Character and Genius. The touching circumstances of Keats’s illness and death at Rome aroused naturally, as soon as they were known, the sympathy of every generous mind. Foremost, as all the world knows, in the expression of that sympathy was Shelley. He had been misinformed as to the degree in which the critics had contributed to Keats’s sufferings, and believing that they had killed him, was full both of righteous wrath against the offenders, and of passionate regret for what the world had lost. Under the stress of that double inspiration Shelley wrote,— “And a whirlwind of music came sweet from the spheres.” As an utterance of abstract pity and indignation, AdonaÏs is unsurpassed in literature: with its hurrying train of beautiful spectral images, and the irresistible current and thrilling modulation of its verse, it is perhaps the most perfect and sympathetic effort of Shelley’s art: while its strain of transcendental consolation for mortal loss contains the most lucid exposition of his philosophy. But of Keats as he actually lived the elegy presents no feature, while the general impression it conveys of his character and fate is erroneous. A similar false impression was at the same time conveyed, to a circle of readers incommensurably wider than that reached by Shelley, in the well-known stanza of Don Juan. In regard to Keats Byron tried both to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare. When the Edinburgh praised him, he was furious, and on receipt of the Lamia volume wrote with vulgar savagery to Murray:—“No more Keats, I entreat:—flay him alive;—if some of you don’t, I must skin him myself.” Then after his death, hearing that it had been caused by the critics, he turns against the latter, and cries:—“I would not be the person who wrote that homicidal article for all the honour and glory of the world.” In the Don Juan passage he contrived to have his fling at the reviewers and at the weakness, as he imagined it, of their victim in the same breath. Taken together with the notion of ‘Johnny Keats’ to which Blackwood and the Quarterly had previously given currency, the AdonaÏs and the Don Juan passage alike tended to fix in the public mind an impression of Keats’s character as that of a weakling to whom the breath of detraction had been poison. It was long before his friends, who knew that he was ‘as like Johnny Keats as the Holy Ghost,’ did anything effectual to set his memory right. Brown had been bent on doing so from the first, but in the end wrote only the brief memoir, still in manuscript, which has been quoted so often in the above pages. For anything like a full biography George Keats in America could alone have supplied the information; but against him, since he had failed to send help to his poet-brother in the hour of need, (having been in truth simply unable to do so,) Brown had unluckily conceived so harsh a prejudice that friendly communication between them became impossible. Neither was Dilke, who alone among Keats’s friends in England took George’s part, disposed under the circumstances to help Brown in his task. For a long time George himself hoped to superintend and supply materials for a life of his brother, but partly his want of literary experience, and partly the difficulty of leaving his occupations in the West, prevented him. Mr Taylor, the publisher, also at one time wished to be Keats’s biographer, and with the help of Woodhouse collected materials for the purpose; but in the end failed to use them. The same wish was entertained by John Hamilton Reynolds, whose literary skill, and fine judgment and delicacy, should have made him of all the poet’s friends the most competent for the work. But of these many projects not one had been carried out, when five-and-twenty years after Keats’s death a younger man, who had never seen him, took up the task,—the Monckton Milnes of those days, the Lord Houghton freshly remembered by us all,—and with help from nearly all Keats’s surviving friends, and by the grace of his own genial and sympathetic temper, set the memory of the poet in its true light in the beautiful and moving book with which every student is familiar. Keats had indeed enemies within his house, apart (if the separation can with truth be made) from the secret presence of that worst enemy of all, inherited disease, which killed him. He had a nature all tingling with pride and sensitiveness: he had the perilous capacity and appetite for pleasure to which he owns when he speaks of his own ‘exquisite sense of the luxurious’: and with it the besetting tendency to self-torment which he describes as his ‘horrid morbidity of temperament.’ The greater his credit that on the one hand he gave way so little to self-indulgence, and that on the other he battled so bravely with the spirits that plagued him. To the bridle thus put on himself he alludes in his unaffected way when he speaks of the ‘violence of his temperament, continually smothered up.’ Left fatherless at eight, motherless at fifteen, and subject, during the forming years of his life which followed, to no other discipline but that of apprenticeship in a suburban surgery, he showed in his life such generosity, modesty, humour, and self-knowledge, such a spirit of conduct and degree of self-control, as would have done honour to one infinitely better trained and less hardly tried. His hold over himself gave way, indeed, under the stress of passion, and as a lover he betrays all the weak places of his nature. But we must remember his state of health when the passion seized, and the worse state into which it quickly threw, him, as well as the lack there was in her who caused it,—not indeed, so far as we can judge, of kindness and loyalty, but certainly, it would seem, of the woman’s finer genius of tact and tenderness. Under another kind of trial, when the work he offered to the world, in all soberness of self-judgment and of hope, was thrust back upon him with gibes and insult, he bore himself with true dignity: and if the practical consequences preyed upon his mind, it was not more than reason and the state of his fortunes justified. In all ordinary relations of life, his character was conspicuous alike for manly spirit and sweetness. No man who ever lived has inspired in his friends a deeper or more