KEATS
1. The Biography
Sir Sidney Colvin deserves praise for the noble architecture of the temple he has built in honour of Keats. His great book, John Keats: His Life and Poetry; His Friends, Critics, and After-fame, is not only a temple, indeed, but a museum. Sir Sidney has brought together here the whole of Keats's world, or at least all the relics of his world that the last of a band of great collectors has been able to recover; and in the result we can accompany Keats through the glad and sad and mad and bad hours of his short and marvellous life as we have never been able to do before under the guidance of a single biographer. We are still left in the dark, it is true, as to Keats's race and descent. Whether Keats's father came to London from Cornwall or not, Sir Sidney has not been able to decide on the rather shaky evidence that has been put forward. If it should hereafter turn out that Keats was a Cornishman at one remove, Matthew Arnold's conjecture as to the "Celtic element" in him, as in other English poets, may revive in the general esteem.
In the present state of our knowledge, however, we must be content to accept Keats as a Londoner without ancestors beyond the father who was head-ostler at the sign of the "Swan and Hoop," Finsbury Pavement, and married his master's daughter. It was at the stable at the "Swan and Hoop"—not a public-house, by the way, but a livery-stable—that Keats was prematurely born at the end of October 1795. He was scarcely nine years old when his father was killed by a fall from a horse. He was only fourteen when his mother (who had re-married unhappily and then been separated from her husband) died, a victim of chronic rheumatism and consumption. It is from his mother that Keats seems to have inherited his impetuous and passionate nature. There is the evidence of a certain wholesale tea-dealer—the respectability of whose trade may have inclined him to censoriousness—to the effect that, both as girl and woman, she "was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways, and was no credit to the family." That she had other qualities besides those mentioned by the tea-dealer is shown by the passionate affection that existed between her and her son John. "Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be kept quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in." As she lay dying, "he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine, or even cook her food, but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease." The Keats children were fortunately not left penniless. Their grandfather, the proprietor of the livery-stable, had bequeathed a fortune of £13,000, a little of which was spent on sending Keats to a good school till the age of sixteen, and afterwards enabled him to attend Guy's Hospital as a medical student.
It is almost impossible to credit the accepted story that he passed all his boyhood without making any attempt at writing poetry. "He did not begin to write," says Sir Sidney Colvin, "till he was near eighteen." If this is so, one feels all the more grateful to his old schoolfellow, Cowden Clarke, who lent him The Faëry Queene, with a long list of other books, and in doing so presented him with the key that unlocked the unsuspected treasure of his genius. There is only one person, indeed, in all the Keats circle to whom one is more passionately grateful than to Cowden Clarke: that is Fanny Brawne. Keats no doubt had laboured to some purpose—occasionally, to fine purpose—with his genius before the autumn of 1818, when he met Fanny Brawne for the first time. None the less, had he died before that date, he would have been remembered in literature not as a marvellous original artist, but rather as one of those "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" among whom Shelley surprisingly placed him. Fanny Brawne may (or may not) have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man. She was unquestionably his good fairy as a poet.
This is the only matter upon which one is seriously disposed to quarrel with Sir Sidney Colvin as a biographer. He does not emphasize as he ought the debt we are under to Fanny Brawne as the intensifier of Keats's genius—the "minx," as Keats irritably called her, who transformed him in a few months from a poet of still doubtful fame into a master and an immortal. The attachment, Sir Sidney thinks, was a misfortune for him, though he qualifies this by adding that "so probably under the circumstances must any passion for a woman have been." Well, let us test this "misfortune" by its consequences. The meeting with Fanny took place, as I have said, in the autumn of 1818. During the winter Keats continued to write Hyperion, which he seems already to have begun. In January 1819 he wrote The Eve of St. Agnes. During the spring of that year, he wrote the Ode to Psyche, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Ode to a Nightingale, and La Belle Dame sans Merci. In the autumn he finished Lamia, and wrote the Ode to Autumn. To the same year belongs the second greatest of his sonnets, Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art. In other words, practically all the fine gold of Keats's work was produced in the months in which his passion for Fanny Brawne was consuming him as with fire. His greatest poems we clearly owe to that heightened sense of beauty which resulted from his translation into a lover. It seems to me a treachery to Keats's memory to belittle a woman who was at least the occasion of such a passionate expenditure of genius. Sir Sidney Colvin does his best to be fair to Fanny, but his presentation of the story of Keats's love for her will, I am afraid, be regarded by the long line of her disparagers as an endorsement of their blame.
I can understand the dislike of Fanny Brawne on the part of those who dislike Keats and all his works. But if we accept Keats and The Eve of St. Agnes, we had better be honest and also accept Fanny, who inspired them. Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems belong to the literature of the higher sensualism. They reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature. He seems to have admired women vulgarly as creatures whose hands were waiting to be squeezed, rather than as equal human beings; the eminent exception to this being his sister-in-law, Georgiana. His famous declaration of independence of them—that he would rather give them a sugar-plum than his time—was essentially a cynicism in the exhausted-Don-Juan mood. Hence, Keats was almost doomed to fall in love with provocation rather than with what the Victorians called "soul." His destiny was not to be a happy lover, but the slave of a "minx." It was not a slavery without dignity, however. It had the dignity of tragedy. Sir Sidney Colvin regrets that the love-letters of Keats to Fanny were ever published. It would be as reasonable, in my opinion, to regret the publication of La Belle Dame sans Merci. La Belle Dame sans Merci says in literature merely what the love-letters say in autobiography. The love-letters, indeed, like the poem, affect us as great literature does. They unquestionably take us down into the depths of suffering—those depths in which tortured souls cry out almost inarticulately in their anguish. The torture of the dying lover, as he sails for Italy and leaves Fanny, never to see her again, has almost no counterpart in biographical literature. "The thought of leaving Miss Brawne," he writes to Brown from Yarmouth, "is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me—I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing." And when he reaches Naples he writes to the same friend:—
I can bear to die—I cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God! Everything that I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her—I see her—I hear her.... O that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her—to receive a letter from her. To see her handwriting would break my heart—even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear.
Sir Sidney Colvin does not attempt to hide Keats's love-story away in a corner. Where he goes wrong, it seems to me, is in his failure to realize that this love-story was the making of Keats as a man of genius. Had Sir Sidney fully grasped the part played by Fanny Brawne as, for good or evil, the presiding genius of Keats as a poet, he would, I fancy, have found a different explanation of the changes introduced into the later version of La Belle Dame sans Merci. Sir Sidney is all in favour—and there is something to be said for his preference—of the earlier version, which begins:—
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering!