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 p.r.i.c.kles to his enemies. Reynolds, it would seem, had more excuse 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"s _Isabella_: as to which pieces he says,--
They were to have been a.s.sociated 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 Sh.e.l.ley"s own death, such a tragedy of a poet"s death as a poet might have loved to invent with all its circ.u.mstances,--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 sh.o.r.e in the presence of Leigh Hunt, newly come to Italy on Sh.e.l.ley"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 s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 Sh.e.l.ley"s posthumous poems in the _Edinburgh Review_, and having his own bitter grounds of quarrel with the _Blackwood_ gang, strained the bonds of prose in an outburst of half-lyric indignation on behalf of Keats as follows:--
Mr Sh.e.l.ley 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 the _Liberal_ during the brief period while Hunt continued to conduct that journal at Pisa after Sh.e.l.ley"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 English colony 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 and many 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 GRAVE CONTAINS ALL THAT WAS MORTAL OF A YOUNG ENGLISH POET WHO ON HIS DEATH BED, IN THE BITTERNESS OF HIS HEART, AT THE MALICIOUS POWER OF HIS ENEMIES, DESIRED THESE WORDS TO BE ENGRAVEN ON HIS TOMB STONE "HERE LIES ONE WHOSE 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.[1] He 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 embarra.s.sed, 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 the _Blackwood_ lampoons. 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 in _Blackwood_, with the tragic circ.u.mstances of the Christie-Scott duel, however little he may have said about them, will a.s.suredly 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 unpublished _Otto 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 Let.i.tia 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 the _Athenaeum_, of which his friend and senior Frederick Denison Maurice was for the time being editor, showed which way the wind was beginning to blow at Cambridge when he said, "Keats, whose memory they (the _Blackwood_ group) 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."[2] But 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 Sh.e.l.ley, Coleridge, and Keats.[3]
The same year saw the reprint of _Adonais_ on 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 Sh.e.l.ley was a greater poet than Byron. Their enthusiasm for _Adonais_ implied enthusiasm for its subject, Keats, as a matter of course.
Alfred Tennyson was a close a.s.sociate 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 in _Lamia_ and _Isabella_,--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.[4] The _Quarterly_ remained 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 of a galaxy or _milky way_ of 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 which _Endymion_ has notoriously attained.[5] So far as popularity was concerned, the _Quarterly_ gibe remained justified. It was not until 1840 that there appeared in England the first separate reprint of Keats"s collected poems:[6] what 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 of _Bells and Pomegranates_ by 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 G.o.d 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 Sh.e.l.ley were pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sage pouring scorn on _Endymion_, treating _Hyperion_ as his only achievement that counted, and ending,--"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 required _Hyperion_ to 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 ma.n.u.script. 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 the _Athenaeum_ after 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 Sh.e.l.ley-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 a cryptic 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 the _Monthly 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 quoted above almost in full. Leigh Hunt, the friend whom Keats owed to Clarke and who had had the most decisive influence on his life, had pa.s.sed with advancing years, not indeed out of his lifelong, lightly borne condition of debt and poverty and embarra.s.sment 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 pa.s.sion, 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 book _Lord 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."
[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. XIII
PAGE FROM A LETTER OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON TO ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1834]
Among Keats"s other intimate friends and a.s.sociates, 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 to _Rejected Addresses_, called _Odes 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 the _Edinburgh Review_ and to the _Athenaeum_ under 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.[9] In 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:--
All the papers I possess--all the information I can render--whatever I can do to aid your kind and judiciously intended work--are at your service! But a word or two on the great subject of our correspondence.
He was hunted in his youth, before he had strength to escape his ban-dogs. He had the greatest power of poetry in him, of any one since Shakespeare! He was the sincerest friend, the most lovable a.s.sociate, the deepest listener to the griefs and disappointments of all around him "that ever lived in the tide of times." Your expressed intentions as to the Life are so clear and good; that I seem to have the weight of an undone work taken from me.
Haslam in like manner lends all the help he can, and from his office as a solicitor in Copthall Court writes somewhat dispiritedly about himself, and declares that this correspondence "has been a clean taking me back to a separate state of existence that I had more than thirty years ago, a state that has long appeared to me almost as a dream. The realities of life have intervened, but G.o.d be praised they have but been laid upon the surface--have but hidden, not effaced those happy happy days." He sends a number of letters from Severn, including those written on the voyage to Naples and quoted in full above. But as to letters from Keats himself says he has found none,--"they probably were so well or intended to be so well taken care of, that every endeavour to lay my hands on them has proved unavailing." One wonders whether they may not be lurking yet, a forgotten bundle, in the dust of some unexplored corner of a safe in that same office. Severn was at this time living in London, and some correspondence pa.s.sed between him and Milnes about the biography, Severn"s chief point being to insist that not the malice of the critics, but the "death-stricken" marriage project, was the trouble preying upon Keats in his dying days, and that the outcries of his delirium ran constantly upon his unfulfilled love and unwritten poems together.
