Chapter IX
We have seen what John Keats did in the shifting scene of the world, and in the high arena of poesy; we have seen what were the qualities of character and of mind which enabled him to bear his part in each. His work as a poet is to us the thing of primary importance: and it remains for us to consider what this poetic work amounts to in essence and in detail. The critic who is a critic—and not a Quarterly or a Blackwood reviewer or lampooner—is well aware of the disproportion between his power of estimation, and the demand which such a genius as that of Keats, and such work as the maturest which he produced, make upon the estimating faculty. But this consideration cannot be allowed to operate beyond a certain point: the estimate has to be given—and given candidly and distinctly, however imperfectly. I shall therefore proceed to express my real opinion of Keats’s poems, whether an admiring opinion or otherwise; and shall write without reiterating—what I may nevertheless feel—a sense of the presumption involved in such a process. I shall in the main, as in previous chapters, follow the chronological order of the poems.
As we have seen, Keats began versifying chiefly under a Spenserean influence; and it has been suggested that this influence remained puissant for harm as well as for good up to the close of his poetic career. I do not see much force in the suggestion: unless in this limited sense—that Spenser, like other Elizabethan and Jacobean poets his successors, allowed himself very considerable latitude in saying whatever came into his head, relevant or irrelevant, appropriate or jarring, obvious or far-fetched, simple or grandiose, according to the mood of the moment and the swing of composition, and thus the whole strain presents an aspect more of rich and arbitrary picturesqueness than of ordered suavity. And Keats no doubt often did the same: but not in the choicest productions of his later time, nor perhaps so much under incitement from Spenser as in pursuance of that revolt from a factitious and constrained model of work in which Wordsworth in one direction, Coleridge in another, and Leigh Hunt in a third, had already come forward with practice and precept. Making allowance for a few early attempts directly referable to Spenser, I find, even in Keats’s first volume, little in which that influence is paramount. He seems to have written because his perceptions were quick, his sympathies vivid in certain directions, and his energies wound up to poetic endeavour. The mannerisms of thought, method, and diction, are much more those of Hunt than of Spenser; and it is extremely probable that the soreness against Hunt which Keats evidenced at a later period was due to his perceiving that that kindly friend and genial literary ally had misled him into some poetic trivialities and absurdities, not less than to anything in himself which could be taken hold of for complaint.
Keats’s first volume would present nothing worthy of permanent memory, were it not for his after achievements, and for the single sonnet upon Chapman’s Homer. Several of the compositions are veritable rubbish: probably Keats knew at the time that they were not good, and knew soon afterwards that they were deplorably bad. Such are the address “To Some Ladies” who had sent the author a shell; that “On Receiving a Curious Shell and a Copy of Verses [Moore’s “Golden Chain”] from the same Ladies;” the “Ode to Apollo” (in which Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Tasso, are commemorated); the “Hymn to Apollo;” the lines “To Hope” (in which there is a patriotic aspiration, mingled with scorn for the gauds of a Court). “Calidore” has a certain boyish ardour, clearly indicated if not well expressed. The verses “I stood tiptoe upon a little hill” are very far from good, and are stuffed with affectations, but do nevertheless show a considerable spice of the real Keats. Some lines have already been quoted from this effusion, about “flowery nests,” and “the pillowy silkiness that rests full in the speculation of the stars.” It is only by an effort that we can attach any meaning to either of these childish Della-Cruscanisms: the “pillowy silkiness” may perhaps be clouds intermingled with stars, and the “flowery nests” may, by a great wrenching of English, be meant for “flowery nooks”—nests or nooks of flowers. “Sleep and Poetry” contains various fine lines, telling and suggestive images, and luscious descriptive snatches, and is interesting as showing the bent of the writer’s mind, and a sense of his mission begun. Serious metrical flaws are perceptible in it here and there, and throughout this first volume of verse—and indeed in “Endymion” as well. One metrical weakness of which he never got rid is the accenting of the preterite or participial form “ed” (in such words as “resolved,” &c.), where its sound ekes out with feeble stress the prosody of a line. Two songs which have genuine lyric grace—dated in 1817, but not included in the volume of “Poems”—are those which begin “Think not of it, sweet one, so,” and “Unfelt, unheard, unseen.” The volume contains sixteen sonnets, besides the grand one on “Chapman’s Homer.” The best are those which begin “Keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there,” and “Happy is England,” and the “Grasshopper and Cricket,” which was written in competition with Hunt. It seems to me that Keats’s production has more of poetry, Hunt’s of finish. The sonnet “On leaving some friends at an early hour” is characteristic enough. This is as much detail as need be given here to the “Poems” of 1817. The sonnet on Chapman’s Homer revealed a hand which might easily prove to be a master’s. All else was prentice-work, with some melody, some richness and freshness, some independence, much enthusiasm; also many solecisms and perversities of diction, imagery, and method: and not a few pieces were included which only self-conceit, or torpor of the critical faculty, or the mis-persuasion of friends, could have allowed to pass muster. But Keats chose to publish—to exhibit his poetic identity at this stage and in this guise; and of course we can see, in the light of his after-work, that the experiment was rather a rash forestalling than a positive mistake.
There are a few other sonnets which Keats wrote in 1817, or, in general terms, between the publishing dates of the “Poems” volume and of “Endymion.” Those “On a Picture of Leander,” and “On the Sea,” and the one which begins “After dark vapours have oppressed our plains,” rank among the best of his juvenile productions. A general observation, applicable to all the early work, whether printed at the time or unprinted, is that the ideas are constantly expressed in an imperfect way. There are perceptions, thoughts, and emotions; but the vehicle of words is, as a rule, huddled and approximate.
“Endymion” now claims our attention. I believe that no better criticism of “Endymion” has ever been written than that which Shelley supplied in a letter dated in September 1819. Certainly no criticism which is equally short is also equally good. I therefore extract it here, and shall have little to say about the poem which is not potentially condensed into Shelley’s brief utterance. “I have read Keats’s poem,” he wrote: “much praise is due to me for having read it, the author’s intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of some of the highest and the finest gleams of poetry; indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger.” In July 1820 Shelley wrote to Keats himself on the subject, furnishing almost the only addendum which could have been needed to the preceding remarks: “I have lately read your ‘Endymion’ again, and even with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion.” As Shelley shared with Gifford the conviction that it is difficult to read “Endymion” from book 1, line 1, to book 4, line 1003, and as human nature has not changed essentially since the time of that pre-eminent poet and that rather less eminent critic, I daresay that there are at this day several Keats-enthusiasts who know in foro conscientiæ, though they may not avow in public, that they have left “Endymion” unread, or only partially read. Others have perused it, but have found in it so much “indistinct profusion” that they also remain after a while with rather a vague impression of the course of the story; although they agree with Gifford, and even exceed him in the assurance, that “it seems to be mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion.” As the poem is an extremely important one in relation to the life-work of Keats, I think it may not be out of place if I here give a succinct account of what the narrative really amounts to. This may be all the more desirable as Keats has not followed the convenient if prosaic practice of several other epic poets by prefixing to the several books of his long poem an “argument” of their respective contents.
