Keats and Chapman

the purple tin

When Keats and Chapman were at Greyfriars, the latter manifested a weakness for practical jokes- 'practical jokes' you might call them, indeed, of the oddest kind.


One afternoon Chapman observed the headmaster pacing quietly up and down in the shade of the immemorial elms, completely submerged in Dindorf's Poetae Scenici Graeci. It was late summer, and the afternoon stood practically upright on the scorched lawns, weaving drunkenly in its own baked light. Sun-struck pigeons gasped happily in the trees, maggots chuckled dementedly in the grasses, and red ants grimly carried on their interminable transport undertakings. It was very, very hot. Chapman, however, had certain fish to fry and mere heat was not likely to deter him.


He wandered off to an old tool-shed and emerged very casually, carrying a small bucket of liquid glue. He took up an unobtrusive position near the pacing headmaster, and waited patiently for his chance. The headmaster approached, turned, and moved again slowly on his way. Instantly Chapman darted out, ran up noiselessly behind the pedagogue, and carefully emptied the bucket of glue all down the back of his coat. In a flash the young joker was back again in the shadow of the elms, carefully studying the results of his work. The headmaster continued his reading, wondering vaguely at the sound of aircraft; for the shining brown mess on the back of his coat had attracted hordes of wasps, bluebottles, gnats, newts, and every manner of dungfly. Chapman from his nook decided that the operation had been successful.


But the end was not yet. Two fifth form bullies (Snoop and Stott, as it happened) had observed the incident from the distance, and thought it would be funny to turn the tables. They approached Chapman undercover, leaped on him, gagged his mouth, and lifted the little fellow in their arms. The pacing headmaster paced on. When his back was turned, the two fifth form ruffians ran up behind him, jammed Chapman on to him back to back on the gleaming glue, and were gone before the wretched headmaster had time to realise the extraordinary facts of his situation. That a howling small boy was glued to him high up on his back did not disturb him as much as the murdreous punctures of the wasps, who were now angry at being disturbed.


There was hell to pay that evening. Nobody would own up, and every boy in the school was flogged with the exception of Chapman, who was regarded as a victim of the outrage.


After Keats had received his flogging like the rest, he was asked for his opinion of the whole incident, and particularly what he thought of Chapman.


'I like a man that sticks to his principals,' was all he would vouchsafe.

the purple tin

Keats and Chapman once paid a visit to the Vale of Avoca, the idea being to have a good look at Moore’s tree. Keats brought along his valet, a somewhat gloomy character called Monk. Irish temperament, climate, scenery, and porter did not agree with Monk, whose idea of home and beauty was the East End of London and a glass of mild. He tried to persuade Keats to go home, but the poet had fastened on a local widow and was not to be thwarted by the fads of his servant. Soon it became evident that a breach between them was imminent. Things were brought to a head by a downpour which lasted for three days and nights. Monk tendered a savage resignation, and departed for Dublin in a sodden chaise. The incident annoyed Chapman.

‘I think you are well rid of that fellow,’ he said. ‘He was a sullen lout.’ Keats shook his head despondently.

‘The last rays of feeling and life must depart,’ he said sadly, ‘ere the bloom of that valet shall fade from my heart.’

Chapman coughed slightly.

the purple tin

BRAINS AND BRAWN

Chapman’s fag at Greyfriars was a boy named Fox, a weedy absent-minded article of Irish extraction. One evening, shortly before the hour when Mr. Quelch was scheduled to take the Remove for prep., the young fellow was sent down the High with a jug and strict instructions to bring back a pint of mild and bitter without spilling it. The minutes lengthened and so did Chapman’s face, who disliked going into class completely sober. He fumed and fretted but still there was no sign of the returning fag. In the opposite armchair lay Keats, indolently biting his long nails. He thought he would console his friend with a witty quotation.

‘Fox dimissa nescit reverti,’ he murmured.

‘Dimissus!’ snapped Chapman, always a stickler for that kind of thing.

