Читать книгу My Star Predominant - Raymond Knister - Страница 8

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Keats sank back patiently and waited for the plaster to set about his features. Haydon’s friendship had swept on from height to height like billows. He insisted that this young friend was to be an immortal genius, praised himself for his own discernment, and would have given Keats no peace, if the young man had not been eager, before making a plaster cast of his face. Reynolds was present in the studio, and they had been making a lark of the occasion. Haydon told how his friend Wilkie had lain like a Knight Templar on a monument and they had quizzed his helplessness. It was a conspiracy of Devonshire men–the Reynolds family hailed from Devon as Haydon did–against a Cockney, Keats declared, as he watched the artist cutting a piece of linen cloth to moisten and press down over his hair. Then he was still, reflecting that even if the plaster could render his hair, it could not do justice to the reddish-auburn colouring. But perhaps this pale cast, grey as with time, would be a symbol of immortality after all.

This ardent, tempestuous Haydon, grand fellow! But he was so strong in his prejudices that you felt it useless to argue. Now, for instance, he was telling Reynolds of a wilderness of weaknesses in Hazlitt, who, he said, had sat down and moralized on the impossibility of Art being revived in England “–not because people had no talent, not because there was no subject-matter, or no patronage, but because he did not take the trouble which Titian took, and was too lazy to try”. What could one say to that? At least one would not laugh at it, as Reynolds was doing. Haydon even seemed inclined against Leigh Hunt, strange as it seemed, for Cowden Clarke had said that he had heard Haydon glaum Hunt with adulation. It was a nothing, perhaps, less than nothing; but when the artist had first spoken of taking the cast, there was talk of Hunt, and Haydon had described Hunt’s features in unflattering terms: Oriental eyes, thick, curving, sensual lips, weak chin. Ah, well, if one’s friends were not one another’s friends, what could one do? They professed to be, there was the rub. But he would speak out against any active disparagement of Hunt.

But these were happy weeks. New friends galore! Each time he went to Hunt’s somebody new was there. Every evening, almost every afternoon, was, or could be, occupied by friends. Clarke, Haslam, Severn, Reynolds. The Wylies were constantly reminding him through George of their standing invitation. The fellows of medical schooldays seemed to have dropped away, except that Stephens came to one of the “concerts” the brothers held in their lodgings, and found himself very much at home. So did Wells, Tom’s schoolfellow. They all imitated musical instruments, pausing duly to wet their whistles; or some of the older fellows might sit about a game of vingt-et-un. Everyone was spirited and gay, ready to take and give a joke. If somebody bit into a wax fruit which had been soberly offered him, or seemed to enjoy a sweet which was filled with physic, he was likely to laugh as loudly as the perpetrator, knowing that he would even the score with a better bam. Some of these new friends were of the kind you could think of hanging to throughout life. There was James Rice, Reynolds’s friend, an odd fellow, but so much of a piece, and taking himself so casually, that you forgot that. No one could appear less lively, in repose; and no one could be better fun. He was always ill, but always coming on his feet again like a cat. Never was a fellow with more liking for his joke; and the riper the joke, so long as it was a joke, the better. His favourite reading was broad Elizabethan and Restoration comedies, and his marvellously apt and unapt quotations brought many a guffaw from the friends. Nor were his original jokes behind his recollected ones.... Oh, it was glorious to be one of such a crew of fine fellows, to spar with them, matching wits, to be accepted as a good fellow oneself–“little Keats”–but also as something more, a genius, praised, respected by older men, the choicest spirits of England. Soon the book would be out, people would know what he had to say for himself; by and by, if his strength grew, he would be numbered among the British Poets. A smaller band than the ignorant educated knew; but that was no matter: even they would see the ascendancy of the new men. His blood boiled with impatience. Not a day could be spared from the great task. His hand stirred.

“Scene in the room where Milton had meditated,” Reynolds was chuckling.

“A scene indeed, sir,” Haydon rejoined. He had been telling of the christening of Hazlitt’s boy–with no parson, and a heartless lack of victuals for the feast. “The wit of these people could not reconcile me to the violation of all the decencies of life. I only recovered on returning home.” (Yet Keats had heard him say he lunched heartily before going.) “I placed a candle on the floor and regarded the imposing look of my picture, and retired to bed filled with thought.”