Book 1. On a lawn within a forest upon a slope of Mount Latmos was held one morning a festival to Pan. The young huntsman-chieftain Endymion attended, but his demeanour betrayed a secret preoccupation and trouble. After the rites were over, his sister Peona addressed him, and gradually won him to open his heart to her. He told her that at a certain spot by the river, one of his favourite haunts, he had lately seen a sudden efflorescence of dittany and poppies (the flowers sacred to Diana). He fell asleep there, and had a dream or vision of entering the gates of heaven, seeing the moon in transcendent splendour, and then being accosted by a woman or goddess lovely beyond words, who pressed his hand. He seemed to faint, and to be upborne into the upper regions of the sky, where he gave the beauty a rapturous kiss, and then they both paused upon a mountain-side. Next he dreamed that he fell asleep. This was the prelude to his actual waking out of the vision. Ever since he had retained a mysterious sense that the dream had not been all a dream. This was confirmed by various incidents of obscure suggestion, and especially by his hearing in a cavern the words (we have read them already, beslavered by the “human serpentry” of criticism, but they remain delicious words none the less)—
“Endymion, the cave is secreter
Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir
No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise
Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys
And trembles through my labyrinthine hair.”
As nothing further, however, had happened, Endymion promised Peona that he would henceforth cease to live a life of feverish expectation, and would resume the calm tenor of his days.
Book 2.—Endymion’s promise had not been strictly fulfilled; he was still restless and craving. One day he plucked a rosebud: it suddenly blossomed, and a butterfly emerged from it, with strangely-charactered wings. He pursued the butterfly, which led him to a fountain by a cavern, and then disappeared. A naiad thereupon addressed him, saying that he must wander far before he could be reunited to his mystic fair one. He then appealed to the moon-goddess for some aid, was rapt into a dizzy vision as if he were sailing through heaven in her car, and heard a voice from the cavern bidding him descend into the entrails of the earth. He eagerly obeyed, and passed through a region of twilight dimness starred with gems, until he reached a natural temple enshrining a statue of Diana. An awful sense of solitude weighed upon him, and he implored the goddess to restore him to his earthly home. A profusion of flowers budded forth before his feet, followed by music as he resumed his journey. At last he came to a verdant space, peopled with slumbering Cupids. Here in a beautiful chamber he found Adonis lying tranced on a couch, attended by other Cupids.18 One of them gave him wine and fruit, and explained to him the winter-sleep and summer-life of Adonis; and at this moment Adonis woke up from his trance, and Venus came to solace him with love. Venus spoke soothingly also to Endymion, telling him that she knew of his love for some one of the immortals, but who this was she had failed to fathom. She promised that one day he should be blessed, and with Adonis she then rose heavenward in her car. The earth closed, and Endymion gladly pursued his way through caves, jewels, and water-springs. Cybele passed on her lion-drawn chariot. The diamond path ended in middle air; Endymion invoked Jupiter, an eagle swooped and bore him down through darkness into a mossy jasmine-bower. With a sense of ecstasy, chequered by an unsatisfied longing for his unknown love, Endymion prepared himself to sleep:
“And, just into the air
Stretching his indolent arms, he took, O bliss!
A naked waist. ‘Fair Cupid, whence is this?’
A well-known voice sighed, ‘Sweetest, here am I!’”
The lovers indulged their passion in kisses and caresses; he urgent to know who she might be, and she confessing herself a goddess hitherto awful in loveless chastity, but not naming herself, though perhaps her avowals were sufficiently indicative,19 and she promised to exalt him ere long to Olympus. The rapturous interview ended with the sleep of Endymion, and awaking he found himself alone. He strayed out, and reached an enormous grotto. Two springs of water gushed forth—the springs of Arethusa and Alpheus, whose loves found voice in words. Endymion, sending up a prayer for their union, stepped forward and found himself beneath the sea.
Book 3. Soothed by a moonbeam which greeted him through the waters, Endymion pursued his course. Upon a rock within the sea he encountered an old, old man, with wand and book. The ancient man started up as from a trance, declaring that he should now be young again and happy. This was Glaucus, who imparted to Endymion the story of his ill-omened love for Scylla (it is told at considerable length, but need not be detailed here), the witchcraft of Circe which had doomed him to a ghastly marine life of a thousand years, and how, after a shipwreck, he came into possession of a book of magic, which revealed to him that at some far-off day a youth should make his appearance and break the accursed spell. In Endymion, Glaucus recognized the predicted youth. Glaucus then led Endymion to an edifice in which he had preserved the corpse of Scylla, and thousands of other corpses, being those of lovers who had been shipwrecked during his many cycles of sea-dwelling doom. Glaucus tore his scroll into fragments, bound his cloak round Endymion, and waved his wand nine times. He then instructed Endymion to unwind a tangled thread, read the markings on a shell, break the wand against a lyre, and strew the fragments of the scroll upon Glaucus himself, and upon the dead bodies. As the final act was performed, Glaucus resumed his youth, and Scylla and the drowned lovers returned to life. The whole joyous company then rushed off, and paid their devotions to Neptune in his palace. Cupid and Venus were also present here; and the goddess of love spoke words of comfort to Endymion, assuring him that his long expectancy would soon find its full reward. She had by this time probed the secret of Diana, but she refrained from naming that deity to Endymion. She invited him and his bride to pass a portion of their honeymoon in Cythera,20 with Adonis and Cupid. A stupendous festival in Neptune’s palace succeeded. Endymion finally sank down in a trance; Nereids conveyed him up to a forest by a lake; and as he floated earthwards he heard in dream words promising that his goddess would soon waft him up into heaven. He awoke in the sylvan scene.