‘Kindly leave my wife out of this,’ Keats said stiffly.

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THAT MAN KEATS

Once when Keats was rotting in Paris a kind old lady gave him a lump of veal and advised him to go home and cook and stuff it into himself. During a desperate attempt to grill it with a tongs over an open fire, the meat caught alight.

The poet is thought to have muttered something like ‘la Veal lumíere’ (under breath that hinted of bountifullest barleycorn). Chapman was out at the Folies.

the purple tin

Keats, when living in the country purchased an expensive chestnut gelding. The animal was very high-spirited and largely untrained and gave the novice owner a lot of trouble. First it was one thing, then another but finally he was discovered one morning to have disappeared from his stable. Foul play was not suspected nor did the poet at this stage adopt the foolish expedient of locking the stable door. On the contrary he behaved very sensibly. He examined the stable to ascertain how the escape had been effected and then travelled all over the yard on his hands and knees looking for traces of the animal’s hooves. He was like a dog looking for a trail, except that he found a trail where many a good dog would have found nothing. Immediately the poet was off cross-country following the trail. It happened that Chapman was on a solitary walking-tour in the vicinity and he was agreeably surprised to encounter the poet in a remote mountainy place. Keats was walking quickly with his eyes on the ground and looking very preoccuopied. He had evidently no intention of stopping to converse with Chapman. The latter, not understanding his friend’s odd behaviour , halted and cried:

‘What are you doing, old man?’

‘Dogging a fled horse,’ Keats said as he passed by.

the purple tin

KEATS AND ALL THAT

It is not generally known that…

O excuse me.

Keats and Chapman (in the old days) spent several months in the county Wicklow prospecting for ochre deposits. That was before the days of (your) modern devices for geological divination. With Keats and Chapman it was literally a case of smelling the stuff out. The pair of them sniffed their way into Glenmalure and out of it again, and then snuffled back to Woodenbridge. In a field of turnips near Avoca Keats suddenly got the pungent effluvium of a vast ochre mine and lay for hours face down in the muck delightedly permeating his nostrils with the perfume of hidden wealth. No less lucky was Chapman. He had nosed away in the direction of Newtonmountkennedy and came racing back shouting that he too had found a mine. He implored Keats to come and confirm his nasal diagnosis. Keats agreed. He accompanied Chapman to the site and lay down in the dirt to do his sniffing. Then he rose.

‘Great mines stink alike,’ he said.

the purple tin

MEMORIES OF KEATS

Keats and Chapman once climbed Vesuvius and stood looking down into the volcano, watching the bubbling lava and considering the sterile ebullience of the stony entrails of the earth. Chapman shuddered as if with cold or fear.

‘Will you have a drop of the crater?’ Keats asked.


An ancestor of Keats (by the same token) was concerned in the dread events of the French Revolution. He was, of course, on the aristocratic side, a lonely haughty creature who ignored the ordinances of the rabblement and continued to sit in his Louis Kahn’s drawing room drinking pale sherry and playing bezique. Soon, however, he found himself in the cart and was delivered to execution. He surveyed the dread engine of Monsieur Guillotine, assessing its mechanical efficiency and allowing it some small mead of admiration. Then turning to the executioner, he courteously presented his compliments and prayed that he should be granted a simple favour on the occasion of his last journey-that of being permitted to face away from the guillotine and lean back so that the blade should meet him in the throat rather than he should adopt the usual attitude of kneeling face down on the block.

‘I like to sit with my back to the engine,’ he explained.


Chapman, during his biochemistry days at Munich, had spent years examining and cataloguing all the human glands. He designated each according to a letter of the alphabet, and when he had them all isolated and labelled, he settled down to write a minute medical monograph on each one of them. Gland A, gland B, gland C-Chapman’s scholarly dossiers accumulated. Keats looked in to see him one day and found him apparently stumped. One of the glands would not yield to the experiment.

‘What’s the trouble?’ Keats said.

