The doctor looks at biography

by Joseph Collins

Early in life Keats lost his mother, who, by her attachment, represented for him the ideal of motherly love. For such love, he unceasingly sought. He had what the Freudians call a mother-complex. He needed the constant watchfulness, the untiring devotion and the profound understanding that a mother alone can bestow on a man. In Fanny Brawne, he found youth and beauty, brains and brilliancy, but none of the fondness and constancy that his nature demanded.

It was Miss Lowell’s unquenchable thirst for justice and honesty that made her attempt such thorough rehabilitation of Fanny Brawne. The effort seems useless and rather irrelevant, without much justification or foundation. Fanny Brawne’s love for Keats was such that, had he not been under the stupefying influence of the little Greek god who blindfolds his victims, he would have seen that Fanny was of similar calibre to the other women whose lack of motherly feeling for him prevented them from taking a permanent place in his heart. Miss Lowell realised the limitations of Fanny when she wrote: “One of the many reasons for Keats’ failure in his relations with Fanny Brawne was that he sought in her a mother as well as a lover, and she had not yet grown up enough to stand to him in both capacities.” This is the judgment of a mind, not of a heart; the judgment of a critic, not of a psychologist; the judgment of one who believes that years bring in their trend qualities and characteristics that do not exist in the embryo of maturity. A woman need not be of mother-age to be maternal any more than a pianist need be able to play Russian music at first sight to be an artist. The maternal instinct, when it exists, is revealed in childhood, and a love like that which united John Keats to Fanny Brawne, should have been the spark which caused her love to blaze. The letters of Fanny which have been published do not help to build a shrine around her and to rehabilitate her, since they were practically all written after Keats’ death—when memories and remorse might have vied to make her appreciate what she had lost. Moreover Fanny, who pretended to love him, did little to prove it; and none of Miss Lowell’s arguments can convince one reader that, had she really been seized of the same passion that possessed Keats, she would not have married him, when marriage meant happiness and bliss for him. Of course, Keats was ill, very ill, but no one knew it to be a fatal illness, and it may be safe to assume that either of Shelley’s wives would have surmounted the obstacle. Miss Lowell says: “Fanny lived in an age when well-brought-up daughters in her class of life did not jump over the traces and marry offhand; and suppose Fanny had happened to do this, neither she nor Keats had the money to run away, and was it to be contemplated that Fanny should move next door and let Brown support the pair of them! The idea is absurd. Fanny was not Harriet Westbrook, and Keats was no Shelley. They each did the best they could, as I think any one not hoodwinked by an unreasoning love for Keats can see.”

It was lucky for Keats that Fanny was no Harriet Westbrook, but what a pity she had not some of the virtues and qualities that made Mary Godwin the exquisite creature and inspirer that she was! Furthermore, there is no indication in Miss Lowell’s book that the question of marriage had ever been brought up for family consideration. It seems just to say that Fanny, with her limitations and light-heartedness, did the best she could, and was no heroine; but what we would have liked to see would have been a Fanny “hoodwinked by an unreasoning love of Keats,” who combined pulchritude and intelligence with a magnificent heart.

The picture that Miss Lowell paints of Keats is idealised. He is not vulgar as Watson said, not a howler and a sniveller as Swinburne said, and not “unmanly” as many said and thought after reading the Brawne letters. We are ready to believe he was none of them, but it is too much to ask that we shall believe “that the pure poet is a pure poet because he is a pure man.” White-washing poets is the meanest occupation in the world next to census-taking.

However, she has interwoven and blended the man with the artist in such manner that the one overlaps the other constantly, and the result is a homogeneous and substantial whole. When the man dominates, Keats is delightful; when the artist has the upper hand, he is admirable. She has rendered exquisitely the humanity of the poet who had belief in nothing but what he learned for himself, and who could be himself always. What she failed to convey was his profound self-consciousness and sensuousness, and how they influenced, one might almost say shaped, his life and his poetry.

Keats underwent a religious experience, conversion one may call it, that influenced his life and his work; so that one may cite him as evidence that poetic comprehension can not be complete unless it includes religious comprehension. It is to be regretted that Miss Lowell did not discuss this episode.

However, she made the most of her documentation, and of her subject from an intellectual and objective point of view. She has written a biography which is as powerfully conceived as it is intelligently realised, and it can never be repeated too often that, above all, Amy Lowell was an intelligence. Her capacity for work was astounding; her painstaking and thorough study an achievement of labour that reminds one of the monks of the Middle Ages who spent their lives in cells and cubicles, illuminating prayer books with the most exquisite figures and colours, bringing to their task the patience of angels, the piety of saints and the skill of artists. But her industry was as naught compared with the tenacity of her opinion and the legitimacy of her judgment.

From a subjective and emotional point of view, John Keats is far from perfect; for the biographer has not made sufficient allowance for the fact that she was writing of a genius. She took his measurements with the same tape she would use if she were measuring William J. Bryan, and she would probably have approved of James Barrie’s Tammas Haggart and his ideas in regard to “geniuses.” She did not allow for the spread of Keats’ wings, or the aureole of his genius. She explained his motives and his achievements with everyday words, and she brought to bear on her task the illumination of medicine and the testimony of psychology. She achieved a work of the head, not of the heart, and John Keats was above all a heart. In several instances she is at a loss to understand her subject, especially toward the end of his life, which takes in centuries of achievements in a few months of actual life. Keats moves too fast for her; his feet are too winged, the empyrean too rarefied.

She can not understand how life could have been “painful” for him since he had almost everything he needed, and had not received more than his share of misfortunes; and unless one attempts to read in the heart of Keats, nothing in his external life can corroborate the statement that his life was a tragedy. Human and material blessings are not enough to make life bearable, and Keats had not an excessive amount of either. It may be a comfort to think that nothing on earth would have made him really happy—save perhaps to possess Fanny as wife, but it is safe to assume that, unless such a marriage accomplished the miracle, Fanny bound to Keats would have failed him. Better for him in this instance to live in hope than to realise it.

Few things are more convincing of Miss Lowell’s inability really to appreciate the heart of her subject than the comment on one of Keats’ letters to Fanny in which she says that few persons could endure much longer the agonies and uncertainties which she was “so peculiarly made to create.” Miss Lowell follows this quotation with “Nobody with a grain of medical sense can fail to see this is delirium.” Perhaps not, but to use medical sense to judge John Keats is a mistake. It was agony of a sort that no medicine could relieve, and which no amount of sense could subdue.