John Keats - Life and Letters (1795-1821)

Houghton

Description

This is the father and the almost universal source, whether acknowledged or not, of all subsequent biographies of that heroic personality so inaptly referred to as 'poor Keats.' Richard Monckton Milnes, who afterwards became Lord Houghton, was only a boy of eleven when Keats died and did not frequent the same circles as the poet, but when he was on a visit to Walter Savage Landor, Houghton met with Charles Browne, who had been an intimate friend of Keats in his Hampstead days. Mr Browne had, himself, planned a biography of Keats but abandoned it when he determined to emigrate to New Zealand. His accumulated material he handed over to Houghton, but the latter spent eight years collecting further material, documentary and by the way of personal recollections and eye-witnesses, and the book, as it finally appeared, is substantially a portrait of Keats as he appeared to his contemporaries, authenticated by a large collection of the poet's original letters and literary notes,. The present edition has a note on the letters by Lewis Gibbs.

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 22 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528761079
• Langue: English

Extrait

LORD HOUGHTON
THE LIFE LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS
INTRODUCTION BY
ROBERT LYND
NOTE ON THE LETTERS BY
LEWIS GIBBS
INTRODUCTION
K EATS in his letters wrote of Shelley as poor Shelley, and we find Shelley, after Keats s death, writing of poor Keats. There are some people who resent the use of the epithet poor in reference to men of genius, but, since men of genius themselves speak of one another in this fashion, we need not quarrel with so innocuous an adjective. The word is used oftener in a spirit of affection than of patronage. We love poor Lamb with a warmth such as Horace Walpole-whom no one would dream of calling poor Walpole -never inspires in us. Mr. Squire, unless my memory is at fault, once said that at least no one would dare to speak of poor Johnson, but poor, dear Dr. Johnson is a phrase that is recorded as having come from the lips of Johnson s most dearly loved friend, Bennet Langton. The truth is, it is natural to speak in this way of men of genius who have suffered more than falls to the common lot, and whose sufferings have been brought home to us in intimate letters and familiar histories of their lives. If Shakespeare s letters had survived, it is possible that poor Shakespeare might win a new place in the personal affections of mankind above even poor Goldsmith and poor Burns. We do not know; but what we do know is that no man of genius was ever loved or admired less as a result of being labelled poor.
That Keats was for some time regarded by many people both as a minor poet and as a minor man-a mannikin, as Byron called him-is true enough. It was commonly believed that he was a self-indulgent and effeminate weakling, so lacking in ordinary courage that he was killed by a hostile review in the Quarterly . Even Shelley, who performed so noble a service to Keats s fame in Adonis , helped to propagate this false view by denouncing the Quarterly reviewer as a murderer. Keats, everybody knows to-day, was as essentially manly a poet as ever lived. We are told in Lord Houghton s Life that at school he was noted for his terrier-like resoluteness of character, and that his friends looked forward to his attaining future greatness, not in literature, but in a military or some such active career. There were morbid and melancholy elements in his rich and varied character, and the ecstasies of the senses play a larger part than the ecstasies of the spirit in his poetry; but the virility of his character and genius is as much beyond doubt as Byron s. He was a man, as he said of himself, who would have jumped down Etna for any public good; and his work is there, even if his life and letters were not, as evidence of a self-discipline such as no self-indulgent weakling ever achieves. It is to Lord Houghton, above all other writers, that we owe the permanent vindication of Keats as a man of heroic cast, devoted in his affections as in his art, crushed beneath real and overwhelming sufferings, and not done to death by a silly shaft of criticism. But, after the vindication, does he seem less poor Keats than he seemed before? I do not think so. There are few things in biographical literature that move the reader s pity more inevitably than the simple account of the last days and death of Keats in this book.
It was Houghton s part, however, to vindicate Keats, not only as a man, but as a man of genius. He himself, being a poet and a friend of such ardent admirers of Keats as Tennyson and FitzGerald, seems to have exaggerated the extent to which the fame of Keats was established before the publication of his book. We know that so slow was the growth of Keats s fame that no separate reprint of his poetry appeared till 1840, nearly twenty years after his death. In 1844, Jeffrey himself, to whom Houghton s book is dedicated, reprinted an essay in which he declared that the rich melodies of Shelley and Keats were being forgotten; and in 1845, three years before the appearance of Houghton s book, it was possible for so eminent a man of letters as De Quincey to write: Upon this mother tongue, upon this English language has Keats trampled as with the hoofs of a buffalo. To-day we are more confident of Keats s mastery of the English language than we are of De Quincey s. Most critics, indeed, regard Keats as the master goldsmith of the English language among all the poets after Shakespeare and Milton. It would be absurd, to my mind, to put him above Wordsworth and Shelley as a poet, but he surpasses them both in the riches of magical diction. It was not till after the publication of Houghton s book that the world at large began to realise this.
