This book, the long promised, has at last appeared, and we must confess that, from the time expended in its preparation, we expected a more satisfactory result. The biography, though written in a style of elaborate elegance, and pleasing enough as regards cadence of period and felicity of phrase, tells little about Keats which is new, and leaves many obscure passages of his life in the same darkness in which it found them. Nothing to the purpose is told of the lady who was the object of Keats's passionate love, and who shares with consumption in being the dismal cause of his early death. Mr. Milnes points triumphantly to the new facts and private letters he has included in the volume, in proof that the common impression that Keats lacked manliness of character, is an error; but instead of proving that Keats was a strong man, he has very nearly proved that he himself is a sentimentalist. The characteristic of Keats is sensitiveness to external impressions, the characteristic of Milnes is sensitiveness to self; the page of one throngs with delicious sensations, but leaves no strong impression of character; that of the other is pervaded by a thoughtful ennui, and leaves an impression of egotistic weakness of character. Of course, Keats is the stronger man of the two, and a stronger man even than Milnes's musical sentences indicate, but still not a strong man in the strict meaning of the phrase.
The letters of Keats are exceedingly interesting, and some of them fine specimens of brilliant epistolary composition, but we think there is a general tone of languid jauntiness observable in them, which shows a certain feebleness at the heart of his being. He seems a man whom every one would desire to see placed in happy circumstances, but not one who would bear bravely up under bad circumstances. The state of his finances occupies a good portion of his letters, and it is often very pleasantly stated. As early as 1817, he speaks of receiving a note for £20, and avows his intention of destroying with it "some of the minor heads of that hydra, the dun;" to conquer which he says, the knight need have no sword or shield, but only the "Bank-note of Faith and Cash of Salvation, and set out against the monster invoking the aid of no Archimago or Urganda, but finger me the paper, light as the Sybil's leaves in Virgil, whereat the fiend skulks off with his tail between his legs. . . I think," he adds, "I could make a nice little allegorical poem, called "The Dun," where we would have the Castle of Carelessness, the Drawbridge of Credit, Sir Novelty Fashion's expedition against the City of Tailors, &c., &c." There is a good deal of this coquetry with indigence in the volume.
There is one curious letter to Reynolds, referring to Wordsworth's calling the exquisite Hymn to Pan, in "Endymion," "a pretty piece of Paganism." Keats took the words in a contemptuous sense, and wrote a letter from the feelings it excited, reminding us in its style of an essay by Emerson. We extract it as almost the best thing in the book.
Hampstead, February 3, 1818.
My Dear Reynolds,—I thank you for your dish of filberts. Would I could get a basket of them by way of dessert every day for the sum of two pence, (two sonnets on Robin Hood, sent by the two penny post.) Would we were a sort of athereal pigs, and turned loose to feed upon spiritual mast and acorns! which would be merely a squirrel and feeding upon filberts; for what is a squirrel but an airy pig, or a filbert but a sort of archangelical acorn? About the nuts being worth cracking, all I can say is, that where there are a throng of delightful images ready drawn, simplicity is the only thing. It may be said that we ought to read our contemporaries, that Wordsworth, &c., should have their due from us. But, for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing. Sancho will invent a journey heavenward as well as any body. We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive; a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How would they lose their beauty, were they to throng into the highway, crying out "Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!" Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this; each of the moderns, like an Elector of Hanover, governs his petty state, and knows how many straws are swept daily from the causeways in all his dominions, and has a continual itching that all the housewives should have their coppers well scoured. The ancients were emperors of vast provinces; they had only heard of the remote ones, and scarcely cared to visit them. I will cut all this. I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular. Why should we be of the tribe of Manassah, when we can wander with Esau? Why should we kick against the pricks when we can walk on roses? Why should we be owls when we can be eagles? Why be teazed with "nice-eyed wagtails," when we have in sight "the cherub Contemplation?" Why, with Wordsworth's "Matthew with a bough of wilding in his hand," when we can have Jacques "under an oak," &c.? The secret of the "bough of wilding" will run through your head faster than I can write it. Old Matthew spoke to him some years ago on some nothing, and because he happens in an evening walk to imagine the figure of the old man, he must stamp it down in black and white, and it is henceforth sacred. I don't mean to deny Wordsworth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to say we need not be teazed with grandeur and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive. Let us have the old Poets and Robin Hood. Your letter and its sonnets gave me more pleasure than will the Fourth Book of "Childe Harold," and the whole of any body's life and opinions.
In return for your dish of filberts, I have gathered a few catkins. [2] I hope they'll look pretty.
"No, those days are gone away," &c.
I hope you will like them—they are at least written in the spirit of outlawry. Here are the Mermaid lines;—
"Souls of Poets dead and gone," &c.
In the hope that these scribblings will be some amusement for you this evening, I remain, copying on the hill,