Life of John Keats

by William Michael Rossetti

The pedestrian tour with Brown was the sequel of a family leave-taking at Liverpool. George Keats, finding in himself no vocation for trade, with its smug compliances and sleek assiduities (and John agreed with him in these views), had determined to emigrate to America, and rough it in a new settlement for a living, perhaps for fortune; and, as a preliminary step, he had married Miss Georgiana Augusta Wylie, a girl of sixteen, daughter of a deceased naval officer. The sonnet “Nymph of the downward smile” &c. was addressed to her. John Keats and Brown, therefore, accompanied George and his bride to Liverpool, and saw them off. They then started as pedestrians into the Lake country, the land of Burns, Belfast, and the Western Highlands. Before starting on the trip Keats had often been in such a state of health as to make it prudent that he should not hazard exposure to night air; but in his excursion he seems to have acted like a man of sound and rather hardy physique, walking from day to day about twenty miles, and sometimes more, and his various records of the trip have nothing of a morbid or invaliding tone. This was not, however, to last long; the Isle of Mull proved too much for him. On the 23rd of July, writing to his brother Tom, he describes the expedition thus: “The road through the island, or rather track, is the most dreary you can think of; between dreary mountains, over bog and rock and river, with our breeches tucked up and our stockings in hand.... We had a most wretched walk of thirty-seven miles across the island of Mull, and then we crossed to Iona.” In another letter he says: “Walked up to my knees in bog; got a sore throat; gone to see Icolmkill and Staffa.” From this time forward the mention of the sore throat occurs again and again; sometimes it is subsiding, or as good as gone; at other times it has returned, and causes more or less inconvenience. Brown wrote of it as “a violent cold and ulcerated throat.” The latest reference to it comes in December 1819, only two months preceding the final and alarming break-down in the young poet’s health. In Scotland, at any rate, amid the exposure and exertion of the walking tour, the sore throat was not to be staved off; so, having got as far as Inverness, Keats, under medical advice, reluctantly cut his journey short, parted from Brown, and went on board the smack from Cromarty. A nine days’ passage brought him to London Bridge, and on the 18th of August he presented himself to the rather dismayed eyes of Mrs. Dilke. “John Keats,” she wrote, “arrived here last night, as brown and as shabby as you can imagine: scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell what he looked like.” More ought to be said here of the details of Keats’s Scottish and Irish trip; but such details, not being of essential importance as incidents in his life, could only be given satisfactorily in the form of copious extracts from his letters, and for these—readable and picturesque as they are—I have not adequate space. He preferred, on the whole, the Scotch people to the little which he saw of the Irish. Just as Keats was leaving Scotland, because of his own ailments, he had been summoned away thence on account of the more visibly grave malady of his brother Tom, who was in an advanced stage of consumption; but it appears that the letter did not reach his hands at the time.

The next three months were passed by Keats along with Tom at their Hampstead lodgings. Anxiety and affection—warm affection, deep anxiety—were of no avail. Tom died at the beginning of December, aged just twenty, and was buried on the 7th of that month. The words in “King Lear,” “Poor Tom,” remain underlined by the surviving brother.

John Keats was now solitary in the world. Tom was dead, George and his bride in America, Fanny, his girlish sister, a permanent inmate of the household of Mr. and Mrs. Abbey at Walthamstow. In December he quitted his lodgings at Hampstead, and set up house along with Mr. Brown in what was then called Wentworth Place, Hampstead, now Lawn Bank; Brown being rightly the tenant, and Keats a paying resident with Brown. Wentworth Place consisted of only two houses. One of them was thus inhabited by Brown and Keats, the other by the Dilkes. In the first of these houses, when Brown and Keats were away, and afterwards in the second, there was also a well-to-do family of the name of Brawne,—a mother, with a son and two daughters. Lawn Bank is the penultimate house on the right of John Street, next to Wentworth House: Dr. Sharpey passed some of his later years in it. This is, beyond all others, the dwelling which remains permanently linked with the memory of Keats.

