All his life Scott was a sincere, mildly rationalistic believer, entirely unaffected by the questioning, daring science of his century. In 1825 he said: "There are few, I trust, who disbelieve the existence of a God; nay, I doubt if at all times, and in all moods, any single individual ever adopted that hideous creed." In the course of the same conversation, however, he allowed that "penal fires and heavenly melody" were possibly only metaphorical expressions. And we know that Lord Byron's dedication ofCainto him, instead of offending him, gave him pleasure. In religion, as in politics and literature, he never attained to personal emancipation from the traditions by which the individual is fettered from his birth. Here, too, he left a task which the position of affairs plainly imposed, to be accomplished by the next generation of authors.
When we look back from the vantage-ground of our own day on the second, the prose, period of Scott's authorship, we find it impossible to see the long series of the Waverley Novels in the same light in which they appeared to his contemporaries. We understand the satisfaction which lay in the certainty that they would never give offence, that they might always be welcomed gladly, not only as gifted, but as perfectly moral works. This particular qualification is, however, exactly what makes them less attractive to us. There is no exaggeration in declaring it to be a law in the modern literature of every country, that an author must cause offence to at least one generation of his contemporaries, and be considered immoral by it, if he is not to seem tiresome and narrow-minded to readers of the period immediately succeeding his own. To us the defects of Scott's novels are very plain. They give pleasure by their excellent character-drawing and the liveliness of their dialogue, but they do not satisfy the reason, do not appeal very strongly to the feelings, do not even arouse any great degree of curiosity. They are soulful, but idealess. We feel that Scott, as a patriotic author, was determined to keep up the interest in Scotland which Macpherson and Burns had awakened in the reading public; therefore he writes in such a manner as to estrange not even the most narrow-minded reader. Himself denied the sensual organisation of the artist, he is so discreet in his treatment of the relations between the sexes that there is next to no description of erotic situations. And, the moral to be conveyed seeming of greater importance to him than art, he represents past ages with such a toning down of all the coarse elements that historic truth suffers terribly. The species of fiction which Scott introduced, and which indicated a distinct step in advance of the older novel, is now in its turn antiquated; the literary critics of every country lean to the opinion that the historical novel, with all its merits, is a bastard species—now it is so hampered with historical material that the poetic development of the story is rendered impossible, again it is so free in its paraphrase of history that the real and the fictitious elements produce a very discordant whole. In the third volume ofThe Heart of Midlothian(Chap, x.), for example, the manner in which imaginary speeches are mixed up with the historical utterances of the Duke of Argyle, distinctly offends the critical taste. It becomes, moreover, increasingly evident how different the general impression conveyed by Scott's pictures of past times is from the essential character of these far-off days, an unvarnished representation of which, supposing it to be understood at all, would certainly fail to awaken sympathy. HisTales of the Crusadersare circulating-library novels, which describe the wonder-lands and the romantic, adventurous deeds of the Crusades with almost as little regard to reality as Tasso'sGerusalemme Liberata; but which do not display anything like the Italian's poetic talent, or his artistically conscientious attention to style.
How could it be otherwise in the case of an author like Scott, who wrote without ever re-reading, much less correcting, a page, who had not the gift of conciseness, and who made no serious demands on himself in the matter of composition? He demands still less of his readers, as far as attention and quick apprehension are concerned. He repeats himself and allows his characters to repeat themselves, puts in his word in the middle of the story, points out and explains. Not satisfied with showing the temperament and character of his personages by their mode of action, he makes them, when necessary, give account of themselves in such phrases as: "I am speaking with calmness, though it is contrary to my character"; or in speeches in which the speaker draws the moral lesson from his own wicked actions, in case the reader should by any chance miss it and be tempted to imitation. (Read, for example, George Staunton's whole confession to Jeanie Deans, a model of bad style and false psychology.) With such serious faults as these in the details, it is of little avail that the plots of the best novels are excellent, leading up naturally to dramatic crises, one or more as the case may be. A book which is to retain its fame for centuries must not only be poetically planned, but artistically elaborated in every detail—a task for which Scott, from the moment he began to write in prose, never left himself time. Even the most dramatic scene he ever wrote—the splendid and powerfully affecting trial-scene inThe Heart of Midlothian, in which Jeanie, with a bleeding heart, but with noble devotion to the truth, gives witness against her own sister—loses half of its effect from the careless prolixity of the style. We learn from Moore'sMemoirsthat the main theme of the book—the story of the young girl who refuses to give witness in court in favour of her sister, and afterwards undertakes the long journey to beg a pardon for her—is a true story, which was communicated to Scott in an anonymous letter. He has evidently had the keenest perception of the moral beauty of the incident, but very little of its essentially dramatic character. If he had possessed only half the amount of talent that he had, along with double the amount of culture and instinct of self-criticism, he would doubtless have made less stir in the world, but he would have produced works of greater and more enduring value.[3]He himself felt that what prevented him from attaining to the highest in the domain of literature was his defective education. In hisJournal(i. 56, 57) there is a curious little survey of his life: "What a life mine has been!—half educated, almost wholly neglected or left to myself, stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash, undervalued in society for a time by most of my companions, getting forward, and held a bold, clever fellow, contrary to the opinion of all who thought me a mere dreamer.... Now taken in my pitch of pride, and nearly winged, because London chooses to be in an uproar, and in the tumult of bulls and bears, a poor inoffensive lion like myself is pushed to the wall."
