1Thoughts suggested on the banks of Nith, near the poet’s residence: the third poem inMemorials of a Tour in Scotland.2First printed in Hunt’sReflectorand reprinted in the two-volume edition of Lamb’s works published in 1818.3A copy of Fairfax’s Tasso appears in the list of books left by Keats at his death.4This point has been made by Mr Buxton Forman,Complete Works of J.K., ii. p. 41, footnote.5I let this paragraph, somewhat officious and over-explanatory though it now seems to me, stand as I wrote it thirty years ago, for the sake of the pleasure I have since had in learning that the identical passage was singled out by Charles Lamb, in a notice which has only lately come to light, (see below, p. 471) as the pick of the wholeLamiavolume.6That published by Allen Awnmarsh, 5th ed. 1684, notes Woodhouse; and a copy of the same is noted in the list of Keats’s books.7See article by H. Noble M’Cracken inPhilological Journalof the Chicago University, 1908. The romance ofFloire and Blancheflor, which Boccaccio in theFilocoloexpands with additions and inventions of his own, tells the story of a Moorish prince in Spain and a Christian damsel, brought up together and loving each other as children and thrown apart in maturity by adverse influences and ill fortune. After many chivalric and fantastic adventures both in West and East, of the kind usual in such romances, judicial combats, captures by corsairs, warnings by a magic ring and the like, Floire learns that Blancheflor is immured with other ladies in an impregnable tower by the ‘Admiral of Babylon,’ who desires to marry her. To Babylon Floire follows, cajoles the guardian of the tower and one of her damsels to admit him to her chamber concealed in a basket of roses: whence issuing, he and she are brought to one another’s arms in happiness; various other adventures ensuing before they can be finally free and united. There exists a fragmentary English medieval version of this romance, which might easily have been known to Keats from the abstract and quotations given by George Ellis in hisSpecimens of Early English Metrical Romance(1806). But unluckily neither this nor, apparently, any version of the original French romance poem contains those incidents recounted in theFilocoloto which Keats’s poem runs most closely parallel. These we must accordingly suppose to be Boccaccio’s own invention and to have been known to Keats, directly or indirectly, from theFilocoloitself.8In both the chapel monuments and the banquet-hall corbels there may be a memory of the following passage from Cary’sDante(quoted by Mr Buxton Forman and Prof. de Sélincourt):—As to support incumbent floor or roof,For corbel is a figure sometimes seenThat crumples up its knees into its breast;With the feign’d posture, stirring ruth unfeign’dIn the beholder’s fancy; so I sawThese fashion’d—.9It may be noted that in the corresponding scene in theFilocoloa single special colour effect is got by describing the room as lit up by two great pendent self-luminous carbuncles.10Paradise Lost, v. 341-347.11Ed. 1860, pp. 269, 270.12The final couplet of this stanza, as Keats wrote it after several attempts, is weak. Madeline continues,—Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go.In the alternative version, intended to leave no doubt of what had happened, which he read to Woodhouse and Woodhouse disapproved, Madeline’s speech breaks off and the poet in his own name adds,—See while she speaks his arms encroaching slowHave zon’d her, heart to heart,—loud, loud, the dark winds blow.13Keats, mentally placing his story in England and writing it at Teignmouth, had at first turned this line otherwise,—‘For o’er the bleak Dartmoor I have a home for thee.’14A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the death of the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of rime. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the beadsman in the lines,But no—already had his death-bell rung;The joys of all his life were said and sung;that of Angela where she calls herselfA poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll.The touch of flippant realism which Keats had, again to Woodhouse’s distress, proposed to throw into his story at this point was as follows. For the four last lines of the last stanza Keats had proposed to write,—Angela went offTwitch’d with the palsy: and with face deformThe beadsman stiffen’d, ‘twixt a sigh and laughTa’en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough.In printing the poem Keats, probably at the instance of Taylor and Woodhouse, reverted to the earlier and better version.15May the following be counted evidence to the same effect? The old woman inApuleius, chap. xxi, just as she is about to tell her daughter the story of Cupid and Psyche, says, ‘as the visions of the day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night do often chance contrary.’ Compare Keats at the end of theOde on Indolence:—Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,And for the day faint visions there is store.16TheMusée Napoléonis a set of four volumes illustrating with outline engravings the works of classic art collected by Napoleon Bonaparte as spoils of war and brought to Paris. Keats’s original tracing from the Sosibios vase was in the collection of Sir Charles Dilke and is reproduced on the frontispiece of the Clarendon Press edition of Keats’s poems, 1906. The subject has been much discussed, but only from the point of view of the classical archaeologist, which ignores the part played by paintings as well as antiques in stimulating Keats’s imagination. From that point of view the nearest approach, as I hold, to a right solution is set out in a paper by Paul Wolters, inArchiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, Band xx, Heft 1/2: Braunschweig; though I think he is too positive in ruling out Roman representations of theSuovetauriliasuch as the fine urn at Holland House suggested as Keats’s source by the late Mr A. S. Murray and reproduced inThe Odes of Keats, by A. C. Downer, M.A. (Oxford, 1897).17Sweet Philomela (then he heard her sing)I do not envy thy sweet carolling,But do admire thee each even and morrowCanst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow.
1Thoughts suggested on the banks of Nith, near the poet’s residence: the third poem inMemorials of a Tour in Scotland.
2First printed in Hunt’sReflectorand reprinted in the two-volume edition of Lamb’s works published in 1818.
3A copy of Fairfax’s Tasso appears in the list of books left by Keats at his death.
4This point has been made by Mr Buxton Forman,Complete Works of J.K., ii. p. 41, footnote.
5I let this paragraph, somewhat officious and over-explanatory though it now seems to me, stand as I wrote it thirty years ago, for the sake of the pleasure I have since had in learning that the identical passage was singled out by Charles Lamb, in a notice which has only lately come to light, (see below, p. 471) as the pick of the wholeLamiavolume.
6That published by Allen Awnmarsh, 5th ed. 1684, notes Woodhouse; and a copy of the same is noted in the list of Keats’s books.
7See article by H. Noble M’Cracken inPhilological Journalof the Chicago University, 1908. The romance ofFloire and Blancheflor, which Boccaccio in theFilocoloexpands with additions and inventions of his own, tells the story of a Moorish prince in Spain and a Christian damsel, brought up together and loving each other as children and thrown apart in maturity by adverse influences and ill fortune. After many chivalric and fantastic adventures both in West and East, of the kind usual in such romances, judicial combats, captures by corsairs, warnings by a magic ring and the like, Floire learns that Blancheflor is immured with other ladies in an impregnable tower by the ‘Admiral of Babylon,’ who desires to marry her. To Babylon Floire follows, cajoles the guardian of the tower and one of her damsels to admit him to her chamber concealed in a basket of roses: whence issuing, he and she are brought to one another’s arms in happiness; various other adventures ensuing before they can be finally free and united. There exists a fragmentary English medieval version of this romance, which might easily have been known to Keats from the abstract and quotations given by George Ellis in hisSpecimens of Early English Metrical Romance(1806). But unluckily neither this nor, apparently, any version of the original French romance poem contains those incidents recounted in theFilocoloto which Keats’s poem runs most closely parallel. These we must accordingly suppose to be Boccaccio’s own invention and to have been known to Keats, directly or indirectly, from theFilocoloitself.
