1The material of these pages belongs in part to the course mentioned on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905. They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the prevalence of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the long poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the false impression that the writer’s admiration for those poems is lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the Romantic Revival of Wordsworth’s time.2This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is the point.3Table-talk, Feb. 16, 1833.4The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this balance. Such, for instance, areThe Eve of St. Agnes,Lamia,Michael,The Vision of Judgment, some of Crabbe’s tales. It does not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the day in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of the time.5See p. 110.6Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.7This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with which many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur’s speech in that Idyll; but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies in the plan of the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far as Arthur is merely the blameless king and representative of Conscience, the attitude of a judge which he assumes in the speech is appropriate, and, again, Lancelot’s treachery to him is intelligible and, however wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience could never be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or shock us by uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the other hand, these utterances are appropriate, and if all along Lancelot and Guinevere have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold and wholly absorbed in his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not merely wrongly but abominably, and as the Lancelot of theIdyllscould not have behaved. The truth is that Tennyson’s design requires Arthur to be at once perfectly ideal and completely human. And this is not imaginable.Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I think the depreciation of Tennyson’s genius now somewhat prevalent a mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.8It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge, and forty years older than Byron and Shelley.9The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as an exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of the poetry of the time, and of Shelley’s poetry in particular, and must supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him to observe that Godwin’s formulas are called sublime as well as ridiculous.Political Justicewould never have fascinated such young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, unless a great truth had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth can be felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on its misapprehension.10The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that this is so in a lyric, and then it is assumed that it isnotso in a narrative or drama. But the assumption is false. At first sight we may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem than of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the whole poetic content of theDivine Comedyin a form not its own than you can the content of a song.The theory is connected in some minds with the view that ‘music is the true type or measure of perfected art.’ That view again rests on the idea that ‘it is the art of music which most completely realises [the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and matter,’ and that accordingly ‘the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises’ (Pater,The Renaissance, pp. 144, 145). I have by implication expressed dissent from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its truth is granted, what follows is that poetry should endeavourin its own wayto achieve that perfect identification; but it does not in the least follow that it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as nearly as possible to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so far as I see) imply it. But others have.
1The material of these pages belongs in part to the course mentioned on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905. They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the prevalence of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the long poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the false impression that the writer’s admiration for those poems is lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the Romantic Revival of Wordsworth’s time.
2This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is the point.
3Table-talk, Feb. 16, 1833.
4The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this balance. Such, for instance, areThe Eve of St. Agnes,Lamia,Michael,The Vision of Judgment, some of Crabbe’s tales. It does not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the day in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of the time.
5See p. 110.
6Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.
7This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with which many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur’s speech in that Idyll; but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies in the plan of the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far as Arthur is merely the blameless king and representative of Conscience, the attitude of a judge which he assumes in the speech is appropriate, and, again, Lancelot’s treachery to him is intelligible and, however wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience could never be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or shock us by uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the other hand, these utterances are appropriate, and if all along Lancelot and Guinevere have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold and wholly absorbed in his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not merely wrongly but abominably, and as the Lancelot of theIdyllscould not have behaved. The truth is that Tennyson’s design requires Arthur to be at once perfectly ideal and completely human. And this is not imaginable.
Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I think the depreciation of Tennyson’s genius now somewhat prevalent a mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.
8It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge, and forty years older than Byron and Shelley.
9The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as an exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of the poetry of the time, and of Shelley’s poetry in particular, and must supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him to observe that Godwin’s formulas are called sublime as well as ridiculous.Political Justicewould never have fascinated such young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, unless a great truth had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth can be felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on its misapprehension.
10The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that this is so in a lyric, and then it is assumed that it isnotso in a narrative or drama. But the assumption is false. At first sight we may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem than of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the whole poetic content of theDivine Comedyin a form not its own than you can the content of a song.
The theory is connected in some minds with the view that ‘music is the true type or measure of perfected art.’ That view again rests on the idea that ‘it is the art of music which most completely realises [the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and matter,’ and that accordingly ‘the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises’ (Pater,The Renaissance, pp. 144, 145). I have by implication expressed dissent from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its truth is granted, what follows is that poetry should endeavourin its own wayto achieve that perfect identification; but it does not in the least follow that it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as nearly as possible to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so far as I see) imply it. But others have.
THE LETTERS OF KEATS
THE LETTERS OF KEATS
Thereis no lack of good criticism on the poetry of Keats. It has been discussed by the leading poets of three generations or semi-generations; by Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much more fully, by Mr. Bridges. Lord Houghton’sLife and Lettersand Mr. Colvin’s biography both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the poems. And (to go no further) they have lately been edited by Mr. de Sélincourt in a volume invaluable to students of Keats, and reflecting honour not only on its author but on the Oxford School of English, to the strength of which he has contributed so much. My principal object is to consider Keats’s attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas set forth in previous lectures on Shelley’s views and on the age of Wordsworth. But I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to any reader of the poems who may need it, to study the letters of Keats. If I may judge from my experience, such readers are still far too numerous; and I am sure that no one already familiar with the letters will be sorry to listen to quotations from them.1
The best of Keats’s poems, of course, can be fully appreciated without extraneous help; but the letters throw light on all, and they are almost necessary to the understanding ofEndymionand of some of the earlier or contemporaneous pieces. They clearly reveal those changes in his mind and temper which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever of the fictions once current of a puny Keats who was ‘snuffed out by an article,’ a sensual Keats who found his ideal in claret and ‘slippery blisses,’ and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his country and his fellow-creatures. Written in his last four years by a man who died at twenty-five, they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity and his faults, but they disclose a nature and character which command on the whole not less respect than affection, and they show not a little of that general intellectual power which rarely fails to accompany poetic genius.