It is a dangerous thing for a modern author to be entirely unaffected by the progress of science. If he has not, like Byron, the gift of divining by a kind of clairvoyance what science is seeking and ascertaining, his works fall from the hands of the cultivated reader, to be seized by readers who are only seeking entertainment; or they are preserved and bound by the cultivated readers, to be given away as birthday and Christmas gifts to their sons and daughters, nephews and nieces. Such has been Scott's fate. The author who in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century ruled the book-market, whose influence was felt in every country of Europe, who in France had imitators like Alfred de Vigny, Hugo, Mérimée, Balzac, and the elder Dumas (The Three Musketeers), in Italy a disciple like Manzoni, in Germany an intellectual kinsman like Fouqué, in Denmark admirers and pupils like Poul Möller, Ingemann, and Hauch, has become, by the silent, instructive verdict of time, the favourite author of boys and girls of fourteen or thereabouts, an author whom all grown-up people have read, and no grown-up people read.
[1]In the same year the Danish poet Oehlenschläger made his first appearance before the public, also with a collection of remodelled ballads.Digt, 1803.
[1]In the same year the Danish poet Oehlenschläger made his first appearance before the public, also with a collection of remodelled ballads.Digt, 1803.
[2]Masson:Scottish Influence in British Literature.
[2]Masson:Scottish Influence in British Literature.
[3]He does not seem to have had any understanding of plastic art. Desiring to give an impression of the old Puritan inThe Heart of Midlothian, he evolves the following artistically impossible fabulous creature: "The whole formed a picture, of which the lights might have been given by Rembrandt, but the outline would have required the force and vigour of Michael Angelo."
[3]He does not seem to have had any understanding of plastic art. Desiring to give an impression of the old Puritan inThe Heart of Midlothian, he evolves the following artistically impossible fabulous creature: "The whole formed a picture, of which the lights might have been given by Rembrandt, but the outline would have required the force and vigour of Michael Angelo."
In Keats's magnificent fragment,Hyperion, there is a scene in which the whole overthrown race of Titanic gods hold counsel in a dark, underground cavern. Their chief, old Saturn, concludes his despondent speech with the words:
"Yet ye are here,O'erwhelm'd and spurred, and batter'd, ye are here!O Titans, shall I say, 'Arise!'—Ye groan:Shall I say 'Crouch!'—Ye groan. What can I then?O Heaven wide! O unseen parent dear!What can I? Tell me, all ye brethren Gods,How we can war, how engine our great wrath!"
JOHN KEATS
JOHN KEATS
Then Oceanus, the thoughtful, meditative sea god, rises, shakes his locks, no longer watery, and, in the murmuring voice which his tongue has caught from the break of the waves on the shore, bids the passion-stung deities take comfort from the thought that they have fallen by the course of Nature's law, and not by the force of thunder or of Jove:—
"Great Saturn, thouHast sifted well the atom-universe;But for this reason, that thou art the King,And only blind from sheer supremacy,One avenue was shaded from thine eyes,Through which I wandered to eternal truth.And first, as thou wast not the first of powers,So art thou not the last; it cannot be:Thou art not the beginning nor the end.From Chaos and parental Darkness cameLight, the first fruits of that intestine broil,That sullen ferment, which for wondrous endsWas ripening in itself. The ripe hour came,And with it light, and light engenderingUpon its own producer, forthwith touch'dThe whole enormous matter into life.Upon that very hour, our parentage,The Heavens and the Earth, were manifest:Then thou first-born, and we the giant race,Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms.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:Yea by that law, another race may driveOur conquerors to mourn as we do now.Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas,My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face?Have ye beheld his chariot, foam'd alongBy noble winged creatures he hath made?I saw him on the calmed waters scud,With such a glow of beauty in his eyes,That it enforc'd me to bid sad farewellTo all my empire."