‘This gland N,’ Chapman replied, ‘is giving me a lot of trouble. But I’m going to keep after it. I won’t let it beat me. I’ll win yet.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Keats said. Then he began to potter about the place, whistling some tune. Chapman pricked up his ears.

What’s that you’re whistling?’ he asked.

‘Wir fahren gegen N-gland,’ Keats said.

Chapman suddenly swallowed some medical potion he had been working at.

the purple tin

People who come to see me with their problems often wonder at the queer name I have on my house-‘The Past’. Is it so queer after all? Is it not better than, say, ‘The Present’? ‘The Present’ seems to imply that the house is the gift of some friend rather than the result of my exertions as secretary of the Gaelic League, a post which I held at a time when the language was neither profitable nor popular, at a time when the sycophant and time-server dominated the counsels of the Irish nation, at a time when our land, broken and bleeding, yielded-nay,-proffered-the hand of friendship to her own exiled kith and kin resident in the distant continent of America, AT A TIME WHEN-

Excuse me.

But about this house of mine, I often hear people saying: ‘Ah, that poor man. Sure that poor man is living in “the Past”!’

And so I am. The poor law valuation is fifty quid.

the purple tin

The ‘abstract’ painter Franz Huehl, son of a Dresden banker, was living in Zurich eking o. a p. l-hood (like manny a betther man) during the last European war. He was happily married, and his wife, not knowing that young Huehl’s allowance had ceased many years ago (in fact when he painted a ‘portrait’ of his father), was pleased with their comparative prosperity; Huehl-an incorrigible gambler-had had a run of luck at the tables and had won enough to put him on velvet for eighteen months. The wife knew nothing of this. However, the money eventually ran (out) and, very worried, the young wife went to consult Keats, who at that time was supervising the construction of tramcars for the Zurich Corporation. Keats heard her (out). Sympathetic, he determined to tell her the truth.

‘My dear girl,’ he said, ‘you have been living in F. Huehl’s pair o’dice.’

When he was gone he turned to Chapman.

‘F. Huehl and his Monet are soon parted,’ he observed.

Chapman bought the picture the next day for one of his spare lieder.

By the way (whatever that idiot phrase means), we newspaper people often refer laughingly to Schubert as a lieder-writer.

the purple tin

The medical profession, remember, wasn’t always the highly organised racket that it is to-day. In your grandfather’s day practically anybody could take in hand (whatever that means) to be a physician or surgeon and embark on experiments which frequently involved terminating other people’s lives. Be that as it may, certain it is that Chapman in his day was as fine a surgeon as ever wore a hat. Chapman took in hand to be an ear nose and throat man and in many an obscure bedroom he performed prodigies which, if reported in the secular press, would have led to a question in the House. Keats, of course, always went along to pick up the odd guinea that was going for the anaesthetist. Chapman’s school-day lessons in carpentry often saved him from making foolish mistakes.

On one occasion the two savants were summoned to perform a delicate antrum operation. This involved opening up the nasal passages and doing a lot of work in behind the forehead. The deed was done and the two men departed, leaving behind a bleeding ghost suffering from what is nowadays called ‘postoperative debility’. But through some chance the patient lived through the night, and the following day seemed to have some slim chance of surviving. Weeks passed and there was no mention of his death in the papers. Months passed. Then Chapman got an unpleasant surprise. A letter from the patient containing several pages of abuse, obviously written with a hand that quivered with pain. It appeared that the patient after ‘recovering’ somewhat from the operation, developed a painful swelling at the top of his nose. This condition progressed from pain to agony and eventually the patient took to consuming drugs made by his brother, who was a blacksmith. These preparations apparently did more harm than good and the patient had now written to Chapman demanding that he should return and restore the patient’s health and retrieve the damage that had been done; otherwise that the brother would call to know the reason why.

‘I think I know what is wrong with this person,’ Chapman said. ‘I missed one of the needles I was using. Perhaps we had better go and see him.’ Keats nodded.