It was largely by accident that Houghton, then Richard Monckton Milnes, became the biographer of Keats. Milnes had never known Keats; indeed, he had been only a boy of eleven when Keats died. He did not even move in his youth in circles in which Keats had moved. It is said that there was a burst of interest in the poetry of Shelley and of Keats at Cambridge in 1829, when Milnes and Tennyson were undergraduates; but there is nothing in Wemyss Reid s two-volume biography of Milnes to suggest that Keats had been at any time a consuming interest in his varied social, political and literary existence. He did not choose Keats as a subject: rather Keats was thrust on him. When he was visiting Walter Savage Landor at his villa in Florence in 1833 or 34, he had the good fortune to meet Charles Brown, the friend with whom Keats had lived on such intimate terms in what is now Keats Grove, Hampstead. Brown was himself an author, and had intended to publish a memoir of Keats as well as to prepare a new edition of his works. He had written the memoir, but had not yet found a publisher for it when in 1840 he decided to leave Europe and settle with his son in New Zealand. In abandoning Europe he also abandoned the hope of becoming the biographer of Keats, and before his departure handed over his materials for the Life to Milnes, himself a poet and a lover of poets. That was the origin of the present book.
It was some years before Milnes, with his distracting genius for knowing, liking, and being liked by everybody, found time to undertake the task that, when it was completed, was to be his most permanent title to fame. Five years after the date of Brown s bequest, however, he began, with the assistance of Coventry Patmore, to collect further materials for the Life from Keats s surviving friends. And, a year or two after that, in 1848, he published this book, which has been the foundation of all biographies of Keats ever since. It will be seen from what has been said that its value lies in the fact that it gives us not only Houghton s Keats but Brown s Keats-the Keats of the wit and jolly companion whom Keats loved, and who was his closest friend during the most fruitful and tragic years of his life-Keats portrayed and reported, as it were, by his contemporaries.
It is true that Houghton does not tell us all that he knows. He is reticent in regard to a number of things of which later biographers have told us in full. He does not so much as mention the name of Fanny Brawne, and Sir Sidney Colvin suggests that he even confused her with Jane Cox, the Charmian with the beauty of a leopardess, of whom Keats wrote to his brother George in October 1818. It seems more reasonable to suppose that Houghton knew the facts about Fanny Brawne perfectly well, but made the easily understood mistake of imagining that the reference to Charmian was intended for her. It was impossible to tell the full story of Fanny in the Life , as she was still alive when it was published: she did not die, indeed, till 1865, seventeen years later. Without mentioning names, however, Houghton contrived to tell by implication much of the story of one of the most tragic passions in the history of lovers. So moving is the story even in shadowy outline that Edward FitzGerald wrote to him some years afterwards: I want to know who was the lady he died in love with, and, if I may not know her name, whether she was single or married.
There are still people who wish that the story of Fanny Brawne had never been told more fully than it is told by Houghton, and who regret that Keats s letters to her were not thrown into the fire, like Byron s autobiography. I cannot agree with them. These letters, these outcries of a dying and tortured lover, enrich our knowledge not only of Keats, but of human nature. It would be as reasonable to wish Hamlet or King Lear unwritten because they lay bare the agonies of great spirits. The letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne, unpleasing though Matthew Arnold thought them, admit us into the profoundest experiences of a soul as heroic as Hamlet s or Lear s-the hopes, the ecstasies, the vain-longing, the agonies of a young lover doomed to early death.
When Keats first met Fanny Brawne in 1818, he was twenty-three years old and she eighteen. His first impression of her was, as he wrote to his brother, that she was beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange. He described her as a minx, and even after they were engaged to be married, he confessed to her: My greatest torment since I have known you has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid. These things have led many people to disparage Fanny Brawne, and to speak of her as though she were a foolish, shallow-hearted girl, whose love was poison and bitterness to a dying man. Sir Sidney Colvin was of the opinion that it was the greatest misfortune of Keats s life that he loved her, though he had the justice to add that probably the love of any woman would, in the circumstances, have been injurious to Keats. I can see no ground for regarding Fanny either as a worthless creature or as an evil influence. Without her, I am convinced, Keats would never have written his greatest poems. I doubt if any poet who has never been in love can write the greatest poetry of