Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. IV. The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti
John Keats (17951821)Critical Introduction by Matthew Arnold
[John Keats was born in London on the 29th of October, 1795. His father was in the employment of a livery-stable keeper in Moorfields, whose daughter he married. Our poet was born prematurely. He lost his father when he was nine years old, and his mother when he was fifteen. He and his brothers were sent to a good school at Enfield kept by Mr. Clarke, whose son, Charles Cowden Clarke, well known afterwards from his connexion with letters and literary men, was a valuable friend to John Keats. As a schoolboy, Keats seems to have been at first remarked chiefly for his pugnacily and high spirit, but he soon showed a love of reading. On leaving school in 1810 he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon at Edmonton; he was thus still in the neighbourhood of the Clarkes, who continued to see him, took interest in his awakening powers, and lent him books,—amongst them the Fairy Queen of Spenser, the poet whose influence has left on the poetry of Keats so deep an impression. The young surgeon’s apprentice took to verse-making; when he went to London to walk the hospitals, he was introduced by the Clarkes to their literary friends there, and knew Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Basil Montagu, Haydon, Shelley, and Godwin. In 1817 he brought out his first volume of verse and abandoned the profession of surgery, for which however, disagreeable though it was to him, he had shown aptitude and dexterity. His first volume contained the Epistles, which we now read amongst his collected poems; it had no success. But his friends saluted his genius with warm admiration and confidence, and in 1818 he published his Endymion. It was mercilessly treated by Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and by the Quarterly Review. Meanwhile Keats’s small fortune was melting away, and signs of disease began to show themselves in him. Nevertheless, in the next year or two he produced his best poems; but his health and circumstances did not mend, while a passionate attachment, with which he was at this time seized, added another cause of agitation. The seeds of consumption were in him, he had the temperament of the consumptive; his poetry fevered him, his embarrassments fretted him, his love-passion shook him to pieces. He had an attack of bleeding from the lungs; he got better, but it returned; change of climate was recommended, and after publishing his third volume, Lamia, Labella, and other Poems, he sailed for Italy in September 1820, accompanied by his friend Severn. Italy could not restore him. He established himself at Rome with Severn, but in spite of the devoted care and kindness of this admirable friend, he rapidly grew worse, and on the 23rd of February, 1821, he died. He was twenty-five years old. John Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, and on his gravestone is the inscription which he himself told his friend to place there: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.]
Character and self-control, the virtus verusque labor so necessary for every kind of greatness, and for the great artist, too, indispensable, appear to be wanting, certainly, to this Keats of Haydon’s portraiture. They are wanting also to the Keats of the Letters to Fanny Brawne. These letters make as unpleasing an impression as Haydon’s anecdotes. The editor of Haydon’s journals could not well omit what Haydon said of his friend, but for the publication of the Letters to Fanny Brawne I can see no good reason whatever. Their publication appears to me, I confess, inexcusable; they ought never to have been published. But published they are, and we have to take notice of them. Letters written when Keats was near his end, under the throttling and unmanning grasp of mortal disease, we will not judge. But here is a letter written some months before he was taken ill. It is printed just as Keats wrote it.
A man who writes love-letters in this strain is probably predestined, one may observe, to misfortune in his love-affairs; but that is nothing. The complete enervation of the writer is the real point for remark. We have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of the man who ‘is passion’s slave.’ Nay, we have them in such wise that one is tempted to speak even as Blackwood or the Quarterly were in the old days wont to speak; one is tempted to say that Keats’s love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. The sensuous man speaks in it, and the sensuous man of a badly bred and badly trained sort. That many who are themselves, also, badly bred and badly trained should enjoy it, and should even think it a beautiful and characteristic production of him whom they call their ‘lovely and beloved Keats,’ does not make it better. These are the admirers whose pawing and fondness does not good but harm to the fame of Keats; who concentrate attention upon what in him is least wholesome and most questionable; who worship him, and would have the world worship him too, as the poet of
Lord Houghton, who praises very discriminatingly the poetry of Keats, has on his character, also, a remark full of discrimination. He says: ‘The faults of Keats’s disposition were precisely the contrary of those attributed to him by common opinion.’ And he gives a letter written after the death of Keats by his brother George, in which the writer, speaking of the fantastic Johnny Keats invented for common opinion by Lord Byron and by the reviewers, declares indignantly: ‘John was the very soul of manliness and courage, and as much like the Holy Ghost as Johnny Keats.’ It is important to note this testimony, and to look well for whatever illustrates and confirms it.