Of Keats’s character, as the letters manifest it, Arnold has written. While speaking plainly and decidedly of the weakness visible in those to Miss Brawne, Arnold brought together the evidence which proves that Keats ‘had flint and iron in him,’ ‘had virtue in the true and large sense of the word.’ And he selected passages, too, which illustrate the ‘admirable wisdom and temper’ and the ‘strength and clearness of judgment’ shown by Keats, alike in matters of friendship and in his criticisms of his own productions, of the public, and of the literary circles,—the ‘jabberers about pictures and books,’ as Keats in a bitter mood once called them. We may notice, in addition, two characteristics. In spite of occasional despondency, and of feelings of awe at the magnitude of his ambition, Keats, it is tolerably plain from these letters, had a clear and habitual consciousness of his genius. He never dreamed of being a minor poet. He knew that he was a poet; sometimes he hoped to be a great one. I rememberno sign that he felt himself the inferior of any living poet except Wordsworth. How he thought of Byron, whom in boyhood he had admired, is obvious. When Shelley wrote, hinting a criticism, but referring to himself as excelled by Keats in genius, he returned the criticism without the compliment. His few references to Coleridge are critical, and his amusing description of Coleridge’s talk is not more reverential than Carlyle’s. Something, indeed, of the native pugnacity which his friends ascribe to him seems to show itself in his allusions to contemporaries, including even Wordsworth. Yet with all this, and with all his pride and his desire of fame, no letters extant breathe a more simple and natural modesty than these; and from end to end they exhibit hardly a trace, if any trace, either of the irritable vanity attributed to poets or of the sublime egotism of Milton and Wordsworth. He was of Shakespeare’s tribe.
The other trait that I wish to refer to appears in a particular series of letters—sometimes mere notes—scattered through the collection. They are addressed to Keats’s school-girl sister Fanny, who was eight years younger than he, and who died in the same year as Browning.2Keats, as we see him in 1817 and 1818, in the first half of Mr. Colvin’s collection, was absorbed by an enthusiasm and ambition which his sister was too young to understand. During his last two years he was, besides, passionately and miserably in love, and, latterly, ill and threatened with death. His soul was full of bitterness. He shrank into himself, avoided society, and rarely sought even intimate friends. Yet, until he left England, he never ceased to visit his sister when he could; and, when he could not, he continued to write letters to her, full of amusing nonsense, full of brotherly care for her,and of excellent advice offered as by an equal who happened to be her senior; letters quite free from thoughts of himself, and from the forced gaiety and the resentment against fate which in parts of his later correspondence with others betray his suffering. These letters to his sister are, in one sense, the least remarkable in the collection, yet it would lose much by their omission. They tell us next to nothing of his genius, but as we come upon them the light in our picture of him, if it had grown for a moment hard or troubled, becomes once more soft and bright.
To turn (with apologies for the distinction) from the character to the mind of Keats, if the reader has formed a notion of him as a youth with a genius for poetry and an exclusive interest in poetry, but otherwise not intellectually remarkable, this error will soon be dispelled by the letters. With Keats, no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were passions more glowing than we have reason to attribute to his contemporaries at the same time of life.3The letters remind us also that, compared with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the University wits. They show, too—the earlier far more than the later—in certain literary mannerisms the unwholesome influence of Leigh Hunt and his circle. But everywhere we feel in them the presence of an intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open, daring, rich, and strong; exceedingly poetic and romantic, yet observant, acute, humorous, and sensible; intense without narrowness, and quite as variousboth in its interests and its capacities as the mind of Wordsworth or of Shelley. Fundamentally, and in spite of abundant high spirits and a love of nonsense, the mind of Keats was very serious and thoughtful. It was original, and not more imitative than an original mind should be in youth; an intelligence which now startles by flashes of sudden beauty, and now is seen struggling with new and deep thoughts, which labour into shape, with scanty aid from theories, out of personal experience. In quality—and I speak of nothing else—the mind of Shakespeare at three and twenty may not have been very different.
Short extracts can give but little idea of all this; but they may at least illustrate the variety of Keats’s mind, and the passages I am about to read have been chosen mainly with this intention, and not because the majority are among the most striking that might be found. The earliest belong to the September of 1817, and I take them partly for their local interest. Keats spent most of that month here in Oxford, staying in the Magdalen Hall of those days with his friend Bailey, a man whose gentle and disinterested character he warmly admired. ‘We lead,’ he writes to his sister, ‘very industrious lives—he in general studies, and I in proceeding at a pretty good pace with a Poem which I hope you will see early in the next year.’ It wasEndymion: he wrote, it seems, the whole of the Third Book in Bailey’s rooms. Unluckily the hero in that Book is wandering at the bottom of the sea; but even in those regions, as Keats imagined them, a diligent student may perhaps find some traces of Oxford. In the letters we hear of towers and quadrangles, cloisters and groves; of the deer in Magdalen Park; and how
The mouldering arch,Shaded o’er by a larch,Lives next door to Wilson the hosier
The mouldering arch,
Shaded o’er by a larch,
Lives next door to Wilson the hosier
(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of the clear streams—‘more clear streams than ever I saw together.’ ‘I take a walk by the side of one of them every evening.’ ‘For these last five or six days,’ he writes to Reynolds, ‘we have had regularly a boat on the Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eyelashes. We sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become naturalised river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened “Reynolds’s Cove,” in which we have read Wordsworth and talked as may be.’ Of those talks over Wordsworth with the grave religious Bailey came perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the best-known of all the letters (it is too well known to quote), thoughts which take their origin from theLines written near Tintern Abbey.4
About a year after this, Keats went with his friend Brown on a walking-tour to the Highlands; and I will quote two passages from the letters written during this tour, for the sake of the contrast they exhibit between the two strains in Keats’s mind. The first is the later. The letter is dated ‘Cairn-something July 17th’:
Steam-boats on Loch Lomond, and Barouches on its sides, take a little from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I. The banks of the Clyde are extremely beautiful—the north end of Loch Lomond grand in excess—the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part is precious good—the evening was beautiful—nothing could surpass our fortune in the weather. Yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry Barges with trumpets and banners, just to die away before me into that blue place among the mountains.5
Steam-boats on Loch Lomond, and Barouches on its sides, take a little from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I. The banks of the Clyde are extremely beautiful—the north end of Loch Lomond grand in excess—the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part is precious good—the evening was beautiful—nothing could surpass our fortune in the weather. Yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry Barges with trumpets and banners, just to die away before me into that blue place among the mountains.5
Keats all over! Yes; but so is this, which was written a fortnight earlier from Carlisle:
After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in Cumberland, where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-schoolholden at the Tun. It was indeed ‘no new cotillion fresh from France.’ No, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go’d it, and twirl’d it and whirl’d it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like mad. The difference between our country dances and these Scottish figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o’ tea and beating up a batter-pudding. I was extremely gratified to think that, if I had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which I could not possibly enter. I hope I shall not return without having got the Highland fling. There was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.6
After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in Cumberland, where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-schoolholden at the Tun. It was indeed ‘no new cotillion fresh from France.’ No, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go’d it, and twirl’d it and whirl’d it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like mad. The difference between our country dances and these Scottish figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o’ tea and beating up a batter-pudding. I was extremely gratified to think that, if I had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which I could not possibly enter. I hope I shall not return without having got the Highland fling. There was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.6
There is little enough here of the young poet who believes himself to care for nothing but ‘Art’; and as little of the theoretic cosmopolitanism of some of Keats’s friends.