As to yet another of Keats"s closest friends, Benjamin Bailey, Milnes had somehow been misinformed, and believed and positively stated him to be dead. He had in fact risen to colonial preferment in the Church, and was alive and well as archdeacon of Colombo in Ceylon. Thence on the appearance of Milnes"s book he wrote to declare his survival, and forwarded to the biographer, for use in future editions, those memoranda of old days spent in Keats"s company upon which I have above (in Chapter V) so fully drawn.
There are a few other points upon which Milnes"s information was less accurate than might have been expected. He a.s.sumes that the _fiancee_ of Keats"s tragic pa.s.sion was identical with the rich-complexioned Charmian described in his autumn letters of 1819, and ignores the existence of f.a.n.n.y Brawne and of her family. One would have supposed that he must have heard the real story both from Brown and from Dilke, whom Mrs Brawne had appointed trustee for her children, and who had not since lost sight of them. That kind lady herself met an unhappy fate, burned to death upon her own doorstep. Her daughter f.a.n.n.y, ten years after her poet-lover"s death, married a Mr Lindo, who afterwards changed his name to Lindon, and of whom we know little except that he was at one time drawn into the meshes of Spanish politics and was afterwards one of the Commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Not long before her marriage, Mrs Lindon is recorded to have said of Keats that the kindest thing to his memory would be to let it die. Little wonder, perhaps, that she should have felt thus, when she remembered the tortured, the terrifying vehemence of his pa.s.sion for herself and when, being probably incapable of independent literary judgment, she saw his name and work still made customary objects of critical derision. It is harder to forgive her when some time later we find her parting with her lover"s miniature, under pressure of some momentary money difficulty, to Dilke.
Neither does the biographer seem to have made any attempt to get into touch with Keats"s young sister, who had been married long before this to an accomplished Spanish man of letters, Senor Valentine Llanos. He also was at various times involved in the political troubles of his country. Of his and his wife"s children, one attained distinction as an artist and a.s.sumed the name of Keats y Llanos. Keats had written to his sister once as a child gaily prophesying that they all, her brothers and herself, would live to have "tripple chins and stubby thumbs." She in fact fully attained the predicted length of days, and having lived to be well a.s.sured of the full and final triumph of her brother"s fame died less than thirty years ago at eighty-six. In mature life she had come into touch with one at least of her brother"s surviving familiars, that is with Severn at Rome, and with more than one of his admirers in a younger generation. Of these a good friend to her was Mr Buxton Forman, through whose initiative a Civil List pension was awarded her by Lord Beaconsfield. A subtle observer, the poet and humorist, Frederick Locker-Lampson, has left a rather disappointing though not unkindly impression of her as follows:--
Whilst I was in Rome Mr Severn introduced me to M. and Mme. Valentine de Llanos, a kindly couple. He was a Spaniard, lean, silent, dusky, and literary, the author of _Don Esteban_ and _Sandoval_. She was fat, blonde, and lymphatic, and both were elderly. _She was John Keats"s sister!_ I had a good deal of talk with her, or rather _at_ her, for she was not very responsive. I was disappointed, for I remember that my sprightliness made her yawn; she seemed inert and had nothing to tell me of her wizard brother of whom she spoke as of a mystery--with a vague admiration but a genuine affection. She was simple and natural--I believe she is a very worthy woman.
Gaps and errors there thus were not a few in Monckton Milnes"s book when it appeared in two volumes in 1848. But it served its purpose admirably for the time being, and with some measure of revision for long afterwards. Distinguished in style and perfect in temper, the preface and introduction struck with full confidence the right note in challenging for Keats the character of "the Marcellus of the Empire of English song"; while the body of the book, giving to the world a considerable, though far from complete, series of those familiar letters, to his friends in which his genius shines almost as vividly as in his verse, established on full evidence the essential manliness of his character against the conception of him as a blighted weakling which both his friends and enemies had contrived to let prevail. Among the posthumous poems printed for the first time, the two longest, _Otho_ and the _Cap and Bells_ were not of his best, but masterpieces like _La Belle Dame_ and _The Eve of St Mark_, with many miscellaneous things of high interest, were included. The reception of the book, though not, of course, unmixed, was in all quarters respectful, and the old tone of flippant contempt hardly made itself heard at all. I shall quote only one critical dictum on its appearance, and that is the letter in which the veteran Landor, in his highest style of urbanity and authority, acknowledged a copy sent him by the author:--
Dear Milnes,
On my return to Bath last evening, after six weeks" absence, I find your valuable present of Keatses Works. He better deserves such an editor than I such a mark of your kindness. Of all our poets, excepting Shakespeare and Milton, and perhaps Chaucer, he has most of the poetical character--fire, fancy, and diversity.... There is an effluence of power and light pervading all his works, and a freshness such as we feel in the glorious dawn of Chaucer.
