CHAPTER X

SWIFT CURRENTS

KEATS was not 'very much amused" at Chichester; in fact, he was not amused at all. It could hardly be expected that any young man much in love, who had recently declared himself and been given considerable encouragement, if nothing more, would find any place not in the vicinity of his idol highly amusing; but in this case, Mr. Dilke's method of entertaining his "odd" guest seems even odder than the guest himself. A couple of "dowager Card parties," as Keats calls them, were the sole outings of his 'few days" there. We may be sure, however, that he and Brown strolled round the neighbourhood and wandered into the cathedral. Keats dearly loved cathedrals, we have already seen him flying from Margate to Canterbury, and before this year, 1819, is out we shall find him flying again, from the Isle of Wight to Winchester. Chichester cathedral fell in comfortably with a sort of pseudo-mediæval mood which he had fallen into. Why a medieval mood? one ask. Well, consider the circumstances a little. Keats had been working on Hyperion, with no great impulse, however, if his own general discouragement with his progress on it can be taken as evidence. After the fateful Christmas dinner at the Brawnes', he was less in tune with it than ever, probably. The excitement of his new situation as an accepted, or quasi-accepted, lover turned the current of his thoughts in an entirely different direction. The age of chivalry had always stood to Keats as a symbol of the strength and beauty of love. Its décor was to him the perfect setting for romance. The Endymion story had meant a dream of the ideal, but by no effort could it be made to represent the actual. Knights and ladies, on the other hand, were strictly human. They could, without

may

difficulty, be taken to personify real people. Yet his point of view can hardly be supposed to have been as squaretoed as this. Rather he found in the entourage and type of thought of chivalric legend something sympathetic and alluring. The over-plus of emotion under which he was labouring, suddenly deflected from its natural outlet of intercourse with Fanny Brawne, sublimated itself into creative energy, and the immediate result was the composition of the Eve of St. Agnes.

St. Agnes' Eve is January twentieth, a date which was practically synchronous with Keats's arrival at Chichester. Since he left Chichester on Saturday, January twentythird, and was there only a "few days," he cannot have been more than at the very beginning of his visit on the twentieth. Woodhouse states that the poem was written "at the suggestion of Mrs. Jones," a remark which has much puzzled Sir Sidney Colvin, and no wonder, since no such person makes her appearance anywhere else in any of the known sources of information as to Keats's life or work. When we remember Keats's habit of concealing real names from the prying curiosity of the indefatigable Woodhouse by substituting imaginary ones in their stead, the puzzle becomes a puzzle no longer, I think. We know nothing of Mrs. Jones, because there is nothing to know; there was no such person. Keats hid the name of the real lady under a conventional Jane Doe pseudonym. There was a lady, but who was she? If we hazard a guess, circumstances leave us hovering between two very possible persons. She was either Mrs. Brawne, or old Mrs. Dilke, she may even have been Fanny Brawne herself, but this I think improbable. Let us take the two chances and weigh them. We will suppose that Keats left Hampstead for Chichester on either Tuesday or Wednesday, January nineteenth or twentieth; it could not have been much earlier, as we have seen. Undoubtedly his last evening before starting was spent in

1 Woodhouse Commonplace Book (Poems II). Crewe Collection.

company with the Brawnes. Somehow the conversation may have turned on St. Agnes' Eve. "You will be away on St. Agnes' Eve," or "Why, you are going down on St. Agnes' Eve," are remarks which, in such a case, may very well have been made, leading to a subsequent narration by Mrs. Brawne of the well-known legend, with the suggestion that it would make a good plot for Keats. So much for the Mrs. Brawne theory. As to Mrs. Dilke, if Keats did actually arrive at Chichester on St. Agnes' Eve, a family so steeped in antiquarian lore as the Dilkes are most likely to have mentioned the day, and this conjecture holds good even if he had arrived the day before. On the whole, I am inclined to consider the Mrs. Brawne theory as the most tenable on two accounts. The first is that Keats had every possible reason for not mentioning Mrs. Brawne's name to Woodhouse; his secretiveness in regard to his intimacy with the Brawnes with people who did not know them would have forced him to this, while, in the case of old Mrs. Dilke, only a sense of fitness could have induced him to obscure her identity. The second account is that Mrs. Brawne would have been much more likely to have suggested that Keats try his hand at a poem on the subject than old Mrs. Dilke, who had known him only a scant twenty-four hours or so. Young Mrs. Dilke at Wentworth Place is a third possibility, but as Keats's familiar footing in Dilke's house was known to everybody, there seems no reason why he should have objected to mentioning her to Woodhouse. Mrs. Brawne, then, I think it undoubtedly was to whom Keats owed the suggestion that he write a poem on St. Agnes' Eve.

