Visit https://ebookultra.

com to download the full version and

explore more ebooks

JOHN KEATS AND THE CULTURE OF DISSENT 2nd

Edition Nicholas Roe

_____ Click the link below to download _____

https://ebookultra.com/download/john-keats-and-the-
culture-of-dissent-2nd-edition-nicholas-roe/

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookultra.com

Here are some suggested products you might be interested in.
Click the link to download

Keats Modesty and Masturbation Keats

https://ebookultra.com/download/keats-modesty-and-masturbation-keats/

Leigh Hunt Life Poetics and Politics Routledge Studies in

Romanticism Nicholas Roe

https://ebookultra.com/download/leigh-hunt-life-poetics-and-politics-
routledge-studies-in-romanticism-nicholas-roe/

The Original Dog Bible 2nd Edition Edition Kristin Mehus-

Roe

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-original-dog-bible-2nd-edition-
edition-kristin-mehus-roe/

John Keats 2 Updated Edition Harold Bloom (Edited And With

An Introduction By)

https://ebookultra.com/download/john-keats-2-updated-edition-harold-
bloom-edited-and-with-an-introduction-by/
Worlds of Dissent Charter 77 The Plastic People of the
Universe and Czech Culture under Communism First Edition
Jonathan Bolton
https://ebookultra.com/download/worlds-of-dissent-charter-77-the-
plastic-people-of-the-universe-and-czech-culture-under-communism-
first-edition-jonathan-bolton/

Project Management for Business and Engineering Principles

and Practice 2nd Edition John M. Nicholas

https://ebookultra.com/download/project-management-for-business-and-
engineering-principles-and-practice-2nd-edition-john-m-nicholas/

Becoming Western Stories of Culture and Identity in the

Cowboy State 1st Edition Liza Nicholas

https://ebookultra.com/download/becoming-western-stories-of-culture-
and-identity-in-the-cowboy-state-1st-edition-liza-nicholas/

The Restoration of Christian Culture John Senior

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-restoration-of-christian-culture-
john-senior/

Writers at Work Russian Production Novels and the

Construction of Soviet Culture 1st Edition Mary A.
Nicholas
https://ebookultra.com/download/writers-at-work-russian-production-
novels-and-the-construction-of-soviet-culture-1st-edition-mary-a-
nicholas/
JOHN KEATS AND THE CULTURE OF DISSENT 2nd
Edition Nicholas Roe Digital Instant Download
Author(s): NICHOLAS ROE
ISBN(s): 9780199251117, 0199251118
Edition: 2
File Details: PDF, 18.93 MB
Year: 2002
Language: english
 P o l i t i c a l D i s s
and
 JOHN KEATS
AND THE
CULTURE OF DISSENT

NICHOLAS ROE

CLARENDON PRESS - OXFORD

This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification
in order to ensure its continuing availability

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dares Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal
Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

© Nicholas Roe 1997

Not to be reprinted without permission

The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
Reprinted 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

ISBN 978-0-19-818629-8

Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne

FOR

JANE
 And now, as deep into the wood as we
Might mark a lynx’s eye, there glimmered light
Fair faces and a rush of garments white,
Plainer and plainer shewing, till at last
Into the widest alley they all past,
Making directly for the woodland altar.
O kindly muse! let not my weak tongue faulter
In telling of this goodly company,
Of their old piety, and of their glee:
But let a portion of ethereal dew
Fall on my head, and presently unmew
My soul; that I may dare, in wayfaring,
To stammer where old Chaucer used to sing.
(Endymion, I. 122-34)

We live far from the world of letters,—out of the pale ofa

fashionable criticism,—aloof from the atmosphere of a
Court; but we are surrounded by a beautiful country, and
love Poetry, which we read out of doors, as well as in.
John Hamilton Reynolds, ‘The Quarterly Review.—
Mr Keats’, Examiner (11 Oct. 1818), 649)

Honour to bold Robin Hood,

Sleeping in the underwood!
(‘Robin Hood: To A Friend’, 57-8)

P AESTIELD|
oF FURTHER EDUCATION
er
 Preface and Acknowledgements

Reynolds has returned from a six weeks enjoyment in

Devonshire, he is well and persuades me to publish my pot
of Basil as an answer to the attacks made upon me in
Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review. There
have been two Letters in my defence in the Chronicle and
one in the Examiner, coppied from the Alfred Exeter
paper, and written by Reynolds—I do not know who wrote
those in the Chronicle—This is a mere matter of the
moment—I think I shall be among the English Poets after
my death.’

KEATs’s letter of October 1818 wishfully abstracted his life as

a writer from the literary warfare carried on in Blackwood’s Maga-
zine and the Quarterly Review, projecting his reception ‘among
the English Poets’ into future years beyond his death. The
Romantic notion of a ‘posthumous life’ was frequently aired at
celebrations of Keats’s bicentenary during 1995, an appropriate
recognition of his achievement as an English poet which has
of
also been given scholarly currency by Andrew Bennett’s study
reading and audience in Keats’s poetry.” In surveying the two
centuries since Keats’s lifetime one finds that by seeking to
disconnect his literary reputation from the ‘matter of the mo-
ment’, Keats had anticipated the aesthetic view of his poetry
h-
which was adopted by generations of nineteenth- and twentiet
respon ded to Keats as
century readers. Certainly, many readers
a ‘thing of beauty’—but by no means all of them did so: over the
have
years Keats’s numerous biographers and some of his critics
related the poems to the vexing circumstances of his life and
times. More lately the historical investment of Romant ic studies
has been so thorough that Michael O’Neill, concerned to re-
Keats’s
assert the uniqueness of the ‘verbal world’ created in
Oct. 1818, Letters, i.
1 Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, 14, 16, 21, 24, 31
393-4-
2 Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative, and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Wnting
(Cambridge, 1994).
Vill PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

poetry, has observed that ‘though a poem emerges fromalife it

takes on alife of its own; often the two lives will not be straight-
forwardly related’.? In “The Posthumous Life of John Keats’, a
BBC radio programme marking Keats’s bicentenary, Marilyn
Butler reflected from a similar angle on recent approaches to
Keats: ‘when a poet is very whole and complete in himself, when
he actually tries to create a world that is an aesthetic world, he
does demand . . . a lot of attention to his text, his words—par-
ticularly to words—and to the way he chose to shape it. I think
that side of Keats, Keats’s artistry, is actually being neglected.’‘
Perhaps New Historicist criticism has indeed overlooked the
artistry of Keats’s poems and the extent to which, as Helen
Vendler says, each of the poems ‘arises from art as well as from
circumstance’.® Scholarly and critical interests change, and at-
tention may now be turning to a reappraisal of the qualities of
verbal art in Keats’s writing. Yet, as Vendler goes on to remind
us, the aesthetic world—whether of painting, sculpture, music,
or poetry—is never entirely sealed off from the circumstances of
life to constitute a separate, perfected unity; in pointing to the
face Benjamin Haydon sketched for his painting Christ’s Entry
into Jerusalem, Vendler recognizes Keats’s ‘vivacity, and even
his pugnacity...the spirited eagerness remarked on by all
[Keats’s] friends’.®
Like many of the faces in Haydon’s painting, and as Virginia
Woolf noted, a
new book is attached to life by a thousand minute filaments. Life goes
on and the filaments break and disappear. But at the moment they
ring and resound and set up all kinds of irrelevant responses. Keats was
an apothecary and lived in Hampstead, and consorted with Leigh
Hunt and the Cockneys.’
Hostile responses to Keats’s books arose from prejudices which
at the time were pressingly relevant to his life as a writer. The

° See ‘ “When this warm scribe my hand”: Writing and History in Hyperion and
The
Fall of Hyperion’, in KH 147.
* ‘The Posthumous Life of John Keats’, first broadcast on BBC Radio
3720 Oct
1995:
° ‘John Keats, 1795-1821: John Keats, 1795-1995, in John Keats 1795-1995
:
With a Catalogue of the Harvard Keats Collection (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 9.
esi bidivanr.
” ‘Lockhart’s Criticism’, The Moment and Other Essays (London, 1947),
62.
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

attacks were of course generated by the immediacy with which

Keats spoke to his contemporaries but, as I argue in my intro-
duction, critical hostility also initiated the disconnection of
those ‘filaments’ which were sparklingly apparent at the first
publication of his poems.
In this book I have set out to restore the vivacious, even
pugnacious, voices of Keats’s poetry, seeking in particular to
trace those frequently unstraightforward ways in which his
poems responded to and addressed matters of the moment.
Reynolds’s idea that Keats might publish Isabella; or, The Pot of
Basil as a counterblast to the critics built upon his confident
arrival on the literary scene in Poems, by John Keats. I have tried
to show that, even in the case of a writer about whose life so
much is now known, there is fresh information to be discovered
which opens new perspectives on the poetry. My first two chap-
ters explore the dissenting culture of Enfield School where
Keats passed his formative years, showing how the school exer-
cised a strong influence on Keats’s imaginative life and his
political radicalism. Imagination and politics are two themes
which intertwine through the following chapters on’ Keats’s
friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke, his medical career, the
‘Cockney’ milieu in which his poems were written, and the
original, controversial impact of his three collections of poetry.
Because the aesthetic world of Keats’s poetry is so intensely
realized, I have been concerned rather less with the reconstruc-
tion of contexts for it (although these have their place in this
study) than I have with attempting to retrieve the contemporary
resonances of Keats’s language, and tracing the semantic
threads which attached the poems to the world in which they
were written (and which loosened as Keats assumed a canonical
appeal). This has entailed a form of close reading which might
properly be called a literal archaeology, in that I have sought to
return (so far as possible) to the original inflections of Keats’s
language, imagery, and poetic style in an endeavour to recover
how his poems were once understood to be loaded with contro-
versial meaning.
One method I have adopted involves relating the poems to
contemporary events as these were reported in journals of the
day, especially those which we know Keats read and in which his
poems were published—the Examiner, the Yellow Dwarf, and the
X PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Champion. This has the effect of highlighting the explicit topi-

cality of numerous poems, and it also places the more subdued,
intimate idiom of others (the verse epistles, for instance) in the
wider cultural perspective which defined their social and politi-
cal meanings. When read alongside the Examiner and the writ-
ings of individuals associated with that journal, Poems, by John
Keats, Endymion, even ‘To Autumn’ abound with contemporary
references and pointers. Keatsian themes and motifs such as
pagan ceremony in Endymion and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, and
woodland verdure in ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’,
can be located within a broader revolutionary discourse which
dated from the 1790s. In all of these ways the unsettling,
modish textures of Keats’s vocabulary and style (frequently stig-
matized as the signs of his ‘vulgarity’) articulate once again their
conspiratorial melodies as lyrical counterparts to—and depar-
tures from—Leigh Hunt’s vigorous political journalism and
literary criticism.
While this book offers fresh readings of some of Keats’s best-
known poems, I hope also that it will encourage further re-
assessment of Hunt’s achievement as poet and journalist. As I
argue in the introduction, Z’s polemic in Blackwood’s Magazine
has had alasting effect in damning ‘Cockney’ or ‘suburban’
culture right down to our own time. Keats, Hunt, and Hazlitt
were the principal targets for Z’s prejudice, and one purpose of
this book is to explain how and why those ‘bad’ writers ap-
peared as powerful advocates for dissent from the cultural or-
thodoxies of the day. Another of my concerns has been more
broadly to rehabilitate the ‘Cockney School’: these writers
formed a coterie which did much to initiate the democratiza-
tion of literary and political culture which is our inheritance
today. Hazlitt said rightly that Leigh Hunt ‘improves upon
acquaintance’; others in their Cockney circle, such as John
Hamilton Reynolds, Horace Smith, and even Cornelius
Webb—ridiculed by Z, and treated slightingly by Keats—do so
too.®
My research was supported by a grant from the British Acad-
emy, and by the award of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship
° Spirit of the Age, Howe, xi. 1:76. For Keats’s remark that Webb was ‘unfortunately
... of our Party occasionally at Hampstead’ see his letter to Benjamin Bailey, Letters,
i. 180 and n.
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Xi

which enabled me to complete the research and write this book.

The School of English at St Andrews University provided me
with a word processor, and has facilitated my work in various
ways. I acknowledge all of this assistance with thanks, and wish
also to express my gratitude to the staff of the following libraries
and institutions: the Bodleian Library; the British Library; the
Brotherton Library, Leeds University, especially Christopher
Sheppard, Head of Special Collections; Edinburgh University
Library; the Keats Collection in the Houghton Library, Harvard
University, especially Susan Halpert and Leslie Morris, Curator
of Manuscripts; Keats House, Hampstead, especially the Cu-
rator Christina Gee and Roberta Davis; Manchester Public
Library; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, especi-
ally Ian Cunningham and Iain G. Brown of the Manuscripts
Division; St Andrews University Library; the Library of the
Wellcome Institute, London, especially Keith Moore; Wills
Medical Library at Guy’s Hospital, London, especially the Act-
ing Librarian Andrew Baster. I owe particular debts to Christine
Gascoigne and Cilla Jackson of the Special Collections Depart-
ment, St Andrews University Library; they have kindly and
patiently helped with my enquiries over many years. Vincent
Newey’s splendid essays on Keats’s poetry and politics opened
the subject up for me. John Barnard and David Fairer of the
School of English, Leeds University, have been closely involved
with my work on Keats from the outset and have helped in many
ways. Jack Stillinger read a draft of the book with the meticulous
care characteristic of all of his scholarship, and his advice and
suggestions have been invaluable. Jason Freeman, and Sophie
Goldsworthy at Oxford University Press encouraged my work on
this book from an early stage. The following colleagues and
friends have shared ideas, and offered support and encourage-
ment: J. H. Alexander, Michael Alexander, Richard Allen,
Richard Altick, Isobel Armstrong, Martin Aske, Andrew
Bennett, Drummond and Vivian Bone, Frederick Burwick,
Jeffrey Cox, Rachel Crawford, Robert Crawford, Lilla Crisafulli-
Jones, Thomas Duncan, Douglas Dunn, James Engell, Kelvin
Everest, Reg and Mary Foakes, Bruce Graver, Jack Haeger,
Terence Hoagwood, Mimi. Hotchkiss, Lawrence and Mary
James, Anthony Johnson, Kenneth Johnston, Theresa Kelley,
John Kerrigan, Peter Kitson, Greg Kucich, Beth Lau, Thomas
Xii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

McFarland, Peter Manning, Raimonda Modiano, Andrew

Motion, Pamela Norris, Michael O’Neill, Barbara Packer,
Morton Paley, Janice Patten, Thomas Pfau, Ralph Pite, Alan
Richardson, Robert Ryan, Philip Shaw, Paul Sheats, Helen
Small, Stuart Sperry, Simon and Jane Taylor, Nicola Trott,
Heather Walker, Stephen Wall, Daniel Watkins, Reggie and
Shirley Watters, Timothy Webb, Susan Wolfson, Alastair and Liz
Work, Duncan Wu. The book is dedicated to the person whose
wisdom and encouragement, generously given, have improved
these pages at numberless points.