“A good thing to retire filled with,” Keats thought, and howled with mirth inwardly, his cheeks hurting under the plaster. He waved his foot at Reynolds.

Life was the killingest! London was the most enchanting! You walked about the crowded streets in daylight, watching the people, sniffing stale tarts at the pastrycooks’ doors in dusty tins, watching office lads in large hats and white trousers peeping under the bonnets of milliners’ and stay-makers’ apprentices, costermongers on their beats in the suburbs, cabs and hackney coachmen on the stand, polishing their vehicles, old women in shawls cheapening a ham in a shop. And at night after the lamplighters had been around with their ladders, and the streets had a mysterious gloom, and the nine-o’clock beer was brought out of the ordinary on a tray, with a lantern in front; and the servant girl poussetting shamelessly with the officer of the watch outside the hedge. He went to Drury Lane Theatre with Clarke, still devoted to the shilling gallery and Mrs. Siddons as when he had walked to them from Edmonton. Vociferous chairmen passed them, crying, “By your leave”, if the vehicle was carried backward–empty. And after the play, there was still time to wander a little in queer streets, mindful of the time when one would not wish to do so, when one would fee a link-boy gladly to go ahead with his light, even not so far abroad as Hampstead. Then the queer night-cellars with little swaths of light across the pavement and into the road, and the roaring of a gambling fight, or some wretch quarrelling with his rib. Life, life!

But it was curious how the friends seemed to recede, to melt away, at the approach of Christmas. Most of them seemed to have friends and holiday enjoyments in which he was not considered. It was the dullness of the Sunday, chill, raw and foggy, which made him think of such things, he thought. He could not sink into a quietude to match Nature’s. The night before, he had talked and planned Christmas with his brothers. They were, George was determined, to go to the Wylies’. By a kind of perversity such demonstrations of warmheartedness now seemed gallingly futile. Tom and George looked at each other and grinned, seeing John in one of his blue spells, while he felt that he gave no sign, his eyes on the book in his lap, his left ankle in his hard right palm.

Suddenly a clangour of bells broke out, near and far, resounding dull and hollow through the cold mist. Keats sat there, and his beloved quietude became more precious than a jewelled amulet taken from him by vandals. Resentment filled him at thought of the stout burghers and their beflounced wives and children with shaking cheeks, wending to chapel: streets full of hypocrites convinced of the ugliness of life! He drew his chair up to the table, sharpened his quill, dipped it into the ink, and restored himself to good humour. Christmas Day found him in high spirits. Wasn’t this tacitly a betrothal party? Keats’s heart warmed and his eye glistened as he looked at his tall, powerful brother, and the short, spirited Georgiana, school-girlish in dress, with blue eyes and merry, turned-up nose. “Nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance”, she was in that day’s sonnet, and she seemed to have many and unconscious moods, trances of sober thought and labyrinths of sweet utterance. He saw, he thought, the budding of Woman in her, while with her brothers and mother they ate and drank and joked and sang. And as he lay in bed that night he thought of her as a new, inestimably precious sister, remembering the dainty bend of her eyebrows like feathers from a rook fallen on a bed of snow.

He could not sleep; the visions of the day returned to him as many times before, twisting themselves into new significances. But now they did not lead to emulation of good fellows, to ambition, and once more to poetry. The apparition of Georgiana Wylie made him alive to all the thoughts of girls, of love, he had ever experienced. He had tried to be honest with himself. Love, he now saw, was impossible for him, with his small stature; what girl would look at him twice when there were more manlike fellows on every street-corner? It might well do for a poem, “Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell Thine ear.” As a boy he had thought of the happiness given knights when they were permitted to succour ladies. And when he wrote of such he lived the moment, he did not preach upon it; with his Calidore he felt a moisture on his cheek when the lady bent over him from her palfrey, and dared not look up to know whether it was tears of languishment or evening dew pearled upon her tresses: like Calidore he “blessed with lips that trembled and with glistening eye all the soft luxury that nestled in his arms”. Among the delights of the new world that had opened to him last spring he had prayed that nothing should call him from the birds and streams and grass, nothing less sweet than the rustle of a maiden’s gown fanning away the dandelion’s down; or the light music of her nimble toes patting against the sorrel as she goes. He pictured how she would start and blush in her innocence of thought, thus to be surprised; he begged to be allowed to lead her across the brook, watching her lips and downward look, to touch her wrist and listen one moment to her breathing. Pleasant enough, all this, for a boy waiting for love, not certain that it could not be. But then there were girls ... flippant, vain, inconstant–with a vengeance–not dressed in lovely modesty; yet somehow elating, so that his spirit danced about them. His fellow-students had known many such. But for him? In Georgiana’s eye he saw the blue of the sea and the sky, transfigured, alive with fate.

