[6] In a review of Keats"s first book written the next year (_Examiner_, July 9, 1817) Hunt says that when he printed the "Solitude" sonnet he knew no more of Keats than of any other anonymous correspondent: but this probably only means that he had not yet met Keats personally.
[7] Putting day-break in early October at a little before six, there would have been fully time enough for Keats to walk to the Poultry, composing as he went, and to commit his draft to paper and send it to Clerkenwell by ten o"clock. The longer walk to and from the Borough, had the date been a year earlier, would have made the feat more difficult. Moreover the feat itself becomes less of a miracle when we recognize it as performed not at the end of the poet"s twentieth year but at the end of his twenty first. But in view of Keats"s own explicit dating of the piece, the point seems to need no labouring: or else it might be pointed out that if Clarke had really introduced him to Chapman in October 1815 Chapman would a.s.suredly not have been left out of the list of masters whom he quotes as having known through Clarke in his epistle of the following August quoted above (pp. 37, 38).
[8] Both Byron and Barry Cornwall have expressed their sense of contrast between certain vulgarities of Hunt"s diction and his personal good breeding. Byron before their quarrel declared emphatically that he was "not a vulgar man"; and Barry Cornwall, admitting that he "indulged himself occasionally in pet words, some of which struck me as almost approaching to the vulgar," goes on to say that "he was essentially a gentleman in conduct, in demeanour, in manner, in his consideration for others," and to praise him for his "great fund of positive active kindness," his freedom from all irritable vanity, his pleasure and liberality in praising (Bryan Walter Procter, _An Autobiographical Fragment_, 1877, pp. 197-200).
[9] This reconstruction of the scene is founded on a comparison of the sonnets themselves with Woodhouse"s note on Keats"s subsequent palinode, _A Hymn to Apollo_. Woodhouse says the friends were both crowned with laurel, but it seems more likely that he should have made this mistake than that a similar performance should have been twice repeated (Houghton MSS.).
CHAPTER III
WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST FOR POETRY
Haydon and the Elgin marbles--Haydon as painter and writer--Vanity, pugnacity, and piety--Haydon on Leigh Hunt--Keats and Haydon meet--An enthusiastic friendship--Keats and the Elgin marbles--Sonnets and protestations--Hazlitt and Lamb--Friendship of Hunt and Sh.e.l.ley--Lamb and Hazlitt on Sh.e.l.ley--Haydon and Sh.e.l.ley: a battle royal--Keats and Sh.e.l.ley--A cool relation--John Hamilton Reynolds--His devotion to Keats--The Reynolds sisters--James Rice--Charles Wells--William Haslam--Joseph Severn--Keats judged by his circle--Described by Severn--His range of sympathies--His poetic ambition--The die is cast--First volume goes to press.
So much for the relations of Keats with Hunt himself in these first six months of their intimacy. Next of the other intimacies which he formed with friends to whom Hunt introduced him. One of the first of these, and for a while the most stimulating and engrossing, was with the painter Haydon. This remarkable man, now just thirty, had lately been victorious in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory in the other. For the last eight years he had fought and laboured to win national recognition for the deserts of Lord Elgin in his great work of salvage--for such under the conditions of the time it was--in bringing away the remains of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens. By dint of sheer justice of conviction and power of fight, and then only when he had been reinforced in the campaign by foreigners of indisputable authority like the archaeologist Visconti and the sculptor Canova, he had succeeded in getting the pre-eminence of these marbles among all works of the sculptor"s art acknowledged, and their acquisition for the nation secured, in the teeth of powerful and bitterly hostile cliques. His opponents included both the sentimentalists who took their cue from Byron"s _Curse of Minerva_ in shrieking at Elgin as a vandal, and the dilettanti who, blinded to the true Greek touch by familiarity with smoothed and pumiced Roman copies, had declared the Parthenon sculptures to be works of the age of Hadrian.