N.H.R.
 Permissions

John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells, is quoted by permission of

John Murray (Publishers) Ltd. Tony Harrison’s ‘Them & [uz]’
from Selected Poems is quoted by permission of Tony Harrison.
Philip Larkin’s ‘Toads Revisited’ from Collected Poems and
Seamus Heaney’s ‘Exposure’ from North are quoted by permis-
sion of Faber and Faber Ltd. Part of Chapter 8 originally ap-
peared as an essay entitled ‘Keats’s Lisping Sedition’ in Essays in
Criticism (Jan. 1992). I am grateful to the editors Stephen Wall
and Christopher Ricks for permission to include material from
the essay here.
"ints an
coal

tie‘Taor.-Mea Syne ii,

, a vat a
y were -
aes patie s
 Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XViii

ABBREVIATIONS
XIX

INTRODUCTION: JOHN KEATS IN THE

COCKNEY SCHOOL

_ A COCKNEY SCHOOLROOM: KEATS AND

THE CULTURE OF DISSENT 27
Dissenting Culture and Enfield School 27
‘Knowledge enormous’: The Achievement ofJohn Collett
Ryland 29
‘The Living Orrery’: Keats’s Education at Enfield School 33
A Republican Library | 45

. COSMOPOLITICS: HISTORY, CLASSICS,

AND PRETTY PAGANISM 51

Keats and History 51

Cockney Classics 60

The Politics of Pan, and Pretty Paganism 71

88
_ KEATS AND CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE
John Keats’s Lost Years 88
A Radical’s Vade-mecum: Charles Cowden Clarke’s
Commonplace Book oo
An Era in his Existence: Keats and Leigh Hunt 105

_ ‘SOFT HUMANITY PUT ON’: THE POETRY

AND POLITICS OF SOCIALITY 1798-1818
111

111
‘Home-born feeling’: The Example of Coleridge
116
Keats, Hunt, and Sociality
Xvi CONTENTS

5- SONGS FROM THE WOODS; OR,

OUTLAW LYRICS 134
The Chaucerian Key 134
Through the Tangled Mazes of the Forest 140
Ethereal Pigs and Autry Citadels te
6. THE PHARMACOPOLITICAL POET 160
The Wavering Apprentice 160
Dresser to ‘Billy’ Lucas: A Cautionary Tale 163
Meeting Astley Cooper 169
Radical Medicine: Astley Cooper and John Thelwall 173
Hie ‘APOLLO’S TOUCH’: THE PHARMACY
OF IMAGINATION 182
Where’s the Poet? 182
The Chemistry of Revolution 187
Effigies of Pain’ 191
A Sylvan Hospice: ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 195
. LISPING SEDITION: POEMS, ENDYMION,
AND THE POETICS OF DISSENT 202
A Cockney Bantling 202
A Time when Pan is not Sought 208
The Suburban School 212
EPILOGUE: JOHN KEATS’S
COMMONWEALTH: THE 1820
COLLECTION AND ‘TO AUTUMN’ 230
Negative Capability and its Backgrounds:
Shakespeare, Politics, Theatre 230
Sympathetic Imagination
239
The Godwinian Inheritance 242
A Godwin Perfectibily Man
245
John Keats’s Commonwealth 248
A Serious Conspiracy in Manchester
253
 CONTENTS XVil

The Calendar of Nature 257

‘Who hath not seen thee?’ 263
Postscript 266

APPENDIX: Correspondence Relating to the ‘Cockney

School’ Essays, from the ‘Blackwood Papers’ in the National
Library of Scotland 268

BIBLIOGRAPHY 277

INDEX 293
 List of Illustrations

Between pp. 156 and 157

. John Collett Ryland

. John Keats’s School at Enfield
. Charles Cowden Clarke
. James Henry Leigh Hunt
. Frontispiece to Poems, by John Keats (1817)
=
N . Manchester Heroes
O98
Oop
 Abbreviations

Unless indicated otherwise, quotations from Keats’s poetry will be

drawn from Poems ofJohn Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.,
1978).

AP The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott

(London, 1970)
BL] Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A.
Marchand (12 vols., London, 1973-82)
DNB - Dictionary of National Biography
Howe The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P.
Howe (21 vols., London, 1930-4)
K@H Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cam-
bridge, 1995)
KC The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816-18 78
and More Letters and Poems 1814-1879, ed.
Hyder Edward Rollins (2nd edn., 2 vols.,
Cambridge, Mass., 1965)
KCH Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. Geoffrey
Matthews (London, 1971)
KHM Jerome J.McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical
Method in Literary Criticism’, Modern Lan-
guage Notes, 94 (1979), rpt. The Beauty of
Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical
Method and Theory (Oxford, 1985)
KP ‘Keats and Politics: A Forum’, ed. Susan
Wolfson, S/R 25 (Summer 1986)
K-S] Keats—Shelley Journal
K-SMB Keats—Shelley Memorial Bulletin
Letters The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed.
Hyder Edward Rollins (2 vols., Cambridge,
Mass., 1958)
LLL Richard Monckton Milnes, Life, Letters, and
Literary Remains, of John Keats (2 vols.,
London, 1848).
NLS The National Library of Scotland
XxX ABBREVIATIONS

OED The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn., Ox-

ford, 1989)
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
of America
Recollections Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollec-
tions of Writers (1878; Fontwell, 1969)
‘Recollections of Keats’ ‘Recollections of John Keats’ in Recollections
SIR Studies in Romanticism
TLS Times Literary Supplement
 Introduction:
John Keats in the Cockney School

Oh! Mr Blackwood, Mr Blackwood, oh!

How could you serve my Pretty Cockneys so?
(H. Townsend to Christopher North
(John Wilson), 6 Dec. 1821)?

Autumn 1795 in England was a season of riots and rumoured

conspiracies. Crop failures, inflation, bread shortages, and the
threat of invasion contributed to the misery of a nation that had
been at-war with France for almost three years. Throughout the
country protesters organized meetings, seeking reform of par-
liamentary representation and an end to the war. At one such
meeting on 26 October a massive crowd of London’s citizens
gathered in Copenhagen Fields to hear John Thelwall de-
nounce the government for abandoning the people to ‘misery,
neglect, and injustice’, while employing informers and agents
to foment conflict:
friends of
Yes, Citizens, conspiracies there are; but they are not the
liberty who are the conspirators, but the friends of the tottering cause
of despotism and corruption. Those are the wretches who will conspire
g
together, in the vain hope of making the friends of liberty, by plungin
them into tumult and disorder, the instruments of their detestable
machinations.”

By conspiring to provoke ‘tumult and disorder’ in a miserable

populace, the ‘friends of despotism’ sought a pretext for intro-
ducing oppressive legislation to shore up the establishment—
that ‘tottering cause of despotism and corruption’. Three days
afterwards, at the opening of parliament on 29 October, the
King’s carriage was surrounded in the street and its windows
Library of
1 NLS, MS 4007, quoted by permission of the Trustees of the National
Scotland.
Violence the Means of
2 John Thelwall, Peaceful Discussion, and not Tumultuary
Redressing National Grievances (London , 1795), 4, 7-8.
2 INTRODUCTION

were smashed as the crowd roared ‘Bread! Peace! Down with

Pitt! No war! No king! Peace! Bread! Peace!’ Within two months
the ‘Gagging Acts’ were passed, extending the law of treason
and curtailing the right of assembly and freedom of speech. At
this critical time of famine, conspiracy, riots, repression, and
impending revolution, John Keats was born at Moorfields,
London, on 31 October 1795.
A child of the 1790s, Keats’s early boyhood, his schooldays
(1803-11), and his medical training (1811-17) extended from
the French Revolution, through the Napoleonic era, to the
unsettled post-war years in which, as Coleridge said, ‘Peace
[had] come without the advantages expected from Peace, and
on the contrary, with many of the severest inconveniences usu-
ally attributable to War.’* Keats’s career as a poet dated from
1814, and overlapped with the widespread revival of reformist
activity generated by the economic depression and unemploy-
ment which accompanied peace. This resurgence gathered to a
crisis when, on 16 August 1819, the militia intervened at a
reform meeting in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, killing and
wounding scores of people: the Peterloo Massacre.
From the peaceful mass meeting in Copenhagen Fields to the
tragic violence at Peterloo, Keats’s life spanned three decades of
intense political ferment in England. Yet, until very recently, he
was regarded as remarkably disengaged from social and politi-
cal issues, a poet who had travelled so far in romance as to have
quite forgotten the uproar and sad peace of his own times.
Keats’s first biographer, Richard Monckton Milnes, announced
his subject as a figure of minimal worldly presence, ‘one whose
whole story may be summed up in the composition of three
small volumes of verse, some earnest friendships, one passion,
and a premature death’.* That story was repeated in numer-
ous subsequent biographies, which elaborated and enriched
Milnes’s outline of the circumstances of his life. None of these
studies entirely overlooked the contemporary historical dimen-
sions of Keats’s life, although these aspects of his career and
creativity were often deemed to be of secondary importance to
* See A Lay Sermon (1817), in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, Bollingen Collected
Coleridge Series 6 (Princeton, 1972), 141.
TNL L SOF
 INTRODUCTION 3

understandings of a writer whose experiences were believed to

have been ‘mainly literary’.°
Sidney Colvin offered a typical profile in which Keats was said
to have
shared the natural sympathy of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and
kind-hearted view of things, and he had a mind naturally unapt for
dogma; ready to entertain and appreciate any set of ideas according as
his imagination recognised their beauty or power, he could never wed
himself to any as representing ultimate truth.®
Readily displacing ‘ideas’ with imagined ‘beauty or power’,
Colvin’s account was representative in offering a sentimental
image of a ‘kindly’ poet naturally sympathetic to but also ‘natu-
rally unapt’ for political ideals or activity. In her bulky two-
volume life of Keats, Amy Lowell conceded that Keats was ‘a
friend of reformers’ like Leigh Hunt, although she reminded
her readers that
ted in
active participation in such things was not his part; he commen
might easily have done
private, but said no word in print, as he
r. That he felt no desire to air his
through the medium of the Examine
the measur e of his interest in such subjects , which
views in public gives
was, in truth, very slight.’
clear that
This last claim has a very dubious logic, although it is
intellectually and
Lowell, like Colvin, believed that politics were
biogra-
practically of no interest to Keats. Of the three excellent
n Bate’s
phies of Keats published in the 1960s, Walter Jackso
focuse d primar ily on events in the poet’s inner
magisterial study
, rightly , as ‘the definit ive critica l biogra phy’ .®
life and was hailed
John
Pubiished within two weeks of Bate’s book, Aileen Ward’s
the ‘inner
Keats: The Making of a Poet also set out to record
the nearest ap-
drama of [Keats’s] creative life’, and remains
the poet,
proach we have to a (Freudian) psycho-biography of
of lively episodes
her book was distinctive, too, in a number
Keats (New York,
5 See Paul de Man, ‘The Negative Road’, in Selected Poetry ofJohn
Critical Views Series (New York,
1966); rpt. John Keats, ed. Harold Bloom, Modern
1985).
and After-Fame (London, 1917),
6 John Keats: His Life and Poetry, his Friends, Critics,
1.
7 John Keats (2 vols., London, 1925), ii. 109.
97-100.
8 See David Perkins’s review in K-SJ 13 (Winter 1964),
 4 INTRODUCTION

treating the social and pclitical dimensions of Keats’s life,

works, and times. Five years later, Robert Gittings’s biography
also sought to place Keats’s life in its historical context, and
differed with Bate on some matters of dating—notably the
tough problem of when precisely Keats left school to begin his
medical apprenticeship.°®
Modern biographies can hardly be said to have ignored
Keats’s relation to political issues although, as Vincent Newey
rightly judged, the subject has been ‘relatively neglected’.’°
More specialized studies of Keats have offered a glimpse of the
poet that is markedly different from that encountered in the
biographies. Prominent here was H. W. Garrod’s fine short
study which argued forcefully that Keats was a poet of the
‘revolutionary idea’, ambitious to write ‘poetry which should
startle princes from the sleep of circumstance’; yet Garrod said,
‘Philosophy, politics, action, character—all these are for ever
calling [Keats] from his proper effectiveness to regions of enter-
prise where he can be only inefficient and unhappy.’!! Clarence
De Witt Thorpe’s essay ‘Keats’s Interest in Politics and World
Affairs’ explicitly identified Keats as a ‘fervid republican’, ‘an
unusually close observer of men and affairs, intently alert to the
social, economic, and political conditions of his day’. Thorpe’s
Keats emerged from the poet’s letters, and from contextual
reconstruction; but like Colvin, Lowell, and Garrod he was
unable to trace the ‘steady strength’ of Keats’s convictions in
the poetry, beyond a generalized humanitarianism. ‘The in-
stinct and the fire were there, as the letters show’, he con-
cluded, ‘but sublimated, the poet habitually suppressing the
reformer.’!? Here, as in some accounts of Keats already noted
above, his commitment to poetry is understood to have re-
* See pp. 14, 89, g0, 163-73 below, and Jack Stillinger’s review of Gittings’s
biography in K-SJ18 (1969), 107-11.
'© See Vincent Newey, ‘ “Alternate uproar and sad peace”: Keats, Politics, and the
Idea of Revolution’, in J. R. Watson (ed.), The French Revolution in English
Literature
and Art, Modern Humanities Research Association Yearbook of English Studies,
19,
(London, 1989), 265.
"H.W. Garrod, Keats (Oxford, 1926), 26, 60. See also Herbert G.
Wright, ‘Keats
and Politics’, in Essays and Studies, 18 (1933), 7-23, which continues
Garrod’s
argument by observing that Keats had ‘a more active political conscience than
has
generally been recognised’, and see June Q. Koch, ‘Politics in Keats’s Poetry’,
Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 71 (1972), 491-501.
See PMLA 46 (1931), 1228-45.
 INTRODUCTION 5

quired him to be unfitted for, or insulated from, the contem-

porary world. The persistence of this view can be illustrated in
Jack Stillinger’s essay on Keats for the 1985 edition of the
Modern Language Association’s English Romantic Poets: A Review
of Research and Criticism. Out of a total of fifty-two pages in
Stillinger’s admirable bibliography of Keats, work on the poet’s
‘political and social ideas’ was sufficiently summarized in just
thirteen lines.”
As everyone knows, Romantic studies during the 1980s were
characterized by a turn towards the contextually informed criti-
cisms associated with New Historicism and, for the first time,
Keats’s political and social imagination received detailed and
sustained scholarly attention. In Romantics, Rebels and Reaction-
aries (1981), Marilyn Butler observed that Hyperion, The Fall of
Hyperion, and ‘To Autumn’ were ‘not now read as political
poems’, but she nevertheless went on to show how both Hyperion
poems endeavour to ‘represent historical change as the liberal
habitually sees it’ and concluded that it would be misleading
to suggest that this poetry is ‘in any important sense evasive’
of contemporary life.’* Two years afterwards, ‘evasion’ and ‘es-
capism’ emerged as crucial imaginative strategies in Jerome
McGann’s study The Romantic Ideology (1983). Romantic po-
etry’s ‘displacement efforts... its escape trails and pursued
states of harmony and reconciliation’ were cited by McGann as
the ‘dominant cultural illusions’ of the age, ‘illusions’ in that
poems were conditioned by the very historical circumstances
they sought to avoid. In The Romantic Ideology and in his essay
‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’,
McGann read Keats’s poetry (and “To Autumn’ in particular)
as fundamentally reactionary efforts ‘to disguise the horror
entailed in the maintenance and reproduction of the social
structures—of the human life—[Keats] knew, to hide from the
recognition of horror’.!’ The escapist, reactionary paradigm
brought forward in McGann’s work did much to set the agenda