Some three months later we find Keats writing from London to his brother and his sister-in-law in America; and he tells them of a young lady from India whom he has just met:
She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich Eastern look. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess.... You will by this time think I am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am not—she kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart’s might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of whose lips is to me a banquet.... I believe, though, she has faults—the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way: for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,—the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian, hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child’s cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings.7
She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich Eastern look. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess.... You will by this time think I am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am not—she kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart’s might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of whose lips is to me a banquet.... I believe, though, she has faults—the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way: for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,—the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian, hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child’s cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings.7
I do not read this passage merely for its biographical interest, but a word may be venturedon that. The lady was not Miss Brawne; but less than a month later, on meeting Miss Brawne, he immediately became her slave. When we observe the fact, and consider how very unlike the words I have quoted are to anything in Keats’s previous letters, we can hardly help suspecting that he was at this time in a peculiar condition and ripe for his fate. Then we remember that he had lately returned from his Scotch tour, which was broken off because the Inverness doctor used the most menacing language about the state of his throat; and further, that he was now, in the late autumn, nursing his brother Tom, who died of consumption before the year was out. And an idea suggests itself which, if exceedingly prosaic, has yet some comfort in it. How often have readers of Keats’s life cried out that, if only he had never met Miss Brawne, he might have lived and prospered! Does it not seem at least as probable that, if Miss Brawne had never existed, what happened would still have happened, and even that the fever of passion which helped to destroy him was itself a token of incipient disease?
I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a passage on politics. The friends of Keats were, for the most part, advanced liberals. His own sympathies went that way. A number of lines in the poems of his boyhood show this, and so do many remarks in the letters. And his sympathies were not mere sentiments. ‘I hope sincerely,’ he wrote in September, 1819, ‘I shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the question before I die’; and a few days later, when he tells Brown of his wish to act instead of dreaming, and to work for his livelihood, composing deliberate poems only when he can afford to, he says that he will write as a journalist for whoever will pay him, but he makes it a condition that he is to write ‘on the liberal side of the question.’ It is a mistake tosuppose that he had no political interests. But he cared nothing for the mere quarrels of Whig and Tory; a ‘Radical’ was for him the type of an ‘obstinate and heady’ man; and the perfectibility theories of friends like Shelley and Dilke slipped from his mind like water from a duck’s back. We have seen the concrete shape his patriotism took. He always saw ideas embodied, and was ‘convinced that small causes make great alterations.’ I could easily find passages more characteristic than the following; but it is short, it shows that Keats thought for himself, and it has a curious interest just now (1905):8
Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause of Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of Liberty than anyone else could have done. Not that the divine right gentlemen have done, or intend to do, any good. No, they have taken a lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done, without any of the good. The worst thing he has done is that he has taught them how to organise their monstrous armies. The Emperor Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian, creating two Czars beside himself, and continuing the supreme monarch of the whole. Should he do this, and they for a series of years keep peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to China. I think it a very likely thing that China itself may fall; Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its horns against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France.
Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause of Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of Liberty than anyone else could have done. Not that the divine right gentlemen have done, or intend to do, any good. No, they have taken a lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done, without any of the good. The worst thing he has done is that he has taught them how to organise their monstrous armies. The Emperor Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian, creating two Czars beside himself, and continuing the supreme monarch of the whole. Should he do this, and they for a series of years keep peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to China. I think it a very likely thing that China itself may fall; Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its horns against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France.
Still aiming chiefly to show the variety there is in these letters, I may take next one or two passages which have an interest also from their bearing on Keats’s poems. Here we have, for example, the unmistakable origin of theOde on Indolence:
This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless. I long after a stanza or two of Thomson’sCastle of Indolence. My passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies, I should call itlanguor, but as I am* I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement, and pain no unbearable power.9Neither Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me. They seem rather like figures on a Greek vase—a man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the mind.10* Especially as I have a black eye.
This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless. I long after a stanza or two of Thomson’sCastle of Indolence. My passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies, I should call itlanguor, but as I am* I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement, and pain no unbearable power.9Neither Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me. They seem rather like figures on a Greek vase—a man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the mind.10
* Especially as I have a black eye.