8In both the chapel monuments and the banquet-hall corbels there may be a memory of the following passage from Cary’sDante(quoted by Mr Buxton Forman and Prof. de Sélincourt):—
As to support incumbent floor or roof,For corbel is a figure sometimes seenThat crumples up its knees into its breast;With the feign’d posture, stirring ruth unfeign’dIn the beholder’s fancy; so I sawThese fashion’d—.
As to support incumbent floor or roof,
For corbel is a figure sometimes seen
That crumples up its knees into its breast;
With the feign’d posture, stirring ruth unfeign’d
In the beholder’s fancy; so I saw
These fashion’d—.
9It may be noted that in the corresponding scene in theFilocoloa single special colour effect is got by describing the room as lit up by two great pendent self-luminous carbuncles.
10Paradise Lost, v. 341-347.
11Ed. 1860, pp. 269, 270.
12The final couplet of this stanza, as Keats wrote it after several attempts, is weak. Madeline continues,—
Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go.
Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go.
In the alternative version, intended to leave no doubt of what had happened, which he read to Woodhouse and Woodhouse disapproved, Madeline’s speech breaks off and the poet in his own name adds,—
See while she speaks his arms encroaching slowHave zon’d her, heart to heart,—loud, loud, the dark winds blow.
See while she speaks his arms encroaching slow
Have zon’d her, heart to heart,—loud, loud, the dark winds blow.
13Keats, mentally placing his story in England and writing it at Teignmouth, had at first turned this line otherwise,—‘For o’er the bleak Dartmoor I have a home for thee.’
14A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the death of the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of rime. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the beadsman in the lines,
But no—already had his death-bell rung;The joys of all his life were said and sung;
But no—already had his death-bell rung;
The joys of all his life were said and sung;
that of Angela where she calls herself
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll.
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,
Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll.
The touch of flippant realism which Keats had, again to Woodhouse’s distress, proposed to throw into his story at this point was as follows. For the four last lines of the last stanza Keats had proposed to write,—
Angela went offTwitch’d with the palsy: and with face deformThe beadsman stiffen’d, ‘twixt a sigh and laughTa’en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough.
Angela went off
Twitch’d with the palsy: and with face deform
The beadsman stiffen’d, ‘twixt a sigh and laugh
Ta’en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough.
In printing the poem Keats, probably at the instance of Taylor and Woodhouse, reverted to the earlier and better version.
15May the following be counted evidence to the same effect? The old woman inApuleius, chap. xxi, just as she is about to tell her daughter the story of Cupid and Psyche, says, ‘as the visions of the day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night do often chance contrary.’ Compare Keats at the end of theOde on Indolence:—
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,And for the day faint visions there is store.
Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,
And for the day faint visions there is store.
16TheMusée Napoléonis a set of four volumes illustrating with outline engravings the works of classic art collected by Napoleon Bonaparte as spoils of war and brought to Paris. Keats’s original tracing from the Sosibios vase was in the collection of Sir Charles Dilke and is reproduced on the frontispiece of the Clarendon Press edition of Keats’s poems, 1906. The subject has been much discussed, but only from the point of view of the classical archaeologist, which ignores the part played by paintings as well as antiques in stimulating Keats’s imagination. From that point of view the nearest approach, as I hold, to a right solution is set out in a paper by Paul Wolters, inArchiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, Band xx, Heft 1/2: Braunschweig; though I think he is too positive in ruling out Roman representations of theSuovetauriliasuch as the fine urn at Holland House suggested as Keats’s source by the late Mr A. S. Murray and reproduced inThe Odes of Keats, by A. C. Downer, M.A. (Oxford, 1897).
17
Sweet Philomela (then he heard her sing)I do not envy thy sweet carolling,But do admire thee each even and morrowCanst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow.
Sweet Philomela (then he heard her sing)
I do not envy thy sweet carolling,
But do admire thee each even and morrow
Canst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow.
CHAPTER XIV
WORK OF 1818, 1819.—II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS
Snatches expressive of moods—Ode to Maia—Hyperion: its scheme and scale—Sources: Homer and Hesiod—Pierre Ronsard—Miltonisms—Voices of the Titans—A match and no match for Milton—A great beginning—Question as to sequel—Difficulties and a suggestion—The scheme abandoned—The Eve of St Mark—Chaucer and Morris—Judgement of Rossetti—Dissent of W. B. Scott—The solution—Keats as dramatist—OthoandKing Stephen—The Cap and Bells—Why a failure—Flashes of Beauty—Recast ofHyperion—Its leading ideas—Their history in Keats’s mind—Preamble: another feast of fruits—The sanctuary—The admonition—The monitress—The attempt breaks off.
Snatches expressive of moods—Ode to Maia—Hyperion: its scheme and scale—Sources: Homer and Hesiod—Pierre Ronsard—Miltonisms—Voices of the Titans—A match and no match for Milton—A great beginning—Question as to sequel—Difficulties and a suggestion—The scheme abandoned—The Eve of St Mark—Chaucer and Morris—Judgement of Rossetti—Dissent of W. B. Scott—The solution—Keats as dramatist—OthoandKing Stephen—The Cap and Bells—Why a failure—Flashes of Beauty—Recast ofHyperion—Its leading ideas—Their history in Keats’s mind—Preamble: another feast of fruits—The sanctuary—The admonition—The monitress—The attempt breaks off.
Muchof our clearest insight into Keats’s mind and genius is gained from the class of his fragments which do not represent any definite poetical purpose or plan, and were never meant to be more than mere snatches and momentary outpourings. Such, though they only express a passing mood, are the lines in his letter to Reynolds of February 1818, translating the early song of the thrush into a warning not to fret after knowledge. Such is the contrasted passage of shifting, perplexed meditation on the problems of life, and the failure of the imagination to solve them alone, in the rimed epistle to the same friend six weeks later. Such, very especially, is the cry declaring that the true poet is the soul sympathetic with every form and mode of life and ready to merge its identity in that of any and every sentient creature: compare the passage inone of his letters where he tells how his own can enter into that of a sparrow picking about the gravel:—
Where’s the Poet? show him! show him,Muses nine! that I may know him.’Tis the man who with a manIs an equal, be he King,Or poorest of the beggar-clan,Or any other wondrous thingA man may be’twixt ape and Plato;’Tis the man who with a bird,Wren, or Eagle, finds his way toAll its instincts; he hath heardThe Lion’s roaring, and can tellWhat his horny throat expresseth,And to him the Tiger’s yellComes articulate and pressethOn his ear like mother-tongue.