Book 4. The first sound that Endymion heard was a female voice; the wail of a damsel who had followed Bacchus from the banks of the Ganges, and who longed to be at home again, if only to die there. Unseen himself, he saw a beautiful girl, who lay bemoaning her loveless lot. He at once felt that, if he adored his unknown goddess, he loved also his Indian Bacchante. He sprang forward and declared his passion.21 She, after chaunting her long journeyings in the train of Bacchus, explained that, being sick-hearted and weary, she had strayed away in the forest, and was now but the votary of sorrow. Endymion continued to woo her with sweet words and hot: he heard a dismal voice, “Woe to Endymion!” echoing through the forest. Mercury descended and touched the ground with his wand, and two winged horses sprang out of the earth. Endymion seated his Bacchante upon one horse and mounted the other; they flew upward, eagle-high. In the air they passed Sleep, who had heard a report that a mortal was to wed a daughter of Jove, and who desired to hearken to the marriage ditties before he returned to his cave. The influence of Sleep made the winged horses drowse, and also Endymion and the Bacchante. Endymion then dreamed of being in heaven, the mate of gods and goddesses, Diana among them. In dream he sprang towards Diana, and so awoke; but awake he still saw the same vision. Diana was there in heaven; his Bacchante was beside him lying on the horse’s pinions. He kissed the Bacchante, and almost in the same breath protested to Diana his unshaken constancy. The Bacchante then awoke. Endymion, dazed in mind with his divided allegiance, urged her to be gone, and the winged horses resumed their flight. They advanced towards the galaxy, the moon peeped out of the sky, the Bacchante faded away in the moonbeams. Her steed dropped down to the earth; while the one which bore Endymion continued mounting upwards, and he again fell into a sort of trance. He heard not the celestial messengers bespeaking guests to Diana’s wedding. The winged horse then carried Endymion down to a hill-top. Here once more he found his beautiful Indian, and for her sake forswore all præterhuman passion. She, however, declared to him that a divine terror forbade her to be his. His sister Peona now re-appeared. She rallied him and the Bacchante on their love and melancholy, both equally obvious, and bade him attend at night a festival to Diana, whom the soothsayers had pronounced to be in a mood peculiarly propitious. Endymion announced his resolution to abandon the world, and live an eremitic life: Peona and the fair Indian should both be his sisters. The Indian vowed lifelong chastity, devoted to Diana. Both the women then retired. The day passed over Endymion motionless and mute. At eventide he walked towards the temple: he heeded not the hymning to Diana. Peona, companioned by the Indian damsel, accosted him. He replied, “Sister, I would have command, if it were heaven’s will, on our sad fate.” The Indian replied that this he should assuredly have; as she spoke she changed semblance, and stood revealed as Diana herself. She laid upon her own fears and upon fate the blame of past delays, and told Endymion that it had also been fitting that he should be spiritualized out of mortality by some unlooked-for change. As Endymion kneeled and kissed her hands, they both vanished away. The last words of the poem are—
“Peona went
Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment:”
words which may perhaps be modelled upon the grave and subdued conclusion of “Paradise Lost.”
This is a bald outline of the thread of story which meanders through that often-skimmed, seldom-read, not easily readable poem—in snatches alluring, in entirety disheartening—the “Endymion” of Keats. It will be perceived that the poet keeps throughout tolerably close to his main and professed subject matter—the loves of Diana and Endymion, although the episode of Glaucus, which is brought within the compass of the amorous quest, is certainly a very long and extraneous one. As we have seen, Keats, when well advanced with this poem, spoke of it as a test of his inventive faculty: and truly it is such, but I am not sure that his inventive faculty has come extremely well out of the ordeal. The best part which invention could take in such an attempt would be a vigorous, sane, and adequate conception of the imaginable relation between a loving goddess and her human lover; her emotion towards him, and his emotion towards her; and his ultimate semi-spiritualized and semi-human mode of existence in the divine conclave; along with a chain of incidents—partly of mythologic tradition, partly the poet’s own—which should illustrate these essential elements of the legend, and take possession of the reader’s mind, for their own sake at the moment, and for the sake of the main conception as ultimate result. Of all this we find little in Keats’s poem. Diana figures as a very willing woman, passing out of the stage of maidenly coyness. Endymion talks indeed at times of the exaltation of a passion transcending the bounds of mortality, but his conduct and demeanour go little beyond those of an adventurous lover of the knight-errant sort who, having taken the first leap in the dark, follows where Fortune leads him—and assuredly she leads him a very curious dance, where one cannot make out how his human organism, with respirative and digestive processes, continues to exist. Moreover, the last book of the poem spoils all that has preceded, so far as continuity of feeling is concerned; for here we learn that no sooner does Endymion see a pretty Indian Bacchante than he falls madly in love with her, and casts to the winds every shred and thought of Diana, already his bride or quasi-bride; she goes out like a cloud-veiled glimpse of moonlight. True, the Bacchante is in fact Diana herself; but of this Endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately—or rather with fatuous precipitancy—gives up the glorious goddess for the sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber. Diana, when she re-assumes her proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. This may possibly be true to the nature of a goddess—it is certainly not so to that of a woman; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself different from womanhood—shall we say superior to it?
In another and minor sense there is no lack of invention in this Poetic Romance. So far as I know, there is nothing in Grecian mythology furnishing a nucleus for the incidents of Endymion’s descending into the bowels of the earth, passing thence beneath the sea, meeting Glaucus, and restoring to life the myriads of drowned lovers, encountering the Indian Bacchante, and taking with her an aërial voyage upon winged coursers. These incidents—except indeed that of the Bacchante—are passing strange, and could not be worked out in a long narrative poem without a lavish command of fanciful and surprising touches. The tale of the aërial voyage seems abortive; its natural raison d’être and needful sequel would appear to be that Diana, having thus launched Endymion along with herself into the heavenly regions, should bear him straight onward to the high court of the gods; but, instead of that, the horses and their riders return to earth, the air has been traversed to no purpose and with no ostensible result, and Endymion is allowed again to forswear Diana for the Bacchante before the consummation is reached. Presumably Morpheus (Sleep) is responsible for this mishap. His untoward presence in the sky sent the Bacchante, as well as Endymion, to sleep for awhile: when they awoke, Diana had to leave the form of the Bacchante, and, in her character of Phœbe, regulate the nascent moon; though a goddess, she could not be in two places at once, and so the winged horses descended re infectâ. This is an ingenious point of incident enough; but it is just one of those points which indicate that the poet’s mind moved in a region of scintillating details rather than of large and majestic contours.
Such is in fact the quality of “Endymion” throughout. Everything is done for the sake of variegation and embroidery of the original fabric; or we might compare it to a richly-shot silk which, at every rustling movement, catches the eye with a change of colour. Constant as they are, the changes soon become fatiguing, and in effect monotonous; one colour, varied with its natural light and shade, would be more restful to the sight, and would even, in the long run, leave a sense of greater, because more congruous and harmonized, variety. Luscious and luxuriant in intention—for I cannot suppose that Keats aimed at being exalted or ideal—the poem becomes mawkish in result: he said so himself, and we need not hesitate to repeat it. Affectations, conceits, and puerilities, abound, both in thought and in diction: however willing to be pleased, the reader is often disconcerted and provoked. The number of clever things said cleverly, of rich things richly, and of fine things finely, is however abundant and superabundant; and no one who peruses “Endymion” with a true sense for poetic endowment and handling can fail to see that it is peculiarly the work of a poet. The versification, though far from faultless, is free, surging, and melodious—one of the devices which the author most constantly employs with a view to avoiding jogtrot uniformity being that of beginning a new sentence with the second line of a couplet. On every page the poet has enjoyed himself, and on most of them the reader can joy as well. The lyrical interludes, especially the hymn to Pan, and the chaunt of the Bacchante (which comprises a sort of verse-transcript of Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne”), are singularly wealthy in that fancy which hovers between description and emotion. The hymn to Pan was pronounced by Wordsworth, vivâ voce, to be “a pretty piece of paganism”—a comment which annoyed Keats not a little. Shelley (in his undispatched letter to the editor of the Quarterly Review) pointed out, as particularly worthy of attention, the passages—“And then the forest told it in a dream” (book ii.); “The rosy veils mantling the East” (book iii.); and “Upon a weeded rock this old man sat” (book iii.) The last—relating to Glaucus and his pictured cloak—is certainly remarkable; the other two, I should say, not more remarkable than scores of others—as indeed Shelley himself implied.
