CHAPTER IV. JOHN KEATS. THE youngest of this young group, connected with Shelley by natural links of congenial spirit and temperament, as well as by some actual acquaintance and kindness, but fiercely thrust aside and disowned by Byron, cannot be dissociated from their larger and, young though they were, maturer figures. The distance between twenty-four and thirty is not very much in years, but it makes a marvellous difference in development, and even to Shelley Keats was not much more than a boy full of ambition and promise. John Keats was born in 1795, and was consequently three years younger than Shelley, and seven years younger than Byron. He was not like them, born, as people say, "a gentleman," but belonged to that middle class which, in those days, kept itself much more closely within its own boundaries, and did not invade the high places as now. His family had much respectability and a little money, but the parents both died early, leaving their children to the care of strangers, and bequeathing a delicate constitution to two at least of their One of his brothers died at a still younger age than the poet, and he himself seems to have sons. been always a delicate youth, accustomed to much care and anxiety about his health. "The publication of three small volumes of verse, some earnest friendships, one profound passion, and a premature death," are, as as his kind and sympathetic biographer, Lord Houghton, touchingly says, "the only incidents in his career." His poems, though they have held their ground from that time to this, are more preludes and overtures in poetry than anything else, and he had little time to show what manhood was in him, and had not that command of money and leisure which enabled his contemporaries to emancipate themselves from the ordinary bonds of life. Byron was a ruined peer, and Shelley a rich man's prodigal son: but even the poverty of wealth is better than the well-todo-ness of the humble, and confers a certain fine superiority to fate. Keats was in no way superior to fate. His friendship with Leigh Hunt brought him within the little literary coterie of which that gentle journalist was the head: and he had met Shelley in its little assemblies, where poetry was the great subject, and the neophytes babbled perpetually of green fields. The epithet of the Cockney school bestowed upon this band by the sharp tongued critics, was not without reason, for Leigh Hunt's enthusiasm for everything that was green and growing has a tone of exaggeration in it which sounds like that of a man whose garden was a flowerbox in a window, and his extravagances of furnishing and decoration—though far enough, no doubt, from what a minor poet would think necessary now afforded contemptuous amusement to the stalwart writers of the Blackwood school. No doubt this pale youth, with his angelic blue eyes and long hair, flitted out and in of that lower circle of society in London which we have attempted to indicate. He attended Hazlitt's lectures on the poets, and wrote long letters about them to his friends, several of whom were poets like himself, as they all thought in those days, but not like Keats as it turned out :-and he had the freedom of Haydon's studio, who was then a rising painter, with, as everybody thought, all the world before him, to whom even Wordsworth, as well as the younger fry, addressed sonnets. The occupation of young Keats in those days was that of a medical student, and he seems to have gone manfully through the preliminary work of the profession to which he was destined, though it revolted him as may be easily imagined. To thrust a worshipper of beauty such as he was, while still so young and always so sensitive, into the dark revelations of disease and the horrors of anatomy, must have been to subject him to an ordeal almost unendurable : and all the advantage his studies eventually gave him was the painful enlightenment by which he could decide on his own case, and foresee the inevitable end of his first attack of illness. But poetry and perpetual poetical communion with so many who were like-minded sweetened his uncongenial toil. Once, it is said, he met Coleridge while walking with Leigh Hunt, no doubt in one of the suburban lanes between Hampstead and Highgate. After a little cursory talk, during which, probably, the modest stripling stood silent, they parted: but a minute after, Keats, his enthusiasm bursting through his shyness, rushed back to beg that he might shake hands with Coleridge. No doubt it was a thin and hot and humid hand which was thrust into that of the elder poet: for he said, "There is death in that hand," as the young enthusiast rushed away. Keats, however, was not Cockney in his inspiration. Though he was no scholar, his mind was Greek rather than English. It is not wonderful that a highly-educated youth, fed upon Greek poetry from his earliest dawn of perception, should turn back upon the classic ages as the true and only fountains of poetical loveliness and truth. But Keats knew these glories only at secondhand, and the fulness of understanding with which he jumped at them looks almost like divination. His mind answered to the far-off touch of the ancient divinities before he knew what they were. He has left in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer an admirable description of the effect produced upon him by his first introduction to the Greeks and their divine fables "Oft of a wide expanse, had I been told, That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne : Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: This great new sea of inexhaustible story and vision which the young reader "shouted" with delight to discover was the very element of his soul. He flung himself into it with a comprehension and feeling which few of its profoundest investigators ever attain. Had he found his inspiration in his own century, in the atmosphere which he and his contemporaries were breathing, we, for our part, would have thought the choice wiser. But such was not the bent of his genius. He turned from the confusions of his own age, which he had neither strength nor inclination to fathom, to the calm and distant land of shadows, where gods and goddesses came down to men, where Endymion wooed Diana, and the Sun-god was superseded on his throne—with the relief at once of physical weakness and natural disposition. He was not robust enough for political strife, or to struggle as his contemporaries were doing with noisy questions about the Regent's morals or manners, or the corruptions of the State. It was so much easier and more delightful to escape into the silvery brightness, the magical dreams and dews of Olympus, even as reflected in dim mirrors of English, and amid the commonplace surroundings of our latter days. From the first glimpse we have of him in his letters, amid the weak boyish jokes and banter which are not worth preserving or reading, there occur continual references which show how early poetry had become his chief object in life. Those whom life endows more abundantly with other interests may play with their inspiration, feeling towards that divine gift as, according to Byron, men do towards a scarcely stronger passion "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence." |