'8 Jack Stillinger, ‘John Keats’, in Frank Jordan (ed.), The English Romantic Poets:
A Review of Research and Criticism: Fourth Edition (New York, 1985), 693.
‘4 Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its
Background, 1760-1830 (Oxford, 1981}, 151-4.
15 Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago,
1983), 133-4, and KHM 48-65.
6 INTRODUCTION

for the 1986 special issue of Studies in Romanticism devoted to

‘Keats and Politics’; the essays contributed by Morris Dickstein,
William Keach, David Bromwich, Paul Fry, and Alan Bewell
agreed that Keats was indeed a ‘radical’ but differed markedly
in their assessments of how Keats’s radicalism affected his writ-
ing. William Keach found in Keats’s loose, run-on couplets the
stylistic signature of his liberal politics, whereas Paul Fry argued
for the neutral atmosphere of ‘To Autumn’, the poem’s disen-
gaged preoccupation with ‘the ontology of the lyric moment’.”°
The Studies in Romanticism forum marked a watershed in
Keats studies beyond which it has no longer been possible to
view Keats as a poet wanting political interests, priorities, and
commitments.!” At the bicentenary of Keats’s birth, recent
studies of him have adopted a variety of social, political, and
gender-based approaches.'* Marjorie Levinson’s Keats’s Life of
Allegory: The Origins of a Style (1988) interpreted Keats’s writing
and career through the disadvantages which were imposed, she
argued, by his family background, social class, and upbringing.
Economic and social deprivations excluded Levinson’s Keats
from participation in English culture, and were also definitive
of his career and stylistic presence as a poet. The materialist
critical formulations of her book have subsequently been
resumed, with different emphases, in Daniel Watkins’s Keats’s
Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (1989), the governing
premiss of which is that Keats’s poetry ‘from the beginning, is
haunted by politics’:
His complex and turbulent poetic articulation and reworking of tradi-
tional poetic topics, of myths and legends, and of contemporary and
past history and politics are signs of intense anxiety—not simply the
psychological anxiety that came of Keats’s frequent questioning of his
own capabilities, but also the historical anxiety of an age threatened by
economic collapse, by the militarization of culture, bad harvests, stag-

'© See William Keach, ‘Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style’, and
Paul H. Fry, ‘History, Existence, and “To Autumn”’, KP 182-96, 211-19.
'7 See in particular Vincent Newey’s two impressive essays on Keats’s poetry and
politics, ‘“Alternate uproar and sad peace”’, and ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’,
K&H 165-93.
; a For an excellent assembly of contemporary approaches to Keats, see in particu-
lar the thirteen essays in K@H, which approach Keats through politics, social
history, feminism, economics, historiography, stylistics, aesthetics, and mathemati-
cal and statistical theory.
 INTRODUCTION 7

geringly high unemployment, and by a fear both of bourgeois, indus-

trial triumph and of a return to feudalism.'®
Here Keats appears as the poet of a nation and culture in crisis,
his ‘turbulent’ imagination betraying intense personal tensions
and registering the distress caused by contemporary social, po-
litical, and economic upheavals. This is a dangerous Keats: a
poet who embodied and gave voice to the anxieties and insecu-
rities of his times; a poet thus capable of challenging and un-
settling the preconceptions of his readers; a poet whom the
establishment would be obliged to silence.
One argument of the present book is that the vigorous cam-
paign to suppress John Keats, carried on in Tory journals of the
day, has had an enduring and malign influence on later ap-
proaches to his life and work, especially so in having prejudiced
understanding of his education and its effect on his poetry.
Modern biographers of Keats agree in their accounts of his
education at Enfield School. In John Keats: The Making of a Poet
Aileen Ward noted that the school was ‘enlightened’ and ‘lib-
eral’, and that it offered a ‘more modern and rounded curricu-
lum than the public schools’. Robert Gittings found that the
school had a ‘distinct tone’ and that it shared the ‘liberal and
progressive’ curriculum offered at nonconformist schools.
Walter Jackson Bate had Enfield School providing Keats with ‘a
fairly liberal education to students whose families were in trade
or in the less affluent professions’. The most recent biography
of the poet, by Stephen Coote, has noted the school’s noncon-
formist background, and described its teaching as ‘neither nar-
row nor merely utilitarian...kindly and enlightened...
benevolent [and] earnest if slightly eccentric’.”° As I hope to
show in this book, the slightly patronizing tone apparent in all
of these descriptions represents a faint but noticeable contami-
nation from the politicized attacks on Keats during his lifetime.
The primary source for information about Keats’s school
education is Cowden Clarke’s ‘Recollections of John Keats’

12 Daniel P. Watkins, Keats’s Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (London,
1989), 22-3.
20 See Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (London, 1963), 7-8; Robert
Gittings, John Keats (Harmondsworth, 1968), 44; Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats
(Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 10; Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life (London, 1995),
11-12.
8 INTRODUCTION

which, although it was written after the passing of many years,

describes in heartfelt detail some aspects of Keats’s schooldays
and his early reading. As Richard Altick has emphasized:
In it occur all the observations and incidents which have become so
familiar through constant retelling: the description of the boy’s sud-
denly developing a passion for reading, after having been a completely
unbookish child; Clarke’s reminiscences of his adventures in Spenser
with his promising former pupil; the classic story of the writing of the
Chapman’s Homer sonnet; the genesis of the friendship with Hunt,
the story of Keats’s ‘passage at arms’ with the butcher boy; and the
spirited defence of Keats against the aspersions cast upon him by
Haydon in his journals. The essay, instinct as it is with Clarke’s undi-
minished affection for the poet, presents a view of Keats’s character
which the passage of more than eighty years, with all the attendant
minute examination of evidence, has failed substantially to alter.”
Clarke’s memoir is still the best guide to Keats’s school years,
especially so in that it resists the myth of ‘poor Keats’, the victim
of hostile critics, and reminds us of how mentally and physically
vigorous Keats actually was. According to Clarke, as a schoolboy
Keats had been ‘highly pugnacious’, with an ‘ungovernable’
temper, and ‘terrier courage’.” But Clarke’s essay was certainly
not fresh material when it was quarried by twentieth-century
biographers. It had first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (Janu-
ary 1861), then in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Littel’s Living Age,
and Every Saturday (all 1874), and in 1878 appeared in its final
form in Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke’s Recollections of
Writers. Keats’s biographers all acknowledge the ‘Recollections
of John Keats’, but the fact that Clarke’s narrative played down
the political and religious dissent of Enfield School has made it
difficult to evaluate how those aspects of the academy at Enfield
may have influenced Keats while he was a pupil there and in
later life.
Clarke tells us that Keats used to read Hunt’s Examiner at
Enfield, and that this ‘no doubt laid the foundation of his love
of civil and religious liberty’. Yet he seems to have had particu-
lar difficulty in pursuing this subject in more detail. In a manu-
script of the ‘Recollections’ at the Houghton Library, Harvard

21 Richard D. Altick, The Cowden Clarkes (London, 1948), 207.

2 ‘Recollections of Keats’, 123.
 INTRODUCTION 9

University, the brief passages which touch upon Keats’s politics

are heavily deleted, interlined, and revised to an extent which is
not typical of Clarke’s manuscript as a whole. By way of explain-
ing the poor sale of Poems, by John Keats, for example, Clarke
recalled the political animus directed at reformists in the years
after Waterloo but, on the evidence of the manuscript, he did so
with some unease:
The word had been passed that its author was a Radical; and, in those
[one word deleted; illegible} days of ‘Bible-Crown-and-Constitution’ su-
premacy, he might [one word deleted; illegible] have had better chance of
success [half a line deleted; illegible], had he [two words deleted; illegible]
been an Anti-jacobin. Keats had [not; interlined] made [not; deleted]
[the slightest; interlined| demonstration of political opinion .. Ree

The passage that immediately follows in the manuscript recalls

Keats’s dedication of Poems to Leigh Hunt: ‘[having; deleted] he
had dedicated his book to Leigh Hunt; [one and a quarter lines
deleted; illegible) Editor of the “Examiner,” [one word deleted;
illegible] a radical and a dubbed’—but at this point Clarke tore
out the remainder of the page, and pasted a new sheet over
the passage just quoted (it remains visible through ‘the thin
paper).2* This dedication to Hunt was of course very much a
calculated demonstration of political opinion, reinforced by his
admiring sonnet ‘Written on the Day that Mr Leigh Hunt left
Prison’ and other poems which made approving references to
Hunt as ‘Libertas’. The political signal Keats gave to his first
readers was singular and unmistakable, just as it would be if one
were to dedicate a book today toa similarly controversial public
figure (although, that said, contemporary public life in England
may not present for ready comparison a political journalist and
poet of Leigh Hunt’s stature). Finally, towards the end of his
manuscript, Clarke transcribed some ‘New Matter’ on the back
of one sheet as a kind of afterthought:

Keats
23 Charles Cowden Clarke, autograph ‘Recollections of John Keats’. MS
University.
4.4.19, fo. 28", quoted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard
was
The manuscript is dated ‘187?’, and probably dates from c.1873—4 when Clarke
expanding his memoir for publicati on in the Gentleman’ s Magazine.
pt
24 Ibid., fo. 29°. Written out on the replacement page pasted into the manuscri
191, and
is the sentence as published in the Gentleman’s Magazine (Jan.-June 1874),
Editor of
‘Recollections of Keats’, 140: ‘he had dedicated his book to Leigh Hunt,
’
the Examiner, a Radical, and a dubbed partisan of the first Napoleon.
10 INTRODUCTION

With regard to [his; deleted] Keats’s political opinions; [one of his

Critics has expressed no doubt that he would become; deleted] I have
little doubt that his whole civil creed was comprised in the master-
principle, of universal ‘Liberty’ ,—Viz: ‘Equal, and stern justice;—from
the Duke to the Dustman’.*
Clarke was I believe endeavouring to present an honest account
of Keats’s politics, admitting the ‘rumour’ that the author of
Poems, by John Keats was a ‘radical’ (and implicitly associating
‘radical’ with ‘Jacobin’) while allowing, in his ‘New Matter’, that
Keats had been a convinced liberal. In the period 1817-22,
however, ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ were virtually synonymous terms
in political discourse: during 1822-3, ‘Libertas’, the ‘radical’
editor of the Examiner, was associated with a celebrated if short-
lived journal entitled the Liberal.
Clarke’s well-intentioned if cautious narrative in the ‘Recol-
lections’ offers one explanation for the longevity of a mis-
leading account of Keats’s schooldays at Enfield. This
misconception dates from the poet’s lifetime and the ‘Cockney
School’ essays published over the initial Z in Blackwood’s Edin-
burgh Magazine from October 1817 onwards. The fourth of
these essays was written, famously, by John Lockhart and it
appeared in August 1818 after the publication of Keats’s first
two volumes, Poems, by John Keats and Endymion. The essay’s
social polemic reflected and contributed to the controversy
surrounding educational practices during the Romantic period,
recently documented by Alan Richardson,”6 and it has been a
principal source for the myth of Keats’s ‘poor’ education and
‘lower-class’ background. Z’s purpose in the essay was to
disempower Keats by making him look ridiculous, inventing
and enforcing his ephemeral presence as a writer in terms of his
youth, his social class, cultural status, and gender.2” According
to Z this ‘young’ man’s burgeoning literary ambition far out-
stripped his intellectual capacity: Keats was the ‘wavering ap-
prentice’, ‘our youthful poet’, an ‘uneducated and flimsy
> Autograph ‘Recollections of John Keats’, fo. 59".
6 See in particular the first chapter in Alan Richardson, Literature, Education,
and
Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780-1832 (Cambridge, 1994), esp. 2, 25-33.
*7 See Kim Wheatley, ‘The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt’, Nineteenth-Century
Literature (June 1992), 1-31, for a related discussion of the ways in which Z created
Hunt in the image of his own insecurities, then displayed ‘the seemingly paranoid
ability to be frightened by his own inventions’.
 INTRODUCTION 11

stripling’. He was ‘without logic to analyse a single idea’; he

lacked ‘the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical poetry or
classical history’; he knew ‘Homer only from Chapman [and
wrote] about Apollo, Pan, Nymphs, Muses, and Mysteries, as
might be expected from [a person] of [his] education’.?® At this
period, of course, ‘uneducated’ people made up the majority of
the population in England, the mass who were excluded from
the political and cultural life of the country—the working
classes, religious dissenters, and—especially—women. Z’s Keats
was a poet of ‘negative capability’ indeed, doubly debarred
from legitimate participation: his poetry demonstrated that he
was ‘not capable of understanding’, and in this last respect his
intellect was shown to be unformed, sickly, and ‘feminine’ in
character. As Mary Wollstonecraft had pointed out in her Vin-
dication of the Rights of Woman, ‘women .. . generally speaking,
receive only a disorderly kind of education . . . in the education
of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subor-
dinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment,
even while enervated by confinement and false notions of
modesty... education thus gives this appearance of weakness
to females.’2? Wollstonecraft was addressing the informal educa-
tion then widely deemed appropriate for women, and perhaps
replying in particular to Edmund Burke’s influential account of
woman’s ‘corporeal accomplishment’ in his Philosophical Inquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. There,
women were said to affect traits of the ‘weakness and imperfec-
tion’ Burke identified with ‘beauty’,”° and it was precisely this
Burkean paradigm of ‘effeminate’ incapacity which Z’s criticism
detected in Keats’s poetry and sought to enforce by way of
defining his social and cultural marginality.
The mischief of the ‘Cockney School’ essays was virulent, and
has endured to the present time as an influential factor in the
construction of ideas about the ‘Cockneys’, and about Keats’s

8 ‘The Cockney School of Poetry: No IV’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Aug.