Thus speaks Oceanus. And the fallen deities, either convinced or in sullen anger, keep silence. At last one, of whom no one has thought, the goddess Clymene, breaks the long silence, speaking timidly among the fierce, with hectic lips and gentle glances:—
"O Father, I am here the simplest voice,And all my knowledge is that joy is gone,And this thing woe crept in among our hearts.There to remain for ever, as I fear:I would not bode of evil, if I thoughtSo weak a creature could turn off the helpWhich by just right should come of mighty Gods;Yet let me tell my sorrow, let me tellOf what I heard, and how it made me weep,And know that we had parted from all hope.—I stood upon a shore, a pleasant shore,Where a sweet clime was breathed from a landOf fragrance, quietness, and trees, and flowers.Full of calm joy it was, as I of grief;Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth;So that I felt a movement in my heartTo chide, and to reproach that solitudeWith songs of misery, music of our woes;And sat me down, and took a mouthed shellAnd murmured into it, and made melody—O melody no more! for while I sang,And with poor skill let pass into the breezeThe dull shell's echo, from a bowery strandJust opposite, an island of the sea,There came enchantment with the shifting wind,That did both drown and keep alive my ears.I threw my shell away upon the sand,And a wave fill'd it, as my sense was fill'dWith that new blissful golden melody,A living death was in each gush of sounds,Each family of rapturous hurried notes,That fell, one after one, yet all at once,Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string:And then another, then another strain,Each like a dove leaving its olive perch,With music wing'd instead of silent plumes,To hover round my head, and make me sickOf joy and grief at once. Grief overcame,And I was stopping up my frantic ears,When, past all hindrance of my trembling hands,A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune,And still it cried, 'Apollo! young Apollo!The morning-bright Apollo! young Apollo!'I fled, it followed me, and cried 'Apollo!'"
Keats has surpassed himself in this passage, which is as profound in thought as it is beautiful. It is not only a proof of the quality of his poetic gift, but the announcement of the appearance of a younger generation of poets in the field held by the poets of the Lake School and Scott. In the name of the reigning deities, the human intellect is too often condemned to inactivity and stagnation. If there is to be progress, a change of rulers is frequently called for. Wordsworth and Scott were mighty Titans whose glory paled when the younger generation appeared. Keats himself was the golden-feathered bird that rose high into the air above Wordsworth's leafy old oak. And Byron—was not he the new ocean god, who "troubled the waters" of passion with such power that the greatest literary genius of the day abdicated in his favour, assured that it was in vain to compete with him? And Shelley's melodies, intoxicatingly sweet, unprecedentedly daring—were they not borne on all the winds, and are they not still penetrating everywhere, though many, like Clymene, stop their ears and refrain as long as possible from listening to the new tones? The struggle is a vain one, for now on every side resounds the cry: "Apollo! morning-bright Apollo!"
The old gods, as in the poem, assumed different attitudes at this crisis in their fates. Scott, the noblest of them all, acknowledged his defeat by Byron with an amiable dignity which still further enhanced his reputation. Wordsworth retired to his Lakes, muttering an accusation of plagiarism. Southey poured forth volleys of abuse. Meanwhile the new, young gods mounted the thrones of the old, and round their heads shone the bright halo of the light that they gave forth.