Haydon"s victory over these antagonists is his chief t.i.tle, and a t.i.tle both sound and strong, to the regard of posterity. His other and life-long, half insane endeavour was to persuade the world to take him at his own estimate, as the man chosen by Providence to add the crown of heroic painting to the other glories of his country. His high-flaming energy and industry, his eloquence, vehemence, and social gifts, the clamour of his indomitable self-a.s.sertion and of his ceaseless conflict with the academic powers, even his unabashed claims for pecuniary support on friends, patrons, and society at large, had won for him much convinced or half convinced attention and encouragement, both in the world of art and letters and in that of dilettantism and fashion. His first and second great pictures, "Dentatus" and "Macbeth," had been dubiously received; his third, the "Judgment of Solomon," with acclamation. This had been finished after his victory in the matter of the Elgin marbles. He was now busy on one larger and more ambitious than all, "Christ"s Entry into Jerusalem," in which it was his purpose to include among the crowd of lookers-on portraits of many famous men both historical and contemporary. While as usual sunk deep in debt, he was perfectly confident of glory. Vain confidence--for he was in truth a man whom nature had endowed, as if maliciously, with one part of the gifts of genius and not the other. Its energy and voluntary power he possessed completely, and no man has ever lived at a more genuinely exalted pitch of feeling and aspiration. "Never," wrote he about this time, "have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his armpits, and ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me.... They came over me, and shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked G.o.d." But for all his sensations and conviction of power, the other half of genius, the half which resides not in energy and will, but in faculties which it is the business of energy and will to apply, was denied to Haydon. Its vision and originality, its gift of "heavenly alchemy" for trans.m.u.ting and new-creating the materials offered it by experience, its sovereign inability to see with any eyes or create to any pattern but its own, were not in him. Except for a stray note here and there, an occasional bold conception, a trick of colour or craftsmanship not too obviously caught from greater men, the pictures with which he exultingly laid siege to immortality belong, as posterity has justly felt, to the kingdom not of true great art but of imitative pictorial posturing and empty pictorial bombast.
As a draughtsman especially, Haydon"s touch is surprisingly loose, empty, and inexpressive. Even in drawing from the Elgin marbles, as he did with pa.s.sionate industry, covering reams, he fails almost wholly to render the qualities which he so ardently perceived, and loses every distinction and every subtlety of the original.[1] Infinitely better is his account of them in words: for in truth Haydon"s chief intellectual power was as an observer, and his best instrument the pen. Readers of his journals and correspondence know how vividly and tellingly he can relate an experience or touch off a character. In this gift of striking out a human portrait in words he stood second in his age, if second, to Hazlitt alone, and in our later literature there has been no one to beat him except Carlyle. But pa.s.sion and pugnacity, vanity and the spirit of self-exaltation, at the same time as they intensify vision, are bound to discolour and distort it; and the reader must always bear in mind that Haydon"s pen portraits of his contemporaries are apt to be not less untrustworthy than they are unforgettable. Moreover in this, the literary, form of expression also, where he aims higher, leaving description and trying to become imaginative and impressive, we find only the same self-satisfied void turgidity, and proof of spiritual hollowness disguised by temperamental fervour, as in his paintings.
But it was the gifts and faculties which Haydon possessed, and not those he lacked, it was the ardour and enthusiasm of his character, and not his essential commonness of gift and faculty, that impressed his a.s.sociates as they impressed himself. St.u.r.dy, loud-voiced, eloquent, high of colour, with a bald perpendicular forehead surmounting a set of squarely compressed, pugnacious features,--eyes, lips and jaw all prominent and aggressive together,--he was a dominating, and yet a welcome, presence in some of the choicest circles of his day. Wordsworth and Wordsworth"s firm ally, the painter-baronet Sir George Beaumont, Hazlitt, Horace Smith, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Mary Mitford, were among his friends. Some of them, like Wordsworth, held by him always, while his imperious and importunate egotism wore out others after a while. He was justly proud of his industry and strength of purpose: proud also of his religious faith and piety, and in the habit of thanking his maker effusively in set terms for special acts of favour and protection, for this or that happy inspiration in a picture, for deliverance from "pecuniary emergencies," and the like. "I always rose up from my knees," he says strikingly in a letter to Keats, "with a refreshed fury, an iron-clenched firmness, a crystal piety of feeling that sent me streaming on with a repulsive power against the troubles of life." And he was p.r.o.ne to hold himself up as a model to his friends in both particulars, lecturing them loftily on faith and conduct while he was living without scruple on their bounty.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. III
BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON
FROM AN ENGRAVING BY THOMSON AFTER HAYDON]
In October 1816, the first month of Keats"s intimacy with Hunt, Haydon also made a short stay at Hampstead. He and Hunt were already acquainted, and Hunt had published in the _Examiner_ the very able, cogent and pungent letter with which Haydon a few months before had clenched the Elgin marble controversy and practically brought it to an end. Hunt had congratulated Haydon in a sonnet on the occasion, closing with a gentle hint that, fine as such a victory was, he was himself devoted to a mission finer still, as
One of the spirits chosen by heaven to turn The sunny side of things to human eyes.