1818), 519-24.
29 See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on
Political and Moral Subjects (London, 1792) in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed.
Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (7 vols., London, 1989), v. 91-2.
80 See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford, 1990), 100. For a more
extensive discussion of Keats and Burke, see Ch. 8, pp. 225-6.
12 INTRODUCTION

life and his poetry. The series of essays as a whole was jointly
authored by John Lockhart and John Wilson, and they were in
no doubt about the malign effect of their essays on the reputa-
tions of Keats, Hunt, and Hazlitt. In a letter to John Murray
written late in 1818, they observed that
the articles on the Cockney School are little if at all more severe than
those in the Quarterly review, & that they give more offence to the
objects of their severity, only on account of their superior keenness—
above all that happy name which you & all the reviews are now borrow-
ing—the Cockney School—a thorn which will stick to them & madden
them & finally damn them.?!
Their conceit was vindicated in the hostile treatment of ‘that
happy name’ in numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century
commentaries, but their essays also worked to obliterate Keats’s
worldly existence for later generations of readers and critics.
With some help from Shelley’s lament in Adonais for Keats’s
‘delicate and fragile’ genius, and Byron’s tart observation in Don
Juan that Keats had been ‘snuff’d out by an article’, Z initiated
the nineteenth-century tradition of Keats’s boyish, ‘unedu-
cated’ incapacity for the world. For many readers at that period
Keats had come to bea figure of apathetic sublimity, as in this
extraordinary account of him written by Stopford Brooke:
[Keats] has, in spite of a few passages and till quite the end of his
career, no vital interest in the present, none in man as a whole, none
in the political movement of human thought, none in the future of
mankind, none in liberty, equality and fraternity, no interest in any-
thing but beauty.”
Brooke’s evacuation of Keats, who becomes a poet with ‘no
interest in anything’, is remarkable for showing how far Z’s
campaign had succeeded. As a devotee of ‘beauty’, Keats’s intel-
lectual and political presence has been wholly effaced by the
supposedly uncerebral category of the aesthetic: ‘“Beauty is
truth, truth beauty,”—that is all | Ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know.’ The chiasmus with which the ‘Ode on a Grecian
Urn’ concludes was an appropriately enigmatic, introverted
figure for the nineteenth-century image of Keats: utterly insu-
*! John Lockhart and John Wilson to John Murray, late 1818. NLS, MS 4003,
quoted by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.
* Stopford A. Brooke, Studies in Poetry (London, 1907), 204.
 INTRODUCTION 13

lated from the world, Keats was truly, beautifully, an autistic

poet, the ‘foster-child of silence’. We should not forget that it
had been the insolent volubility of Keats’s poetry which had so
unsettled Z and the others who had determined to suppress the
‘young Cockney rhymester’.
Directly in line with Z’s view of Keats are modern studies of
him which have continued to emphasize how social and educa-
tional ‘disadvantages’ placed him beyond the pale of legitimate
culture and the tradition of English poets which some would
argue he aspired to join. Having glancingly observed that the
‘facts of Keats’s life are too familiar to bear recounting’,
Marjorie Levinson presses on to explain the development of
Keats’s poetic style in the following way:
To observe that Keats’s circumstances put him at a severe remove from
the canon is to remark not only his educational deficits but his lack of
those skills prerequisite to a transparent mode of appropriation . . . He
knew some French and Latin, little Italian, no Greek. His Homer was
Chapman, his Dante was Cary, his Provene¢al ballads translations in an
edition of Chaucer, his Boccaccio Englished. Keats’s art education was
largely by engravings and, occasionally, reproductions. His absorption
of the accessible English writers was greatly constrained by his igno-
rance of the originals upon which they drew and by his nonsystematic
self-education.”
By seeking to define Keats’s social and cultural removal in
terms of ‘educational deficits’ and constraining ‘ignorance’,
Levinson’s provocative account evidently recalls the terms and
rhetorical strategies of Z’s attack in Blackwood’s Magazine.** The

38 Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford, 1988),

34 Compare Wheatley, ‘Blackwood’s Attacks’, 4, who observes that Levinson’s book

and Jon Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison,
1987) ‘repeat the rhetorical moves of the early-nineteenth-century reviewers’. Ac-
cording to Wheatley, Levinson ‘allegorizes Keats as the representative of an “entire
class”, and retells the reviewers’ story of social, sexual, and stylistic aspiration and
overreaching’ (4-5). Whereas Levinson recognizes that Z was responding to the
‘social offensiveness’ of Keats’s writing, Wheatley (5) identifies the perceived
‘threat’ of Keats and Hunt as afiction invented by paranoid Tory reviewers. In the
following pages I seek to recover Keats’s insolent presence for his first readers,
modifying Levinson’s image of the social-literary ‘entrepreneur’ by relating Keats to
the tradition of English dissenting repvblicanism and thus, I hope, also answering
Wheatley’s claim that Keats would never have been noticed by the periodicals ‘had
[he] not been associated with Leigh Hunt’.
14 INTRODUCTION

claim that Keats had been ‘greatly constrained by his ignorance’

takes at face-value, and reinforces, Z’s fiction that Keats was
‘incapable of understanding’. Where Z had found that Keats’s
poetry was an affront to literary and social decorums, Levinson
similarly emphasizes Keats’s ‘vulgar’ and ‘overwrought’ poetic
style as the expression of intellectual lack “driven by the strong-
est desire for an authorial manner and means, and for the social
legitimacy felt to go with it’.*° This argument had been outlined
at the beginning of E. P. Thompson’s study William Morns:
Romantic to Revolutionary. But whereas Thompson had identified
Keats as a radical like Shelley, Henry Hunt, and Richard
Carlile, Levinson’s Keats is a proto-capitalist, a lower-class
‘literary entrepreneur’ who was aggressively—literally—on the
make and determined to write himself out of the obscurity to
which he had been born.
I should emphasize that Keats’s Life of Allegory has been a
valuable stimulant to my own research into and thinking about
the relationship between Keats’s education and his poetry, and
nowhere more so than in the points at which Levinson’s argu-
ment replicates Z’s original polemic. Where Z had found
Keats’s social status disabling to his poetic ambitions, Levinson
reads his poetry as the signature of his marginality in Regency
society and of the ‘educational deficits’ which may be traced to
his years at Enfield School, 1803-11, before he left aged 15
years and 10 months to become apprentice to the surgeon
Thomas Hammond at Edmonton.®’ I shall look in some detail at
Keats’s schooling in my first chapter. For the moment I want to
suggest that the idea of Keats’s deficient education, his ‘igno-
rance’, reveals the deeper anxiety compelling Z’s essays, in that
it is predicated on the assumption that a more orthodox
grounding in literary culture (Harrow, Eton, Cambridge,
Oxford) would have enabled Keats to become ‘acceptable’ as
a writer. Certainly those establishments offered what Coleridge
termed the ‘ “sound book learnedness,” into which our old public
schools still continue to initiate their pupils’; for Coleridge in

8° Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, 4.

%° See E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London, 1955,
1977), 10-21, and Levinson, Keats’s Life ofAllegory, 19.
37 T follow Bate, John Keats, 30, '703—4, in dating Keats’s departure from the school
to summer 1811.
 INTRODUCTION 15

1816, ‘soundness’ was in direct proportion to the schools’ effi-

ciency in reproducing and perpetuating the dominant ideology
and established social order of the day, and in preparing a
learned class which he would later identify as the ‘clerisy’.*° As
Levinson rightly points out, these ‘conformable bowers’ of so-
cial advantage were not available to Keats—although it is said
that his parents had wished to send him to Harrow School. But
to bring forward his ‘ignorance’ as the corollary is to reiterate
the social and political prejudices which emerged so forcefully
in the Cockney School essays nearly two centuries ago. I want
instead to shift the emphasis over to a more positive view of
Keats’s education, attending to Keats’s eloquence as a repre-
sentative voice of the most vital sector of contemporary English
culture: that is, the culture of dissent in which ideological oppo-
sition to and consequent exclusion from the establishment
formed the intellectual dynamic of enlightened progress in
political, religious, aesthetic, and educational matters.°?
In the fourth ‘Cockney School’ essay, published in August
1818, Z sought to ridicule Keats by identifying him with a
number of stereotypes. First, his childishness, which was in
effect the consequence of his unorthodox education: ‘this
young man’, ‘so young a person’, ‘the wavering apprentice’,
‘sood Johnny Keats’, ‘our youthful poet’, ‘Johnny’, ‘a young
Cockney rhymester’, ‘a boy of pretty abilities’, ‘back to the shop
Mr John’.*? That last remark, tagging Keats as a shopkeeper,
intersects with another stereotype Z endeavoured to (re-)
establish: the supposedly lower-class origins which necessarily

38 See The Statesman’s Manual, in Lay Sermons, 39. See also Alan Richardson’s
discussion of relations between ideology and education in the theoretical writings of
Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Raymond Williams; Literature, Education, and
Romanticism, 25-33.
3° In a recent essay Donald Goellnicht has taken issue with Marjorie Levinson’s
reading of Keats in terms which parallel my own account of the dissenting motives
for Keats’s ambitions. Goellnicht writes that Levinson ‘casts Keats as a man on the
margins who longs to live at the urbane and sophisticated centre, who envies the
freedom granted Byron by birth and Wordsworth by claim. She fails to entertain
the possibility of Keats’s harbouring genuinely revolutionary ambitions, of his hold-
ing an oppositional social perspective from within the historical structure, of his
desiring to destroy the very Tradition to which he wishes to belong.’ See Donald
Goellnicht, ‘The Politics of Reading and Writing: Periodical Reviews of Keats’s
Poems (1817)’, in D. L. Clarke and D. CG. Goellnicht (eds.), New Romanticisms: Theory
and Critical Practice (Toronto, 1995), 101.
49 ‘Cockney School IV’, 519-24.
16 INTRODUCTION

also restricted him to the subordinate social position occupied

by women. Keats was relegated to ‘the Grub-street race’ of
scribbling ‘farm-servants and unmarried ladies... footmen
[and] superannuated governess[es]’, and he was identified as a
‘bound apprentice ...to a worthy apothecary in town’.* As a
direct result of these unfortunate circumstances Keats was dis-
enfranchised from high culture—and nowhere was this more
evident, according to Z, than in his want of education.
As an example of ‘very pretty raving’ Z quotes the passage
from Sleep and Poetry in which Keats foresees his poetic career:
‘O for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.
Then will I pass the countries that I see
In long perspective, and continually
Taste their pure fountains. First the realm I’ll pass
Of Flora, and old Pan: sleep in the grass,
Feed upon apples red, and strawberries,
And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees
Catch the white-handed nymphs in shady places,
To woo sweet kisses from averted faces,—
Play with their fingers, touch their shoulders white
Into a pretty shrinking with a bite
As hard as lips can make it.. .’*
This passage epitomizes the ‘heroic vulgarity’ that John Bayley
has identified with Keats’s distinctive poetic personality: ‘at his
most characteristic Keats always disconcerts’, Bayley says.** To
understand Z’s charge that Keats was ‘raving’, we need to re-
spond to the full sense of ‘disconcerts’ in Bayley’s remark—that
is, from the old French disconcerté, ‘disordered, confused, set
awry’, merging into the English senses: ‘to put out of concert or
harmonious action; to throw into confusion; disarrange, de-
range, spoil, frustrate’ (OED). A look into the Metamorphoses will
show that Ovid’s nymphs usually disappear or change form long
“| The Dunciad, 1. 44, in Pope: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1966).
* “Cockney School IV’, 519. See also Margaret Homans, ‘Keats Reading Women,
Women Reading Keats’, SIR 29 (Fall 1990), 341-2.
*8 Quoted from ‘Cockney School IV’, 520.
“John Bayley, “The Vulgar and the Heroic in “Bad Poetry”’, in The Uses of
Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (London, 1976), 115.
 INTRODUCTION 17

before an admirer is close enough for a love-bite; perhaps

Keats’s nymphs, with their ‘fingers’, ‘shoulders white’, and
shadowy allure are more sensually realized than their mythical
ancestors. But what really invigorates this piece of Cockney
eroticism is the way in which the act of reading falls in with the
sexual dalliance evoked by the poetry. The reader is led on by
a narrative of apparently intensifying desire (‘choose...
Catch ...woo...Play...touch...’) although this does not
gather to the ‘rich anger’ of sexual passion; the sequence culmi-
nates with ‘a bite’ which immediately withdraws its pressure, ‘a
bite | As hard as lips can make it’. For ali the mounting intimacy
of its cadences, this is an impotent encounter which finally
settles for the mediated experience of literature,
‘till agreed,
A lovely tale of human life we’ll read’.

