connected with mine?you know more of the real Cause than they do?nor
have I any chance of being rack'd as you have been'?you perhaps at one time
thought there was such a thing as Worldly Happiness to be arrived at, at
certain periods of time marked out?you have of necessity from your dispo
sition been thus led away?I scarcely remember counting upon any Happi
ness?I look not for it if it be not in the present hour?nothing startles me
beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights?or if a
Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existince and pick about
the Gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hea[r]ing a Misfortune having
befalled another is this. 'Well it cannot be helped.?he will have the pleasure
of trying the resourses of his spirit, and I beg now my dear Bailey that here
after should you observe any thing cold in me not to [put] it to the account
of heartlessness but abstraction?for I assure you I sometimes feel not the
influence of a Passion or Affection during a whole week?and so long this
6. Probably not only sense experiences but also Immortality,' line 187. the intuitive perceptions of truths, as opposed to 1. Keats's friends Jane and Mariane Reynolds truth achieved by consecutive reasoning. feared that his ill health at this time threatened 7. Cf. the 'Pleasure Thermometer' in Endymion tuberculosis, from which his brother Tom was suf1.777ff. (p. 885). fering. Bailey had recently experienced pain (been 8. Heavenly. 'racked') because of an unsuccessful love affair. 9. An echo of Wordsworth, 'Ode: Intimations of
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94 2 / JOHN KEATS
sometimes continues I begin to suspect myself and the genuiness of my
feelings at other times?thinking them a few barren Tragedv-tears. * * *
Your affectionate friend
John Keats?
To George and Thomas Keats
[NEGATIVE CAPABILITY]
[December 21, 27 (?), 1817] My dear Brothers I must crave your pardon for not having written ere this. * * * I spent Friday
evening with Wells' & went the next morning to see Death on the Pale horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West's2 age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality, the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth'?Examine King Lear & you will find this examplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness?The picture is larger than Christ rejected?I dined with Haydon4 the Sunday after you left, & had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two Brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois,5 they only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment? These men say things which make one start, without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their very eating & drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter?They talked of Kean6 & his low company?Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me & yet I am going to Reynolds, on Wednesday?Brown & Dilke7 walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime.8 I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously? I mean Negative Capability,9 that is when man is capable of being in uncer
1. Charles Wells, a former schoolmate of Tom for the Champion. Keats. 7. Charles Armitage Brown, John Hamilton Reyn2. Benjamin West (1738-1820), painter of histor-olds, and Charles Wentworth Dilke were all writers ical pictures, was an American who moved to and friends of Keats. Keats interrupted the writing England and became president of the Royal Acad-of this letter after the dash; beginning with 'Brown emy. The Christ Rejected mentioned a few sen-& Dilke' he is writing several days after the pretences farther on is also by West. ceding sentences. 3. Keats's solution to a problem at least as old as 8. Christmas pantomimes were performed each Aristotle's Poetics: why do we take pleasure in the year at Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters. aesthetic representation of a subject that in life 9. This famous and elusive phrase has been much would be ugly or painful? discussed. Keats coins it so as to distinguish 4. Keats's close friend Benjamin Haydon, painter between, on the one hand, a poetry that is eviof large-scale historical and religious pictures. dently shaped by the writer's personal interests and 5. Smith was one of the best-known literary wits beliefs and, on the other hand, a poetry of imperof the day; the others mentioned were men of let-sonality that records the writer's receptivity to the ters or of literary interests. 'uncertainties' of experience. This second kind of 6. Edmund Kean, noted Shakespearean actor. His poetry, in which a sense of beauty overcomes con- popularity in the early 19th century was conten-siderations of truth versus falsehood, is that protious because he made no secret of his humble duced by the poet of 'negative capability.' Cf. class origins. Keats had written an article on Kean Keats's dislike, in his letter to John Hamilton Reyn
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LETTERS / 95 1
tainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason?
Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught
from the Penetralium1 of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content
