Travellers' Tales of Scotland

The following is from Travellers' Tales of Scotland by R. H. Coats:

XVI - John Keats

(1818)

KEATS visited Scotland in the year 1818. He was accompanied during the tour by his ever faithful friend, Charles Armitage Brown, a middle-aged man who dabbled in literature on a small independent income, and who had an ambition to be the biographer of the poet he adored. He was jovial, bald-headed, and somewhat corpulent, and his bearded face, large gold spectacles, and general appearance gave Scotsmen the impression that the two companions were commercial travellers from England, jewellers, it might be, or razor sellers, or linen drapers, or perhaps excisemen. Keats himself, however, was a glorious young Apollo of twenty-three, well built, cleanly shaven, and ardent-looking. He had small hands, a broad forehead, clustering brown hair, a sensitive and mobile mouth, and flashing hazel eyes which, at the recital of a fine action or a noble thought, would be suffused with tears a man whom no one would ever have supposed to be the son of an ostler, or the seven months' child of a consumptive mother.

Keats at the time was ready for a holiday. The nightmare of a medical career, which had so long haunted him, was now shaken off, and he had dedicated himself utterly and for ever to the service and love of poetry. And a brief apprenticeship of two years had more than justified his choice, proving him to be a consummate master of the art. Keats had already published Endymion and written Isabella. He was acquainted with Wordsworth and with Shelley; his bosom friends were Haydon and Leigh Hunt; and he was just beginning to attract to himself the venom of Blackwood's Magazine. Clearly his literary star was on the ascendant. Before it should climb higher, Keats was determined to seek fresh inspiration from a change of scene. "I have many reasons," he wrote, "for going wonder ways; to make my winter chair free from spleen, and to enlarge my vision... I should not have consented to four months' tramping in the Highlands, but that it would give me more experiences, rub off more prejudices, use me to more hardships, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach in poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though I should reach Homer." In the month of June, therefore, Keats and his companion set forth on a tour that was to take them through the English lake district to Dumfries, Ayrshire, Glasgow, Loch Lomond, Loch Awe, Mull, Iona, Staffa, and Inverness. It was to be a walking tour, a tramp of about twenty miles being proposed daily. And it was to be a poetical tour, in every sense of the word. No book was to be carried save Gary's Dante.

At first sight it might seem as if no one could have been more fitted than Keats to appreciate the characteristic beauty of Scottish scenery. Few poets have been so gifted as he with the capacity for vivid and intense sensation. He had a soul which tingled and thrilled spontaneously to everything of beauty and delight in the world around him. "Nothing seemed to escape him," wrote his friend Severn, "the song of a bird and the undertone of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the changing of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the motions of the wind just how it shook certain tall flowers and plants the wayfaring of the clouds, even the features and gestures of passing tramps." And Hay don, the artist, gave similar testimony. "The humming of a bee," he wrote, "the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble; then his eyes flashed, his cheek glowed, and his mouth quivered." In the case of a spirit so vibrant and sensitive to the influences of nature, we turn with some eagerness to his published letters to discover what impression he formed of the "land of brown heath and shaggy wood," as he journeyed through it. To our surprise we find that, for the most part, the references to Scottish scenery are perfunctory and commonplace. The mountains impressed him even to ecstasy on his first beholding them, but they moved him less and less as he advanced, and he found himself quite ready to turn from any scenery in order to contemplate a crowd of romping schoolboys or the exquisitely shaped mouth of a little girl. "I know not how it is," he wrote, "the clouds, the sky, the houses all seem anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish."