He went to see Fanny during the Christmas holidays; poor girl, her little life went on from day to day, unschooled by kindness. To see the old year out he went with Clarke to Hunt’s. A cricket was chirruping somewhere about the hearth and, recalling their summer walks about Caen Wood and Hampstead Heights, Hunt proposed a competition in writing sonnets on the grasshopper and the cricket. Haydon insisted that he call every day if possible. Always there were additions, changes to be made in the Poems which were to be published any day now. On the thirty-first he woke to the slipping away of January, and before the month had departed into limbo, wrote a sonnet about an unseasonable thaw. It did not suit him, but it eased the chafing to have done something. Poetry was the first of his needs.

But Reynolds was the first of friends, it seemed. The girls were delightful, and evenings in their home charming with the dignity of Mrs. Reynolds; witty and socially graceful, she was an intimate in Lamb’s circle. Mr. Reynolds, John’s father, was writing-master in Christ’s Hospital, Lamb’s and Coleridge’s and Hunt’s old school: he recounted legends of them which still haunted the walls and common rooms. It all made Keats think of what his home would have been if his parents had lived. John Reynolds, however, did not seem to care much for domestic joys; he liked to have Keats to himself as a boon companion, away from his family.

They played the man about town. What curiosities there were they had to see: Richer the Juggler, the champion fives player, boxing bouts, art galleries, and plays. Reynolds in his easy way got them behind the scenes; they became occupied with a very youthful actress, Miss Macauley, who, rumour said, had written some kind of book while with Macready’s company at Newcastle. She was a pretty, if not very witty, creature, though so spoiled by popular attention that they made no attempt to become intimate, and soon left the train. They felt themselves no match in the entertainment of actresses for older men with money, and told themselves they had no desire to be.

Where they did feel themselves more or less on a footing with the bloods and the sports was at the Fives Courts, and at Jack Randall’s place in Chancery Lane. There they would hie many a night when the street lamps were lit, to watch the sparring in the heavy, leather-smelling, tobacco-smelling air of the vast shed-like building. The famous Pierce Egan would be there, and they could pass quips with him or with Captain Barclay, who had trained Tom Cribb. Both the courts and Randall’s had a ring on a raised platform, where the dead-game sports could get up and spar. Keats and Reynolds were not content merely to look on. Soon they would strip and enjoy a mill themselves. Reynolds was slight and wiry, but the advantage he had in height was overcome by Keats’s stubbornness and fierce vigour, the power in his broad shoulders. It was not long before they became so expert that people like the Davis brothers did not mind having a go with one or the other. But Rice, when he went, could never be induced to put on the gloves. Rice seemed to be the crony Keats had displaced in Reynolds’s companionship, but did not seem to make anything of that; he had shown an instant liking for Keats, and came along or went his own way with the same whimsical calm, as wise as he was waggish.

One night Hunt gave warning that he was going to give a dinner-party of ceremonial cast. Haydon would be there, of course, and Horace Smith, and Shelley and his present wife. They got talking of Shelley. For a fellow three years older than Keats, not four-and-twenty, he had been through a deal of experience; and he was the son of a baronet. He had gone to Ireland after being expelled from the University and marrying his first wife; there he had composed and printed a tract addressed to the Irish People, in attempted mitigation of their wrongs. He seemed to produce such pamphlets as a conjurer pulled rabbits from a hat; for he gave the impression that he spent his days talking and enjoying Nature. But they caused him a good deal of inconvenience. There was a “Proposal for an Association of Philanthropists,” and “The Vindication of a Natural Diet” (he was a vegetarian) and the “Necessity of Atheism”. Ostracism and badgering were his rewards; and even to get his manifestoes circulated he had continually to pay new printers and cajole new publishers. “In short,” said Hunt, “no man gives warmer wishes or more sincere effort to the betterment of his fellowman than Shelley; and few can have had so little gratitude for their efforts.”