When they arrived the patient could barely speak, but he summoned his remaining strength to utter a terrible flood of bad language at the selfless men who had come a long journey to relieve pain. A glance by the practised eye of Chapman revealed that one of the tiny instruments had, indeed, been sewn up (inadvertently) in the wound, subsequently causing grandiose suppurations. Chapman got to work again, and soon retrieved his property. When the patient was re-sewn and given two grains, the blacksmith brother arrived and kindly offered to drive the two men home in his trap. The offer was gratefully accepted. At a particularly filthy part of the road, the blacksmith deliberately upset the trap, flinging all the occupants into a morass of muck. This, of course, by way of revenge, accidentally on purpose.

That evening Chapman wore an expression of sadness and depression. He neglected even to do his twenty lines of Homer, a nightly chore from which he had never shrunk in five years.

‘To think of the fuss that fellow made over a mere needle, to think of his ingratitude,’ he brooded. ‘Abusive letters, streams of foul language, and finally arranging to have us fired into a pond full of filth! And all for a tiny needle! Did you ever hear of such vindictiveness!’

‘He had it up his nose for you for a long time,’ Keats said.

the purple tin

Chapman thought a lot of Keats’s girl, Fanny Brawne, and often said so.

‘Do you know,’ he remarked one day, ‘that girl of yours is a sight for sore eyes.’

‘She stupes to conquer, you mean,’ Keats said.

the purple tin

A MEMOIR OF KEATS

Keats and Chapman once lived near a church. There was a heavy debt on it. The pastor made many attempts to clear the debt by promoting whist drives and raffles and the like, but was making little headway. He then heard of the popularity of these carnivals where you have swing-boats and roundabouts and fruit-machines and la-boule and shooting-galleries and every modern convenience. He thought to entertain the town with a week of this and hoped to make some money to reduce the debt. He hired one of these outfits but with his diminutive financial status he could only induce a very third-rate company to come. All their machinery was old and broken. On the opening day, as the steam-organ blared forth, the heavens opened and disgorged sheets of icy rain. The scene, with its drenched and tawdry trappings, assumed the gaiety of a morgue. Keats and Chapman waded from stall to stall, soaked and disconsolate. Chapman (unwisely, perhaps) asked the poet what he thought of the fiesta.

‘A féte worse than debt,’ Keats said.

Chapman collapsed into a trough of mud.

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LITERARY CORNER

Chapman was once complaining to Keats about the eccentric behaviour of a third party who had rented a desolate stretch of coast and engaged an architect to build a fantastic castle on it. Chapman said that no sane person could think of living in so forsaken a spot, but Keats was more inclined to criticise the rich man on the score of the architect he had chosen, a young man of ‘advanced’ ideas and negligible experience. Chapman insisted that the site was impossible, and that this third party was a fool.

‘His B.Arch. is worse than his bight,’ Keats said.

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A GLIMPSE OF KEATS

Keats and Chapman were conversing one day on the street, and what they were conversing about I could not tell you. But anyway there passed a certain character who was renowned far and wide for his piety, and who was reputed to have already made his own coffin, erected it on trestles, and slept in it every night.

‘Did you see our friend?’ Keats asked.

‘Yes,’ said Chapman, wondering what was coming.

‘A terrible man for his bier,’ the poet said.

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Keats (in his day) had a friend named Byrne. Byrne was a rather decent Irish person, but he was frightfully temperamental, politically unstable and difficult to get on with, particularly if the running board of the tram was already crowded with fat women. He frightened (the life) out of his wife with his odd Marxist ideas.

‘What shall I do?’ she implored Keats. ‘Politics mean nothing to me; his love means much.’

