It is also a pleasure to find that, with his other failings, he had a touch of book-madness. There was in him the making of a first-class bibliophile. He speaks with rapture of his black-letter Chaucer, which he proposes to have bound ‘in Gothique,’ so as to unmodernize as much as possible its outward appearance. But to Keats books were literature or they were not literature, and one cannot think that his affections would twine about ever so bookish a volume which was merely ‘curious.’
One reads with sympathetic amusement of Keats’s genuine and natural horror of paying the same bill twice, ‘there not being a more unpleasant thing in the world (saving a thousand and one others).’ The necessity of preserving adequate evidence that a bill had been paid was uppermost in his thought quite frequently; and once when, at Leigh Hunt’s instance, sundry packages of papers belonging to that eminently methodical and businesslike man of letters were to be sorted out and in part destroyed, Keats refused to burn any, ‘for fear of demolishing receipts.’
But the reader will chance upon few more humorous passages than that in which the poet tells his brother George how he cures himself of the blues, and at the same time spurs his flagging powers of invention: ‘Whenever I find myself growing vaporish I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and, in fact, adonize, as if I were going out—then all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief.’ The virtues of a clean shirt have often been sung, but it remained for Keats to show what a change of linen and a general adonizing could do in the way of furnishing poetic stimulus. This is better than coffee, brandy, absinthe, or falling in love; and it prompts one to think anew that the English poets, taking them as a whole, were a marvelously healthy and sensible breed of men.
It is, however, in respect to the light they throw upon the poet’s literary life that the letters are of highest significance. They gratify to a reasonable extent that natural desire we all have to see authorship in the act. The processes by which genius brings things to pass are so mysterious that our curiosity is continually piqued; and our failure to get at the real thing prompts us to be more or less content with mere externals. If we may not hope to see the actual process of making poetry, we may at least study the poet’s manuscript. By knowing of his habits of work we flatter ourselves that we are a little nearer the secret of his power.
We must bear in mind that Keats was a boy, always a boy, and that he died before he quite got out of boyhood. To be sure, most boys of twenty-six would resent being described by so juvenile a term. But one must have successfully passed twenty-six without doing anything in particular to understand how exceedingly young twenty-six is. And to have wrought so well in so short a time, Keats must have had from the first a clear and noble conception of the nature of his work, as he must also have displayed extraordinary diligence in the doing of it. Perhaps these points are too obvious, and of a sort which would naturally occur to any one; but it will be none the less interesting to see how the letters bear witness to their truth.
In the first place, Keats was anything but a loafer at literature. He seems never to have dawdled. A fine healthiness is apparent in all allusions to his processes of work. ‘I read and write about eight hours a day,’ he remarks in a letter to Haydon. Bailey, Keats’s Oxford friend, says that the fellow would go to his writing-desk soon after breakfast, and stay there until two or three o’clock in the afternoon. He was then writing Endymion. His stint was about ‘fifty lines a day, … and he wrote with as much regularity, and apparently with as much ease, as he wrote his letters…. Sometimes he fell short of his allotted task, but not often, and he would make it up another day. But he never forced himself.’ Bailey quotes, in connection with this, Keats’s own remark to the effect that poetry would better not come at all than not to come ‘as naturally as the leaves of a tree.’ Whether this spontaneity of production was as great as that of some other poets of his time may be questioned; but he would never have deserved Tom Nash’s sneer at those writers who can only produce by ‘sleeping betwixt every sentence.’ Keats had in no small degree the ‘fine extemporal vein’ with ‘invention quicker than his eye.’