‘This is the only happiness’—the sentence will surprise no one who has even dipped into Keats’s letters. It expresses a settled conviction. Happiness, he feels, belongs only to childhood and early youth. A young man thinks he can keep it, but a little experience shows him he must do without it. The mere growth of the mind, if nothing else, is fatal to it. To think is to be full of sorrow, because it is to realise the sorrow of the world and to feel the burden of the mystery. ‘Health and spirits,’ he says, ‘can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man.’11Shelley might be speaking. ‘To see an entirely disinterested girl quite happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It depends upon a thousand circumstances. On my word it is extraordinary. Women must want Imagination, and they may thank God for it: and so may we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of crime.’12These passages, taken alone, even when we observe his qualifications, would give a false impression of Keats; but they supply a curious commentary on the legend of the sensuous Keats. We may connect with them his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of such ‘dreaming’ poets as himself) to men of action.
In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several recently written poems, andamong them the balladLa Belle Dame Sans Merci. He copies it without a word of introduction. He could not say, ‘Here is the record of my love and my despair,’ for on this one subject he never opened his heart to his brother. But when he has finished the copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza (afterwards altered):
She took me to her elfin grot,And there she wept and sighed full sore,And there I shut her wild wild eyesWith kisses four.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
‘Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said “score” without hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the Imagination, as the Critics say, with Judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three and a half apiece—a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.’ This is not very like the comments of Wordsworth on his best poems, but I dare say the author ofHamletmade such jests about it. Is it not strange, let me add, to think that Keats and his friends were probably unconscious of the extraordinary merit of this poem? It was not published with the Odes in the volume of 1820.
I will quote, finally, three passages to illustrate in different ways Keats’s insight into human nature. It appears, on the whole, more decidedly in the letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope of ultimate success in dramatic poetry was well founded. The first is a piece of ‘nonsense,’ rattled off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents, and worth quoting only for its last sentence. He has been describing ‘three wittypeople, all distinct in their excellence’; and he goes on:
I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence—A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first, I forbear the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel, the second ditch-water, the third is spilt—he ought to be wiped up.
I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence—A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first, I forbear the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel, the second ditch-water, the third is spilt—he ought to be wiped up.
C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often we have met and still shall meet him! Shakespeare, I think, would gladly have fathered the phrase that describes him, and the words that follow are not much out of the tune of Falstaff: ‘C, they say, is not his mother’s true child, but she bought him of the man who cries, Young lambs to sell.’13
In the second passage Keats is describing one of his friends:
Dilke is a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. The genus is not scarce in population: all the stubborn arguers you meet are of the same brood. They never begin on a subject they have not pre-resolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you, and if you turn the point, still they think you wrong. Dilke will never come at a truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a Godwin Methodist.14
Dilke is a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. The genus is not scarce in population: all the stubborn arguers you meet are of the same brood. They never begin on a subject they have not pre-resolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you, and if you turn the point, still they think you wrong. Dilke will never come at a truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a Godwin Methodist.14
These lines illustrate the instinctive feeling of Keats that it is essential to the growth of the poetic mind to preserve its natural receptiveness and to welcome all the influences that stream in upon it. They illustrate also his dislike of the fixed theories held and preached by some members of his circle. We shall have to consider later the meaning of his occasional outbreaks against ‘thought,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘philosophy.’ It is important not to bemisled by them, and not to forget the frequent expressions of his feeling that what he lacks and must strive to gain is this very ‘knowledge’ and ‘philosophy.’ Here I will only observe that his polemics against them, though coloured by his temperament, coincide to a large extent with Wordsworth’s dislike of ‘a reasoning self-sufficing thing,’ his depreciation of mere book-knowledge, and his praise of a wise passiveness. And, further, what he objects to here is not the pursuit of truth, it is the ‘Methodism,’ the stubborn argument, and the habit of bringing to the argument and maintaining throughout it a ready-made theory. He offers his own thoughts and speculations freely enough to Bailey and to his brother—men willing to probe with him any serious idea—but not to Dilke. It is clear that he neither liked nor rated high the confident assertions and negations of Shelley and his other Godwinian friends and acquaintances. Probably from his ignorance of theories he felt at a disadvantage in talking with them. But he did not dismiss their theories as something of no interest to a poet. He thought about them, convinced himself that they were fundamentally unsound, and himself philosophises in criticising them. The following passage, from a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, is the nearest approach to be found in his writings to a theory of the world, a theology as he jestingly calls it; and although it is long, I make no apology for quoting it. He has been reading, he says, Robertson’sHistory of Americaand Voltaire’sSiècle de Louis XIV., and he observes that, though the two civilisations described are so different, the case of the great body of the people is equally lamentable in both. And he goes on thus:
The whole appears to resolve into this—that man is originally a poor forked creature, subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodationsand comforts, at each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances—he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom-appearing Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme, but what must it end in? Death—and who could in such a case bear with death? The whole troubles of life, which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of a being who, instead of hailing its approach, would leave this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will not admit of it—the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa—whirlpools and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may arrive at earthly happiness. The point at which man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For instance, suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances—they are as native to the world as itself. No more can man be happy in spite [?], the worldly elements will prey upon his nature.The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is ‘a vale of tears,’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven. What a little circumscribed straitened notion! Call the world if you please ‘The vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it to be immortal, which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say ‘Soul-making’—Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence.15There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure; in short they are God. How then are souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion—or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series ofyears. These three materials are theIntelligence, thehuman heart(as distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the World or elemental space suited for the proper action ofMindandHearton each other for the purpose of forming theSoulorIntelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—and yet I think I perceive it. That you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call theworlda School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call thehuman heartthe horn-book read in that School. And I will call theChild able to read, theSoulmade from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, it is the Mind’s Bible, it is the mind’s experience, it is the text from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the sparks of his own essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not offend our reason and humanity.16
The whole appears to resolve into this—that man is originally a poor forked creature, subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodationsand comforts, at each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances—he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom-appearing Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme, but what must it end in? Death—and who could in such a case bear with death? The whole troubles of life, which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of a being who, instead of hailing its approach, would leave this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will not admit of it—the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa—whirlpools and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may arrive at earthly happiness. The point at which man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For instance, suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances—they are as native to the world as itself. No more can man be happy in spite [?], the worldly elements will prey upon his nature.
