A POET'S LOVE-LETTERS.*
IN days when the wishes of "the pious founder" are not regarded with any superstitious respect, it is, we suppose, natural that the wishes of the poetic letter-writer should be regarded with none at all. As far as we can judge from the intense and acute horror with which Keats evidently regarded the discussion of his love by a coterie of friends, the notion of confiding his love-letters to the general public, though it were more than fifty years after his death, would have been simply hateful to him. He bad all the dread which every man of strong nature is sure to feel of any contact between purely personal though very deep emotions, and the curious criticism of an indifferent world. Feelings the only meaning of which is individual, ought to be reserved for those for whom they have a mean- ing. When thrown into a poetic or imaginative form, they are of course so far transformed by that process as to be made applic- able to the feelings of a thousand different minds under similar circumstances. But while they remain in the form of passionate avowals from A to B, and are marked by all the individual detail which applies only to the circumstances of A. and B, there is a certain amount of indelicacy in inviting the inspection of all the world, from which Keats certainly, for his lifetime at all events, had the most sensitive shrinking. And though we do not say that the death of both parties, the fame of one of them, and the gulf of intervening time, do not diminish to some extent the unbe- comingness of publishing this kind of correspondence, yet if we may trust the impression which it has produced upon the present writer, there is still something decidedly unbecoming in doing this offence to Keats's feelings, and Mr. Forman would have judged better, we think, had he recommended the owners of these letters to give them to the flames. In proportion to our admiration for a man of genius, should be our wish to consult his wishes as to the disposal of his private concerns. And what can • Letters of John Keats to Fanny Browne, written in the years 1819 and 1820, and now given from the Original Manuscripts, with Introduction and Notes. By Harry Buxton Forman. London: Reeves and Turner.
be-a more private concern to any one than the fate of letters meant only for one person's eyes, and more or less liable to appear unseemly, eccentric, wanting in reticence, if brought under the eyes of any one else ? Even the truest admirer of Keats will read these letters with a sense that they are prying into what he would have kept from them, if he could. And surely it is a very bad return to make to a man of genius for the delight he has given us, thus to avail ourselves of the permanence of records to which he would certainly have given, if he had been able, no longer existence than that of the two persons of whose tie to each other these letters formed some of the most im- portant links. You might almost as fitly reproduce the actual lovers' talks and sighs of the present day for our posterity fifty years hence, by the help of the talking phonograph, as reproduce letters of this kind, which were evidently meant to perish with the relation which they recorded and modified.
Yet who would dream of making love in the presence of a talking phonograph ? Keats assuredly least of all. And we may be sure that if he could have procured paper which was bound to crumble into dust before the death of the lady to whom he wrote, such paper he would have procured.
We cannot say, then, that the reading of this little volume has given us anything like unmixed pleasure. We have felt all through it that we were guilty of an intrusion, which, like all intrusions in such a region, Keats would have warmly resented. And we have felt, too, something beside this, and quite inde- pendent of the uncomfortable feeling of intrusion,—that much in these letters which Keats could easily have justified, and would have justified, if he had been writing a poem or a play,--by the very simple expedient of making us see the object of his passion, as well as the glow of the subjective passion itselt—has an un- comfortably naked, unnatural effect here, where we have only his own side of the relation, and hardly even a single glimpse of the other side of it. To hear even a poet raving about his "swooning admiration" of a lady's beauty, while that lady's beauty is a blank to us, or worse than a blank,—represented by a very ugly black silhouette of a young lady with a high cap, an impossible waist, and a big nose,—is quite as painful in an artistic sense, as it is in a moral sense by giving us the feeling of being made party to a breach of personal confidence. We are aware that Miss Brawne indicated her impression that ultimately these records of Keats's passion might be published, but in so doing she only betrayed, we think, how imperfectly she understood, or how little she respected, Keats's horror of any revelation of the kind.
But though this little book is in both the ways we have men- tioned distasteful to us, it would be false to say that it is without interest. It bears the marks of Keats's genius in many of the letters, and the marks of his individual character in almost all.