Keats was the youngest of the young race of giants, and he had peculiar qualities and a peculiar domain of his own, into which none of the others intruded. He is one of the many examples of singularly delicate and refined organisms appearing in the most unlikely outward surroundings and developing almost unaided by circumstances. This youth who, dying at the age of twenty-six, has left behind him master-works which none who read them can forget, and whose name is immortalised in Shelley'sAdonais, was the son of a London livery-stable keeper, and was bred an apothecary. Few of the elder literary celebrities knew him. Wordsworth, the only one among them on whom his eyes were steadily turned, and with more reverence than was felt by any of the other young men—even Wordsworth showed himself cold. At Haydon the painter's, one evening, when Wordsworth was present, Keats was induced to repeat to him the famous Hymn to Pan from the First Book ofEndymion. The "iron-grey poet" heard it to the end, and then only remarked that it was "a pretty piece of paganism." And so, praise be to Keats, it is! Wordsworth, however, meant nothing flattering by the remark. Such was the verdict of the most influential member of the elder school of poetry. The elder school of criticism was distinctly adverse. Its verdict was harsh and scathing. Both theQuarterly ReviewandBlackwood's Magazinejeered foolishly atEndymion. The author was told that "it is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet," and was bidden "back to his gallipots." Calmly as the young poet writes of the ignominious treatment he received, there can be no doubt that the sting rankled deeply. It is most improbable that the report spread among Keats's acquaintances of the ruinous effect of these criticisms on his health, was, as is now maintained, entirely without foundation. He certainly was not, as Byron inDon Juandeclares him to have been, killed by a savage article in theQuarterly; and his own utterances give ample proof of his profound contempt for these disparagements of his art and his personality; but his ambition was excessive, his susceptibility equally so, and his body contained the germs of a fatal disease; and it would be surprising if rancorous attacks from without had not affected an organism which was preyed upon from within by consuming passion and consuming disease.
John Keats was born in October 1795. At the age of nine he lost his father. His mother sent him to a good school; but she, too, to his inexpressible grief, died while he was still a boy. His appearance corresponded to the impression which his poetry makes on us. Whilst the feminine and ethereal Shelley had a slender, slightly-built, narrow-chested figure and a shrill voice, the heavier footed, more earth-bound Keats was deep-chested and broad-shouldered; his lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper; and he had a deep, grave voice. His small head was covered with thick brown curls; the eyes were large and of a dark, on occasion glowing, blue; the handsome mouth had a projecting lower lip, which gave the face a defiant and pugnacious expression. And as a matter of fact he was, as a boy, a perfect little terrier for resoluteness and pugnacity, and seemed much more likely to distinguish himself in war than in literature. He early displayed great personal courage, and was an adept in all athletic exercises; just before he was attacked by consumption he thrashed an insolent butcher in a regular stand-up fight.
At the age of fifteen he left school, and was apprenticed by his relations to a clever surgeon-apothecary at Edmonton, with whom he remained till he was twenty, when he began, as a medical student, to walk the London hospitals. He soon, however, gave up medicine for literature, and lived for several years in close companionship with some of the rising young literary men and artists of the day. Then he was attacked by the disease which had carried off his mother and his younger brother. The absence of any prospect of earning a living, and the ever-increasing pressure of poverty, favoured its development, which was farther hastened by a violent and hopeless passion for a young Anglo-Indian lady—a passion only rendered hopeless by Keats's poverty and ill-health—his love being returned. His health obliged him to quit the neighbourhood of his beloved and take a journey to Italy, where he died.
Glancing over the non-literary part of Keats's life, we distinguish three facts of leading importance—his want of any real prospect of gaining a livelihood (he had thoughts of emigrating to South America, or applying for a post as surgeon on an Indiaman); the ardent and hopeless passion for the woman without whom life was worthless to him; and the wasting disease.
Miss Fanny Brawne was eighteen, five years younger than Keats, when he made her acquaintance in 1818. He and his friend, Brown, had settled at Hampstead, in a semidetached house, the other half of which was occupied by Miss Brawne and her mother. The first six months after he fell in love were to Keats months of real happiness. In December 1818 he beganHyperion. In February 1819, the most fruitful month in his life, he wrote theOde to Psyche, The Eve of St Agnes, and great part ofHyperion. And early in the spring, sitting under a plum-tree in the Brawnes' garden, he wrote hisOde to the Nightingale. In other words—his most beautiful poetry was written in the half year during which he took long walks with Fanny, and was still a healthy man. Unfortunately, it being possible for him to see his beloved every day, we have not a single love-letter dating from this, his short period of happiness. In July 1819 he wrote to her for the first time; and all the letters which he sent her from that date until the time of his death were published in 1878.
They are not melancholy to begin with. In one of the earliest he writes: "I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair;" and to some objection made by her he answers: "Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could never have lov'd you?—I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others; but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart."
Very soon, however, the jealousy which was to have such a wearing effect upon the lover appears in his letters. Again and again he exacts promises of eternal devotion. Though not yet ill, he has a vague presentiment that his end is not far off. "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks," he writes; "your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute!"