Where’s the Poet? show him! show him,
Muses nine! that I may know him.
’Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan,
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be’twixt ape and Plato;
’Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren, or Eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The Lion’s roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the Tiger’s yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother-tongue.
Such again are the several passages in which he expressed a mood that frequently beset him, that of being rapt in spirit too high above earth to breathe, too far above his body not to feel an awful intoxication and fear of coming madness:—
It is an awful mission,A terrible division;And leaves a gulph austereTo be fill’d with worldly fear.Aye, when the soul is fledToo high above our head,Affrighted do we gazeAfter its airy maze,As doth a mother wild,When her young infant childIs in eagle’s claws—And is not this the causeOf madness?—God of Song,Thou bearest me alongThrough sights I scarce can bear;O let me, let me shareWith the hot lyre and thee,The staid Philosophy.Temper my lonely hours,And let me see thy bowersMore unalarm’d!
It is an awful mission,
A terrible division;
And leaves a gulph austere
To be fill’d with worldly fear.
Aye, when the soul is fled
Too high above our head,
Affrighted do we gaze
After its airy maze,
As doth a mother wild,
When her young infant child
Is in eagle’s claws—
And is not this the cause
Of madness?—God of Song,
Thou bearest me along
Through sights I scarce can bear;
O let me, let me share
With the hot lyre and thee,
The staid Philosophy.
Temper my lonely hours,
And let me see thy bowers
More unalarm’d!
But our main business in this chapter must be not with illuminating snatches such as these, but with things begun of set purpose and not carried through.
When Keats, drawing near the end of his work onEndymion, was meditating what he meant to be his second long and arduous poem,Hyperion, he still thought and spoke of it as a ‘romance.’ But a phrase he uses elsewhere shows him conscious that its style would have to be more ‘naked and Grecian’ than that ofEndymion. Was he trying an experiment in the naked and Grecian style when on May day 1818 he wrote at Teignmouth the beginning of an ode on Maia? He never went on with it, and the fragment as it stands is of fourteen lines only; but these are in a more truly Greek manner than anything else he wrote, not even excepting, as I have just said, theOde to Autumn. The words figuring what Greek poets were and did for Greek communities, and expressing the aspiration to be even as they, bear the true, the classic, mint-mark of absolute economy and simplicity in absolute rightness. Considering how meagre are the hints antiquity has left us concerning Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades and mother of Hermes, and her late identification with the Roman divinity to whom sacrifice was paid on the first of May, and hence how little material for development the theme seems to offer,—considering these things, perhaps it is as well that Keats, despite his promise to finish it ‘all in good time,’ should have tantalized posterity by breaking off this beautiful thing where he did.
The next fragment we come to is colossal,—it isHyperionitself. From the poem as far as it was written no reader could guess either that it was taken up as a ‘feverous relief’ from tendance on his dying brother, or that in continuing it later under Brown’s roof he had to put force upon himself against the intrusion of private cares and affections upon his thoughts, as well as against a reaction from his own mode of conceiving and handling the task itself. The impressionHyperionmakes is one, as Woodhouse on first reading it justly noted, of serenemastery by the poet both over himself and over his art:—‘It has an air of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power’: and again,—‘the above lines give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur and quiet power which characterize the poem.’ Woodhouse goes on to tell what he knew of the scheme of the work as Keats had first conceived it:—
The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo,—and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the giants for Saturn’s reestablishment— with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet’s brain.
The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former God of the Sun, by Apollo,—and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the giants for Saturn’s reestablishment— with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet’s brain.
The statement inserted by the publishers at the head of the volume in which the poem appeared in 1820, thatHyperionwas intended to be as long asEndymion, is probably also due to Woodhouse, their right-hand man (Keats, we know, had nothing to do with it), and may represent what he had gathered in conversation to have been the poet’s original idea. Mr de Sélincourt has shown grounds for inferring that when Keats came to actual grips with the subject he decided to treat it much more briefly and partially. Clearly the essential meaning of the story was for him symbolical; it meant the dethronement of an older and ruder worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers. Into this story the poet plunges, not even in the middle but near the close. When his poem opens, the younger gods, the Olympians, have won their victory, and the Titans, all except Hyperion, are already overthrown. In their debate whether to fight again general despondency prevails, and only one of the fallen, Enceladus, strikes a note of defiance; so that it seems as if there were nothing left to tell except the coming defeat or abdication of Hyperion in favour of Apollo. Hyperion, it is true, has not yet spoken when we are called away from the council, and Keatsmight have made him side with Enceladus and rouse his brethren to a temporary renewal of the strife. Or leaving the Titans conquered, he might, as Woodhouse suggests, have gone on to narrate the second warfare, that waged against the Olympians not by them but later by the Giants in revolt. In either case we should have seen the poet try his hand, hitherto untested in such themes, on scenes of superhuman battle and violence.
Woodhouse is right at any rate in saying that the hints for handling the theme to be found in the ancient poets are few and uncertain, leaving a modern writer free to invent most of his incidents for himself. Beyond the bald notices in his classical dictionaries, Chapman’sIliadwould have given Keats a picture of the dethroned Saturn: Chapman’s Homer’s hymn to Apollo might have filled his imagination, even to overflowing, with visions of the youth of that god in Delos,—‘Chief isle of the embowered Cyclades’: Hesiod’sTheogony(which he had doubtless read in the translation of Pope’s butt and enemy, Thomas Cooke) would have taught him more, but very confusedly, about the warfare of Gods, Titans, and Giants in general, besides inspiring his vision of the den where the Titans lie vanquished; while he would have gleaned other stray matters from Sandys’s notes on certain passages of Ovid. As far as his beloved English poets are concerned, brief allusions occur in theFaerie Queeneand inParadise Lost, where Milton includes the fallen Titans among the rebel hosts that flock to the standard of Satan in hell. But I think the source freshest in his mind at the moment when he began to write is one which has not hitherto been suggested, the ode of the famous French Renaissance poet Ronsard to his friend Michel de l’Hôpital. We know by his translation of the sonnetNature ornant Cassandrethat Keats had the works of Ronsard in his hands—lent, it would seem, by Mr Taylor—exactly about this time. The ode in question, partly founded on Hesiod, partly on Horace,1but largely on Ronsard’sown invention, relates the birth of the Muses, their training by their mother Mémoire (= Mnemosyne), their desire as young girls to visit their father Jupiter, their mother’s consent, their undersea journey to the palace of Oceanus where Jupiter is present at a high festival, their choral singing before him, first of the strife of Neptune and Pallas for the soil of Attica, and then of the battle of the gods and giants:—
Après sur la plus grosse cordeD’un bruit qui tonnait jusqu’aux cieux,Le pouce des Muses accordeL’assaut des Géants et des Dieux.
Après sur la plus grosse corde
D’un bruit qui tonnait jusqu’aux cieux,
Le pouce des Muses accorde
L’assaut des Géants et des Dieux.