“Perhaps he should not try to change his fellows,” suggested Keats.

“It’s quite possible that he goes too far in his efforts,” agreed Hunt. “But his sense of the ideal in conduct and social matters is so high and so intense! I tell you there is no more generous fellow living, Keats! And his true greatness is shown in his simplicity and boyishness, his childlike playfulness. He came down to see me, after a warm correspondence following my article on the three young poets.”

“Yes,” said Keats dryly. “Men are children still, but they might to their own advantage sometimes curb their childish behaviours.” It was the first time Hunt’s own youthful impulsiveness had jarred upon himself in memory.

“He is, he is a man in every sense,” cried Hunt. “A generous, noble soul. Why, have I never told you? My trial and my expenses at Horsemonger’s Lane were very heavy, with the paper still running and my family to keep: I got into debt, and I have not yet got out of it. Well, Shelley offered, when he was down here before Christmas, to pay it all off. What do you think of that? And long before, he offered to pay my fine, so that I need not have suffered imprisonment, but for my principles, which forbade taking such assistance. He would share with anyone he truly esteems, who chanced to want.”

“I suppose he is a talented poet, eh?”

Hunt, for a rarity, looked offended. Who were these young poets to sneer at one another and thereby at his protectorate? “Without depreciation of other geniuses, yes. You know, perhaps, his superb high thought in the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ which we printed in the Examiner not long ago?”

“Yes, superb in its way.” Hunt’s pure goodness of heart and zeal for the recognition of anything he admired dictated his profuse and somewhat injudicious expressions of admiration. It occurred to Keats that even to people outside of Hunt’s enemies, his unbridled enthusiasm might do damage to whatever cause he espoused. At the risk of offence he had to try to explain his objections to Shelley’s poem: “Superb. And high thought, too, I grant you. I would not cavil at the execution or even the matter. There are beautiful lines of luxury. But the principle of the thing does not seem to me true. It is not Shakespeare’s or even Milton’s, who said that poetry should be simple, sensuous, passionate––”

“Why, John Keats, how can you say that Shelley’s poem is not all of those things?”

“I am talking about the principle, not to detract .... In order to express intellectual beauty you have to bring up pictures and delights of sensuous beauty. To write a hymn to intellectual beauty is a kind of contradiction.”

“Of course,” Hunt parried, recovering, “you don’t mean there is no other kind of beauty but sensuous beauty.”

“I’m not sure that I don’t,” declared Keats. “How can you apprehend beauty save by the senses? Moral beauty is apprehended by the natural rightness in a man.”

“Be that as it may, Shelley is one of the new men, and there is none better. Shall you come to the dinner?” Half an hour ago the question would have been farcically supererogatory.

“Of course I shall be glad to meet any friends of my beloved master, Libertas.” Keats spoke with Hunt’s own lightness, but his master was scarcely mollified, and they parted more coolly than ever before. As he thought it over, it appeared a shame; but then, was Hunt always to have the sovereignty? That idea of Hunt’s that one should act with the abandon of a child, when you had sounded it, was right, in a way. Wordsworth too had vindicated the emotions, which had long been denied their virtues in a world of formalism and fine and coarse manners. The instinctive man was the right man. But even old Wordsworth had let his mind rule him so long that his long face should have scared his own simple Lucy Grey.

On the evening of the dinner, an air of rosy harmony greeted Keats. One other guest had arrived, a man who seemed tall and old, not forty, but getting on towards it. Hunt introduced Horace Smith, a well-known figure from the time five years back when his and his brother’s inimitable parodies Rejected Addresses had appeared. They were men about town combining Bohemian lightness with sound taste and character. The three were chaffing about the Muse and the Golden Calf (Smith spent his days on the Stock Exchange) and agreeing that even a social philosopher had to eat, when, as though the words had been a cue, Godwin’s daughter and Percy Bysshe Shelley, her husband, were announced.

A slim, girlishly willowy figure was Shelley’s, and tall, Keats saw. His voice was high and sweet, almost too piercing to be pleasant. Mary Shelley, daughter of the famous Mary Wollstonecraft, had a long, regular face, less handsome, he thought, than the portrait of her feminist mother. But Shelley’s wife herself must have attainments associated with travel and intercourse with gifted men. He looked at her with instinctive respect and his accustomed shyness, but he had no chance to withdraw into himself and at the same time remain a spectator. Shelley turned from his friends Hunt and Horace Smith and spoke eagerly:

“One of the pleasures to which I have been looking forward, almost ever since my return to England, has been this opportunity of meeting Mr. Keats. You will surely call and see me while we are in London. I must be given an opportunity of reading more of your poetry.”