Her letters had really only a depressing effect on him. He read them so often that each sentence assumed a distorted proportion; and they seemed to him now cold, now full of reproaches. He tortured first himself and then her with his suspicious irritableness and perversity; he would, for example, pass her door without going in, though he was longing to see her, and knew that his not appearing was a disappointment to her. There are a few perfectly happy, tender letters, dated October 1819. But in February 1820 commences a period of miserable excitement. He begins to spit blood, and "reads his death-warrant in its colour." After this the letters are short, some of them still playful and hopeful, others suspicious and violent in their jealousy—all brimming over with passion. Here is a fragment: "You know our situation—what hope is there if I should be recovered ever so soon—my very health will not suffer me to make any great exertion. I am recommended not even to read poetry, much less write it. I cannot say forget me—but I would mention that there are impossibilities in the world. No more of this. I am not strong enough to be weaned—take no notice of it in your goodnight."
During his apparent convalescence he is constantly begging her to come and show herself only for half a minute outside of the window through which he can see her, or to walk a little in the garden. Then he asks her not to come every day, because he cannot always bear to see her. But when, according to his wish, she does not come, he is restless and jealous.
As the end approaches, the letters become ever sadder and more distressing to read. The last of them are positively harrowing. He is as wild and helpless in his passionate despair as a child who believes himself forgotten. It is the mental death-struggle preceding the physical.
Fanny Brawne's tenderness for her lover never wavered. It is now evident that, as was only natural, this young girl with the touch of coquetry in her nature had no suspicion whatever of the gifts and powers of the poor consumptive youth who worshipped and tortured her. But she loved him for his own sake, and when, from the last letter, she learned in what a sad condition he really was, she and her mother would no longer leave him to the care of his friend, but took him into their own house in Wentworth Place, where he lived for the last month before he left for Italy. A stay in that country had been prescribed, as giving him a last chance of recovery.
The man to whom, in other circumstances, the prospect of seeing the country for which he had always longed, and whose gods he had awakened from the dead, would have given supreme happiness, now writes: "This journey to Italy wakes me at daylight every morning, and haunts me horribly. I shall endeavour to go, though it be with the sensation of marching up against a Battery." On board ship he writes, referring to his attachment to Miss Brawne: "Even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it.... I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.... I seldom think of my brother and sister in America. The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me—I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing." And in another letter he writes: "The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die—I cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her—I see her—I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her for a moment.... I cannot say a word about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties around me. I am afraid to write to her—I should like her to know that I do not forget her. Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery. Was I born for this end?"
On the last day of November 1820, Keats wrote his last letter. His intimate old friend, Dr. Clark, a skilful physician, preserved his life till the end of the winter. While in Naples, Keats received a letter from his brother poet, Shelley, inviting him to come to Pisa, where he would be nursed and cared for in every way. But this invitation he did not accept. After several weeks of great suffering came rest and sleep, resignation and tranquillity. He desired that a letter from his beloved, which he had not dared to read, along with a purse and a letter which he had received from his sister, should be placed in his coffin; and that on his gravestone should be inscribed:
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
The touch of Shelley's magic wand stiffened the water into crystal, and the name stands inscribed for all time.[1]
Keats's poetry is the most fragrant flower of English Naturalism. Before he appeared, this Naturalism had had a long period of vigorous growth. Its active principle had been evolved by Wordsworth, who developed it so methodically that he divided his poems into groups, corresponding to the different periods of human life and the different faculties of the soul. Coleridge provided it with the support of a philosophy of nature which had a strong resemblance to Schelling's. In Scott it assumes the highly successful form of a study of men, manners, and scenery, inspired by patriotism, by interest in history, and by a wonderful apprehension of the significance of race. Both in Moore and Keats it takes the form of gorgeous sensuousness, is the literary expression of the perceptions of beings whose sensitiveness to impressions of the beauty of the external world makes that of the average human being seem blunt and dull. But the sensuousness of Moore's poetry, which reveals itself artistically in his warm, bright colouring, is confined to the erotic domain, and is of a light and playful character. Keats's is full-blooded, serious sensuousness, by no means specially erotic, but all-embracing, and, in this its comprehensiveness, one of the most admirable developments of English Naturalism. This Naturalism led Wordsworth into one extreme, which has already been referred to; Keats it led into a different and more poetical one.
