Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends
inveterate obstinacy of our affairs. On receiving your last, I immediately
took a place in the same night's coach for London. Mr. Abbey behaved
extremely well to me, appointed Monday evening at seven to meet me, and
observed that he should drink tea at that hour. I gave him the enclosed
note and showed him the last leaf of yours to me. He really appeared
anxious about it, and promised he would forward your money as quickly as
possible. I think I mentioned that Walton was dead.... He will apply to
Mr. Gliddon the partner, endeavour to get rid of Mrs. Jennings' claim, and
be expeditious. He has received an answer from my letter to Fry. That is
something. We are certainly in a very low estate--I say we, for I am in
such a situation, that were it not for the assistance of Brown and Taylor,
I must be as badly off as a man can be. I could not raise any sum by the
promise of any poem, no, not by the mortgage of my intellect. We must wait
a little while. I really have hopes of success. I have finished a tragedy,
which if it succeeds will enable me to sell what I may have in manuscript
to a good advantage. I have passed my time in reading, writing, and
fretting--the last I intend to give up, and stick to the other two. They
are the only chances of benefit to us. Your wants will be a fresh spur to
me. I assure you you shall more than share what I can get whilst I am
still young. The time may come when age will make me more selfish. I have
not been well treated by the world, and yet I have, capitally well. I do
not know a person to whom so many purse-strings would fly open as to me,
if I could possibly take advantage of them, which I cannot do, for none of
the owners of these purses are rich. Your present situation I will not
suffer myself to dwell upon. When misfortunes are so real, we are glad
enough to escape them and the thought of them. I cannot help thinking Mr.
Audubon a dishonest man. Why did he make you believe that he was a man of
property? How is it that his circumstances have altered so suddenly? In
truth, I do not believe you fit to deal with the world, or at least the
American world. But, good God! who can avoid these chances? You have done
your best. Take matters as coolly as you can; and confidently expecting
help from England, act as if no help were nigh. Mine, I am sure, is a
tolerable tragedy; it would have been a bank to me, if just as I had
finished it, I had not heard of Kean's resolution to go to America. That
was the worst news I could have had. There is no actor can do the
principal character besides Kean. At Covent Garden there is a great chance
of its being damm'd. Were it to succeed even there it would lift me out of
the mire; I mean the mire of a bad reputation which is continually rising
against me. My name with the literary fashionables is vulgar. I am a
weaver-boy to them. A tragedy would lift me out of this mess, and mess it
is as far as regards our pockets. But be not cast down any more than I am;
I feel that I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I
find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash, and put on a clean
shirt, brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly, and in fact
adonise as I were going out. Then, all clean and comfortable, I sit down
to write. This I find the greatest relief. Besides I am becoming
accustomed to the privations of the pleasures of sense. In the midst of
the world I live like a hermit. I have forgot how to lay plans for the
enjoyment of any pleasure. I feel I can bear anything,--any misery, even
imprisonment, so long as I have neither wife nor child. Perhaps you will
say yours are your only comfort; they must be. I returned to Winchester
the day before yesterday, and am now here alone, for Brown, some days
before I left, went to Bedhampton, and there he will be for the next
fortnight. The term of his house will be up in the middle of next month
when we shall return to Hampstead. On Sunday, I dined with your mother and
Hen and Charles in Henrietta Street. Mrs. and Miss Millar were in the
country. Charles had been but a few days returned from Paris. I daresay
you will have letters expressing the motives of his journey. Mrs. Wylie
and Miss Waldegrave seem as quiet as two mice there alone. I did not show
your last. I thought it better not, for better times will certainly come,
and why should they be unhappy in the meantime? On Monday morning I went
to Walthamstow. Fanny looked better than I had seen her for some time. She
complains of not hearing from you, appealing to me as if it were half my
fault. I had been so long in retirement that London appeared a very odd
place. I could not make out I had so many acquaintances, and it was a
whole day before I could feel among men. I had another strange sensation.
There was not one house I felt any pleasure to call at. Reynolds was in
the country, and, saving himself, I am prejudiced against all that family.
Dilke and his wife and child were in the country. Taylor was at
Nottingham. I was out, and everybody was out. I walked about the streets
as in a strange land. Rice was the only one at home. I passed some time
with him. I know him better since we have lived a month together in the
Isle of Wight. He is the most sensible and even wise man I know. He has a
few John Bull prejudices, but they improve him. His illness is at times
alarming. We are great friends, and there is no one I like to pass a day
with better. Martin called in to bid him good-bye before he set out for
Dublin. If you would like to hear one of his jokes, here is one which, at
the time, we laughed at a good deal: A Miss ----, with three young ladies,
one of them Martin's sister, had come a-gadding in the Isle of Wight and
took for a few days a cottage opposite ours. We dined with them one day,
and as I was saying they had fish. Miss ---- said she thought _they tasted
of the boat_. "No" says Martin, very seriously, "they haven't been kept
long enough." I saw Haslam. He is very much occupied with love and
business, being one of Mr. Saunders' executors and lover to a young woman.
