore their part in that great revival, we can commonly recognize either some strain of power in their blood or some strong inspiring quality in the scenery and traditions of their home, or both together. Granting that the scenic and legendary romance of the Scottish border wilds were to be made live anew for the delight of the latter-day world, we seem to see in Walter Scott a man predestined for the task alike by origin, a.s.sociation, and opportunity.
Had the indwelling spirit of the c.u.mbrian lakes and mountains, and their power upon the souls and lives of those living among them, to be newly revealed and interpreted to the general mind of man, where should we look for its spokesman but in one of Wordsworth"s birth and training?
What, then, it may be asked, of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley, the two great contrasted poets of revolution, or rather of revolt against the counter-revolution, in the younger generation,--the one worldly, mocking, half theatrically rebellious and Satanic, the other unworldly even to unearthliness, a loving alien among men, more than half truly angelic? These we are perhaps rightly used to count as offspring of their age, with its forces and ferments, its violent actions and reactions, rather than of their ancestry or upbringing. And yet, if we will, we may fancy Byron inspired in literature by demons of the same froward brood that had urged others of his lineage on lives of adventure or of crime, and may conceive that Sh.e.l.ley drew some of his instincts for headlong, peremptory self-guidance, though in directions most opposite to the traditional, from the stubborn and wayward stock of colonial and county aristocracy whence he sprang.
Keats, more purely and exclusively a poet than any of these, and responding more intuitively than any to the spell alike of ancient Greece, of mediaeval romance, and of the English woods and fields, was born in a dull and middling walk of London city life, and "if by traduction came his mind",--to quote Dryden with a difference,--it was through channels hidden from our search. From his case less even than from Shakespeare"s can we draw any argument as to the influence of heredity or environment on the birth and growth of genius. His origin, in spite of much diligent inquiry, has not been traced beyond one generation on the father"s side and two on the mother"s. His father, Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to London, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery-stable kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Seven or eight years later, about the beginning of 1795, he married his employer"s daughter, Frances Jennings, then in her twentieth year. Mr Jennings, who had carried on a large business in north-eastern London and the neighbouring suburbs, and was a man of substance, retired about the same time to live in the country, at Ponder"s End near Edmonton, leaving the management of the business in the hands of his son-in-law. At first the young couple lived at the stable, at the sign of the Swan and Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open s.p.a.ce of Lower Moorfields. Here their eldest child, the poet JOHN KEATS, was born prematurely on either the 29th or 31st of October, 1795. A second son, named George, followed on February 28, 1797; a third, Tom, on November 18, 1799; a fourth, Edward, who died in infancy, on April 28, 1801; and on the 3rd of June, 1803, a daughter, Frances Mary. In the meantime the family had moved from the stable to a house in Craven Street, City Road, half a mile farther north.
The Keats brothers as they grew up were remarked for their intense fraternal feeling and strong vein of family pride. But it was a pride that looked forward and not back: they were bent on raising the family name and credit, but seem to have taken no interest at all in its history, and have left no record or tradition concerning their forbears.
Some of their friends believed their father to have been a Devonshire man: their sister, who long survived them, said she remembered hearing as a child that he came from Cornwall, near the Land"s End.
There is no positive evidence enabling us to decide the question. The derivation of English surnames is apt to be complicated and obscure, and "Keats" is no exception to the rule. It is a name widely distributed in various counties of England, though not very frequent in any. It may in some cases be a possessive form derived from the female Christian name Kate, on the a.n.a.logy of Jeans from Jane, or Maggs from Margaret: but the source accepted as generally probable for it and its several variants is the Middle-English adjective "kete", a word of Scandinavian origin meaning bold, gallant. In the form "Keyte" the name prevails princ.i.p.ally in Warwickshire: in the variants Keat (or Keate) and Keats (or Keates[1]) it occurs in many of the midland, home, and southern, especially the south-western, counties.
Mr Thomas Hardy tells me of a Keats family sprung from a horsedealer of Broadmayne, Dorsetshire, members of which lived within his own memory as farmers and publicans in and near Dorchester, one or two of them bearing, as he thought, a striking likeness to the portrait of the poet.