Keats was more of the artist than any of his English brother poets. He troubled himself less about principles than any of them. There is no groundwork of patriotism in his poetry as there is in Scott's and Moore's; no message of liberty, as in Shelley's and Byron's; it is pure art, owing its origin to nothing but the power of imagination. It was one of his favourite sayings, that the poet should have no principles, no morality,no self. Why? Because the true poet enjoys both light and shade—has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. All poets who have forgotten themselves in the theme of their flights of fancy, have, when engaged in production, to the best of their ability banished their private peculiarities and preferences. Few have managed to make such a clean sweep as Keats of their personal hopes, enthusiasms, and principles. His study was, as one of his admirers has said, "a painter's studio with very little in it besides the easel."
Keats's poetical indifference to theories and principles was, however, in itself a theory and a principle—was the philosophy which has its foundation in poetic worship of nature. To the consistent pantheistic poet all forms, all shapes, all expressions of life on earth which engage the imagination, are precious, and all equally precious. Keats, as poet, recognises no truth of the kind that means improvement or exclusion; but he has an almost religious faith in imagination as the source of truth. In one of his letters he expresses himself thus:—"I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or not;—for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.... The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream; he awoke and found it truth." He enlarges on the difference between this kind of truth and the truth arrived at by consecutive reasoning, and concludes with an exclamation which is a key to the whole of his poetry:—"However it may be, O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!"
He led in great part a life of passive sensation, of pleasure and pain through the senses. "Take," says Masson, "a book of physiology and go over the so-called classes of sensations one by one—the sensations of the mere muscular states; the sensations connected with such vital processes as circulation, alimentation, respiration, and electrical intercommunication with surrounding bodies; the sensations of taste; those of odour; those of hearing; and those of sight—and Keats will be found to have been unusually endowed in them all."
He had, for example, an extreme sensitiveness to the pleasures of the palate, and tried to heighten them by extraordinary stimulants. A friend tells us that he once saw Keats covering his tongue with cayenne pepper, that he might enjoy the delicious sensation of a draught of cold claret after it. "Talking of pleasure," he says himself in one of his letters, "this moment I was writing with one hand and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine." It is therefore not surprising that imagery drawn from the domain of the sense of taste is of frequent occurrence in Keats's poetry. In his deservedly famousOde to Melancholywe are told that this goddess has her sovran shrine in the very temple of Delight—
"Though seen of none save himwhose strenuous tongueCan burst Joy's grape against his palate fine!"
And in one of his last sonnets he characteristically mentions "the palate of my mind losing its gust" as an indication of approaching death.
Naturally the senses of hearing and sight provided him with a much greater proportion of his imagery than the inferior, less noble senses. He had a musician's love of music and a painter's eye for variations of light and colour. And for all the different kinds of sound and smell and taste and sensations of touch, he possessed a store of words which any of the greatest poets might have envied. In short, he was by nature endowed with qualities which in combination, and in their full development, constituted supreme capacity to perceive and to reproduce all the beauty of nature.
To be able to reproduce it was from the very beginning his dream; and the man who affirmed that, except in the matter of art, he had no "opinions," expressed enthusiastic approval of the revolution of opinion in regard to the artificial, so-called classical, poetry of the eighteenth century, which had been brought about by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Spenser was Keats's idol, the classic poets were his aversion. In his poem,Sleep and Poetry, he has embodied an artistic confession of faith in language which could not well be more violent. After describing the old poetic triumphs of England, he exclaims:
"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schismNurtured by foppery and barbarismMade great Apollo blush for this his land.Men were thought wise who could not understandHis glories; with a puling infant's forceThey sway'd about upon a rocking-horseAnd thought it Pegasus. Ah! Dismal-soul'd!The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'dIts gathering waves; ye felt it not. The blueBared its eternal bosom, and the dewOf summer night collected still to makeThe morning precious; Beauty was awake!Why wereyenot awake? . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . No, they went about.Holding a poor decrepit standard out,Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large,The name of one Boileau!"
Long before the French assault upon this ancient, honoured name, Keats blows the war-trumpet! Théophile Gautier himself does not treat it with greater contempt.
It was probably the above passage, the energetic style of which reminds one of that picture of Kaulbach's in Munich, in which the artist of the rococo period is painted asleep with the lay-figure in his arms, which gave occasion to Byron's repeated thrusts at Keats as the traducer of Pope. For Keats never published a line against Pope; and when Countess Guiccioli, in her naïve work on Byron, refers to attacks which infuriated her lover, she is only repeating vague remarks she has heard. It is, however, highly probable that Keats included Pope among those whom he reproached with being deaf to the music of the waves and the winds, and with sleeping whilst the morning unfolded its beauties.
