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"Well," said Father Payne, "I can conceive that if he had recovered his health, and escaped from his engagement with Fanny Brawne, he might have been a much finer fellow afterwards. There were two weak points in Keats, you know his over-sensuousness and a touch of commonness I won't call it vulgarity," he added, "but his jokes are not of the best quality!
I have no rost, but a nut brawne toste And a crab laid in the fyre; A little breade shall do me steade, Much breade I not desyre. No frost nor snow, nor winde, I trowe, Can hurte mee, if I wolde, I am so wrapt and throwly lapt Of joly good ale and olde. Chorus. Backe and syde go bare, go bare, etc.
Men as a rule do not so die, for the race of the Azra is nearly extinct. These Brawne letters, however, are not without their bright side; and it is wonderful to see how Keats's elastic nature would rebound the instant that the pressure of the disease relaxed. He is at times almost gay.
Did Keats forget his Fanny Brawne? Did Richard Feverel forget his Lucy? On a level with these high-thinking gentlemen was Peter, disguising his emotions from Alice's sharp eyes but silent, breathless, wanting some other place than that high studio in which to breathe. "Yes she came to tea once with a Miss Monogue there I liked her...."
He would need for this an indefinite lease upon life; but since I am wishing, let me wish largely. There is need of such wishing. Many editors have been called, and only two or three chosen. But why one who reads the letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne should have any other feeling than that of pity for a poor fellow who was so desperately in love as to be wretched because of it I do not see.
Something must be said and may be touched on later in connection with a very important division of our subject in general, as to the publication by the last-named, of the letters to Fanny Brawne: but nothing in detail need be written, and it is almost needless to say that none of these letters will appear here.
Anglo-Saxon charms translated in Stopford Brook, English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest , p. 43. Old High German charm written in a tenth-century hand in a ninth-century codex containing sermons of St Augustine, now in the Vatican Library. Another Old High German charm preserved in a tenth-century codex now at Vienna. Brawne, op. cit., p. 164.
They are the letters, referred to above, of Keats to Fanny Brawne, and those of the Brownings to each other.
Certain it is, as I have already said, that it was after his meeting with Fanny Brawne that he grew, as in a night, into a great poet. Let us not then abuse Keats's passion for her as vulgar. And let us not attempt to make up for this by ranking him with Shakespeare. He is great among the second, not among the first poets.
Most of his famous poems were written in the year after meeting her. In February, 1820, his health began to decline so rapidly that he knew that his days were numbered. His mother and one of his brothers had died of consumption, and he had been for some time threatened with the disease. He offered to release Miss Brawne from her engagement, but she would not listen to the suggestion.
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