One Keats family of good standing was established by the mid-eighteenth century in Devon, in the person of a well-known headmaster of Blundell"s school, Tiverton, afterwards rector of Bideford. His son was one of Nelson"s bravest and most famous captains, Sir Richard G.o.dwin Keats of the "Superb", and from the same stock sprang in our own day the lady whose tales of tragic and comic west-country life, published under the pseudonym "Zack", gave promise of a literary career which has been unhappily cut short. But with this Bideford stock the Keats brothers can have claimed no connexion, or as schoolboys they would a.s.suredly have made the prowess of their namesake of the "Superb" their pride and boast, whereas in fact their ideal naval hero was a much less famous person, their mother"s brother Midgley John Jennings, a tall lieutenant of marines who served with some credit on Duncan"s flagship at Camperdown and by reason of his stature was said to have been a special mark for the enemy"s musketry. In the form Keat or Keate the name is common enough both in Devon, particularly near Tiverton, and in Cornwall, especially in the parishes of St Teath and Lanteglos,--that is round about Camelford,--and also as far eastward as Callington and westward as St Columb Major: the last named parish having been the seat of a family of the name ent.i.tled to bear arms and said to have come originally from Berkshire.
But neither the records of the Dorsetshire family, nor search in the parish registers of Devon and Cornwall, have as yet yielded the name of any Thomas Keat or Keats as born in 1768, the birth-year of our poet"s father according to our information. A "Thomas Keast", however, is registered as having been born in that year in the parish of St Agnes, between New Quay and Redruth. Now Keast is a purely Cornish name, limited to those parts, and it is quite possible that, borne by a Cornishman coming to London, it would get changed into the far commoner Keats (a somewhat similar phonetic change is that of Crisp into Cripps).
So the identification of this Thomas Keast of St Agnes as the father of our Keats is not to be excluded. The Jennings connexion is of itself a circ.u.mstance which may be held to add to the likelihood of a Cornish origin for the poet, Jennings being a name frequent in the Falmouth district and occurring as far westward as Lelant. Children are registered as born in and after 1770 of the marriage of a John Jennings to a Catherine Keate at Penryn; and it is a plausible conjecture (always remembering it to be a conjecture and no more) that the prosperous London stable-keeper Jonn Jennings was himself of Cornish origin, and that between him and the lad Thomas Keats, whom he took so young first as head stableman and then as son-in-law, there existed some previous family connexion or acquaintance. These, however, are matters purely conjectural, and all we really know about the poet"s parents are the dates above mentioned, and the fact that they were certainly people somewhat out of the ordinary. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of sense, spirit, and conduct: "of so remarkably fine a commonsense and native respectability," writes Cowden Clarke, in whose father"s school the poet and his brother were brought up, "that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canva.s.sed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys." And again:--"I have a clear recollection of his lively and energetic countenance, particularly when seated on his gig and preparing to drive his wife home after visiting his sons at school. In feature, stature, and manner John resembled his father." Of Frances Keats, the poet"s mother, we learn more vaguely that she was "tall, of good figure, with large oval face, and sensible deportment": and again that she was a lively, clever, impulsive woman, pa.s.sionately fond of amus.e.m.e.nt, and supposed to have hastened the birth of her eldest child by some imprudence. Her second son, George, wrote in after life of her and of her family as follows:--"my grandfather Mr Jennings was very well off, as his will shows, and but that he was extremely generous and gullible would have been affluent. I have heard my grandmother speak with enthusiasm of his excellencies, and Mr Abbey used to say that he never saw a woman of the talents and sense of my grandmother, except my mother."
As to the grandmother and her estimable qualities all accounts are agreed, but of the mother the witness quoted himself tells a very different tale. This Mr Richard Abbey was a wholesale tea-dealer in Saint Pancras Lane and a trusted friend of Mr and Mrs Jennings. In a memorandum written long after their death he declares that both as girl and woman their daughter, the poet"s mother, was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways and was no credit to her family.[2] Whatever truth there may be in these charges, it is certain that she lived to the end under her mother"s roof and was in no way cut off from her children. The eldest boy John in particular she is said to have held in pa.s.sionate affection, by him pa.s.sionately returned. Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in.