Startlingly, this couplet brings into focus the reader’s complicity

in the preceding narrative of sensual enticement; we are sud-
denly aware ‘not just that something [was] happening, but that
something [was] being watched’.** This example of, Keats’s
eroticism disconcerts to the extent that it exposes the reader's
role in generating its effects. John Bayley observes: ‘Now a mark
of the man of poise and breeding is to object beyond all things
to being disconcerted, and it was no doubt for this reason that
Byron hated Keats.’ Perhaps the aristocratic temper of the
poet of Don Juan was a significant factor in his claim that ‘the
grand distinction of the under forms of the new school is their
’ But (as we have just seen) the power to disconcert
vulgarity.*7
also works to bring out energies and insecurities which are
usually suppressed, or at least contained, by formalities of social
I.
4 See Christopher Ricks’s fine discussion of the lines about Niobe (Endymion,
337-43), Showing how the passage recognizes not only that ‘the embarrassingness
‘though
of acute grief makes it hard for us to evince a full sympathy’ but also that
While the Niobe
hard it can be done’; Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford, 1974), 8—g.
the
passage demonstrates a difficult but attainable ‘companionship with grief’,
readiness
erotic passage from Sleep and Poetry might be said to uncover a voyeuristic
to gaze at sexual activity.
4© Bayley, ‘Vulgar and Heroic’, 115.
47 See Byron’s remarks in ‘Observations upon “Observations”: A Second Letter to
of
John Murray, Esq. on the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings
Pope’, in The Works of Lord Byron (17 vols., London, 1832-3), Vi. 413.
18 INTRODUCTION

or sexual behaviour: Byron’s attacks on Keats arose from an

uneasy sense of self-recognition in Keats’s poetic manner.*® As
Marjorie Levinson has shown, it is telling that his Lordship
sought to reassert his social virility against Cockney Keats by
sexual slander that was calculated to fix the distance between
them, intimating that ‘Mankin’ Keats’s poetry was wholly self-
directed, socially and culturally impotent: ‘he is always f—
gg—eg his Imagination.’*
Z’s response to Keats’s poems, and to Sleep and Poetry in
particular, is just as revealing about his own anxieties. In react-
ing to Keats’s tease about neoclassical poets who ‘sway’d about
upon a rocking horse, | And thought it Pegasus’ (186-7), Z
writes:
our youthful poet passes very naturally into a long strain of foaming
abuse against a certain class of English Poets, whom, with Pope at their
head, it is much the fashion with the ignorant unsettled pretenders of
the present time to undervalue. Begging these gentlemens’ pardon,
although Pope was not a poet of the same high order with some who
are now living, yet, to deny his genius, is just about as absurd as to
dispute that of Wordsworth, or to believe in that of Hunt. Above all
things, it is most pitiably ridiculous to hear men, of whom their coun-
try will always have reason to be proud, reviled by uneducated and
flimsy striplings, who are not capable of understanding either their
merits, or those of any other men of power—fanciful dreaming tea-
drinkers, who, without logic enough to analyse a single idea, or im-
agination enough to form one original image, or learning enough
to distinguish between the written language of Englishmen and the
spoken jargon of Cockneys, presume to talk with contempt of some of
the most exquisite spirits the world ever produced, merely because
they did not happen to exert their faculties in laborious affected
descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots, or cascades heard
at Vauxhall; in short, because they chose to be wits, philosophers,

* William Keach’s paper ‘Byron as a Reader of Keats’, presented to the Keats

Bicentenary Conference at the University of Bologna, Nov. 1995, argued that
Keats's eroticism displayed a close affinity with Byron’s, a ‘common writerly im-
pulse’. So Byron’s admiration for Hyperion (‘His Hyperion is a fine monument & will
keep his name’) was related to Keats’s perceived turn away from a style which had
seemed uncomfortably close to Byron’s own. See BL viii. 163, and see also Paul
Dawson’s analysis of Shelley's and Byron’s responses to Keats and Hunt in ‘Byron,
Shelley, and the “New School”’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Shelley Revalued: Essays from
the Gregynog Conference (Leicester, 1983), 89-108.
* Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory, 16-19; BL] vii. 225.
 INTRODUCTION 19

patriots, and poets, rather than to found the Cockney school of versi-
fication, morality, and politics, a century before its time.®”

All of this to assert the authority of those ‘men of power’ against

the ‘young man’, the ‘wavering apprentice’— ‘Johnny Keats’. Z
was evidently disturbed by Keats’s poems, recognizing that Sleep
and Poetry coincided with Hunt’s celebration of ‘the downfall of
the French school of poetry’ in the ‘Preface’ to Foliage (pub-
lished early in 1818): ‘The notions about poetry can no longer
be controlled, like the fashions, by a coterie of town gentle-
men,’ Hunt had written, signalling his opposition to ‘the world
of letters [which] still rested with men who sought to continue
the servile tradition of dependence upon aristocratic patron-
age’.*! As William Keach demonstrates in his splendid essay on
‘Cockney Couplets’,? when read alongside the explicitly politi-
cized commentary in Hunt’s preface the loose versification of
Sleep and Poetry expressed a distinctly registered politics of style
forming part of a concerted, cocky challenge to the neoclassical
values of the literary and political establishments.
Z sought to externalize his discomfiture by framing Keats and
Leigh Huntas partisans of the ‘unsettled’ party—and we should
not overlook the fact that ‘unsettled’ was a term which since the
1790s had been closely associated with Jacobin revolution. But
we can also sense that Z’s mockery of the Cockneys overlay
worries which ran far, far deeper than the immediate matters of
poetic style and radical politics. In Keats’s poetry—one could
almost say in Cockney rhyming—
high suspended /life is ended
hold my pen/denizen
on, and on/cinnamon
infant’s force/rocking horse
reverence bow/could reach? How!
intimacies
50 ‘Cockney School IV’, 520-1. Tea-drinking was one of the social
“Then
relished by Hunt; see for example his verse epistle ‘To William Hazlitt’,
for your supper, with lettuces white, | And a moon and friend’s arm
tea... | an egg
or, Poems Original and Translated (London, 1818),
to go home with at night,’ Foliage;
p. xciv. See also my discussion of Hunt and ‘sociality’ in Ch. 4.
ed Keats in
51 Foliage, 12, and Thompson, William Morns, 16. Hunt had introduc
essay as one of the ‘new school of poetry... which promises to
his ‘Young Poets’
of Charles the
extinguish the French one that has prevailed among us since the time
2d’; Examiner (1 Dec. 1816), 761.
52 See Keach, ‘Cockney Couplets’, KP 182-96.
20 INTRODUCTION

pleasant sonnet/think upon it

pleasant flow/portfolio
nearer bliss/Felicity’s abyss!
cold thin feet/winding-sheet
whirlwind writhen/one huge Python?
—Z heard a truculent English equivalent of the ‘Marseillaise’,
the music of the democratic revolution which had been under
way since the later eighteenth century and which continues as a
force for change in our own time.
This brazen, jaunty music is figured in Z’s essay as metromanie,
the mania for writing poetry that allegedly accompanied the
French Revolution and shared its democratic impetus. The
word ‘metromania’ actually dates from the revolutionary dec-
ade, and William Gifford’s Baviad of 1794: ‘This pernicious
pest, | This metromania, creeps thro’ every breast’ (OED);
metromanie—rampant, demented scribbling—might be aligned
readily with the virulent ‘social disease’ of disaffection signalled
by Edmund Burke’s perception of revolutionary France as the
‘antagonist world of madness and discord, vice, confusion, and
unavailing sorrow’.* At all stages of European history, medical
metaphors have been employed to denote and stigmatize the
deviant, the disenfranchised, the alienated. Z’s pathological
account of Keats’s poetry as a ‘malady’, an ‘infection’, ‘a violent
fit’, a ‘disease’, exactly conformed to this pattern while high-
lighting—with ‘sorrow’—the particularly distressing case of an
apprentice healer who had succumbed to infection and become
the transmitter of sickness.*°
° Sleep and Poetry, 35-6; 47-8; 117-18; 185-6; 273-4; 319-20; 337-8; and
Endymion, Il. 175-6; 195-6; 529-30. These few examples of Keats’s rhyming also
help to explain John Wilson Croker’s charge in the Quarterly Review (Sept. 1818)
that Keats ‘seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the
thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it con-
cludes’. See KCH 112.
°4 See Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien
(Harmondsworth, 1968), 195. Many of the terms of Z’s caricature of the Cockneys,
and Keats and Hunt in particular, recall Edmund Burke’s attack on the French
Revolution; compare especially Z’s remarks on the sexual content of Hunt’s Story of
Rimini, in Ch. 4 below. Verbal links also reinforce Z’s common ground with Burke,
in defending the political and cultural establishment as ‘a fixed compact... which
holds each in their appointed place’, Reflections, 195.
*° ‘Cockney School IV’, 519. The pathological agenda of Z’s criticism was illumi-
nated by George Rousseau’s seminar ‘W/D/W: Writing Disease, Diseased Writing’,
at St Andrews University, 1 Nov. 1995.
 INTRODUCTION 21

Although written from a very different political standpoint

from Gifford’s high Toryism, the ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Bal-
lads (1798)—and Wordsworth’s prefaces to later editions of
that book—responded to the same perceived adulteration of
contemporary literature, and sought to correct ‘the gaudiness
and inane phraseology of many modern writers’ by presenting
‘a natural delineation of human passions, human characters,
and human incidents’.*° Both Wordsworth and Coleridge con-
tinued to be preoccupied with this issue in later life, although
the humane experimentalism of their 1798 volume had been
succeeded by different priorities. In addressing ‘the Learned
and Reflecting of all Ranks and Professions, especially among
the Higher Class’,>” Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual (published
in December 1816, and read by Lockhart soon afterwards)
argued that political revolution was associated with the ‘craving
for novelty’ which had also produced a democratization, and
debasement, of literary culture.** One cancerous ‘misgrowth’
encouraged by metromania, or, as Coleridge termed it, the
‘luxuriant activity’ of writers, was ‘a promiscuous audience ...a
READING PUBLIC’ fed by ‘circulating libraries and the periodical
press’:
Does the inward man thrive on this regime? Alas! if the average health
of the consumers may be judged of by the articles of largest consump-
tion; if the secretions may be conjectured from the ingredients of the
dishes that are found best suited to their palates; from all that I have
seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my Profaccia with
a desponding sigh. From a popular philosophy and a philosophic
populace, Good Sense deliver MIS)

For Coleridge, as for laureate Southey, ‘popular philosophy’

encouraged the ‘stirrings of mind, with all their restlessness’
56 See The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (3
vols., Oxford, 1974), i. 116.
7 Coleridge’s corrected title for the Statesman’s Manual appears in his letter to
George Frere, 5 Dec. 1816, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs
(6 vols., Oxford, 1956-71), iv. 695. For Coleridge’s worries about his readership,
see Lucy Newlyn, ‘Coleridge and the Anxiety of Reception’, Romanticism, 1/2
(1995), 46-78, and Klancher, Making of English Reading Audiences, 4-5, 47-50.
38 Statesman’s Manual, 25. For Lockhart’s campaign in Blackwood’s Magazine
against the ‘excessive, artificial supply of “sources of sentiment”’ in the ‘plethora of
books’ then being published, see J.H. Alexander, ‘Blackwood’s: Magazine as Roman-
tic Form’, Wordsworth Circle, 15/2 (Spring 1984), 57-68, esp. 59.
59 Statesman’s Manual, 36-9. 6 Tbid. 39.
22 INTRODUCTION

which had already led to revolution in France. By the same

token a proliferating literary culture in Britain, dedicated
wholly to popular consumption, might be one symptom of a
(‘tubercular’) society which had weakened its intellectual, reli-
gious, and moral constitution and was about to devour itself in
revolution.
When Poems, by John Keats appeared in March 1817 (coincid-
ing with A Lay Sermon, Coleridge’s sequel to the Statesman’s
Manual) it seemed to present the paradigmatic case of ‘dis-
orderly appetite’: a degenerate, sickly, ‘luxuriant’ poet who
was, additionally, ‘uneducated’, ill read, and given to ‘foaming
abuse’.®! To Z, the ‘case of Mr John Keats’, apprentice physician
turned poet, represented the ‘phrenzy’ of metromania at its
critical stage; yet Z hoped that the ‘invalid’ may in ‘some inter-
val of reason’ be ‘in a fair way to be cured’, medicining himself
in the quarantine of his former trade and appropriate social
station. The medical analogy (which had also been adopted by
Coleridge) brings forward as a ‘cure’ the reassertion of Z’s
cultural authority against febrile Cockney writing. But ‘recov-
ery’, in other words the re-establishment of an ‘educated’ cul-
tural consensus against the upstart Cockneys, was not a possible
outcome. Z’s vigorously caustic diagnosis was itself an admission
of the Cockneys’ power to disconcert, an acknowledgement that
their poetry was a vigorous assault upon the ‘lousy leasehold’ of
cultural exclusivity rather than a quest for ‘social legitimacy’
and conformity with the establishment.
The robust northern English ‘Cockney’ idiom of Tony
Harrison’s sonnet “Them & [uz]’ deliberately alludes to Keats
in staging a comparable social-literary skirmish:
4 words only of mi ‘art aches and . . . ‘Mine’s broken,
you barbarian, T.W.!’ He was nicely spoken.
‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’®
This scene of confrontation—between ‘nicely spoken’ master
and ‘barbarian’ pupil Harrison, between sownd ‘RP’ and an
inglorious dialect—exactly parallels Z’s quarrel with ‘Cockney
Keats’ while also highlighting the social and cultural stakes
contested: ‘I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth.’ In 1818, as
6! Reflections, 247. 8 “Cockney School IV’, 519.
6 Quoted from Tony Harrison, Selected Poems (2nd edn., London, 1987), 122.
 INTRODUCTION 23

at this end of the twentieth century, the schoolroom was ‘the

primary apparatus of social regulation’—the arena in which
wider forces for cultural change came into conflict with re-
ceived values. Z’s decision to ridicule Keats’s unauthorized
schooling and supposed intellectual deficiencies was not, there-
fore, simply an abusive rebuff to a ‘young’ poet who was also
deemed socially unacceptable. The tactic revealed Z’s dismayed
understanding that the seemingly naive verses in Poems, by John
Keats and Endymion represented a fresh and thoroughgoing
challenge to the social and cultural standing of the status quo:
that ‘coterie of town gentlemen’, whether in Edinburgh or
London, who—as Hunt said—had presumed to control ‘no-
tions about poetry’.
As a counterblast to an emergent Cockney culture, Z’s essay
coincided with Coleridge’s agenda in his Lay Sermons in seeking
to recuperate the establishment represented by the public
schools at Harrow and Eton; the universities of Oxford and
Cambridge; the Church of England; and canonical writers such
as Alexander Pope (dead Catholic) and William Wordsworth
(ex-Jacobin). His intention was to reassert the hegemony of
establishment values (political, social, religious, educational,
aesthetic) and to discredit an incipient reorientation of the
literary and cultural life of the country. It is worth emphasizing
that Z would never have noticed Keats had he been really the
common, uneducated stripling caricatured in his essay. The
association with Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt rendered Keats
suspect, although others in the same circle (Charles Cowden
Clarke, Charles and Mary Lamb, John Hamilton Reynolds,
James Rice, Horace Smith, and John Clare for example) were
not singled out in the same way: it was Keats’s unusual educa-
tional background, above all, which served as a focus for Z’s
animosity. But did Z know anything about Enfield School, and
Keats’s education there? and if so, why was he so alarmed by
its values, in so far as these were reflected in Johnny Keats’s
poems?
John Lockhart had heard about Keats’s family and education
in a conversation with the poet’s friend Benjamin Bailey at
Bishop Gleig’s house, near Stirling, in summer 1818. ‘I fear

