Chapter III: Letter III: of the present series, “the very first week I knew you I wrote

myself your vassal,” we must perforce regard the date of first meeting as between the end of October and the beginning of December, 1818.

In conducting the reader to this conclusion it will be necessary to remove a misapprehension which has been current for nearly thirty years in regard to a passage in the letter that yields us our starting-point. This is the long letter to George Keats, dated the 29th of October, 1818, given in Lord Houghton’s _Life, Letters, &c._,[2] and commencing at page 227 of Vol. I, wherein is the following passage:

“The Misses —— are very kind to me, but they have lately
displeased me much, and in this way:—now I am coming the
Richardson!—On my return, the first day I called, they were
in a sort of taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs, who,
having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner, was
invited by Mrs. —— to take asylum in her house. She is an
East-Indian, and ought to be her grandfather’s heir. At the
time I called, Mrs. —— was in conference with her up stairs,
and the young ladies were warm in her praise down stairs,
calling her genteel, interesting, and a thousand other pretty
things, to which I gave no heed, not being partial to nine
days’ wonders. Now all is completely changed: they hate her,
and, from what I hear, she is not without faults of a real
kind; but she has others, which are more apt to make women of
inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at
least, a Charmian: she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine
eyes, and fine manners. When she comes into the room she makes
the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too
fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may
address her: from habit she thinks that _nothing particular_. I
always find myself more at ease with such a woman: the picture
before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot
possibly feel with anything inferior. I am, at such times,
too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble:
I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You will,
by this time, think I am in love with her, so, before I go
any further, I will tell you I am not. She kept me awake one
night, as a tune of Mozart’s might do. I speak of the thing as
a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper
than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very ‘yes’ and
‘no’ of whose life is to me a banquet. I don’t cry to take
the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave
her behind me. I like her, and her like, because one has no
_sensations_: what we both are is taken for granted. You will
suppose I have, by this, had much talk with her—no such thing;
there are the Misses —— on the look out. They think I don’t
admire her because I don’t stare at her; they call her a flirt
to me—what a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in
such a manner that a man is drawn towards her with a magnetic
power; this they call flirting! They do not know things; they
do not know what a woman is. I believe, though, she has faults,
the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet she
is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are
two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things—the
worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly,
spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron,
and this Charmian, hold the first place in our minds; in the
latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child’s cradle,
and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man
of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal
being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me,
and I should like you to save me.

‘I am free from men of pleasure’s cares,
By dint of feelings far more deep than theirs.’

This is ‘Lord Byron,’ and is one of the finest things he has
said.”

Now it is clear from this passage that a lady had made a certain impression on Keats; and Lord Houghton in his latest publication states explicitly what is only indicated in general terms in the Memoirs published in 1848 and 1867,—that the lady here described was Miss Brawne. In the earlier Memoirs, three letters to Rice, Woodhouse, and Reynolds follow the long letter to George Keats; then comes the statement that “the lady alluded to in the above pages inspired Keats with the passion that only ceased with his existence”; and, as the letter to Reynolds contains references to a lady, it might have been possible to regard Lord Houghton’s expression as an allusion to that letter only. But in the brief and masterly Memoir prefixed to the Aldine Edition of Keats[3], his Lordship cites the passage from the letter of the 29th of October as descriptive of Miss Brawne,—thus confirming by explicit statement what has all along passed current as tradition in literary circles.

When Lord Houghton’s inestimable volumes of 1848 were given to the world there might have been indelicacy in making too close a scrutiny into the bearings of these passages; but the time has now come when such cannot be the case; and I am enabled to give the grounds on which it is absolutely certain that the allusion here was not to Miss Brawne. As Lord Houghton has elsewhere recorded, Keats met Miss Brawne at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Dilke, who had no daughters, while the relationship of “the Misses ——” and “Mrs. ——” of the passage in question is clearly that of mother and daughters. Mrs. Brawne had already been settled with her children at Hampstead for several years at this time, whereas this cousin of “the Misses ——” had just arrived when Keats returned there from Teignmouth. The “Charmian” of this anecdote was an East-Indian, having a grandfather to quarrel with; while Miss Brawne never had a grandfather living during her life, and her family had not the remotest connexion with the East Indies. Moreover, Keats’s sister, who is still happily alive, assures me positively that the reference is not to Miss Brawne. In regard to the blank for a surname, I had judged from various considerations internal and external that it should be filled by that of Reynolds; and, on asking Mr. Severn (without expressing any view whatever) whether he knew to whom the story related, he wrote to me that he knew the story well from Keats, and that the reference is to the Misses Reynolds, the sisters of John Hamilton Reynolds. Mr. Severn does not know the name of the cousin of these ladies.

