THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. John Keats

poetical if only there is strength and intensity of feeling behind it, nothing but the finest social instinct and tradition can impart the tact for such light conversational graces as he attempted, and that to treat a theme of high tragic passion in the tone and vocabulary of a suburban tea-party is intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any change from the stale conventions and tarnished glitter of eighteenth century poetic rhythm and diction, and perhaps sated for the moment with the rush and thrill of new romantic and exotic sensation they had owed in recent years, first to Scott’s metrical tales of the Border and the Highlands, then to Byron’s of Greece and the Levant, — contemporaries found something fresh and homefelt in Leigh Hunt’s Rimini, and sentimental ladies and gentlemen wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine as though they had been their own. No less a person than Byron, to whom the poem was dedicated, writes to Moore:— ‘Leigh Hunt’s poem is a devilish good one — quaint here and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about it that will stand the test. I do not say this because he has inscribed it to me.’ And to Leigh Hunt himself Byron reports praise of the poem from Sir Henry Englefield the dilettante, ‘a mighty man in the blue circles, and a very clever man anywhere,’ from Hookham Frere ‘and all the arch literati,’ and says how he had left his own sister and cousin ‘in fixed and delighted perusal of it.’ Byron’s admiration cooled greatly in the sequel, with or even before the cooling of his regard for the author. But it is an instructive comment on standards of taste and their instability that cultivated readers should at any time have endured to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca — Dante’s Paolo and Francesca — diluted through four cantos in a style like that of the above quotations. When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a familiar ease of manner to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into Hunt’s faults of triviality and under-breeding: but Keats was only too apt to be betrayed into them.

      Hunt had spent the first months after his release in London, but by the end of 1815, some time before the publication of Rimini, had settled at Hampstead, where he soon made himself a sort of self-crowned laureate of the beauties of the place, and continued to vary his critical and political labours with gossiping complimentary verses to his friends in the form both of sonnet and epistle. The gravest of the epistles is one addressed in a spirit of good-hearted loyalty to Byron in that disastrous April when, after four years spent in the full blaze of popularity and fashion, he was leaving England under the storm of obloquy aroused by the scandals attending his separation from his wife. This is in Hunt’s reformed heroic couplet: the rest are in a chirruping and gossiping anapaestic sing-song which is perhaps the writer’s most congenial vein. Here is a summer picture of Hampstead from a letter to Tom Moore: —

      And yet how can I touch, and not linger a while,

       On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile?

       On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades,

       Dark pines, and white houses, and long-allied shades,

       With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees

       The hills up above him with roofs in the trees?

       Now too, while the season, — half summer, half spring, —

       Brown elms and green oaks — makes one loiter and sing;

       And the bee’s weighty murmur comes by us at noon,

       And the cuckoo repeats his short indolent tune,

       And little white clouds lie about in the sun,

       And the wind’s in the west, and hay-making begun? —

      and here an autumn night-sketch, from a letter expressing surprise that the wet weather has not brought a visit from Charles Lamb, that inveterate lover of walking in the rain: —

      We hadn’t much thunder and lightning, I own;

       But the rains might have led you to walk out of town;

       And what made us think your desertion still stranger,

       The roads were so bad, there was really no danger;

       At least where I live; for the nights were so groping,

       The rains made such wet, and the paths are so sloping,

       That few, unemboldened by youth or by drinking,

       Came down without lanthorns, — nor then without shrinking.

       And really, to see the bright spots come and go,

       As the path rose or fell, was a fanciful shew.

       Like fairies they seemed, pitching up from their nooks,

       And twinkling upon us their bright little looks.

      Such were Leigh Hunt’s antecedents, and such his literary performances and reputation, when Keats at the age of twenty-one became his intimate. So far as opinions and public sympathies were concerned, those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been largely formed in boyhood by familiarity, under the lead of Cowden Clarke, with Leigh Hunt’s writings in the Examiner. Hunt was a confirmed Voltairian and sceptic as to revealed religion, and supplied its place with a private gospel of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his own invincibly sunny temperament and partly by the hopeful doctrines of eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy of generous youth for Hunt’s liberal and kind-hearted view of things, and he had a mind naturally unapt for dogma: ready to entertain and appreciate any set of ideas according as his imagination recognized their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. In matters of poetic feeling and fancy the two men had up to a certain point not a little in common. Like Hunt, Keats at this time was given to ‘luxuriating’ too effusively and fondly over the ‘deliciousness’ of whatever he liked in art, books, or nature. To the everyday pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception and acuteness of enjoyment which in Keats were intense beyond parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also truly felt with Keats the perennial charm and vitality of classic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about this time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some, less adequate, of Homer. But behind such pleasant faculties in Hunt nothing deeper or more potent lay hidden. Whereas with Keats, as time went on, delighted sensation became more and more surely and instantaneously transmuted and spiritualized into imaginative emotion; his words and cadences came every day from deeper sources within him and more fully charged with the power of far-reaching and symbolic suggestion. Hence, as this profound and passionate young genius grew, he could not but be aware of what was shallow in the talent of his senior and cloying and distasteful in his ever-voluble geniality. But for many months the harmony of their relations was complete.

      The ‘little cottage’ in the Vale of Health must have been fairly overcrowded, one would suppose, with Hunt’s fast-growing family of young children, but a bed was made up for Keats on a sofa, ‘in a parlour no bigger than an old mansion’s closet,’ says Hunt, which nevertheless served him for a library and had prints after Stothard hung on the walls and casts of the heads of poets and heroes crowning the bookshelves. Here the young poet was made always welcome. The sonnet beginning ‘Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there’ records a night of October or November 1816, when, instead of staying to sleep, he preferred to walk home under the stars, his head full of talk about Petrarch and the youth of Milton, to the city lodgings where he lived with his brothers the life affectionately described in that other pleasant sonnet written on Tom’s birthday, November 18, beginning ‘Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals.’ The well-known fifty lines at the end of Sleep and Poetry, a poem on which Keats put forth the best of his half-fledged strength this winter, give the fullest and most engaging account of the pleasure and inspiration he drew from Hunt’s hospitality: —

      The chimes

       Of friendly voices had just given place

       To as sweet a silence, when I ‘gan retrace

       The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease.

       It was a poet’s house who keeps the keys