To sum up, “Endymion” is an essentially poetical poem, which sins, and greatly or even grossly does it sin, by youthful indiscipline and by excess. To deny these blemishes would be childish—they are there, and must be not only admitted, but resented. The faults, like the beauties, of the poem, are positive—not negative or neutral. The work was in fact (as Keats has already told us) a venture of an experimental kind. At the age of twenty-one to twenty-two he had a mind full of poetic material; he turned out his mind into this poetic romance, conscious that, if some things came right, others would come wrong. We are the richer for his rather overweening experiment; we are not to ignore its conditions, nor its partial failure, but we have to thank him none the less. If “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” a thing of alloyed beauty is a joy in its minor degree.
The next long poem of Keats—“Isabella, or the Pot of Basil”—is a vast advance on “Endymion” in sureness of hand and moderation of work: it is in all respects the better poem, and justifies what Keats said (in his letter of October 9, 1818, quoted in our Chapter v.) of the experience which he was sure to gain by the adventurous plunge he had made in “Endymion.” Of course it was a less arduous attempt; the subject being one of directly human passion, the story ready-furnished to him by Boccaccio, and the narrative much briefer. Except in altering the locality from Messina to Florence (a change which seems objectless), Keats has adhered faithfully enough to the sweet and sad story of Boccaccio; he has however amplified it much in detail, for the Italian tale is a short one. “Isabella” has always been a favourite with the readers of Keats, and deservedly so; it is tender, touching, and picturesque. Yet I should not place it in the very first rank of the poet’s works—the treatment seems to me at once more ambitious and less masculine than is needed. The writer seems too conscious that he has set himself to narrating something pathetic; he tells the story ab extra, and enlarges on “the pity of it,” instead of leaving the pity to speak to the heart out of the very circumstances themselves. The brothers may have been “ledger-men” and “money-bags” (Boccaccio does not insist upon any such phase of character), and they certainly became criminals, though the Italian author treats their murder of Lorenzo as if it were a sufficiently obvious act in vindication of the family honour; but, when Keats “again asks aloud” why these commercial brothers were proud, he seems to intrude upon us overmuch the personality of the narrator of a tragic story, and pounds away at his text like a pulpiteer. This is only one instance of the flaw which runs through the poem—that it is all told as with a direct appeal to the reader to be sympathetic—indignant now, and now compassionate. Leigh Hunt has pointed out the absurdity of putting into the mouth of one of the brother “money-bags,” just as they are about to execute their plot for murdering Lorenzo, the lines (though he praises the pretty conceit in itself)—
“Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
His dewy rosary on the eglantine.”
The author’s invocation to Melancholy, Music, Echo, Spirits in grief, and Melpomene, to condole the approaching death of Isabella, seems to me a fadeur hardly more appropriate than the money-bag’s epigram upon the “dewy rosary.” But the reader is probably tired of my qualifying clauses for the admiration with which he regards “The Pot of Basil.” He thinks it both beautiful and pathetic—and so do I.
“Isabella” is written in the octave stanza; “The Eve of St. Agnes” in the Spenserean. This difference of metre corresponds very closely to the difference of character between the two poems. “Isabella” is a narrative poem of event and passion, in which the incidents are presented so as chiefly to subserve purposes of sentiment; “The Eve of St. Agnes,” though it assumes a narrative form, is hardly a narrative, but rather a monody of dreamy richness, a pictured and scenic presentment, which sentiment again permeates and over-rules. I rate it far above “Isabella”—and indeed above all those poems of Keats, not purely lyrical, in which human or quasi-human agents bear their part, except only the ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and the uncompleted “Eve of St. Mark.” “Hyperion” stands aloof in lonely majesty; but I think that, in the long run, even “Hyperion” represents the genius of Keats less adequately, and past question less characteristically, than “The Eve of St. Agnes.” The story of this fascinating poem is so meagre as to be almost nugatory. There is nothing in it but this—that Keats took hold of the superstition proper to St. Agnes’ Eve, the power of a maiden to see her absent lover under certain conditions, and added to it that a lover, who was clandestinely present in this conjuncture of circumstances, eloped with his mistress. This extreme tenuity of constructive power in the poem, coupled with the rambling excursiveness of “Endymion,” and the futility of “The Cap and Bells,” might be held to indicate that Keats had very little head for framing a story—and indeed I infer that, if he possessed any faculty in that direction, it remained undeveloped up to the day of his death. One of the few subsidiary incidents introduced into “The Eve of St. Agnes” is that the lover Porphyro, on emerging from his hiding-place while his lady is asleep, produces from a cupboard and marshals to sight a large assortment of appetizing eatables. Why he did this no critic and no admirer has yet been able to divine; and the incident is so trivial in itself, and is made so much of for the purpose of verbal or metrical embellishment, as to reinforce our persuasion that Keats’s capacity for framing a story out of successive details of a suggestive and self-consistent kind was decidedly feeble. The power of “The Eve of St. Agnes” lies in a wholly different direction. It lies in the delicate transfusion of sight and emotion into sound; in making pictures out of words, or turning words into pictures; of giving a visionary beauty to the closest items of description; of holding all the materials of the poem in a long-drawn suspense of music and reverie. “The Eve of St. Agnes” is par excellence the poem of “glamour.” It means next to nothing; but means that little so exquisitely, and in so rapt a mood of musing or of trance, that it tells as an intellectual no less than a sensuous restorative. Perhaps no reader has ever risen from “The Eve of St. Agnes” dissatisfied. After a while he can question the grounds of his satisfaction, and may possibly find them wanting; but he has only to peruse the poem again, and the same spell is upon him.