It is clear then that the lady who had impressed Keats some little time before the 29th of October, 1818, and was still fresh in his mind, was not Fanny Brawne. That the impression was not lasting the event shewed; and we may safely assume that it was really limited in the way which Keats himself averred,—that he was not “in love with her.” But it is incredible, almost, that, in his affectionate frankness with his brother, he would ever have written thus of another woman, had he been already enamoured of Fanny Brawne. This view is strengthened by reading the letter to the end: in such a perusal we come upon the following passage:

“Notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendations, I
hope I shall never marry: though the most beautiful creature
were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though
the carpet were of silk, and the curtains of the morning
clouds, the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet’s down, the
food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on
Winandermere, I should not feel, or rather my happiness should
not be, so fine; my solitude is sublime—for, instead of what
I have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home;
the roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through my
window-panes are my children; the mighty abstract Idea of
Beauty in all things, I have, stifles the more divided and
minute domestic happiness. An amiable wife and sweet children I
contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand
of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more
and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do
not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No
sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are stationed
around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent
to a King’s Body-guard: ‘then Tragedy with scepter’d pall comes
sweeping by:’ according to my state of mind, I am with Achilles
shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of
Sicily; or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating
those lines, ‘I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank,
staying for waftage,’ I melt into the air with a voluptuousness
so delicate, that I am content to be alone. Those things,
combined with the opinion I have formed of the generality of
women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give
a sugar-plum than my time, form a barrier against matrimony
which I rejoice in. I have written this that you might see
that I have my share of the highest pleasures of life, and
that though I may choose to pass my days alone, I shall be no
solitary; you see there is nothing splenetic in all this. The
only thing that can ever affect me personally for more than one
short passing day, is any doubt about my powers of poetry: I
seldom have any, and I look with hope to the nighing time when
I shall have none.”[4]

There is but little after this in the letter, and apparently no break between the time at which he thus expressed himself and that at which he signed the letter and added—“This is my birthday.” If therefore my conclusion as to the negative value of this and the “Charmian” passage be correct, we may say that he was certainly not enamoured of Miss Brawne up to the 29th of October, 1818, although it is tolerably clear, from the evidence of Mr. Dilke, that Keats first met her about October or November. Again, in a highly interesting and important letter to Keats’s most intimate friend John Hamilton Reynolds, a letter which Lord Houghton placed immediately after one to Woodhouse dated the 18th of December, 1818, we read the following ominous passage suggesting a doom not long to be deferred:—

“I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has
haunted me these two days—at such a time when the relief,
the feverish relief of poetry, seems a much less crime. This
morning poetry has conquered—I have relapsed into those
abstractions which are my only life—I feel escaped from a
new, strange, and threatening sorrow, and I am thankful for
it. There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of
Immortality.

“Poor Tom—that woman and poetry were ringing changes in my
senses. Now I am, in comparison, happy.”[5]

There is no date to this letter; and, although it was most reasonable to suppose that the fervid expressions used pointed to the real heroine of the poet’s tragedy,—that he wrote in one of those moments of mastery of the intellect over the emotions such as he experienced when writing the extraordinary fifth Letter of the present series,—the fact is that the reference is to “Charmian,” and that the letter was misplaced by Lord Houghton. It really belongs to September 1818, and should precede instead of following this “Charmian” letter.

When Keats wrote the next letter in Lord Houghton’s series (also undated) to George and his wife, Tom was dead; and there is another clue to the date in the fact that he transcribes a letter from Miss Jane Porter dated the 4th of December, 1818. After making this transcript he proceeds to draw the following verbal portrait of a young lady:

“Shall I give you Miss ——? She is about my height, with a
fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort; she wants
sentiment in every feature; she manages to make her hair look
well; her nostrils are very fine, though a little painful; her
mouth is bad and good; her profile is better than her full
face, which, indeed, is not full, but pale and thin, without
showing any bone; her shape is very graceful, and so are her
movements; her arms are good, her hands bad-ish, her feet
tolerable. She is not seventeen, but she is ignorant; monstrous
in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling
people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the
term—Minx: this is, I think, from no innate vice, but from a
penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of
such style, and shall decline any more of it. She had a friend
to visit her lately; you have known plenty such—she plays the
music, but without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at
her fingers; she is a downright Miss, without one set-off.
We hated her, and smoked her, and baited her, and, I think,
drove her away. Miss ——, thinks her a paragon of fashion,
and says she is the only woman in the world she would change
persons with. What a stupe,—she is as superior as a rose to a
dandelion.”[6]

There is nothing explicit as to the date of this passage; but there is no longer any doubt that this sketch has reference to Miss Brawne, and that Keats had now found that most dangerous of objects a woman “alternating attraction and repulsion.”

