Keats held that the melody of verse is founded on the adroit management of open and close vowels. He thought that vowels can be as skilfully combined and interchanged as differing notes of music, and that monotony should only be allowed when it subserves some special purpose.
The following, from a letter to Mr. Woodhouse, October 1818 (soon after the abusive reviews had appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine and The Quarterly), is a remarkable piece of self-analysis. As we read it, we should bear in mind what Haydon said of Keats’s want of decision of character. I am not indeed clear that Keats has here pourtrayed himself with marked accuracy. It may appear that he ascribes to himself too much of absorption into the object or the personage which he contemplates; whereas it might, with fully as much truth, be advanced that he was wont to assimilate the personage or the object to himself. I greatly doubt whether in Keats’s poems we see the object or the personage the clearer because his faculty transpires through them: rather, we see the object or the personage through the haze of Keats. His range was not extremely extensive (whatever it might possibly have become, with a longer lease of life), nor was his personality by any means occulted. But in any event his statement here is of great importance as showing what he thought of the poetic phase of mind and working.
“As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am anything, I am a member—that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself—it has no self. It is everything, and nothing—it has no character. It enjoys light, and shade. It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity: he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute: the poet has none, no identity. He is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature. How can it when I have no nature? When I am in a room with people, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated. Not only among men; it would be the same in a nursery of children.”
Elsewhere Keats says, November 1817: “Nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights; or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel.”
For painting Keats had a good deal of taste, largely fostered, no doubt, by his intimacy with Haydon. This came to him gradually. Towards the beginning of 1818 he was, according to his own account, quite unable to appreciate Raphael’s Cartoons, but afterwards gained an insight into them through contrasting them with some maudlin saints by Guido. It is interesting to find him entering warmly into the beauties of the earlier Italian art, as indicated in a book of prints from some church in Milan (so he says, but perhaps it should rather be Pisa or Florence). “I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance and the most tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael’s, but grotesque to a curious pitch—yet still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as there was left so much room for imagination.”
Here is a small trait of character, recorded by Keats in a letter to George, from Winchester, September 1819. “I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoe-strings neatly, and in fact adonize as if I were going out; then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief.”
Haydon, as we have seen, said that Keats had an exquisite sense of humour. There are few things more difficult to analyse than the sense of humour; few points as to which different people will vary more in opinion than the possession, by any particular man, of a sense of humour, or the account, good or bad, to which he turned this sense. Certainly there is a large amount of jocularity in the familiar writings of Keats—often a quick perception of the ridiculous or the risible, sometimes a telling jest or jeu d’esprit. I confess, however, that to myself most of Keats’s fun appears forced or inept, wanting in fineness of taste and manner, and tending towards the vulgar; a jangling jingle of word and notion. Punning plays a large part in it, as it did in Leigh Hunt’s familiar converse. Some specimens of Keats’s funning or punning seem to me a humiliating exhibition, as, for instance, a letter, January 1819, which Armitage Brown addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, with interpolations by Keats. No doubt both the friends were resolutely bent upon being silly on that occasion; but to be silly is not fully tantamount to being “a fellow of infinite jest,” or having an exquisite sense of humour. There is some very exasperating writing also in a letter to Reynolds (May 1818), about “making Wordsworth and Colman play at leap-frog, or keeping one of them down a whole half-holiday at fly-the-garter,” &c., &c. A feeling for the inappropriate is perhaps one element of jocoseness; if so, Keats may have been genuinely jocose when (as he wrote in his very last letter to Brown) he “at his worst, even in quarantine [in Naples Harbour], summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of his life.” He had a good power of mimicry, as well as of dramatic recital. He did indisputably, towards September 1819, play off one practical joke—Brown was the victim—with eminent success; pretending that a certain Mr. Nathan Benjamin, who was then renting Brown’s house at Hampstead, had written a letter complaining of illness—gravel, caused by some lime-tainted water on the premises. But the success depended upon a very singular coincidence, viz., that by mere chance Keats had happened to give the tenant’s name correctly. The angry reply of Brown to the angry supposititious letter of Benjamin, and the astonishment of Benjamin upon receiving Brown’s retort, are fertile of laughter.
Keats does not appear to have ever made any pretence to defined religious belief of any sort, nor seriously to have debated the subject, or troubled his mind about it one way or the other. He was certainly not a Christian. His early friend, Mr. Felton Mathew, speaks of him as “of the sceptical and republican school.” On Christmas Eve, 1816, soon after he had come of age, he wrote the following sonnet—
“The church-bells toll a melancholy round,
Calling the people to some other prayers,
Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermon’s horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
In some black spell: seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crowned.