And again: ‘let me have another opportunity of years and I will not die without being remember’d. Take care of yourself dear that we may both be well in the summer.’
He began to get about again, and by the 25th of March was well enough to go into town to the private view of Haydon’s huge picture, finished at last, of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. This was the occasion which Haydon in his autobiography describes in language so vivid and with a self-congratulation so boisterous and contagious that it is impossible in reading not to share his sense of the day’s triumph. As in the case of the Elgin marbles three years earlier, he had achieved his object in the face of a thousand difficulties and enmities, living the while on the bounty of friends, some of them rich, others, as we know, the reverse, whom his ardour and importunity had whipped up to his help. At the last moment he had contrived to scrape together money enough to stop the mouths of his creditors and to pay the cost of hiring the Egyptian Hall and hanging up his gigantic canvas there, with the help of three gigantic guardsmen, his models and assistants; and the world of taste and fashion, realising how Haydon had been right and the established dilettanti wrong in regard to the Elgin marbles, were determined to be on the safe side this time in case he should turn out to be right also about the merits of his own work.
Some exalted and many distinguished personages had been to see the picture in his studio, and now, on the opening day, the hall was thronged in answer to his invitations. ‘All the ministers and their ladies, all the foreign ambassadors, all the bishops, all the beauties in high life, all the geniuses in town, and everybody of any note, were invited and came.... The room was full. Keats and Hazlitt were up in a corner, really rejoicing.’ Hazlitt expressed in the Edinburgh Review for the following August a tempered, far from undiscriminating admiration of certain qualities in the painting. Keats himself merely mentions to his sister Fanny, without comment, the fact of his having been there. One wonders whether he witnessed the scene which Haydon goes on in his effective way to narrate.
He had tried to treat the head of Christ unconventionally, had painted and repainted it, and was nervous and dissatisfied over the result. The crowd seemed doubtful too. ‘Everybody seemed afraid, when in walked, with all the dignity of her majestic presence, Mrs Siddons, like a Ceres or a Juno. The whole room remained dead silent, and allowed her to think. After a few minutes Sir George Beaumont, who was extremely anxious, said in a very delicate manner, “How do you like the Christ?” Everybody listened for her reply. After a moment, in a deep, loud, tragic tone she said, “It is completely successful.” I was then presented with all the ceremonies of a levee, and she invited me to her house in an awful tone.’... I think it is not recorded whether Northcote’s acid comment in a different sense, ‘Mr Haydon, your ass is the Saviour of your picture’, was made on this famous occasion or privately. Certainly the ass, judging by photographs of the picture as it now hangs in a wrecked condition at Cincinnati, is the object that first takes the eye with its black ears and shoulders strongly relieved against the white drapery of Christ, and what looks like the realistic treatment of the creature in contrast with the ‘ideal,’ that is the vapidly pompous and pretentious, portraiture of geniuses past and present, Newton, Voltaire, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Keats, introduced among the crowd in the foreground.[2]
In the course of April the improvement in Keats’s health failed to maintain itself. We find him complaining much of nervous irritability and general weakness. He is recommended, one would like to know by whom, to avoid the excitement of writing or even reading poetry and turn to the study of geometry—of all things!—as a sedative. He has no strength for the walk to Walthamstow to see his young sister, and even shrinks from the fatigue of going by coach. Brown having arranged to let his house again and go for another tramp through Scotland—not, one would have said under the circumstances, the course of a very considerate or solicitous friend, but he was probably misled by Keats’s apparent improvement the month before—Brown having made this arrangement, Keats, also on the recommendation of the doctors, thinks of sailing with him on the packet and returning alone, in hopes of getting strength from the sea-trip to Scotland and back. This plan, when it came to the point, he gave up, and only accompanied his friend down the river as far as Gravesend. Having to turn out of Wentworth Place in favour of Brown’s summer tenants, he thought of taking a lodging a few doors from the house where Leigh Hunt was then living in Kentish Town, then still a village on the way between London and Hampstead. Almost at the same time he writes to Dilke in regard to his future course of life, ‘My mind has been at work all over the world to find out what to do. I have my choice of three things, or at least two, South America, or surgeon to an Indiaman; which last, I think, will be my fate.’ For the present he moved as he had proposed to Kentish Town (2 Wesleyan Place). Here he stayed for six or seven weeks (approximately May 6-June 23), and then, having suffered a set-back in the shape of two slight returns of hæmorrhage from the lung, moved for the sake of better nursing into the household of the ever kind and affectionate, but not less ever feckless and ill-managing, Leigh Hunts at 13 Mortimer Terrace. With them he remained for another period of about seven weeks, ending on August 12th.
