The Complete Poems of John Keats. John Keats

senior by three years, his relation was from the first and remained to the end one of friendly civility and little more. He did not take to Shelley as kindly as Shelley did to him, says Hunt, and adds the comment: ‘Keats, being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt inclined to see in every man of birth a sort of natural enemy.’ ‘He was haughty, and had a fierce hatred of rank,’ says Haydon in his unqualified way. Where his pride had not been aroused by anticipation, Keats, as we have seen, was eagerly openhearted to new friendships, and it may well be that the reserve he maintained towards Shelley was assumed at first by way of defence against the possibility of social patronage on the other’s part. But he must soon have perceived that from Shelley, a gentleman of gentlemen, such an attitude was the last thing to be apprehended, and the cause of his standing off was much more likely his knowledge that nearly all Shelley’s literary friends were his pensioners, — from Godwin, the greediest, to Leigh Hunt, the lightest-hearted, — and a fear that he too might be supposed to expect a similar bounty. It would seem that in his spirit of independence he gave Shelley the impression of being much better off than he was, — or possibly instances of his only too ready generosity in lending from his modest means to his intimates when they were hard pressed may have come to Shelley’s knowledge: at all events a few months later we find Shelley casting about for persons able to help him in helping Hunt, and writing under a false impression, ‘Keats certainly can.’

      These two young poets, equally and conjointly beloved by posterity, were in truth at many points the most opposite-natured of men. Pride and sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy between them. Keats, with the rich elements of earthly clay in his composition, his lively vein of everyday commonsense and humour, his keen, tolerant delight and interest in the aspects and activities of nature and human nature as he found them, may well have been as much repelled as attracted by Shelley, Shelley the ‘Elfin knight,’ the spirit all air and fire, with his passionate repudiation of the world’s ways and the world’s law, his passionate absorption in his vision of a happier scheme of things, a vision engendered in humanitarian dreams from his readings of Rousseau and Godwin and Plato, — or was it rather one brought with him from some ante-natal sojourn among the radiances and serenities of the sunset clouds? Leigh Hunt’s way of putting it is this:— ‘Keats, notwithstanding his unbounded sympathies with ordinary flesh and blood, and even the transcendental cosmopolitics of Hyperion, was so far inferior in universality to his great acquaintance, that he could not accompany him in his daedal rounds with nature, and his Archimedean endeavours to move the globe with his own hands.’ Of the incidents and results of their intercourse at Hampstead we know little more than that Shelley, wisely enough in the light of his own headlong early experiments, tried to dissuade Keats from premature publication; and that Keats on his part declined, ‘in order that he might have his own unfettered scope,’ a cordial invitation from Shelley to come and stay with him at Great Marlow. Keats, though he must have known that he could learn much from Shelley’s trained scholarship and fine literary sense, was doubtless right in feeling that whatever power of poetry might be in him must work its own way to maturity in freedom and not in leading-strings. To these scanty facts Shelley’s cousin Medwin adds the statement that the two agreed to write in friendly rivalry the long poems each was severally meditating for his summer’s work, Shelley Laon and Cythna, afterwards called The Revolt of Islam, and Keats Endymion. This may very well have been the case, but Medwin was a man so lax of memory, tongue, and pen that his evidence, unconfirmed, counts for little. Of the influence possibly exercised on Keats by Shelley’s first important poem, Alastor, or by his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty printed in the Examiner during the January of their intercourse at Hunt’s, it will be time to speak later on.

      A much closer intimacy sprang up between Keats and the other young poetic aspirant whom Hunt in his December essay in the Examiner had bracketed with him and Shelley. This was John Hamilton Reynolds, of whom we have as yet heard only the name. He was a handsome, witty, enthusiastic youth a year younger than Keats, having been born at Shrewsbury in September 1796. Part of his boyhood was spent in Devonshire near Sidmouth, a countryside to which he remained always deeply attached; but he was still quite young when his father came and settled in London as mathematical master and head writing master at Christ’s Hospital. The elder Reynolds and his wife were people of literary leanings and literary acquaintance, and seem to have been characters in their way: both Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were frequenters of their house in Little Britain, and Mrs Reynolds is reported as holding her own well among the talkers at Lamb’s evenings. Their son John was educated at St Paul’s school and showed talent and inclinations which drew him precociously into the literary movement of the time. At eighteen he wrote an Eastern tale in verse in the Byronic manner, Safie, of which Byron acknowledged the presentation copy in a kind and careful letter several pages long. Two years later, just about the time of his first introduction to Keats at Leigh Hunt’s, the youngster had the honour of receiving a similar attention from Wordsworth in reply to a presentation of another poem, The Naiad (November 1816). Neither of these two youthful volumes, nor yet a third, The Eden of Imagination, showed much more than a quick susceptibility to nature and romance, and a gift of falling in readily and gracefully now with one and now with another of the poetic fashions of the hour. Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt were alternately his models.

      The same gift of adaptiveness which Reynolds showed in serious work made him when he chose a deft, sometimes even a masterly, parodist in the humourous vein, and his work done in this vein a few years later in collaboration with Thomas Hood holds its own well beside that of his associate. Partly owing to the persuasions of the lady to whom he was engaged, Reynolds early gave up the hope of a literary career and went into business as a solicitor. In 1818 he inscribed a farewell sonnet to the Muses in a copy of Shakespeare which he gave to Keats, and in 1821 he writes again

       As time increases

      I give up drawling verse for drawing leases.

      In point of fact he continued to write occasionally for some years, and in the end failed somewhat tragically to prosper in the profession of law. During these early years he was not only one of the warmest friends Keats had but one of the wisest, to whom Keats could open his innermost mind with the certainty of being understood, and who once at least saved him from a serious mistake. A sonnet written by him within three months of their first meeting proves with what warmth of affection as well as with what generosity of admiration the one young aspirant from the first regarded the other. Keats one day, calling on Cowden Clarke and finding him asleep over Chaucer, passed the time by writing on the blank space at the end of The Floure and the Lefe, a poem with which he was already familiar, the sonnet beginning ‘This pleasant tale is like a little copse.’ Reynolds’s comment after reading it is as follows: —

      Thy thoughts, dear Keats, are like fresh-gathered leaves,

       Or white flowers pluck’d from some sweet lily bed;

       They set the heart a-breathing, and they shed

       The glow of meadows, mornings, and spring eyes,

       O’er the excited soul. — Thy genius weaves

       Songs that shall make the age be nature-led,

       And win that coronal for thy young head

       Which time’s strange hand of freshness ne’er bereaves.

       Go on! and keep thee to thine own green way,

       Singing in that same key which Chaucer sung;

       Be thou companion of the summer day,

       Roaming the fields and older woods among: —

       So shall thy muse be ever in her May

       And thy luxuriant spirit ever young.

      Reynolds had two sisters, Marianne and Jane, older than himself, and a third, Charlotte, several years younger. With the elder two Keats was soon on terms of almost brotherly intimacy and affection, seeing them often at the family home in Little Britain, exchanging lively letters with them in absence, and contributing to Jane’s album sets of verses some of which have only through this means been preserved. A little later the piano-playing of the youngest sister, Charlotte, was often a source of great pleasure to him.

      Outside his own family Reynolds had an inseparable friend