Keating

“ While we waited a tall thin man, wearing over his ordinary clothes a long blue smock, apparently a farm labourer by trade, harangued the crowd feverishly, gesticulating the while with a pitchfork. He did not seem to like us. Keating, whose spirits were still high, laughed at him and made matters worse. The oration had no immediate effect, for when the Hauptmann, a little fat man in a bright blue uniform, had seen us [67] we were permitted to drive on to the village. ”

“ Paul had discovered the lost squadron of Spain in the harbor of Santiago. This last fact was the one which sent Keating to Jamaica. Where he was sent was a matter of indifference to Keating. He had worn the collar of the Consolidated Press for so long a time that he was callous. A board meeting—a mine disaster—an Indian uprising—it was all one to Keating. He collected facts and his salary. He had no enthusiasms, he held no illusions. The prestige of the mammoth syndicate he represented gained him an audience where men who wrote for one paper only were repulsed on the threshold. ”

“ It came to him that there might be on the boat some Philip sober, to whom he could appeal from Philip drunk.
“I haven't got anyone to help me,” Keating answered, with dignity. “I don't need anyone to help me.” He placed his hand heavily and familiarly on the shoulder of the deck-hand. “You see that man?” he asked. “You see tha' man, do you? Well, tha' man he's too good for me an' you. Tha' man—used to be the best reporter in New York City, an' he was too good to hustle for news, an' now he's—now he can't get a job—see? Nobody'll have him, see? He's got to come and be a stoker.” ”

“ Keating, a young widow, who had lost her husband a year before the time mentioned. Her husband was a young man of education and well bred, but had become reduced by his father's failure in business, and at the time of his death was a thriving cartman, being constantly employed by our wealthiest merchants. Mrs. Keating had no children by him. On his death-bed, young Keating became much concerned about his future welfare, and a very pious and devoted member of the Methodist persuasion held frequent interviews with him. ”

“ It won't cost you anything to wire, and I need the job, and I haven't the money to cable.”
“The Consolidated Press,” began Keating, jealously. “Why—well, you know what the Consolidated Press is? They don't want descriptive writers—and I've got all the men I need.”
Keating rose and stood hesitating in some embarrassment. “I'll tell you what I could do, Channing,” he said, “I could take you on as a stoker, or steward, say. They're always deserting and mutinying; I have to carry a gun on me to make them mind. How would you like that? Forty dollars a month, and eat with the crew?” ”

“ Keating as being absolutely the proper sort, at once adult and full of authority, without being irritating.
She patted young Robert's head, and went on her way, disappeared round the corner of the house, headed evidently for the back door. No doubt cook admitted her, for presently Mrs. Keating, with some surprise, heard soft-soled boots come squeaking up the stairs, and there stood the stranger in the doorway of her room.
"Good morning, ma'am," she said in a pleasant voice. "Please to excuse me for coming up, but the cook tells me you 're not very well, so I did n't want to trouble you. ”

“ I hate to keep those whinin’ coyotes waitin’, but——”
“I’ll take no train,” Keating cut in coolly; “but I’ll take a revolver.”
Spirlaw growled and shook his head.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Kuryla at first?” he demanded abruptly.
“You know why as well as I do,” smiled Keating. “I wanted to get you away from here if I could. There wouldn’t have been any use trying at all if I’d begun by telling you that. Wild horses wouldn’t have budged you then. As for a train, what’s the use of talking about it, there probably won’t be another one along under an hour. ”

“ Keating treated his “table” to strawberries by way of celebrating his achievement. Edward spoke afterwards to Payne about it and expressed his pleasure that Keating had made the team.
“He’s great on first base,” Payne said. “He can’t miss ’em—pick-ups, wide balls, high ones, he eats ’em all. But at the bat he’s a mess. He can’t hit for little green apples.”
“Maybe he’ll learn.”
“He does n’t seem to. If a fellow has n’t a natural eye for hitting the ball, you can’t teach him much.” ”

“ I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement; with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism; longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be one; resolute to be a man—unselfish, kindly, and generous. ”

“ Libro was looking over the Poems of John Keats, published in 1817, when a catalogue slip fell out. On the slip it stated that a copy had once sold for five hundred dollars! This, then, was meat and drink for him! He would sell it! He could live for months on poor Keats. But his soul revolted. He was not a cannibal. He could not live off the flesh of his own.
But at last he was compelled to return to Steinman. He wrapped up the precious volume tenderly, affectionately. ”

“ We cannot see more clearly to what perfectness the artistic method of Keats had attained than by glancing at a poem which, though little known and less talked of, was one of the last and the loveliest he gave us. The ballad, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' is wholly simple and direct, and informed throughout by reposeful strength. In all the qualities that rule and shape poetry into unity of form, this little work strides, perhaps, leagues in advance of ‘Endymion.' That more ambitious work was in full sense poetic—soft and rich and sweetly linked. ”

“ From this point forwards nothing but misery remains to be recorded of John Keats. The narrative becomes depressing to write and depressing to read. The sensation is like that of being confined in a dark vault at noonday. One knows, indeed, that the sun of the poet’s genius is blazing outside, and that, on emerging from the vault, we shall be restored to light and warmth; but the atmosphere within is not the less dark and laden, nor the shades the less murky. ”

“ If, like Keats, he could appreciate the hell of conscious failure, its most poignant anguish, I could have sworn, would borrow from some too-late realization of the correctest “form” in a hat-brim or shirt-collar. I could have sworn it, I say, and I should have been, of course, mistaken. Keats may have claimed it as his poetical prerogative to go ill-dressed, and to object, though John, to be dubbed “Johnny.” It remained to Sweeting to prove that a man might be a very typical “Johnny” and a poet to boot. ”