The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is ‘a vale of tears,’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven. What a little circumscribed straitened notion! Call the world if you please ‘The vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it to be immortal, which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say ‘Soul-making’—Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence.15There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure; in short they are God. How then are souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion—or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series ofyears. These three materials are theIntelligence, thehuman heart(as distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the World or elemental space suited for the proper action ofMindandHearton each other for the purpose of forming theSoulorIntelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—and yet I think I perceive it. That you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call theworlda School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call thehuman heartthe horn-book read in that School. And I will call theChild able to read, theSoulmade from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, it is the Mind’s Bible, it is the mind’s experience, it is the text from which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the sparks of his own essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not offend our reason and humanity.16
Surely, when Keats’s education is considered, this, with all its crudity, is not a little remarkable. It would not be easy to find anything written at the same age by another poet of the time which shows more openness of mind, more knowledge of human nature, or more original power of thought.
About a fortnight after Keats wrote that description of A, B, and C, he received what he recognised at once for his death-warrant. He had yet fourteen months to endure, but at this point the development of his mind was arrested. During the three preceding years it had been very rapid, and is easy to trace; and it is all the more interesting because, in spite of its continuity, we are aware of a decided difference between the Keats of the earlier letters and the Keats of the later. The tour in Scotland in the summer of 1818 may be taken with sufficient accuracy as a dividing-line. The earlier Keats is the youth who had written theSonnet on firstlooking into Chapman’s Homer, andSleep and Poetry, and who was writingEndymion. He is thoughtful, often grave, sometimes despondent; but he is full of the enthusiasm of beauty, and of the joy and fear, the hope and the awe, that accompanied the sense of poetic power. He is the poet who looked, we are told, as though he had been gazing on some glorious sight; whose eyes shone and whose face worked with pleasure as he walked in the fields about Hampstead; who is described watching with rapture the billowing of the wind through the trees and over meadow-grasses and corn, and looking sometimes like a young eagle and sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest depths. This is the Keats who wrote ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’; who found ‘the Religion of Joy’ in the monuments of the Greek spirit, in sculpture and vases, and mere translations and mere handbooks of mythology; who never ceased, he said, to wonder at all that incarnate delight, and would point out to Severn how essentially modern, how imperishable, the Greek spirit is—a joy for ever.
Yet, as we have seen already, he was aware, and we find him becoming more and more aware, that joy is not the only word. He had not read for nothing Wordsworth’s great Ode, andTintern Abbey, and theExcursion. We know it fromEndymion, and the letter about the ‘burden of the mystery’ was written before the tour in Scotland. But after this we feel a more decided change, doubtless hastened by outward events. The Blackwood and Quarterly reviews ofEndymionappeared—reviews not less inexcusable because we understand their origin. Then came his brother’s death. A few weeks later he met Miss Brawne. Henceforth his youth has vanished. There are traces of morbid feeling in the change, painful traces; but they are connected, I think, solely with his passion. Hisbrother’s death deepened his sympathies. The reviews, so long as health remained to him, did him nothing but good. He rated them at their true value, but they gave him a salutary shock. They quickened his perception, already growing keen, of the weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt’s verse and his own. Through them he saw a false but useful picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into self-worship by foolish friends, and posturing as a man of genius. He kept his faith in his genius, but he felt that he must prove it. He became impatient of dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of fierceness. He turns against his old self harshly. Some of his friends, he says, think he has lost his old poetic ardour, and perhaps they are right. He speaks slightingly of wonders, even of scenery: the human heart is something finer,—not its dreams, but its actions and its anguish. His gaze is as intent as ever,—more intent; but the glory he would see walks in a fiery furnace, and to see it he must think and learn. He is young, he says, writing at random, straining his eyes at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness. He knows at times the ‘agony’ of ignorance. In one year he writes six or seven of the best poems in the language, but he is little satisfied. ‘Thus far,’ he says, ‘I have a consciousness of having been pretty dull and heavy, both in subject and phrase.’ Two months later he ends a note to Haydon with the words, ‘I am afraid I shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone.’ And so it was.
It is important to remember this change in Keats in considering his ideas about poetry; but we have first to look at them in a more general way. Many of the most interesting occur in detached remarks or aphorisms, and these I must pass by. The others I intended at first to deal within connection with Shelley’s view of poetry; and, although that plan proved to be too large for a single lecture, I do not wish altogether to abandon it, because in the extracts which I have been reading the difference between the minds of the two poets has already appeared, and because it re-appears both in their poetic practice and in their opinions about their art. Indeed, with so much difference, it might be thought unlikely that these opinions would show also a marked resemblance. For Keats, it may be said, was of all the great poets then alive the one least affected by the spirit of the time, or by that ‘revolutionary’ atmosphere of which I spoke in a previous lecture. He did not concern himself, we may be told, with the progress of humanity, or with Manchester Massacres or risings in Naples. He cared nothing for theories, abstractions, or ideals. He worshipped Beauty, not Liberty; and the beauty he worshipped was not ‘intellectual,’ but visible, audible, tangible. ‘O for a life of sensations,’ he cried, ‘rather than of thoughts.’ He was an artist, intent upon fashioning his material until the outward sensible form is perfectly expressive and delightful. In all this he was at the opposite pole to Shelley; and he himself felt it. He refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might keep his own unfettered scope; and he never speaks of Shelley cordially. He told him, too, that he might be more of an artist and load every rift of his subject with ore; and that, while many people regard the purpose of a work as the God, and the poetry as the Mammon, an artist must serve Mammon. And his practice, like his opinions, proves that, both in his strength and his limitations, he belongs to quite a different type.