Their intercourse was now warmly resumed, though never without latent risk of antagonism and discord. The following letter of Haydon to Wilkie, more just and temperate than usual, is good for filling in our picture both of Hunt and of Haydon himself, as well as for adding another to the number of bewildering contemporary estimates of _Rimini_.
27 October, 1816.
I have been at Hampstead this fortnight for my eyes, and shall return with my body much stronger for application. The greater part of my time has been spent in Leigh Hunt"s society, who is certainly one of the most delightful companions. Full of poetry and art, and amiable humour, we argue always with full hearts on everything but religion and Buonaparte, and we have resolved never to talk of these, particularly as I have been recently examining Voltaire"s opinions concerning Christianity, and turmoiling my head to ascertain fully my right to put him into my picture!
Though Leigh Hunt is not deep in knowledge, moral, metaphysical, or cla.s.sical, yet he is intense in feeling, and has an intellect for ever on the alert. He is like one of those instruments on three legs, which, throw it how you will, always pitches on two, and has a spike sticking for ever up and ever ready for you. He "sets" at a subject with a scent like a pointer. He is a remarkable man, and created a sensation by his independence, his courage, his disinterestedness in public matters, and by the truth, acuteness, and taste of his dramatic criticisms he raised the rank of newspapers, and gave by his example a literary feeling to the weekly ones more especially.
As a poet, I think him full of the genuine feeling. His third canto in _Rimini_ is equal to anything in any language of that sweet sort.
Perhaps in his wishing to avoid the monotony of the Pope school, he may have shot into the other extreme, and his invention of obscure words to express obscure feelings borders sometimes on affectation.
But these are trifles compared with the beauty of the poem, the intense painting of the scenery, and the deep burning in of the pa.s.sion which trembles in every line. Thus far as a critic, an editor, and a poet. As a man, I know none with such an affectionate heart, if never opposed in his opinions. He has defects of course: one of his great defects is getting inferior people about him to listen, too fond of shining at any expense in society, and a love of approbation from the darling s.e.x bordering on weakness; though to women he is delightfully pleasant, yet they seem more to dandle him as a delicate plant. I don"t know if they do not put a confidence in him which to me would be mortifying.
He is a man of sensibility tinged with morbidity, and of such sensitive organisation of body that the plant is not more alive to touch than he. I remember once, walking in a field, we came to a muddy place concealed by gra.s.s. The moment Hunt touched it, he shrank back, saying, "It"s muddy!" as if he meaned that it was full of adders....
He is a composition, as we all are, of defects and delightful qualities, indolently averse to worldly exertion, because it hara.s.ses the musings of his fancy, existing only by the common duties of life, yet ignorant of them, and often suffering from their neglect.