We uncritically feel that it could hardly have been otherwise in the case of one with whom poetry was a passion. Keats had an infinite hunger and thirst for good poetry. His poetical life, both in the receptive and productive phases of it, was intense. Poetry was meat and drink to him. He could even urge his friend Reynolds to talk about it to him, much as one might beg a trusted friend to talk about one’s lady-love, and with the confidence that only the fitting thing would be spoken. ‘Whenever you write, say a word or two on some passage in Shakespeare which may have come rather new to you,’—a sentence which shows his faith in the many-sidedness of the great poetry. Shakespeare was forever ‘coming new’ to him, and he was ‘haunted’ by particular passages. He loved to fill the cup of his imagination with the splendors of the best poets until the cup overflowed. ‘I find I cannot exist without Poetry,—without eternal Poetry; half the day will not do,—the whole of it; I began with a little, but habit has made me a leviathan.’ He tells Leigh Hunt, in a letter written from Margate, that he thought so much about poetry, and ‘so long together,’ that he could not get to sleep at night. Whether this meant in working out ideas of his own, or living over the thoughts of other poets, is of little importance; the remark shows how deeply the roots of his life were imbedded in poetical soil. He loved a debauch in the verse of masters of his art. He could intoxicate himself with Shakespeare’s sonnets. He rioted in ‘all their fine things said unconsciously.’ We are tempted to say, by just so much as he had large reverence for these men, by just so much he was of them.
Undoubtedly, this ability to be moved by strong imaginative work may be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment. Keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses. He knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than mere ambition could. He understood the limits of ambition as a force in literature. Keats’s ambition trembled in the presence of Keats’s conception of the magnitude of the poetic office. ‘I have asked myself so often why I should be a poet more than other men, seeing how great a thing it is.’ Yet he had honest confidence. One cannot help liking him for the fine audacity with which he pronounces his own work good,—better even than that of a certain other great name in English literature; one cannot help loving him for the sweet humility with which he accepts the view that, after all, success or failure lies entirely without the range of self-choosing. There is a point of view from which it is folly to hold a poet responsible even for his own poetry, and when Endymion was spoken of as ‘slipshod’ Keats could reply, ‘That it is so is no fault of mine…. The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man…. That which is creative must create itself. In Endymion I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.’
Well might a man who could write that last sentence look upon poetry not only as a responsible, but as a dangerous pursuit. Men who aspire to be poets are gamblers. In all the lotteries of the literary life none is so uncertain as this. A million chances that you don’t win the prize to one chance that you do. It is a curious thing that ever so thoughtful and conscientious an author may not know whether he is making literature or merely writing verse. He conforms to all the canons of taste in his own day; he is devout and reverent; he shuns excesses of diction, and he courts originality; his verse seems to himself and to his unflattering friends instinct with the spirit of his time, but twenty years later it is old-fashioned. Keats, with all his feeling of certainty, stood with head uncovered before that power which gives poetical gifts to one, and withholds them from another. Above all would he avoid self-delusion in these things. ‘There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter one’s self into an idea of being a great Poet.’
Keats, if one may judge from a letter written to John Taylor in February, 1818, had little expectation that his Endymion was going to be met with universal plaudits. He doubtless looked for fair treatment. He probably had no thought of being sneeringly addressed as ‘Johnny,’ or of getting recommendations to return to his ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.’ In fact, he looked upon the issue as entirely problematical. He seemed willing to take it for granted that in Endymion he had but moved into the go-cart from the leading-strings. ‘If Endymion serves me for a pioneer, perhaps I ought to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths; and I have, I am sure, many friends who if I fail will attribute any change in my life to humbleness rather than pride,—to a cowering under the wings of great poets rather than to bitterness that I am not appreciated.’ And for evidence of any especial bitterness because of the lashing he received one will search the letters in vain. Keats was manly and good-humored, most of his morbidity being referred directly to his ill health. The trouncing he had at the hands of the reviewers was no more violent than the one administered to Tennyson by Professor Wilson. Critics, good and bad, can do much harm. They may terrorize a timid spirit. But a greater terror than the fear of the reviewers hung over the head of John Keats. He stood in awe of his own artistic and poetic sense. He could say with truth that his own domestic criticism had given him pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict. If he had had any terrible heart-burning over their malignancy, if he had felt that his life was poisoned, he could hardly have forborne some allusion to it in his letters to his brother, George Keats. But he is almost imperturbable. He talks of the episode freely, says that he has been urged to publish his Pot of Basil as a reply to the reviewers, has no idea that he can be made ridiculous by abuse, notes the futility of attacks of this kind, and then, with a serene conviction that is irresistible, adds, ‘I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death!’