In the choice of these surprising and outlandish epithets, the secret of Keats's antipathy is revealed. The literary influences in which his mind was steeped had so far been either classic or romantic. The first awakening of soul came to him from reading Spenser, whose Faerie Queene he went through, we are told, "like a young horse through a spring meadow, romping." Then came the discovery of another and a larger world on his first looking into Chapman's Homer. His subsequent close study of Boccaccio and Vergil and Lempriere's Classical Dictionary confirmed these early preferences and fostered in him a passion for the mythology of the ancients and the legends of mediaeval chivalry and romance. The scenery of Scotland was not quite in harmony with either of these moods. It was, as he said, "anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish." Even Loch Lomond lacked some element of enchantment to Keats's mind. The northern end, he admitted, was glorious in excess. "Yet I was worldly enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry barges, with trumpets and banners, just to die away before me into that blue place among the mountains." Yes, something more Grecian or Charlemagnish. Keats, in fact, brought to the observation of nature the tastes of a refined aesthete. Beautiful things intoxicated him like rich wine, and he desired that his love of Beauty might be inscribed upon his tombstone. But the beauty he pursued had always a certain rich voluptuousness about it, or else an ideal quality of detachment from this world. Keats lacked that power which Wordsworth signally possessed, and to which he attained only after long years of severe self-discipline and intense spiritual concentration and a wise passiveness, the power to interpret mystically the austerer and wilder aspects of nature's loveliness. Hence some of the most characteristic glories of Scottish scenery necessarily escaped him. Keats had a temperament which required a more languorous and exotic beauty than Scotland could provide. The ripe and mellow fruitfulness of an English autumn suited him much better, and he would probably have appreciated an Eastern or an Italian summer best of all.

With three scenes especially the travellers in Scotland were impressed. The first of these was Ailsa Craig, a rock which rises bleak, solitary, and sheer, for more than a thousand feet above the Firth of Clyde. Keats saw it first through a drizzle of mist and rain, as he descended the hills of Carrick, when the huge mass wore that romantic aspect of visionary grandeur, suggestive of a deluge, which Keats was just the poet to detect and appreciate.

"Hearken, thou craggy ocean-pyramid,
  Give answer by thy voice the sea-fowl's screams!
  When were thy shoulders mantled in huge streams?
When from the sun was thy broad forehead hid?
How long is't since the mighty Power bid
  Thee heave to airy sleep from fathom dreams
  Sleep in the lap of thunder or sunbeams
Or when grey clouds are thy cold coverlid!
Thou answer'st not for thou art dead asleep.
  Thy life is but two dead eternities,
The last in air, the former in the deep!
  First with the whales, last with the eagle-skies!
Drown 'd wast thou till an earthquake made thee sleep,
  Another cannot wake thy giant size!"

A second sight which moved Keats was Fingal's Cave. He grudged the expense of travelling to Staff a by the ordinary fashionable steamboat. It was like "paying sixpence for an apple at the playhouse." The two friends accordingly resolved to tramp for thirty-seven miles across the island of Mull, their breeches tucked up and their stockings in their hands. They spent one night in a turf-thatched hut, of which the rafters were black with the pervading smoke, and the floor was a bare surface of hills and dales. But the glories of the famous cave made ample amends for all. "Suppose, now, the giants who rebelled against Jove had taken a whole mass of black columns and bound them together like bunches of matches, and then, with immense axes, had made a cavern in the body of these columns. Such is Fingal's Cave, except that the sea has done the work of excavation, and is continually dashing there... For solemnity and grandeur it far surpasses the finest cathedral. It is impossible to describe it."

Another scene with which Keats was manifestly impressed was the panorama of clouds and chasms to be witnessed from the summit of Ben Nevis. "These chasms are fifteen hundred feet in depth, and are the most tremendous places I have ever seen; they turn one giddy if you choose to give way to it. We tumbled in large stones and set the echoes at work in fine style. Sometimes these chasms are tolerably clear, sometimes there is a misty cloud which seems to steam up, and sometimes they are entirely smothered with clouds. After a little time the mist cleared away, but still there were large clouds about, attracted by old Ben to a certain distance, so as to form, as it appeared, large dome curtains which kept sailing about, opening and shutting at intervals here and there and everywhere; so that although we did not see one vast wide extent of prospect all round, we saw something perhaps finer, these cloud veils opening with dissolving motion and showing us the mountainous regions beneath us through a loophole, these cloudy loopholes ever varying and discovering fresh prospects east, west, north, and south. Then it was misty again, and again it was fair, then puff came a cold breeze of wind and bared a craggy chap we had not yet seen, though in close neighbourhood."

