LXIII. To CHARLES WENTWORTH Dilke. At Mr. Snook's, Bedhampton, near Havant, Hants. [Postmark, Hampstead, 21 September 1818.] My dear Dilke, According to the Wentworth place Bulletin you have left Brighton much improved: therefore now a few lines will be more of a pleasure than a bore. I have things to say to you, and would fain begin upon them in this fo[u]rth line: but I have a Mind too well regulated to proceed upon any thing without due preliminary remarks. You may perhaps have observed that in the simple process of eating radishes I never begin at the root but constantly dip the little green head in the salt -that in the Game of Whist if I have an ace I constantly play it first. So how can I with any face begin without a dissertation on letter-writing? Yet when I consider that a sheet of paper contains room only for three pages and a half, how can I do justice to such a pregnant subject? However, as you have seen the history of the world stamped as it were by a diminishing glass in the form of a chronological Map, so will I "with retractile claws" draw this into the form of a table-whereby it will occupy merely the remainder of this first page Folio-Parsons, Lawyers, Statesmen, Phys[ic]ians out of place-ut-Eustace-Thornton-out of practice or on their travels. Foolscap-1. Superfine-Rich or noble poets-ut Byron. 2. common ut egomet. Quarto-Projectors, Patentees, Presidents, Potato growers. Bath-Boarding s[c]hools, and suburbans in general. Gilt edge-Dandies in general, male, female and lite rary. Octavo or tears-All who make use of a lascivious seal. Duodec.-May be found for the most part on Milliners' and Dressmakers' Parlour tables. Strip-At the Playhouse-doors, or any where. Snip So called from its size being disguised by a twist. I suppose you will have heard that Hazlitt has on foot a prosecution against Blackwood.' I dined with him a few days since at Hessey's-there was not a word said about it, though I understand he is excessively vexed. Reynolds, by what I hear, is almost over-happy,' and Rice is in town. I have not seen him, nor shall I for some time, as my throat has become worse after getting 1 The August number of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Number XVII), which contained the infamous attack upon Keats, bristled also with the most scurrilous of its habitual scurrilities, directed against William Hazlitt. Besides a blatant and vulgar article entitled Hazlitt Cross-questioned, full of the most insolent personal abuse, there was a paper on Shakespeare's Sonnets, bringing in Hazlitt for another dose of the like nauseous stuff. It is curious that we find so little trace in Keats's letters of the kind of impression made upon him by the attack on himself and his poetry in the paper Number IV of The Cockney School of Poets. At pages 84-5 of the present volume will be found a portion of a letter written to Bailey in the course of October 1817, when Number I of the series had just appeared, from the tone of which we should have anticipated less of dignified silence on the appearance of Number IV. 2 Presumably concerning his marriage. well, and I am determined to stop at home till I am quite well. I was going to Town tomorrow with Mrs. D. but I thought it best to ask her excuse this morning. I wish I could say Tom was any better. His identity presses upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out —and although I intended to have given some time to study alone, I am obliged to write and plunge into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, and feebleness-so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine "the hateful siege of contraries "-if I think of fame, of poetry, it seems a crime to me, and yet I must do so or suffer. I am sorry to give you pain-I am almost resolved to burn this-but I really have not self-possession and magnanimity enough to manage the thing otherwise-after all it may be a nervousness proceeding from the Mercury. Bailey I hear is gaining his spirits, and he will yet be what I once thought impossible, a cheerful Man-I think he is not quite so much spoken of in Little Britain. I forgot to ask Mrs. Dilke if she had any thing she wanted to say immediately to you. This morning look'd so unpromising that I did not think she would have gone— but I find she has, on sending for some volumes of Gibbon. I was in a little funk yesterday, for I sent in an unseal'd note of sham abuse, until I recollected, from what I heard Charles' say, that the servant could neither 1 But I in none of these Find place or refuge; and the more I see Of contraries ;... Paradise Lost, Book 1x, lines 118-22. 2 Charles Wentworth Dilke, the son of Keats's friend, and afterwards the first baronet of that name, was born in 1810and died in 1869. read nor write-not even to her Mother as Charles observed. I have just had a Letter from Reynolds-he is going on gloriously. The following is a translation of a line of Ronsard1 Love poured her beauty into my warm veins. You have passed your Romance, and I never gave in to it, or else I think this line a feast for one of your Lovers. How goes it with Brown? Believe me, I have rather rejoiced at your happiness than fretted at your silence. Indeed I am grieved, on your account, that I am not at the same time happy. But I conjure you to think, at present, of nothing but pleasure; "Gather the rose," &c., gorge the honey of life. I pity you as much that it cannot last for ever, as I 1 See the Sonnet from Ronsard at pages 317-18 of Volume II. (LXIV) This interesting letter has had the chance to play a more important part in Keats's biography than it is entitled to maintain. The absence of a date left it natural to suppose that the woman referred to in it in such a serious tone was Fanny Brawne; and Lord Houghton, acting upon that assumption, places the letter after one dated the 18th of December-a position which, in the absence of documentary evidence to the contrary, I readily accepted when writing the introduction to the Letters to Fanny Brawne. But do myself now drinking bitters. Give yourself up to it -you cannot help it—and I have a consolation in thinking so. I never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days—at such a documents bearing on the date of this letter, now in my hands, make it certain that the date is several weeks earlier than the 18th of December; and leave, I think, no reasonable doubt that this letter to Reynolds was written about the same time as the foregoing letter to Dilke. When Keats began the letter to Dilke he had clearly been to Little Britain and heard of Reynolds; but he had not heard from him; when he ended he had "just had a Letter" from him, That letter we may presume he immediately proceeded to answer for he says "the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days "-no doubt referring to the lady whose impression upon him he describes on the 29th of October, to George, as having been made on his return to Town when he visited the Reynoldses. Now he had but just returned from Teignmouth, for he wrote thence to Bailey some time in September. Then the state of mind about Tom and Poetry, the inability through temporary confinement to see Rice, and the occupation over Ronsard's sonnet, are all identical in the two letters. But even if this ascription of date be not admitted as proved, nothing can push the letter on later than the second week in October; for he had not heard from George; and on the 16th of October he had. Thus the reasons which make it clear he was not in love with Miss Brawne when he described "Charmian " on the 29th are valid against any connexion between Miss Brawne and the present letter; and leave barely any supposition except that the person mentioned to Reynolds was Reynolds's cousin, Miss Cox. Not being pleased with Reynolds's sisters in this connexion, Keats's natural delicacy would prevent his saying who the woman was. It must have been very soon after this that Keats met Fanny Brawne; for, in the annotated copy of the Life, Letters &c. frequently referred to, Mr. Dilke records that about October or November 1818 Keats "met Miss Brawne for the first time at my house. Brown let his house when he and Keats went to Scotland to Mrs. Brawne, a stranger to all of us. As the house adjoined mine in a large garden, we almost necessarily became acquainted. When Brown returned, the Brawnes took another house at the top of Downshire Hill; but we kept up our acquaintance and no doubt Keats, who was daily with me, met her soon after his return from Teignmouth." |