devoted affection. One, of whose name we have heard little in this history[74], wrote while the poet lay dying: “Keats must get himself again, Severn, if but for me—I cannot afford to lose him: if I know what it is to love I truly love John Keats.” The following is from a letter of Brown written also during his illness:—“he is present to me every where and at all times,—he now seems sitting here at my side, and looking hard into my face.... So much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely he was wound about my heart[75].” Elsewhere, speaking of the time of his first attack, Brown says:—“while I waited on him his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance of his eye, or motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment. Something like this, Severn his last nurse, observed to me[76]:” and we know in fact how the whole life of Severn, prolonged nearly sixty years after his friend’s death, was coloured by the light reflected from his memory. When Lord Houghton’s book came out in 1848, Archdeacon Bailey wrote from Ceylon to thank the writer for doing merited honour to one “whose genius I did not, and do not, more fully admire than I entirely loved the Man[77].” The points on which all who knew him especially dwell are two. First his high good sense and spirit of honour; as to which let one witness stand for many. “He had a soul of noble integrity,” says Bailey: “and his common sense was a conspicuous part of his character. Indeed his character was, in the best sense, manly.” Next, his beautiful unselfishness and warmth of sympathy. This is the rarest quality of genius, which from the very intensity of its own life and occupations is apt to be self-absorbed, requiting the devotion it receives with charm, which costs it nothing,—but with charm only, and when the trial comes, refusing to friendship any real sacrifice of its own objects or inclinations. But when genius to charm adds true unselfishness, and is ready to throw all the ardour of its own life into the cares and interests of those about it, then we have what in human nature is most worthy of love. And this is what his companions found in Keats. “He was the sincerest friend,” cries Reynolds, “the most loveable associate,—the deepest listener to the griefs and distresses of all around him,—‘That ever lived in this tide of times[78].’” To the same effect Haydon:—“He was the most unselfish of human creatures: unadapted to this world, he cared not for himself, and put himself to any inconvenience for the sake of his friends.... He had a kind gentle heart, and would have shared his fortune with any one who wanted it.” And again Bailey:— “With his friends, a sweeter tempered man I never knew, than was John Keats. Gentleness was indeed his proper characteristic, without one particle of dullness, or insipidity, or want of spirit.... In his letters he talks of suspecting everybody. It appeared not in his conversation. On the contrary he was uniformly the apologist for poor frail human nature, and allowed for people’s faults more than any man I ever knew, and especially for the faults of his friends. But if any act of wrong or oppression, of fraud or falsehood, was the topic, he rose into sudden and animated indignation[79].” Lastly, “he had no fears of self,” says George Keats, “through interference in the quarrels of others, he would at all hazards, and without calculating his powers to defend, or his reward for the deed, defend the oppressed and distressed with heart and soul, with hand and purse.” In this chorus of admiring affection, Haydon alone must assert his own superiority by mixing depreciation with praise. When he laments over Keats’s dissipations, he exaggerates, there is evidence enough to show, idly and calumniously. When on the other hand he speaks of the poet’s “want of decision of character and power of will,” and says that “never for two days did he know his own intentions,” his criticism is deserving of more attention. This is only Haydon’s way of describing a fact in Keats’s nature of which no one was better aware than himself. He acknowledges his own “unsteady and vagarish disposition.” What he means is no weakness of instinct or principle affecting the springs of conduct in regard to others, but a liability to veerings of opinion and purpose in regard to himself. “The Celtic instability,” a reader may perhaps surmise who adopts that hypothesis as to the poet’s descent. Whether the quality was one of race or not, it was probably inseparable from the peculiar complexion of Keats’s genius. Or rather it was an expression in character of that which was the very essence of that genius, the predominance, namely, of the sympathetic imagination over every other faculty. Acute as was his own emotional life, he nevertheless belonged essentially to the order of poets whose work is inspired, not mainly by their own personality, but by the world of things and men outside them. He realised clearly the nature of his own gift, and the degree to which susceptibility to external impressions was apt to overpower in him, not practical consistency only, but even the sense of a personal identity. “As to the poetic character itself,” he writes, “(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. 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.... 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.” “Even now,” he says on another occasion, “I am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live.” Keats was often impatient of this Protean quality of his own mind. “I would call the head and top of those who have a proper self,” he says, “men of power”: and it is the men of power, the men of trenchant individuality and settled aims, that in the sphere of practical life he most admires. But in the sphere of thought and imagination his preference is dictated by the instinctive bent of his own genius. In that sphere he is impatient, in turn, of all intellectual narrowness, and will not allow that poetry should make itself the exponent of any single creed or given philosophy. Thus in speaking of what he thinks too doctrinal and pedagogic in the work of Wordsworth:— “For the sake,” he asks, “of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. Many a man can travel to the very bourne of