A few days later, on October 31, we find Keats writing to Cowden Clarke of his pleasure at "the thought of seeing so soon this glorious Haydon and all his creations." The introduction was arranged to take place at Leigh Hunt"s cottage, where they met for dinner. Haydon, the sublime egoist, could be rapturously sympathetic and genuinely kind to those who took him at his own valuation, and there was much to attract the spirits of eager youth about him as a leader. Keats and he were mutually delighted at first sight: each struck fire from the other, and they quickly became close friends and comrades. After an evening of high talk at the beginning of their acquaintance, on the 19th of November, 1816, the young poet wrote to Haydon as follows, joining his name with those of Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt:--
Last evening wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the following:--
Great spirits now on earth are sojourning: He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, Who on Helvellyn"s summit, wide awake, Catches his freshness from Archangel"s wing: He of the rose, the violet, the spring, The social smile, the chain for Freedom"s sake, And lo! whose steadfastness would never take A meaner sound than Raphael"s whispering.
And other spirits there are standing apart Upon the forehead of the age to come; These, these will give the world another heart, And other pulses. Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings in some distant mart?
Listen awhile, ye nations, and be dumb.
Haydon was at no time of his life unused to compliments of this kind.
About the same time as Keats another young member of Hunt"s circle, John Hamilton Reynolds, also wrote him a sonnet of eager sympathy and admiration; and the three addressed to him some years later by Wordsworth are well known. In his reply to Keats he proposed to hand on the above piece to Wordsworth--a proposal which "puts me," answers Keats, "out of breath--you know with what reverence I would send my well-wishes to him." Haydon suggested moreover the needless, and as it seems to me regrettable, mutilation of the sonnet by leaving out the words after "workings" in the last line but one. The poet, however, accepted the suggestion, and his editors have respected his decision.
Some time after the turn of the year we find Keats presented with a copy of Goldsmith"s _Greek History_ "from his ardent friend, B. R. Haydon."
All the winter and early spring the two met frequently, sometimes at Haydon"s studio in Great Marlborough Street, sometimes in the rooms of the Keats brothers in the Poultry or in those of their common acquaintance, and discussed with pa.s.sionate eagerness most things in heaven and earth, and especially poetry and painting. "I have enjoyed Shakespeare," declares Haydon, "with John Keats more than with any other human being." Both he and Keats"s other painter friend, Joseph Severn, have testified that Keats had a fine natural sense for the excellencies of painting and sculpture. Both loved to take him to the British Museum and expatiate to him on the glories of the antique; and it would seem that through Haydon he must have had access also to the collection of one at least of the great dilettanti n.o.blemen of the day. After a first visit to the newly acquired Parthenon marbles with Haydon at the beginning of March 1817, Keats tried to embody his impressions in a couple of sonnets, which Hunt promptly printed in the _Examiner_. It is characteristic of his unfailing sincerity with his art and with himself that he allows himself to break into no stock raptures, but strives faithfully to get into words the confused sensations of spiritual infirmity and awe that have overpowered him:--
My spirit is too weak--mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.
And each imagin"d pinnacle and steep Of G.o.dlike hardship, tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
Yet "tis a gentle luxury to weep That I have not the cloudy winds to keep, Fresh for the opening of the morning"s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time--with a billowy main-- A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.
He sends this with a covering sonnet to Haydon asking pardon for its immaturity and justly praising the part played by Haydon in forcing the acceptance of the marbles upon the nation:--
Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak Definitely on these mighty things; Forgive me that I have not Eagle"s wings-- That what I want I know not where to seek; And think that I would not be over meek In rolling out upfollow"d thunderings, Even to the steep of Heliconian springs, Were I of ample strength for such a freak-- Think too, that all those numbers should be thine; Whose else? In this who touch thy vesture"s hem?
For when men star"d at what was most divine With browless idiotism--o"erwise phlegm-- Thou hadst beheld the Hesperian shine Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them.
Haydon"s acknowledgment is of course enthusiastic, but betrays his unfortunate gift for fustian in the following precious expansion of Keats"s image of the sick eagle:--
Many thanks, my dear fellow, for your two n.o.ble sonnets. I know not a finer image than the comparison of a poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the sky, where he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling sunbeams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds; now and then pa.s.sing angels, on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind with moveless wings, or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager and intent on objects of their seeking....