The book appeared just at the right moment, when the mounting enthusiasm of the young generation for the once derided poet was either gradually carrying the elders along with it or leaving them bewildered behind. Do readers remember how the simple soul of Colonel Newcome was perplexed by the talk of his son Clive and of Clive"s friends?--
He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him: he heard that Byron was no great poet, though a very clever man ... that his favourite, Doctor Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English; that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael; and that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately published two volumes of verses might take rank with the greatest poets of all. Doctor Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second order! Mr Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr Keats and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern poetic literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington delivered with a puff of tobacco smoke; to which Mr. Honeyman blandly a.s.sented, and Clive listened with pleasure?
Thackeray"s sketch of Clive and his companions scarcely suggests, nor was it meant to suggest, the characteristics of the special group of young artists in whom, almost contemporaneously with the appearance of Milnes"s book, the enthusiasm for Keats had begun to burn at its whitest heat. I refer of course to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Of the three leaders of that movement, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, it is hard to say which, in the late "forties and early "fifties, declared himself first or most ardent in Keats-worship.[10] Of Hunt"s exhibited pictures, one of the earliest showed the lovers in the _Eve of St Agnes_ stealing past the sprawling porter and the sleeping bloodhound into the night; and of Millais"s earliest, one is from _Isabella or the Pot of Basil_, showing the merchant brothers and their sister and her lover at a meal in company (the well-known work, so queerly designed and executed with so much grip and character, now in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool).
Rossetti had in these early days much less technical skill and training than either of his two a.s.sociates. But from the first he was poet as well as painter, and instinctively and spiritually stood, we can well discern, much nearer to Keats than they did for all their enthusiasm.
Combining Italian blood and temperament with British upbringing, Rossetti added to his inherited and paternally inculcated knowledge and love of Dante a no less intense love and knowledge of English romance poetry, both that of the old ballads and that of the revival of 1800 and onwards. In boyhood and early youth waves of enthusiasm for different recent poets had swept over him one after another, first Sh.e.l.ley, then Keats, then Browning; but Keats, and next to Keats Coleridge, kept the strongest and deepest hold on him. When his first a.s.sociates Hunt and Millais had parted from him on their several, widely divergent paths of public success and distinction, Rossetti became, in the comparative seclusion in which he chose to live, a powerful focus of romantic inspiration to younger men who came about him. He is reported to have urged upon William Morris that he should become a painter and not a poet, seeing that Keats had already done all there was to be done in poetry. Of all Keats"s poems, it was _La belle dame sans Merci_ and _The Eve of St Mark_ which most aroused the enthusiasm of Rossetti and his group. We have already seen how the latter fragment stands in our nineteenth-century poetry as a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between Chaucer and Morris. It was the task and destiny of Morris as a writer to give, by his abounding fertility and brooding delight in the telling of Greek and mediaeval stories in verse, the most profuse and for the present perhaps the last expression to the pure romantic spirit in English narrative poetry: and to this effort Keats had given him the immediate impulse, though Chaucer was his ultimate great exemplar.
Answering a congratulatory letter addressed to him by the veteran Cowden Clarke on the publication of the first volume of the _Earthly Paradise_, Morris speaks of "Keats for whom I have such a boundless admiration, and whom I venture to call one of my masters." I have quoted above (page 470) his emphatic later words to a like effect.
While the leaven was thus intensely working among a special group in England, an English poetess of quite other training and a.s.sociations, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, paid in _Aurora Leigh_ (1857) her well-known tribute to Keats in lines that are neither good as poetry nor accurate as fact, but in their chaotic way none the less pa.s.sionately felt and haunting:--
By Keats"s soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died, not young, (the life of a long life Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear Upon the world"s cold cheek to make it burn For ever;) by that strong accepted soul, I count it strange and hard to understand That nearly all young poets should write old.