Keats said nothing, but wrote to her that night-‘Please Byrne when Red.’

the purple tin

Keats once bought a small pub in London and one day he was visited by Dr Watson, confrére of the famous Baker Street sleuth. Watson came late in the evening accompanied by a friend and the pair of them took to hard drinking in the back snug. When closing time came, Keats shouted out the usual slogans of urgent valediction such as ‘Time now please!’, ‘Time gents!’, ‘The licence gents!’, ‘Fresh air now gents!’ and ‘Come on now all together!’ But Dr Watson and his friend took no notice. Eventually Keats put his head into the snug and roared ‘Come on now gents, have yez no Holmes to go to!’

The two topers then left in that lofty vehicle, high dudgeon.

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A Memoir of Keats. Number eighty four. Copyright in all civilised countries, also in ‘Eire’ and in the Sick Counties of Northern Ireland. Pat. Appd. For. The public is warned that copyright subsists in these epexegetic biographic addenda under warrant issued by the Ulster King of Farms (nach maireann) and persons assailing, invading or otherwise violating such rights of copy, which are in-alienable and indefeasible, will be liable to summary disintitulement in feodo without remembrances and petty sochemaunce pendent graund plaisaunce du roi.

A Memoir of Keats. No. 84. Copyright.

Keats once rented a trout-stream and managed to kill a sackful of fish every day. Transport was poor and he had no means of marketing the surplus, which, however, was not large. Chapman, hearing of this, presented his friend with a small mobile canning plant. (He managed to pick up (rather than buy) for that odd mercantile cantana, a song.) Calling to see the poet some months later, he was astonished at his robust and girthy physique.

‘You must be eating a lot,’ Chapman said. ‘I suppose you are making money out of the canned trout?’

‘I eat what I can,’ Keats said.

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Chapman had a small cousin whom he wished to put to a trade and he approached Keats for advice. The poet had an old relative who was a tailor and for a consideration this tailor agreed to accept the young man as an apprentice. For the first year however, he refused to let him do any cutting, insisting that he should first master the art of making garments up.

One day Chapman accidentally spilled some boiling porridge over his only suit, ruining it completely. The same evening he had an appointment with a wealthy widow and was at his wits’ end to know how he could get another suit in time. Keats suggested that the young apprentice should be called upon in the emergency. Chapman thought this a good idea and sent the apprentice an urgent message. Afterwards he had some misgivings as to the ability of a mere apprentice to produce a wearable suit in a few hours.

‘He’ll certainly want to spare no effort to have it finished by six o’ clock,’ he said gloomily.

‘He’ll have his work cut out,’ Keats said reassuringly.

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Chapman once fell in love and had not been long plying his timid attentions when it was brought to his notice that he had a rival. This rival, a ferocious and burly character, surprised Chapman in the middle of a tender conversation with the lady and immediately challenged him to a duel, being, as he said, prohibited from breaking him into pieces there and then merely by the presence of the lady.

Chapman, who was no duellist, went home and explained what had happened to Keats.

‘And I think he means business,’ he added. ‘I fear it is a case of “pistols for two, coffee for one”. Will you be my second?’

‘Certainly,’ Keats said, ‘and since you have the choice of weapons I think you should choose swords instead of pistols.’

Chapman agreed. The rendezvous was duly made and one morning at dawn Keats and Chapman drove in a cab to the dread spot. The poet had taken the ‘coffee for one’ remark rather too literally and had brought along a small quantity of coffee, sugar, milk, a coffee-pot, a cup, saucer and spoon, together with a small stove and some paraffin.

After the usual formalities Chapman and the rival fell to sword-play. The two men fought fiercely, edging hither and thither about the sward. Keats, kneeling and priming the stove, was watching anxiously and saw that his friend was weakening. Suddenly Chapman’s guard fell and his opponent drew back to plunge his weapon home. Keats, with a lightning flick of his arm, took up the stove and hurled it at the blade that was poised to kill! With such force and aim so deadly was the stove hurled that it smashed the blade in three places. Chapman was saved!

The affair ended in bloodless recriminations. Chapman was warm in his thanks to Keats.

‘You saved my life,’ he said, ‘by hurling the stove between our blades. You’re tops!’

