Readers of Keats’s poetry will have no difficulty in believing that, ever since his first introduction into a professional life, surgery and literature had claimed a divided allegiance from him. When at Edmonton with Mr. Hammond, he kept up his connection with the Clarke family, especially with Charles Cowden Clarke. He was perpetually borrowing books; and at last, about the beginning of 1812 he asked for Spenser’s “Faery Queen,” rather to the surprise of the family, who had no idea that that particular book could be at all in his line. The effect, however, was very noticeable. Keats walked to Enfield at least once a week, for the purpose of talking over Spenser with Cowden Clarke. “He ramped through the scenes of the romance,” said Clarke, “like a young horse turned into a spring meadow.” A fine touch of description or of imagery, or energetic epithets such as “the sea-shouldering whale,” would light up his face with ecstasy. His leisure had already been given to reading and translation, including the completion of his rendering of the Æneid. A literary craving was now at fever-heat, and he took to writing verses as well as reading them. Soon surgery and letters were to conflict no longer—the latter obtaining, contrary to the liking of Mr. Abbey, the absolute and permanent mastery. Keats indeed always denied that he abandoned surgery for the express purpose of taking to poetry: he alleged that his motive had been the dread of doing some mischief in his surgical operations. His last operation consisted in opening a temporal artery; he was entirely successful in it, but the success appeared to himself like a miracle, the recurrence of which was not to be reckoned on.
While surgery was waning with Keats, and finally dying out—an upshot for which the exact date is not assigned, nor perhaps assignable—he was making, at first through his intimacy with Cowden Clarke, some good literary acquaintances. The brothers John and Leigh Hunt were the centre of the circle to which Keats was thus admitted. John was the publisher, and Leigh the editor, of The Examiner. They had both been lately fined, and imprisoned for two years, for a libel on the Prince Regent, George IV.; it was perhaps legally a libel, and was certainly a castigation laid on with no indulgent hand. Leigh Hunt (born in 1784, and therefore Keats’s senior by some eleven years) is known to us all as a fresh and airy essayist, a fresh and airy poet, a liberal thinker in the morals both of society and of politics (hardly a politician in the stricter sense of the term), a charming companion, a too-constant cracker of genial jocosities and of puns. He understood good literature both instinctively and critically; but was too full of tricksy mannerisms, and of petted byways in thought and style, to be an altogether safe associate for a youthful literary aspirant, whether as model or as Mentor. Leigh Hunt first saw Keats in the spring of 1816, not at his residence in Hampstead as has generally been supposed, but at No. 8 York Buildings, New Road.[2] The earliest meeting of Keats with Haydon was in November 1816, at Hunt’s house; Haydon born in 1786, the zealous and impatient champion of high art, wide-minded and combative, too much absorbed in his love for art to be without a considerable measure of self-seeking for art’s apostle, himself. He painted into his large picture of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem the head of Keats, along with those of Wordsworth and others. Another acquaintance was Mr. Charles Ollier, the publisher, who wrote verse and prose of his own. The Ollier firm in the early spring of 1817 became the publishers of Keats’s first volume of poems, of which more anon. Still earlier than the Hunts, Haydon, and Ollier, Keats had known John Hamilton Reynolds, his junior by a year, a poetical writer of some mark, now too nearly forgotten, author of “The Garden of Florence,” “The Fancy,” and the prose tale, “Miserrimus”; he was the son of the writing-master at Christ Hospital, and Keats became intimate with the whole family, though not invariably well pleased with them all. One of the sisters married Thomas Hood. Through Reynolds Keats made acquaintance with Mr. Benjamin Bailey, born towards 1794, then a student at Oxford reading for the Church, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo in Ceylon. Charles Wentworth Dilke, born in 1789, the critic, and eventually editor of The Athenæum, was another intimate; and in course of time Keats knew Charles Wells, seven years younger than himself, the author of the dramatic poem “Joseph and his Brethren,” and of the prose “Stories after Nature.” Other friends will receive mention as we progress. I have for the present said enough to indicate what was the particular niche in the mansion of English literary life in which Keats found himself housed at the opening of his career.
CHAPTER II.
