of it. If Keats really did, then young, wondering friendship is blind, like love.

grass

Keats's sonnet, although not up to his best, is a delightful thing. The opening is an excellent picture, vivid and suggestive; one can see it, feel it, and smell it. The frost, as Hunt pointed out, is perfect; and the return of the hopper in the end, as being recollected through the sound of the cricket, well managed. This end is not only beautiful as regards the technical pattern, as I have said, it is so in regard to what I may call the mental pattern as well.

in

Two more sonnets belong to 1816, but we have no more exact date for them than the year. One, As from the darkling gloom, may be dismissed with its mention. Keats rejected it for his forthcoming book, and he was perfectly right. The other, Had I a man's fair form, reads as though it belonged to the preceding Spring, since there appear it a "knight," a "foeman," and a "cuirass." It is a lovepoem, of no value as poetry, and only interesting because the first words, "Had I a man's fair form," seem to refer to a momentary and painful realization of his diminutive stature, which he conceives as a hindrance to any woman's loving him. This, and his mention of his size in the letter to Bailey I have already quoted,' make us aware that, in spite of the advantages of his appearance in other ways, his lack of height worried him a good deal at times. That George Keats stood quite five feet ten and was already a successful lover, is probably the clue to this first line. There is no hint to whom the sonnet was addressed. In Tom Keats's copy-book it is simply called, Sonnet. I believe it to have been merely one of those periodic gestures toward a vague and ideal eroticism which we have already observed occurring from time to time.

When Keats looked back on what had been accomplished during the year, I think he must have rubbed his eyes. He had got his apothecary's certificate, and imme

1 See Vol. I, p. 96.

diately after had let fall the aim of five hard-working years to take up another of most precarious possibility. True, fortunes were being made in poetry. The popularity of Byron, Moore, and Scott testified to this, but Keats could hardly have supposed that his kind of work would lead to any such golden future. Still, he had lined out his path and was stepping along it that was a great wonder. A year ago, he had been a struggling medical student, knowing only a few obscure people; now, many of his friends were important men, men who were acknowledged masters in their kind, and he was taken in among them on equal terms, or, at least, on terms as equal as the difference between promise and achievement admits. But the most remarkable thing of all was that he had a book coming out. Dear me! What changes! And all to the good in his eyes, for not for one moment did he regret the loss of the sure subsistence which the practice of surgery would have brought him. The body of work that he had done, so much greater than ever before, justified his action. He must have felt sure of this, and regarded the future with considerable confidence. Probably he was happier just at this time than he was ever destined to be again. His woes, when he had them, were personal and artistic. For the nonce, the miseries of inevitable event were quiescent. The extent of Tom's illness was realized by nobody. There seemed to be plenty of money for all current needs. He sincerely liked the girl to whom George was engaged. When the churchbells tolled for the New Year, theirs can have been no sinister sound; hearing them, he must have felt a good deal like Dick Whittington resting by the milestone.

CHAPTER IV

A PET LAMB IN A SENTIMENTAL FARCE

THE heading of this chapter is Keats's subsequent expression of the rôle he was playing at this period.1 That he came to regard it so, is significant of his power of growth. Petted he certainly was, and to a degree which falls to the lot of few young men, even those who give promise of marked genius. He enjoyed it, of course, and it took him some time to get his bearings and wrench himself away, but it speaks volumes for his just apprehension of facts and his naturally affectionate disposition that even when he had learnt to see the triangle of his friends, his work, and himself in a truer relation, these same friends, in differing degrees, continued a part of his life. No longer a child in leading strings, he took them on another plane; but it was their fault, not his, when change, however subtly, altered the circumstances of their intercourse with him.

We shall see all this happening in due time. The sentimental farce was in full swing during the Winter of 181617. After all, although the sentimentality cannot be gainsaid, farce is perhaps too strong a word. It applies very well to Hunt, whose attitude toward life was chiefly one of pleasant buoyance on very shallow grounds, indeed, but this a series of unnecessary and thriftless misfortunes were unable to make him aware of. In the case of Haydon, the farce takes on the dourness of satire. He was sincere enough, but like a man catching at phantoms in a game of blind-man's-buff. Unlike his friend, Wilkie, who knew what he could do and did it to the best of his ability, at the same time carefully eschewing what was beyond his power,

1 See Ode on Indolence; also letter to Miss Jeffrey of June 9th, 1819. Buxton Forman. Complete Edition.

Haydon persisted against all sense in believing himself a giant, and ended as the veriest pigmy of them all. John Hamilton Reynolds, less assured, and with reason, than Hunt and Haydon, takes his place in the farce more pathetically. We are not tempted to see satire in his failure so much as tragedy. As to Keats himself, the word farce applies only to the extent of his admiration for men so far his inferiors. What would have been the effect upon him had Haydon been Turner, Hunt been Coleridge, and Reynolds been Shelley? This brings in the question of whether genius is best fostered by genius. I think we can safely answer “no.” Genius goes its own way, and is usually only hampered by too close an intercourse with other correspondingly great geniuses. Is there a case, except that of Goethe and Schiller, where one genius has been cordially and profitably intimate with another? I cannot think of one. At this stage in his career, Keats needed admiration and stimulus. The admiration could not be overdone for his good, provided the time allotted to it were short. The kind of stimulus which Hunt, Haydon, Reynolds, etc. gave him was just enough. He could assimilate it and pass on. There was no danger of its holding him; he was bound to outdistance it, and, when this was accomplished, follow his own trend unconfused by any rival issue. On the whole, he was considerably indebted to the farce, a fact which he never clearly understood.

Among other things which genius is, a genius is a man with the power of growing beyond other men in particular directions. For this reason, to a man of genius, friendships, events, atmospheres, must, to a great extent, be merely stepping-stones. The air he breathes at certain periods of his life is uncommonly likely to stifle him at others. Everything must be lived through with zest, and very nearly everything must be sloughed off in due course. We' can see this process taking place in Keats's life, short though it was, with remarkable clarity. Already, by this

New Year of 1817, the sloughing had begun. Where were Keats's schoolmates? We know that he was popular at school, and there must have been fellows there whom he considered as friends, but not one of these appears to have followed him even so far as the Edmonton surgery. Henry Stephens and the medical students had gone, and even George Felton Matthew seems to have dropped away, for we hear nothing of him henceforward. Matthew may have married. He must have done so young, as thirty-odd years later, in 1848, he was the father of twelve children. In the case of these early friends, it is not necessary to probe into the whys and wherefores of their disappearance from the scene of Keats's life. For his later, more important, friendships, we shall see them arriving and departing, or, if not departing, remaining with altered psychological contours as far as their position in the scheme of Keats's life is concerned. And we shall see the same thing with regard to books, art, and life in general. With Keats, things moved swiftly, and when we consider that, starting from this January of 1817, four years completes the span of his life, we shall realize the incredible speed of his development.

Among the most salient events of this time was Keats's rapidly growing intimacy with John Hamilton Reynolds and the whole Reynolds family. The two friends were extremely congenial. Their tastes and aims were the same, and their characters fitted to a T. Marianne and Jane Reynolds quickly became almost like sisters to Keats. The fact that they were older than their brother brought them into just the right relation with his friend. Keats was not in the frame of mind to fall in love, except with theoretical nymphs in fairy grottoes, but he was very much in the frame of mind to appreciate older sisters. It is significant that a year and a half before, when he was seeing much of the Matthew family, both the Miss Matthews were much older than himself. I have already spoken of his need of