These words of Fanny Brawne, then Mrs Lindon, to Medwin are not well known, and it is only fair to quote them as proving that if in youth the lady had not been willing to sacrifice her gaieties and her pleasure in admiration for the sake of her lover’s peace of mind, she showed at any rate in after life a true and loyal understanding of his character.
While Keats was staying in Kentish Town Severn went often to see him, and in the second week of July writes to Haslam struggling to keep up his hopes for their friend in spite of appearances and of Keats’s own conviction:—‘It will give you pleasure to say I trust he will still recover. His appearance is shocking and now reminds me of poor Tom and I have been inclined to think him in the same way. For himself—he makes sure of it—and seems prepossessed that he cannot recover—now I seem more than ever not to think so and I know you will agree with me when you see him—are you aware another volume of Poems was published last week—in which is “Lovely Isabel—poor simple Isabel”? I have been delighted with this volume and think it will even please the million.’ During the same period Shelley’s friends the Gisbornes twice met him at Leigh Hunt’s. The first time was on June 23. Mrs Gisborne writes in her journal that having lately been ill he spoke little and in a low tone: ‘the Endymion was not mentioned, this person might not be its author; but on observing his countenance and eyes I persuaded myself that he was the very person.’ It is always Keats’s eyes that strangers thus notice first: the late Mrs Procter, who met him only once, at a lecture of Hazlitt’s, remembered them to the end of her long life as like those of one ‘who had been looking at some glorious sight.’ This first time Keats and Mrs Gisborne had some talk about music and singing, but some three weeks later, on July 12th, the same lady notes, ‘drank tea at Mr Hunt’s; I was much pained by the sight of poor Keats, under sentence of death from Dr Lamb. He never spoke and looks emaciated.’
Doubtless it was under the impression of this last meeting that Mr Gisborne sent Shelley the account of Keats’s state of health which moved Shelley to write in his own and his wife’s name urging that Keats should come to Italy to avoid the English winter and take up his quarters with or near them at Pisa. Shelley repeats nearly the same kind and just opinion of Endymion as he had previously expressed in writing to the Olliers; saying he has lately read it again, ‘and ever with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion. This people in general will not endure, and that is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold. I feel persuaded that you are capable of the greatest things, so you but will.’ At the same time Shelley sends Keats a copy of his Cenci. Keats’s answer shows him touched and grateful for the kindness offered, but nevertheless, as always where Shelley is in question, in some degree embarrassed and ungracious. He says nothing of the invitation to Pisa, though he was already considering the possibility of going to winter in Italy. As to Endymion, he says he would willingly unwrite it did he care so much as once about reputation, and as to The Cenci, and The Prometheus announced as forthcoming, he makes the well-known, rather obscurely worded criticism of which the main drift is that to his mind Shelley pours out new poems too quickly and does not concentrate enough upon the purely artistic aims and qualities of his work. These, Keats goes on, are ‘by many spirits nowadays considered the Mammon. A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose which may be the God. An artist must serve Mammon; he must have ‘self-concentration’—selfishness, perhaps. You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.’
Keats in these admonitions was no doubt remembering views of Shelley’s such as are expressed in his words ‘I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.’ Judging by them, his mind would seem to have veered back from the convictions which inspired the pre-amble to the revised Hyperion the autumn before, insisting, in language which might almost seem borrowed from the preface to Alastor, on the doom that awaits poets who play their art in selfishness instead of making it their paramount aim to ‘pour balm’ upon the miseries of mankind. With reference to the promised Prometheus he adds, ‘could I have my own wish effected, you would have it still in manuscript, or be but now putting an end to the second act. I remember your advising me not to publish my first blights, on Hampstead Heath. I am returning advice upon your hands.’ Finally, mentioning that he is sending out a copy of his lately published Lamia volume, he says that most of its contents have been written above two years (a slip of memory, the statement being only true of Isabella and of one or two minor pieces) and would never have been published now but for hope of gain.
Shelley’s letter was written from Pisa on the 27th of July and received by Keats on the 13th of August. On the previous day he had fled suddenly from under the Leigh Hunts’ roof, having been thrown into a fit of uncontrollable nervous agitation by the act of a discharged servant, who kept back a letter to him from Fanny Brawne and on quitting the house left it to be delivered, opened and two days late, by one of the children. His first impulse on leaving the Hunts’ was to go back to his old lodging with Bentley the postman, but this Mrs Brawne would not hear of, and took him into her own house, where she and her daughter for the next few weeks nursed him and did all they could for his comfort.
During those unhappy months at Kentish Town Keats’s best work was given to the world. First, in Leigh Hunt’s Indicator for May 20, La Belle Dame sans Merci, signed, obviously in bitterness, ‘Caviare’ (Hamlet’s ‘caviare to the general’), and unluckily enfeebled by changes for which we find no warrant either in Keats’s autograph or in extant copies made by his friends Woodhouse and Brown. Keats’s judgment in revising his own work had evidently by this time become unsure. We have seen how in recasting Hyperion the previous autumn he changed some of the finest of his original lines for the worse: and it is conceivable that in the case of La Belle Dame he may have done so again of his own motion, but much more likely, I should say, that the changes, which are all in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt’s suggestion and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference, or perhaps even from that very sense of lack of sympathy in most readers which made him sign ‘Caviare.’ Hunt introduced the piece with some commendatory words, showing that he at all events felt nothing amiss with it in its new shape, and added a short account of the old French poem by Alain Chartier from which the title was taken. It is to be deplored that in some recent and what should be standard editions of Keats the poem stands as thus printed in the Indicator, instead of in the original form rightly given by Lord Houghton from Brown’s transcript, in which it had become a classic of the language.[4]
It is surely a perversion in textual criticism to perpetuate the worse version merely because it happens to be the one printed in Keats’s lifetime. No sensitive reader but must feel that ‘wretched wight’ is a vague and vapid substitute for the clear image of the ‘knight-at-arms,’ while ‘sigh’d full sore’ is ill replaced by ‘sighed deep,’ and ‘wild wild eyes’ still worse by ‘wild sad eyes’: that the whimsical particularity of the ‘kisses four,’ removed in the new version, gives the poem an essential part of its savour (Keats was fond of these fanciful numberings, compare the damsels who stand ‘by fives and sevens’ in the Induction to Calidore, and the ‘four laurell’d spirits’ in the Epistle to George Felton Matthew): and again, that the loose broken construction—‘So kissed to sleep’ is quite uncharacteristic of the poet: and yet again, that the phrase ‘And there we slumbered on the moss,’ is what any amateur rimester might write about any pair of afternoon picknickers, while the phrase which was cancelled for it, ‘And there she lulled me asleep,’ falls with exactly the mystic cadence and hushing weight upon the spirit which was required. The reader may be interested to hear the effect which these changes had upon the late William Morris, than whom no man had a better right to speak. Mr Sydney Cockerell writes me:—
In February 1894 the last sheets of the Kelmscott Press Keats, edited by F. S. Ellis, were being printed. A specimen of each sheet of every book was brought in to Morris as soon as it came off the press. I was with him when he happened to open the sheet on which La Belle Dame sans Merci was printed. He began to read it and was suddenly aware of unfamiliar words, ‘wretched wight’ for ‘knight at arms,’ verses 4 and 5 transposed, and several changes in verse 7. Great was his indignation. He swiftly altered the words and then read the poem to me, remarking that it was the germ from which all the poetry of his group had sprung—The sheet was reprinted and the earlier and better version restored—I still have the cancelled sheet with his corrections.