In such a plea there would certainly be much truth; and yet it is notthetruth, for it ignores other truths which must somehow be combined with it. There are great differences between the two poets, but then in Keats himself there are contendingstrains. Along with the differences, too, we find very close affinities. And these affinities with Shelley also show that Keats was deeply influenced by the spirit of his time. Let me illustrate these statements.
The poet who cried, ‘O for a life of sensations,’ was consoled, as his life withered away, by the remembrance that he ‘had loved the principle of beauty in all things.’ And this is not a chance expression; it repeats, for instance, a phrase used two years before, ‘the mighty abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things.’ If Shelley had used this language, it would be taken to prove his love of abstractions. How does it differ from the language of theHymn to Intellectual Beauty?17
Again, we noticed in a previous lecture the likeness betweenAlastorandEndymion, each the first poem of any length in which the writer’s genius decisively declared itself. Both tell the story of a young poet; of a dream in which his ideal appears in human form, and he knows the rapture of union with it; of the passion thus enkindled, and the search for its complete satisfaction. We may prefer to readEndymionsimply as we readIsabella; but the question here is not of our preferences. If we examine the poem without regard to them, we shall be unable to doubt that to some extent the story symbolises or allegorises this pursuit of the principle of beauty by the poetic soul. This is one of the causes of its failure as a narrative. Keats had not in himself the experience required by parts of his design, and hence in them he had to write from mereimagination. And the poem, besides, shows in a flagrant degree the defect felt here and there inPrometheus Unbound. If we wish to read it as the author meant it, we must ask for the significance of the figures, events, and actions. Yet it is clear that not all of them are intended to have this further significance, and we are perplexed by the question where, and how far, we are to look for it.18
Take, again, some of the most famous of the lyrical poems. Is it true that Keats was untroubled by that sense of contrast between ideal and real which haunted Shelley and was so characteristic of the time? So far is this from being the case that a critic might more plausibly object to his monotonous insistence on that contrast. Probably the best-known lyrics of the two poets are the stanzasTo a Skylarkand theOde to a Nightingale. Well, if we summarise prosaically the subject of the one poem we have summarised that of the other. ‘Our human life is all unrest and sorrow, an oscillation between longing and satiety, a looking before and after. We are aware of a perfection that we cannot attain, and that leaves us dissatisfied by everything attainable. And we die, and do not understand death. But the bird is beyond this division and dissonance; it attains the ideal;
Das Unzulängliche,Hier wird’s Ereigniss.’
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird’s Ereigniss.’
This is the burden of both poems. In style, metre, tone, atmosphere, they are far apart; the ‘idea’ is identical. And what else is the idea of theOdeon a Grecian Urn, where a moment, arrested in its ideality by art and made eternal, is opposed to the change and decay of reality? And what else is the idea of the playful linesTo Fancy,—Fancy who brings together the joys which in life are parted by distances of time and place, and who holds in sure possession what life wins only to lose? Even a poem so pictorial and narrative and free from symbolism as theThe Eve of St. Agnesrests on the same feeling. The contrast, so exquisitely imagined and conveyed, between the cold, the storm, the old age, the empty pleasure and noisy enmity of the world outside Madeline’s chamber, and the glow, the hush, the rich and dreamy bliss within it, is in effect the contrast which inspired theOde to a Nightingale.
It would be easy to pursue this subject. It would be easy, too, to show that Keats was far from indifferent to the ‘progress of humanity.’ He conceived it in his own way, but it is as much the theme ofHyperionas ofPrometheus Unbound. We are concerned however here not with the interpretation of his poems, but with his view of poetry, and especially with certain real or apparent inconsistencies in it. For in the letters he now praises ‘sensation’ and decries thought or knowledge, and now cries out for ‘knowledge’ as his greatest need; in one place declares that an artist must have self-concentration, perhaps selfishness, and in others insists that what he desires is to be of use to his fellow-men. We shall gain light on these matters and on his relation to Shelley if I try to reduce his general view to a precise and prosaic form.
That which the poet seeks is Beauty. Beauty is a ‘principle’; it is One. All things beautiful manifest it, and so far therefore are one and the same. This idea of the unity of all beauty comes out in many crucial passages in the poems and letters. I take a single example. The goddess CynthiainEndymionis the Principle of Beauty. In this story she is also identified with the Moon. Accordingly the hero, gazing at the moon, declares that in all that he ever loved he lovedher:
thou wast the deep glen—Thou wast the mountain-top—the sage’s pen—The poet’s harp—the voice of friends—the sun;Thou wast the river—thou wast glory won;Thou wast my clarion’s blast—thou wast my steed—My goblet full of wine—my topmost deed:—Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!O what a wild and harmonised tuneMy spirit struck from all the beautiful!
thou wast the deep glen—
Thou wast the mountain-top—the sage’s pen—
The poet’s harp—the voice of friends—the sun;
Thou wast the river—thou wast glory won;
Thou wast my clarion’s blast—thou wast my steed—
My goblet full of wine—my topmost deed:—
Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!
O what a wild and harmonised tune
My spirit struck from all the beautiful!
When he says this he does not yet understand that the Moon and his strange visitant are one; he thinks they are rivals. So later, when he loves the Indian maid, and is in despair because he fancies himself therefore false to his goddess, he is in error; for she is only his goddess veiled, the shaded half of the moon.