Keats, although he writes of the battle of the Gods not against the Giants but against the earlier Titans, yet when he rolls out rebel names like this,—
Cœus, and Gyges, and Briareus;Typhon, and Dolor, and PorphyrionWere pent in regions of laborious breathDungeon’d in opaque elements,—
Cœus, and Gyges, and Briareus;
Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion
Were pent in regions of laborious breath
Dungeon’d in opaque elements,—
Keats, when he rolls out these rebel names, has surely been haunted by the strophes of Ronsard:—
Styx d’un noir halecret rempareSes bras, ses jambes, et son sein,Sa fille amenant par la mainContre Cotte, Gyge, et Briare.2······Neptune à la fourche estoféeDe trois crampons vint se meslerPar la troupe contre TyphéeQui rouoit une fonde en l’air:Ici Phoebus d’un trait qu’il jetteFit Encelade trébucher,Là Porphyre lui fit broncherHors des poings l’arc et la sagette.
Styx d’un noir halecret rempare
Ses bras, ses jambes, et son sein,
Sa fille amenant par la main
Contre Cotte, Gyge, et Briare.2
······
Neptune à la fourche estofée
De trois crampons vint se mesler
Par la troupe contre Typhée
Qui rouoit une fonde en l’air:
Ici Phoebus d’un trait qu’il jette
Fit Encelade trébucher,
Là Porphyre lui fit broncher
Hors des poings l’arc et la sagette.
For such an epic theme Keats felt instinctively, when he set to work, that an epic and not a romance treatment was necessary; and for an English poet the obvious epic model is Milton. Ever since his visit to Bailey at Oxford, and especially during his stay at Teignmouththe next year, Keats had been absorbing Milton and taking him into his being, as formerly he had taken Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, and now he can utter his own thoughts and imaginations almost with Milton’s voice. Speaking generally of the blank verse ofHyperion, its rhythms are almost as full and sonorous as Milton’s own, but simpler; its march more straightforward, with less of what De Quincey calls ‘solemn planetary wheelings’; its periods do not sweep through such complex evolutions to so stately and far foreseen a close. The Miltonisms inHyperionare rather matters of diction and construction—construction almost always derived from the Latin—than of rhythm: sometimes also they are matters of direct verbal echo and reminiscence. To take a single instance out of many:—
For as among us mortals omens drearFright and perplex, so also shuddered he.
For as among us mortals omens drear
Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he.
It is only inHyperionthat Keats habitually thus puts the noun Latin-wise before the adjective: and the omens that ‘perplex’ are derived from the eclipse which inParadise Lost‘with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.’ Throughout the fragment Keats uses frequently and with fine effect the Miltonic figure of the ‘turn’ or rhetorical iteration of identical words to a fresh purport, as in that noble phrase which seems to have inspired one of the finest passages in Shelley’sDefence of Poesy3:
How beautiful, if Sorrow had not madeSorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.
How beautiful, if Sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.
It has been said, and justly, that Keats has done nothing greater than the debate of the fallen Titans in their cave of exile, modelled frankly in its main outlines on that of the rebel angels inParadise Lost, but with the personages and utterances nevertheless entirely his own. In creating and animating these colossal figures between the elemental and the human, what masterly imaginative instinct does he show—to takeone point only—in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realise their voices. Thus of the murmuring of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:—
There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pinesWhen Winter lifts his voice; there is a noiseAmong immortals when a God gives sign,With hushing finger, how he means to loadHis tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,With thunder, and with music, and with pomp:Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines.
There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a God gives sign,
With hushing finger, how he means to load
His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,
With thunder, and with music, and with pomp:
Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines.
This is not a whit the less Keats for his use of the Miltonic ‘turn’ in rounding the period by a repetition in the last line of the ‘bleak-grown pines’ from the first. Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:—
So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea,Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,But cogitation in his watery shades,Arose, with locks not oozy, and began,In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongueCaught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.
So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea,
Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,
But cogitation in his watery shades,
Arose, with locks not oozy, and began,
In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue
Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.
Here the affirmation by negation in the second and fourth lines is a Latin usage already employed by Keats in thePot of Basil4: the ‘locks not oozy’ are a reminiscence fromLycidasand the ‘first-endeavouring tongue’ fromThe Vacation Exercise. But into what a vitally apt and beautiful new music of his own has Keats moulded and converted all such echoes. Once more, of Clymene following Enceladus in debate:—
So far her voice flow’d on, like timorous brookThat, lingering along a pebbled coast,Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met,And shudder’d; for the overwhelming voiceOf huge Enceladus swallow’d it in wrath:The ponderous syllables, like sullen wavesIn the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,Came booming thus.
So far her voice flow’d on, like timorous brook
That, lingering along a pebbled coast,
Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met,
And shudder’d; for the overwhelming voice
Of huge Enceladus swallow’d it in wrath:
The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves
In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,
Came booming thus.
In this last example the sublimity owes nothing to Milton except in the single case of the repetition in the third line. Even the scoffing Byron recognized after Keats’s death the authentic ‘large utterance of the early gods’ in passages like these, though Keats in his modesty had himself refused to recognize it.
Further to compare Keats with Milton,—the poet ofHyperionis naturally no match for Milton in passages where the elder master has been inspired by life-long impassioned meditation on his readings of history and romance, like that famous one ending with
What resoundsIn fable or romance of Uther’s son.Begirt with British and Armoric knightsOr all who since, baptized or infidelJousted in Aspramont or Montalban,Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebizond,Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shoreWhen Charlemain with all his peerage fellBy Fontarrabia—
What resounds
In fable or romance of Uther’s son.
Begirt with British and Armoric knights
Or all who since, baptized or infidel
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebizond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarrabia—
On the other hand Milton, even in the sweetness and the nearness to nature ofComusand his other early work, is scarce a match for Keats when it comes to the evocation, even in a mode relatively simple, of nature’s secret sources of delight,—as thus:
throughout all the isleThere was no covert, no retired caveUnhaunted by the murmurous noise of wavesThough scarcely heard in many a green recess:
throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retired cave
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess:
while comparison is scarcely possible in the case of the nature images most characteristically Keats’s own, for instance:—
As when, upon a tranced summer night,Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,Dream, and so dream all night without a stir—.
As when, upon a tranced summer night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir—.
Neither to the Greek nor the Miltonic, but essentially to the modern, the romantic, sentiment of nature does it belong to try and express, by such a concourse ofmetaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of the oaks among the other trees—their quasi-human venerableness—their verdure, unseen in the darkness—the sense of their preternatural stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky.