Haydon, an artist who loved to lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different turn:--"He was when an infant a most violent and ungovernable child. At five years of age or thereabouts, he once got hold of a naked sword and shutting the door swore n.o.body should go out. His mother wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through the window saw her position and came to the rescue." Another trait of the poet"s childhood, mentioned also by Haydon, on the authority of a gammer who had known him from his birth, is that when he was first learning to speak, instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of making a rime to the last word people said and then laughing.
The parents were ambitious for their boys, and would have liked to send them to Harrow, but thinking this beyond their means, chose the school kept by a Mr John Clarke at Enfield. The brothers of Mrs Keats, including the boys" admired uncle, the lieutenant of marines, had been educated here, and the school was one of good repute, and of exceptionally pleasant aspect and surroundings. The school-house had been originally built for a rich West India merchant, in the finest style of early Georgian cla.s.sic architecture, and stood in a s.p.a.cious garden at the lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was used for a railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but later it was taken down, and the central part of the facade, with its fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum, and is still preserved there as a choice example of the style. It is evident that Mr Clarke was a kind and excellent schoolmaster, much above the standards of his time, and that lads with any bent for literature or scholarship had their full chance under him. Still more was this the case when his son Charles Cowden Clarke, a genial youth with an ardent and trained love of books and music, grew old enough to help him as usher in the school-work. The brothers John and George Keats were mere children when they were put under Mr Clarke"s care, John not much over and George a good deal under eight years old, both still dressed, we are told, in the childish frilled suits which give such a grace to groups of young boys in the drawings of Stothard and his contemporaries.
Not long after Keats had been put to school he lost his father, whose horse fell and threw him in the City Road as he rode home late one night after dining at Southgate, perhaps on his way home from the Enfield School. His skull was fractured: he was picked up unconscious about one o"clock and died at eight in the morning. This was on the 16th of April, 1804. Within twelve months his widow had taken a second husband--one William Rawlings, described as "of Moorgate in the city of London, stable-keeper," presumably therefore the successor of her first husband in the management of her father"s business. (It may be noted incidentally that Rawlings, like Jennings, is a name common in Cornwall, especially in and about the parish of Madron). This marriage must have turned out unhappily, for it was soon followed by a separation, under what circ.u.mstances or through whose fault we are not told. In the correspondence of the Keats brothers after they were grown up no mention is ever made of their stepfather, of whom the family seem soon to have lost all knowledge. Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live at Edmonton, in the house of her mother, Mrs Jennings, who was just about this time left a widow. The family was well enough provided for, Mr Jennings (who died March 8, 1805) having left a fortune of over 13,000, of which, in addition to other legacies, he bequeathed a capital yielding 200 a year to his widow absolutely; one yielding 50 a year to his daughter Frances Rawlings, with reversion to her Keats children after her death; and 1000 to be separately held in trust for the said children and divided among them on the coming of age of the youngest.
Between the home, then, in Church Street, Edmonton, and the neighbouring Enfield school, where the two elder brothers were in due time joined by the youngest, the next five years of Keats"s boyhood (1806-1811) were pa.s.sed in sufficient comfort and pleasantness. He did not live to attain the years, or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and almost the only recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in his grandmother"s house at Edmonton. They are conveyed in some rimes which he wrote years afterwards by way of foolishness to amuse his young sister, and testify to a partiality, common also to little boys not of genius, for dabbling by the brookside and keeping small fishes in tubs,--
There was a naughty boy t.i.ttlebat And a naughty boy was he Not over fat, He kept little fishes Minnow small In washing tubs three As the stal In spite Of a glove Of the might Not above Of the Maid, The size Nor afraid Of a nice Of his Granny-good Little Baby"s He often would Little finger-- Hurly burly O he made Get up early "Twas his trade And go Of Fish a pretty kettle By hook or crook A kettle-- To the brook A kettle-- And bring home Of Fish a pretty kettle Miller"s thumb, A kettle!