‘Primus inter parries,’ Keats said.

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Keats and Chapman once called to see a titled friend and after the host had hospitably produced a bottle of whiskey, the two visitors were called into consultation regarding the son of the house, who had been exhibiting a disquieting redness of face and boisterousness of manner at the age of twelve. The father was worried, suspecting some dread disease. The youngster was produced but the two visitors, glass in hand, declined to make any diagnosis. When leaving the big house, Chapman rubbed his hands briskly and remarked on the cold.

‘I think it must be freezing and I’m glad of that drink,’ he said. ‘By the way, did you think what I thought about that youngster?’

‘There’s a nip in the heir,’ Keats said.

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Keats and Chapman met one Christmas Eve and fell to comparing notes on the Christmas present each had bought himself. Keats had bought himself a ten glass bottle of whiskey and paid thirty shillings for it on the black market.

‘That is far too dear,’ Chapman said. ‘Eighteen shillings is plenty to pay for a ten glass bottle.’

Chapman then explained that he had bought an expensive Irish manuscript, one of the oldest copies of the Battle of Ventry, or Cath Fionntragha. He explained that the value of the document was much enhanced by certain interlineal Latin equivalents of obscure Irish words.

‘How many such interlineal comments are there?’ Keats asked.

‘Ten,’ Chapman said.

‘And how much did you pay for this thing?’ Keats asked.

‘Forty-five shillings,’ Chapman said defiantly.

‘Eighteen shillings is plenty to pay for a ten gloss battle,’ Keats said crankily.

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Keats once tried to collar the Christmas card trade in pretty mottoes. He bought a quantity of small white boards and got to work burning philosophical quotations on them with a tiny poker. Festina Lente, Carpe Diem and Dum Spiro Spero, were produced in great numbers. Becoming more ambitious the poet showed Chapman a board bearing the words Proximus Ardet Ucalegon.

‘One does not like to be captious,’ Chapman said, ‘but I’m afraid there’s a word left out there.’

Keats looked at the board again.

‘You want Jam on it,’ he said.

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Chapman was much give to dreaming and often related to Keats the strange things he saw when in bed asleep. On one occasion he dreamt that he had died and gone to heaven. He was surprised and rather disappointed at what he saw for although the surroundings were most pleasant, there seemed to be nobody about. The place seemed to be completely empty and Chapman saw himself wandering disconsolately about looking for somebody to talk to. He suddenly woke up without solving this curious puzzle.

‘It was very strange,’ he told Keats. ‘I looked everywhere but there wasn’t a soul to be seen.’

Keats nodded understandingly.

‘There wasn’t a sinner in the place,’ he said.

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While Keats and Chapman were at Heidelberg arranging for the purchase of cheap doctorates, the latter conceived a violent, wholly mysterious attachment for a practically supernumerary lecturer in Materia Med., by name Jakob Arnim-Woelkus, an incredible bore and a man wanting in the meanest of personal accomplishments. Chapman never wearied of this person’s company and in his absence, was for ever retailing the ‘pleasantries’ and sophisms of the deplorable bore. Keats, who could not bear this, kept out of his compatriot’s way as much as possible. Late in term, however, Keats, to heal the scars he had received in a duel, went walking into the mountains and persuaded Chapman to accompany him, fearing less the devil he knew than any foreigner. The two walked for hours, Keats gloomy, Chapman meditative. Not a word was exchanged until eventually they came to the brow of a hill whence a fine landscape was to be seen. Chapman, moved, spoke, student-wise, in dog Latin: Ah Keats! Hic utinam nunc sit Jacobus Arnim-Woelkus, doctor praeclaris-simus noster! Keats snarled, Odi, he roared, odi Prof. Arnim-Woelkus!

Stan.

And this is humour?

Boardnashea

Maybe there's a punch line coming........?

pdebarra

Utter brilliance - even if he was a Strabane man!