Great weight is laid by Lord Houghton on such a direct profession of faith as the following. ‘That sort of probity and disinterestedness,’ Keats writes to his brothers, ‘which such men as Bailey possess, does hold and grasp the tip-top of any spiritual honours that can be paid to anything in this world.’ Lord Houghton says that ‘never have words more effectively expressed the conviction of the superiority of virtue above beauty than those.’ But merely to make a profession of faith of the kind here made by Keats is not difficult; what we should rather look for, is some evidence of the instinct for character, for virtue, passing into the man’s life, passing into his work.
Signs of virtue, in the true and large sense of the word, the instinct for virtue passing into the life of Keats and strengthening it, I find in the admirable wisdom and temper of what he says to his friend Bailey on the occasion of a quarrel between Reynolds and Haydon:—
Butler has well said that ‘endeavouring to enforce upon our own minds a practical sense of virtue, or to beget in others that practical sense of it which a man really has himself, is a virtuous act.’ And such an ‘endeavouring’ is that of Keats in those words written to Bailey. It is more than mere words; so justly thought and so discreetly urged as it is, it rises to the height of a virtuous act. It is proof of character.
The same thing may be said of some words written to his friend Charles Brown, whose kindness, willingly exerted whenever Keats chose to avail himself of it, seemed to free him from any pressing necessity of earning his own living. Keats felt that he must not allow this state of things to continue. He determined to set himself to ‘fag on as others do’ at periodical literature, rather than to endanger his independence and his self-respect; and he writes to Brown:—
He had not, alas, another year of health before him when he announced that wholesome resolve; it then wanted but six months of the day of his fatal attack. But in the brief time allowed to him he did what he could to keep his word.
What character, again, what strength and clearness of judgment, in his criticism of his own productions, of the public, and of ‘the literary circles’! His words after the severe reviews of Endymion have often been quoted; they cannot be quoted too often:—
And again, as if he had foreseen certain of his admires gushing over him, and was resolved to disengage his responsibility:—
Young poets almost inevitably over-rate what they call ‘the might of poesy,’ and its power over the world which now is. Keats is not a dupe on this matter any more than he is a dupe about the merit of his own performances:—
His attitude towards the public is that of a strong man, not of a weakling avid of praise, and made to ‘be snuff’d out by an article’:—
And again, in a passage where one may perhaps find fault with the capital letters, but surely with nothing else:—
Against these artistic and literary ‘jabberers,’ amongst whom Byron fancied Keats, probably, to be always living, flattering them and flattered by them, he has yet another outburst:—
There is a tone of too much bitterness and defiance in all this, a tone which he with great propriety subdued and corrected when he wrote his beautiful preface to Endymion. But the thing to be seized is, that Keats had flint and iron in him, that he had character; that he was, as his brother George says, ‘as much like the Holy Ghost as Johnny Keats,’—as that imagined sensuous weakling, the delight of the literary circles of Hampstead.
It is a pity that Byron, who so misconceived Keats, should never have known how shrewdly Keats, on the other hand, had characterised him, as ‘a fine thing’ in the sphere of ‘the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical.’ But indeed nothing is more remarkable in Keats than his clear-sightedness, his lucidity; and lucidity is in itself akin to character and to high and severe work. In spite, therefore, of his overpowering feeling for beauty, in spite of his sensuousness, in spite of his facility, in spite of his gift of expression, Keats could say resolutely:—
And of Milton, instead of resting in Milton’s incomparable phrases, Keats could say, although indeed all the while ‘looking upon fine phrases,’ as he himself tells us, ‘like a lover’:—
In his own poetry, too, Keats felt that place must be found for ‘the ardours rather than the pleasures of song,’ although he was aware that he was not yet ripe for it:—
Even in his pursuit of ‘the pleasures of song,’ however, there is that stamp of high work which is akin to character, which is character passing into intellectual production. ‘The best sort of poetry—that,’ he truly says, ‘is all I care for, all I live for.’ It is curious to observe how this severe addiction of his to the best sort of poetry affects him with a certain coldness, as if the addiction had been to mathematics, towards those prime objects of a sensuous and passionate poet’s regard, love and women. He speaks of ‘the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time.’ He confesses ‘a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats—they never see themselves dominant’; and he can understand how the unpopularity of his poems may be in part due to ‘the offence which the ladies,’ not unnaturally, ‘take at him’ from this cause. Even to Fanny Brawne he can write ‘a flint-worded letter,’ when his ‘mind is heaped to the full’ with poetry:—
The truth is that ‘the yearning passion for the Beautiful,’ which was with Keats, as he himself truly says, the master-passion, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental man, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion. It is ‘connected and made one,’ as Keats declares that in his case it was, ‘with the ambition of the intellect.’ It is, as he again says, ‘the mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things.’ And in his last days Keats wrote: ‘If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory; but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.’ He has made himself remembered, and remembered as no merely sensuous poet could be; and he has done it by having ‘loved the principle of beauty in all things.’