While Tom was still lingering out the days of his brief life, Keats made the acquaintance of two young ladies. He has left us a description of both of them. His portraiture of the first, Miss Jane Cox, is written in a tone which might seem the preliminary to a grande passion; but this did not prove so; she rapidly passed out of his existence and out of his memory. His portraiture of the second, Miss Fanny Brawne, does not suggest anything beyond a tepid liking which might perhaps merge into a definite antipathy; this also was delusive, for he was from the first smitten with Miss Brawne, and soon profoundly in love with her—I might say desperately in love, for indeed desperation, which became despair, was the main ingredient in his passion, in all but its earliest stages. I shall here extract these two passages, for both of them are of exceptional importance for our biography—one as acquainting us with Keats’s general range of feeling in relation to women, and the other as introducing the most serious and absorbing sentiment of the last two years of his life. On October 29, 1818, he wrote as follows to his brother George and his wife in America:—

“The Misses Reynolds are very kind to me.... On my return, the first day I called [this was probably towards the 20th of September], they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs, Miss Cox, who, having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. Reynolds to take asylum in her house. She is an East Indian, and ought to be her grandfather’s heir.... From what I hear she is not without faults of a real kind; but she has others which are more apt to make women of inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is at least a Charmian; she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her; from habit she thinks that nothing particular. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman; the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble; I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You will by this time think I am in love with her; so, before I go any further, I will tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart’s might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very yes and no of whose lips[4] is to me a banquet. I don’t cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her like, because one has no sensations; what we both are is taken for granted. You will suppose I have by this time had much talk with her. No such thing; there are the Misses Reynolds on the look out. They think I don’t admire her because I don’t stare at her; they call her a flirt to me—what a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn to her with a magnetic power; this they call flirting! They do not know things; they do not know what a woman is. I believe, though, she has faults, the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things:—the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian, hold the first place in our mind; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child’s cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me.”

So much for Miss Cox, the Charmian whom Keats was not in love with. This is not absolutely the sole mention of her in his letters, but it is the only one of importance. We now turn to Miss Brawne, the young lady with whom he had fallen very much in love at a date even preceding that to which the present description must belong. The description comes from a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, written probably towards the middle of December 1818. It is true that the name Brawne does not appear in the printed version of the letter, but the “very positive conviction” expressed by Mr. Forman that that name really does stand in the MS., a conviction “shared by members of her family,” may safely be adopted by all my readers. I therefore insert the name where a blank had heretofore appeared in print.

“Perhaps, as you are fond of giving me sketches of characters, you may like a little picnic of scandal, even across the Atlantic. Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height, with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort. She wants sentiment in every feature. She manages to make her hair look well; her nostrils are very fine, though a little painful; her mouth is bad, and good; her profile is better than her full face, which indeed is not ‘full,’ but pale and thin, without showing any bone; her shape is very graceful, and so are her movements; her arms are good, her hands bad-ish, her feet tolerable. She is not seventeen [Keats, if he really wrote ‘not seventeen,’ was wrong here; ‘not nineteen’ would have been correct, as she was born on August 9, 1800.] But she is ignorant, monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions; calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term ‘minx.’ This is, I think, from no innate vice, but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of such style, and shall decline any more of it. She had a friend to visit her lately. You have known plenty such. She plays the music, but without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at her fingers. She is a downright Miss, without one set-off. We hated her [“We” would apparently be Keats, Brown, and the Dilkes], and smoked her, and baited her, and I think drove her away. Miss Brawne thinks her a paragon of fashion, and says she is the only woman in the world she would change persons with. What a stupe! She is as superior as a rose to a dandelion.”

