BOOKS
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beginning, to get the theatricals of some paper. When I can afford
to compose deliberate poems, I will ... I had got in the habit of mind
of looking towards you as a help in difficulties ... You will see it is a
duty lowe myself to break the neck of . . .
Few solid citizens of his age, let alone artists, have shown a greater
sense of family responsibility; for instance, at the same time that in a
letter to his grown-up brother he is expressing heterodox theological
opinions, in answer to some questions by his adolescent sister, he sends–
o
admirable insincerity!-a set of conventionally orthodox answers.
Lastly, the literary style of Keats's letters is of exceptional interest.
In
the case of most poets or novelists whose correspondence has been
preserved, there is an obvious similarity between their studied composi–
tions and their epistolary style; the Byron of
Don Juan
and the Byron
of the letters are recognizably the same person, so that, reading the one,
one could make a good guess, not, of course, at the quality but at the
manner of the other.
In
Keats's case there is no such likeness; no one
who had read the Odes, so calm and majestic in pace, so skillfully and
tightly organized, could possibly foresee the helter-skelter rush of the
letters in which the thoughts tumble over each other, defying the laws
of grammar, spelling and punctuation.
It
is in the letters, indeed, rather than in the poems, that one is
constantly reminded directly of
his
idol, Shakespeare, the Shakespeare
who wrote the prose of the Comedies. Passages such as the following
would not seem out of place in
Much Ado
or
Twelfth Night.
Had England been a large devonshire we should not have won the
Battle of Waterloo. There are knotted oaks-there are lusty rivulets such
as are not-there are vallies of femminine Climate but there are no
thews and Sinews-Moor's Almanack is here a curiosity-Arms Neck
and Shoulders may at least be seen there, and the Ladies read it as
some out of the way romance ... A Devonshirer standing on his native
hills is not a distinct object-he does not show against the light-a wolf
or two would disposses him.
. . . ready to tumble into bed so fatigued that when I am asleep you
might sew my nose to my great toe and trundle me round the town like
a Hoop without waking me.
. . . you had better each of you take a glass of cherry branday and drink
to the health of Archimedes who was of so benign a disposition that he
never would (leave) Syracuse in his Life so kept himself out of all
Knight errantry-this I know to be a fact for it is written in the 45
Book of Winkine's treatise on Garden rollers that he trod on a fisher–
woman's toe in Liverpool and never begged her pardon.... the Life of
Man is like a great Mountain-his breath
is
like a Shrewsbury Cake–
he comes into the world like a shoeblack and goes out of it like a