All good poems, it has been said, begin well. None begins better thanHyperion, with its ‘Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,’ and its grand mournful dialogue between the discrowned Saturn and the Titaness Thea, his would-be comforter. Then, with a rich contrast from this scene of despondency, comes the scene, dazzling and resplendent for all its ominousness, of the mingled wrath and terror of the threatened sun-god in his flaming palace. The second book, relating the council of the dethroned Titans, has neither the contrasted sublimities of the first nor the intensity, rising almost to fever-point, of the unfinished third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead. But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to my mind, fully on a level with the other two. And it is in this book, in the speech of Oceanus, that Keats sets forth the whole symbolical purport and meaning of the myth as he had conceived it:—
Now comes the pain of truth, to whom ’tis pain;O folly! for to bear all naked truths,And to envisage circumstance, all calm,That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer farThan Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;And as we show beyond that Heaven and EarthIn form and shape compact and beautiful,In will, in action free, companionship,And thousand other signs of purer life;So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,A power more strong in beauty, born of usAnd fated to excel us, as we passIn glory that old Darkness: nor are weThereby more conquer’d, than by us the ruleOf shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soilQuarrel with the proud forests it hath fed,And feedeth still, more comely than itself?Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?Or shall the tree be envious of the doveBecause it cooeth, and hath snowy wingsTo wander wherewithal and find its joys?We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughsHave bred forth, not pale solitary doves,But eagles golden-feather’d, who do towerAbove us in their beauty, and must reignIn right thereof; for ’tis the eternal lawThat first in beauty should be first in might:
Now comes the pain of truth, to whom ’tis pain;
O folly! for to bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!
As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
In form and shape compact and beautiful,
In will, in action free, companionship,
And thousand other signs of purer life;
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness: nor are we
Thereby more conquer’d, than by us the rule
Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil
Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed,
And feedeth still, more comely than itself?
Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?
Or shall the tree be envious of the dove
Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings
To wander wherewithal and find its joys?
We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs
Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves,
But eagles golden-feather’d, who do tower
Above us in their beauty, and must reign
In right thereof; for ’tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might:
That difficulty, to which we have referred, of surmising how there could have remained material to fill out a poem on the Titanomachia which had begun with the Titans, all but one, dethroned already, seems to increase when we consider the above speech of Oceanus, setting forth with resigned prophetic wisdom the fated necessity of their fall. It increases still further when Clymene, following on the same side as Oceanus, tells how she has heard the strains of a new and ravishing music from the lyre of Apollo which have made her cast away in despair the instrument of her own formless music, the sea-shell; and still further again when in the next book we witness the meeting of Apollo with the Titaness Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, who for his sake has ‘forsaken old and sacred thrones,’ and when we hear him proclaim how in the inspiration of her presence,
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions,Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,Creations and destroyings, all at oncePour into the wide hollows of my brain,And deify me, as if some blithe wineOr bright elixir peerless I had drunk,And so become immortal.
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.
Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings, all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,
And deify me, as if some blithe wine
Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,
And so become immortal.
Before the glory of this new-deified Apollo, what could long have delayed the defeat or abdication of the elder sun-god Hyperion?—what could have remained for Keats to invent that should have much enriched or lengthened out his poem? The sense of the difficulty of sustaining the battle of the primeval powers against these new and nobler successors may well have been one of the things (even had he not had Milton’s comparative failure with the warfare in heaven to warn him) that hindered his going on with his poem. To the reader there occurs another and even greater difficulty: and that is that Keats had already given to his fallen elder gods or Titans so much not only of majesty but of nobleness and goodness that it is hard to see wherein he could have shown their successors excelling them. He had represented Saturn as wroth, indeed, at his downfall, but chiefly because it leaves him
—smother’d up,And buried from all godlike exerciseOf influence benign on planets pale,Of admonition to the winds and seas,Of peaceful sway above man’s harvesting,And all those acts which Deity supremeDoth ease its heart of love in.
—smother’d up,
And buried from all godlike exercise
Of influence benign on planets pale,
Of admonition to the winds and seas,
Of peaceful sway above man’s harvesting,
And all those acts which Deity supreme
Doth ease its heart of love in.
Increase of knowledge, of skill in the arts of life and of beauty, the gods of the new dynasty might indeed extend to mankind, but what increase of love and beneficence? Even the relations of Saturn to his father Coelus (the Greek Uranus), which in the ancient cosmogony are of the crudest barbarity, Keats inHyperionmakes benignant and sympathetic.
Such inherent difficulties as these might well have made Keats diffident of his power to complete his poem as a rounded or satisfying whole had its intended scope been what we are told. But I am sometimes tempted to conjecture that his root idea had been other than what his friends attributed to him,—that battle, and the victory of the Olympians over the Titans or Giants or both, would not in fact have been his main theme, butthat he intended to present to us Apollo, enthroned after the abdication of Hyperion, in the character of a prophet and to have put into his mouth revelations of things to come, a great monitory vision of the world’s future. To such a supposition some colour is surely lent by the speech of Apollo above quoted on the ‘knowledge enormous’ just poured into his brain by Mnemosyne. On the other hand it has to be remembered that Keats himself, in a forecast of his work made ten months before it was written, shows clearly that he then meant his Apollo to be above all things a god of action.
Keats himself, writing some eight months later, when he had finally decided to give up his epic attempt, cites as his chief reason a re-action of his critical judgment against the Miltonic style, at least as a style suitable for him, Keats, to work in:—
I have given upHyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines fromHyperion, and put a mark * to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul ’twas imagination—I cannot make the distinction—Every now and then there is a Miltonic intonation—But I cannot make the division properly.
I have given upHyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist’s humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines fromHyperion, and put a mark * to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul ’twas imagination—I cannot make the distinction—Every now and then there is a Miltonic intonation—But I cannot make the division properly.
And again: ‘I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.’ This re-action was certainly not fully conscious or formulated in Keats’s mind by the previous winter. But it would seem none the less to have been working in him instinctively: for the moment he had turned, inThe Eve of St Agnes, to a romance in the flowing, straightforward, Spenserian-Chattertonian manner of narration, he had been able to carry his task through with felicity and ease.
This was on his excursion to Hampshire in the latter half of January. Within three weeks of his return hewas at work again on a kindred theme of popular and traditional belief,The Eve of St Mark. The belief was that a person standing in the church porch of any town or village on the evening before St Mark’s day (April 24th) might thereby gain a vision of all the inhabitants fated to die or fall grievously sick within the year. Those destined to die would be seen passing in but not returning, those who were to be in peril and recover would go in and after a while come out. The heroine of the poem, to whom this vision would appear, was to be a maiden of Canterbury named Bertha, no doubt after the first Christian queen of Kent, the Frankish wife of Ethelbert; the scene, Canterbury itself, memories of the poet’s stay there in 1817 mingling apparently with impressions of his recent visit to Chichester. Keats never got on with this poem after his first three or four days’ work (February 14th-17th 1819), and it remains a mere fragment, tantalizing and singular, of a hundred and twenty lines’ length. Why? Perhaps merely because it was begun almost at the very hour when he became the accepted lover of Fanny Brawne. We have seen how various causes, but chiefly the obsession of that passion, paralysed his power of work for the next two months, and what were the thoughts and tasks that held him fully occupied afterwards. It has been suggested by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Keats meant to give the story a turn applicable to himself and his mistress, and that the present fragment would have served as the opening of a poem which afterwards, in sickness, he mentioned to her as being in his mind:—‘I would show some one in love, as I am, with a person living in such Liberty as you do.’ I can find no sure evidence, internal or external, either to refute the suggestion or confirm it.
