prompted an interjection of Keats in a rather earlier letter to Bailey (November 1817): "Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!" One does not usually associate the suspicious character with the unselfish and generous character. Even apart from Haydon's, there is ample evidence to show that Keats was generous, and, in a sense, unselfish; although a man of creative or productive genius, intent upon his own work, and subordinating everything else to it, is seldom unselfish in the fullest ordinary sense of the term. But he was certainly suspicious. Of this temper we have already seen some painful ebullitions in his letters to Fanny Brawne. These might be ascribed mainly to the acute feelings of a lover, the morbid impressions of an invalid. But, in truth, Keats always was and had been suspicious. In a letter to his brothers, dated in January 1818, he refers, in a tone of some soreness, to objections which Hunt had raised against points of treatment in the first Book of " Endymion,” adding: "The fact is, he and Shelley are hurt, and perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously; and, from several hints I have had, they appear much disposed to dissect and anatomize any trip or slip I may have made." Still earlier, writing to Haydon, he had confessed to "a horrid morbidity of temperament." In a letter of June 1818 to Bailey he says: "You have all your life (I think so) believed everybody: I have suspected everybody." By January 1820 he has got into a condition of decided ennui, not far removed from misanthropy, and the company of acquaintances, and even of friends, is a tedium to him. This was a month before the begin ning of his fatal illness. It is true, he was then in love. He writes to Mrs. George Keats : 66 I dislike mankind in general. . . . The worst of men are those whose self-interests are their passions; the next, those whose passions are their self-interest. Upon the whole, I dislike mankind. Whatever people on the other side of the question may advance, they cannot deny that we are always surprised at hearing of a good action, and never of a bad one. If you were in England, I dare say you would be able to pick out more amusement from society than I am able to do. To me it is as dull as Louisville is to you. [Then follow several remarks on Hunt, Haydon, the Misses Reynolds, and Dilke.] 'Tis best to remain aloof from people, and like their good parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull processes of their everyday lives. When once a person has smoked the vapidness of the routine of society, he must have either some self-interest or the love of some sort of distinction to keep him in good humour with it. All I can say is that, standing at Charing Cross, and looking east, west, north, and south, I see nothing but dulness." "I carry all things to an extreme," he had written to Bailey in July 1818, "so that when I have any little vexation it grows in five minutes into a theme fit for Sophocles. Then and in that temper if I write to any friend, I have so little self-possession that I give him matter for grieving, at the very time perhaps when I am laughing at a pun." A phrase which Keats used in a letter of the 24th of October 1820, addressed to Mrs. Brawne, may also be, in the main, a true item of selfportraiture: "If ever there was a person born without the faculty of hoping, I am he." Too much weight, however, should not be given to this, as the poet's disease had then brought him far onward towards his grave. Severn does not seem to have regarded such a tendency as innate in Keats, for he wrote, at a far later date, "No mind was ever more exultant in youthful feeling." Keats's sentiment towards women appears to have been that of a shy youth who was at the same time a critical man. Miss Brawne enslaved him, but did not inspire him with that tender and boundless confidence which the accepted and engaged lover of a virtuous girl naturally feels. With one woman, Miss Cox, he seems to have been thoroughly at his ease; and one can gather from his expressions that this unusual result depended upon a fair counterbalance of claims. While she was self-centred in her beauty and attractiveness, he was selfcentred in his intellect and aspirations. early poem of his-the reverse of a good There is an -which one— seems worth quoting here. I presume he may have been in his twenty-first year or so when he wrote it :— "Woman, when I behold thee flippant, vain, Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies; The downcast eye, repentant of the pain But, when I see thee meek and kind and tender, Thy winning graces! To be thy defender A very Red-cross Knight, a stout Leander- Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair, Yet these I leave as thoughtless as a lark; These lures I straight forget-e'en ere I dine My ear is open like a greedy shark To catch the tunings of a voice divine. Ah who can e'er forget so fair a being? Who can forget her half-retiring sweets? In truth there is no freeing One's thoughts from such a beauty. When I hear A lay that once I saw her hand awake, Her form seems floating palpable and near. Had I e'er seen her from an arbour take A dewy flower, oft would that hand appear, And o'er my eyes the trembling moisture shake." From the opening lines of this poem I gather that Keats, when he wrote it, had never been in love; but that he had a feeling towards pure, sweet-minded, lovely women, which made him, in idea, their champion and votary. Later on, in June 1818, he wrote to Bailey that his love for his brothers had "always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise have made upon him." And in July of the same year, also to Bailey : ... "I am certain that our fair friends [ie. the Misses Reynolds] are glad I should come for the mere sake of my coming; but I am certain I bring with me a vexation they are better without. . . . I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women: at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality. I thought them ethereal -above men; I find them perhaps equal-great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. I do not like to think insults in a lady's company; I commit a crime with her which absence would not have known. When I am among women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone. You must be charitable, and put all this perversity to my being dis ΙΟ |