MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON 0 N Saturday afternoon I was present at the reopening of the house where Keats spent the last months of his life in England. The guests were received by the Mayor of Hampstead and Mrs. Judd, and the opening ceremony was performed by Lady Crewe, Chairman of the Keats- Shelley Memorial Association and daughter-in-law of Richard Monckton Milnes. The company were seated on the sloping lawn to the east of the house, where a neat dais had been erected for the speakers. White clouds chased each other slowly across a June sky, the sun was hot, the photographers concealed themselves tactfully among the thick branches of the mulberry tree, and the blackbirds and the thrushes, espying three microphones, sang their little hearts out into the summer air. The Borough of Hampstead deserve great credit for the energy they have shown in preserving for posterity this monu- ment to a great poet. But for their initiative and for the support given them by local residents, the house might have been demolished in 1920 and replaced by a towering block of flats. The building was damaged by bombs during the recent war, and the Borough voted a substantial sum for its repair and assisted a public appeal for subscriptions. Money was received from the United States as well as from the Dominions; the Pilgrim Trust displayed their Wonted zeal and discrimination in adding a valuable donation. The restora- tion appeal still remains open, and it would be kind if readers of the Spectator would. now- send to His Worship the Mayor, Town Hall, Hampstead, N.W.3, a token of their appreciation of the public-spirited work which he, his predecessors, his aldermen and his councillors have performed. It will be agreeable for you, when you sign your handsome cheques, to feel that the name of Keats was not, after all, writ in water. We can all pay this small tribute to Adonais.
* * * * The restoration of the damaged edifice presented a diffi- cult problem. The original building as Keats had known it was enlarged and altered by the actress, Miss Chester, when - she acquired the property in 1838; she added a drawing-room and conservatory at the east end of the house and changed the position of the doors, the partition walls and the staircases. There were some who thought that the Borough Council should seize this opportunity to abolish all Miss Chester's improve- ments and to reconstruct the house exactly as it had been when Charles Wentworth Dilke first built it in 1816. It was rightly felt, however, that such deliberate restoration would be arti- ficial. It would have been easy enough to sweep away Miss Chester's pleasant drawing room and conservatory; it would not have been difficult to replace the doors and staircases in the position they had originally occupied. But it would have been impossible to re-create the atmosphere, the sense of place -and space, that surrounded the little house and garden when Keats lived there with Charles Armitage Brown; when Fanny Brawne, her mother, her sister and her brother, lived next door. In those days the house gave the impression of being a cottage on the top of a hill with an open sweep of sky above it; only a low hedge of laurustinus separated the garden from the heath beyond; the houses opposite had not been con- structed, and the trees which now enclose the house protectingly were no more than striplings. The rooms moreover were, we may suppose, sparsely furnished and shabby; it is possible to re-create grandeur, but shabbiness possesses a more authentic charm and must develop naturally.
The Borough Council have been fortunate in finding in Mr. Alan Reed an architect of understanding and taste. Ably supported by Alderman Boyd, the Chairman a the Public Libraries Committee, Mr. Reed has been able to carry out the restoration with sure sincerity. He knows that houses are living organisms and no mere arrangement of bricks and plaster; he knows that to destroy the organic development of the house would have been to deprive it of living tissue. He realised also that the building was never intended to be more than a semi-detached villa on the northern heights; to have overweighted it with Regency valances and headings would have been to destroy its character completely. He has thus worked carefully; reproducing colours and mouldings as they existed in Keats's day, introducing here and there a few small features to remind us of the period, but leaving the rest of the house as it had grown in the first half of the last century. Miss Chester's drawing-room has been turned into a convenient space for the exhibition of Keats's relics, and the visitor will find there Keats's inkstand, his beloved folio Shakespeare, portraits and silhouettes and several characteristic letters written in his firm and lovely hand. There is Brown's room, facing north across the heath, and Keats's own room facing south, with its French window opening up one step upon the sunlight, the shrubberies, the flowers and the birds of the little garden. I was glad also to observe that in the Brawne half of the house a few relics of Fanny have been displayed. Fanny Brawne has been unfairly treated by posterity; it is indeed fitting that she should share in this memorial to a man who loved her so wildly and whom she gently loved.
For all the atrocious despair of his last months in England. Keats was happier in this house than in any other. In a letter to his young sister (whose great-grandson, Dr. Ernesto Para- dinas, was present at Saturday's ceremony) he speaks of "the habit I have acquired of this room." Before the terrible haemorrhage of February 3rd, 1820, he would sit for hours in a cane chair by the window with a book upon his knee. "I should like," he wrote, "the window to open onto the Lake of Geneva, and there I'd sit and read all day, like the picture of somebody reading." It was thus that Joseph Severn portrayed him in the picture which is now in the National Portrait Gallery; the visitor to Keats House today can identify the exact spot where he was seated between the fire-place and the window, with the Shakespeare portrait and the bookcase to his left. After the fearful attack which assailed him on February 3rd,-- 1820 (presage of his death a year later in the small blue- ceilinged room in Rome), he was moved to a sofa-couch in Brown's sitting-room, from where he could watch the people walking on the heath, and see Fanny Brawne flitting across the garden. Pathetic indeed are the notes he would send round to her in the morning: "Come round to m5r window for a moment when you have read this." For a bright instant she would stand there framed in the window—so small, so young, so merry-- and he would gaze at her with the agonised eyes of a man con- demned. To be with her filled him with the torture of unattain- able desire; to be absent from her exposed his sick nerves to demon visitations of suspicion, jealousy and despair. The memory of a mighty poet dying in misery hangs solemnly about that house.
. For us, on that sunny afternoon last Saturday, there was alleviation from the weight of wastage left by thoughts of the sufferings and death of this miraculous young man. The poems which he wrote in that small room, in that small garden, are still winged with triumph; there was gladness in our know- ledge that the renown of Keats had been so completely fulfilled. We recalled his words. We remembered: "1 think I shall be among the English poets after my death." We remem- bered: "There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality." Our regret was that this young man, with all his gentle dignity, with all his " terrier courage," did not foresee the solace of his disappointment, or know that the huge English-speaking world would join together to preserve his monument one hundred and thirty-one-years after his death.
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