"as a bear encompassed round with dogs, Who having pinched a few and made them cry, The rest stand all aloof and bark at him."
Keats also attended a prize-fight between two of the most skilful and enduring "light-weights,"—Randal and Turner. It was, I believe, at that remarkable wager, when, the men being so equally matched and accomplished, they had been sparring for three-quarters of an hour before a blow had been struck. In describing the rapidity of Randal's blows while the other was falling, Keats tapped his fingers on the window-pane.
I make no apology for recording these events in his life; they are characteristics of the natural man,—and prove, moreover, that the indulgence in such exhibitions did not for one moment blunt the gentler emotions of his heart, or vulgarize his inborn love of all that was beautiful and true. His own line was the axiom of his moral existence, his political creed:—"A thing of beauty is a joy forever"; and I can fancy no coarser consociation able to win him from this faith. Had he been born in squalor, he would have emerged a gentleman. Keats was not an easily swayable man; in differing with those he loved, his firmness kept equal pace with the sweetness of his persuasion; but with the rough and the unlovable he kept no terms,—within the conventional precincts, I mean, of social order.
From Well Walk he moved to another quarter of the Heath,—Wentworth Place the name, if I recollect. Here he became a sharing inmate with Mr. Charles Armitage Brown, a gentleman who had been a Russia merchant, and had retired to a literary leisure upon an independence. I do not know how they became acquainted; but Keats never had a more zealous, a firmer, or more practical friend and adviser than Brown. His robust eagerness and zeal, with a headstrong determination of will, led him into an undue prejudice against the brother, George, respecting some money-transactions with John, which, however, the former redeemed to the perfect satisfaction of all the friends of the family. After the death of Keats, Armitage Brown went to reside in Florence, where he remained some few years; then he settled at Plymouth, and there brought out a work entitled, "Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems. Being his Sonnets clearly developed; with his Character, drawn chiefly from his Works." It cannot be said that in this work the author has clearly educed his theory; but, in the face of his failure upon that main point, the book is interesting, for the heart-whole zeal and homage with which he has gone into his subject. Brown was no half-measure man; "whatsoever his hand found to do, he did it with his might." His last stage-scene in life was passed in New Zealand, whither he emigrated with his son, having purchased some land,—or, as his own letter stated, having been thoroughly defrauded in the transaction. Brown accompanied Keats in his tour in the Hebrides, a worthy event in the poet's career, seeing that it led to the production of that magnificent sonnet to "Ailsa Rock." As a passing observation, and to show how the minutest circumstance did not escape him, he told me, that, when he first came upon the view of Loch Lomond, the sun was setting; the lake was in shade, and of a deep blue; and at the farther end was "a slash across it, of deep orange." The description of the traceried window in the "Eve of St. Agnes" gives proof of the intensity of his feeling for color.
It was during his abode in Wentworth Place that the savage and vulgar attacks upon the "Endymion" appeared in the "Quarterly Review," and in "Blackwood's Magazine." There was, indeed, ruffian, low-lived work,—especially in the latter publication, which had reached a pitch of blackguardism, (it used to be called "Blackguard's Magazine,") with personal abuse,—ABUSE,—the only word,—that would damage the sale of any review at this day. The very reverse of its present management. There would not now be the inclination for such rascal bush-fighting; and even then, or indeed at any period of the Magazine's career, the stalwart and noble mind of John Wilson would never have made itself editorially responsible for such trash. As to him of the "Quarterly," a thimble would have been "a mansion, a court," for his whole soul. The style of the articles directed against the Radical writers, and those especially whom the party had nicknamed the "Cockney school" of poetry, may be conceived by its provoking the following observation from Hazlitt to me:—"To pay those fellows, Sir, in their own coin, the way would be, to begin with Walter Scott, and have at his clump-foot." "Verily, the former times were not better than these."
To say that these disgusting misrepresentations did not affect the consciousness and self-respect of Keats would be to underrate the sensitiveness of his nature. He felt the insult, but more the injustice of the treatment he had received; he told me so, as we lay awake one night, when I slept in his brother's bed. They had injured him in the most wanton manner; but if they, or my Lord Byron, ever for one moment supposed that he was crushed or even cowed in spirit by the treatment he had received, never were they more deluded. "Snuffed out by an article," indeed! He had infinitely more magnanimity, in its fullest sense, than that very spoiled, self-willed, and mean-souled man,—and I have authority for the last term. To say nothing of personal and private transactions, pages 204-207 in the first volume of Mr. Monckton Milnes's life of our poet will be full authority for my estimate of his Lordship. "Johnny Keats" had, indeed, "a little body with a mighty heart," and he showed it in the best way: not by fighting the ruffians,—though he could have done that,—but by the resolve that he would produce brain-work which not one of their party could approach; and he did.
In the year 1820 appeared the "Lamia," "Isabella," "Eve of St. Agnes," and "Hyperion," etc. But, alas! the insidious disease which carried him off had made its approach, and he was going to, or had already departed for, Italy, attended by his constant and self-sacrificing friend, Severn. Keats's mother died of consumption; and he nursed his younger brother in the same disease, to the last,—and, by so doing, in all probability, hastened his own summons. Upon the publication of the last volume of poems, Charles Lamb wrote one of his own finely appreciative and cordial critiques in the "Morning Chronicle." This was sent to me in the country, where I had for some time resided. I had not heard of the dangerous state of Keats's health,—only that he and Severn were going to Italy; it was, therefore, an unprepared shock which brought me the news that he had died in Rome.
Mr. Monckton Milnes has related the anecdote of Keats's introduction to Wordsworth, with the latter's appreciation of the "Hymn to Pan," which its author had been desired to repeat, and the Rydal Mount poet's snow-capped comment upon it,—"Uhm! a pretty piece of Paganism!" Mr. Milnes, with his genial and placable nature, has made an amiable defence for the apparent coldness of Wordsworth's appreciation,—"That it was probably intended for some slight rebuke to his youthful compeer, whom he saw absorbed in an order of ideas that to him appeared merely sensuous, and would have desired that the bright traits of Greek mythology should be sobered down by a graver faith." Keats, like Shakspeare, and every other true poet, put his whole soul into what he imagined, portrayed, or embodied; and hence he appeared the young Greek, "suckled in that creed outworn." The wonder is, that Mr. Wordsworth forgot to quote himself. From Keats's description of his Mentor's manner, as well as behavior, that evening, I cannot but believe it to have been one of the usual ebullitions of the egoism, not to say of the uneasiness, known to those who were accustomed to hear the great moral philosopher discourse upon his own productions and descant upon those of a contemporary. During this same visit, he was dilating upon some question in poetry, when, upon Keats's insinuating a confirmatory suggestion to his argument, Mrs. Wordsworth put her hand upon his arm, saying,—"Mr. Wordsworth is never interrupted." Again, during the same interview, some one had said that the next Waverley novel was to be "Rob Roy"; when Mr. Wordsworth took down his volume of Ballads, and read to the company "Rob Roy's Grave,"—then, returning it to the shelf, observed, "I do not know what more Mr. Scott can have to say upon the subject." When Leigh Hunt had his first interview with Wordsworth, the latter lectured to him—finely, indeed—upon his own writings; and repeated the entire sonnet,
"Great men have been among us,"—
which Hunt said he did "in a grand and earnest tone." Some one in a company quoting the passage from "Henry V.,"—