Modern critics, reading these lines, are tempted to disparage the work Keats actually accomplished in comparison with the work that he might have accomplished, had he not died at twenty-five. They prefer “The Fall of Hyperion,” that he might have written, to “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the “Nightingale,” and the “Grecian Urn” that he did write. They love the potential middle-aged Keats more than the perfect youthful Keats.
This seems to me a perversity, but the criticism has value in reminding us how rich and deep was the nature that expressed itself in the work even of the young Keats. Keats was an æsthete, but he was always something more. He was a man continually stirred by a divine hunger for things never to be attained by the ecstasies of youth—for knowledge, for truth, for something that might heal the sorrows of men. His nature was continually at war with itself. His being was in tumult, even though his genius found its perfect hour in stillness.
But it was the tumult of love, not the tumult of noble ideals, that led to the production of his greatest work. Fanny Brawne, that beautiful minx in her teens, is denounced for having murdered Keats; but she certainly did not murder his genius. It was after meeting her that he wrote the Odes and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” There has been too much cursing of Fanny. She may have been the cause of Keats’s greatest agony, but she was also the cause of his greatest ecstasy. The world is in Fanny’s debt, as Keats was. It was Fanny’s Keats, in a very real sense, who wrote the immortal verse that all the world now honours.
3. FANNY BRAWNE
“My dear Brown,” wrote the dying Keats, with Fanny Brawne in his thoughts, in almost the last of his surviving letters, “for my sake, be her advocate for ever.” “You think she has many faults,” he had written a month earlier, when leaving England; “but, for my sake, think she has none.” Thus did Keats bequeath the perfect image of Fanny Brawne to his friend. And the bequest is not only to his friend but to posterity. We, too, must study her image in the eyes of Keats, and hang the portrait of the lady who had no faults in at least as good a position on the wall with those other portraits of the flawed lady—the minx, the flirt, the siren, the destroyer.
Sir Sidney Colvin, in his noble and monumental biography of Keats, found no room for this idealised portrait. He was scrupulously fair to Fanny Brawne as a woman, but he condemned her as the woman with whom Keats happened to fall in love. To Sir Sidney she was not Keats’s goddess, but Keats’s demon. Criticising the book on its first appearance, I pointed out that almost everything that is immortal in the poetry of Keats was written when he was under the influence of his passion for Fanny Brawne, and I urged that, had it not been for the ploughing and harrowing of love, we should probably never have had the rich harvest of his genius. Sir Sidney has now added a few pages to his preface, in which he replies to this criticism, and declares that to write of Fanny Brawne in such a manner is “to misunderstand Keats’s whole career.” He admits that “most of Keats’s best work was done after he had met Fanny Brawne,” but it was done, he insists, “not because of her, but in spite of her.” “At the hour when his genius was naturally and splendidly ripening of itself,” he writes, “she brought into his life an element of distracting unrest, of mingled pleasure and torment, to use his own words, but of torment far more than of pleasure.... In writing to her or about her he never for a moment suggests that he owed to her any of his inspiration as a poet.... In point of fact, from the hour when he passed under her spell he could never do any long or sustained work except in absence from her.” Now all this means little more than that Fanny Brawne made Keats suffer. On that point everybody is agreed. The only matter in dispute is whether this suffering was a source of energy or of destruction to Keats’s genius.
Keats has left us in one of his letters his own view of the part suffering plays in the making of a soul. Scoffing at the conception of the world as a “vale of tears,” he urges that we should regard it instead as “the vale of soul-making,” and asks: “Do you not see how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Thus, according to his own philosophy, there is no essential contradiction between a love that harrows and a love that enriches. As for his never having suggested that he owed any of his inspiration to his love for Fanny, he may not have done this in so many words, but he makes it clear enough that she stirred his nature to the depths for the first time and awakened in him that fiery energy which is one of the first conditions of genius in poetry. “I cannot think of you,” he wrote, “without some sort of energy—though mal à propos. Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of you would uncrystallise and dissolve me. I must not give way to it—but turn to my writing again—if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy—I must forget them.” Sir Sidney would read this letter as a confession that love and genius were at enmity in Keats. It seems to me a much more reasonable view that in the heat of conflict Keats’s genius became doubly intense, and that, had there been no struggle, there would have been no triumph. It is not necessary to believe that Fanny Brawne was the ideal woman for Keats to have loved: the point is that his love of her was the supreme event in his life. “I never,” he told her, “felt my mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment—upon no person but you.” “I have been astonished,” he wrote in another letter, “that men could die martyrs for religion—I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more—I could be martyr’d for my religion—love is my religion—I could die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet.” And still earlier he had written: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks—your loveliness and the hour of my death. O, that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.... I will imagine you Venus to-night and pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen.” It is out of emotional travail such as we find in these letters that poetry is born. Is it possible to believe that, if Keats had never fallen in love—and he had never been in love till he met Fanny—he would have been the great poet we know?
I hold that it is not. Hence I still maintain the truth of the statement which Sir Sidney Colvin sets out to controvert, that, while Fanny “may have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man, she was his good fairy as a poet.”
Keats’s misfortune in love was a personal misfortune, not a misfortune to his genius. He was too poor to marry, and, in his own phrase, he “trembled at domestic cares.” He was ill and morbid: he had longed for the hour of his death before ever he set eyes on Fanny. Add to this that he was young and sensual and as jealous as Othello. His own nature had in it all the elements of tragic suffering, even if Fanny had been as perfect as St. Cecilia. And she was no St. Cecilia. He had called her “minx” shortly after their first meeting in the autumn of 1818, and described her as “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange.” Even then, however, he was in love with her. “The very first week I knew you,” he told her afterwards, “I wrote myself your vassal.... If you should ever feel for man at the first sight what I did for you, I am lost.” It is clear from this that his heart and his head quarrelled about Fanny. At the same time, after those first censures, he never spoke critically of her again, even to his most intimate friends. Some of his friends evidently disliked Fanny and wished to separate the lovers. He refers to this in a letter in which he speaks angrily of “these laughers who do not like you, who envy you for your beauty,” and writes of himself as “one who, if he never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory.” But Keats himself could not be certain that she was a saint. “My greatest torment since I have known you,” he tells her, “has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid.” He is so jealous that, when he is ill, he tells her that she must not even go into town alone till he is well again, and says: “If you would really what is called enjoy yourself at a party—if you can smile in people’s faces, and wish them to admire you now—you never have nor ever will love me.” But he adds a postscript: “No, my sweet Fanny—I am wrong—I do not wish you to be unhappy—and yet I do, I must while there is so sweet a beauty—my loveliest, my darling! Good-bye! I kiss you—O the torments!” In a later letter he returns to his jealousy, and declares: “Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’” He tells this fragile little worldly creature that she should be prepared to suffer on the rack for him, accuses her of flirting with Brown, and, in one of the most painful of his letters, cries out:
I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in: Do not write to me if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to have seen. You may have altered—if you have not—if you still believe in dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you—I do not want to live—if you have done so I wish the coming night may be my last. I cannot live without you, and not only you, but chaste you, virtuous you.... Be serious! Love is not a plaything—and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience.