IIIMOUNTAIN SCENERY IN KEATS

III

MOUNTAIN SCENERY IN KEATS

THE ‘love of mountains’ which plays so large a part in the poetry of the age of Wordsworth, and has so few close analogies in that of any other country or any earlier time, offers matter of still unexhausted interest to the student of poetic psychology. This is not the place to consider how it happened that any mass of boldly crumpled strata, on a certain scale, became in the course of the eighteenth century charged with a kind of spiritual electricity which set up powerful answering excitements in the sensitive beholder. Gray already in 1739 expressed the potential reach and compass of these excitements in our psychical life when he called the scenery of the Grande Chartreuse ‘pregnant with religion and poetry’—a thought which Wordsworth’s sublime verses on the Simplon, sixty years later, only made explicit. Not all the mountain-excitement of the time was of this quality; and we can distinguish easily enough between the ‘picturesque,’ ‘romantic’ mountain sentiment of Scott, to whom the Trossachsand Ben Venue spoke most eloquently when they sounded to the pad of a horseman’s gallop, and the ‘natural religion’ of Wordsworth, to whom the same pass wore the air of a ‘Confessional’ apt for autumnal meditation on the brevity of life. In the younger poets of the age mountain sentiment is less original and profound than in Wordsworth, less breezily elemental than in Scott. The mountain poetry of Wordsworth concurred, as an explicit stimulus to mountain sentiment, with the inarticulate spell of the mountains themselves, transforming in some degree the native feeling and experience of almost all mountain-lovers of the next twenty years, even when they were of the calibre of Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. Yet even where the Wordsworthian colour is most perceptible, as inThe Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni, inAlastor,Mont Blanc, and in the Third Canto ofChilde Harold, the younger poet has seen his mountains with his own eyes and through the glamour of his own passions, impregnated them with his own genius and temperament. Shelley’s mountains are no longer the quiet brotherhood of Grasmere, with a listening star atop, but peaks of flamelike aspiration, or embodied protests against men’s code of crime and fraud; Byron’s are warriors calling joyously to one another over the lit lake across the storm. For all these poets—even for Scott when hewasa poet—mountain scenery was not so much new matter to be described as a new instrument of expression, a speaking symbol for their own spiritual appetencies and ideal dreams. Of its importance for the poetry of any one of them there cannot be a moment’s doubt.There remains, however, another poet, the youngest, the shortest-lived, but in some respects the most gifted of the whole group. On a general view Keats appears to be sharply distinguished, in regard to the characteristic here in question, from all the rest. Mountains and mountain sentiment seem to have a quite negligible place in his poetry. It may be worth while to consider how far this is really the case.

If we look to the sources of his experience, Keats was more nearly secluded from the stimulus of mountain scenery than any of his compeers. By the outward circumstances, of his birth and breeding he was in reality the ‘cockney poet’ of later derisive criticism. During the whole formative period of youth he hardly encountered even ‘wild’ scenery; what lay about him in his infancy was at best the semi-suburban meadow and woodland landscape of Edmonton, or the ‘little hill’ (of Hampstead) on which he ‘stood tiptoe’ to command a wider view. Before the summer of 1818 there is no sign that either ‘mountain power’ or ‘mountain mystery’ had any meaning for him. He deeply admired Wordsworth, and regardedThe Excursionas one of the three things to rejoice at in that age; but it was Wordsworth as an interpreter of human life, the poet who ‘thought into the human heart’ (to Reynolds, May 1818), rather than the mountain lover. There is no clear trace as yet in his earlier poetry of Cumberland fells; there is none whatever of the great mountainmythology of Wordsworth. No menacing peak had ever towered up between him and the stars, no far-distant hills had sent an alien sound of melancholy to his ear. Not that he owes nothing as a poet to the mythic rendering of mountains. On the contrary, up to this date, all his imagining of mountains, in the stricter sense, is derived from, or at least touched with, myth. Only it is the myth of classic legend, not of modern ‘natural religion.’ Had not the ‘lively Grecians’ inhabited a ‘land of hills,’ these would hardly have entered even as largely as they do into the enchanted scenery ofEndymion; and on the whole it is a scenery of woods and waters, flowery glades and ocean caverns, not of Olympian heights. But if Keats’s experience of nature is still limited, it is used to the full.Endymion, at first sight a tissue of exquisite dreams, is full of the evidence of his no less exquisite perception of the living nature within his reach. From the very outset we are aware that the ‘things of beauty’ he loved best and knew most intimately in the natural world were woods and flowers and streams. There is no mention, in that opening survey, of hills, and when they come perforce into the story they are arrayed as far as may be in the semblance of these beloved things. ‘A mighty forest’ is ‘outspread upon the sides of Latmus’ (i. 62); in the summons to the Shepherds, the highland homes are touched vaguely and without interest (‘whether descended from beneath the rocks that overtop your mountains’), while he lingers with evident delight upon the ‘swelling downs’

... where sweet air stirsBlue hare-bells lightly and where prickly furzeBuds lavish gold. (i. 201.)

... where sweet air stirs

Blue hare-bells lightly and where prickly furze

Buds lavish gold. (i. 201.)

as later, no less daintily, upon the

... hill-flowers running wildIn pink and purple chequer. (ii. 286.)

... hill-flowers running wild

In pink and purple chequer. (ii. 286.)

The ideal dwelling for Endymion and his ‘swan of Ganges’ will be under the brow of a steep hill, but they will be embowered in ivy and yew, and the hill itself, like their bridal couch, will be ‘mossy’—the haunting character of the Keatsian woodland and its ‘winding ways’ (iv. 670).

On the other hand, some of the hills inEndymion, like ‘fountain’d Helicon,’ are purely legendary, and the higher and bolder ones derive their characters from the tales of Olympus or Cyllene. Between nature and classic myth there was for Keats no trace of the disparity which so deeply offended Wordsworth; his imagination passed without thought of discord from one to the other, or blended them together; it was probably the Nature poet yet more than the Christian in Wordsworth who responded so coldly (‘A pretty piece of paganism’) when the young poet brought his train of Bacchanals ‘over the light-blue hills.’ It is of Arcadian boar-hunts that we have to think when Endymion on the mountain-heights will ‘once more make his horn parley from their foreheads hoar’ (i. 478), or sees the thunderbolt hurled from his threshold (ii. 203); it is an Arcadian shepherd whose ‘pipe comes clear from aery steep’ (iii. 359). And it is atleast no English mountain of whose ‘icy pinnacles’ we have a momentary and here quite isolated glimpse.

But while the mountain-drawing inEndymionis on the whole vague and derivative, there are hints that Keats was already becoming alive to the imaginative spell of great mountains, to their power in poetry, and for his poetry. When he imagines the moonlit earth, he sees it partly in delicate miniature like the image of the nested wren, who takes glimpses of the moon from beneath a sheltering ivy-leaf, but this is coupled with a picture of Miltonic grandeur and tumult:

Innumerable mountains rise, and rise,Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes. (iii. 59.)

Innumerable mountains rise, and rise,

Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes. (iii. 59.)

He was already on the way to that clear recognition of his need of great mountains which speaks from his famous explanation of the motives of the northern tour which he undertook, with Brown, in the summer of 1818—the crucial event of his history from our present point of view. ‘I should not have consented to myself,’ he wrote to Bailey, ‘these four months tramping in the highlands, but that I thought that it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to more hardship, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though I should read Homer.’[11]The passage has great psychological value, for it shows how closely involved his nascent apprehension of mountains was with the other spiritual appetencies urgent within him in these months. To be ‘loaded with grander mountains’ he thought of as an integral part of an inner process of much wider scope, of which the common note was to be the bracing and hardening of a mind which had not yet won complete control of its supreme gift of exquisite sensation. The ‘grander mountains’ were to be only one of the bracing forces, but it is clear that he felt this new force, under whose sway he was for a while about to live, akin to others which his letters show to have been alluring him during these months. The bare rugged forms of the mountains he was now to explore accorded subtly for him with the hardihood and endurance of the climber, and not less with the severity of the epic poet, who, like Milton, preferred ‘the ardours to the pleasures of song,’ or who, like Homer, allowed us fugitive but sublime glimpses of the mountains which looked down upon the scene of his Tale. When Keats and Brown came down upon the town of Ayr, they had before them ‘a grand Sea view terminated by the black Mountains of the isle of Arran. As soon as I saw them so nearly I said to myself: How is it they did not beckon Burns to some grand attempt at Epic?’[12]Keats perhaps thought of the Isle of Tenedos, which similarly dominates the plain of Troy across a reach of sea; ‘You would lift your eyes from Homer only to see close before you the real Isle of Tenedos,’ he was writing toReynolds in a different context on the same day. That one peaked Isle should stand out in Keats’s mind from all the other imagery of Homer, and that he should wonder at the failure of another to beget new Iliads in the unhomeric Burns, shows with much precision how his literary passion for the Homeric poetry was now quickened and actualized by the visible presence of grand mountains.

It is needless (though not irrelevant) to dwell here upon other kindred features of the expanding horizons which came into view for Keats in this momentous year: the resolve to renounce his ‘luxurious’ art for philosophy and knowledge;[13]and the disdain for women, for effeminate characters, for the pleasures of domesticity. In each case the urgency of this passion for what he felt more bracing, more intellectually fortifying, more masculine, found vent, for a time, in language too peremptory and exclusive to be true to the needs of his rich and complex nature.[14]Philosophy would, had he lived, assuredly have ministered more abundantly to his poetry, butLamiashows how far she was from becoming its master, or its substitute; the Miltonic ardours ofHyperionwere to be qualified in the renewed but chastened and ennobled ‘luxury’ ofSt. Agnes’ Eveand theOdes. The man who wrote: ‘the roaring ofthe wind is my wife and the stars through the windowpane are my children,’ would yet have found a place for noble womanhood within his ‘masculine’ ideal, had not a tragical influence intervened. And, similarly, the traces of his mountain experience fade after 1818, a new order of symbols, more congenial at bottom to the ways of his imagination, asserts or reasserts itself in his poetry; and it is hardly an accident that in the revisedHyperionof a year later we approach the granite precipices and everlasting cataracts of the original poem by way of a garden, a temple, and a shrine.

For, evidently, it is inHyperion, if anywhere, that we have to seek the afterglow of that experience of ‘grander mountains’ which, in June, he had set out to encounter. We must not indeed look in poetry of this quality for those detailed reproductions of what he had seen which Wordsworth condemned as ‘inventories’ in Scott, but which are not strange either to the lower levels of his own verse. Even in the letters written for the entertainment of a sick brother Keats rarely describes; and constantly, to others, he breaks off impatiently when he has begun. ‘My dear Reynolds—I cannot write about scenery and visitings.’ His impressions come from him in brief, sudden, unsought phrases; he left it to the methodic Brown to give the enchanting and ‘picturesque’ detail of mountains and valleys ‘in the manner of the Laputan printing-press.’‘I have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about their grandeur,’ he writes a little later to Bailey. But there is no doubt of the impression. He had hoped that his experience would ‘load’ him with grander mountains; and, in fact, as he goes on to tell, ‘The first mountains I saw, though not so large as some I have since seen,weighedvery solemnly upon me.’ And Brown tells us that when Windermere first burst upon their view, ‘he stopped as if stupefied with beauty.’[15]

Their actual experiences of mountain-climbing were few. Weather checked them at Helvellyn, and expense at Ben Lomond; but in the ‘bleak air atop’ of Skiddaw, as Lamb had called it, ‘I felt as if I were going to a Tournament.’ What he felt about the Arran mountains we have seen. Ailsa Craig—the seafowl-haunted ‘craggy ocean pyramid,’ evoked ‘the only sonnet of any worth I have of late written.’ They found the north end of Loch Lomond ‘grand to excess,’ and Keats made a rude pen-and-ink sketch of ‘that blue place among the mountains.’ But their greatest experience was doubtless the climb on Ben Nevis, on 2 August. The chasms below the summit of Nevis seemed to him ‘the most tremendous places I have ever seen,’ ‘the finest wonder of the whole—they appear great rents in the very heart of the mountain, ... other huge crags rising round ... give the appearance to Nevis of a shattered heart or core in itself.’

The plan of a poem on the war of the gods and Titans was already shaped or shaping in his mindwhen Keats set out for the north. As early as September 1817 he had had in view ‘a new romance’ for the following summer; in keeping with the new aspirations which that summer brought, the ‘romance’ was now to be an epic. The most potent influence governing the execution, that of Milton, is familiar, and does not directly concern us here. Still less can we consider the possible effect of companionship with those three little volumes of Cary’sDante, the single book taken with him on this tour.[16]But while the spell ofParadise Lostis apparent in the cast of the plot, above all in the debate of the Titans, and in the style, an influence to which Milton’s is wholly alien asserts itself in the delineation of the Titanic ‘den’ itself. Clearly based upon the idea of an Inferno, this ‘sad place’ where ‘bruised Titans’ are ‘chained in torture,’ is yet full of traits which recall neither Milton nor Dante, but rather one of those amazing chasms on Nevis, which seemed to be the very ‘core’ of the great mountain. He had, even, as he looked down into that vaporous gulf, actually thought of the image of Hell. Milton’s Hell is a plain of burning earth vaulted with fire and verging on a sea of flame[17]; if there is a hill (i. 670) it is a volcano, belching fire, or coated with a sulphurousscurf. The Keatsian Inferno is genuinely, what he calls it, a ‘den,’ a yawning mountain dungeon overarched with jutting crags, floored with hard flint and slaty ridge, and encompassed by a deafening roar of waterfalls and torrents. A shattered rib of rock, with his iron mace beside it, attests the spent fury of Creus. Enceladus lies uneasily upon a craggy shelf. To render the spectacle of the ruined and almost lifeless bodies lying ‘vast and edgeways,’ he calls in a definite reminiscence, the ‘dismal cirque’ of Druid stones near Keswick. He has felt too the silence of the mountains in the pauses of the winter wind, though he speaks of it only to contrast it with the organ voice of Saturn preceding the expectant murmur of his audience of fallen divinities (ii. 123).[18]The darkness, too, in which they languish is not eternal and ordained like that of Milton’s Hell; the coming of the Sun-god will invade it with a splendour like the morn and

... all the beetling gloomy steeps,All the sad spaces of oblivion,And every gulf, and every chasm old,And every height, and every sullen depth,Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams,And all the everlasting cataracts,And all the headlong torrents, far and near,Mantled before in darkness and huge shade, (ii. 358)

... all the beetling gloomy steeps,

All the sad spaces of oblivion,

And every gulf, and every chasm old,

And every height, and every sullen depth,

Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams,

And all the everlasting cataracts,

And all the headlong torrents, far and near,

Mantled before in darkness and huge shade, (ii. 358)

will stand revealed in that terrible splendour.

It is clear that in this great passage Keats has deliberately invoked the image of a sunrise among precipitous mountains; and these lines assure him a lasting place amongst our poet interpreters of mountain glory. We must beware, as we haveseen, of overstressing the element of realism in the poem. Keats was notdescribingmountain scenery, English, Scotch, or any other, but using certain aspects of it, which had been vividly brought home to him as he climbed or trudged, to render poetic inspirations of far richer compass and wider scope. Much of the detail of this Titan prison belongs as little to his British mountain experience as do the Titans themselves. Iapetus grasps a strangled serpent; Asia, dreaming of palm-shaded temples and sacred isles, leans upon an elephant tusk. We are conscious of no discord, so pervading is the impress of a single potent imagination, whatever the material it employs. But it is not immaterial to note that, as Professor de Sélincourt has pointed out, Keats did alter the original draft of Hyperion’s coming in such a way as to give it a close resemblance to a sunrise among the mountains, omitting two lines which preceded the last but one quoted above:

And all the Caverns soft with moss and weed,Or dazzling with bright and barren gems.

And all the Caverns soft with moss and weed,

Or dazzling with bright and barren gems.

The former of these lines may be described as a momentary reversion to the tender ‘mossy’ luxuriance of theEndymionscenery, like the ‘nest of pain’ (ii. 90), which, however, he allowed to stand.[19]Its excision, in the final version, marks Keats’s sense of the incongruity of that earlier symbolism with the sterner matter in hand, as does the transformation of the dreamy, pastoralOceanus of the earlier poem into the master of Stoic wisdom, able ‘to bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm,’ who offers his bitter balm to the despairing Titans, in the later.

Hyperion, we know, was left a fragment, and with deliberate purpose. The mighty shade of Milton, he came to feel, deflected him from his proper purpose in poetry. It is less important, but not less true, that his passing vision of grand mountains was not in complete consonance with his genius, and that his brief anthem of mountain poetry had in it something of the nature of atour de force. The mountains were for him neither strongholds of faith nor sources of sublime consolation. Even in the letters written in their presence he could speak somewhat impatiently, as we have seen, of ‘scenery’ compared with life and men. And if he places his ruined Titans in this wild den among the crags and torrents, it is because there was something in him, deeper than his reverence for Wordsworth or for mountain grandeur, which felt the very savagery of the scene, its naked aloofness from everything human, to be in accord with the primeval rudeness of an outdone and superseded race. It is not for nothing that, when the scene changes from the old order to the new, we are transported from Hyperion’s sun-smitten precipices to the sea-haunted lawns and woodlands of Delos, where the young Apollo is seen wandering forth in the morning twilight

Beside the osiers of a rivulet,Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.

Beside the osiers of a rivulet,

Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.

Do we not hear in this the home-coming accents, as of one who has escaped from barbarous Thynia and Bithynia, and tastes the joy that is born

‘cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrinolabore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum’?

‘cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino

labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum’?

Keats had, in effect, come home.

Yet the deflection, if it strained, also braced; and if in the following months his imagination, when he is most inspired, moves once more habitually among mossy woodland ways and by enchanted waters, the immense advance in robustness of artistic and intellectual sinew which distinguishes the poet of theNightingaleandAutumnfrom the poet ofEndymionwas gained chiefly in that summer of enlarged ideals and experience, of which the mountain vision was a small but a significant and symbolical part.

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