Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends
162. TO MRS. BRAWNE Oct. 24, 1820 372
163. TO CHARLES BROWN Nov. 1, 2, 1820 374
164. " " Nov. 30, 1820 376
PREFACE
The object of the present volume is to supply the want, which many readers
must have felt, of a separate and convenient edition of the letters of
Keats to his family and friends. He is one of those poets whose genius
makes itself felt in prose-writing almost as decisively as in verse, and
at their best these letters are among the most beautiful in our language.
Portions of them lent an especial charm to a book charming at any
rate--the biography of the poet first published more than forty years ago
by Lord Houghton. But the correspondence as given by Lord Houghton is
neither accurate nor complete. He had in few cases the originals before
him, but made use of copies, some of them quite fragmentary, especially
those supplied him from America; and moreover, working while many of the
poet's friends were still alive, he thought it right to exercise a degree
of editorial freedom for which there would now be neither occasion nor
excuse. While I was engaged in preparing the life of Keats for Mr.
Morley's series some years since, the following materials for an improved
edition of his letters came into my hands:--
(1) The copies made by Richard Woodhouse, a few years after Keats's death,
of the poet's correspondence with his principal friends, viz. the
publishers, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey; the transcriber, Woodhouse himself,
who was a young barrister of literary tastes in the confidence of those
gentlemen; John Hamilton Reynolds, solicitor, poet, humourist, and critic
(born 1796, died 1852); Jane and Mariane Reynolds, sisters of the
last-named, the former afterwards Mrs. Tom Hood; James Rice, the bosom
friend of Reynolds, and like him a young solicitor; Benjamin Bailey,
undergraduate of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo
(1794?-1852), and one or two more.
(2) The imperfect copies of the poet's letters to his brother and
sister-in-law in America, which were made by the sister-in-law's second
husband, Mr. Jeffrey of Louisville, and sent by him to Lord Houghton, who
published them with further omissions and alterations of his own.
(3) Somewhat later, after the publication of my book, the autograph
originals of some of these same letters to America were put into my hands,
including almost the entire text of Nos. lxiii. lxxiii. lxxx. and xcii. in
the present edition. The three last are the long and famous
journal-letters written in the autumn of 1818 and spring of 1819, and
between them occupy nearly a quarter of the whole volume. I have shown
elsewhere[1] how much of their value and interest was sacrificed by Mr.
Jeffrey's omissions.
Besides these manuscript sources, I have drawn largely on Mr. Buxton
Forman's elaborate edition of Keats's works in four volumes (1883),[2] and
to a much less extent on the edition published by the poet's American
grand nephew, Mr. Speed (1884)[3]. Even thus, the correspondence is still
probably not quite complete. In some of the voluminous journal-letters
there may still be gaps, where a sheet of the autograph has gone astray;
and since the following pages have been in print, I have heard of the
existence in private collections of one or two letters which I have not
been able to include. But it is not a case in which absolute completeness
is of much importance.
In matters of the date and sequence of the letters, I have taken pains to
be more exact than previous editors, especially in tracing the daily
progress and different halting-places of the poet on his Scotch tour
(which it takes some knowledge of the ground to do), and in dating the
successive parts, written at intervals sometimes during two or three
months, of the long journal-letters to America. On these particulars Keats
himself is very vague, and his manuscript sometimes runs on without a
break at points where the sense shows that he has dropped and taken it up
again after a pause of days or weeks.[4] Again, I have in all cases given
in full the verse and other quotations contained in the correspondence,
where other editors have only indicated them by their first lines. It is
indeed from these that the letters derive a great part of their character.
Writing to his nearest relatives or most intimate friends, he is always
quoting for their pleasure poems of his own now classical, then warm from
his brain, sent forth uncertain whether to live or die, or snatches of
doggrel nonsense as the humour of the moment takes him. The former,
familiar as we may be with them, gain a new interest and freshness from
the context: the latter are nothing apart from it, and to print them
gravely, as has been done, among the Poetical Works, is to punish the
levities of genius too hard.
As to the text, I have followed the autograph wherever it was possible,
and in other cases the manuscript or printed version which I judged
nearest the autograph; with this exception, that I have not thought it
worth while to preserve mere slips of the pen or tricks of spelling. The
curious in such matters will find them religiously reproduced by Mr.
Buxton Forman wherever he has had the opportunity. The poet's punctuation,
on the other hand, and his use of capitals, which is odd and full of
character, I have preserved. As is well known, his handwriting is as a
rule clear and beautiful, quite free from unsteadiness or sign of fatigue;
and as mere specimens for the collector, few autographs can compare with
these close-written quarto (or sometimes extra folio) sheets, in which the
young poet has poured out to those he loved his whole self
indiscriminately, generosity and fretfulness, ardour and despondency,
boyish petulance side by side with manful good sense, the tattle of
suburban parlours with the speculations of a spirit unsurpassed for native
poetic gift and insight.
