real existence of God. But these are only the outward moments of the act of real communion. The inward act is a knowledge of God by the soul: a knowledge that is independent both of the knowledge of the mind and the knowledge of the body,-a direct and ineffable. contact of soul with Soul, which can be outwardly expressed only by these two acts of the soul's two members. This act of worship is not an easy act; it calls for a real achievement in the life of the individual who makes it. And the tendency is for it to become abstract, or perfunctory, or emotional. For this knowledge of God by the soul is essentially a concrete knowledge, of the necessity and harmony of all that is. Knowledge of God is acceptance of life. But this meaning becomes overlaid and hidden, in the pullulation of theology and the multiplication of ceremonies. The accidental and outward parts of religion suffocate its inward life. The fundamental truth that the knowledge of God is a consummation of the progress of the individual soul, that the kingdom of Heaven is within us,' is always forgotten, and the Church becomes a temporality. Therefore true men rebel against it. Sometimes they can rebel, like Francis of Assisi, and remain within the Church and revolutionize it for a moment into reality; or like Christ himself they can rebel and found a new Church; and sometimes, as at the Renaissance, they rebel against the whole conception of a Church, as something which must inevitably deny the freedom of the individual to fulfil his own destiny. For we must remember that in the long history of human civilization which we know, a Church, in our sense of the word, is a comparatively modern invention; it is a temporary expedient, which may well become permanently inexpedient. But the truth which is expressed in religion remains. The rebels rediscover it, if they are true men; and they rediscover it by a path which the Church against which they rebel has long since left, the path of loyalty to their complete humanity; and they rediscover the reality which the Church has lost. That reality is twofold: it is a knowledge of the unity and harmony of the universe which can be reached only through the individual's knowledge of unity and harmony in himself. This twofold knowledge is achieved by the pure poet, and in him it never becomes abstract and schematic: he does not assert a harmony, he reveals it, and he gains the power to reveal this through the completeness of his achieved humanity. In the pure poet, who makes his mind the faithful instrument of his heart, who neither allows mind to tyrannize over heart, or heart to tyrannize over mind, completeness of humanity and true personality are achieved. We have an instinctive sense that this is so; quite instinctively we feel that there was in both Shakespeare and Keats a greater richness of the poetic gift, and a greater completeness of common manhood, than in any other of our English poets save Chaucer. And this appears a strange paradox to our intellectual minds, which have been nurtured on the false assumption that pure poetry is a thing abnormal and inhuman. But the sense of paradox is due to the fact that we have forgotten the nature of the human soul, and we have forgotten that chiefly because religion ceased to be a reality after the Rennaissance. There would have been no harm done, but on the contrary a great good, if men had lived up' to the responsibility of their freedom, and had not run away from it by enthroning deities more trivial by far than those they had overthrown. If men had fought out the battle for themselves, they would have understood the poet, who fought out the battle on their behalf; they would have understood that the poetic gift in a Shakespeare or a Keats is more complete because they are completer men; because they did, in a very precise sense, possess their souls; because they more completely achieved this fusion of mind and body into the immanent reality of the soul, having a life and knowledge of its own. Argument of this kind, because it is unfamiliar, will be said to be obscure and transcendental. It will be objected that this is a mystical theory. It may be so; but the names we give to such things are not very important. It is the realities that matter. This obscure or transcendental or mystical theory is what Keats believed, and he did not reach it by any obscure or transcendental or mystical road. He followed his destiny as a man and a poet; he knew that poetry must be the spontaneous utterance of the complete self, and he strove against incredible suffering to achieve that necessary wholeness in himself. He won the victory and he tried to tell his brother how he did it. If that account is obscure or transcendental or mystical, it is because the greatest victories won in human life are themselves obscure or transcendental or mystical. I do not believe they are; they are at once simple and mysterious-simple to know, mysterious to understand. And Keats' letter on 'Soul-making' is, in this, like the process it records. Keats, by this process which I have tried to expound, achieved in April 1819 his own complete individuality, and the knowledge which inevitably accompanies that achievement. The mighty abstract idea of Beauty in all things' had become concrete and his own. Could he maintain his victory? CHAPTER XI THE FINAL STRUGGLE BETWEEN mid-March and mid-April Keats had won a great victory; between mid-April and the end of May he wrote the Odes. But life took no account of that. He was in love, he was ill, he was all but penniless; by the middle of June, he heard that a suit in Chancery had been begun against his small estate and for the time being (which might in those days of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce be twenty years) his money was non-existent. But before that news reached him, he must have learned, in his efforts to raise the wind for Haydon, that it was likely. Long before the end of May he knew that he had to make his living, and to begin to make it without delay. There is no knowing what were the relations between Keats and Fanny Brawne during the late spring months of this year 1819. At some time in