Thus, between the effects of Monckton Milnes"s book and the enthusiasm of various groups of university men and poets and artists, the previously current contempt for Keats was from soon after the mid-century practically silenced and the battle for his fame, at least among the younger generation, won. He has counted for the last sixty years and more, alike in England and in America, as an uncontested great poet, whose works, collected or single, have been in demand in edition after edition. One of the earliest new issues was that edited in 1850 by Monckton Milnes, who continued nearly until the end, under his new style as Lord Houghton, to further by fresh editions and revisions the good work he had begun. Not only every professed critic and historian of our poetry, but nearly all our chief poets themselves, as Aubrey de Vere, James Russell Lowell, Matthew Arnold, Coventry Patmore, Swinburne, and latterly the present poet laureate, have been in various tones public commentators on Keats. All such comments have shed light upon his work in their degree. I can here only touch on a few special points and mention in their order a few of the contributions to the knowledge or appreciation of the poet which I think have helped the most.
One point to be remarked is that very few judges have seemed able to care equally for Keats and Sh.e.l.ley. A special devotion to Sh.e.l.ley, the poet who wedded himself in youth to a set of ready-made beliefs from G.o.dwin, of which the chief was that all the miseries of the world were due to laws and inst.i.tutions and could be cured by their abolition, who clothed these abstract beliefs in imagery of clouds and winds and ocean-streams, of meteor and rainbow and sunset and all things radiant and evanescent, and sang them to strains of music inimitably swift and pa.s.sionate, seems incompatible with complete delight in the work of that other young poet who could hold fast no dogma spiritual or social, but found truth wherever his imagination could divine or create living and concrete beauty, and who, as to the sorrows of the world, was convinced that they were inherent in its very fabric and being, and yearned for knowledge and wisdom to a.s.suage them but died before he had attained clearness or found his way. As between these two, Tennyson"s final and calm opinion is quoted by his son as follows:--"Keats would have become one of the very greatest of all poets had he lived. At the time of his death there was apparently no sign of exhaustion or having written himself out; his keen poetical instinct was in full process of development at the time. Each new effort was a steady advance on that which had gone before. With all Sh.e.l.ley"s splendid imagery and colour, I find a sort of _tenuity_ in his poetry." FitzGerald was much stronger on the same side, counting Sh.e.l.ley, to use his own words, as not worth Keats"s little finger. Matthew Arnold, who has said some memorably fine and just things about Keats, belittles the poetry of Sh.e.l.ley and even paradoxically prefers the prose of his essays and letters to his verse.
With ardent Sh.e.l.ley-worshippers on the other hand full appreciation of Keats is rare. Swinburne, for one, has done little for Keats"s memory by the torrent of hyperbolical adjectives of alternate praise and blame which he has poured upon it. Mr William Rossetti, for whom Sh.e.l.ley is "one of the ultimate glories of our race and planet," has in his monograph on Keats, as I think, been icily unjust to his subject. And I can remember my admirable friend and colleague, Mr Richard Garnett of the British Museum, taking me roundly to task for the opinion, which I still stoutly hold, that the letters of Keats, with all their every-day humanity and fun and gossip, are in their wonderful sudden gleams and intuitions more vitally the letters of a poet than Sh.e.l.ley"s. But such preferences between two such contrasted geniuses and creators of beauty are perhaps inevitable, and have at any rate not prevented the equal and brotherly a.s.sociation of the two in the memorial house--the house in which Keats died--lately acquired and consecrated to their joint fame by representative English and Americans at Rome.
One great snare in judging of Keats is his variability of mood and opinion. The critic is apt to seize upon the expression of some one phase or att.i.tude of mind that strikes him, and to theorize and draw conclusions from it as though it were permanent and dominant. The very excellence of what was best both in his poetry and himself is a second snare, tempting us to forget that after all he was but a lad, a genius and character not made but in the making. A third is the obvious and frankly avowed intensity of the sensuous elements in his nature. But the critic who casts these up against him should remember that it took the same capacity for sense-delights that inspired the rhapsodies on claret-drinking and nectarine-sucking in the letters, to inspire also, being spiritualized into imaginative emotion, the "blushful Hippocrene"
pa.s.sage in the Nightingale ode or the feast of fruits, in all its pureness, of the revised _Hyperion_; and also that Keats, with his clear and sane self-consciousness, has rarely any doubt that the master bent within him was not his "exquisite sense of the luxurious" but his love for the high things and thoughts which he calls "philosophy."
It is a pity that the author of the one full and recent history of our poetry, the late Mr W.J. Courthope, should have been debarred from just appreciation of this poet alike by adopted dogma and by natural taste.