Still the mountain-top and the voice of friends differ. Indeed, the one Beauty is infinitely various. But its manifestations, for Keats, tend to fall into two main classes. On the one hand there is the kind of beauty that comes easily and is all sweetness and pleasure. In receiving it we seem to suppress nothing in our nature. Though it is not merely sensuous, for the Principle of Beauty is in it, it speaks to sense and delights us. It is ‘luxury.’ But the other kind is won through thought, and also through pain. And this second and more difficult kind is also the higher, the fuller, the nearer to the Principle. That it is won through pain is doubly true. First, because the poet cannot reach it unless he consents to suffer painful sympathies, which disturb his enjoyment of the simpler and sweeter beauty, and may even seem to lead him away from beauty altogether. Thus Endymion can attain union with his goddess only by leaving the green hill-sides where he met her first, and by wanderingunhappily in cold moonless regions inside the earth and under the sea. Here he feels for the woes of other lovers, and to help them undertakes tasks which seem to interrupt his search for Cynthia. Returning to earth he becomes enamoured of a maiden devoted to sorrow, and gains his goddess just when he thinks he has resigned her. The highest beauty, then, is reached through the poet’s pain; and, in the second place, it has pain in itself, or at least appears in objects that are painful. In his early poemSleep and PoetryKeats asks himself the question,
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
And he answers:
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,Where I may find the agonies, the strifeOf human hearts.
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
He felt himself as yet unequal to this task. He never became equal to it, but the idea was realised to some extent inIsabellaandLamiaandHyperion. The first two of these are tales of passion, ‘agony,’ and death. The third, obviously, is on one side a story of ‘strife.’
Such, in its bare outline, is Keats’s habitual view of poetry. What, then, are the points where, in spite of its evident resemblance to Shelley’s, we feel a marked difference? The most important seem to be two. In the first place Keats lays far the heavier stress on the idea that beauty is manifested in suffering and conflict. The idea itself is to be found in Shelley, but (as we saw in another lecture) it is not congenial to him; it appears almost incidentally and is stated half-heartedly; and of the further idea that beauty is not only manifested in this sphere, but is there manifested most fully, we find, I believe, no trace. And this was inevitable; for the whole tendency of Shelley’s mind was to regard suffering and conflict with mere distress and horror as something senselessand purely evil, and to look on the world as naturally a paradise entirely free from them, but ruined by an inexplicable failure on the part of man. To this world of woe his Intellectual Beauty does not really belong; it appears there only in flashes; its true home is a place where no contradictions, not even reconciled contradictions, exist. The idealism of Keats is much more concrete. He has no belief either in this natural paradise or in ‘Godwinian perfectibility.’ Pain and conflict have a meaning to him. Without them souls could not be made; and the business of the world, he conjectures, is the making of souls. They are not therefore simply obstacles to the ideal. On the contrary, in this world it manifests itself most fully in and through them. For ‘scenery is fine, but human nature is finer’;19and the passions and actions of man are finer than his enjoyments and dreams. In the same way, the conflict inHyperionis not one between light and darkness, the ideal and mere might, as inPrometheus Unbound. The Titans must yield to the Olympians because, in a word, they are less beautiful, and
’tis the eternal lawThat first in beauty should be first in might.
’tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.
But the Titans, though less beautiful,arebeautiful; it is one and the same ‘principle’ that manifests itself in them and more fully in their victors. Their defeat therefore is not, in the end, defeat, but the completion of their own being. This, it seems probable, the hero inHyperionwould have come to recognise, so that the poem, at least so far as he is concerned, would have ended with a reconciliation born of strife.
Man is ‘finer,’ Keats says, and the Titans must submit because they are less ‘beautiful.’ Thesecond point of difference between him and Shelley lies in this emphasis on beauty. The ideal with Shelley has many names, and one of them is beauty, but we hardly feel it to be the name nearest to his heart. The spirit of his worship is rather
that sustaining LoveWhich, through the web of being blindly woveBy man and beast and earth and air and sea,Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors ofThe fire for which all thirst;
that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst;
and ‘love’ is a word less distinctively aesthetic, if the term must be used, than ‘beauty.’ But the ideal for Keats is always and emphatically beauty or the ‘principle of beauty.’ When he sets the agonies and strifes of human hearts above a painless or luxurious loveliness, it is because they are the more beautiful. He would not have said that theMidsummer Night’s Dreamis superior toKing Learin beauty, but inferior to it in some other respect; it is inferior inbeautytoKing Lear. Let art only be ‘intense’ enough, let the poet only look hard enough and feel with force enough, so that the pain in his object is seen truly as the vesture of great passion and action, and all ‘disagreeables’ will ‘evaporate,’ and nothing will remain but beauty.20Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet of the great poet’s power of vision, he is still content when he can feel that a poem of his has intensity, has (as he says ofLamia) ‘that sort of fire in it that must take hold of people some way.’21And an earlier and inferior poem,Isabella, may show his mind. The mere subject is exceedingly painful, and Keats by no means suppresses the painful incidents and details; but the poem can hardly be called painful at all; for the final impression is that of beauty, almost as decidedly so as the final impression left by the blissful story ofSt. Agnes’ Eve. And this is most characteristic of Keats. Ifthe word beauty is used in his sense, and not in the common contracted sense, we may truly say that he was, and must have remained, more than any other poet of his time, a worshipper of Beauty.
When, then—to come to his apparent inconsistencies—he exalts sensation and decries thought or knowledge, what he is crying out for is beauty. The word ‘sensation,’ as a comparison of passages would readily show, has not in his letters its usual meaning. It stands forpoeticsensation, and, indeed, for much more. It is, to speak broadly, a name forallpoetic or imaginative experience; and the contents of the speech of Oceanus are, in kind, just as much ‘sensation’ as the eating of nectarines (which may well be poetic to the poetic). This is, I repeat, to speak broadly. For it is true that sometimes in the earlier letters we find Keats false to his better mind. Knowing that the more difficult beauty is the fuller, he is yet, to our great advantage, so entranced by the delight or glory of the easier, that he rebels against everything that would disturb its magic or trouble his ‘exquisite sense of the luxurious.’ And then he is tempted to see in thought only that vexatious questioning that ‘spoils the singing of the nightingale,’ and to forget that it is necessary to the fuller and more difficult kind of beauty. But these moods are occasional. He knew that there was something wilful and weak about them; and they gradually disappear. On the whole, the gist of his attitude to ‘thought’ or ‘philosophy’ may be stated as follows.
