the paper entitled “A Now,” at the composition of which Keats is said to have been not only present but assisting;[16] and, as Hunt wrote pretty much “from hand to mouth” for The Indicator, we may safely assume that Keats was with him, at all events till just the end of June. On a second attack of spitting of blood, he returned to Wentworth Place to be nursed by Mrs. and Miss Brawne; and he was writing from there to Taylor on the 14th of August.
Between these two attacks he would seem to have written the letters forming the third series, Numbers XXXIII to XXXVII. I suspect the desperate tone of Number XXXVII had some weight in bringing about the return to Wentworth Place; and that this was the last letter Keats ever wrote to Fanny Brawne; for Mr. Severn tells me that his friend was absolutely unable to write to her either on the voyage or in Italy.
There are certain passages in the letters, taking exception to Miss Brawne’s behaviour, particularly with Charles Armitage Brown, which should not, I think, be read without making good allowance for the extreme sensitiveness natural to Keats, and exaggerated to the last degree by terrible misfortunes. Keats was himself endowed with such an exquisite refinement of nature, and, without being in any degree a prophet or propagandist like Shelley, was so intensely in earnest both in art and in life, that anything that smacked of trifling with the sacred passion of love must have been to him more horrible and appalling than to most persons of refinement and culture. Add to this that, for the greater part of the time during which his good or evil hap cast him near the object of his affection, his robust spirit of endurance was disarmed by the advancing operations of disease, and his discomfiture in this behalf aggravated by material difficulties of the most galling kind; and we need not be surprised to find things that might otherwise have been deemed of small account making a violent impression upon him. In a memoir[17] of his friend Dilke, written by that gentleman’s grandson, there is an extract from some letter or journal, emanating from whom, and at what date, we are not told, but probably from Mr. or Mrs. Dilke, and which is significant enough: it is at page 11:
“It is quite a settled thing between Keats and Miss ——. God help them. It’s a bad thing for them. The mother says she cannot prevent it, and that her only hope is that it will go off. He don’t like anyone to look at her or to speak to her.”
This indicates, at all events, a morbid susceptibility on the part of Keats as to the relations of his betrothed with the rest of the world, and must be taken into account in weighing his own words in this connexion. That things went uncomfortably enough to attract the attention of others is indicated again in an extract which Sir Charles Dilke has published on the same page with the foregoing, from a letter written to Mrs. Dilke by Miss Reynolds:
“I hear that Keats is going to Rome, which must please all his friends on every account. I sincerely hope it will benefit his health, poor fellow! His mind and spirits must be bettered by it; and absence may probably weaken, if not break off, a connexion that has been a most unhappy one for him.”
Unhappy, the connexion doubtless was, as the connexion of a doomed man with the whole world is likely to be; but it would be unfair to assume that the engagement to Miss Brawne took a more unfortunate turn than any engagement would probably take for a man circumstanced as Keats was,—a man without independent means, and debarred by ill-health from earning an independence. Above all, it would be both unsafe and extremely unfair to conclude that either Miss Brawne or Keats’s amiable and admirable true friend Charles Brown was guilty of any real levity.
That Keats’s passion was the cause of his death is an assumption which also should be looked at with reserve. Shelley’s immortal Elegy and Byron’s ribald stanzas have been yoked together to draw down the track of years the false notion that adverse criticism killed him; and now that that form of murder has been shewn not to have been committed, there seems to be a reluctance to admit that there was no killing in the matter. Sir Charles Dilke says, at page 7 of the Memoir already cited, that Keats “‘gave in’ to a passion which killed him as surely as ever any man was killed by love.” This may be perfectly true; for perhaps love never did kill any man; but surely it must be superfluous to assume any such dire agency in the decease of a man who had hereditary consumption. Coleridge’s often-quoted verdict, “There is death in that hand,” does not stand alone; and the careful reader of Keats’s Life and Letters will find ample evidence of a state of health likely to lead but to one result,—such as the passage already cited in regard to his staying at home determined to rid himself of sore throat, the account of his return, invalided, from the tour in Scotland, which his friends agreed he ought never to have undertaken, and his own statement to Mr. Dilke, printed in the Life, Letters, &c. (Vol. II, p. 7), that he “was not in very good health” when at Shanklin.
Lord Houghton’s fine perception of character and implied fact sufficed to prevent his giving any colour to the supposition that Keats was not sufficiently cherished and considered in his latter days: the reproaches that occur in some of the present letters do not lead me to alter the impression conveyed to me on this subject by his Lordship’s memoirs; nor do I doubt that others will make the necessary allowance for the fevered condition of the poet’s mind and the harassed state of body and spirit. Mr. Severn tells me that Mrs. and Miss Brawne felt the keenest regret that they had not followed him and Keats to Rome; and, indeed, I understand that there was some talk of a marriage taking place before the departure. Even twenty years after Keats’s death, when Mr. Severn returned to England, the bereaved lady was unable to receive him on account of the extreme painfulness of the associations connected with him.