The fragment ofThe Eve of St Markis Keats’s only attempt at narrative writing in the eight-syllabled four-stress couplet. Its pace and movement are nearer to Chaucer inThe Romaunt of the RoseorThe House of Famethan to Coleridge or Scott or any other model ofKeats’s own time. That he was writing with Chaucer in his mind is proved by some lines in which he tries in Rowley fashion to reproduce Chaucer’s actual style and vocabulary, thus:—
Gif ye wol stonden hardie wight—Amiddes of the blacke night—Righte in the churche porch, pardieYe wol behold a companieApprochen thee full dolourouseFor sooth to sain from everich houseBe it in city or villageWol come the Phantom and imageOf ilka gent and ilka carleWho coldè Deathè hath in parleAnd wol some day that very yearTouchen with foulè venime spearAnd sadly do them all to die—Hem all shalt thou see verilie—And everichon shall by thee passAll who must die that year, Alas.
Gif ye wol stonden hardie wight—
Amiddes of the blacke night—
Righte in the churche porch, pardie
Ye wol behold a companie
Approchen thee full dolourouse
For sooth to sain from everich house
Be it in city or village
Wol come the Phantom and image
Of ilka gent and ilka carle
Who coldè Deathè hath in parle
And wol some day that very year
Touchen with foulè venime spear
And sadly do them all to die—
Hem all shalt thou see verilie—
And everichon shall by thee pass
All who must die that year, Alas.
These lines give us a sure key to the main motive of the story which was to follow. With some others in the same style, they are quoted by the poet as composing a gloss written in minute script on the margin of a wonderful illuminated book over which the damsel is found poring and which is to have some mysterious influence on her destiny. More noticeable and interesting than their somewhat random Rowleyism is the way in which some of the descriptive lines in the body of the poem anticipate the very cadences of Chaucer’s great latter-day disciple, William Morris. The first eight or ten lines of the following might have come straight fromThe Man born to be KingorThe Land East of the Sun, and provide, as it were, in the history of our poetry a direct stepping-stone between Chaucer and Morris:—
The city streets were clean and fairFrom wholesome drench of April rains;And, on the western window panes,The chilly sunset faintly toldOf unmatur’d green vallies cold,Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,Of primroses by shelter’d rills,And daisies on the aguish hills.Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell:The silent streets were crowded wellWith staid and pious companies,Warm from their fire-side orat’ries;And moving, with demurest air,To even-song, and vesper prayer.Each arched porch, and entry low,Was fill’d with patient folk and slow,With whispers hush, and shuffling feet,While play’d the organ loud and sweet.
The city streets were clean and fair
From wholesome drench of April rains;
And, on the western window panes,
The chilly sunset faintly told
Of unmatur’d green vallies cold,
Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,
Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,
Of primroses by shelter’d rills,
And daisies on the aguish hills.
Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell:
The silent streets were crowded well
With staid and pious companies,
Warm from their fire-side orat’ries;
And moving, with demurest air,
To even-song, and vesper prayer.
Each arched porch, and entry low,
Was fill’d with patient folk and slow,
With whispers hush, and shuffling feet,
While play’d the organ loud and sweet.
The relation of this fragment to the Pre-Raphaelites of the mid nineteenth century and their work is altogether curious and interesting. It was natural that it should appeal to them by the pure and living freshness of English nature-description with which it opens, by the perfectly imagined scene of hushed movement in the twilight streets that follows, perhaps most of all by the insistent delight in vivid colour, and in minuteness of animated and suggestive detail, which marks the final indoor scene of the maiden Bertha over her book by firelight. But what is strange is that Rossetti should not only have coupled the fragment withLa Belle Dame sans Mercias ‘the chastest and choicest example of Keats’s maturing manner,’ an opinion which may well pass, but that he should have claimed it as showing ‘astonishingly real mediævalism for one not bred an artist,’ and even as the finest picture of the Middle Age period ever done. The truth is that the description of the Sabbath streets and the maiden’s chamber are not mediæval at all and probably not intended to be, while the one thing so intended, the illuminated manuscript from which she reads, is a quite impossible invention jumbling fantastically together things that never could have figured in the same manuscript, things from the Golden Legend, from the book of Exodus, the book of Revelation, with others from no possible manuscriptsource at all. Keats evidently took some interest in mediæval illuminations, for in speculating on the old skulls of supposed monks at Beauly Abbey he had apostrophized one of them,—
Poor Skull, thy fingers set ablazeWith silver saint in golden rays,The holy Missal: thou didst crazeMid bead and spangle,While others pass’d their idle daysIn coil and wrangle.
Poor Skull, thy fingers set ablaze
With silver saint in golden rays,
The holy Missal: thou didst craze
Mid bead and spangle,
While others pass’d their idle days
In coil and wrangle.
But he can have seen few and made no study of them, and his imagined mystically illuminated book inThe Eve of St Markis invented with no such fine instinctive tact or likelihood as his imagined Grecian urn of the ode.
An elder member of the Rossetti circle, that shrewd and caustic, very originally minded if only half accomplished Scottish poet and painter, William Bell Scott, was much exercised over his friend’s misconception in this matter. I will give his comment, certainly in some points just, as written to me in 1885. ‘On reading the fragment it seems to me impossible to resist the conclusion that the scene represented is of the present day. The dull and quiet Sunday evening represented is of our time in any cathedral town in England, not the Sunday evening of old when morning Mass was the religious observance, and the evening was spent in long-bow and popinjay games and practice. The weary girl sits at a coal fire with a screen behind her, a Japanese screen apparently,’ [Japanese or old English lacquer imitating Oriental the screen certainly is]. ‘Every item of the description is modern. But alas! what shall we say to the ancient illuminated MS. she has in hand, with the pictures of early martyrs dying by fire, the Inquisition punishment of heretics, and the writing annotated, the notes referred to modern printers’ signs? As he describes a mediæval MS. book so badly, it may be said he intended the scene of the poem to be mediæval, but did the description also so badly. But no, the description of the dreariness of Sunday evening, utterlysilent but for the passing of the people going to evening sermon, is admirable.’ By ‘badly’ my old friend meant inexactly. But Keats never was nor tried to be exact in his antiquarianism. If we takeThe Eve of St Agnesas intended to be a faithful picture from the Middle Ages, it simply goes to pieces in the line—
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.
Probably neitherThe Eve of St AgnesnorSt Mark’s Evewere dated with any definiteness in the poet’s mind at all. A reference he makes to the last-named piece in a letter from Winchester the following autumn lends no definite support either to the modern or the mediæval interpretation:—‘Some time since I began a poem calledThe Eve of St Mark, quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town on a coolish evening.’ The impression of mediævalism which the two poems convey is not by any evidence of antiquarian knowledge or accuracy but by the intense spirit of romance that is in them,—by that impassioned delight in vivid colour and beautiful, imaginative detail which we have noted.
