The Life and Times of John Keats: Complete Personal letters & Two Extensive Biographies. John Keats
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sprawling suburbs, rose the softly shagged undulations of Epping forest, a region which no amount of Cockney frequentation or prosaic vicinity can ever quite strip of its primitive romance. Westward over Hornsey to the Highgate and Hampstead heights, north-westward through Southgate towards the Barnets, and thence in a sweep by the remains of Enfield Chase, was a rich tract of typically English country, a country of winding elm-shadowed lanes, of bosky hedge and thicket and undulating pasture-land charmingly diversified with parks and pleasaunces. Nearly such I can myself remember it some sixty years ago, and even now, off the tram-frequented highways and between the devastating encroachments of bricks and mortar, forlorn patches of its ancient pastoral self are still to be found lurking.
It was in his rambles afield in these directions and in his habitual afternoon and evening strolls to Enfield and back, that a delighted sense of the myriad activities of nature’s life in wood and field and brook and croft and hedgerow began to possess Keats’ mind, and to blend with the beautiful images that already peopled it from his readings in Greek mythology, and to be enhanced into a strange supernatural thrill by the recurring magic of moonlight. It is only in adolescence that such delights can be drunk in, not with conscious study and observation but passively and half unaware through all the pores of being, and no youth ever drank them in more deeply than Keats. Not till later came for him, or comes for any man, the time when the images so absorbed, and the emotions and sympathies so awakened, define and develop themselves in consciousness and discover with effort and practice the secret of rightly expressing themselves in words.
After Keats, under the stimulus of Spenser, had taken his first plunge into verse, he went on writing occasional sonnets and other pieces: secretly and shyly at first like all other young poets: at least it was not until some two years later, in the spring of 1815, that he showed anything that he had written to his friend and confidant Cowden Clarke. This was a sonnet on the release of Leigh Hunt after serving a two years’ sentence of imprisonment for a political offence. Clarke relates how he was walking in to London from Enfield to call on and congratulate the ex-prisoner, whom he not only revered as a martyr in the cause of liberty but knew and admired personally, when Keats met him and turned back to accompany him part of the way. ‘At the last field-gate, when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled Written on the day that Mr Leigh Hunt left prison. This I feel to be the first proof I had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I remember the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with life.’ About a score of the pieces which Keats had written and kept secret during the preceding two years are preserved, and like the work of almost all beginners are quite imitative and conventional, failing to express anything original or personal to himself. They include the aforesaid Spenserian stanzas, which in fact echo the cadences of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence much more than those of Spenser himself; an ode to Hope, quite in the square-toed manner of eighteenth century didactic verse, and another to Apollo, in which style and expression owe everything to Gray; a set of octosyllabics recording, this time with some touch of freshness, a momentary impression of a woman’s beauty received one night at Vauxhall, and so intense that it continued to haunt his memory for years; two sets of verses addressed in a vein of polite parlour compliment to lady friends at the seaside; and several quite feeble sonnets in the Wordsworthian form, among them one on the peace of Paris in 1814, one on Chatterton and one on Byron.
Of Keats’ outward ways and doings during these days when he was growing to manhood we know nothing directly except from Cowden Clarke, and can only gather a little more by inference. It is clear that he enjoyed a certain amount of liberty and holiday, more, perhaps, than would have fallen to the lot of a more zealous apprentice, and that he spent part of his free time in London in the society of his brother George, at this time a clerk in Mr Abbey’s counting-house, and of friends to whom George made him known. Among these were the family of an officer of marines named Wylie, to whose charming daughter, Georgiana, George Keats a little later became engaged, and another family of prosperous tradespeople named Mathew. Here too there were daughters, Caroline and Ann, who made themselves pleasant to the Keats brothers, and to whom were addressed the pair of complimentary jingles already mentioned. One of the sisters, asked in later life for her recollections of the time, replied in a weariful strain of evangelical penitence for the frivolities of those days, and found nothing more to the purpose to say of Keats than this:— ‘I cannot go further than say I always thought he had a very beautiful countenance and was very warm and enthusiastic in his character. He wrote a great deal of poetry at our house but I do not recollect whether I ever had any of it, I certainly have none now; Ann had many pieces of his.’ A cousin of this family, one George Felton Mathew, was a youth of sensibility and poetical leanings, and became for a time an intimate friend of Keats, and next to his brothers and Cowden Clarke the closest confidant of his studies and ambitions. Their intimacy began in the Edmonton days and lasted through the earlier months of his student life in London. Looking back upon their relations after some thirty years, Mr Felton Mathew, then a supernumerary official of the Poor Law Board, struggling meekly under the combined strain of a precarious income, a family of twelve children, and a turn for the interpretation of prophecy, wrote as follows: —
Keats and I though about the same age, and both inclined to literature, were in many respects as different as two individuals could be. He enjoyed good health — a fine flow of animal spirits — was fond of company — could amuse himself admirably with the frivolities of life — and had great confidence in himself. I, on the other hand was languid and melancholy — fond of repose — thoughtful beyond my years — and diffident to the last degree. But I always delighted in administering to the happiness of others: and being one of a large family, it pleased me much to see him and his brother George enjoy themselves so much at our little domestic concerts and dances…. He was of the sceptical and republican school. An advocate for the innovations which were making progress in his time. A faultfinder with everything established. I, on the contrary, hated controversy and dispute — dreaded discord and disorder — loved the institutions of my country…. But I respected Keats’ opinions, because they were sincere — refrained from subjects on which we differed, and only asked him to concede with me the imperfection of human knowledge, and the fallibility of human judgment: while he, on his part, would often express regret on finding that he had given pain or annoyance by opposing with ridicule or asperity the opinions of others.
Of Keats’ physical appearance and poetical preferences the same witness writes further: —
A painter or a sculptor might have taken him for a study after the Greek masters, and have given him ‘a station like the herald Mercury, new lighted on some heaven-kissing hill.’ His eye admired more the external decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. He used to spend many evenings in reading to me, but I never observed the tears in his eyes nor the broken voice which are indicative of extreme sensibility. These indeed were not the parts of poetry which he took pleasure in pointing out.
This last, it should be noted, seems in pretty direct contradiction with one of Cowden Clarke’s liveliest recollections as follows:— ‘It was a treat to see as well as hear him read a pathetic passage. Once when reading Cymbeline aloud, I saw his eyes fill with tears, and his voice faltered when he came to the departure of Posthumus, and Imogen saying she would have watched him —
Till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay follow’d him till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air; and then
Have turn’d mine eye and wept.’
Early in the autumn of 1815, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday, Keats left the service of Mr Hammond, his indentures having apparently been cancelled by consent, and went to live in London as a student at the hospitals, then for teaching purposes united, of Guy’s and St Thomas’s. What befell him during the eighteen months that followed, and how his career as a student came to an end, will be told in the next two chapters.
Chapter II