Part 4

Sir Sidney Colvin, in his noble and monumental biography of Keats, found no room for this idealised portrait. He was scrupulously fair to Fanny Brawne as a woman, but he condemned her as the woman with whom Keats happened to fall in love. To Sir Sidney she was not Keats’s goddess, but Keats’s demon. Criticising the book on its first appearance, I pointed out that almost everything that is immortal in the poetry of Keats was written when he was under the influence of his passion for Fanny Brawne, and I urged that, had it not been for the ploughing and harrowing of love, we should probably never have had the rich harvest of his genius. Sir Sidney has now added a few pages to his preface, in which he replies to this criticism, and declares that to write of Fanny Brawne in such a manner is “to misunderstand Keats’s whole career.” He admits that “most of Keats’s best work was done after he had met Fanny Brawne,” but it was done, he insists, “not because of her, but in spite of her.” “At the hour when his genius was naturally and splendidly ripening of itself,” he writes, “she brought into his life an element of distracting unrest, of mingled pleasure and torment, to use his own words, but of torment far more than of pleasure.... In writing to her or about her he never for a moment suggests that he owed to her any of his inspiration as a poet.... In point of fact, from the hour when he passed under her spell he could never do any long or sustained work except in absence from her.” Now all this means little more than that Fanny Brawne made Keats suffer. On that point everybody is agreed. The only matter in dispute is whether this suffering was a source of energy or of destruction to Keats’s genius.

Keats has left us in one of his letters his own view of the part suffering plays in the making of a soul. Scoffing at the conception of the world as a “vale of tears,” he urges that we should regard it instead as “the vale of soul-making,” and asks: “Do you not see how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Thus, according to his own philosophy, there is no essential contradiction between a love that harrows and a love that enriches. As for his never having suggested that he owed any of his inspiration to his love for Fanny, he may not have done this in so many words, but he makes it clear enough that she stirred his nature to the depths for the first time and awakened in him that fiery energy which is one of the first conditions of genius in poetry. “I cannot think of you,” he wrote, “without some sort of energy--though _mal à propos_. 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. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy--I must forget them.” Sir Sidney would read this letter as a confession that love and genius were at enmity in Keats. It seems to me a much more reasonable view that in the heat of conflict Keats’s genius became doubly intense, and that, had there been no struggle, there would have been no triumph. It is not necessary to believe that Fanny Brawne was the ideal woman for Keats to have loved: the point is that his love of her was the supreme event in his life. “I never,” he told her, “felt my mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment--upon no person but you.” “I have been astonished,” he wrote in another letter, “that men could die martyrs for religion--I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more--I could be martyr’d for my religion--love is my religion--I could die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet.” And still earlier he had written: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks--your loveliness and the hour of my death. O, that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.... I will imagine you Venus to-night and pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen.” It is out of emotional travail such as we find in these letters that poetry is born. Is it possible to believe that, if Keats had never fallen in love--and he had never been in love till he met Fanny--he would have been the great poet we know?

I hold that it is not. Hence I still maintain the truth of the statement which Sir Sidney Colvin sets out to controvert, that, while Fanny “may have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man, she was his good fairy as a poet.”

Keats’s misfortune in love was a personal misfortune, not a misfortune to his genius. He was too poor to marry, and, in his own phrase, he “trembled at domestic cares.” He was ill and morbid: he had longed for the hour of his death before ever he set eyes on Fanny. Add to this that he was young and sensual and as jealous as Othello. His own nature had in it all the elements of tragic suffering, even if Fanny had been as perfect as St. Cecilia. And she was no St. Cecilia. He had called her “minx” shortly after their first meeting in the autumn of 1818, and described her as “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange.” Even then, however, he was in love with her. “The very first week I knew you,” he told her afterwards, “I wrote myself your vassal.... If you should ever feel for man at the first sight what I did for you, I am lost.” It is clear from this that his heart and his head quarrelled about Fanny. At the same time, after those first censures, he never spoke critically of her again, even to his most intimate friends. Some of his friends evidently disliked Fanny and wished to separate the lovers. He refers to this in a letter in which he speaks angrily of “these laughers who do not like you, who envy you for your beauty,” and writes of himself as “one who, if he never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory.” But Keats himself could not be certain that she was a saint. “My greatest torment since I have known you,” he tells her, “has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid.” He is so jealous that, when he is ill, he tells her that she must not even go into town alone till he is well again, and says: “If you would really what is called enjoy yourself at a party--if you can smile in people’s faces, and wish them to admire you _now_--you never have nor ever will love me.” But he adds a postscript: “No, my sweet Fanny--I am wrong--I do not wish you to be unhappy--and yet I do, I must while there is so sweet a beauty--my loveliest, my darling! Good-bye! I kiss you--O the torments!” In a later letter he returns to his jealousy, and declares: “Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’” He tells this fragile little worldly creature that she should be prepared to suffer on the rack for him, accuses her of flirting with Brown, and, in one of the most painful of his letters, cries out:

I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in: Do not write to me if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to have seen. You may have altered--if you have not--if you still believe in dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you--I do not want to live--if you have done so I wish the coming night may be my last. I cannot live without you, and not only you, but _chaste you, virtuous you_.... Be serious! Love is not a plaything--and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience.

Poor Keats! Poor Fanny! That Fanny loved Keats is obvious. In this at least she showed herself unworldly. She cannot have been dazzled by his fame, for at that time he was to all appearance merely a minor poet who had been laughed at. He was of humble birth, and he had not even the prospect of being able to earn a living. Add to this that he was an all but chronic invalid. Her love must, in the circumstances, have been a very real and unselfish affair, and there is no evidence to suggest that, for all her taste for dancing and for going into town, it was fickle. Keats asked too much of her. He wished to enslave her as she had enslaved him. He knew in his saner moments that he was unfair to her. “At times,” he wrote, “I feel bitterly sorry that ever I made you unhappy.” There was unhappiness on both sides--the unhappiness of an engagement that could come to nothing. “There are,” as Keats mournfully wrote, “impossibilities in the world.” It was Fate, not Fanny, that wrecked the life of Keats. “My dear Brown,” he wrote near the end, “I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well.” That is not the comment a man makes on a woman whom he regards as his destroying angel. Nor is it a destroying angel that Keats pictures when he writes to Fanny: “You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you passed my window home yesterday, I was filled with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time.” Love such as this is not the enemy of poetry. Without it there would be no poetry but that of patriots, saints and hermits. A biography of Keats should not be a biography without a heroine. That would be _Hamlet_ without Ophelia. Sir Sidney Colvin’s is a masterly life which is likely to take a permanent place in English biographical literature. But it has one flaw. Sir Sidney did not see how vital a clue Keats left us to the interpretation of his life and genius in that last despairing appeal: “My dear Brown, for my sake be her advocate for ever.”

VI

CHARLES LAMB

Charles Lamb was a small, flat-footed man whose eyes were of different colours and who stammered. He nevertheless leaves on many of his readers the impression of personal beauty. De Quincey has told us that in the repose of sleep Lamb’s face “assumed an expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual beauty of outline, its childlike simplicity, and its benignity.” He added that the eyes “disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb’s waking face,” and gave a feeling of restlessness, “shifting, like Northern lights, through every mode of combination with fantastic playfulness.” This description, I think, suggests something of the quality of Lamb’s charm. There are in his best work depths of repose under a restless and prankish surface. He is at once the most restful and the most playful of essayists. Carlyle, whose soul could not find rest in such quietistic virtue as Lamb’s, noticed only the playfulness and was disgusted by it. “Charles Lamb,” he declared, “I do verily believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners.” He wrote this in his Diary in 1831 after paying a visit to Lamb at Enfield. “Poor Lamb!” he concluded. “Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius! He said: ‘There are just two things I regret in England’s history: first, that Guy Fawkes’ plot did not take effect (there would have been so glorious an _explosion_); second, that the Royalists did not hang Milton (then we might have laughed at them), etc., etc.’ _Armer Teufel!_”