After his four days’ start on this poem in February came the spell of two months’ idleness which towards its close yieldedLa Belle Dame sans Merciand came to an end with theOde to Psyche, followed in the course of May by the four other odes. The choralSong of the Four Fairies, for some inchoate opera, sent by Keats to his brother together withLa Belle Dame, is not worth pausing upon, and we may pass to Keats’s main work of the ensuing July and August,Otho the Great. This is no fragment, having been duly finished to the last scene of the last act; but it is very much of an experiment. The question whether Keats, had he lived, might have become a great dramatic poet and creator is one of the most interesting possible. His intense and growing interest in humankind, together with his recorded and avowed liability to receive (‘like putty,’ as modern criticism has conjectured of Shakespeare)the impression of any character he might come in contact with, has led many students to believe that he had in him the stuff of a great creative playwright.Otho the Greatdoes nothing to solve the question. The plot and construction, as we have said, were entirely Brown’s, building with quite arbitrary freedom on certain bald historical facts of the rebellion raised against Otho, in the course of his Hungarian wars, by his son Ludolf and the Red Duke Conrad of Lorraine, whom the emperor subsequently forgave. Creation demands fore-knowledge, premeditation on the characters you desire to create and the situations in which they are to be placed, and Keats, Brown tells us, only foreknew what was coming in any scene after they had sat down at the table to work on it. His business was to supply the words, and what the result shows is only the surprising facility with which he could by this time improvise poetry to order. The speeches in Otho are much more than passably poetical, they are often quite brilliant and touched with Keats’s unique genius for felicity in lines and phrases. But they affect us as put into the mouths of puppet speakers, not as coming out of the hearts and passions of men and women.
In rhythm they are vital and varied enough, in style extremely high-pitched, and they resemble much Elizabethan work of the second order in smothering action and passion under a redundance and feverish excess of poetry. There is violence amounting to hysteria alike in the villainy of Conrad and of his sister Auranthe, the remorse of Albert, and the mixture of filial devotion and lover’s blindness in Ludolf, with his vengeful frenzy when he finds how he has been gulled. Keats, it is recorded, had in his eye the special gift of Edmund Kean for enacting frantic extremes and long-drawn agonies of passion; and it is possible that as played by him the last act, of which Keats took the conduct as well as the writing into his own hands, might have proved effective on the stage. It shows the maddened Conrad bent on executing vengeance onthe traitress Auranthe, and insanely stabbing empty air while he imagines he is stabbing his victim, until curtains drawn aside disclose an inner apartment where she has at the very moment fallen self-slain. But it is doubtful whether any acting could carry off a plot so ultra-romantically extravagant and in places so obscure, or characters so incommensurably more eloquent than they are alive. Nor do lovers of Keats commonly care to read the play twice, for all its bursts and coruscations of fine poetry, feeling that these do not spring from the poet’s own inner self and imagination, but are rather as fireworks fitted by a man of genius on to a frame which another man, barely of talent, has put together.
The case is different when we come toKing Stephen, the brief dramatic fragment on which Keats wrought alone afterOtho the Greatwas finished. This teaches us one thing at any rate about Keats, that he could at will call away his imagination from matters luxurious or refreshing to the spirit, from themes broodingly meditative or tragically tender, to deal in a manner of fiery energy with the clash of war. He is still enough a child of the Renaissance to make his twelfth-century knights and princes quote Homer in their taunts and counter-taunts; but in the three-and-a-half scenes which he wrote he makes us feel his Stephen, defiant in defeat, a real elemental force and not a mere mouther of valiant rhetoric, fine and concentrated as the rhetoric sometimes is, as for instance when an enemy taunts him with being disarmed and helpless and he cries back, ‘What weapons has the lion but himself?’
In persuading Keats to work with him on a tragedy for the stage, Brown had had the entirely laudable motive of putting his friend in the way of earning money for them both. But what would we not have given that the time and labour thus, as it turned out, thrown away should have yielded us from Keats’s self anotherIsabellaorEve of St Agnes, or a finishedEve of St Mark, or even anotherLamia? Brown’s next piece of suggestionand would-be help was far more unfortunate still. We have seen how in the unhappy weeks after Keats’s return from Winchester in October, he spent his mornings in Brown’s company spinning the verses of a comic and satiric fairy tale the scheme of which they had concocted together,—The Cap and BellsorThe Jealousies. The idea of the friends in this was no doubt to throw a challenge to Byron, the first cantos of whoseDon Juanhad lately been launched upon a dazzled and scandalized world. Byron’s genius, the spirit, that is, of brilliant devilry and worldly mockery which was the sincerest part of his genius, with his rich experiences of life, travel and society, of passion and dissipation and the extremes of fame and obloquy, and his incomparable address and versatility in playing tricks of legerdemain with ideas and language, had here all found their perfect opportunity for display. Attempts at worldly banter and satire by the tender-hearted, intensely loving and imagining Keats, with his narrow and in the main rather second-rate social experience, were never more than wry-mouthed as I have called them, ineffectual, and essentially against the grain.
His collaborator Brown imagined he had a gift for satiric fairy tales, but his recorded efforts in that kind are silly and dull as well as inclining to coarseness. What happier result could be expected from their new joint work than that which posterity deplores inThe Cap and Bells? The story is of an Indian Faery emperor Elfinan,—a name suggested by Spenser,—enamoured of an English maiden Bertha Pearl,—the very Bertha ofThe Eve of St Mark, resuscitated to our amazement,—but having for political reasons to seek in marriage a Faery princess Bellanaine, who herself is in love with an English youth named Hubert. The eighty-eight stanzas which Keats wrote on those autumn mornings in Brown’s room carry the tale no farther than Elfinan’s despatching his chancellor Crafticanto on an embassy to fetch Bellanaine on an aerial journey from her home in Imaus, his consultation with his magician Hum as to the meansof escaping the marriage and conveying himself secretly to England, his departure, and the arrival of Bellanaine and her escort to find the palace empty and the emperor flown. How the seriously, perhaps tragically, conceived Bertha ofSt Mark’s Eve, with the mystic book fated to have influence on her life, could have been worked, as they were evidently meant to be worked, into this new ridiculous narrative, we cannot guess, nor how the relations of Bellanaine with her mortal lover would have been managed.