While in Ayrshire, Keats paid a visit of respect to the house of Robert Burns. He took a pinch of snuff on the keystone of the Brig o' Doon, in honour of Tarn o' Shanter, and he tossed off a glass of toddy, as well as an indifferent sonnet, in the cottage at Alloway. To his surprise, Keats found the scenery of the district as rich and beautiful as that of Devon, but his pleasure in visiting the birthplace was somewhat marred by the annoying and persistent talk of a garrulous old fool who had known Burns personally. "The man at Burns's cottage was a great bore with his anecdotes. I hate the rascal. His life consists of fuzy, fuzzy, fuzziest. He drinks glasses five for the quarter and twelve for the hour. He is a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew Burns. He ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him. I should like to employ the Caliph Vathek to kick him. Oh, the flummery of a birthplace! Cant! cant! cant! It is enough to give a spirit the guts-ache. Many a true word, they say, is spoken in jest; this may be because his gab hindered my solemnity. The flat dog made me write a flat sonnet."

With the appearance of Glasgow Keats was well pleased. Being built of stone, it "had a much more solid appearance than London to his eyes," and he was surprised to learn that it was twice the size of Edinburgh. The manners of the people, however, were unendurable. "We entered Glasgow last evening under the most oppresive stare a body could feel. When we had crossed the bridge Brown looked back and said its whole population had turned out to wonder at us. We went on till a drunken man came up to me. I put him off with my arm. He returned all up in arms, saying aloud that 'he had seen all foreigners bu-u-ut he never saw the like o' me.'"

Unfortunately, Keats and his companion had other discomforts than those to put up with during the tour. Gadflies stung them to madness while bathing in Loch Long. For days they could get "nothing to eat but eggs, ten a-piece, till it became sickening," and in Galloway they were compelled to dine on "dirty bacon, dirtier eggs, and dirtiest potatoes." Even bread was not obtainable in certain places, and they had perforce to content themselves with "cursed oat cakes." These were distressing circumstances to the travellers, for the vigorous exercise and the bracing air gave them ravenous appetites. "I get so hungry," wrote the poet, "that a ham goes but a very little way, and fowls are like larks to me. A batch of bread I make no more ado with than a sheet of parliament, and I can eat a bull's head as easily as I used to do Bull's Eyes... Ah, dear, I must soon be contented with an acre or two of oaten cake, a hogshead of milk, and a clothes-basket of eggs, morning, noon, and night, when I get among the Highlanders." But the most harrowing experience of all was that of having to listen to the band at Inveraray Castle. "I must say I enjoyed two or three common tunes, but nothing could stifle the horrors of a solo on the bagpipe. I thought the beast would never have done." This from the sensitive author of the Ode to a Nightingale is not surprising.

On the whole, Keats enjoyed his Scottish tour, but it did him little good. That daily stretch of twenty miles, sometimes covered before midday, was too much for him, and the unwonted exertion of toiling across Mull, o'er bog and moor, or of scrambling on all fours down the rocks of Ben Nevis, only fanned the smouldering embers of his hereditary disease. By the time Keats reached Inverness, he was suffering so seriously from sore throat that it was deemed advisable to accomplish the rest of the journey immediately by sea. He set forth accordingly from the port of Cromarty, and nine days later arrived in London "as brown and as shabby," wrote one of his friends, "as you can imagine; scarcely any shoes left, his jacket all torn at the back, a fur cap, a great plaid, and his knapsack. I cannot tell what he looked like." The poetical fruits of the tour were two fine sonnets on Ailsa Rock and Ben Nevis, two poor sonnets on Robert Burns, a beautiful poem on Staffa, and some excellent stanzas on the subject of Meg Merrilees. We are grateful for such gleanings as these, but we should have been still more thankful if the tour had never been undertaken, and Keats' s health had been preserved, and we might have had more such poems as Endymion and La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the Ode on a Grecian Urn.

XVII - Queen Victoria (1848-1882)