“The Eve of St. Mark” was begun at much the same date as “The Eve of St. Agnes,” rather the earlier of the two. Its relation to other poems by the author is singular. In “Endymion” he had been a prodigal of treasures—some of them genuine, others spurious; in “The Eve of St. Agnes” he was at least opulent, a magnate superior to sumptuary laws; but in “The Eve of St. Mark” he subsides into a delightful simplicity—a simplicity full, certainly, of “favour and prettiness,” but chary of ornament. It comes perfectly natural to him, and promises the most charming results. The non-completion of “The Eve of St. Mark” is the greatest grievance of which the admirers of Keats have to complain. I should suppose that, in the first instance, he advisedly postponed the eve of one saint, Mark, to the eve of the other, Agnes; and that he did not afterwards find a convenient opportunity for resuming the uncompleted poem. The superstition connected with St. Mark’s vigil is not wholly unlike that pertaining to St. Agnes’s. In the former instance (I quote from Dante Rossetti), “it is believed that, if a person placed himself near the church porch when twilight was thickening, he would behold the apparition of those persons in the parish who were to be seized with any severe disease that year go into the church. If they remained there, it signified their death; if they came out again, it portended their recovery; and, the longer or shorter the time they remained in the building, the severer or less dangerous their illness.” The same writer, forecasting the probable course of the story,22 surmised that “the heroine, remorseful after trifling with a sick and now absent lover, might make her way to the minster porch to learn his fate by the spell, and perhaps see his figure enter but not return.” If this was really to have been the sequel, we can perceive that the unassuming simplicity of the poem at its commencement would, ere its close, have deepened into a different sort of simplicity—emotional, and even tragic. As it stands, the simplicity of “The Eve of St. Mark” is full-blooded as well as quaint—there is nothing starved or threadbare about it. Diverse though it is from Coleridge’s “Christabel,” we seem to feel in it something of the like possessing or haunting quality, modified by Keats’s own distinctive genius. In this respect, and in perfectness of touch, we link it with “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
“Hyperion” has next to be considered. This was the only poem by Keats which Shelley admired in an extreme degree. He wrote at different dates: “The fragment called ‘Hyperion’ promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age.... It is certainly an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats which I confess I had not before.... If the ‘Hyperion’ be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.... The great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry.” Byron, who had been particularly virulent against Keats during his lifetime, wrote after his death a much more memorable phrase: “His fragment of ‘Hyperion’ seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus.” Mr. Swinburne has written of the poem more at length, and with carefully weighed words:
“The triumph of ‘Hyperion’ is as nearly complete as the failure of ‘Endymion.’ Yet Keats never gave such proof of a manly devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his resolution to leave this great poem unfinished; not (as we may gather from his correspondence on the subject) for the pitiful reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the reception given to his former work, but on the solid and reasonable ground that a Miltonic study had something in its very scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was implied by his original design. Fortified and purified as it had been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluous verse had been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body of a subject so little charged with tangible significance.”
Mr. Swinburne is a critic with whom one may well be content to go astray, if astray it is. I will therefore say that I entirely agree with him in this estimate of “Hyperion,” and of the sound discretion which Keats exercised in giving it up. To deal with the gods of Olympus is no easy task—it had decidedly overtaxed Keats in “Endymion,” though he limited himself to the two goddesses Diana and Venus, and casually the gods Neptune and Mercury; but to deal with the elder gods—Saturn, Ops, Hyperion—and with the Titans, on the scale of a long epic narration, is a task which may well be pronounced unachievable. The Olympian gods would also have had to be introduced: Apollo already appears in the poem, not too promisingly. The elder gods are necessarily mere figure-heads of bulk, might, majesty, and antiquity; to get any character out of them after these “property” attributes have been exhausted to the mind’s eye, to “set them going” in act, and doing something apportionable into cantos, and readable by human energies, was not a problem which could be solved by a poet of the nineteenth century. Past question, Keats started grandly, and has left us a monument of Cyclopean architecture in verse almost impeccable—a Stonehenge of reverberance; he has made us feel that his elder gods were profoundly primæval, powers so august and abstract-natured as to have become already obsolete in the days of Zeus and Hades: his Titans, too, were so vast and muscular that no feat would have been difficult to them except that of interesting us. This sufficed for the first book of the poem; in the second book, the enterprise is already revealing itself as an impossible one, for the council at which Oceanus and others speak is reminiscent of the Pandæmonic council in Milton, and clearly very inferior to that. It could not well help resembling the scene in “Paradise Lost,” nor yet help being inferior; besides, even were it equal or preferable, Milton had done the thing first. The “large utterance of the early gods,” large though it be, tends to monotony. In book iii., we go off to Mnemosyne and Apollo; but of this section little remains, and we close the poem with a conviction that Keats, if he had succeeded in writing “a fragment as sublime as Æschylus,” was both prudent and fortunate in leaving it a fragment. To say that “Hyperion” is after all a semi-artificial utterance of the grand would be harsh, and ungrateful for so noble an effort of noble faculty; but to say that, by being prolonged, its grandeur must infallibly have partaken more and more of an artificial infusion, appears to me criticism entirely sound and safe.
Mr. Woodhouse has informed us: “The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former god of the sun, by Apollo; and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, &c., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn’s re-establishment; with other events of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact, the incidents would have been pure creations of the poet’s brain.” Here again Keats would have been partly forestalled by Milton: the combat of the Giants with the Olympian gods must have borne a very appreciable resemblance to the combat of Satan and his legions with the hosts of heaven. How far Keats’s “invention” would have sufficed to filling in this vast canvas may be questioned. The precedent of “Endymion,” in which he had attempted something of the same kind, was not wholly encouraging. The method and tone would of course have been very different; in what remains of “Hyperion,” the general current of diction is as severe as in “Endymion” it had been florid.
The other commencement of “Hyperion” (alluded to in my sixth chapter) was a later version, done in November and December 1819; it presents a great deal of poetic or scenic machinery in which the author’s personality was copiously introduced. This recast contains impressive things; but the prominence given to the author as spectator or participant of what he pictures forth was fulsome and fatal. Mr. Swinburne is in error (along with most other writers) in supposing this to be the earlier version of the two.
The tragedy of “Otho the Great,” written on a peculiar system of collaboration to which I have already referred, succeeded “Hyperion.” It is a tragedy on the Elizabethan model, and we find in scene i. a curious instance of Elizabethan contempt of chronology—a reference to “Hungarian petards.” The main factors in the plot are a fierce and fervent love-passion of the man, and an unscrupulous ambition of the woman, reddened with crime. Webster may perhaps have been taken by Keats as his chief prototype. To call “Otho the Great” an excellent drama would not be possible; but it can be read without tedium, and contains vigorous passages, and lines and images moulded with a fine poetic ardour. The action would be sufficient for stage-representation at a time when an audience come prepared to like a play if it is good in verse and strong in romantic emotion; under such conditions, while it could not be a great success, it need not nevertheless fall manifestly flat. Under any other conditions, such as those which prevail nowadays, this tragedy would necessarily run no chance at all. In a copy of Keats which belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti I find the following note of his, which may bear extracting: “This repulsive yet powerful play is of course in draft only. It is much less to be supposed that it would have been left so imperfect than to be surmised, from its imperfection, how very gradual the maturing of Keats’s best work probably may have been. It gives after all, perhaps, the strongest proof of robustness that Keats has left; and as a tragedy is scarcely more deficient than ‘Endymion’ as a poem. Both, viewed as wholes, are quite below Keats’s three masterpieces;23 yet ‘Otho,’ as well as ‘Endymion,’ gives proof of his finest powers.” Another note from the same hand remarks: “The character and conduct of Albert [the lover of Auranthe murdered to clear the way for her ambition] are the finest point in the play.”
