What Became of Severn ?
Against Oblivion. By Sheila Birkenhead. (Cassell. 12s. 6d.) THIS book is so nearly good that it desaves severe criticism for not being better. Joseph Severn (for it is he who, with his family, is to be rescued from oblivion) was not only the friend of Keats and the enthusiastic painter of innumerable peasants and princesses: "lightly sagacious, lovingly humorous, daintily sentimental," as Ruskin wrote "he was in council with the Cardinals today and at picnic in the wrote, with the brightest English belles tomorrow ; and caught the hearts of all in the golden net of his goodwill and understanding." London, Rome, London, and again Rome, where at the age of eighty-one he was still concealing his rheumatism and enjoying gay Anglo-Italian dinner-parties, prosperity and poverty, an imprudent and highly successful marriage with the illegitimate daughter of a Scottish peer, friendships with Lady Westmorland, Henry Fox, the Richmonds, the Gladstones, and throughout the Keats memories so keen that reading the letters to Fanny Brawne precipitated his final collapse—what richer field than this could the biographer desire? As for the evidence, it is worthy of the subject. Published letters and memoirs are supplemented by a verbal family tradition and a _mass of unpublished family papers. From such material what an excellent book might have been written!
Alas! the author is often both careless and banal. It is irritating to read on page 30 that Joseph's sister Sarah "had lately married and he was lodging with her in Goswell Street. This made his life much easier in eliminating the long walk from his father's house at Hoxton to his work in Newman Street," when we have already learnt from page 23 that "life became easier for Joseph when Sarah married. She let him have a room in her house in Goswell Street." It is worse than irritating to come across such passages as this: "Sinister dark-faced Antonelli was Pope in all but name. Timid Pius found his interest in evolving new religious dogma, while the unscrupulous Cardinal encouraged corruption." This sort of writing really will not do.
But faults of execution are more easily overlooked than faults of intention. It is open to question how far it is legitimate to romanticise biography: to relate as if it were fact what might have been said or done or felt on occasions which might have arisen or actually did arise during the hero's life. In general, however, truth is more interesting than fiction and falsehood not interesting at all. "Joseph walked part of the way back with Keats. . . . Joseph said nothing, and then Keats shrugged his shoulders and smiled. 'Now, is not all this a most paltry thing to think about,' he said in a lighter tone. . . . Then his thoughts turned again to his poem. "I have heard Hunt say, and I may be asked—why endeavour after a long poem? to which I should answer, &c.'" Now it is simply not true that this was said by Keats walking home with Severn It was written, in the first place, in a letter to his brother George. He may have said something like it ; but to take whole passages from letters and to reproduce them with or without additions as conversations taking place on definite and quite different occasions is both literary vandalism and appalling misuse of historical evidence. Unfortunately, it is the sort of thing Lady Birkenhead, on her own confession, does continually. After this it would be frivolous to complain that in the later part of the book Mary Severn completely eclipses her father (indeed, that Mr. Severn is always called Joseph while Mrs. Severn is called Mama betrays a certain confusion of purpose): all the more since Mary is the most enchanting creature that biographer could find or novelist invent. She is romantic, scoring her copies of Tennyson and Keats to her family's derision, enthusiastic and practical. During the lean periods it is she who keeps the household going with her portraits of Irish peers, Eton boys and the Royal children. "If only she (the Queen) would sit in warm rooms,'; she writes, "she really would be better looking ; but to me it seems as if she were frozen, quite trembling, and no fires! . . . I quite agree with you about beauty and warmth, and on the strength of it I bought some brown stockings." In Mary's company we do not regret the temporary disappearance of her father, hiding from his creditors in his sister's house in Islington.
Criticism, it must be repeated, would not be worth making if this were not on the whole a very pleasant book. We may occasionally wince, but we read on. Whenever we get to the original documents we are safe, and, on the whole, the charm of the story to be told more than makes up for any literary or historical shortcomings on
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