Lord Houghton gives an attractive picture of Keats at what was probably his happiest time, the winter of 1817-18, when “Endymion” was preparing for the press. I cannot condense it to any purpose, and certainly cannot improve it, so I reproduce the passage as it stands:
“Keats passed the winter of 1817-18 at Hampstead, gaily enough among his friends. His society was much sought after, from the delightful combination of earnestness and pleasantry which distinguished his intercourse with all men. There was no effort about him to say fine things, but he did say them most effectively, and they gained considerably by his happy transition of manner. He joked well or ill as it happened, and with a laugh which still echoes sweetly in many ears; but at the mention of oppression or wrong, or at any calumny against those he loved, he rose into grave manliness at once, and seemed like a tall man. His habitual gentleness made his occasional looks of indignation almost terrible. On one occasion, when a gross falsehood respecting the young artist, Severn, was repeated and dwelt upon, he left the room, declaring ‘he should be ashamed to sit with men who could utter and believe such things.’”
Severn himself avers that Keats never spoke of any one unless by way of saying something in his favour.
Cowden Clarke’s anecdote tells in the same direction, that once, when some local tyranny was being discussed, Keats amused the party by shouting: “Why is there not a human dust-hole into which to tumble such fellows?” His own Carlylean phrase seems to have tickled Keats as well as others, for he repeated it in a field walk with Haydon: “Haydon, what a pity it is there is not a human dust-hole!”
To this may be added a few words from a letter addressed from Teignmouth by Keats to Mr. Taylor in April 1818:—
“I know nothing, I have read nothing: and I mean to follow Solomon’s directions, ‘Get learning, get understanding.’ I find earlier days are gone by; I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society, some with their wit, some with their benevolence, some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet—and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of great Nature. There is but one way for me: the road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it; and for that end purpose retiring for some years. I have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love for philosophy. Were I calculated for the former, I should be glad; but, as I am not, I shall turn all my soul to the latter.”
This “exquisite sense of the luxurious” must have prompted an interjection of Keats in a rather earlier letter to Bailey (November 1817): “Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!”
One does not usually associate the suspicious character with the unselfish and generous character. Even apart from Haydon’s, there is ample evidence to show that Keats was generous, and, in a sense, unselfish; although a man of creative or productive genius, intent upon his own work, and subordinating everything else to it, is seldom unselfish in the fullest ordinary sense of the term. But he was certainly suspicious. Of this temper we have already seen some painful ebullitions in his letters to Fanny Brawne. These might be ascribed mainly to the acute feelings of a lover, the morbid impressions of an invalid. But, in truth, Keats always was and had been suspicious. In a letter to his brothers, dated in January 1818, he refers, in a tone of some soreness, to objections which Hunt had raised against points of treatment in the first Book of “Endymion,” adding: “The fact is, he and Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously; and, from several hints I have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made.” Still earlier, writing to Haydon, he had confessed to “a horrid morbidity of temperament.” In a letter of June 1818 to Bailey he says: “You have all your life (I think so) believed everybody: I have suspected everybody.” By January 1820 he has got into a condition of decided ennui, not far removed from misanthropy, and the company of acquaintances, and even of friends, is a tedium to him. This was a month before the beginning of his fatal illness. It is true, he was then in love. He writes to Mrs. George Keats:—
“I dislike mankind in general.... The worst of men are those whose self-interests are their passions; the next, those whose passions are their self-interest. Upon the whole, I dislike mankind. Whatever people on the other side of the question may advance, they cannot deny that we are always surprised at hearing of a good action, and never of a bad one.... If you were in England, I dare say you would be able to pick out more amusement from society than I am able to do. To me it is as dull as Louisville is to you. [Then follow several remarks on Hunt, Haydon, the Misses Reynolds, and Dilke.] ’Tis best to remain aloof from people, and like their good parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull processes of their everyday lives. When once a person has smoked the vapidness of the routine of society, he must have either some self-interest or the love of some sort of distinction to keep him in good humour with it. All I can say is that, standing at Charing Cross, and looking east, west, north, and south, I see nothing but dulness.”
“I carry all things to an extreme,” he had written to Bailey in July 1818, “so that when I have any little vexation it grows in five minutes into a theme fit for Sophocles. Then and in that temper if I write to any friend, I have so little self-possession that I give him matter for grieving, at the very time perhaps when I am laughing at a pun.” A phrase which Keats used in a letter of the 24th of October 1820, addressed to Mrs. Brawne, may also be, in the main, a true item of self-portraiture: “If ever there was a person born without the faculty of hoping, I am he.” Too much weight, however, should not be given to this, as the poet’s disease had then brought him far onward towards his grave. Severn does not seem to have regarded such a tendency as innate in Keats, for he wrote, at a far later date, “No mind was ever more exultant in youthful feeling.”