“Why, yes. Of course, I had rather show my stuff in permanent form, between boards.”

“Ah, my friend, it is not always so permanent, is it, Smith? My books have had the most curious mischances; out of print or withdrawn, or what not. It’s just as well, for I am ill-satisfied with a great deal of the work. If I were asked to advise a young poet from my own experience, I would say not to publish a book for a long time.”

There was nothing to be said to this! Horace Smith, who had been talking to Mary Shelley, made some perfunctory remark, and with the appearance of Mrs. Hunt and her younger sister, Miss Kent, who contributed to the paper, the conversation became general until they went into the dining-room and dinner was served. They had started the entrée when Haydon came in and took his place opposite Shelley. The latter had been toying with food and exhaling words with gusto. “It is only in contemplation of a life and objects unmeasured and infinite that the being can be joyous and tranquil and self-possessed. The sky–the sea,” he was saying in his gentle manner and high-pitched voice. “As for that detestable religion, the Christian, it has been the source of the most self-centred delusions, making the prime object of man the saving of his own puny individual soul.”

Haydon, who had come in slightly flustered by haste and his tardiness, glanced around the table in dumbfounded consternation. “Was Mr. Shelley belittling the Christian religion?” He glanced with condescension at the broccoli Shelley was cutting on his plate in place of the meat on his own. Hunt interposed smoothly.

“It is a matter which will not bear arguing. Nothing should be done to tamper with the faith of simple souls who depend upon it.”

Haydon gave him a look fitted for an enemy, or worse, a faithless friend. “Sir,” he addressed Shelley, “you have been upon the Continent of late, have you not? The revolution taught a good few of the advanced intellects of the day just where theory and the practicality of government come to a parting of the ways,” he continued with a guarded lack of animation which seemed to parody Shelley’s perfectly simple courtesy. Hunt and Smith exchanged glances, and Mrs. Hunt simpered at the other ladies.

“To make an excuse for the oppressors of mankind because one’s opponents chance to be defeated in their aspirations is not the sort of thing a man of your insight would do voluntarily, I am certain.”

“But was not Bonaparte an oppressor of mankind? And I think I have heard that he represented the forces of revolution.”

“But how long?” asked Keats.

“Yes; misrepresented ’em would be better,” said Horace Smith.

“Bonaparte,” said Shelley, “was simply another tyrant. An unambitious slave. The fact that he misled the people by means of the very aspiration to freedom casts no reflection upon that aspiration.”

Dinner was nearly over; dessert had come and the servant gone. Hunt was enjoying the wordy battle, even seemed to egg each side on. “But after all, who knows? In another age, Napoleon may be regarded by the credulous as a major prophet, like Moses or Mr. Paul.” He smiled blandly.

“Let us,” exclaimed Haydon, swallowing hastily, “let us go on without appellations of that kind. I detest them.”

“Oh, the question irritates you.”

“And always will when so conducted. I am like Johnson; I will not suffer so awful a question as the truth or falsehood of Christianity to be treated like a new farce, and if you persist I will go.”

“But really, Mr. Haydon, as reasonable men, we will have to admit that many errors are current on these very matters. For example, it is plain to the most ordinary intelligence that the Mosaic and the Christian dispensations are inconsistent.” Shelley advanced this proposition as though hopeful that it would be agreed with.

“Inconsistent they are not,” shouted Haydon. “The Ten Commandments have been the foundation of all the codes of law on earth.”

Shelley and Hunt gave Shakespeare as an instance, but Haydon outquoted them, and Hunt actually seemed to become blindly partisan.

“No doubt, Haydon, you derive a great deal of comfort from the Scriptures. You are inspired, are you not, Haydon, when you undertake a picture of Christ? Is that why you have to rub it out half a dozen times?”

“I thank God I am at least as truly inspired as any flighty aesthete by some old ‘tale of love and languishment’, to give it no worse name.”