Of the later drama, “King Stephen,” so little was written that I need not dwell upon it here.
“Lamia” was begun about the same time as “Otho the Great,” but finished afterwards. The influence of Dryden, under which it was composed, has told strongly upon its versification, as marked especially in the very free use of alexandrines—generally the third line of a triplet, sometimes even the second line of a couplet. You might search “Endymion” in vain for alexandrines; and I will admit that their frequency appears to me to give an artificial tone to “Lamia.” The view which Keats has elected to take of his subject is worth considering. The heroine is a serpent-woman, or a double-natured being who can change from serpent into woman and vice versâ. In the female form she beguiles a young student of philosophy, Lycius, lives with him in a splendid palace, and finally celebrates their marriage-feast. The philosopher Apollonius attends among the guests, perceives her to be “human serpentry,” and, gazing on her with ruthless fixity, he compels her and all her apparatus of enchantment to vanish. This is the act for which (in lines partly quoted in these pages) Keats arraigns philosophy, and its power of stripping things bare of their illusions. No doubt a poet has a right to treat a legend of this sort from such point of view as he likes; it is for him, and not for his reader, to take the bull by the horns. But it does look rather like taking the bull by the weaker horn to contend that the philosopher who saves a youthful disciple from the wiles of a serpent is condemnably prosaic—a grovelling spirit that denudes life of its poetry. Conveniently for Keats’s theory, Lycius is made to die forthwith after the vanishing of his Lamia. If we invent a different finale to the poem, and say that Lycius fell down on his knees, and thanked Apollonius for saving him from such pestilent delusions and perilous blandishments, and ever afterwards looked out for the cloven tongue (if not the cloven hoof) when a pretty woman made advances to him, we may perhaps come quite as near to a right construction of so strange a series of events, and to the true moral of the story. But Keats’s championship was for the enjoying aspects of life; he may be held to have exercised it here rather perversely. “Lamia” is one of his completest and most finished pieces of writing—perhaps in this respect superior to all his other long poems, if we except “Hyperion”; it closes the roll of them with an affluence, even an excess, of sumptuous adornment. “Lamia” leaves on the mental palate a rich flavour, if not an absolutely healthy one.
Passing from the long compositions, we find the cream of Keats’s poetry in the ballad of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and in the five odes—“To Psyche,” “To Autumn,” “On Melancholy,” “To a Nightingale,” and “On a Grecian Urn.” “La Belle Dame sans Merci” may possibly have been written later than any of the odes, but this point is uncertain. I give it here as marking the highest point of romantic imagination to which Keats attained in dealing with human or quasi-human personages, and also his highest level of simplicity along with completeness of art.
“Ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,24
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
“Ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
“I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew;
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.”
“I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a faery’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
“I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone:
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
“I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean and sing
A faery’s song.
“She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew;
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true.’
“She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gazed and sighèd deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes—
So kissed to sleep.
“And there we slumbered on the moss,
And there I dreamed—ah woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill-side.
“I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors—death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall.’
“I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gapèd wide;
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill-side.
“And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering;
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.”
This is a poem of impression. The impression is immediate, final, and permanent; and words would be more than wasted upon pointing out to the reader that such and such are the details which have conduced to impress him.
In the five odes there is naturally some diversity in the degrees of excellence. I have given their titles above in the probable (not certain) order of their composition. Considered intellectually, we might form a kind of symphony out of them, and arrange it thus—1, “Grecian Urn”; 2, “Psyche”; 3, “Autumn”; 4, “Melancholy”; 5, “Nightingale”; and, if Keats had left us nothing else, we should have in this symphony an almost complete picture of his poetic mind, only omitting, or representing deficiently, that more instinctive sort of enjoyment which partakes of gaiety. Viewing all these wondrous odes together, the predominant quality which we trace in them is an extreme susceptibility to delight, close-linked with afterthought—pleasure with pang—or that poignant sense of ultimates, a sense delicious and harrowing, which clasps the joy in sadness, and feasts upon the very sadness in joy. The emotion throughout is the emotion of beauty: beauty intensely perceived, intensely loved, questioned of its secret like the sphinx, imperishable and eternal, yet haunted (as it were) by its own ghost, the mortal throes of the human soul. As no poet had more capacity for enjoyment than Keats, so none exceeded him in the luxury of sorrow. Few also exceeded him in the sense of the one moment irretrievable; but this conception in its fulness belongs to the region of morals yet more than of sensation, and the spirit of Keats was almost an alien in the region of morals. As he himself wrote (March 1818)—
“Oh never will the prize,
High reason, and the love of good and ill,
Be my award!”
I think it will be well to cull out of these five odes—taken in the symphonic order above noted—the phrases which constitute the strongest chords of emotion and of music.
(1)
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe, to the spirit, ditties of no tone.
“Human passion far above
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
(2)
“Too late for antique vows,
Too too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire.
“Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branchèd thoughts new-grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind.
(3)
“Where are the songs of spring—ay, where are they?
Think not of them: thou hast thy music too,
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.
(4)
“But, when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud,
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave.
“She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.
(5)
“That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
Here where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs;
Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
“Darkling I listen: and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,—
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy.
“The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self.
“Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep?”
To one or two of these phrases a few words of comment may be given. That axiom which concludes the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,”
is perhaps the most important contribution to thought which the poetry of Keats contains: it pairs with and transcends
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
I am not prepared to say whether Keats was the first writer to formulate any axiom to this effect,—I should rather presume not; but at any rate it comes with peculiar appropriateness in the writings of a poet who might have varied the dictum of Iago, and said of himself
“For I am nothing if not beautiful.”
In the Ode, the axiom is put forward as the message of the sculptured Grecian Urn “to man,” and is thus propounded as being of universal application. It amounts to saying—“Any beauty which is not truthful (if any such there be), and any truth which is not beautiful (if any such there be), are of no practical importance to mankind in their mundane condition: but in fact there are none such, for, to the human mind, beauty and truth are one and the same thing.” To debate this question on abstract grounds is not in my province: all that I have to do is to point out that Keats’s perception and thought crystallized into this axiom as the sum and substance of wisdom for man, and that he has bequeathed it to us to ponder in itself, and to lay to heart as the secret of his writings. Those other lines, from the “Ode on Melancholy,” where he says of Melancholy—
“She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu”—
appear to me unsurpassable in the whole range of his poetry—as intense in imagery as supreme in diction and in music. They pair with the other celebrated verses from the “Ode to a Nightingale”—
“Now more then ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain;”
and—
“Charmed magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.”