The lady’s children assured me that the description answered to the facts in every particular except that of age: the correct expression would be “not nineteen”; but Keats was not infallible on such a point; and the holograph letter in which he wrote “Miss Brawne” in full shews that he made a mistake as to her age. When he wrote this passage, he was, I should judge, feeling a certain resentment analogous to what found a much more tender expression in the first letter of the present series, when the circumstances made increased tenderness a matter of course,—a resentment of the feeling that he was becoming enslaved.

There is no announcement of his engagement in the original letter to his brother and sister-in-law, which I have read; and it would seem improbable that he was engaged when he wrote it. But of the journal letter begun on the 14th of February, 1819, and finished on the 3rd of May, only a part of the holograph is accessible; and there may possibly have been such an announcement in the missing part, while, under some date between the 19th of March and the 15th of April, Keats writes the following paragraph and sonnet, from which it might be inferred that the engagement had been announced in an unpublished letter.

“I am afraid that your anxiety for me leads you to fear for the
violence of my temperament, continually smothered down: for
that reason, I did not intend to have sent you the following
Sonnet; but look over the two last pages, and ask yourself if I
have not that in me which will bear the buffets of the world.
It will be the best comment on my Sonnet; it will show you that
it was written with no agony but that of ignorance, with no
thirst but that of knowledge, when pushed to the point; though
the first steps to it were through my human passions, they went
away, and I wrote with my mind, and, perhaps, I must confess, a
little bit of my heart.

Why did I laugh to-night? No voice will tell:
No God, no Demon of severe response,
Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell.
Then to my human heart I turn at once.
Heart! Thou and I are here sad and alone;
I say, why did I laugh? O mortal pain!
O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan,
To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain.
Why did I laugh? I know this Being’s lease,
My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads;
Yet would I on this very midnight cease,
And the world’s gaudy ensigns see in shreds;
Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser—Death is Life’s high meed.”[7]

Again in the same letter, on the 15th of April, Keats says “Brown, this morning, is writing some Spenserian stanzas against Miss B —— and me,”—a reference, doubtless, to Miss Brawne, probably indicative of the engagement being an understood thing; and, seemingly on the same date, he writes as follows:

“The fifth canto of Dante pleases me more and more; it is that
one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca. I had passed
many days in rather a low state of mind, and in the midst of
them I dreamt of being in that region of Hell. The dream was
one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life; I
floated about the wheeling atmosphere, as it is described, with
a beautiful figure, to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed
for an age; and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I
was warm; ever-flowery tree-tops sprung up, and we rested on
them, sometimes with the lightness of a cloud, till the wind
blew us away again. I tried a Sonnet on it: there are fourteen
lines in it, but nothing of what I felt. Oh! that I could dream
it every night.

As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept,
So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright,
So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes,
And seeing it asleep, so fled away,
Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,
Nor unto Tempe, where Jove grieved a day,
But to that second circle of sad Hell,
Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows,—pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.”[8]

The meaning of this dream is sufficiently clear without any light from the fact that the sonnet itself was written in a little volume given by Keats to Miss Brawne, a volume of Taylor & Hessey’s miniature edition of Cary’s Dante, which had remained up to the year 1877 in the possession of that lady’s family.[9]

Although the present citation of extant documents does not avail to fix the date of Keats’s passion more nearly than to shew that it almost certainly lies somewhere between the 29th of October and beginning of December, 1818, there can be little doubt that, if a competent person should be permitted to examine all the original documents concerned, the date might be ascertained much more nearly;—that is to say that the particular “first week” of acquaintance in which Keats “wrote himself the vassal” of Miss Brawne, as he says (see page 13), might be identified. But in any case it must be well to bring into juxtaposition these passages bearing upon the subject of the letters now made public.

The natural inference from all we know of the matter in hand is that after his brother Tom’s death, Keats’s passion had more time and more temptation to feed upon itself; and that, as an unoccupied man living in the same village with the object of that passion, an avowal followed pretty speedily. It is not surprising that there are no letters to shew for the first half of the year 1819, during which Keats and Miss Brawne probably saw each other constantly, and to judge from the expressions in