For to see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth, and Keats knew it. ‘What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth,’ he says in prose; and in immortal verse he has said the same thing:—
It is no small thing to have so loved the principle of beauty as to perceive the necessary relation of beauty with truth, and of both with joy. Keats was a great spirit, and counts for far more than many even of his admirers suppose, because this just and high perception made itself clear to him. Therefore a dignity and a glory shed gleams over his life, and happiness, too, was not a stranger to it. ‘Nothing startles me beyond the moment,’ he says; ‘the setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.’ But he had terrible bafflers,—consuming disease and early death. ‘I think,’ he writes to Reynolds, ‘if I had a free and healthy and lasting organisation of heart, and lungs as strong as an ox’s, so as to be able to bear unhurt the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could pass my life very nearly alone, though it should last eighty years. But I feel my body too weak to support me to the height; I am obliged continually to check myself, and be nothing.’ He had against him even more than this; he had against him the blind power which we call Fortune. ‘O that something fortunate,’ he cries in the closing months of his life, ‘had ever happened to me or my brothers!—then I might hope,—but despair is forced upon me as a habit.’ So baffled and so sorely tried,—while laden, at the same time, with a mighty formative thought requiring health, and many days, and favouring circumstances, for its adequate manifestation,—what wonder if the achievement of Keats be partial and incomplete?
Nevertheless, let and hindered as he was, and with a short term and imperfect experience,—‘young,’ as he says of himself, ‘and writing at random, straining after particles of light in the midst of a great darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion,’—notwithstanding all this, by virtue of his feeling for beauty and of his perception of the vital connexion of beauty with truth, Keats accomplished so much in poetry, that in one of the two great modes by which poetry interprets, in the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare. ‘The tongue of Kean,’ he says in an admirable criticism of that great actor and of his enchanting elocution, ‘the tongue of Kean must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them honeyless. There is an indescribable gusto in his voice;—in Richard, “Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!” comes from him as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns.’ This magic, this ‘indescribable gusto in the voice,’ Keats himself, too, exhibits in his poetic expression. No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. ‘I think,’ he said humbly, ‘I shall be among the English poets after my death.’ He is; he is with Shakespeare.
For the second great half of poetic interpretation, for that faculty of moral interpretation which is in Shakespeare, and is informed by him with the same power of beauty as his naturalistic interpretation, Keats was not ripe. For the architectonics of poetry, the faculty which presides at the evolution of works like the Agamemnon or Lear, he was not ripe. His Endymion, as he himself well saw, is a failure, and his Hyperion, fine things as it contains, is not a success. But in shorter things, where the matured power of moral interpretation, and the high architectonics which go with complete poetic development, are not required, he is perfect. The poems which follow prove it,—prove it far better by themselves than anything which can be said about them will prove it. Therefore I have chiefly spoken here of the man, and of the elements in him which explain the production of such work. Shakespearian work it is; not imitative, indeed, of Shakespeare, but Shakespearian, because its expression has that rounded perfection and felicity of loveliness of which Shakespeare is the great master. To show such work is to praise it. Let us now end by delighting ourselves with a fragment of it, too broken to find a place among the pieces which follow, but far too beautiful to be lost. It is a fragment of an ode for May-day. O might I, he cries to May, O might I