the month of silence,' the Brawnes had moved into Dilke's house next door; Keats and his beloved were under the same roof. Whether Fanny was kind to him, no one can say: certainly she was not kind enough to make Keats believe even for a moment that his chance of an earthly fruition of his love was anything but hazardous. Nor is it pertinent to ask whether he was happy in her neighbourhood during that month of May: for the Odes alone reveal him as beyond happiness. He was pressing out a quintessence of beauty from the contemplation of his thwarted destiny. The great creative moment over, he turned to face the urgencies of life. He must put money in his purse without delay. His former plan of qualifying for a physician at Edinburgh, which would cost money instead of making it, inevitably went by the board. The next thing that occurred to him was to ship as surgeon on an East Indiaman. He had almost decided upon this on 26th May. Five days later he is undecided again. He thinks of trying to live cheaply in the English country and writing more poetry. So he sends a letter to a Teignmouth friend, Miss Jeffrey, to ask her if she knows of a cheap lodging in the neighbourhood: I have the choice as it were of two Poisons (yet I ought not to call this a Poison) the one is voyaging to and from India for a few years; the other is leading a fevrous life alone with Poetry-This latter will suit me best; for I cannot resolve to give up my studies. What had made the second poison possible was the offer of his friend, Charles Brown, to lend Keats the modest sum he needed to live on while he wrote another book of poetry and collaborated with Brown in writing a play for Kean, of which Brown would provide the scenario. Charles Brown was a figure scarcely less important than Fanny Brawne herself during these months of Keats' life. He has been obscured in clouds of glory by benevolent biographers. The real Charles Brown was different from this legendary figure, and it was the real Charles Brown who had a crucial influence upon Keats. Charles Brown was a shrewd and canny Scot, an honest man and a good fellow. He was about ten years older than Keats, and lived rather modestly, after a failure in commerce, on a small income left him by a brother. He liked Keats and Keats liked him; and on Tom's death he had invited Keats to share his little house. He genuinely admired Keats' talent, and wished somehow to be identified with him. He was something of an amateur man of letters, and had done what was easier for the amateur to do in those days than these, namely, written a serio-comic opera which was actually produced at Drury Lane. Out of this he made some £300. Now his acquaintance with a real poet had fired him with the idea of collaborating with Keats in a successful play. He would lend Keats the money to live while it was written; and Keats would repay him out of his half-share of the profits. It was a straightforward business arrangement; generous it would appear only to those who disregard the fact that Brown was a man of literary ambitions. Brown was a scrupulously honest man, but no more. When Keats died he presented George with a bill for all he had lent Keats, which would have been reasonable enough had he not kept the play for himself. Moreover, he charged George with interest in addition. The total amount was a little over £70. That is not the action of a generous man, and Brown was not a generous man: much less was he, as he has been represented, a sort of Maecenas to Keats. As in money-affairs, so in affairs more subtle, Brown was a realist. There was no humbug about him,' as the phrase goes; and Keats, who was a realist of another kind, liked him for it. But the fundamental contrast between the two men emerges plainly in the contrast between Keats' action in moving heaven and earth, when he was ill, to raise money for Haydon, and Brown's in presenting George with a bill for all he had lent Keats, plus interest, and keeping the play for himself. Keats was generous, too generous; Brown was not. But in no point were the characters of the two men more utterly opposed than in their attitude to women. In this matter Brown's realism was carried to an extreme. Keats wrote some humorous verses upon him in April 1819 in which his knowledge of this side of Brown's character is expressed with an amused and amusing tolerance. The description goes, of course, by contraries: 1 Ne cared he for wine, or half and half; The slang of cities in no wise he knew; For curled Jewesses with ankles neat Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet. That admirable piece of humorous poetry (for poetry it is rather than verse) was written, it is worth noting, as a riposte to some stanzas Brown was writing against Fanny Brawne and Keats. Keats knew the name of one at least of the 'curled Jewesses '— she was called Jenny Jacobs. But what Keats apparently did not know was an interesting and characteristic episode in Brown's life in this very year 1819, which has since been revealed in a memoir of Brown by his son. In this year Brown made a journey to Ireland in order to marry a peasant girl called Abigail Donohue, who seems to have been at one time a servant in Brown's house. The marriage, being performed by a Catholic priest, was illegal; it was also kept secret by Brown. In fact, Brown seems to have gone through the ceremony simply for the sake of getting a son, who was duly born in 1820. So soon as the child was old enough to be taken from his mother, in 1822, Brown took him, and went off to Italy, to avoid the danger of a suit claiming custody of the child. The whole affair was a perfectly cold-blooded exercise in eugenics; and as such was, no doubt, concealed from Keats. Brown's attitude to Keats' passion for Fanny Brawne is obvious: he could not understand its nature at all, and what little he did understand of it seemed to him thoroughly deplorable. The mere idea that a man should suffer from love of a woman seemed to him fantastic. 'Put the woman out of your head, my dear Keats,' would have been about the kindest consolation of which Brown was capable. Inevitably, Keats kept his devouring love to himself. |