In Haydon"s journal about the same date there is an entry which reads with ironical pathos in the light of after events:--"Keats is a man after my own heart. He sympathises with me, and comprehends me. We saw through each other, and I hope are friends for ever. I only know that, if I sell my picture, Keats shall never want till another is done, that he may have leisure for his effusions: in short he shall never want all his life." To Keats himself, more hyperbolically still, and in terms still more suited to draw the pitying smile of the ironic G.o.ds, Haydon writes a little later:--
Consider this letter a sacred secret.--Often have I sat by my fire after a day"s effort, as the dusk approached and a gauzy veil seemed dimming all things--and mused on what I had done, and with a burning glow on what I would do till filled with fury I have seen the faces of the mighty dead crowd into my room, and I have sunk down and prayed the great Spirit that I might be worthy to accompany these immortal beings in their immortal glories, and then I have seen each smile as it pa.s.ses over me, and each shake his hand in awful encouragement. My dear Keats, the Friends who surrounded me were sensible to what talent I had,--but no one reflected my enthusiasm with that burning ripeness of soul, my heart yearned for sympathy,--believe me from my soul, in you I have found one,--you add fire, when I am exhausted, and excite fury afresh--I offer my heart and intellect and experience--at first I feared your ardor might lead you to disregard the acc.u.mulated wisdom of ages in moral points--but the feelings put forth lately have delighted my soul. G.o.d bless you! Let our hearts be buried on each other.
Familiar visitors at this time of Haydon in the Marlborough Street studio and of Hunt in the Hampstead cottage were two men of finer gift than either, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. With both of these seniors (Lamb was forty-one and Hazlitt thirty-eight) Keats now became acquainted without becoming intimate. Unluckily neither of them has left any but the slightest personal impression of the young poet, whose modesty probably kept him somewhat in the background when they were by.
Haydon used to complain that it was only after Keats"s death that he could get Hazlitt to acknowledge his genius; but Lamb, as we shall see, with his unerring critical touch, paid to Keats"s best work while he was still living a tribute as splendid as it was just. Keats on his part, after the publication of Hazlitt"s lectures on the characters of Shakespeare in 1817, reckoned his "depth of taste" one of the things most to rejoice at in his age, and was a diligent attendant at his next course on the English poets. But he never frequented, presumably for lack of invitation, those Wednesday and Thursday evening parties at the Lambs of which Talfourd and B. W. Procter have left us such vivid pictures; and when he met some of the same company at the Novello"s, the friends of his friend Cowden Clarke, he enjoyed it, as will appear later, less than one would have hoped. He has left no personal impression of Hazlitt, and of Lamb only the slightest and most casual.
Fortunately we know them both so well from other sources that we can almost see and hear them: Hazlitt with his unkempt black hair and restless grey eyes, lean, slouching, splenetic, an Ishmaelite full of mistrust and suspicion, his habitual action of the hand within the waistcoat apt in his scowling moments to suggest a hidden dagger; but capable withal, in company where he felt secure, of throwing into his talk much the same fine mixture as distinguishes his writing of impetuous fullness and variety with incisive point and critical lucidity: Lamb noticeable in contrast by his neat, sombrely clad small figure on its spindle legs and his handsome romantic head; by his hurried, stammering utterance and too often, alas! his vinous flush and step almost as t.i.tubant as his tongue; but most of all by that airy genius of insight and caprice, of deep tenderness and freakish wisdom, quick to break from him in sudden, illuminating phrases at any moment and in any manner save the expected.
Yet another acquaintance brought about by Hunt in these days was that between Keats and Sh.e.l.ley, who was Keats"s senior by only three years and with whom Hunt himself was now first becoming intimate. When Hunt was sentenced for sedition four years earlier, Sh.e.l.ley, then barely twenty, had been eager to befriend him and had sent him an offer of money help; which for once, not being then in immediate need, Hunt had honourably declined. Since then they had held only slight communication; but when Hunt included Sh.e.l.ley on the strength of his poem _Alastor_, among the young poets praised in his _Examiner_ essay (December 1, 1816), a glowing correspondence immediately followed, and a few days later Sh.e.l.ley came up from Bath to stay at the Hampstead cottage. The result of a week"s visit was an immediate intimacy and enthusiastic mutual regard, with a prompt determination on Sh.e.l.ley"s part to rescue Hunt from the slough of debt (something like 1400) into which during and since his imprisonment he had cheerfully muddled himself.