In a later letter to his sister he makes much the same confession in a different key, when he bids her ask him for any kind of present she fancies, only not for live stock to be kept in captivity, "though I will not now be very severe on it, remembering how fond I used to be of Goldfinches, Tomt.i.ts, Minnows, Mice, Ticklebacks, Dace, c.o.c.k salmons and all the whole tribe of the Bushes and the Brooks." Despite the changes which have overbuilt and squalidly or sprucely suburbanized all those parts of Middles.e.x, the Pymmes brook still holds its course across half the county, is still bridged by the main street of Edmonton, and runs countrywise, clear and open, for some distance along a side street on its way to join the Lea. Other memories of it, and of his childish playings and musings beside it, find expression in Keats"s poetry where he makes the shepherd-prince Endymion tell his sister Peona how one of his love-sick vagaries has been to sit on a stone and bubble up the water through a reed,--
So reaching back to boy-hood: make me ships Of moulted feathers, touchwood, alder chips, With leaves stuck in them; and the Neptune be Of their petty ocean.
If we learn little of Keats"s early days from his own lips, we have sufficient testimony as to the impression which he made on his school companions; which was that of a fiery, generous little fellow, handsome and pa.s.sionate, vehement both in tears and laughter, and as placable and loveable as he was pugnacious. But beneath this bright and mettlesome outside there lay deep in his nature, even from the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, to whom he was attached by the very closest of fraternal ties. George, the second brother, had all John"s spirit of manliness and honour, with a less impulsive disposition and a cooler blood. From a boy he was the bigger and stronger of the two: and at school found himself continually involved in fights for, and not unfrequently with, his small, indomitably fiery senior. Tom, the youngest, was always delicate, and an object of protecting care as well as the warmest affection to the other two.
Here are some of George Keats"s recollections, written after the death of his elder brother, and referring partly to their school days and partly to John"s character after he was grown up:
I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of his heart and the n.o.bleness of his spirit, before we left school we quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my schoolfellows will bear witness that John"s temper was the cause of all, still we were more attached than brothers ever are.
From the time we were boys at school, where we loved, jangled, and fought alternately, until we separated in 1818, I in a great measure relieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He avoided teazing any one with his miseries but Tom and myself, and often asked our forgiveness; venting and discussing them gave him relief.
Let us turn now from these honest and warm brotherly reminiscences to their confirmation in the words of two of Keats"s school friends; and first in those of his junior Edward Holmes, afterwards a musical critic of note and author of a well-known _Life of Mozart_:--
Keats was in childhood not attached to books. His _penchant_ was for fighting. He would fight any one--morning, noon, and night, his brother among the rest. It was meat and drink to him. Jennings their sailor relation was always in the thoughts of the brothers, and they determined to keep up the family reputation for courage; George in a pa.s.sive manner; John and Tom more fiercely. The favourites of John were few; after they were known to fight readily he seemed to prefer them for a sort of grotesque and buffoon humour. I recollect at this moment his delight at the extraordinary gesticulations and pranks of a boy named Wade who was celebrated for this.... He was a boy whom any one from his extraordinary vivacity and personal beauty might easily fancy would become great--but rather in some military capacity than in literature. You will remark that this taste came out rather suddenly and unexpectedly. Some books of his I remember reading were _Robinson Crusoe_ and something about Montezuma and the Incas of Peru. He must have read Shakespeare as he thought that "no one would care to read _Macbeth_ alone in a house at two o"clock in the morning." This seems to me a boyish trait of the poet. His sensibility was as remarkable as his indifference to be thought well of by the master as a "good boy"
and to his tasks in general.... He was in every way the creature of pa.s.sion.... The point to be chiefly insisted on is that he was _not literary--his love of books and poetry manifested itself chiefly about a year before he left school_. In all active exercises he excelled.