At the time when Keats wrote these words he had known Miss Brawne for a couple of months, more or less, having first seen her in October or November at the house of the Dilkes. It might seem that he was about this time in a state of feeling propense to love. Some woman was required to fill the void in his heart. The woman might have been Miss Cox, whom he met in September. As the event turned out, it was not she, but it was Miss Brawne, whom he met in October or November. Fanny Brawne was the elder daughter of a gentleman of independent means, who died while she was still a child; he left another daughter and a son with their mother; and the whole family, as already mentioned, lived at times in the same house which the Dilkes occupied in Wentworth-place, Hampstead, and at other times in the adjoining house, while not tenanted by Brown and Keats. Miss Brawne (I quote here from Mr. Forman) “had much natural pride and buoyancy, and was quite capable of affecting higher spirits and less concern than she really felt. But, as to the genuineness of her attachment to Keats, some of those who knew her personally have no doubt whatever."[5] If so—or indeed whether so or not—it is a pity that she was wont, after Keats’s death, to speak of him (as has been averred) as “that foolish young poet who was in love with me.” That Keats was a poet and a young poet is abundantly true; but that he was a foolish one had even before his death, and especially very soon after it, been found out to be a gross delusion by a large number of people, and might just as well have been found out by his betrothed bride in addition. I know of only one portrait of Miss Brawne; it is a silhouette by Edouart, engraved in two of Mr. Forman’s publications. A silhouette is one of the least indicative forms of portraiture for enabling one to judge whether the sitter was handsome or not. This likeness shows a very profuse mass of hair, a tall, rather sloping, forehead, a long and prominent aquiline nose, a mouth and chin of the petite kind, a very well-developed throat, and a figure somewhat small in proportion to the head. The face is not of the sort which I should suppose to have ever been beautiful in an artist’s eyes, or in a poet’s either; and indeed Keats’s description of Miss Brawne, which I have just cited, is qualified, chilly, and critical, with regard to beauty. Nevertheless, his love-letters to Miss Brawne, most of which have been preserved and published, speak of her beauty very emphatically. “The very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal;” “I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you, but beauty;” “all I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty.” It seems probable that Keats was the declared lover of Miss Brawne in April 1819 at the latest—more probably in February; and when his first published letter to her was written, July 1819, he and she must certainly have been already engaged, or all but engaged, to marry. This was contrary to Mrs. Brawne’s liking. They appear to have contemplated—anything but willingly on the poet’s part—a tolerably long engagement; for he was a young man of twenty-three, with stinted means, no regular profession, and no occupation save that of producing verse derided in the high places of criticism. He spoke indeed of re-studying in Edinburgh for the medical profession: this was a vague notion, with which no practical beginning was made. An early marriage, followed by a year or so of pleasuring and of intellectual advancement in some such place as Rome or Zurich, was what Keats really longed for.

We must now go back a little—to December 1818. Haydon was then still engaged upon his picture of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, and found his progress impeded by want of funds, and by a bad attack, from which he frequently suffered, of weakness of eyesight. On the 22nd of the month, Keats, with conspicuous generosity—and although he had already lent nearly £200 to various friends—tendered him any money-aid which might be in his power; asking merely that his friend would claim the fulfilment of his promise only in the last resort. On January 7, 1819, Haydon definitely accepted his offer; and Keats wrote back, hoping to comply, and refusing to take any interest. His own money affairs were, however, at this time almost at a deadlock, controlled by lawyers and by his ex-guardian Mr. Abbey; and the amount which he had expected to command as coming to him after his brother Tom’s death was not available. He had to explain as much in April 1819 to Haydon, who wrote with some urgency. Eventually he did make a small loan to the painter—£30; but very shortly afterwards (June 17th) was compelled to ask for a reimbursement—“do borrow or beg somehow what you can for me.” There was a chancery-suit of old standing, begun soon after the death of Mr. Jennings in 1805, and it continued to obstruct Keats in his money affairs. The precise facts of these were also but ill-known to the poet, who had potentially at his disposal certain funds which remained perdu and unused until two years after his death. On September 20, 1819, he wrote to his brother George in America that Haydon had been unable to make the repayment; and he added, “He did not seem to care much about it, and let me go without my money with almost nonchalance, when he ought to have sold his drawings to supply me. I shall perhaps still be acquainted with him, but, for friendship, that is at an end.” And in fact the hitherto very ardent cordiality between the poet and the painter does seem to have been materially damped after this date; Keats being somewhat reserved towards Haydon, and Haydon finding more to censure than to extol in the conduct of Keats. We can feel with both of them; and, while we pronounce Keats blameless and even praiseworthy throughout, may infer Haydon to have been not greatly blameable.

Towards the end of June 1819 Keats went to Shanklin; his first companion there being an invalid but witty and cheerful friend, James Rice, a solicitor, and his second, Brown, who co-operated at this time with the poet in producing the drama “Otho the Great.” Next, the two friends went to Winchester, “chiefly,” wrote Keats to his sister Fanny, “for the purpose of being near a tolerable library, which after all is not to be found in this place. However, we like it very much; it is the pleasantest town I ever was in, and has the most recommendations of any.” One of his letters from here (September 21) speaks of his being now almost as well acquainted with Italian as with French, and he adds, “I shall set myself to get complete in Latin, and there my learning must stop. I do not think of venturing upon Greek.” It is stated that he learned Italian with uncommon quickness.