Keats’s sentiment towards women appears to have been that of a shy youth who was at the same time a critical man. Miss Brawne enslaved him, but did not inspire him with that tender and boundless confidence which the accepted and engaged lover of a virtuous girl naturally feels. With one woman, Miss Cox, he seems to have been thoroughly at his ease; and one can gather from his expressions that this unusual result depended upon a fair counterbalance of claims. While she was self-centred in her beauty and attractiveness, he was self-centred in his intellect and aspirations. There is an early poem of his—the reverse of a good one—which seems worth quoting here. I presume he may have been in his twenty-first year or so when he wrote it:—
“Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain,
Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies;
Without that modest softening that enhances
The downcast eye, repentant of the pain
That its mild light creates to heal again;
E’en then elate my spirit leaps and prances,
E’en then my soul with exultation dances,
For that to love so long I’ve dormant lain.
But, when I see thee meek and kind and tender,
Heavens! how desperately do I adore
Thy winning graces! To be thy defender
I hotly burn—to be a Calidore,
A very Red-cross Knight, a stout Leander—
Might I be loved by thee like these of yore.
Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair,
Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast,
Are things on which the dazzled senses rest
Till the fond fixèd eyes forget they stare.
From such fine pictures, Heavens! I cannot dare
To turn my admiration, though unpossessed
They be of what is worthy—though not dressed
In lovely modesty and virtues rare.
Yet these I leave as thoughtless as a lark;
These lures I straight forget—e’en ere I dine
Or thrice my palate moisten. But, when I mark
Such charms with mild intelligences shine,
My ear is open like a greedy shark
To catch the tunings of a voice divine.
Ah who can e’er forget so fair a being?
Who can forget her half-retiring sweets?
God! she is like a milk-white lamb that bleats
For man’s protection. Surely the All-seeing,
Who joys to see us with His gifts agreeing,
Will never give him pinions who entreats
Such innocence to ruin—who vilely cheats
A dove-like bosom. In truth there is no freeing
One’s thoughts from such a beauty. When I hear
A lay that once I saw her hand awake,
Her form seems floating palpable and near.
Had I e’er seen her from an arbour take
A dewy flower, oft would that hand appear,
And o’er my eyes the trembling moisture shake.”
From the opening lines of this poem I gather that Keats, when he wrote it, had never been in love; but that he had a feeling towards pure, sweet-minded, lovely women, which made him, in idea, their champion and votary. Later on, in June 1818, he wrote to Bailey that his love for his brothers had “always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon him.” And in July of the same year, also to Bailey:—
“I am certain that our fair friends [i.e. the Misses Reynolds] are glad I should come for the mere sake of my coming; but I am certain I bring with me a vexation they are better without.... I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women: at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality. I thought them ethereal—above men; I find them perhaps equal—great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. I do not like to think insults in a lady’s company; I commit a crime with her which absence would not have known.... When I am among women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since my boyhood.... After all, I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes them or not.”
In his letter about Miss Cox as “Charmian,” written perhaps just before he knew Miss Brawne, Keats said: “I hope I shall never marry.... The mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things I have stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart.... These things, combined with the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in.”
We have seen, in one of Keats’s letters to Miss Brawne, that he shrank from the thought of having their mutual love made known to any of their friends. But he went further than this. As well after as before he had fallen in love with Miss Brawne, and had become engaged to her, he could express a contrary state of feeling. Thus, in addressing Mr. Taylor, on August 23, 1819, he says: “I equally dislike the favour of the public with the love of a woman; they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence.” And to his brother George, September 17, 1819: “Nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the ridiculous as love. A man in love, I do think, cuts the sorriest figure in the world. Even when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, I could burst out laughing in his face; his pathetic visage becomes irresistible.” The letters to George, in fact, give no hint of any love for Miss Brawne, still less of an engagement.
From all these details it would appear that Keats was by no means an ardent devotee of the feminine type of character. He thought there was but little congruity between the Ideal and the Real of womanhood. He parted company, in this regard, with Shakespeare and Shelley, and adhered rather to Milton. So it was before he was in love; and to be in love was not the occasion of any essential alteration of view. He ascribed to Fanny Brawne the same volatile appetite for amusement, the same propensity for flirtation, the same comparative shallowness of heart-affection, which he imputed to her sex in general. He loved her passionately: he believed in her not passionately, nor even intensely. That he was hard hit by the blind and winged archer was a patent fact; but he still knew the archer to be blind.
In a room, says Keats’s surgical fellow-student, Mr. Stephens, he was always at the window peering out into space, and it was customary to call the window-seat “Keats’s place.” In his last illness he told Severn that the intensest of his pleasures had been to watch the growth of flowers; and, after lying quiet one day, he whispered, “I feel the daisies [or “the flowers">[ growing over me.” In an early stage of his fatal illness, February 16, 1820, he had written pathetically to James Rice: “How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not ‘babble,’ I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy—their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hot-houses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our spring are what I want to see again.” Music was another of his great enjoyments. He would sit for hours while Miss Charlotte Reynolds played to him on the pianoforte; and a wrong note in an orchestra has been known to rouse his pugnacity, and make him wish to “go down and smash all the fiddles.” Haydn’s symphonies were among his prime favourites, and Purcell’s songs from Shakespeare. “Give me,” he wrote from Winchester to his sister, in August 1819, “books, fruit, French wine, and fine weather, and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know, and I can pass a summer very quietly.” He would also listen long to Severn’s playing, following the air with a low kind of recitative; and could himself “produce a pleasing musical effect, though possessing hardly any voice.”