“Gentlemen,” said Keats, “it must be remembered there are ladies present, and that the tone of your discussion is becoming warmer than need be.” He had been giving strained attention. How could such men speak so?

“I would not be such a borrower as you, Haydon, for the world.”

“My borrowings have been from the purest and most primitive sources.”

The ladies had been carrying on a conversation of their own from the time the men had become embroiled, but the high words could not be ignored, and Mrs. Hunt was proposing that they move into the sitting-room. Haydon followed them at once, but the other men lingered, Hunt and Smith remarking upon his ferocity. Shelley was pressing Keats to share his plans for the summer. He intended to go down to Great Marlow, in Bucks. It was convenient, and on the Thames, with fine opportunities for boating. He was to write a long poem, “Laon and Cythna”, and he hoped that Keats had a long poem in mind too, so that, in the manner of the bards of old, they might spur one another on as rivals.

“That would be more valuable to me than to you, I fear,” remarked Keats. “I’ll confess I have a poem of some scope in mind. It is to be a kind of recreation of the Endymion tale. ‘An ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own’, it is possible; and yet I may be very uneasy in the composition of it, and no good companion. Still, I may take up establishment in the country during the summer.”

“It is a splendid idea. I hope you will be near us.” Shelley was meanwhile taking a hint. As he walked away from the house, Keats thought he saw through the motives of this too-friendly man. “He wants the satisfaction of helping me as he has helped all his other friends. Not this time, me young lordling!”

But when Reynolds expressed willingness to call upon Shelley with him he agreed. Shelley received them rather coolly, seeming to feel that the two as fast friends were leagued against him in silent criticism. Or could it be that he did not like Reynolds, or (impossible!) was jealous of him? Perhaps it was because Reynolds kept telling him of the fine letter he had received from Wordsworth on presentation of the Naiad, and even mentioned the fine letter Byron had sent him on receipt of his first book, Safie, An Eastern Tale. It was very kind of those two gentlemen, Shelley told him.

Shelley’s notion, the two friends agreed, of Keats’s not publishing a book now, was absurd. The very next week, the Keats brothers held a party in honour of its coming-out. After supper with Clarke, wine and chestnuts, for roasting on the hearth, and cards were brought forth. Charles Ollier, a plump little man with the face of an epicure, said, “So I’m the first to come. I give myself more credit for being ‘the first and onlie begetter’ of your volume, my dear Keats.” Then Reynolds of the merry presence, and dry, wise James Rice; Severn and staunch Haslam came together, and last, Leigh Hunt and Horace Smith bestowing a mature grace comme il faut upon the occasion. Laughter and wit filled the accustomed room, and the aroma of snuff and cigars and liqueurs. When in the midst of the gaiety a messenger appeared at the door bearing the last proof-sheet of the book, with the request that any dedicatory matter to be added be sent back with them, and when Keats withdrew from the conversation which still buzzed around him, and wrote a sonnet to Leigh Hunt which he had held ready in his mind for this need, and when Charles Ollier, to whom the sonnet was delivered as the publisher, read it aloud, it was felt that the evening had reached its culmination. Keats listened to the reading with a full heart. The sonnet was good, and it bore the image and impress of the master–who had first encouraged him, first printed him and cherished his gift. All that he had done Keats would have rendered unto him again and more, at that moment, as much out of love as gratitude. Whatever success the book might have would be owing to Hunt’s championship. Of course, the Tory critics might slash it, but let them: there would be merry battle, which might do good.

He bade his guests farewell with warm pressures of their hands, and the brothers talked long afterward in the scene of their triumph, rejoicing triply in it and in this certainty to which the family could hold: its name was from that moment not outside the thoughts of worthy men.

But next morning he paced the room uneasily. Oh that summer would come! He was tired from the fierce burning of ambition, which had become like a wasting disease. His days seemed melting and lost, and his nights a more feverish living of his days mingled with the future. He could and should produce something of which the age would be proud, and which would reveal his sense of the spirit in all things. But how short the time was! How fast he was living! His blood boiled with impatience. Even the midnight confidences stole from him. He looked at his hand upon the table, the hand that had all to do, and that was loose-skinned and swollen in the veins. “It is the hand of a man of fifty.” Tom and George looked at each other with misgiving.

“You should go away by yourself if you want to do a great poem,” George remarked sensibly. “Away to the country somewhere.”