He himself was not of that company. If we examine the distinctive individuality of Keats's genius, we find its determining element to be the all-embracing sensuousness already alluded to. Read this stanza of theOde to a Nightingale:—
"O, for a draught of vintage! that hath beenCool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,Tasting of Flora and the country green,Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth!O for a beaker full of the warm South,Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,And purple-stainèd mouth;That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,And with thee fade away into the forest dim."
And compare with it the following lines ofEndymion:—
"Taste these juicy pears,Sent me by sad Vertumnus; . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . here is cream,Deepening to richness from a snowy gleam;Sweeter than that nurse Amalthea skimmedFor the boy Jupiter: and here, undimmedBy any touch, a bunch of blooming plumsReady to melt between an infant's gums."
The delicate, highly developed sense of taste is accompanied by an equally delicate and highly developed sense of touch and sense of smell. Read the passage inIsabella—a poem which, following Boccaccio, treats of the same theme as Hans Andersen's tale of the "Rose Fairy"—the passage which tells how the young girl took the head of her murdered lover from the grave:—
"Then in a silken scarf,—sweet with the dewsOf precious flowers pluck'd in Araby,And divine liquids come with odorous oozeThrough the cold serpent pipe refreshfully,She wrapp'd it up." . . . . . . . . . . .
and the lines inLamia, describing the reception of the guests who come to take part in the wedding festivities:—
"When in an antechamber every guestHad felt the cold full sponge to pleasure press'd,By minist'ring slaves, upon his hands and feet,And fragrant oils with ceremony meetPour'd on his hair, they all mov'd to the feastIn white robes, and themselves in order placedAround the silken couches."
In one of theEpistlesoccurs a line, about a swan, into which is compressed an incredible amount of sensuous imagery. It is: "Kissing thy daily food from Naiads' pearly hands."
It is unnecessary to draw the reader's attention in detail to all the delicate charms of these fragments. Proceeding to the domain of the sense of sight, we find that it preeminently is Keats's territory, although it is never his eye alone which is impressed by his surroundings. Wordsworth's poetry of nature leads us out into the open air; following Keats, we enter a hot-house: a soft, moist warmth meets us; our eyes are attracted by brightly coloured flowers and juicy fruits; slender palms, amidst whose branches no rough wind ever blows, beckon gently with their huge fans. HisOde to Autumnis a characteristic specimen of his descriptions of nature. After telling of autumn's conspiracy with the sun
"to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsWith a sweet kernel,"
he with a masterly hand portrays autumn as a person:
"Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may findThee sitting careless on a granary floor,Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind:Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hookSpares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers."
It is impossible for Keats to name any conception or any thought without at once proceeding to represent it in a corporeal, plastic form. His numerous allegories have the same life and fire as if they were executed in stone by the best Italian artists of the sixteenth century. He says of Melancholy:
"She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;And Joy,whose hand is ever at his lipsBidding adieu."
He says of Poetry:
"A drainless showerOf light is poesy; 'tis the supreme power;'Tismight half-slumb'ring on its own right arm."
We see the scope of Keats's poetic powers steadily increasing. His point of departure, especially in some of the most beautiful of his smaller poems (for example, theOde to the Nightingale), is the description of a purely physical condition, such as weariness, nervousness, thirst, languor, the drowsiness produced by opium. Upon this background of sensitiveness the sensuous pictures rise, distinct and round, like the reliefs upon a shield. The word "welded" comes involuntarily to one's lips when one thinks of Keats's pictures. There is something firm and finished about them, as if they were welded on a metal plate.
Observe how the figures rise gradually into relief in the following stanzas, the first and third of the beautifulOde to Indolence:
"One morn before me were three figures seenWith bowed necks and joined hands, side-faced;And one behind the other stepped serene,In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;They passed like figures on a marble urn,When shifted round to see the other side;They came again; as when the urn once moreIs shifted round, the first green shades return,And they were strange to me, as may betideWith vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .A third time passed they by, and, passing, turnedEach one the face a moment whiles to me;Then faded, and to follow them I burnedAnd ached for wings, because I knew the three;The first was a fair maid, and Love her name;The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,And ever watchful, with fatigued eye;The last, whom I love more, the more of blameIs heaped upon her, maiden most unmeek,—I knew to be my demon, Poesy."
