The boy Keats, then, was not so utterly out of the way, at all events he was not without the support of good company, in taking for his own the motto of Ariel,—
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I.”
And a good time he had of it; reading and idling, reading and writing, not too much in a hurry, no busier than a bee, following his bent, finding Shakespeare and the “Paradise Lost” every day greater wonders to him; looking upon fine phrases like a lover; more and more convinced that “fine writing, next to fine doing, is the top thing in the world.”
“Next to fine doing,” he said,—and meant it; for his life and his own doings chimed with the word. Nor does the word, even as a verbal confession of faith, stand alone. On the testimony of his friends, and on the testimony of his letters, Keats was no selfish weakling, no puny luxuriator in his own emotions, no mere hectic taster and maker of phrases. He worshiped beauty; he was born a poet, and rightly enough he followed his genius; but he was born also affectionate and generous; in his nature there was much of that glorious something which we call chivalry; and he knew as well as all the preachers could tell him that in any true assize high conduct must always bear away the palm. No more than the apostle of old had he any “poor vanity that works of genius were the first things. No! for that sort of probity and disinterestedness which such men as Bailey possess does hold and grasp the tiptop of any spiritual honors that can be paid to anything in this world.” Truly said, of this world or any other; for many things may be great, but the greatest of all is charity.
It might almost have been expected that genius so sudden in its flowering, so amazingly exceptional, as Keats’s, one of the wonders of human history, would be attended by some strain of disease, some taint, more or less pronounced, of mental or moral unsoundness. It is the more to be rejoiced in, therefore, that his nature, mental, moral, and physical (except for the tuberculosis which he doubtless contracted from his mother, over whom, in her last illness, he, a boy of fifteen, watched with all a son’s and daughter’s faithfulness), was to all appearance eminently sane and normal. As a boy, undersized though he was, he would always be fighting (which is normal, surely), and as a man he showed habitually, with one distressing exception, a manly, self-respecting spirit.
The single exception has to do with his passion for Fanny Brawne, concerning which it may be enough to say that when a man is head over ears in love with a pretty girl, or a girl whom he thinks pretty, and is by her, or by some perversity of Fate, put off, he is never sane. The letters that Keats wrote to his inamorata may have been, as his friendly critic says, “the letters of a surgeon’s apprentice.” For ourselves we will take the critic’s word for it. We have never read them (in our opinion it was indecent or worse to print them), nor should we feel sure of our ability to tell in what respect the love letters of a young doctor might be expected to differ from those of a young schoolmaster or a young duke of the realm. To be crazy is to be crazy. Enough to say that they were not the letters of the poet Keats. Alas, alas! What a tragedy is human life! What a weak and silly thing is the human heart! A man sees a girl’s face, and behold, he is no longer a reasonable being; his peace of mind is gone, his work hindered, his day shortened, his fame tarnished, his name a laughing-stock. It is that which hath been, and it is that which shall be. As was said of old, so one may feel like saying still, “A man hath no preëminence above a beast; for all is vanity.”
And for all that, considering Keats’s genius, its early development and its miraculous quality, and comparing him with men of his own kind, we must account him on the whole a man surprisingly well-balanced and sane. Call the roll of his famous poetic contemporaries, and few of them will be found saner. Good Archdeacon Bailey, who had abundant opportunity to know, said that common sense was “a conspicuous part of his character.” Of how many of the others would it ever have occurred to any one to say the like?
He seems not to have been either crotchety or boastful, though he believed in aiming high, and made no scruple of professing, in so many words, that he “would rather fail than not be among the greatest.” Born fighter that he was, born, too, of the genus irritabile vatum (“when I have any little vexation,” he once wrote, with Lamb-like exaggeration, “it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles”), he loved peace, and in the Biblical phrase pursued it, for which Mr. Arnold, it is pleasant to see, awards him full credit; but he was not to be trodden upon, he held the popular judgment of poetry in something like contempt (as all poets do, it is to be presumed), and he would not be crowded too hard even by the chiefest of his brethren. The most thoroughgoing Wordsworthian must read with amusement, if not with temptations to applause, the few clever sentences in which the youthful aspirant for poetic honors, in one of his letters, hits off some of that great man’s foibles. He has no thought of denying Wordsworth’s grandeur, he declares; but not for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages will he “be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egoist.” “Every man,” he goes on, “has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself.... We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself—but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers!—how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway, crying out, ‘Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!’”
To another correspondent he expresses a fear that Wordsworth has gone away from town “rather huffed” about something or other, the nature of which does not precisely appear; but adds that he ought not to expect but that every man of worth should be “as proud as himself;” a remark concerning which we are bound to acknowledge, loyal Wordsworthians as within reason we esteem ourselves, that we rather like the sound of it.
An artist cannot well be without some of the defects—or what more steady-going, lower-flying people are wont to account the defects—that go naturally, if not of necessity, with the artistic temperament. For one thing, he must work more or less by fits and starts. Poems are not to be made—unless it be by a Southey—as a shoemaker makes shoes, so many strokes to the minute. It is a wonder how much Keats accomplished in his few years, and this even if we take no reckoning of his experiments and failures; but there were times, of course, when he could do nothing, and then, equally of course, he could invent the prettiest kind of excuses for himself, excuses that were themselves hardly less than works of genius. At such a minute he would say, for instance, “Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase.” Or, if the beauty of the morning operated upon a sense of idleness, he would declare it “more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury.” “Let us open our leaves like a flower,” he would say, “and be passive and receptive; budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favors us with a visit.... I have not read any books—the Morning said I was right—I had no idea but of the Morning, and the Thrush said I was right—seeming to say,—