64 See Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 29.

24 INTRODUCTION

Endymion will be dreadfully cut up in the Edinburgh Magazine

(Blackwood’s)’, Bailey wrote to John Taylor, 29 August 1818: ‘I
met a man...who is concerned in that publication, & who
abused poor Keats in a way that, although it was at the Bishop’s
table, I could hardly keep my temper . . . In Scotland he is very
much despised from what I could collect.’® Bailey remembered
this difficult encounter some three years afterwards,
[I] explained that Keats was of a [good; deleted] respectable family; &
though he & his brothers & sister were orphans, they were left with a
small but independent Patrimony. He had been brought up to the
profession of medicine which he had abandoned for the pursuit of
Literature.
He recalled the same conversation, as a still more distant
memory, in 1849:
[Keats] was a young man, to whom Mr Hunt had shewn kindness
which called forth gratitude in so young & warm a bosom,—but that
he himself mingled in no party-politics, & as I could confidently say,
from his own lips, saw the weakness of his friend, & the impolicy of
having his name mixed up with so decididly [szc] a party-man as Mr
Hunt. I gave him an outline of Keats’s history—that he had been
brought up as a surgeon & apothecary; & though not highly, that he
was respectably educated.®
From Bailey’s accounts, it is evident that Keats’s medical train-
ing was discussed and that there was talk about his family back-
ground and schooldays. The memoirs seem bland enough, yet,
even though the conversation was being recalled after many
years, there are perhaps traces of the provocations which had
made it difficult for Bailey to retain his composure at the
Bishop's table. In particular, his emphasis on the ‘respectability’
of Keats’s upbringing, a term which invokes social coding as
much as intellectual quality, reveals an awareness that on these

°° KCi. 34. It is notable that the 19th-cent. epithet ‘poor Keats’ was current this
early, and that it coincided with the attack on Keats in Blackwood’s in Aug. 1818.
°° “Benjamin Bailey: Notes on his Conversation with Lockhart, 8 May 1821', KCi.
246. A further source of information was Lockhart’s friend Jonathan Henry
Christie, who had met Keats in company with John Hamilton Reynolds, Nov. 1817;
see L. M. Jones, The Life of John Hamilton Reynolds (Hanover, 1984), 127-8, and
Letters, i. 187n.
°” Bailey to Richard Monckton Milnes, 7 May 1849, KC ii. 287.
 INTRODUCTION 25

matters Keats had proved vulnerable to attack. According to the

earlier passage Keats’s political opinions were not mentioned;
in the later reminiscence, however, Bailey claimed to have given
Lockhart a sentimental account of the ‘young’ man’s politics as
the glow of a ‘warm bosom’ responding to Hunt’s kindness: the
poet had not ‘mingled’ in ‘party-politics’ at all.
Whatever Bailey had said to Lockhart in 1818, his report of
this aspect of their conversation was mild invention—as Bailey
was surely aware. But it does reveal how the idea of Keats’s
‘youthfulness’ (targeted by Z) was employed after his death to
efface his worldly presence and interests. Bailey was responding
to Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, ofJohn Keats, pub-
lished in 1848, at a period when it had become prudent to
obscure or disavow political activities, sympathies, and involve-
ments of former years. Comparable examples of this revision
can be found during the nineteenth century, in Southey’s later
journalism; in Coleridge’s Friend and Biographia Literaria; in
Wordsworth’s successive versions of The Prelude between 1805
and 1850; and in Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography, where the editor
of the Examiner, who in 1813 had been gaoled for libelling the
Prince Regent, declared that his reformist politics ‘were rather
a sentiment... than founded on any particular political reflec-
tion’. For Keats this refashioning of the past was undertaken
by friends (such as Bailey and Cowden Clarke), by critics, and by
successive generations of biographers.
Although, as we have already seen, Cowden Clarke’s memoir
is reticent in places, the following passage in his ‘Recollections’
deserves close attention for what it reveals—indirectly—about
the political culture of the school and its influence on the
schoolboy Keats:
in my ‘mind’s eye’, I now see him at supper (we had our meals in the
the
school-room), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding
folio volume of Burnet’s ‘History of his Own Time’ between himself
and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh
Hunt’s Examiner—which my father took in, and I used to lend to
Keats—no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious
liberty. He once told me, smiling, that one of his guardians, being

6 The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (3 vols., London, 1850), il. 4.

Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Recuerdos de
mi vida (tomo 1 de 2)
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Recuerdos de mi vida (tomo 1 de 2)

Author: Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Release date: November 24, 2018 [eBook #58331]

Language: Spanish

Credits: Produced by Ramon Pajares Box and the Online

Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file
was
produced from images generously made available by
The
Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECUERDOS DE

MI VIDA (TOMO 1 DE 2) ***
Nota de transcripción
Índice
Índice de figuras
Fe de erratas
Notas a pie de página
 S. RAMÓN Y CAJAL

Recuerdos
de mi vida

2.ª EDICIÓ N

(OBRA ILUSTRADA CON NUMEROSOS FOTOGRABADOS)

TO M O I
MI INFA NCIA Y J UVENTUD

MADRID
IMPRENTA Y LIBRERÍA DE NICOLÁS MOYA
Garcilaso, 6, y Carretas, 8.
—
1917
Es propiedad del autor.
 ADVERTENCIA AL LECTOR

Allá por los años de 1896 a 1900 se puso en moda el género de la

autobiografía. Varios ingenios, en su mayoría pertenecientes a los
gremios militar, político y literario, dieron la señal redactando
interesantes y amenos Recuerdos, que serán de seguro consultados
con fruto por los actuales y futuros historiadores.
Yo fuí entonces un caso de contagio de la general epidemia. Para
complacer a algunos amigos que deseaban saber en qué condiciones
se desarrolló mi modesta actividad científica, resolví escribir la
historia de una vida vulgar, tan pobre de peripecias atrayentes como
fértil en desilusiones y contrariedades.
Además de aportar el consabido documento humano, me
proponía ofrecer al público un caso de psicología individual y cierta
crítica razonada de nuestro régimen docente. En el Prólogo
advertencia, que precedía al primer tomo, decíamos con leves
variantes:
«Contendrá este libro, más que narración de actos, exposición de
sentimientos e ideas. En él se reflejará sintéticamente la serie de las
reacciones mentales, provocadas en el autor por el choque de la
realidad del mundo y de los hombres.
»Enseñan Taine (entonces Taine estaba a la moda) y otros
modernos críticos, que el hombre es función del medio físico y moral
que le rodea. Referir las ideas que le guiaron y los afectos que le
movieron, es tanto como mostrar los efectos casi necesarios del
ambiente, las causas mecánicas de la obra realizada; pero es
también, y muy señaladamente, poner en evidencia los gérmenes de
error, de atraso o de progreso existentes en el medio social; es
señalar los vicios de la enseñanza y de la educación; y es, en fin, por
lo que toca a nuestro caso particular, marcar los obstáculos contra
los cuales se estrella a menudo la juventud cuando, a impulsos de
generosa ambición, pretende, en la modesta esfera de sus aptitudes,
colaborar en la magna y redentora empresa de la cultura patria.
»Tal es la justificación de la presente obrilla. Ahí está también,
según yo pienso, el único y menguado interés que mi autobiografía
puede inspirar a aquellas personas sinceramente preocupadas del
arduo problema de la educación nacional.
»No busque, pues, aquí el lector aventuras estupendas,
narraciones pintorescas, ni arranques pasionales. Quien sienta, como
el toro, atracción por lo rojo, debe leer vidas de caudillos, historias
de héroes.
»Una vida de aventuras implica exceso y variación continua de la
acción y de su escenario, al revés de lo que reclama la labor del
espíritu, que a imitación de la naturaleza sólo puede producir en la
calma, el silencio y la obscuridad.
»Pero una vida, por sencilla que sea, es un haz complejísimo de
ideas, de sentimientos y de sucesos, frecuentemente contradictorios
e ilógicos, solamente enlazados y armonizados por la continuidad de
una conciencia personal. Imposible será, pues, sin faltar a la
sinceridad o sin trazar un cuadro incompleto y excesivamente
objetivo, dejar de reflejar en un escrito de este género los diversos y
sucesivos estados mentales del autor acerca de sus convicciones o
sus dudas en materias religiosas, filosóficas, científicas y hasta
sociológicas y artísticas...
»Si algún psicólogo o educador se toma la molestia de recorrer
estas páginas, podrá ver en ellas un caso típico de educación
romántica; siendo de notar la curiosa circunstancia de que
semejante educación fué muy principalmente obra personal y tuvo la
significación de una reacción compensadora excesiva contra los
gustos y cultura, harto utilitarios y positivistas, que padres y
maestros quisieron imponer al autor.
»Cumplióse en mí cierto principio de mecánica moral que podría
llamarse ley de la inversión de los efectos. Esta ley, que padres y
maestros debieran tener muy presente para no extremar ciertas
tesis ni imponer con celo exagerado determinados gustos e
inclinaciones (con lo que se evitarían resultados contraproducentes),
explica cómo las voluntades más indisciplinadas y los revolucionarios
más radicales han salido tan a menudo del seno de las corporaciones
religiosas.
»Desde otro punto de vista, una biografía sincera, aun referente a
persona tan vulgar e indigna de los honores de la historia como yo,
encierra algún interés para el pensador. La vida es, ante todo, lucha.
La inteligencia se adapta a las cosas, pero éstas se adaptan también
a la inteligencia. La teoría del medio moral no lo explica todo; en el
resultado final de la educación entra por mucho el carácter
individual, es decir, la energía específica traída del fondo histórico de
la raza. Es para nosotros indudable que el hombre nace con un
cerebro casi siempre algo original en su organización, porque la
naturaleza, preocupada ante todo del progreso de la especie, cuida
de no repetirse demasiado; y así, a cada generación cambia sus
tipos, desarrollando en ellos inclinaciones diferentes. Mas el medio
social, gran demagogo de la vida, propende, en virtud de cierta
contrapresión deformante, a uniformarnos, achicándonos o
elevándonos según la energía mental nativa, con la mira de
transformar el carácter disonante traído del seno del protoplasma
humano, en un producto uniforme, anodino, especie de diagonal o
término medio entre todas las tendencias divergentes.
»Pero ni gobiernos, ni familias, ni educadores, pueden crear, a
pesar de las más exquisitas precauciones, un medio moral
rigurosamente idéntico para todos; de donde resulta que las
discrepancias y los estridores surgen por todas partes. Constreñida
entre las mallas de la educación burguesa, la naturaleza reclama de
vez en cuando sus fueros, y asistida por esas desigualdades
irremediables del ambiente social, por el azar de las impresiones
personales o el choque de lecturas imprudentes, hace surgir
diariamente, para preocupación de maestros y tormento de padres,
espíritus rebeldes, celosos de su individualidad y resueltos a
defenderse de los efectos aplanadores del rodillo igualitario.
»Esto sentado, resulta interesante averiguar en virtud de qué
influencias quedó desvirtuada y sin efecto, para ciertos díscolos
temperamentos, la obra de la presión colectiva, y pudieron
mantenerse, con leves e insuficientes adaptaciones, las agudas
aristas traídas de la cantera orgánica, a despecho del perenne batir
del oleaje social, que tiende a transformar todas las cabezas en
cantos rodados, igualmente lisos, redondos y movedizos.

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

»Faltaría a la sinceridad que debo a mis lectores si no confesara

que, además de las razones expuestas, me han impulsado también a
componer este librito móviles egoístas. Cuando el hombre ha
entrado en el último cuarto de la vida y siente ese molesto rechinar
de piezas desgastadas por el uso y aun por el abuso; cuando los
sentidos pierden aquella admirable precisión y congruencia que
tuvieron en la edad juvenil, convirtiéndose en averiados
instrumentos de física... gusta saborear el recuerdo de los tiempos
plácidos y luminosos de la juventud; de aquella dichosa edad en que
la máquina, pulida y rozagante como recién salida de la fábrica,
podía funcionar a todo vapor, derrochando entusiasmo y energías, al
parecer inagotables. ¡Época feliz en que la naturaleza se nos ofrecía
cual brillante espectáculo cuajado de bellezas; en que la ciencia se
nos aparecía como espléndida antorcha capaz de disipar todos los
enigmas del Cosmos, y la filosofía como el verbo infalible de la
tradición y de la experiencia, destinada a mostrarnos, para consuelo
y tranquilidad de la existencia, los gloriosos títulos de nuestro origen
y la grandeza de nuestro destino!
»¡Sí, repetimos, cuando se llega a cierta edad nadie puede
sustraerse a esa nostalgia de fuerza y de vida que nos arrastra,
como burlando la ley inexorable del tiempo, a vivir otra vez nuestra
juventud, contemplada desde el áureo castillo de nuestros
recuerdos, donde buscamos ese calor de humanidad y de afecto que
el viejo no encuentra ya en el medio social, cruelmente frío y
positivista para los inválidos del tiempo y los prometidos de la
muerte! Los jóvenes sobre todo miran al anciano con antipatía;
considéranle como obstáculo perenne a su legítima ambición,
acaparador egoísta de puestos y honores oficiales...
»Una advertencia antes de terminar. Ha dicho Renan “que no es
posible hacer la propia biografía como se hace la de los demás. Lo
que de uno mismo se dice es siempre poesía”. El gran Goethe
encabeza también su autobiografía con el significativo subtítulo de
Poesía y Realidad. En igual pensamiento se han inspirado artistas
como Wagner, filósofos como Stuart Mill, naturalistas como C. Vogt,
etc., y entre nosotros, dramaturgos como Echegaray, y pensadores
como Unamuno. Todos han formado el ramillete de sus recuerdos
con las flores más bellas escogidas en las márgenes, no siempre
verdes y floridas, del accidentado camino de la vida. Y con mayor
razón deberemos inspirarnos en él las medianías, los grises y
monótonos obreros de la ciencia y de la enseñanza.»