We have now reached the year 1817 and the month of May, when Keats was in the twenty-second year of his age. He then wrote that he had “forgotten all surgery,” and was beginning at Margate his romantic epic of “Endymion,” reading and writing about eight hours a day. Keats had previously been at Carisbrooke in the Isle of Wight, but had run away from there, finding that the locality, while it charmed, also depressed him. He had left London for the island, apparently with the view of having greater leisure for study and composition. His brother Tom was with him at Carisbrooke and at Margate. He was already provided with a firm of publishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, willing to undertake the risk of “Endymion,” and they advanced him a sum sufficient for continuing at work on it with comfort. In September he went with Mr. Benjamin Bailey to Oxford: they made an excursion to Stratford-on-Avon, and Keats was back at Hampstead by the end of the month. It would appear that in Oxford Keats, in the heat of youthful blood, committed an indiscretion of which we do not know the details, nor need we give them if we knew them; for on the 8th of October he wrote to Bailey in these terms: “The little mercury I have taken has corrected the poison and improved my health,[3] though I feel, from my employment, that I shall never again be secure in robustness.” The residence of Keats and his brother Tom in Hampstead, a first-floor lodging, was in Well Walk, No. 1, next to the Wells Tavern, which was then called the Green Man. The reader who has a head for localities should bear this point well in mind, should carefully discriminate the house in Well Walk from another house, Wentworth Place, afterwards tenanted by Keats and others at Hampstead, and, every time that the question occurs to his thought, should pass a mental vote of thanks to Mr. Buxton Forman for the great pains which he took to settle the point, and the lucid and pleasant account which he has given of it. Keats was at Leatherhead in November; finished the first draft of “Endymion” at Burford Bridge, near Dorking, on the 28th of that month, and returned to Hampstead for the winter. Two anecdotes which have often been repeated belong apparently to about this date. One of them purports that Keats gave a sound drubbing in Hampstead to a butcher, or a butcher’s boy, who was ill-treating a small boy, or else a cat. Hunt simply says that the butcher “had been insolent,”—by implication, to Keats himself. The “butcher’s boy” has obtained traditional currency; but, according to George Keats, the offender was “a scoundrel in livery,” the locality “a blind alley at Hampstead.” Clarke says that the stand-up fight lasted nearly an hour. Keats was an undersized man, in fact he was not far removed from the dwarfish, being barely more than five feet high, and this small feat of stubborn gallantry deserves to be appraised and praised accordingly. The other anecdote is that Coleridge met Keats along with Leigh Hunt in a lane near Highgate, “a loose, slack, not well-dressed youth,” and after shaking hands with Keats, he said aside to Hunt, “There is death in that hand.” Nothing is extant to show that at so early a date as this, or even for some considerable while after, any of Keats’s immediate friends shared the ominous prevision of Coleridge.
In March 1818 Keats joined his brothers at Teignmouth in Devonshire, and in April “Endymion” was published. In June he set off on a pedestrian tour of some extent with a friend whose name will frequently recur from this point forwards, Charles Armitage Brown. One is generally inclined to get some idea of what a man was like; if one knows what he was unlike much the same purpose is served. In April 1819 Keats wrote some bantering verses about Brown, which are understood to go mainly by contraries we therefore infer Brown to have presented a physical and moral aspect the reverse of the following—
“He is to meet a melancholy carle,
Thin in the waist, with bushy head of hair,
As hath the seeded thistle when a parle
It holds with Zephyr ere it sendeth fair
Its light balloons into the summer air.
Thereto his beard had not begun to bloom;
No brush had touched his chin, or razor sheer;
No care had touched his cheek with mortal doom,
But new he was and bright as scarf from Persian loom.
“Ne carèd he for wine or half-and-half,
Ne carèd he for fish or flesh or fowl,
And sauces held he worthless as the chaff;
He ’sdained the swine-head at the wassail bowl.
Ne with lewd ribalds sat he cheek by jowl,
Ne with sly lemans in the scorner’s chair;
But after water-brooks this pilgrim’s soul
Panted, and all his food was woodland air,
Though he would oft-times feast on gillyflowers rare.
“The slang of cities in no wise he knew;
‘Tipping the wink’ to him was heathen Greek.
He sipped no olden Tom or ruin blue,
Or Nantz or cherry-brandy, drank full meek
By many a damsel brave and rouge of cheek.
Nor did he know each aged watchman’s beat;
Nor in obscurèd purlieus would he seek
For curlèd Jewesses with ankles neat,
Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet.”
Mr. Brown, son of a London stockbroker from Scotland, was a man several years older than Keats, born in 1786. He was a Russia merchant retired from business, of much culture and instinctive sympathy with genius, and he enjoyed assisting the efforts of young men of promise. He had produced the libretto of an opera, “Narensky,” and he eventually published a book on the Sonnets of Shakespeare. From the date we have now reached, the summer of 1818, which was more than a year following their first introduction, Brown may be regarded as the most intimate of all Keats’s friends, Dilke coming next to him.