The generosity and daring of his character with the extreme beauty and animation of his face made I remember an impression on me--and being some years his junior I was obliged to woo his friendship--in which I succeeded, but not till I had fought several battles. This violence and vehemence--this pugnacity and generosity of disposition--in pa.s.sions of tears or outrageous fits of laughter--always in extremes--will help to paint Keats in his boyhood. a.s.sociated as they were with an extraordinary beauty of person and expression, these qualities captivated the boys, and no one was more popular.[3]
Entirely to the same effect is the account of Keats given by a school friend seven or eight years older than himself, to whose appreciation and encouragement the world most likely owes it that he first became aware of his own vocation for poetry. This was the aforementioned Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the head master, who towards the close of a long life, during which he had deserved well of literature and of his generation in more ways than one, wrote retrospectively of Keats:--
He was a favourite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which when roused was one of the most picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw. One of the transports of that marvellous actor, Edmund Kean--whom, by the way, he idolized--was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure. Upon one occasion when an usher, on account of some impertinent behaviour, had boxed his brother Tom"s ears, John rushed up, put himself into the received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher--who could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. His pa.s.sion at times was almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing when John was "in one of his moods," and was endeavouring to beat him.
It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration; for he had an intensely tender affection for his brothers, and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not merely the favourite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his highmindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him.[4]
The same excellent witness records in agreement with the last that in his earlier school days Keats showed no particular signs of an intellectual bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did.
But during his last few terms, that is in his fifteenth and sixteenth years, he suddenly became a pa.s.sionate student and a very glutton of books. Let us turn again to Cowden Clarke"s words:--
My father was in the habit, at each half-year"s vacation, of bestowing prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quant.i.ty of voluntary work; and such was Keats"s indefatigable energy for the last two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that, upon each occasion, he took the first prize by a considerable distance. He was at work before the first school-hour began, and that was at seven o"clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation were so devoted; and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at play, he would be in the school--almost the only one--at his Latin or French translation; and so unconscious and regardless was he of the consequences of so close and persevering an application, that he never would have taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes driven out for the purpose by one of the masters....
One of the silver medals awarded to Keats as a school prize in these days exists in confirmation of this account and was lately in the market. Cowden Clarke continues:--
In the latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading.
Thus, his _whole_ time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive memory, and the quant.i.ty that he read was surprising. He must in those last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted princ.i.p.ally of abridgements of all the voyages and travels of any note; Mavor"s collection, also his _Universal History_; Robertson"s histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss Edgeworth"s productions, together with many other books equally well calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke"s _Pantheon_, Lempriere"s _Cla.s.sical Dictionary_, which he appeared to _learn_, and Spence"s _Polymetis_. This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek mythology; here was he "suckled in that creed outworn;" for his amount of cla.s.sical attainment extended no farther than the _aeneid_, with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a considerable portion....
He must have gone through all the better publications in the school library, for he asked me to lend him some of my own books; and, in my "mind"s eye," I now see him at supper (we had our meals in the schoolroom), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet"s _History of his Own Time_ between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh Hunt"s _Examiner_--which my father took in, and I used to lend to Keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty.
In the midst of these ardent studies of Keats"s latter school days befell the death of his mother, who had been for some time in failing health. First she was disabled by chronic rheumatism, and at last fell into a rapid consumption, which carried her off at the age of thirty-five in February 1810. We are told with what devotion her eldest boy attended her sick-bed,--"he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer n.o.body to give her medicine, or even cook her food, but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease,"--and how bitterly he mourned for her when she was gone,--"he gave way to such impa.s.sioned and prolonged grief (hiding himself in a nook under the master"s desk) as awakened the liveliest pity and sympathy in all who saw him."
From her, no doubt, came that predisposition to consumption which showed itself in her youngest son from adolescence and carried him off at nineteen, and with the help of ill luck, over-exertion, and distress of mind, wrecked also before twenty-five the robust-seeming frame and const.i.tution of her eldest, the poet. Were the accounts of her character less ambiguous, or were the strands of human heredity less inveterately entangled than they are, it would be tempting, when we consider the deep duality of Keats"s nature, the trenchant contrast between the two selves that were in him, to trace to the mother the seeds of one of those selves, the feverishly over-sensitive and morbidly pa.s.sionate one, and to his father the seeds of the other, the self that was all manly good sense and good feeling and undisturbed clear vision and judgment. In the sequel we shall see this fine virile self in Keats continually and consciously battling against the other, trying to hold it down, and succeeding almost always in keeping control over his ways and dealings with his fellow-men, though not over the inward frettings of his spirit.