Heaven, and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing.... We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul.” This is but one of many passages in which Keats proclaims the necessity, for a poet, of an all-embracing receptivity and openness of mind. His critics sometimes speak as if his aim had been merely to create a paradise of art and beauty remote from the cares and interests of the world. If the foregoing pages have been written to any purpose, the reader will be aware that no criticism can be more mistaken. At the creation, the revelation, of beauty Keats aimed indeed invariably, but of beauty wherever its elements existed:—“I have loved,” as he says, “the principle of beauty in all things.” His conception of the kingdom of poetry was Shaksperean, including the whole range of life and imagination, every affection of the soul and every speculation of the mind. Of that kingdom he lived long enough to enter on and possess certain provinces only, those that by their manifest and prevailing charm first and most naturally allure the spirit of youth. Would he have been able to make the rest also his own? Would the faculties that were so swift to reveal the hidden delights of nature, to divine the true spirit of antiquity, to conjure with the spell of the Middle Age,—would they with time have gained equal power to unlock the mysteries of the heart, and, still in obedience to the law of beauty, to illuminate and harmonize the great struggles and problems of human life? My belief is that such power they would not have failed to gain. From the height to which the genius of Keats arose during the brief period between its first effervescence and its exhaustion,—from the glowing humanity of his own nature, and the completeness with which, by the testimony alike of his own consciousness and his friends’ experience, he was accustomed to live in the lives of others,—from the gleams of true greatness of mind which shine not only in his poetry, but equally amid the gossip and pleasantry of his familiar letters,—from all our evidences, in a word, as to what he was as well as from what he did,—I think it probable that by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shaksperean spirit that has lived since Shakspere; the true Marcellus, as his first biographer has called him, of the realm of English song; and that in his premature death our literature has sustained its greatest loss. Something like this, it would seem, is also the opinion of his foremost now living successors, as Lord Tennyson, Mr Browning, Mr Matthew Arnold. Others have formed a different judgment: but among those unfortunate guests at the banquet of life, the poets called away before their time, who can really adjudge the honours that would have been due had they remained? In a final estimate of any writer’s work, we must take into account not what he might have done, but only what he did. And in the work actually left by Keats, the master-chord of humanity, we shall admit, had not yet been struck with fulness. When we sum up in our minds the total effect of his poetry, we can think, indeed, of the pathos of Isabella, but of that alone, as equally powerful in its kind with the nature-magic of the Hymn to Pan and the Ode to a Nightingale, with the glow of romance colour in St Agnes’ Eve, the weirdness of romance sentiment in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the conflict of elemental force with fate in Hyperion, the revelations of the soul of ancient life and art in the Ode on a Grecian Urn and the fragment of an Ode to Maia. It remains to glance at the influence exercised by Keats on the poets who have come after him. In two ways chiefly, I should say, has that influence been operative. First on the subject-matter of poetry, in kindling and informing in other souls the poetic love of nature for her own sake, and also, in equal degrees, the love both of classic fable and of romance. And secondly on its form, in setting before poets a certain standard of execution—a standard not of technical correctness, for which Keats never cared sufficiently, but of that quality to which he himself refers when he speaks of ‘loading every rift of a subject with ore.’ We may define it as the endeavour after a continual positive poetic richness and felicity of phrase. A typical instance is to be found in the lines already quoted that tell us of the trembling hopes of Madeline,— “But to her heart her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side.” The beauty of such a phrase is no mere beauty of fancy or of sound; it is the beauty which resides in truth only, every word being chosen and every touch laid by a vital exercise of the imagination. The first line describes in perfection the duality of consciousness in such a moment of suspense, the second makes us realise at once the physical effect of the emotion on the heroine, and the spell of her imagined presence on ourselves. In so far as Keats has taught other poets really to write like this, his influence has been wholly to their advantage,—but not so when for this quality they give us only its simulacrum, in the shape of brilliancies merely verbal and a glitter not of gold. The first considerable writer among Keats’s successors on whom his example took effect was Hood, in the fairy and romance poems of his earlier time. The dominant poet of the Victorian age, Tennyson, has been profoundly influenced by it both in the form and the matter of his art, and is indeed the heir of Keats and of Wordsworth in almost equal degrees. After or together with Coleridge, Keats has also contributed most, among English writers, to the poetic method and ideals of Rossetti and his group. Himself, as we have seen, alike by gifts and training a true child of the Elizabethans, he thus stands in the most direct line of descent between the great poets of that age and those, whom posterity has yet to estimate, of our own day. Such, I think, is Keats’s historic place in English literature. What his place was in the hearts of those who best knew him, we have just learned from their own lips. The days of the years of his life were few and evil, but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friendship shines immortally. THE END.
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