The phrase “rich to die” is of the very essence of Keats’s emotion; and the passage about “magic casements” shows a reach of expression which might almost be called the Pillars of Hercules of human language. Far greater things have been said by the greatest minds: but nothing more perfect in form has been said—nothing wider in scale and closer in utterance—by any mind of whatsoever pitch of greatness.
And here we come to one of the most intrinsic properties of Keats’s poetry. He is a master of imagination in verbal form: he gifts us with things so finely and magically said as to convey an imaginative impression. The imagination may sometimes be in the substance of the thought, as well as in its wording—as it is in the passage just quoted: sometimes it resides essentially in the wording, out of which thought expands in the reader, who is made
“To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest.”
From wealth of perception, at first confused or docked in the expression, he rose into a height of verbal embodiment which has seldom been equalled and seldomer exceeded. His conception of poetry as an ideal, his sense of poetry as an art, spurred him on to artistic achievement; and in the later stages of his work the character of the Artist is that which marks him most strongly. As one of his own letters says, he “looks upon fine phrases like a lover.”
According to Mr. Swinburne, “the faultless force and profound subtlety of this deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals.” We may safely accept this verdict of poet upon poet as a true one: yet I should be inclined to demur to such strong adjectives as “faultless” and “absolute.” Beautiful as several of them are, I might hesitate to say that even one poem by Keats exhibits this his special characteristic in a faultless degree, or expresses absolutely throughout a natural beauty of absolute quality. To the last, he appears to me to have been somewhat wanting in those faculties of selection and of discipline which we sum up, by a rough-and-ready process, in the word “taste.” He had done a great deal in this direction, and would probably, with a few years more of life, have done all that was needed; but we have to take him as he stands, with those few years denied. Unless perhaps in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Keats has not, I think, come nearer to perfection than in the “Ode to a Nightingale.” It is with some trepidation that I recur to this Ode, for the invidious purpose of testing its claim to be adjudged “faultless,” for in so doing I shall certainly lose the sympathy of some readers, and strain the patience of many. The question, however, seems to be a very fair one to raise, and the specimen a strong one to try it by, and so I persevere. The first point of weakness—excess which becomes weak in result—is a surfeit of mythological allusions: Lethe, Dryad (the nightingale is turned into a “light-wingèd Dryad of the trees”—which is as much as to say, a light-wingèd Oak-nymph of the trees), Flora, Hippocrene, Bacchus, the Queen-moon (the Queen-moon appears at first sight to be the classical Phœbe, who is here “clustered around by all her starry Fays,” spirits proper to a Northern mythology; but possibly Keats thought more of a Faery-queen than of Phœbe). Then comes the passage (already cited in these pages) about the poet’s wish for a draught of wine, to help him towards spiritual commune with the nightingale. Some exquisite phrases in this passage have endeared it to all readers of Keats; yet I cannot but regard it as very foreign to the main subject-matter. Surely nobody wants wine as a preparation for enjoying a nightingale’s music, whether in a literal or in a fanciful relation. Taken in detail, to call wine “the true, the blushful Hippocrene”—the veritable fount of poetic inspiration—seems both stilted and repulsive, and the phrase “with beaded bubbles winking at the brim” is (though picturesque) trivial, in the same way as much of Keats’s earlier work. Far worse is the succeeding image, “Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”—i.e., not under the inspiration of wine: the poet will fly to the nightingale, but not in a leopard-drawn chariot. Further on, as if we had not already had enough of wine and its associations, the coming musk-rose is described as “full of dewy wine”—an expression of very dubious appositeness: and the like may be said of “become a sod,” in the sense of “become a corpse—earth to earth.” The renowned address—
“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down,”
seems almost outside the region of criticism. Still, it is a palpable fact that this address, according to its place in the context, is a logical solecism. While “Youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies,” while the poet would “become a sod” to the requiem sung by the nightingale, the nightingale itself is pronounced immortal. But this antithesis cannot stand the test of a moment’s reflection. Man, as a race, is as deathless, as superior to the tramp of hungry generations, as is the nightingale as a race: while the nightingale as an individual bird has a life not less fleeting, still more fleeting, than a man as an individual. We have now arrived at the last stanza of the ode. Here the term “deceiving elf,” applied to “the fancy,” sounds rather petty, and in the nature of a make-rhyme: but this may possibly be a prejudice.
Having thus—in the interest of my reader as a critical appraiser of poetry—burned my fingers a little at the clear and perennial flame of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” I shall quit that superb composition, and the whole quintett of odes, and shall proceed to other phases of my subject. The “Ode to Indolence,” and the fragment of an “Ode to Maia,” need not detain us; the former, however, is important as indicating a mood of mind—too vaguely open to the influences of the moment for either love, ambition, or poesy—to which we may well suppose that Keats was sufficiently prone. The few poems which remain to be mentioned were all printed posthumously.
There are four addresses to Fanny Brawne, dating perhaps from early till late in 1819; two of them are irregular lyrics, and two sonnets. The best of the four is the sonnet, “The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone,” which counts indeed among the better sonnets of Keats. Taken collectively, all four supply valuable evidence as to the poet’s love affair, confirmatory of what appears in his letters; they exhibit him quelled by the thought of his mistress and her charms, and jealous of her mixing in or enjoying the company of others.
Keats wrote some half-hundred of sonnets altogether, some of them among his very earliest and most trifling performances, others up to his latest period, including the last of all his compositions. Notwithstanding his marked growth in love of form, and his ultimate surprising power of expression—both being qualities peculiarly germane to this form of verse—his sonnets appear to me to be seldom masterly. A certain freakishness of disposition, and liability to be led astray by some point of detail into side-issues, mar the symmetry and concentration of his work. Perhaps the sonnet on “Chapman’s Homer,” early though it was, remains the best which he produced; it is at any rate pre-eminent in singleness of thought, illustrated by a definite and grand image. It has a true opening and a true climax, and a clear link of inventive association between the thing mentally signified in chief, and the modes of its concrete presentment. In points of this kind Keats is seldom equally happy in his other sonnets; sometimes not happy at all, but distinctly at fault. There is a second Homeric sonnet, “Standing aloof in giant ignorance” (1818), which contains one line which has been very highly praised,
“There is a budding morrow in midnight:”
but, regarded as a whole, it is a weakling in comparison with the Chapman sonnet. The sonnets, “To Sleep” (“O soft embalmer of the still midnight”), “Why did I laugh to-night?” and “On a Dream” (“As Hermes once took to his feathers light”)—all of them dated in 1819—are remarkable; the third would indeed almost be excellent were it not for the inadmissible laxity of an alexandrine last line. This is the sonnet of which we have already spoken, the dream of Paolo and Francesca. The “Why did I laugh to-night?” is a strange personal utterance, in which the poet (not yet attacked by his mortal illness) exalts death above verse, fame, and beauty, in the same mood of mind as in the lovely passage of the “Ode to a Nightingale”; but the sonnet, considered as an example of its own form of art, is too exclamatory and uncombined.