Before Keats’s deepening despondency and recklessness caused him to drop writing altogether, which apparently happened early in December, he was evidently out of conceit withThe Cap and Bells.5One of the most unfortunate things about the attempt is the choice of the Spenserian stanza for its metre. Keats had probably wished to avoid seeming merely to imitate Byron, as he might have seemed to do had he written in theottava rimaof Don Juan, the one perfectly fit measure for such a blend of fantasy and satire as he was attempting. But not even Keats’s power over the Spenserian stanza could make it a fit vehicle for his purpose. Thomson and Shenstone had used it in work of mild and leisurely playfulness, but to bite in satire or sting in epigram it cannot effectively be bent. To my sense the precedent most in Keats’s mind was not these, but the before-mentioned translation of Wieland’sOberonby Sotheby. Sotheby had invented a modified form of the Spenserian stanza rimingabbaccddcinstead ofabcbbdbddand keeping the final alexandrine. Much of the machinery and spirit ofThe Cap and Bells—the magic journeys through the air—the comic atmosphere and adventures of the courts—are closely akin to the jocular parts of thisOberon. Some of the passages of mere fun and playfulness are pleasant enough, like that description of a dilapidated hackney coach (much resembling the four-wheeler of our youth) which Hunt selected to publish in theIndicatorwhile Keats waslying sick in his house the next year: but the attempts at social satire are almost always feeble and tiresome, and still more so those at political satire, turning for the most part rather obscurely on the scandals, then at their height, attending the relations of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In the faery narrative itself there break forth momentary flashes from the true genius of the poet, such as might delight the reader if he could lose his sense of irritation at the rubbish from amidst which they gleam. As thus, of the princess’s flight through the air (was Keats thinking, in the first line, of the children carried heavenward by angels in Orcagna’sTriumph of Death?)
As in old pictures tender cherubimA child’s soul thro’ the sapphir’d canvas bear,So, thro’ a real heaven, on they swimWith the sweet princess on her plumag’d lair,Speed giving to the winds her lustrous hair.
As in old pictures tender cherubim
A child’s soul thro’ the sapphir’d canvas bear,
So, thro’ a real heaven, on they swim
With the sweet princess on her plumag’d lair,
Speed giving to the winds her lustrous hair.
Or this, telling how Bertha of Canterbury, in Keats’s queer new conception of her, was really a changeling born in the jungle:—
She is a changeling of my management;She was born at midnight in an Indian wild;Her mother’s screams with the striped tiger’s blent,While the torch-bearing slaves a halloo sentInto the jungles.
She is a changeling of my management;
She was born at midnight in an Indian wild;
Her mother’s screams with the striped tiger’s blent,
While the torch-bearing slaves a halloo sent
Into the jungles.
Or again, some of the stanzas describing the welcome prepared in Elfinan’s capital for the faery princess after her flight: note in the last the persistence with which Keats carries into these incongruous climates his passion for the English spring flowers:—
The morn is full of holiday; loud bellsWith rival clamours ring from every spire;Cunningly-station’d music dies and swellsIn echoing places; when the winds respire,Light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire;A metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm,Comes from the northern suburbs; rich attireFreckles with red and gold the moving swarm;While here and there clear trumpets blow a keen alarm.
The morn is full of holiday; loud bells
With rival clamours ring from every spire;
Cunningly-station’d music dies and swells
In echoing places; when the winds respire,
Light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire;
A metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm,
Comes from the northern suburbs; rich attire
Freckles with red and gold the moving swarm;
While here and there clear trumpets blow a keen alarm.
And again:—
As flowers turn their faces to the sun,So on our flight with hungry eyes they gaze,And, as we shap’d our course, this, that way run,With mad-cap pleasure, or hand-clasp’d amaze;Sweet in the air a mild-ton’d music plays,And progresses through its own labyrinth;Buds gather’d from the green spring’s middle-days,They scatter’d,—daisy, primrose, hyacinth,—Or round white columns wreath’d from capital to plinth.
As flowers turn their faces to the sun,
So on our flight with hungry eyes they gaze,
And, as we shap’d our course, this, that way run,
With mad-cap pleasure, or hand-clasp’d amaze;
Sweet in the air a mild-ton’d music plays,
And progresses through its own labyrinth;
Buds gather’d from the green spring’s middle-days,
They scatter’d,—daisy, primrose, hyacinth,—
Or round white columns wreath’d from capital to plinth.
After his mornings spent in Brown’s company over the strained frivolities ofThe Cap and Bells, Keats was in the same weeks striving, alone with himself of an evening, to utter the new thoughts on life and poetry which he found taking shape in the depths of his being. He took up again the abandonedHyperion, and began rewriting it no longer as a direct narrative, but as a vision shewn and interpreted by a supernatural monitress acting to him somewhat the same part as Virgil acts to Dante. In altering the form and structure of the poem Keats also takes pains to alter its style, de-Miltonizing and de-latinizing, sometimes terribly to their disadvantage, the passages which he takes over from the earlier version. It is not in these, it is in the two hundred and seventy lines of its wholly new pre-amble or introduction that the value of the altered poem lies.
The reader remembers how Keats had broken off his work on the originalHyperionat the point where Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses, is enkindling the brain of Apollo by mysteriously imparting to him her ancient wisdom and all-embracing knowledge. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of mythology he had lately bought,6he now identifies this Greek Mnemosyne with the Roman Moneta, goddess of warning or admonition; and being possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta onthe Capitol at Rome was not far from that of Saturn, makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess and guardian of Saturn’s temple. His vision takes him first into a grove or garden of trees and flowers and fountains, with a feast of summer fruits spread on the moss before an embowered arbour. The events that follow, and the converse held between the poet and the priestess, are in their ethical and allegoric meanings at many points obscure, and capable, like all symbols that are truly symbolic, of various interpretations. But the leading ideas they embody can be recognised clearly enough.
They are primarily the same ideas, developed in a deeper and more sombre spirit, as had been present in Keats’s mind almost from the beginning: the idea that in the simple delights of nature and of art as unreflectingly felt in youth there is no abiding place for the poetic spirit, that from the enjoyment of such delights it must rise to thoughts higher and more austere and prompting to more arduous tasks: the further idea that to fit it for such tasks two things above all are necessary, growth in human sympathy through the putting down of self, and growth in knowledge and wisdom through strenuous study and meditation. Such ideas had already been thrown out by Keats inSleep and Poetry; they had been developed with much more fullness, though in a manner made obscure from redundance of imagery, inEndymion, especially in the third book: they had been expressed with a difference under the new and clearer symbolism of the Two Chambers of Thought in Keats’s letter to Reynolds from Teignmouth. About the same hour, the hour, as I think, of the finest achievement of Keats’s genius as well as of its highest promise,—there had appeared in his letters and some of his verses the quite new idea, which would have been inconceivable to him a year earlier, of questioning whether poetry was a worthy pursuit at all in a world full of pain and destruction. Musing beside the sea on a calm evening of April, he anticipates the Tennysonian vision of ‘nature, red intooth and claw With ravine.’ In letters written during the next few weeks he insists over and over again alike upon the acuteness of his new sense that the world is ‘full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression,’ and upon the poet’s need of knowledge, and again knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to take away the heat and fever and ease ‘the Burden of the Mystery.’ The first passage that shows the dawn of a desire in his mind to do good to a suffering world by means possibly other than his art is that well-known and deeply significant one:—