Carlyle would have been astonished if he had foreseen that it would be he and not Lamb who would be the “poor devil” in the eyes of posterity. Lamb is a tragically lovable figure, but Carlyle is a tragically pitiable figure. Lamb, indeed, is in danger of being pedestalled among the saints of literature. He had most of the virtues that a man can have without his virtue becoming a reproach to his fellows. He had most of the vices that a man can have without ceasing to be virtuous. He had enthusiasm that made him at home among the poets, and prejudices that made him at home among common men. His prejudices, however, were for the most part humorous, as when, speaking of L. E. L., he said: “If she belonged to me I would lock her up and feed her on bread and water till she left off writing poetry. A female poet, a female author of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think.” He also denounced clever women as “impudent, forward, unfeminine, and unhealthy in their minds.” At the same time, the woman he loved most on earth and devoted his life to was the “female author” with whom he collaborated in the _Tales from Shakespeare_. But probably there did exist somewhere in his nature the seeds of most of those prejudices dear to the common Englishman--prejudices against Scotsmen, Jews, and clever women, against such writers as Voltaire and Shelley, and in favour of eating, drinking and tobacco. He held some of his prejudices comically, and some in sober earnest, but at least he had enough of them mixed up in his composition to keep him in touch with ordinary people. That is one of the first necessities of a writer--especially of a dramatist, novelist or essayist, whose subject-matter is human nature. A great writer may be indifferent to the philosophy of the hour or even to some extent to the politics of the hour, but he cannot safely be indifferent to such matters as his neighbour’s love of boiled ham or his fondness for a game of cards. Lamb sympathised with all the human appetites that will bear talking about. Many noble authors are hosts who talk gloriously, but never invite us to dinner or even ring for the decanter. Lamb remembers that a party should be a party.

It is not enough, however, that a writer should be friends with our appetites. Lamb would never have become the most beloved of English essayists if he had told us only such things as that Coleridge “holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings,” or that he himself, though having lost his taste for “the whole vegetable tribe,” sticks, nevertheless, to asparagus, “which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts.” He was human elsewhere than at the table or beside a bottle. His kindness was higher than gastric. His indulgences seem but a modest disguise for his virtues. His life was a life of industrious self-sacrifice. “I am wedded, Coleridge,” he cried, after the murder of his mother, “to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father”; and his life with his sister affords one of the supreme examples of fidelity in literary biography. Lamb is eminently the essayist of the affections. The best of his essays are made up of affectionate memories. He seems to steep his very words in some dye of memory and affection that no other writer has discovered. He is one of those rare sentimentalists who speak out of the heart. He has but to write, “Do you remember?” as in _Old China_, and our breasts feel a pang like a home-sick child thinking of the happiness of a distant fireside and a smiling mother that it will see no more. Lamb’s work is full of this sense of separation. He is the painter of “the old familiar faces.” He conjures up a Utopia of the past, in which aunts were kind and Coleridge, the “inspired charity-boy,” was his friend, and every neighbour was a figure as queer as a witch in a fairy-tale. “All, all are gone”--that is his theme.

He is the poet of town-bred boyhood. He is a true lover of antiquity, but antiquity means to him, not merely such things as Oxford and a library of old books: it means a small boy sitting in the gallery of the theatre, and the clerks (mostly bachelors) in the shut-up South-Sea House, and the dead pedagogue with uplifted rod in Christ’s Hospital, of whom he wrote: “Poor J. B.! May all his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no _bottoms_ to reproach his sublunary infirmities.” His essays are a jesting elegy on all that venerable and ruined world. He is at once Hamlet and Yorick in his melancholy and his mirth. He has obeyed the injunction: “Let us all praise famous men,” but he has interpreted it in terms of the men who were famous in his own small circle when he was a boy and a poor clerk.