He was far from being indifferent to truth, or from considering it unimportant for poetry. In an early letter, when he criticises a poem of Wordsworth’s, he ventures to say that ‘if Wordsworth had thought a little deeper at that moment he would not have written it,’ and that ‘it is a kind of sketchy intellectual landscape, not a search after truth.’22He writes of a passage inEndymion: ‘The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that, when I wrote it, it was the regular stepping of Imagination towards a truth.’23And many passages show his conviction that for his progress towards this truth ‘thought,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘philosophy,’ are indispensable;24that he must submit to the toil and the solitude that they involve, just as he must undergo the pains of sympathy; that ‘there is but one way for him,’ and that this one ‘road lies through application, study, and thought.’25On the other hand he had, in the first place, as we saw, a strong feeling that a man, and especially a poet, must not be in a hurry to arrive at results, and must not shut up his mind in the box of his supposed results, but must be content with half-knowledge, and capable of ‘living in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ And, in the second place, a poet, he felt, will never be able to rest in thoughts and reasonings which do not also satisfy imagination and give a truth which is also beauty; and in so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they aremerethoughts and reasonings, they are no more than a means, though a necessary means, to an end, which end is beauty,—that beauty which is also truth. This alone is the poet’s end, and therefore his law. ‘With a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.’26Thought, knowledge, philosophy, if they fall short of this, are nothing but a ‘road’ to his goal. They bring matter for him to mould to his purpose of beauty; but he must not allow them to imposetheirpurpose on him, or to ask that it shall appear in his product. These statementsformulate Keats’s position more than he formulates it, but I believe that they represent it truly. He was led to it mainly by the poetic instinct in him, or because, while his mind had much general power, he was, more than Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley, a poet pure and simple.27
We can now deal more briefly with another apparent inconsistency. Keats says again and again that the poet must not live for himself, but must feel for others and try to help them; that ‘there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world’; that he is ambitious to do some good or to serve his country. Yet he writes to Shelley about theCenci: ‘There is only one part of it I am judge of—the poetry and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon. A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God. An artist must serve Mammon; he must have “self-concentration”—selfishness, perhaps.’28These are ungracious sentences, especially when we remember the letter to which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to Shelley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of having an ultra-poetic purpose, and whose Count Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination than any figure drawn by Keats. But it is ungracious too to criticise the irritability of a man condemned to death; and in any case these sentences are perfectly consistent with Keats’s expressed desire to do good. The poet is to do good; yes, but by being a poet. He is to have a purpose of doing good by his poetry; yes, but he is not toobtrude it in his poetry, or to show that he has a design upon us.29To make beauty ishisphilanthropy. He will not succeed in it best by making what is only in part beauty,—something like theExcursion, half poem and half lecture. He must be unselfish, no doubt, but perhaps by being selfish; by refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of helping by the desire to help in another way. This is the drift of Keats’s thought. If we remember what he means by ‘beauty’ and ‘poet,’ and how he distinguishes the poet from the ‘dreamer,’30we shall think it sound doctrine.
Keats was by nature both dreamer and poet, and his ambition was to become poet pure and simple. There was, in a further sense, a double strain in his nature. He had in him the poetic temper of his time, the ever-present sense of an infinite, the tendency to think of this as an ideal perfection manifesting itself in reality, and yet surpassing reality, and so capable of being contrasted with it. He was allied here especially to Wordsworth and to Shelley, by the former of whom he was greatly influenced. But there was also in him another tendency; and this, it would seem, was strengthening at the expense of the first, and would in time have dominated it. It was perhaps the deeper and more individual. It may be called the Shakespearean strain, and it works against any inclination to erect walls between ideal and real, or to magnify differences of grade into oppositions of kind. Keats had the impulse to interest himself in everything he saw or heard of, to be curious about a thing, accept it, identify himself with it, without first asking whether it is better or worse than another, or how far it isfrom the ideal principle. It is this impulse that speaks in the words, ‘If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel’;31and in the words, ‘When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess’; and in the feeling that she is fine, though Bishop Hooker is finer. It too is the source of his complaint that he has no personal identity, and of his description of the poetical character; ‘It has no self; it is everything and nothing.... It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation.32A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity. He is continually in, for, and filling some other body.’33That is not a description of Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley; neither does it apply very fully to Keats; but it describes something at least of the spirit of Shakespeare.
Now this spirit, it is obvious, tends in poetry, I do not say to a realistic, but to what may be called a concrete method of treatment; to the vivid presentment of scenes, individualities, actions, in preference to the expression of unembodied thoughts and feelings. The atmosphere of Wordsworth’s age, as we have seen, was not, on the whole, favourable to it, and in various degrees it failed in strength, or it suffered, in all the greater poets.Scott had it in splendid abundance and vigour; but he had too little of the idealism or the metaphysical imagination which was common to those poets, and which Shakespeare united with his universal comprehension; nor was he, like Shakespeare and like some of them, a master of magic in language. But Keats had that magic in fuller measure, perhaps, than any of our poets since Milton; and, sharing the idealism of Wordsworth and Shelley, he possessed also wider sympathies, and, if not a more plastic or pictorial imagination than the latter, at least a greater freedom from the attraction of theoretic ideas. To what results might not this combination have led if his life had been as long as Wordsworth’s or even as Byron’s? It would be more than hazardous, I think, to say that he was the most highly endowed of all our poets in the nineteenth century, but he might well have written its greatest long poems.
1905.