Keats, JOHN: Oct. 1795—Feb. 1821. Youngest to rise and earliest to set in that brilliant constellation of poets who ennobled England during the first half of the Nineteenth century, John Keats, both in himself and in his work, is one of the most profoundly interesting and attractive figures in literature. In character, true, magnanimous, modest, and tender; much tried and rarely failing: throughout training himself sedulously for the highest achievement in poetry—his life, as man and as artist, was one of persistent growth onward and upward. It is to trace this development, under both aspects, that the following narrowly limited sketch will be mainly devoted.
John Keats was born in Finsbury, London, son of a respectable livery-stable keeper; sent early to school at Enfield, where an elder boy, Cowden Clarke, turned his boyish energies at thirteen towards literature. Henceforward Keats read much and widely. Greek, like Shakespeare, he never learned, but eagerly studied manuals of classical mythology; in Latin he began and (after leaving school) finished a prose version of the Aeneid; and we cannot doubt that his passion for melody, felicity of phrase, tenderness and beauty in style, was developed or inspired by Vergil's unequalled magical art. Quitting school in 1810, Keats was first apprenticed to a surgeon; then, till 1817, practised diligently in London, and, (for his age,) with success. But poetry had now become paramount; and his high sense of duty withdrew him from a profession demanding imperiously a man's entire devotion.
By 1816-17 Keats had found many friends and associates; notably Leigh Hunt, Haydon, Hazlitt:—men of early promise, and (Hunt and Hazlitt at least) of real ability, though sadly marred or blighted by bad taste, vanity, and weakness. His youth naturally led Keats at first to accept their self-estimate and hence overrate their worth and powers. Morally and intellectually he could gain little, except some genial literary impulse, from natures so inferior to his own: yet though familiarity in time cooled, he remained loyal to their better qualities. His friendship was also sought by Shelley. Their names have been united through Adonais; but the wild eloquence, the chill Auroral splendour of that great Elegy display no truth in the portraiture of Keats, no touch of human pathos. The two men were in fact, (generally speaking), antagonistic in nature, principles, conduct, and ruling ideas upon that art in which both were so richly gifted: and hence familiarity, on the part of Keats, now and later, was impossible. Others of less note, Reynolds, Dilke, Armitage Brown, were more to Keats: but above all his intense unwavering affectionateness, (one of several points in which he resembles Catullus), placed his two brothers and sister by far highest in value.
This was the poet's student-period. Vergil was his first—perhaps his most influential—love. Clarke led him to Spenser at the close of 1813. Homer in the fine extravagance of Chapman's version, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Words- worth,—‘the best sort of poetry’ as he said, color che sanno, became his bosom-friends. Yet, except in early years, he imitated none: Literature has no poet more decisively original.
Thus far Enfield and Hampstead (then unspoiled) were the landscape, the free nature, whence visions of beauty had been created by the young poet’s observant eye, ever ‘on the object,’ and his vivid imagination. But having (March, 1817) published his first book, Keats found ‘pastures new’ at Carisbrooke, in the island now for near forty years a home of the one modern poet in whose genius we may trace a certain congenital likeness to his own. Here Keats worked at Endymion; but solitude was fever to that tropically developing nature; financial anxiety also, (so badly was his slender fortune handled by a guardian), which never wholly left him, threw the first cloud of dejection over his sensitive spirit; and he returned to Hampstead and his friends. Eminent among these was now Bailey, then studying at Oxford, where Keats visited him during Long Vacation, continuing Endymion upon the Isis. This may have been the sunniest moment of his life. Bailey was apparently the friend who called out what was best and deepest in Keats: It is he also who has left us the most charming sketch of his conversation: (Colvin, p. 76).
In 1818 Keats frequently saw Lamb and Wordsworth, whose poetry, (the Excursion especially), amongst that of his contemporaries, most deeply affected him. To nurse his much-loved brother Tom, rapidly failing under consumption, he now moved to Teignmouth; Endymion was finished; Isabella, for his third volume, begun.