It was the eve of the most harrowing crisis in Sh.e.l.ley"s life, when his principle of love a law to itself entailed in action so dire a consequence, and his obedience to his own morality brought him into such harsh collision with the world"s. First came the news of the suicide of his deserted wife Harriet (December 14) and three months later the sentence of Lord Eldon which deprived him of the custody of his and Harriet"s children. On the day of the first tragic news he writes to Mary G.o.dwin, whom he had left at Bath, "Leigh Hunt has been with me all day, and his delicate and tender attentions to me, his kind speeches of you, have sustained me against the weight of horror of this event." In the interval between the shock of Harriet"s death and that of the judgment sequestering his children Sh.e.l.ley was a frequent guest in the Vale of Health, sometimes alone and sometimes with Mary, now legally his wife. Neither in these first days nor later could Hunt persuade his old intimates Hazlitt and Lamb to take kindly to his new friend Sh.e.l.ley either as man or poet. Lamb, who seems only to have seen him once, said after his death, "his voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with"; of his poetry, that it was "thin sown with profit or delight"; and of his "theories and nostrums," that "they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend "em not, or there is miching malice and mischief in "em." Hazlitt, opening the most studied of his several attacks on Sh.e.l.ley"s poetry and doctrine, gives one of his vivid portraits, saying "he has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech.... He is sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced.... His bending, flexible form appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the world about him, but flows from it like a river." Still less was a good understanding possible between Sh.e.l.ley and Haydon, who met him more than once in these early days at the Vale of Health. He tells how, on the evening of their first meeting, Sh.e.l.ley, looking hectically frail and girlish, opened the conversation at dinner with the words, "as to that detestable religion, the Christian,"--and how he, Haydon, a man at all times stoutly and vociferously orthodox, waited till the meal was over and then, "like a stag at bay and resolved to gore without mercy,"
struck his hardest on behalf of the established faith, while Hunt in his airily complacent way kept skirmishing in on Sh.e.l.ley"s side, until the contention grew hot and stormy. The heat and noise, Haydon owns, were chiefly on his side, and we might guess as much without his admission, for we have abundant evidence of the unfailing courtesy and sweetness of manner with which Sh.e.l.ley would in that high-pitched feminine voice of his advance the most staggering propositions and patiently encounter the arguments of his adversaries.
Such contentions, victorious as he always held himself to be in them, annoyed Haydon. The queer blend, in the atmosphere of the Hampstead cottage, of eager kindness and hospitality and a graceful, voluble enthusiasm for the "luxuries" of poetry, art, and nature with slatternly housekeeping and a spirit of fervent or flippant anti-Christianity, became distasteful to him, and he afterwards dated from these days his gradual estrangement from Hunt and his circle. At the same time he began to try and draw away Keats from Hunt"s influence.
Keats, we are told, though much inclining in these days towards the Voltairian views of his host, would take little part in such debates as that above narrated, and once even supported another young member of the circle, Joseph Severn, in a defence of Christianity against Hunt and Sh.e.l.ley. To Sh.e.l.ley himself, his senior by three years, his relation was from the first and remained to the end one of friendly civility and little more. He did not take to Sh.e.l.ley as kindly as Sh.e.l.ley did to him, says Hunt, and adds the comment: "Keats, being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy." "He was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of rank," says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his pride had not been aroused by antic.i.p.ation, Keats, as we have seen, was eagerly open-hearted to new friendships, and it may well be that the reserve he maintained towards Sh.e.l.ley was a.s.sumed at first by way of defence against the possibility of social patronage on the other"s part. But he must soon have perceived that from Sh.e.l.ley, a gentleman of gentlemen, such an att.i.tude was the last thing to be apprehended, and the cause of his standing off was much more likely his knowledge that nearly all Sh.e.l.ley"s literary friends were his pensioners,--from G.o.dwin, the greediest, to Leigh Hunt, the lightest-hearted,--and a fear that he too might be supposed to expect a similar bounty. It would seem that in his spirit of independence he gave Sh.e.l.ley the impression of being much better off than he was,--or possibly instances of his only too ready generosity in lending from his modest means to his intimates when they were hard pressed may have come to Sh.e.l.ley"s knowledge: at all events a few months later we find Sh.e.l.ley casting about for persons able to help him in helping Hunt, and writing under a false impression, "Keats certainly can."