But not until he wrote the two completed books ofHyperiondid Keats attain to absolute mastery over his artistic material, and realise the ideal of sensuous plasticity which was ever before his eyes. In this work the relief has been superseded by the statue; and they are statues, these, which impress us with the feeling that Michael Angelo's chisel must have played a part in their production. Granted that the influence of Milton is clearly perceptible—there is more than Milton here. The nature of the subject demanded the colossal.
We are told of the goddess Thea:
"By her in stature the tall AmazonHad stood a pigmy's height; she would have ta'enAchilles by the hair and bent his neck;Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel."
And read this description of the cavern where the Titans are assembled after their fall:—
"It was a den where no insulting lightCould glimmer on their tears; where their own groansThey felt, but heard not, for the solid roarOf thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse,Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where.Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks that seem'dEver as if just rising from a sleep,Forehead to forehead held their monstrous horns;And thus in thousand hugest phantasiesMade a fit roofing to this nest of woe.Instead of thrones, hard flint they sat upon,Couches of rugged stone, and slaty ridgeStubborn'd with iron. All were not assembled:Some chain'd in torture, and some wandering.Cæus, and Gyges, and Briareüs,Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion,With many more, the brawniest in assault,Were pent in regions of laborious breath;Dungeon'd in opaque element, to keepTheir clenchèd teeth still clench'd, and all their limbsLocked up like veins of metal, crampt and screw'd;Without a motion, save of their big heartsHeaving in pain, and horribly convuls'dWith sanguine feverous boiling gurge of pulse."
Byron, who had been very severe in his criticism of Keats's previous works, said, and said truly, ofHyperion: "It seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus."
The specimens of his poetry here quoted afford sufficient proof of Keats's imaginative power. It is to it, and not to his melodies, sweet as they are, that he owes his rank among English poets.[2]The purely artistic character of his verse makes of him the connecting link between the conservative and the progressive poets. He has a distinct bias in the direction of progress. Of this his enthusiastic friendship for the Radical editor of theExaminer, Leigh Hunt, is a striking proof. He felt what he wrote when, in his indignation at the proceedings of the Liverpool-Castlereagh ministry, he exclaimed (in his poemTo Hope):
"O, let me see our land retain her soul,Her pride, her freedom; and not freedom's shade!"
And William Tell, Wallace, and, chief of all, Kosciuszko, are named again and again in his verse with the profoundest admiration. What he might have developed into if he had reached maturity, it is impossible to tell. When he wrote his last poems he was still but a child, ignorant of the world.
And it must not be forgotten that while he wrote them he was enduring great physical suffering, and mental anxiety amounting to torture. Perhaps it is for this very reason they are so beautiful. Let the artist keep his private life long enough out of his work—let him, like Keats, hardly make any allusion in his poetry to his most absorbing passion—and no work will have such life, such colour, such divine fire as that executed whilst he not only wrought, but lived and suffered. Neither the precariousness of Keats's circumstances, nor his hopeless state of health, nor his passion for Fanny Brawne, set any distinct mark on his poetry; but from all this poison for himself he drew nourishment for it.
He sank into his early grave, but hardly had the earth closed over him before he rose again from the dead in Shelley's great elegy. He ceased to exist as Keats; he was transformed into a myth, into Adonais, into the beloved of all the Muses and the elements; and henceforward he had, as it were, a double existence in the consciousness of the age.
"He lives, he wakes—'tis Death is dead, not he;Mourn not for Adonais....He is made one with Nature. There is heardHis voice in all her music, from the moanOf thunder to the song of night's sweet bird....He is a portion of the lovelinessWhich once he made more lovely. He doth bearHis part, while the One Spirit's plastic stressSweeps through the dull dense world, compelling thereAll new successions to the forms they wear....The inheritors of unfulfilled renownRose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,Far in the unapparent. ChattertonRose pale, his solemn agony had notYet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought,And as he fell, and as he lived and loved,Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot,Arose . . . . . . . . . . . .And many more, whose names on earth are dark,But whose transmitted effluence cannot dieSo long as fire outlives the parent spark,Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.'Thou art become as one of us,' they cry;'It was for thee yon kingless sphere has longSwung blind in unascended majesty,Silent alone amid an heaven of song.Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!'"[3]
We search the history of literature in vain for a parallel to this elegy. It is instant transfiguration after death—a poetic transfiguration of a purely naturalistic and purely human kind. To Shelley, Keats's true apotheosis was what he expresses in the words: "He is made one with Nature."