Those three months in Kentish Town were to Keats a time of distressing weakness and for the most part of terrible inward fretfulness and despondency. Early in the time he speaks of intending soon to begin (meaning begin again) on The Cap and Bells. When we read those vivid stanzas quoted above (p. 446) describing the welcome by the crowd of princess Bellanaine after her aerial journey, we are inevitably reminded of an event—the triumphal approach and entry of Queen Caroline into London from Dover—which happened on the 9th of June this same year. It would be tempting to suppose that Keats may have witnessed the event and been thereby inspired to his description. But he was too ill for such outings, and moreover the earlier of the two stanzas comes well back in the poem (sixty-fourth out of eighty-eight) and it is impossible to suppose that in his then state he could have added so much to the fragment as that would imply. So we must credit the stanzas to imagination only, and take it as certain that his only real occupation with poetry in these days was in passing through the press the new volume of poems (Lamia, Isabella, etc.,) which his friends had at last persuaded him to put forward. Even on this task his hold must have been loose, seeing that the publishers put in without his knowledge a note which he afterwards sharply disowned, to the effect that his reason for dropping Hyperion had been the ill reception of Endymion by the critics.
His only outing, so far as we hear, was to an exhibition of English historical portraits at the British Institution, of which he writes to Brown with some interest and vividness. He tells at the same time of an invitation, which he was not well enough to accept, to meet Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Haydon, and some others at supper. Leigh Hunt, despite his engrossing literary and editorial occupations and a recent trying illness of his own, did his best, while Keats was his inmate, to keep him interested and amused. Keats in writing to his sister gratefully acknowledges as much. ‘Mr Hunt does everything in his power to make the time pass as agreeably with me as possible. I read the greatest part of the day and generally take two half-hour walks a day up and down the terrace which is very much pester’d with cries, ballad singers, and street music.’ But the obsession of his passion, its consuming jealousy and hopelessness, gave him little respite. He would keep his eyes fixed all day, as he afterwards avowed, on Hampstead; and once when, at Hunt’s suggestion, they took a drive as far as the Heath, he burst into a flood of unwonted tears and declared his heart was breaking.
His letters to his beloved in these same months are too agonizing to read. He is so little himself in them, so merely and utterly, to borrow words of his own, ‘a fever of himself,’ that many of us could not endure, when they were first published, the thought of this Keats-that-is-no-Keats being exposed before a hastily reading and carelessly judging after-world, and even now cannot but regret it. All the morbid self-torturing elements of his nature, which in health it had been a main part of the battle of his life to subdue, and of which he never suffered those about him to see a sign, now burst from control and flamed out against the girl he loved and the friends he loved next best to her. Once only, at the beginning of the time, he could write contentedly, telling her that he is marking for her the most beautiful passages in Spenser, ‘comforting myself in being somewhat occupied to give you however small a pleasure. It has lightened my time very much. God bless you.’ His other letters are in a tortured, almost frenzied, strain of jealous suspicion and reproach against her and against those of his intimates who had, as he imagined, disapproved their attachment, or pried into or made light of it, or else had shown her too marked attentions. Among the former were Reynolds and his sisters, from whom for the time being he was tacitly estranged. Among the latter he includes Brown and Dilke, with especial bitterness against Brown. Between them all they had made, he vows, a football of his heart, and again, ‘Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he cried to Ophelia, “Go to a Nunnery, go, go!”.’ That these were but the half-delirious promptings of his fevered blood is clear from the fact that a very few weeks both before and after such outbreaks he wrote to Brown as though counting him as much a friend as ever. As for his betrothed, wound as his reproaches might at the time, we know from her own words that they left no lasting impression of unkindness on her memory. Writing in riper years to Medwin, who had asked her whether the accounts current in Rome of Keats’s violence of nature were true, she says:—
That his sensibility was most acute, is true, and his passions were very strong, but not violent, if by that term, violence of temper is implied. His was no doubt susceptible, but his anger seemed rather to turn on himself than on others, and in moments of greatest irritation, it was only by a sort of savage despondency that he sometimes grieved and wounded his friends. Violence such as the letter describes, was quite foreign to his nature. For more than a twelvemonth before quitting England, I saw him every day, often witnessed his sufferings, both mental and bodily, and I do not hesitate to say, that he never could have addressed an unkind expression, much less a violent one, to any human being.[3]