“ At such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no less importance to understand Keats than to appreciate his poetry. The culmination of the achievement of the Keats to be understood is not the Odes, perfect as they are, nor the tales—a heresy even for objective criticism—nor 'Hyperion'; but precisely that revised Induction to 'Hyperion' which on the other argument is held to indicate how the poet's powers had been ravaged by disease and the pangs of unsatisfied love. On the technical side alone the Induction is of extraordinary interest. ”

“ A verse of Keats could so stimulate her, so lift her into delight, that she would find jarring and offense in things which her practical good sense told her were as true, as harmonious in their way as the color and rhythm of Keats's peerless lines. She recalled herself constantly; she reproached herself constantly; she said sternly to herself many a time, "Dignity and truth are the same in all ages. ”

“ So, at least, it is plain, Keats understood himself; and whether one counts his faith a vague self-deception, meaningless except to a mystic, or has found the most precious truth borne in upon his heart only by this selfsame way, the recognition of the poet's philosophy not merely lifts Keats out of and above the sphere of the purely sensuous, but reveals at once the spiritual substance which underlies his poetry, and which gives it vitality for all time. To other men beauty has been a passion, but to him it was a faith ”

“ We have no doubt that when Bailey wrote to Lord Houghton that common-sense and gentleness were Keats’s two special characteristics the worthy Archdeacon meant extremely well, but we prefer the real Keats, with his passionate wilfulness, his fantastic moods and his fine inconsistence. Part of Keats’s charm as a man is his fascinating incompleteness. ”

“ I named Keate. You were not at Eton, and I must tell you, therefore, what manner of man it was that I named, though I think you must have some idea of him already, for wherever from utmost Canada to Bundelcund—wherever there was the whitewashed wall of an officer’s room, or of any other apartment in which English gentlemen are forced to kick their heels, there likely enough (in the days of his reign) the head of Keate would be seen scratched or drawn with those various degrees of skill which one observes in the representations of saints. ”

“ Disease was sapping his vitals, pain wrung him, Death beckoned him with finger more and more imperative. Poetic fame became the vision of Tantalus, and love the clasp of Ixion.
Such was the life, or such the incipient death, of Keats, in the last twelvemonth of his brief existence.
For half a year prior to February 1820 he had been unrestful and cheerless. “Either that gloom overspread me,” so he wrote to James Rice, “or I was suffering under some passionate feeling, or, if I turned to versify, that exacerbated the poison of either sensation.” ”

“ No poet ever exhibited a more vivid perception of the beautiful, or greater powers of fancy, than Keats; but the bitterness of the criticism referred to was too much for his delicate health and sensitive nature, [170] hastening, if it did not actually develop, the seeds of consumption, of which he died. Keats's father was a livery-stable keeper, and it is said that the future poet was born in the most humble quarters; but the irresistible fire of genius lighted his path, and had he lived past the noon of life, he would have carved his way to the highest fame. ”

“ Sir Sidney sees clearly enough the double nature of Keats—his fiery courage, shown in his love of fighting as a schoolboy, his generosity, his virtue of the heart, on the one hand, and his luxurious love of beauty, his tremulous and swooning sensitiveness in the presence of nature and women, his morbidness, his mawkishness, his fascination as by serpents, on the other. But in the resultant portrait, it is a too respectable and virile Keats that emerges. Keats was more virile as a man than is generally understood. He does not owe his immortality to his virility, however. ”

“ So much may be said in definition of Keats's genius. It was essentially an aesthetic genius. It anticipated both William Morris and Oscar Wilde. There is in Keats a passion for the luxury of the world such as we do not find in Wordsworth or Shelley. He had not that bird-like quality of song which they had—that happiness to be alive and singing between the sky and the green earth. He looked on beautiful things with the intense devotion of the temple-worshipper rather than with the winged pleasure of the great poets. ”

“ In the Ode to Autumn, and Ode to a Nightingale, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer hues of romance.
There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent genius, but he knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must die
Before high-piled books in charactry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain. ”

“ We can trace the influence of Keats not merely in the conscious or unconscious imitations of his manner, like those which are so evident in the early poems of Tennyson and Procter, in Hood’s Plea of the Midsummer Fairies and Lycus the Centaur, in Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets, and William Morris’s Earthly Paradise, but also in the youthful spirit of delight in the retelling of old tales of mythology and chivalry; in the quickened sense of pleasure in the luxuriance and abundance of natural beauty ”

“ I light the fire, make his breakfast, and sometimes am obliged to cook; make his bed, and even sweep the room.... Oh I would my unfortunate friend had never left your Wentworth Place for the hopeless advantages of this comfortless Italy! He has many many times talked over ‘the few happy days at your house, the only time when his mind was at ease’.... Poor Keats cannot see any letters—at least he will not; they affect him so much, and increase his danger. ”

“ Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus: this makes him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an Ariadne.... I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have: I forgot game. I must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock passim.”
At a rather later date, October 1819, Keats had “left off animal food, that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs by nature.” ”

“ Keats cared for none of these things: he was in love with beauty. One must go back to Spenser to find an Englishman of his sensitiveness to beauty, and he was much simpler than Spenser, whose moral idealism expressed itself in a refined symbolism. Keats was the son of a stable keeper, went to school for a few years, and was conspicuous chiefly for his pugnacious disposition. The impression that he was a weak, sentimental boy and man is without foundation. ”