John was silent; he would not admit that these marvellous friends hindered. That afternoon was to be a great one: Haydon was to go with him to see the Elgin Marbles. To be sure Haydon lectured him and rehearsed the dinner-party scene with gusto, telling how he had felt exactly like a stag at bay, determined to gore without mercy. He warned Keats of the dangers of loose talk and loose morals in such company. It would be well to get away from the coteries of well-meaning but smaller men, and meditate the poem.

But as they approached the British Museum they fell silent. It was significant of Haydon’s victory that already the Marbles were lodged there for posterity. Now a young acolyte was being conducted to them by the hero himself. In the room, men of the solid-citizen and artistic types clustered about vast white torsos on platforms, one with feet, arms and head broken off, reclining half-turned; another sitting, complete save for the feet. The majesty of these forms and their perfections dwarfed the men with their clothes and heads that still suggested the perukes of the previous century; it stunned the senses. Keats went from one to another; all that he had dreamed of antiquity took form in his imagination; what a destiny it would be to create a poem of the ancient world which would recall such majesties as these! But Haydon began to talk. Many of the men there knew him; some looked curiously at him, others grimly and even bitterly. Aside he mentioned gleefully that two enemies who had opposed the purchase of the Marbles were present, that they would not relish his catching them there. Again he pointed out the painter Benjamin West, sitting with Joseph Planta, the principal librarian of the Museum. Such fellows liked to assume an official air and pretend that he, Haydon, was a mere member of the public; but well they knew who had done this. They might approach him, but he would have nothing to say to them on his own initiative. He kept on talking, explaining, expatiating, comparing; and at last when they came out on the street he seemed worried and demanded bluntly the opinion of Keats.

“They are far beyond anything that can be said of them, or of any reproduction that can be made of them.”

This, curiously, Haydon at once took as applying to himself. They parted more coldly than ever before, without mention of another meeting. Keats felt a chill as he climbed the stairs to his lodgings. This should be the best sonnet he ever had tried. But Haydon had confused him so. It would not go, he saw when he opened the door and saw Tom with a package he was aching to open: a dozen copies of Poems by John Keats. Then glee there was! Tom and John seized hands and whirled until they were breathless, and chairs and table began to rock and crash; then they gazed again upon the book, that slim beauty in the drab boards, cool as a larch tree, with a label on the back proclaiming to the world that these were “Keats’s Poems. Price 6s.” They seized hands again, and George came in and beheld the marvel, and they all whirled about until there came shouts from below. Then each took up a different copy–his. And inside on the title page was a profile of Shakespeare, with the motto above it from Spenser. Suddenly Tom gave a screech. “Look, look here!” One of the books was different from the rest, though how could that be? Keats leaped to his side, and read a hand-written sonnet; Charles Ollier must have composed it himself.

“Aren’t it–aren’t it–aren’t it grand,” breathed Tom to George. George nodded while they listened to John intoning the tribute.

“I think that settles it,” he added. “We may take it that Ollier counts the book a success. You must know how rare it is for a publisher to burst into song about his authors.”

“I’d like to show it to Abbey,” said George.

Haydon’s reply to the two “noble sonnets”, one on the Elgin Marbles, one to himself, was a curious entertainment. He added, “You filled me with fury for an hour, and with admiration for ever.” Everyone Keats knew treated him finely; if not quite perfectly, that was mere seeming, because his nerves were worn from the long, wonderful winter. Reynolds wrote a sonnet to him, better than Ollier’s, though it wouldn’t do to say so, and hurt Ollier. A few days later Haydon swore him to secrecy and intimated that when he sat by his fire he had been visited by the mighty dead, whereupon he had knelt and prayed to be made “worthy to accompany those immortal beings in their immortal glories”. And he sent a book, Goldsmith’s History of Greece. Keats gazed upon it wistfully, then listlessly.

“It looks interesting,” said George. “What’s the matter, John? Don’t you like it?”

John shook himself. “I don’t know. Nothing, I presume.”

But he added aloud, “O for ten years, that I may overwhelm myself in poesy; so I may do the deed that my own soul has to itself decreed.”

“Don’t fret; you’ll have your ten years–in time!”