These two young poets, equally and conjointly beloved by posterity, were in truth at many points the most opposite-natured of men. Pride and sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy between them. Keats, with the rich elements of earthly clay in his composition, his lively vein of every-day common-sense and humour, his keen, tolerant delight and interest in the aspects and activities of nature and human nature as he found them, may well have been as much repelled as attracted by Sh.e.l.ley, Sh.e.l.ley the "Elfin knight," the spirit all air and fire, with his pa.s.sionate repudiation of the world"s ways and the world"s law, his pa.s.sionate absorption in his vision of a happier scheme of things, a vision engendered in humanitarian dreams from his readings of Rousseau and G.o.dwin and Plato,--or was it rather one brought with him from some ante-natal sojourn among the radiances and serenities of the sunset clouds? Leigh Hunt"s way of putting it is this:--"Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of _Hyperion_, was so far inferior in universality to his great acquaintance, that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own hands." Of the incidents and results of their intercourse at Hampstead we know little more than that Sh.e.l.ley, wisely enough in the light of his own headlong early experiments, tried to dissuade Keats from premature publication; and that Keats on his part declined, "in order that he might have his own unfettered scope," a cordial invitation from Sh.e.l.ley to come and stay with him at Great Marlow. Keats, though he must have known that he could learn much from Sh.e.l.ley"s trained scholarship and fine literary sense, was doubtless right in feeling that whatever power of poetry might be in him must work its own way to maturity in freedom and not in leading-strings. To these scanty facts Sh.e.l.ley"s cousin Medwin adds the statement that the two agreed to write in friendly rivalry the long poems each was severally meditating for his summer"s work, Sh.e.l.ley _Laon and Cythna_, afterwards called _The Revolt of Islam_, and Keats _Endymion_. This may very well have been the case, but Medwin was a man so lax of memory, tongue, and pen that his evidence, unconfirmed, counts for little. Of the influence possibly exercised on Keats by Sh.e.l.ley"s first important poem, _Alastor_, or by his _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_ printed in the _Examiner_ during the January of their intercourse at Hunt"s, it will be time to speak later on.
A much closer intimacy sprang up between Keats and the other young poetic aspirant whom Hunt in his December essay in the _Examiner_ had bracketed with him and Sh.e.l.ley. This was John Hamilton Reynolds, of whom we have as yet heard only the name. He was a handsome, witty, enthusiastic youth a year younger than Keats, having been born at Shrewsbury in September 1796. Part of his boyhood was spent in Devonshire near Sidmouth, a countryside to which he remained always deeply attached; but he was still quite young when his father came and settled in London as mathematical master and head writing master at Christ"s Hospital. The elder Reynolds and his wife were people of literary leanings and literary acquaintance, and seem to have been characters in their way: both Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were frequenters of their house in Little Britain, and Mrs Reynolds is reported as holding her own well among the talkers at Lamb"s evenings.
Their son John was educated at St Paul"s school and showed talent and inclinations which drew him precociously into the literary movement of the time. At eighteen he wrote an Eastern tale in verse in the Byronic manner, _Safie_, of which Byron acknowledged the presentation copy in a kind and careful letter several pages long. Two years later, just about the time of his first introduction to Keats at Leigh Hunt"s, the youngster had the honour of receiving a similar attention from Wordsworth in reply to a presentation of another poem, _The Naiad_ (November 1816). Neither of these two youthful volumes, nor yet a third, _The Eden of Imagination_, showed much more than a quick susceptibility to nature and romance, and a gift of falling in readily and gracefully now with one and now with another of the poetic fashions of the hour.