He showed me her picture by Severn. I think she is, though not very
cunning, too cunning for him. Nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense
of the ridiculous as love. A man in love I do think cuts the sorriest
figure in the world; queer, when I know a poor fool to be really in pain
about it, I could burst out laughing in his face. His pathetic visage
becomes irresistible. Not that I take Haslam as a pattern for lovers; he
is a very worthy man and a good friend. His love is very amusing.
Somewhere in the Spectator is related an account of a man inviting a party
of stutterers and squinters to his table. It would please me more to
scrape together a party of lovers--not to dinner, but to tea. There would
be no fighting as among knights of old.
Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes,
Nibble their toast and cool their tea with sighs;
Or else forget the purpose of the night,
Forget their tea, forget their appetite.
See, with cross'd arms they sit--Ah! hapless crew,
The fire is going out and no one rings
For coals, and therefore no coals Betty brings.
A fly is in the milk-pot. Must he die
Circled by a humane society?
No, no; there, Mr. Werter takes his spoon,
Inserts it, dips the handle, and lo! soon
The little straggler, sav'd from perils dark,
Across the tea-board draws a long wet mark.
Romeo! Arise take snuffers by the handle,
There's a large cauliflower in each candle.
A winding sheet--ah, me! I must away
To No. 7, just beyond the circus gay.
Alas, my friend, your coat sits very well;
Where may your Taylor live? I may not tell.
O pardon me. I'm absent now and then.
Where _might_ my Taylor live? I say again
I cannot tell. Let me no more be teased;
He lives in Wapping, might live where he pleased.
You see, I cannot get on without writing, as boys do at school, a few
nonsense verses. I begin them, and before I have written six the whim has
passed--if there is anything deserving so respectable a name in them. I
shall put in a bit of information anywhere, just as it strikes me. Mr.
Abbey is to write to me as soon as he can bring matters to bear, and then
I am to go to town and tell him the means of forwarding to you through
Capper and Hazlewood. I wonder I did not put this before. I shall go on
to-morrow; it is so fine now I must take a bit of a walk.
Saturday [September 18].
With my inconstant disposition it is no wonder that this morning, amid all
our bad times and misfortunes, I should feel so alert and well-spirited.
At this moment you are perhaps in a very different state of mind. It is
because my hopes are ever paramount to my despair. I have been reading
over a part of a short poem I have composed lately, called Lamia, and I am
certain there is that sort of fire in it that must take hold of people
some way. Give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation--what they
want is a sensation of some sort. I wish I could pitch the key of your
spirits as high as mine is; but your organ-loft is beyond the reach of my
voice.
I admire the exact admeasurement of my niece in your mother's letter--O!
the little span-long elf. I am not in the least a judge of the proper
weight and size of an infant. Never trouble yourselves about that. She is
sure to be a fine woman. Let her have only delicate nails both on hands
and feet, and both as small as a May-fly's, who will live you his life on
a 3 square inch of oak-leaf; and nails she must have, quite different from
the market-women here, who plough into butter and make a quarter pound
taste of it. I intend to write a letter to your wife, and there I may say
more on this little plump subject--I hope she's plump. Still harping on my
daughter. This Winchester is a place tolerably well suited to me. There is
a fine cathedral, a college, a Roman Catholic chapel, a Methodist do., and
Independent do.; and there is not one loom, or anything like manufacturing
beyond bread and butter, in the whole city. There are a number of rich
Catholics in the place. It is a respectable, ancient, aristocratic place,
and moreover it contains a nunnery. Our set are by no means so hail fellow
well met on literary subjects as we were wont to be. Reynolds has turn'd
to the law. By the bye, he brought out a little piece at the Lyceum call'd
One, Two, Three, Four: by Advertisement. It met with complete success. The
meaning of this odd title is explained when I tell you the principal actor
is a mimic, who takes off four of our best performers in the course of the
farce. Our stage is loaded with mimics. I did not see the piece, being out
of town the whole time it was in progress. Dilke is entirely swallowed up
in his boy. It is really lamentable to what a pitch he carries a sort of
parental mania. I had a letter from him at Shanklin. He went on, a word or
two about the Isle of Wight, which is a bit of hobby horse of his, but he
soon deviated to his boy. "I am sitting," says he, "at the window
expecting my boy from ----." I suppose I told you somewhere that he lives
in Westminster, and his boy goes to school there, where he gets beaten,
and every bruise he has, and I daresay deserves, is very bitter to Dilke.
The place I am speaking of puts me in mind of a circumstance which
occurred lately at Dilke's. I think it very rich and dramatic and quite
illustrative of the little quiet fun that he will enjoy sometimes. First I
must tell you that their house is at the corner of Great Smith Street, so
that some of the windows look into one street, and the back windows into
another round the corner. Dilke had some old people to dinner--I know not
who, but there were two old ladies among them. Brown was there--they had
known him from a child. Brown is very pleasant with old women, and on