It is, for instance, most characteristic of Keats to say that if the lady with whom he is so deeply in love, should ever feel for a man at the first sight what he did for her, he should not
quarrel with her, though he should hate himself, but he " should burst, if the thing were not as fine, as a man, as you are as a
woman." So passionate a love of beauty had Keats, that doubt- less he was capable, even in such a trial as this, of admitting to himself,—at least if so it were,— that " the thing " was "as
fine as a man" as his fiancée was as a woman. Whether Keats himself, however, would have felt less inclined " to burst " after making that avowal to himself, than he would have done if he had, in his aesthetic conscience, been compelled to deny this in- dignantly in regard to " the thing," it is not easy to say. Nor does he seem to have been actually tried to this extent. Still it is most characteristic of Keats that he should even have imagined
himself likely to suffer less, if the lady of his choice were to fall in love with " a thing" who was " as fine as a man as she was as a woman," than he would have suffered if she were to fall in love with a creature of less excellence.
Again, the intense horror of " settling" in life which Keats expresses, i.e., of falling into a limited and conventional routine, is only less individually characteristic of Keats, because it has certainly haunted many another poet,—Goethe, for instance,—quite as sharply. Still not only is it character- istic of the class of poets to which Keats belonged, but the mode in which he gives expression to it is highly character- istic of himself individually. In leaving Shanklin for Winchester, he writes :— ;':You would delight very greatly in the walks about here, the cliffs, -woods, hills, sands, rocks, &c., about here. They are, however, not so Ilise,but I shall give them a hearty good-bye to exchange them for my ,Clatilsedral. Yet, again, I am• not so tired of scenery as to hate Switzer- land. We might spend a pleasant year at Berne or Zurich—if Halton's! please Venus to hear my 'Beseeeh thee to hear us, 0 Goddess.' And if she should hear, God forbid we should what people call settle—turn into a pond, a stagnant Lethe—a vile crescent, row or buildings. Better be imprudent moveables than prndent fixtures. Open my mouth at the street door like the lion's head at Venice to receive hateful cards, letters, messages. Go out and wither at tea parties ; freeze at dinners ; bake at dances ; simmer at routs. No, my love, trust yourself to me, and I will find you nobler amusement, fortune favouring."
One of his great pleasures at Winchester was to be the following : —" At Winchester I shall get your letters more readily ; and it being a cathedral city, I shall have a pleasure, always a great one to me when near a Cathedral, of reading them during the service up and down the aisle." Rather a cynical peripatetic pleasure, this, during service-time, and one that can only have been taken not very considerately for the worship of others. But in another letter Keats says, " My creed is Love, and you are its only tenet," and that was, we suppose, his excuse for reading its homilies in a Cathedral, " during the service, up and down the aisle."
The most characteristic, however, of any of these letters, at least the most characteristic of those which are not so personal as to give us the sense of prying into his secrets in the perusal, is the last letter written from Winchester, in what Keats regarded as a hard literary mood, when his heart was surrounded with the as triplex of imaginative prepossessions. In this letter he speaks of seeing the lady of his choice through a mist of other images and cares, and apologises throughout (with much tenderness) for the iron hardness of his thought and style :- "Winchester, August 17th. [Postmark, 16th August, 1810.]—My dear girl,—what shall I say for myself ? I have been here four days and not yet written you—'tis true I have had many teasing letters of business to dismiss—and I have been in the claws, like a serpent in an eagle's, of the last act of our tragedy. This is no excuse ; I know it ; I do not presume to offer it. I have no right either to ask a speedy answer to let me know how lenient you are—I must remain some days in a Mist—I see you through a Mist ; as I daresay you do me by this time. Believe in the first Letters I wrote you: I assure you I felt as I wrote—I could not write so now. The thousand images I have had pass through my brain—my uneasy spirits—my unguess'd fate—all spread as a veil between me and you. Remember I have had no idle leisure to brood over you—'tis well perhaps I have not. I could not have endured the throng of jealousies that used to haunt me before I had plunged so deeply into imaginary interests. I would fain, as my sails are set, sail on without an interruption for a Brace of Months longer—I am in complete cue—in the fever; and shall in these four Months do an immense deal. This Page as my eye skims over it I see is excessively unloverlike and ungallant—I cannot help it—I am no officer in yawning quarters; no Parson-Romeo. My Mind is heap'd to the full ; stuff'd like a cricket-ball—if I strive to fill it more it would burst. I know the generality of women would hate me for this ; that I should have so unsoften'd, so hard a Mind as to forget them ; forget the brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own Brain. But I conjure you to give it a fair thinking; and ask yourself whether 'tis not better to explain my feelings to you, than write artificial Passion.