The Warm South

The Death of Alcibiades

The Death of Alcibiades

It was evening. Severn worked by lamplight at his canvas. The painting looked its best at this dim hour; the burning house on the left caught the glow of the Argand lamp and really seemed to be dissolving in fire. Flames pulsed and black smoke belched with palpable thickness to smother the palm trees and Greek portico that Severn had copied from the Roman streets. Still, one might wonder—Keats had wondered—if it was really to the painting’s advantage that it looked so much better under a lamp than in the full light of day. Alcibiades himself was clear enough, long-haired and brawny as he rushed naked from the flames with sword in hand. But the assassins on the right, scarcely visible in the gloom, made Keats wonder if his appreciation was at fault, or if they really were somewhat crowding one another, blocking each other’s shoulders and limbs in awkward ways, as if it wasn’t quite worked out who was meant to be in front and who behind. They were seven in all, some shooting arrows, some with hands raised against Alcibiades’s sword, others retreating behind trees, and something in their composition suggested a bunch of children who wouldn’t line up as they’d been told to, and who were not really fair targets for the hero’s unclad wrath.

These were not kind thoughts, and Keats didn’t claim to understand painting. He’d never questioned Severn’s talent to anyone. He had once walked out of a dinner where some society painters were laughing at his Cave of Despair and making remarks on what the true cause for despair was. Even if Severn’s assassins looked a bit like urchins and their arms hung a bit strangely from their shoulders, Keats was sure that if he didn’t get his scholarship it would only prove the envy and hypocrisy of the Royal Academy. Anyhow, he told himself privately, in the half-expressed way of shameful thoughts, what harm was there in Severn continuing to paint, even if his talents were not perfect? Whose talents are perfect? Each of us struggles against fate, against his own limited powers. We have scarcely a sliver of a chance to reach greatness. It is best to be kind.

“Suppose I did go to Pisa?” he said.

“Pisa!” Severn’s brush halted in his hand, and he looked over his shoulder. “But why? That is—” He took a breath and said more lightly, “Well, you know what I think of Shelley.”

“On account of your disagreement over religion?”

“A disagreement, you call it?” He set down the brush and said plaintively, “Do you not remember? There we are dining at Hunt’s, and him sitting bone-thin opposite us, eating his bit of vegetable supper like a moon-man, and he opens his mouth and says”—Severn pinched his voice unkindly, but not inaccurately—“‘As to that detestable religion, the Christian—’”

Keats laughed. “I remember.”

“You shouldn’t laugh. My word, Keats, he declared he was going to write a poem comparing our Saviour to a mountebank, performing miracles like street-fair tricks.”

“And when we were getting our coats to leave,” said Keats, “that lady came up in a dither and asked you, ‘Is that creature to be damned, Mr. Severn?’”

“And you would be his house-guest now?”

“I must be someone’s. God knows, it is wretched to live at anyone’s expense. But while I’m getting no money, I wonder if it isn’t as well to be Shelley’s expense and not yours. At least Shelley can afford it. Severn”—he lifted his hand—“you have your child. You have your painting.”

“Well.” Severn’s face was slack with hurt, and his eyes would not stay on Keats more than a moment. “But you shan’t leave me on that account? Why, you’ll soon be writing again.”

It was Keats’s habit, when his writing was mentioned, to look inside himself, as if he might find his unwritten poems waiting in a dark cavity of his heart. But there were no poems there. They came from somewhere else, a borderland between himself and the outer world that his thinking mind was blind to. He didn’t know where to look for this place, and lacking it, he peered into an empty well.

“I should be in London,” he murmured, “prescribing digitalis and setting bones. Or I should be in the palazzi, teaching English to the daughters of marquesses. I don’t know.”

“You should be here and nowhere else,” said Severn. When no answer came he tightened his lips, making Keats’s silence an assent, and turned back to his work.