Negative Capability Letter to George and Tom Keats
John Keats
                                                Hampstead Sunday
                                                [Late] 22 December 1818

My dear Brothers

   I must crave your pardon for not having written ere this & &.  I saw Kean return to the public in Richard III, & finely he did it, & at the request of Reynolds I went to criticize his Luke in Riches—the critique is in todays champion, which I send you with the Examiner in which you will find very proper lamentation on the obsoletion of Christmas Gambols & pastimes: but it was mixed up with so much egotism that driveling nature that pleasure is entirely lost.  Hone the publisher’s trial, you must find very amusing; & as Englishmen very encouraging—his Not Guilty is a thing, which not to have been, would have dulled still more Liberty’s Emblazoning.  Lord Ellenborough has been paid in his own coin—Wooler & Hone have done us an essential service. I have had two very pleasant evenings with Dilke yesterday & today; & am at this moment just come from him & feel in the humour to go on with this, began in the morning, & from which he came to fetch me.  I spent Friday evening with Wells & went the next morning to see Death on the Pale horse.  It is a wonderful picture, when West’s age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality. The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth. Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness.  The picture is larger than Christ rejacted.  I dined with Haydon the sunday after you left, & had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two Brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment.  These men say things which make one start, without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their very eating & drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter—They talked of Kean & his low company.  Would I were with that company instead of your said I to myself!  I know such like acquaintance will never do for me & yet I am going to Reynolds, on Wednesday.  Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime.  I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.  This pursed through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Shelley’s poem is out & there are words about it being objected too, as much as Queen Mab was.  Poor Shelley I think he has his Quota of good qualities, in sooth la!!  Write soon to your most sincere friend & affectionate Brother

                                                                                                           John
Write the lyrics for a misc song made in 1818, titled "Negative Capability Letter to George and Tom Keats", by artist "John Keats".