— Besides, you would see through it. It would be vain to strive to de- ceive you. 'Tis harsh, harsh, I know it. My heart seems now made of iron—I could not write a proper answer to an invitation to Idalia. You are my Judge : my forehead is on the ground. You seem offended at a little simple innocent childish playfulness in my last. I did not seriously mean to say that you were endeavouring to make me keep my promise. I bog your pardon for it. 'Tis but just your pride should take tho alarm—seriously. You say I may do as I please—I do not think with any conscience I can ; my cash resources are for the present stopp'd ; I fear for some time. I spend no money, but it increases my debts. I have all my life thought very little of these matters—they seem not to belong to me. It may be a proud sentence ; but by Heaven I am as entirely above all matters of interest as the Sun is above the Earth—and though of my own money I should be careless ; of my Friends' I must bo spare. You see how I go on—like so many strokes of a hammer. I cannot help it—I am impell'd, driven to it. I am not happy enough for silken Phrases, and silver sentences. I can no more use soothing words to you than if I were at this moment engaged in a charge of Cavalry. Then you will say I should not write at all.—Should I not? This Winchester is a fine place ; a beautiful cathedral and many other ancient buildings in the environs. The little coffin of a room at Shanklin is changed for a large room, where I can promenade at my pleasure—looks out on to a beautiful—blank side of a house. It is strange I should like it better than the view of the sea from our window at Shanklin. I began to hate the very posts there— the voice of tho old Lady over the way was getting a groat Plague. Tho Fisherman's face never altered any more than our black teapot—. the knob, however, was knock'd off, to my little relief. I am getting a great dislike of the picturesque, and can only relish it over again by seeing you enjoy it. One of the pleasantest things I have seen lately was at Cowes. The Regent in his Yatch* (I think they spell it) was anchored opposite—a beautiful vessel—and all the Yatchs and boats on the coast were passing and repassing it, and circuiting and tacking about it in every direction. I never beheld. anything so silent, light, and graceful. As we pass'd over to Soath- ampton, there was nearly an accident. There came by a Boat, well mann'd, with two naval officers at the stern. Our Bow-lines took the top of their little mast and snapped it off close by the board. Had the• mast been a little stouter, they would have been upset. In so trifling an event, I could not help admiring our seamen,—neither officer- nor • This word is of course left es found in the original letter a an editor-who. should spell it yacht would be guilty of representing Keats as thinkhg what ho. did not think. man in the whole Boat moved a muscle,—they scarcely notie'd it even with words. Forgive me for this flint-worded Letter, and believe and see that I cannot think of you without some sort of energy, though mal apropos. Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments' thought of you would uncrystallise and dissolve me. I must not give way to it—but turn to my writing again—if I fail, I shall die hard. 0 my love, your lips are growingsweet again to my fancy—I must forget them. Ever your affectionate KEATS."
That seems to us a letter most characteristic of Keats, well worth preserving, and not of the purely personal character of most of the correspondence. The idea throughout is that the writer's heart, while it is occupied with the world of poetry, " seems made of iron ;" that the sentences of the letter he wrote while thus employed are like " strokes of a hammer ;" that instead of writing soothing words, he is " engaged in a charge of cavalry," and that all this hardness is due to his poetic preoccupations. That fancy of his is very characteristic of the depth of his poetic tife. And still more the touching plea for what he calls his " flint- worded letter,"—namely, that it proves, at all events, that he can- not think of her to whom it is addressed " without some sort of energy,"—and the melting into genuine love in the last sentence, so.s his fancy conjures up once more her to whom he is writing, are curiously characteristic of a poet whose love of beauty was so strong, that it alone seemed to satisfy him like love of a person, and was his only equivalent for personal affection, and who evi- dently made even the lady of his choice jealous of her own beauty, since she seems to have feared, not perhaps untruly, that he loved her for her beauty, not for herself, and so fearing, was not able to elicit from Keats any positive contradiction.
The little volume is, indeed, full of Keats. And yet we would rather that it had been buried in the oblivion to which assuredly be himself would have consigned it.
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