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Keats had a nephew who evinced, even in early childhood, an unusual talent for manufacturing spurious coins. At the age of twelve he was already in the habit of making his own pocket money. His parents were poor and could not procure for him the tuition that would enable him to proceed from the science of penny-making to the more intricate and remunerative medium of work in silver. The boy’s attempts at making half-crowns were very poor indeed and on one occasion resulted in the father being presented with six months hard labour by a local magistrate. Keats, who was in reduced circumstances and could not offer any help himself, put the problem before Chapman, who was in tow with a wealthy widow. The widow was induced to give £100 to have the boy educated. Six months after the money had been given over and a tutor found, Keats and Chapman visited the boys home to see what progress was being made. They found the boy in his workshop engrossed in the production of a very colourable half-crown, working with meticulous industry on what was a very life-like representation of his late majesty, King Edward. To Keats, Chapman expressed satisfaction at the improvement in the boy’s skill.
‘I think he is making excellent progress,’ he said.
‘He is forging ahead,’ Keats said.

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ONCE CHAPMAN, in his tireless quest for a way to get rich quick, entered into a contract with a London firm for the supply of ten tons of swansdown. At the time he had no idea where he could get this substance, but on the advice of Keats, went to live with the latter in a hut on a certain river estuary where the rather odd local inhabitants cultivated tame swans for the purposes of their somewhat coarsely-grained eggs. Chapman erected several notices in the locality inviting swan-owners to attend at his hut for the purpose of having their fowls combed and offering a ‘substantial price’ per ounce for the down so obtained. Soon the hut was surrounded by gaggles of unsavoury-looking natives, each accompanied by four or five disreputable swans on dog-leads. The uproar was enormous and vastly annoyed Keats, who was in bed with toothache. Chapman went out and addressed the multitude and then fell to bargaining with individual owners. After an hour in the pouring rain he came in to Keats, having apparently failed to do business. He was in a vile temper.
‘Those appalling louts!’ he exploded. ‘Why should I go out and humiliate myself before them, beg to be allowed to comb their filthy swans, get soaked to the skin bargaining with them?’
‘It’ll get you down sooner or later,’ Keats mumbled.

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A MILLIONAIRE collector (whose name was ever associated with that old-time Irish swordsman of France, O’Shea d’Ar) once invited Chapman and Keats to dinner. The invitation came quite at the wrong time for Keats, who was crippled with stomach trouble. Chapman insisted, however, that the poet should come along and endeavour to disguise his malady, holding that millionaires were necessarily personable folk whose friendship could be very beautiful. Keats was too ill to oppose Chapman’s proposal and in due course found himself in a cab bound for the rich man’s bounteous apartments. On arrival Chapman covered up his friend’s incapacity by engaging the host in loud non-stop conversations and also managed to have Keats placed at an obscure corner of the table where little notice would be taken of him. Slumped in his chair, the unfortunate poet saw flunkeys deposit course after course of the richest fare before him but beyond raking his knife and fork through the food in desultory attempts to make a show of eating, he did not touch it. When the main course was served- a sight entirely disgusting to the eye of Keats- Chapman and the host were in the middle of a discussion on rare china. The host directed that a valuable vase on the mantelpiece should be passed round to the guests for inspection. Chapman gave a most enthusiastic dissertation on it, identifying it as a piece of the Ming dynasty. He then passed it to Keats, who was still slumped over his untouched platter of grub. The poet had not been following the conversation and apparently assumed that Chapman was trying to aid him in his extremity. He muttered something about the vase being ‘a godsend’ and after a moment handed it to the flunkey to be replaced on the mantelpiece. On the way home that evening Chapman violently reproached his friend for not making a fuss about the vase and pleasing the host.
‘I saw nothing very special about it,’ Keats said.
‘Good heavens man,’ Chapman expostulated, ‘it was a priceless Ming vase, worth thousands of pounds! Why didn’t you at least say nothing if you couldn’t say something suitable?’
‘I’m afraid I put my food in it,’ Keats said.