Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame

by Sidney Colvin

In persuading Keats to work with him on a tragedy for the stage, Brown had had the entirely laudable motive of putting his friend in the way of earning money for them both. But what would we not have given that the time and labour thus, as it turned out, thrown away should have yielded us from Keats’s self another Isabella or Eve of St Agnes, or a finished Eve of St Mark, or even another Lamia? Brown’s next piece of suggestion and would-be help was far more unfortunate still. We have seen how in the unhappy weeks after Keats’s return from Winchester in October, he spent his mornings in Brown’s company spinning the verses of a comic and satiric fairy tale the scheme of which they had concocted together,—The Cap and Bells or The Jealousies. The idea of the friends in this was no doubt to throw a challenge to Byron, the first cantos of whose Don Juan had lately been launched upon a dazzled and scandalized world. Byron’s genius, the spirit, that is, of brilliant devilry and worldly mockery which was the sincerest part of his genius, with his rich experiences of life, travel and society, of passion and dissipation and the extremes of fame and obloquy, and his incomparable address and versatility in playing tricks of legerdemain with ideas and language, had here all found their perfect opportunity for display. Attempts at worldly banter and satire by the tender-hearted, intensely loving and imagining Keats, with his narrow and in the main rather second-rate social experience, were never more than wry-mouthed as I have called them, ineffectual, and essentially against the grain.

His collaborator Brown imagined he had a gift for satiric fairy tales, but his recorded efforts in that kind are silly and dull as well as inclining to coarseness. What happier result could be expected from their new joint work than that which posterity deplores in The Cap and Bells? The story is of an Indian Faery emperor Elfinan,—a name suggested by Spenser,—enamoured of an English maiden Bertha Pearl,—the very Bertha of The Eve of St Mark, resuscitated to our amazement,—but having for political reasons to seek in marriage a Faery princess Bellanaine, who herself is in love with an English youth named Hubert. The eighty-eight stanzas which Keats wrote on those autumn mornings in Brown’s room carry the tale no farther than Elfinan’s despatching his chancellor Crafticanto on an embassy to fetch Bellanaine on an aerial journey from her home in Imaus, his consultation with his magician Hum as to the means of escaping the marriage and conveying himself secretly to England, his departure, and the arrival of Bellanaine and her escort to find the palace empty and the emperor flown. How the seriously, perhaps tragically, conceived Bertha of St Mark’s Eve, with the mystic book fated to have influence on her life, could have been worked, as they were evidently meant to be worked, into this new ridiculous narrative, we cannot guess, nor how the relations of Bellanaine with her mortal lover would have been managed.

Before Keats’s deepening despondency and recklessness caused him to drop writing altogether, which apparently happened early in December, he was evidently out of conceit with The Cap and Bells.[5] One of the most unfortunate things about the attempt is the choice of the Spenserian stanza for its metre. Keats had probably wished to avoid seeming merely to imitate Byron, as he might have seemed to do had he written in the ottava rima of Don Juan, the one perfectly fit measure for such a blend of fantasy and satire as he was attempting. But not even Keats’s power over the Spenserian stanza could make it a fit vehicle for his purpose. Thomson and Shenstone had used it in work of mild and leisurely playfulness, but to bite in satire or sting in epigram it cannot effectively be bent. To my sense the precedent most in Keats’s mind was not these, but the before-mentioned translation of Wieland’s Oberon by Sotheby. Sotheby had invented a modified form of the Spenserian stanza riming abbaccddc instead of abcbbdbdd and keeping the final alexandrine. Much of the machinery and spirit of The Cap and Bells—the magic journeys through the air—the comic atmosphere and adventures of the courts—are closely akin to the jocular parts of this Oberon. Some of the passages of mere fun and playfulness are pleasant enough, like that description of a dilapidated hackney coach (much resembling the four-wheeler of our youth) which Hunt selected to publish in the Indicator while Keats was lying sick in his house the next year: but the attempts at social satire are almost always feeble and tiresome, and still more so those at political satire, turning for the most part rather obscurely on the scandals, then at their height, attending the relations of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In the faery narrative itself there break forth momentary flashes from the true genius of the poet, such as might delight the reader if he could lose his sense of irritation at the rubbish from amidst which they gleam. As thus, of the princess’s flight through the air (was Keats thinking, in the first line, of the children carried heavenward by angels in Orcagna’s Triumph of Death?)

As in old pictures tender cherubim A child’s soul thro’ the sapphir’d canvas bear, So, thro’ a real heaven, on they swim With the sweet princess on her plumag’d lair, Speed giving to the winds her lustrous hair.

Or this, telling how Bertha of Canterbury, in Keats’s queer new conception of her, was really a changeling born in the jungle:—

She is a changeling of my management; She was born at midnight in an Indian wild; Her mother’s screams with the striped tiger’s blent, While the torch-bearing slaves a halloo sent Into the jungles.

Or again, some of the stanzas describing the welcome prepared in Elfinan’s capital for the faery princess after her flight: note in the last the persistence with which Keats carries into these incongruous climates his passion for the English spring flowers:—

The morn is full of holiday; loud bells With rival clamours ring from every spire; Cunningly-station’d music dies and swells In echoing places; when the winds respire, Light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire; A metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm, Comes from the northern suburbs; rich attire Freckles with red and gold the moving swarm; While here and there clear trumpets blow a keen alarm.

And again:—