Lamb not only made all that world of school and holiday and office a part of antiquity; he also made himself a part of antiquity. He is himself his completest character--the only character, indeed, whom he did not paint in miniature. We know him, as a result of his letters, his essays, and the anecdotes of his friends, more intimately even than we know Dr. Johnson. He has confessed everything except his goodness, and, indeed, did his reputation some harm with his contemporaries by being so public with his shortcomings. He was the enemy of dull priggishness, and would even set up as a buffoon in contrast. He earned the reputation of a drunkard, not entirely deserved, partly by his _Confessions of a Drunkard_, but partly by his habit of bursting into singing “Diddle, diddle, dumpling,” under the influence of liquor, whatever the company. His life, however, was a long, half-comic battle against those three friendly enemies of man--liquor, snuff and tobacco. His path was strewn with good resolutions. “This very night,” he wrote on one occasion, “I am going to _leave off tobacco_! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.” The perfect anecdote of Lamb’s vices is surely that which Hone tells of his abandonment of snuff:

One summer’s evening I was walking on Hampstead Heath with Charles Lamb, and we talked ourselves into a philosophic contempt of our slavery to the habit of snuff-taking, and with the firm resolution of never again taking a single pinch, we threw our snuff-boxes away from the hill on which we stood, far among the furze and the brambles below, and went home in triumph. I began to be very miserable, and was wretched all night. In the morning I was walking on the same hill. I saw Charles Lamb below, searching among the bushes. He looked up laughing, and saying, “What, you are come to look for your snuff-box too!” “Oh, no,” said I, taking a pinch out of a paper in my waistcoat pocket, “I went for a halfpennyworth to the first shop that was open.”

Lamb’s life is an epic of such things as this, and Mr. Lucas is its rhapsodist. He has written an anthological biography that will have a permanent place on the shelves beside the works of Lamb himself.

VII

BYRON ONCE MORE

It will always be easy to take an interest in Byron because he was not only a scamp but a hero--or, alternatively, because he was not only a hero but a scamp. As a hero he can be taken seriously: as a villain he can be taken comically. His letters, like _Don Juan_, reveal him at their best chiefly on the comic side. He was not only a wit, but an audacious wit, and there is a kind of audacity that amuses us, whether in a guttersnipe or in a peer. Byron was a guttersnipe in scarlet and ermine. He enjoyed all the more playing the part of a guttersnipe, because he could play it in a peer’s robe. He was obviously the sort of person who, if brought up in the gutter, would be sent to a reformatory. Imagine a reformatory boy, unreformed and possessed of genius, loosed on respectable society, and you will have a picture of Byron. Not that Byron did not share the point of view of respectable society on the most important matters. He had no sympathy with the heresies of Shelley, whom he thought “crazy against religion and morality.” He did not want a new morality, as Shelley did: he was quite content with the old morality and the old immorality. He never could have run away with a woman on principle. Love with him was not a principle, but an appetite. He was a glutton who did not know where to stop. He himself never pretended that it was the desire of the moth for the star that was the cause of his troubles. He was an orthodox materialist, as we may gather from one of his unusually frank letters to Lady Melbourne, a lady in her sixties, to whom he ran with the tale of every fresh amour, like a newsboy with the stop-press edition of an evening paper. We find him at the age of twenty-five or so writing to explain that he was sure to die fairly young. “I began very early and very violently,” he wrote, “and alternate extremes of excess and abstinence have utterly destroyed--oh, unsentimental word!--my stomach, and, as Lady Oxford used seriously to say, a broken heart means nothing but a bad digestion.” Byron, no doubt, enjoyed posturing, whether he exposed a broken heart or a weak stomach. But, for a poet, he undoubtedly lived and thought on the material plane out of all proportion to his life and thought on the spiritual plane. He felt much the same dread of a respectable woman as did the wicked young æsthete of the ’nineties. When he was thinking of getting married, and had his eye on Miss Milbanke, he wrote doubtingly to Lady Melbourne: “I admired your niece, but she is engaged to Eden; besides, she deserves a better heart than mine. What shall I do--shall I advertise?” About the same time he was writing concerning women in general:

I am sadly out of practice lately; except a few sighs to a gentlewoman at supper, who was too much occupied with ye _fourth_ wing of her _second_ chicken to mind anything that was not material.

If the wing of a chicken was not at least as immaterial as Byron’s sighs, there must have been something amiss with the cooking. Byron’s sighs to women were material enough, one fancies, to have been visible, like a drayman’s breath on a frosty day.