Packed up with his clothes and brushes and other things in the portmanteau which Keats carried with him to Chichester was some of the thin oblong paper which Haslam had given him to write to America upon. Perhaps Keats intended to start a letter to George while he was gone. However that may have been, it was not as a letter to George

that the oblong sheets in the portmanteau were to serve, they were destined for a more important fate, for on them, in the dull and quiet moments surrounding the "dowager Card parties," Keats wrote a part, or sketched the whole, of the first draft of the Eve of Saint Agnes. His own account of the proceeding sent later to George is as follows:

"I took down some thin paper and wrote on it a little poem call'd St. Agnes' Eve, which you shall have as it is when I have finished the blank part of the rest for you."

From his speaking of "the blank part of the rest," it seems clear that the poem was not even finished in skeleton form until after his return to Hampstead. Lord Houghton, who probably had the information direct from Brown, says that the poem "was begun on a visit to Hampshire, at the commencement of this year [1819] and finished on his return to Hampstead." The manuscript of the first draft is still in existence.1 I, who have handled it many times, can testify to the thinness of the oblong paper. That sheets of such extreme frailty should have lasted intact for a hundred years is due simply to the fact that they have had but four owners during the time. This manuscript was one of the many that fell into Severn's hands on Keats's death. There never seems to have been any regular distribution of Keats's belongings. Brown, in England, divided Keats's books among his friends in a rough and ready fashion, allotting to each friend such volumes as each had given the poet, returning lent copies to their rightful owners, and as to the rest, giving some away and keeping the remainder himself. Others of Keats's circle appear simply to have appropriated to themselves whatever relics of Keats they happened to have. Severn evidently regarded himself as heir to such papers as Keats had carried to Rome. Severn certainly meant well in constituting himself the guardian

1 Author's Collection. Locker-Lampson manuscript referred to by Buxton Forman.

of these papers, but his kind-hearted simplicity has proved most unfortunate to posterity. For Severn, in his delight at the constantly increasing number of Keats's admirers, could not bring himself to refuse requests made to him for "something in the poet's handwriting," and to meet these demands he took to cutting up long manuscripts and giving them away a few lines at a time. One of the copies of Otho the Great was mutilated in this way, as was also the Pot of Basil. This manuscript of the Eve of St. Agnes lacks the first seven stanzas, or the first original sheet. It has been suggested that the sheet was separated from the rest to point out a mistake in the proof which Keats referred to in a letter of June eleventh, 1820, to Taylor. But since Woodhouse had already made a transcript of the poem for his Commonplace Book, which was always at Taylor's service for consultation,1 since also the mistake which Keats desired corrected was perfectly clear without any reference to the manuscript, it seems far more likely that the separation of the first sheet from the others was due to one of Severn's blundering kindnesses. Whatever occurred, no trace of this missing sheet has yet been found, although the letter to Taylor has been preserved.2

The sources of the Eve of St. Agnes have occupied commentators not a little. Some of the suggestions made have been strangely fantastic, as is inevitable, for rare indeed is the commentator who is content with a simple solution to any query. Leigh Hunt, who reprinted the poem entire in his London Journal on January twenty-first, 1835, interpolating between the stanzas a most interesting running commentary, and reprinted the whole again in his volume Imagination and Fancy, published in 1845, is quite content with citing the old and well-known legend in this connection. The rites proper to be performed on St. Agnes' Eve were probably as familiar to earlier generations of English-speaking people as are those of All Hallowe'en to ours.