In the days that followed, dissatisfaction deepened–and satisfaction should be possible in life. Everyone he knew praised the book, true; but scarcely anyone was buying it, Ollier told him. What could that portend? Were all these friends of his, experienced authors too, some of them, mistaken about his gifts? There was something mysterious about it. After a sleepless night he went to see Reynolds. Reynolds had written and got published at once a review in the Champion, for which Keats must thank him.

“It’s fine, it’s the finest thing, by God, as Hazlitt would say. But I hope I have not deceived you into false prophecy––”

“My dear Keats, everyone who has seen the book says––”

“I know. I am glad of your review. There are some acquaintances of mine who will scratch their beards, and although I hope I have some charity, I wish their nails may be long.” His weariness suddenly asserted itself in a laboured diaphragm. What was the good of this chaffering? Reynolds laughed, and, fearing that he might think it some of their circle, Keats hastened to add, “My guardian, Mr. Abbey, for one.”

Reynolds was finding his own prospects confused. Could he hope to make a living by the pen? But before they got into discussion, Mrs. Reynolds brought in a guest, Benjamin Bailey, a rather florid young man in spectacles, who beamed with pleasure when he saw Keats. The latter could scarcely keep face at being recognized so promptly–by his size.

“Jack here has told me so much about you that I was delighted when I saw your book. There’s genius, sir. I felt I had to make your acquaintance when I ran up to town.”

“And the Reynolds household every one seems glad of the run up, however occasioned,” said Reynolds with a waggish nod.

“I am taking orders, you know,” Bailey hurried on; “keeping at Oxford.”

The three young men concluded that if the book was not leaving the shelves it was the fault of no one but the publisher. Therefore a new publisher should answer: Taylor & Hessey, who published Hazlitt, and had done well with Reynolds’s Naiad last year. Bailey, too, knew Taylor, and at a party that week Keats made his acquaintance: a dry, sandy man of scholarly habit: he had written some kind of book himself, on the identity of Junius. And at the same party were Charles Wentworth Dilke, a friendly fellow who edited reprints of Elizabethan dramatists, with a charming unaffected Mrs. Dilke, and John Scott, who edited the Champion; and others young-minded and of literary acquirement.

Hunt was being neglected, Keats thought, once more taking the ever-delightful walk out to Hampstead; and wondered whether he had been overborne by Hayden’s gustiness. Hunt had gone on printing poems: the Elgin Marble sonnets and one about Chaucer, all in March. Too late for the book, they could be used in a later one if he liked them then. The apparition of Libertas in Millfield Lane between Hampstead and Highgate startled Keats from his desultory musing. Two noble lords owned the grounds on either side, but the trees and sloping meadows could be as well enjoyed by two poets. Keats presented a duly inscribed volume, in addition to the plain one Ollier had sent for review in the Examiner.

“So you are going away, Junkets?” said Hunt with a calm which was almost sadness. Keats started. “Oh, it is nothing to deny. Probably Haydon is right about that. A new countryside may cause you to look into your mind and bring something new out of it.”

“My brothers are willing to sacrifice the loss of my company to the ultimate good––”

“But what of our old evenings joco-serio-musico-pictorio, Junkets? I shall miss you sorely. When do you begin your villeggiatura?”

“Soon, soon–I am sorry to say.” But candour came to him. “I expect to enjoy myself, however, and do something worthy with what powers I possess.”

They parted friendlily, without going into Hunt’s house. The next thing was to bid Fanny good-bye, and see Abbey regarding money. Poor Fanny! Her life was so removed from his that he scarcely knew impetus enough to write her a letter. He would like her to be living in the same house with her brothers–with her parents, too, for that matter, which seemed equally possible.

But Abbey was a different kettle of fish. Abbey greeted him blandly, and agreed after some discussion to give him enough to make his journey–and that would be the last, for a considerable time. As Keats was leaving, he said:

“Well, John, I have read your book, which I looked at because it was your writing, otherwise I should not have troubled my head about any such thing.

“Indeed.”

“I will tell you my opinion of it,” went on Abbey, “whether you care or not. Your book reminds me of the Quaker’s horse which was hard to catch, and good for nothing when caught. So your book is hard to understand and good for nothing when it is understood.” Abbey paused to laugh heartily. “Good-bye, and good luck!” he shouted after his ward.

To think that the volume inscribed to Fanny should have fallen into the hands of such a barbarian! The more quickly a man could get out of a city that held such ruffians as Abbey, the better.