Hasta aquí el prólogo de 1901, de que entresacamos solamente

los párrafos más significativos.
Como se ve, nuestro propósito era escribir una autobiografía con
tendencias filosóficas y pedagógicas.
 Hoy, transcurridos dieciocho años, me sorprendo un poco de mis
arrogancias de entonces. Engolfado hasta la preocupación en
estudios de índole analítica, mi cultura psicológica y literaria dejaba
harto que desear. Había leído poco o nada de los admirables
educadores ingleses y franceses. Mi documentación era, pues,
demasiado deficiente para dar cima a la empresa acometida. Si hoy
debiera repensar y redactar este libro, adoptaría de seguro plan,
tendencia y estilo diferentes.
Pero carezco del vagar necesario para refundir por completo el
viejo texto. En la edición actual me he limitado, por consiguiente, a
sanearlo un poco, abreviando digresiones, condensando o
descartando desahogos líricos y filosóficos asaz inoportunos, y
limando el estilo sin tocar esencialmente a lo fundamental del relato.
En algunos capítulos aparecen adiciones introducidas con la doble
intención de hacer menos ingrata la lectura y de mitigar en lo
posible las monótonas descripciones de travesuras estudiantiles, en
el fondo bastante vulgares y corrientes. Se han multiplicado también
los grabados.
A pesar de las referidas correcciones y adiciones, el contenido del
primer volumen de los Recuerdos dista mucho de ser comparable, a
los fines educativos, con la materia del segundo. Poco me falta hoy
para pensar que su valor pedagógico es francamente negativo.
Mas considerando que el indulgente lector ha agotado una
primera edición, sin contar las aparecidas en dos Revistas
literarias[1], me animo a sacar a luz esta segunda, confiando en que
el público la acogerá con igual bondadoso interés que la anterior.

Madrid, Junio de 1917.

 CAPÍTULO PRIMERO
Mis padres, el lugar de mi nacimiento y mi primera
infancia.

ací el 1.º de Mayo de 1852 en Petilla de Aragón, humilde

lugar de Navarra, enclavado por singular capricho geográfico
en medio de la provincia de Zaragoza, no lejos de Sos. Los
azares de la profesión médica llevaron a mi padre, Justo Ramón
Casasús, aragonés de pura cepa, y modesto cirujano por entonces, a
la insignificante aldea donde vi la primera luz, y en la cual
transcurrieron los dos primeros años de mi vida.
Fué mi padre un carácter enérgico, extraordinariamente laborioso,
lleno de noble ambición. Apesadumbrado en los primeros años de su
vida profesional, por no haber logrado, por escasez de recursos,
acabar el ciclo de sus estudios médicos, resolvió, ya establecido y
con familia, economizar, aun a costa de grandes privaciones, lo
necesario para coronar su carrera académica, sustituyendo el
humilde título de Cirujano de segunda clase con el flamante diploma
de Médico-cirujano.
Sólo más adelante, cuando yo frisaba en los seis años de edad,
dió cima a tan loable empeño. Por entonces (corrían los años de
1849 y 1850), todo su anhelo se cifraba en llegar a ser cirujano de
acción y operador de renombre; y alcanzó su propósito, pues la
fama de sus curas extendióse luego por gran parte de la Navarra y
del alto Aragón, granjeando con ello, además de la satisfacción de la
negra honrilla, crecientes y saneadas utilidades.
El partido médico de Petilla era de los que los médicos llaman de
espuela; tenía anejos, y la ocasión de recorrer a diario los montes de
su término, poblados de abundante y variada caza, despertó en mi
padre las aficiones cinegéticas, dándose al cobro de liebres, conejos
y perdices, con la conciencia y obstinación que ponía en todas sus
empresas. No tardó, pues, en monopolizar por todos aquellos
contornos el bisturí y la escopeta.
Con los ingresos proporcionados por el uno y la otra, o digamos
las perdices y los clientes, pudo ya, cumplidos los dos años de
estada en Petilla, comprar modesto ajuar y contraer matrimonio con
cierta doncella paisana suya, de quien hacía muchos años andaba
enamorado.
Era mi madre, al decir de las gentes que la conocieron de joven,
hermosa y robusta montañesa, nacida y criada en la aldea de Larrés,
situada en las inmediaciones de Jaca, casi camino de Panticosa.
Habíanse conocido de niños (pues mi padre era también de Larrés),
simpatizaron e intimaron de mozos y resolvieron formar hogar
común, en cuanto el modesto peculio de entrambos, que había de
crecer con el trabajo y la economía, lo consintiese.
No poseo, por desgracia, retratos de la época juvenil, ni siquiera
de la madurez de mis progenitores. Las fotografías adjuntas fueron
hechas en plena senectud, pasados ya los setenta años.
 Lám. I: Retrato de mis padres. Estas fotografías están hechas cuando mis
progenitores pasaban de los setenta años.

La ley de herencia fisiológica da, de vez en cuando, bromas

pesadas. Parecía natural que los hijos hubiésemos representado, así
en lo físico como en lo mental, una diagonal o término medio entre
los progenitores; no ocurrió así desgraciadamente. Y de la belleza de
mi madre, belleza que yo todavía alcancé a ver, y de sus excelentes
prendas de carácter, ni un solo rasgo se transmitió a los cuatro
hermanos, que representamos, así en lo físico como en lo moral,
reproducción casi exacta de nuestro padre; circunstancia que nos ha
condenado en nuestra vida de familia a un régimen sentimental e
ideológico, monótono y fastidioso.
Porque, según es harto sabido, cada cual busca instintivamente
aquello de que carece, y se aburre y molesta al ver reflejados en los
otros iguales defectos de carácter, sin las virtudes y talentos que la
Naturaleza le negó. A la manera del concierto musical, la armonía
moral resulta, no del unísono vibrar de muchos diapasones, sino de
la combinación de notas diferentes. Por mi parte, siempre he sentido
antipatía hacia esas familias homogéneas, cuyos miembros parecen
cronómetros fabricados por la misma mano, en las cuales, una
palabra lanzada por un extraño provoca reacciones mentales
uniformes, comentarios concordantes. Diríase que las lenguas todas
de la familia están unidas a un hilo eléctrico y regidas por un solo
cerebro. Afortunadamente, y en lo referente a nosotros, la
heterogeneidad del medio moral, es decir, las condiciones algo
diversas en que cada uno de mis hermanos ha vivido, han atenuado
mucho los enfadosos efectos de la uniformidad psicológica y
temperamental.
Pero no debo quejarme de la herencia paterna. Mi progenitor era
mentalidad vigorosa, donde culminaban las más excelentes
cualidades. Con su sangre me legó prendas de carácter, a que debo
todo lo que soy: la religión de la voluntad soberana; la fe en el
trabajo; la convicción de que el esfuerzo perseverante y deliberado
es capaz de modelar y organizar desde el músculo hasta el cerebro,
supliendo deficiencias de la Naturaleza y domeñando hasta la
fatalidad del carácter, el fenómeno más tenaz y recalcitrante de la
vida. De él adquirí también la hermosa ambición de ser algo y la
decisión de no reparar en sacrificios para el logro de mis
aspiraciones, ni torcer jamás mi trayectoria por motivos segundos y
causas menudas. De sus excelencias mentales, faltóme, empero, la
más valiosa quizá: su extraordinaria memoria. Tan grande era, que
cuando estudiante recitaba de coro libros de patología en varios
tomos, y podía retener, después de rápida lectura, listas con cientos
de nombres tomados al azar. Con ser grande su retentiva natural u
orgánica, aumentábala todavía a favor de ingeniosas combinaciones
mnemotécnicas que recordaban las tan celebradas y artificiosas del
abate Moigno.
Para juzgar de la energía de voluntad de mi padre, recordaré en
breves términos su historia. Hijo de modestos labradores de Larrés
(Huesca), con hermanos mayores, a los cuales, por fuero de la
tierra, tocaba heredar y cultivar los campos del no muy crecido
patrimonio, tuvo que abandonar desde muy niño la casa paterna,
entrando a servir en concepto de mancebo, a cierto cirujano de
Javierre de Latre, aldea ribereña del río Gállego, no muy lejana de
Anzánigo. Aprendió allí el oficio de barbero y sangrador, pasando en
compañía de su amo, un benemérito cirujano romancista, ocho o
diez años consecutivos.

Lám. II, Fig. 1.—Larrés tomado a vista de pájaro. En la fotografía no aparece el

Pirineo nevado, que hacia el Norte cierra el horizonte.
 Lám. II, Fig. 2.—La casa alta, destartalada y situada en el centro de la calle, fué
donde nací. (Petilla).

Otro que no hubiese sido el autor de mis días, habría acaso

considerado su carrera como definitivamente terminada, o hubiera
tratado de obtener como coronamiento de sus ambiciones
académicas, el humilde título de ministrante; pero sus aspiraciones
rayaban más alto. Las brillantes curas hechas por su amo, la lectura
asidua de cuantos libros de cirugía encontraba (de que había copiosa
colección en la estantería del huésped), el cuidado y asistencia de
los numerosos enfermos de cirugía y medicina que su patrón,
conocedor de la excepcional aplicación del mancebo, le confiaba,
despertaron en él vocación decidida por la carrera médica.
Resuelto, pues, a emanciparse de la bajeza y estrechez de su
situación, cierto día (frisaba ya en los veintidós años), sorprendió a
su amo con la demanda de su modesta soldada. Y despidiéndose de
él, y en posesión de algunas pesetas prestadas por sus parientes,
emprendió a pie el viaje a Barcelona, en donde halló por fin, tras
muchos días de privación y abandono (en Sarriá), cierta barbería
cuyo maestro le consintió asistir a las clases y emprender la carrera
de cirujano.
A costa, pues, de la más absoluta carencia de vicios, y
sometiéndose a un régimen de austeridad inverosímil, y sin más
emolumentos que el salario y los gajes de su mancebía de barbero,
logró mi padre el codiciado diploma de cirujano, con nota de
Sobresaliente en todas las asignaturas, y habiendo sido modelo
insuperable de aplicación y de formalidad. Allí, en esa lucha sorda y
obscura por la conquista del pan del cuerpo y del alma, bordeando
no pocas veces el abismo de la miseria y de la desesperación,
respirando esa atmósfera de indiferencia y despego que envuelve al
talento pobre y desvalido, aprendió mi padre el terror de la pobreza
y el culto un poco exclusivo de la ciencia práctica, que más tarde,
por reacción mental de los hijos, tantos disgustos había de
proporcionarle y proporcionarnos.
Años después, casado ya, padre de cuatro hijos, y regentando el
partido médico de Valpalmas (provincia de Zaragoza), dió cima a su
ideal, graduándose de Doctor en Medicina.
Cuento estos sucesos de la biografía de mi padre, porque sobre
ser honrosísimos para él, constituyen también antecedentes
necesarios de mi historia. Es indudable que, prescindiendo de la
influencia hereditaria, las ideas y ejemplos del padre, representan
factores primordiales de la educación de los hijos, y causas, por
tanto, principalísimas de los gustos e inclinaciones de los mismos.

De mi pueblo natal, así como de los años pasados en Larrés y

Luna (partidos médicos regentados por mi padre desde los años
1850 a 1856), no conservo apenas memoria. Mis primeros
recuerdos, harto vagos e imprecisos, refiérense al lugar de Larrés, al
cual se trasladó mi padre dos años después de mi nacimiento,
halagado con la idea de ejercer la profesión en su pueblo natal,
rodeado de amigos y parientes. En Larrés nació mi hermano Pedro,
actual catedrático de la Facultad de Medicina de Zaragoza.
Cierta travesura cometida cuando yo tenía tres o cuatro años
escasos, pudo atajar trágicamente mi vida. Era en la villa de Luna
(provincia de Zaragoza).
Hallábame jugando en una era del ejido del pueblo, cuando tuve
la endiablada ocurrencia de apalear a un caballo; el solípedo, algo
loco y resabiado, sacudióme formidable coz, que recibí en la frente;
caí sin sentido, bañado en sangre, y quedé tan mal parado que me
dieron por muerto. La herida fué gravísima; pude, sin embargo,
sanar, haciendo pasar a mis padres días de dolorosa inquietud. Fué
ésta mi primera travesura; luego veremos que no debía ser la última.
 CAPÍTULO II
Excursión tardía a mi pueblo natal. — La pobreza de
mis paisanos. — Un pueblo pobre y aislado que
parece símbolo de España.