The editor of familiar correspondence has at all times a difficult task
before him in the choice what to give and what to withhold. In the case of
Keats the difficulty is greater than in most, from the ferment of opposing
elements and impulses in his nature, and from the extreme unreserve with
which he lays himself open alike in his weakness and his strength. The
other great letter-writers in English are men to some degree on their
guard: men, if not of the world, at least of some worldly training and
experience, and of characters in some degree formed and set. The phase of
unlimited youthful expansiveness, of enthusiastic or fretful outcry, they
have either escaped or left behind, and never give themselves away
completely. Gray is of course an extreme case in point. With a masterly
breadth of mind he unites an even finicking degree of academic
fastidiousness and personal reserve, and his correspondence charms, not
by impulse or openness, but by urbanity and irony, by ripeness of judgment
and knowledge, by his playful kindliness towards the few intimates he has,
and the sober wistfulness with which he looks out, from his Pisgah-height
of universal culture, over regions of imaginative delight into which it
was not given to him nor his contemporaries to enter fully. To take others
differing most widely both as men and poets: Cowper, whether
affectionately "chatting and chirping" to his cousin Lady Hesketh, or
confiding his spiritual terrors to the Rev. John Newton, that unwise
monitor who would not let them sleep,--Cowper is a letter-writer the most
unaffected and sincere, but has nevertheless the degree of reticence
natural to his breeding, as well as a touch of staidness and formality
proper to his age. Byron offers an extreme contrast; unrestrained he is,
but far indeed from being unaffected; the greatest attitudinist in
literature as in life, and the most brilliant of all letter-writers after
his fashion, with his wit, his wilfulness, his flash, his extraordinary
unscrupulousness and resource, his vulgar pride of caste, his everlasting
restlessness and egotism, his occasional true irradiations of the divine
fire. Shelley, again--but he, as has been justly said, must have his
singing robes about him to be quite truly Shelley, and in his
correspondence is little more than any other amiable and enthusiastic
gentleman and scholar on his travels. To the case of Keats, at any rate,
none of these other distinguished letter-writers affords any close
parallel. That admirable genius was from the social point of view an
unformed lad in the flush and rawness of youth. His passion for beauty,
his instinctive insight into the vital sources of imaginative delight in
nature, in romance, and in antiquity, went along with perceptions
painfully acute in matters of daily life, and nerves high-strung in the
extreme. He was moreover almost incapable of artifice or disguise. Writing
to his brothers and sister or to friends as dear, he is secret with them
on one thing only, and that is his unlucky love-passion after he became a
prey to it: for the rest he is open as the day, and keeps back nothing of
what crosses his mind, nothing that vexes or jars on him or tries his
patience. His character, as thus laid bare, contains elements of rare
nobility and attraction--modesty, humour, sweetness, courage, impulsive
disinterestedness, strong and tender family affection, the gift of
righteous indignation, the gift of sober and strict self-knowledge. But it
is only a character in the making. A strain of hereditary disease, lurking
in his constitution from the first, was developed by over-exertion and
aggravated by mischance, so that he never lived to be himself; and from
about his twenty-fourth birthday his utterances are those of one
struggling in vain against a hopeless distemper both of body and mind.
If a selection could be made from those parts only of Keats's
correspondence which show him at his best, we should have an anthology
full of intuitions of beauty, even of wisdom, and breathing the very
spirit of generous youth; one unrivalled for zest, whim, fancy, and
amiability, and written in an English which by its peculiar alert and
varied movement sometimes recalls, perhaps more closely than that of any
other writer (for the young Cockney has Shakspeare in his blood), the
prose passages of _Hamlet_ and _Much Ado about Nothing_. Had the
correspondence never been printed before, were it there to be dealt with
for the first time, this method of selection would no doubt be the
tempting one to apply to it. But such a treatment is now hardly possible,
and in any case would hardly be quite fair; since the object, or at all
events the effect, of publishing a man's correspondence is not merely to
give literary pleasure--it is to make the man himself known; and the
revelation, though it need not be wholly without reserve, is bound to be
just and proportionate as far as it goes. Even as an artist, in the work
which he himself published to the world, Keats was not one of those of
whom it could be said, "his worst he kept, his best he gave." Rather he
gave promiscuously, in the just confidence that among the failures and
half-successes of his inexperienced youth would be found enough of the
best to establish his place among the poets after his death. Considering
all things, the nature of the man, the difficulty of separating the
exquisite from the common, the healthful from the diseased, in his mind
and work, considering also the use that has already been made of the
materials, I have decided in this edition to give the correspondence
almost unpruned; omitting a few passages of mere crudity, hardly more than
two pages in all, but not attempting to suppress those which betray the
weak places in the writer's nature, his flaws of taste and training, his