These were the last good days allotted to Keats. His character and his aims as Poet were now formed; both have been much misinterpreted; let us here attempt to summarize them. Manliness, magnanimity, unselfishness, force of human affection, chivalry to woman,—are the dominant notes of his nature: Hatred of wrong and meanness, insight and generosity in act and judgment:—and all guided by eminent good sense: Personally proud;—as to his abilities and work, almost pathetically humble-minded. Keats was no sensualist, as has been erroneously reported; no vague idealist; for the first too unselfish,—too clear-headed for the latter: and from perversity, instability, and self-conceit singularly free.
A man’s art is inevitably conditioned by his nature. From that of Keats, sensitive yet strong, modest yet aspiring, when we add a freshness and fullness of genius which recalls Chaucer and Shakespeare, we might justly anticipate that he would not fail to grasp the true idea of poetry under its main heads, the interpretation of nature and of humanity,—both always subordinate to beauty in sound, words, and form. And we find that it was in such wise that Keats, like Sophocles and Pindar, Vergil and Milton, consciously or not, regarded poetry. He was an artist in the rarest and truest sense; this makes him so noteworthy; it is this, not Endymion or Hyperion, which ranks him with the Greeks. Pursuing Beauty always as his goal, its sensuous charm, in melody and in wealth of description,—an impulse natural to a youth so gifted—often largely over-dominates his verse to 1818. Yet this style from the first he felt was but the prelude to the higher Muses; the transit from Euphrosyne to Urania. Keats was in truth as exquisitely human as Shakespeare; already in the final piece of his first book he is hoping to quit the mere joys of poetry for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
By 1818, in an admirable letter comparing Life to a many-chambered house, he notes how he has passed from Maiden-thought,—the bower of youth, pure yet pleasure-devoted,—to a place of darkness: ‘We feel the Burden of the Mystery.’ Hence, though he dares not yet ‘philosophise,’ he finds that the only worthy pursuit is the ‘idea of doing some good to the world:’ that he ‘can have no enjoyment . . . but continual drinking of knowledge:’ he rejoices that he has kept his old medical books. This feeling gradually masters him: ‘Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer:’ his longing is, not for vain praise, but for ‘the glory of making, by any means, a country happier.’ That these were not mere words, the details of his life prove: whilst some realization of his hopes in poetry is given by the volume of 1820. And if, by twenty-four, he was only beginning to handle the higher human interests; yet may we not truly say that his country has been made lastingly happier by what Keats did thus leave us?
Returning to the story: Henceforth, in quick sequence, the shadows deepen. George Keats departed for America: John to the Lakes and Western Scotland, where what was to prove consumption, developed by overfatigue, claimed him. Then, (Dec. 1818) came the death of his brother Tom: Last, the passion of first-love for Miss Fanny Brawne. They became engaged; but it was too late:—Poverty, bodily decline, and above all his own intensely loving heart, morbidly anxious, gradually changed what should have been support and comfort to agony. Yet Keats struggled bravely. As if purified by the trial, his genius now rapidly bore its ripest fruit: almost all that his third volume contains—the ‘treasures for ever’ he bequeathed us—were written between Hampstead, Shanklin, and Winchester before Autumn, 1819. Even yet he hoped to live by literature; but, returning to Hampstead, health of mind and body began unmistakably to fail: the fatal sign of lung-bleeding appeared in February 1820. Except the one swan-song of the last sonnet, henceforth it is in letters only—letters which throughout his life often rival his poetry itself in loveliness and surpass it in depth of thought—that the sorely-charged heart finds expression.
In September Keats sailed for Italy; the sad and honourable care of nursing him taken by a young artist and friend, Severn. From Naples they moved to Rome. There even the faint delusive sun-gleams of consumption were soon overclouded. It is a relief to the gloom that the generous wounded spirit now found meet reward from Severn’s devotedness. Nearing death, the vague ‘sentimental optimism’ which formed Hunt’s substitute, and perhaps his, for religious faith, proved unavailing: Keats ‘contrasting now the behaviour of the believer Severn with his own, acknowledged anew the power of the Christian teaching and example, and bidding Severn read to him from Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying, strove to pass the remainder of his days in a temper of more peace and constancy:’ (Colvin.)