There are several minor poems by Keats of which—though some of them are extremely dear to his devotees—I have made no mention. Such are “Teignmouth,” “Where be you going, you Devon maid?” “Meg Merrilies,” “Walking in Scotland,” “Staffa,” “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” “Robin Hood,” “To Fancy,” “To the Poets,” “In a drear-nighted December,” “Hush, hush, tread softly,” four “Faery Songs.” Most of these pieces seem to me over-rated. As a rule they have lyrical impulse, along with the brightness or the tenderness which the subject bespeaks; but they are slight in significance and in structure, pleasurable but not memorable work. One enjoys them once and again, and then their office is over; they have not in them that stuff which can be laid to heart, nor that spherical unity and replenishment which can make of a mere snatch of verse an inscription for the adamantine portal of time.
The feeling with which Keats regarded women in real life has been already spoken of. As to the tone of his poems respecting them we have his own evidence. A letter of his to Armitage Brown, dated towards the first days of September 1820, says, in reference to the “Lamia” volume: “One of the causes, I understand from different quarters, of the unpopularity of this new book, is the offence the ladies take at me. On thinking that matter over, I am certain that I have said nothing in a spirit to displease any woman I would care to please; but still there is a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats; they never see themselves dominant.” The long poems in the volume in question were “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Hyperion,” and “Lamia.” In “Hyperion” women are of course not dominant; but, as regards the other three poems, they are surely dominant enough in one sense. In “Isabella” the heroine is the sole figure of prime importance—so also in “Lamia”; and in the “Eve of St. Agnes” she counts for much more than Porphyro, though the number of stanzas about her may be fewer. Nevertheless it might be that the women in the three poems, though “dominant,” are “classed with roses and sweetmeats.” I do not see, however, that this can fairly be said of Madeline in the “Eve of St. Agnes”; she is made a very charming and loveable figure, although she does nothing very particular except to undress without looking behind her, and to elope. Again, Isabella, amenable as she may be to the censure of the severely virtuous, plays a part which takes her very considerably out of affinity to roses and sweetmeats. To Lamia the objection applies clearly enough; but then she is not exactly a woman, and Keats resents so fiercely the far from indefensible line of conduct which Apollonius adopts in relation to her that it seems hard if the ladies owed the poet a grudge. On the whole I incline to think that they must have been misreported; but the statement in Keats’s letter remains not the less significant as a symptom of his real underlying feeling about women.
It has often been pointed out that Keats’s lovers have a habit of “swooning,” and the fact has sometimes been remarked upon as evidencing a certain want of virility in himself. I cannot affect to be, so far, of a different opinion. The incident and the phrase do manifestly tend to the namby-pamby. This may have been more a matter of affected or self-willed diction on his part—and diction of that kind appears constantly in his earlier poems, and not seldom in his later ones—than of actual character chargeable against himself; yet I would not entirely disregard it in the latter relation either. Keats was a very young man, with a limited experience of life. He had to picture to himself how his lovers would be likely to behave under given conditions; and, if he thought they would be likely to swoon, the probability is that he also, under parallel conditions, would have been likely to swoon—or at least supposed he would be likely. Because he thrashed a butcher-boy, or was indignant at backbiting and meanness, we are not to credit him with an unmingled fund of that toughness which distinguishes the English middle class. The English middle-class man is not habitually addicted to writing an “Endymion,” an “Eve of St. Agnes,” or an “Ode on Melancholy.”
Sensuousness has been frequently defined as the paramount bias of Keats’s poetic genius. This is, in large measure, unassailably true. He was a man of perception rather than of contemplation or speculation. Perception has to do with perceptible things; perceptible things must be objects of sense, and the mind which dwells on objects of sense must ipso facto be a mind of the sensuous order. But the mind which is mainly sensuous by direct action may also work by reflex action, and pass from sensuousness into sentiment. It cannot fairly be denied that Keats’s mind continually did this; it had direct action potently, and reflex action amply. He saw so far and so keenly into the sensuous as to be penetrated with the sentiment which, to a healthy and large nature, is its inseparable outcome. We might say that, if the sensuous was his atmosphere, the breathing apparatus with which he respired it was sentiment. In his best work—for instance, in all the great odes—the two things are so intimately combined that the reader can only savour the sensuous nucleus through the sentiment, its medium or vehicle. One of the most compendious and elegant phrases in which the genius of Keats has been defined is that of Leigh Hunt: “He never beheld an oak tree without seeing the Dryad.” In immediate meaning Hunt glances here at the mythical sympathy or personifying imagination of the poet; but, if we accept the phrase as applying to the sensuous object-painting, along with its ideal aroma or suggestion in his finest work, we shall still find it full of right significance. We need not dwell upon other less mature performances in which the two things are less closely interfused. Certainly some of his work is merely, and some even crudely, sensuous: but this is work in which the poet was trying his materials and his powers, and rising towards mastery of his real faculty and ultimate function.
While discriminating between what was excellent in Keats, and what was not excellent, or was merely tentative in the direction of final excellence, we must not confuse endowments, or the homage which is due to endowments, of a radically different order. Many readers, and there have been among them several men highly qualified to pronounce, have set Keats beside his great contemporary Shelley, and indeed above him. I cannot do this. To me it seems that the primary gift of Shelley, the spirit in which he exercised it, the objects upon which he exercised it, the detail and the sum of his achievement, the actual produce in appraisable work done, the influence and energy of the work in the future, were all superior to those of Keats, and even superior beyond any reasonable terms of comparison. If Shelley’s poems had defects—which they indisputably had—Keats’s poems also had defects. After all that can be said in their praise—and this should be said in the most generous or rather grateful and thankful spirit—it seems to me true that not many of Keats’s poems are highly admirable; that most of them, amid all their beauty, have an adolescent and frequently a morbid tone, marking want of manful thew and sinew and of mental balance; that he is not seldom obscure, chiefly through indifference to the thought itself and its necessary means of development; that he is emotional without substance, and beautiful without control; and that personalism of a wilful and fitful kind pervades the mass of his handiwork. We have already seen, however, that there is a certain not inconsiderable proportion of his poems to which these exceptions do not apply, or apply only with greatly diminished force; and, as a last expression of our large and abiding debt to him and to his well-loved memory, we recur to his own words, and say that he has given us many a “thing of beauty,” which will remain “a joy for ever.” By his early death he was doomed to be the poet of youthfulness; by being the poet of youthfulness he was privileged to become and to remain enduringly the poet of rapt expectation and passionate delight.
The End