un cuando trunque y altere el buen orden de la narración, diré

ahora algo de mi aldea natal, que, conforme dejo apuntado,
abandoné a los dos años de edad. De mi pueblo, por tanto,
no guardo recuerdo alguno. Además, mis relaciones ulteriores con el
nativo lugar no han sido parte a subsanar esta ignorancia, puesto
que se han reducido solamente a solicitar, recibir y pagar serie
inacabable de fées de bautismo. Carezco, pues, de patria chica bien
precisada (en virtud de la singularidad ya mentada de pertenecer
Petilla a Navarra, no obstante estar enclavada en Aragón).
Contrariedad desagradable de haberme dado el naipe por la política;
pero ventaja para mis sentimientos patrióticos, que han podido
correr más libremente por el ancho y generoso cauce de la España
plena.
Así y todo, y después de confesar que mi amor por la patria
grande supera, con mucho, al que profeso a la patria chica, he
sentido más de una vez vehementes deseos de conocer la aldehuela
humilde donde nací. Deploro no haber visto la luz en una gran
ciudad, adornada de monumentos grandiosos e ilustrada por genios;
pero yo no pude escoger, y debí contentarme con mi villorrio triste y
humilde, el cual tendrá siempre para mí el supremo prestigio de
haber sido el escenario de mis primeros juegos y la decoración
austera con que la Naturaleza hirió mi retina virgen y desentumeció
mi cerebro.
Impulsado, pues, por tan naturales sentimientos, emprendí, hace
pocos años, cierto viaje a Petilla. Después de determinar
cuidadosamente su posición geográfica (que fué arduo trabajo) y
estudiar el enrevesado itinerario (tan escondido y fuera de mano
está mi pueblo), púseme en camino. Mi primera etapa fué Jaca; la
segunda, Verdún y Tiermas (villa ribereña del Aragón, célebre por
sus baños termales), y la tercera y última, Petilla.
Hasta Verdún y Tiermas existe hermosa carretera, que se recorre
en los coches que hacen el trayecto de Jaca a Pamplona; pero la
ruta de Tiermas a Petilla, larga de tres leguas, es senda de
herradura, flanqueada por montes escarpadísimos, cortada y casi
borrada del todo, en muchos parajes, por ramblas y barrancos.
Caballero en un mulo, y escoltado por peatón conocedor del país,
púseme en camino cierta mañana del mes de Agosto. En cuanto
dejamos atrás las relativamente verdes riberas del Aragón,
aparecióseme la típica, la desolada, la tristísima tierra española. El
descuaje sistemático de los bosques había dejado las montañas
desnudas de tierra vegetal. Sabido es que en estas tristes comarcas
cada aguacero, en vez de llevar la esperanza al agricultor, constituye
trágica amenaza. Precisamente dos días antes ocurrió tormenta
devastadora. Campos antes fecundos aparecían cubiertos de légamo
arcilloso; y nueva denudación de valles y laderas había convertido
ríos y arroyos en ramblas y pedregales. Para apagar la sed y calmar
el calor hice escala en dos o tres humildes aldehuelas cuyos
habitantes lamentaban aún los furores y estragos de la pasada
tempestad. Y caída ya la tarde, llegué a la vista del empinado monte
donde se asienta el pueblo.
 A medida que me aproximaba a la aldea natal, apoderábase de
mí inexplicable melancolía, y que llegó al colmo cuando me hizo
escuchar el guía el tañido de la campana, tan extraña a mi oído,
como si jamás lo hubiera impresionado.
No dejaba, en efecto, de ser algo singular mi situación
sentimental. Al regresar al pueblo nativo, todos los hombres
saborean anticipadamente el placer de abrazar a camaradas de la
infancia y adolescencia; en su espíritu aflora el grato recuerdo de
comunes placeres y travesuras; todos, en fin, ansían recorrer las
calles, la iglesia, la fuente y los alrededores del lugar, en los cuales
cada árbol y cada piedra evoca un recuerdo de alegría o de pena.
«Yo sólo —me decía— tendré el triste privilegio de hallar a mi
llegada por único recibimiento la curiosidad, acaso algo hostil, y el
silencio de los corazones. Nadie me espera, porque nadie me
conoce.»
Y sin embargo, me engañaba. El cura y el ayuntamiento habían
barruntado mi visita y me aguardaban en la plaza del pueblo. Y hubo
además un episodio conmovedor. Al pie del altozano, sobre que se
alza la aldea, cierta anciana, que no tenía la menor noticia de mi
excursión, y que se ocupaba en lavar ropa a la vera de un arroyo,
volvió de pronto el rostro, dejó su faena y, encarándose conmigo y
mirándome de hito en hito, exclamó: «¡Señor, si usted no es D. Justo
en persona, tiene que ser el hijo de D. Justo! ¡Es milagroso!... ¡La
misma cara del padre!... ¡No me lo niegue usted! ¡Si supiera usted
cuántas veces, enferma su madre, le dí a usted de mamar!... ¿Vive
aún la Sra. Antonia? ¡Qué buena y qué hermosa era!...»
Felicité a la pobre octogenaria por su admirable memoria y
excelentes sentimientos, y dejando en sus manos una moneda,
continué mi ascensión a Petilla.
Es Petilla uno de los pueblos más pobres y abandonados del alto
Aragón, sin carreteras ni caminos vecinales que lo enlacen con las
vecinas villas aragonesas de Sos y Uncastillo, ni con la más lejana de
Aoiz, cabeza del partido a que pertenece. Sólo sendas ásperas y
angostas conducen a la humilde aldehuela, cuyos naturales
desconocen el uso de la carreta. Extraño y forastero para los pueblos
aragoneses que le rodean, tiénenlo por igual abandonado los
navarros, quienes, inspirándose en ese criterio de ruin egoísmo tan
castizamente español, excusan su desdén diciendo que la
construcción de una carretera que enlazara Aoiz y Petilla, cedería en
provecho de muchos pueblos aragoneses, entre los cuales yace,
como una isla, mi nativo lugar.
Álzase éste casi en la cima de enhiesto cerro, estribación de
próxima y empinada sierra, derivada a su vez, según noticias
recogidas sobre el terreno, de la cordillera de la Peña y de Gratal.
 Lám. III, Figs. 3 y 4.—Dos vistas de Petilla: la primera tomada del lado Sur y la
segunda del lado Norte.

El panorama, que hiere los ojos desde el pretil de la iglesia, no

puede ser más romántico y a la vez más triste y desolado. Más que
abrigo de rudos y alegres aldeanos, parece aquello lugar de
expiación y de castigo. Según mostramos en el adjunto grabado, una
gran montaña, áspera y peñascosa, de pendientes descarnadas y
abruptas, llena con su mole casi todo el horizonte; a los pies del
gigante y, bordeando la estrecha cañada y accidentado sendero que
conduce al lugar, corre rumoroso un arroyo nacido en la vecina
sierra; los estribos y laderas del monte, única tierra arable de que
disponen los petillenses, aparecen como rayados por infinidad de
estrechos campos dispuestos en graderías, trabajosamente
defendidos de los aluviones y lluvias torrenciales por robustos
contrafuertes y paredones; y allá en la cumbre, como defendiendo la
aldea del riguroso cierzo, cierran el horizonte y surgen imponentes
colosales peñas a modo de tajantes hoces, especie de murallas
ciclópeas surgidas allí a impulso de algún cataclismo geológico. Al
amparo de esta defensa natural, reforzada todavía por castillo feudal
actualmente en ruinas, se levantan las humildes y pobres casas del
lugar, en número de 40 a 60, cimentadas sobre rocas y separadas
por calles irregulares cuyo tránsito dificultan grietas, escalones y
regueros abiertos en la peña por el violento rodar de las aguas
torrenciales. Al contemplar tan mezquinas casuchas, siéntese
impresión de honda tristeza. Ni una maceta en las ventanas, ni el
más ligero adorno en las fachadas, nada, en fin, que denote algún
sentido del arte, alguna aspiración a la comodidad y al confort. Bien
se echa de ver, cuando se traspasa el umbral de tan mezquinas
viviendas, que los campesinos que las habitan gimen condenados a
una existencia dura, sin otra preocupación que la de procurarse, a
costa de rudas fatigas, el cuotidiano y frugalísimo sustento.
Desgraciadamente, no es mi pueblo una excepción de la regla; así
viven también, con leves diferencias, la inmensa mayoría de
nuestros aldeanos. Su ignorancia es fruto de su pobreza. Para ellos
no existen los placeres intelectuales que tan agradable hacen la vida
y cuya brevedad compensan.
Por un contraste chocante, en una aldea en donde la escuela está
reducida a cuartucho destartalado y angosto, y en que hasta la
iglesia es pobre y menguada, álzase orgullosa cierta casa nueva,
mansión cómoda, holgada y hasta espléndida, a la cual encuadra y
adorna, por el lado del campo, frondoso huerto y ameno y vistoso
jardín: tal es la abadía o casa del cura, construcción donada al
pueblo por cierta persona tan piadosa como opulenta, a fin de que
sirviera de albergue decoroso al humilde pastor de almas.
En otra situación de ánimo, tan punzante contraste hubiese dado
a mis meditaciones un giro amargo. Hubiera pensado acaso que en
nuestra pobre y abatida España, no hay sino una pasión grande,
absorbente, suprema manifestación del egoísmo individual, a saber:
el ansia de alcanzar a todo trance el cielo prometido por la religión a
los buenos, y una sola generosidad (si cabe considerar como tal lo
que se da en vista de personales provechos), los legados al clero y a
las fundaciones piadosas. La caridad generosa y de buena ley, ese
sublime calor de humanidad del filántropo, que, depurado de bajos
egoísmos, da sin esperanza de remuneración, sin desear más
recompensa que la gratitud de los buenos, es un sentimiento
rarísimo entre nuestros opulentos. Exclusiva preocupación de éstos
parece ser realizar lo que podríamos llamar el copo de la felicidad, es
decir, alcanzar los dones de la fortuna en esta vida y gozar la
beatitud eterna en la otra.
Pero yo, que sólo me siento socialista muy de vez en cuando, no
estaba entonces para semejantes consideraciones. Impresionado por
la miseria y el abandono de aquel lugar; por la esquivez de una
naturaleza tirana e insensible; por las fatigas y trabajos a costa de
los cuales aquellos infortunados aldeanos debían ocurrir a su
mezquino sustento; por la ausencia, en fin, de toda comodidad y
regalo, capaces de hacer amable o tolerable la vida, me pregunté: Si
el sacerdote no tenía allí alta y piadosa misión que cumplir; si
aquella casa, relativamente suntuosa, destinada a asegurar la
residencia de un ecónomo, que de otra suerte viviría en alguna aldea
próxima más populosa, no satisfacía vital necesidad, ¿qué sería —
decíame para mis adentros— de estas existencias duras, si la religión
no acariciase y elevase sus almas abatidas por la fatiga y el dolor?
¿Cómo soportar la desconsoladora monotonía de una vida sin otros
contrastes que los creados por la sucesión de las estaciones y los
inevitables estragos del tiempo? ¿Cómo adherirse, formal y
profundamente, a la infecunda tierra donde nacimos, sin ese
confortador optimismo de la religión, que nos promete, calmando
impaciencias y desalientos del presente, en pos de una vida de
prueba y de expiación, la resurrección luminosa, la ansiada
repatriación a las doradas tierras del cielo, cuna de nuestras almas y
mansión donde nos esperan los muertos queridos y llorados?
Gran escuela de espiritualidad y virtud es un suelo gris y un cielo
perennemente azul. Donde la naturaleza es próvida y paganamente
deleitosa, declina a menudo el sentimiento religioso.
¡Oh, los heroicos labriegos de nuestras mesetas esteparias!...
Amémosles cordialmente. Ellos han hecho el milagro de poblar
regiones estériles, de las cuales el orondo francés o el rubicundo y
linfático alemán huirían como de peste. Y, de pasada, rechacemos
indignados la brutal injusticia con que ciertos escritores franceses,
catalanes y vascos (no todos por fortuna) y en general los felices
habitantes de los países de yerba, desprecian o desdeñan a los
amojamados, cenceños, tostados, pero enérgicos pobladores de las
austeras mesetas castellanas y aragonesa, como si tan humildes
cultivadores del terruño nacional tuvieran la culpa de haber visto la
luz bajo un cielo inclemente...
Pero arrastrado por mis pensamientos, olvido hablar de la visita a
mi pueblo. Diré, pues, que a mi llegada fuí recibido con grandes
agasajos por el ecónomo, a quien el párroco, residente en otro lugar
y sabedor de mi visita, habíame recomendado. Fina y generosa
hospitalidad dispensáronme también diversas personas,
particularmente algunos ancianos que se acordaban de mi padre,
con quien me encontraban sorprendente parecido. Complacíanse
todos en mostrarme su buena voluntad y en colmarme de halagos
que yo agradecí de todo corazón. Y para hacer agradable mi breve
estancia allí, concertáronse algunas giras campestres. Recuerdo
entre ellas: la exploración de las ruinas del vetusto castillo; la gira a
los seculares bosques de la vecina sierra, y la visita a modesta
ermita, situada a corta distancia del pueblo, tenida en gran
devoción, y en cuyas inmediaciones se extiende florido y deleitoso
oasis, donde hubimos de reconfortarnos con suculenta y bien servida
merienda. Mostráronme, también, la humilde casa en que nací,
fábrica ruinosa casi abandonada, albergue hoy de gente pordiosera y
trashumante. Algunas ancianas del lugar, que se ufanaban
bondadosamente de haberme tenido en sus brazos, recordáronme la
lozana belleza de mi madre, la robustez de mis primeros meses y las
hazañas quirúrgicas y cinegéticas de mi padre, cuya fama de
Nemrod dura todavía.
Al despedirme de los rudos pero honrados montañeses, mis
paisanos, oprimióseme el corazón: había satisfecho un anhelo de mi
alma, pero llevábame una gran tristeza. Cierta voz secreta me decía
que no volvería más por aquellos lugares; que aquella decoración
romántica que acarició mis ojos y mi cerebro al abrirse por primera
vez al espectáculo del mundo no impresionaría nuevamente mi
retina; que aquellas manos de ancianos, selladas con los honrosos
callos del trabajo, no volverían a ser estrechadas con efusión entre
las mías.
Apesadumbrado por estos melancólicos sentimientos y
cavilaciones bajé la áspera cuesta del pueblo, tendí una última
mirada sobre el agreste y desolado paisaje, cuya imagen intenté fijar
en mi retina con esa tenacidad con que procura retener el que sueña
la fugitiva visión que le mintió sabrosas felicidades, y alejéme
tristemente, tomando la vuelta de Tiermas y de Jaca. Una voz
interior me decía que no lo vería más; y, en efecto, hasta hoy no lo
he visto. Los lazos del afecto son harto flojos para llevarme a él,
porque la atracción y el amor nacen del hábito y se miden por la
amplitud del espacio que las representaciones de los hombres y de
las cosas ocupan en la memoria. Y en la mía los recuerdos juveniles
de gran vivacidad y difusión se enlazan con otros lugares, con
aquellos donde transcurrieron mi niñez y adolescencia y en donde
anudé las primeras amistades.
Ni sería razonable conceder excesiva importancia al hecho de
haber casualmente nacido en una aldea de la montaña navarra;
pues el hombre no es como la planta, que sabe a la tierra que le
crió. El alma humana toma su sabor, digamos mejor su timbre
sentimental, antes que de la tierra y del aire inorgánicos, del medio
vivo, de la estratificación humana que alimentó las raíces de su
razón y fué ocasión de las primeras imborrables emociones. Bajo
este aspecto, mi verdadera patria es Ayerbe, villa de la provincia de
Huesca, donde pasé el período más crítico y a la vez más plástico y
creador de la juventud, es decir, los años que median entre los ocho
y los diecisiete de mi edad, o sea desde el 60 al 69, fecha esta
última de la famosa revolución española.
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookultra.com