So, though the bodily suffering and agony of remembered love were intense, calm came at last. ‘He lay quiet, with his hand clasped on a white cornelian, one of the little tokens’ his Fanny ‘had given him at starting.’ Thus, ‘loveable and considerate to the last,’—humbly, after his wont, not (as misinterpreted) bitterly, he spoke of his own work and name as ‘writ in water:’—until with a ‘Thank God, it has come,’ his soul resigned itself to Him in peace: (23 Feb. 1821.)
Keats lies within the Aurelian Wall of Rome on its southern side, where the faithful Severn was also buried in 1879.
As ‘Maker,’ Keats presents two main aspects: he is far more an artist in the highest sense than most modern poets: He has also left us masterpieces in that style of art which his few years allowed him finally to reach. The development of his character and general aims in poetry has been traced; the parallel advance in his writing will be now briefly noticed.
The earliest volume (1817) is frankly experimental. Spenser apparently unsealed the spring of poetry for Keats: yet his three imitative pieces, although Spenserian in musical flow and wealth of imagery, are coloured everywhere (in common with a few short lyrics) by the sentimental tone of the later Eighteenth century, and by slipshod mannerisms caught from Hunt. The tender chivalry of his nature glows through the technical inexperience of the Ode to Woman: Some trochaic lines prelude to his later success in that rare and difficult metre. Several among the sonnets rise much higher: that on Chapman's Homer alone in the volume shows his final mastery. Most interesting however are five poems in the free, lovely, heroic metre of Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists. Here, dashed with youthful extravagance, bad taste, and confused metaphor, we find that 'fascinating felicity,' that 'perfection of loveliness' in the interpretation of Nature—(yet Nature externally viewed, without reference to her inner or human meanings)—which, in Matthew Arnold's estimate, is not less than Shakespearean. Delight in beauty for its own sake only is the leading note; yet while he wrote Keats had before him the image of Poetry by Raphael (in the Vatican fresco),—with her outstretched wings and eager glance over Things that he scarce could tell—things that lift the thoughts of men; and acknowledges with candour that these spiritual depths and heights of the art are as yet beyond him.
Endymion, (1818), that 'feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished' (so, with his delightful union of modesty and clear judgment, Keats named it), in its main features of style carries on the work of 1815-17. We have the over-sensuous pictures, the fanciful and even tasteless coinage of words; but also the myriad felicities of touch; the 'morning freshness' of Chaucer; many passages of splendid vividness. Though the subject be Greek, the treatment lacks Greek sobriety, finish, unity: It is Elizabethan-Romantic. The ground-legend is hardly traceable: a vague allegory may underlie the whole—but the serious purpose of the mediaeval allegorists and Spenser, but moral beauty, are wanting.
Two years only separate Endymion from the concluding, the treasure-volume of 1820. Keats in this is not yet wholly disengaged from youthful exuberance; Even Lamia, his last and strongest poem, is too Asiatic: Hyperion, with pictures of unsurpassed magnificence, fails in Epic unity and interest. That supreme beauty, never attained except when it interprets human life in its misery and its greatness, is rarely touched. Yet the growth everywhere is tropical: and praise would be idle for the dignity and tenderness of the Odes, the pictorial splendour, the affluence of charm diffused throughout this little volume. One of Pindar's noblest lyrics, we read, was written in gold upon the walls of a Grecian temple. And not a few of the poems now before us might deserve a like honour.
Keats published only the three volumes of 1817, 1818, 1820, and in one edition each. An absolutely literal reproduction of them, (the reprints to 1883 teeming with errors), with notes, has been edited by the writer: including a few first-rate pieces from the great mass of incomplete and inferior work, withheld by Keats himself, but made public by the cruel kindness of admirers.
See the Lives by Lord Houghton (1848) and Sidney
Colvin (1886); the Letters, edited by Mr Colvin (1891); and the Poems, edited by Drury (1896).