Keats Part 8

But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to my mind, quite on a level with the other two.

With a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal incorrectness, _Hyperion_, as far as it was written, is indeed one of the grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the easiest and most spontaneous. Keats, however, had never been able to apply himself to it continuously, but only by fits and starts. Partly this was due to the distractions of bereavement, of material anxiety, and of dawning pa.s.sion amid which it was begun and continued: partly (if we may trust the statement of the publishers) to disappointment at the reception of _Endymion_: and partly, it is clear, to something not wholly congenial to his powers in the task itself. When after letting the poem lie by through the greater part of the spring and summer of 1819, he in September made up his mind to give it up, he wrote to Reynolds explaining his reasons as follows. "There were too many Miltonic inversions in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up." In the same connection he declares that Chatterton is the purest writer in the English language. "He has no French idiom or particles, like Chaucer; it is genuine English idiom in English words." In writing about the same time to his brother, he again expresses similar opinions both as to Milton and Chatterton.

The influence, and something of the majesty, of _Paradise Lost_ are in truth to be found in _Hyperion_: and the debate of the fallen t.i.tans in the second book is obviously to some extent modelled on the debate of the fallen angels. But Miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense.

Pa.s.sing by those general differences that arise from the contrast of Milton's age with Keats's youth, of his austerity with Keats's luxuriance of spirit, and speaking of palpable and technical differences only:--in the matter of rhythm, Keats's blank verse has not the flight of Milton's.

Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so solemn and far-foreseen a close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music, and ranks unquestionably with the finest blank-verse written since Milton,--beside that of Sh.e.l.ley's _Alastor_,--perhaps a little below that of Wordsworth when Wordsworth is at his infrequent best. As to diction and the poetic use of words, Keats shows almost as masterly an instinct as Milton himself: but while of Milton's diction the characteristic colour is derived from reading and meditation, from an impa.s.sioned conversance with the contents of books, the characteristic colour of Keats's diction is rather derived from conversance with nature and with the extreme refinements of physical sensation. He is no match for Milton in a pa.s.sage of this kind:--

"Eden stretch'd her line From Auran eastward to the royal towers Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings, Or where the sons of Eden long before Dwelt in Tela.s.sar."

But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like this:--

"throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, Though scarcely heard in many a green recess."

After the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second chief technical note of Milton's style is his partiality for a Latin use of the relative p.r.o.noun and the double negative, and for scholarly Latin turns and constructions generally. Already in _Isabella_ Keats is to be found attempting both notes, thus:--

"With duller steel than the Persean sword They cut away no formless monster's head--."

Similar Miltonic echoes occur in _Hyperion_, as in the introduction already quoted to the speech of Ocea.n.u.s: or again thus:--

"Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies."

But they are not frequent, nor had Keats adopted as much of Milton's technical manner as he seems to have supposed. Yet he had adopted more of it than was natural to him or than he cared to maintain.

In turning away from Milton to Chatterton, he was going back to one of his first loves in literature. What he says of Chatterton's words and idioms seems paradoxical enough, as applied to the archaic jargon concocted by the Bristol boy out of Kersey's _Dictionary_[54]. But it is true that through that jargon can be discerned, in the Rowley poems, not only an ardent feeling for romance and an extraordinary facility in composition, but a remarkable gift of plain and flowing construction. And after Keats had for some time moved, not perfectly at his ease, though with results to us so masterly, in the paths of Milton, we find him in fact tempted aside on an excursion into the regions beloved by Chatterton. We know not how much of _Hyperion_ had been written when he laid it aside in January to take up the composition of _St Agnes' Eve_, that unsurpa.s.sed example--nay, must we not rather call it unequalled?--of the pure charm of coloured and romantic narrative in English verse. As this poem does not attempt the elemental grandeur of _Hyperion_, so neither does it approach the human pathos and pa.s.sion of _Isabella_. Its personages appeal to us, not so much humanly and in themselves, as by the circ.u.mstances, scenery and atmosphere amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the weakness, of modern romance,--its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the mediaeval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at all,--its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral truth: and without these no great literature can exist.

Keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare theme of the love of an adventurous youth for the daughter of a hostile house,--a story wherein something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young Lochinvar,--and brings it deftly into a.s.sociation with the old popular belief as to the way a maiden might on this anniversary win sight of her lover in a dream. Choosing happily, for such a purpose, the Spenserian stanza, he adds to the melodious grace, the 'sweet-slipping movement,' as it has been called, of Spenser, a transparent ease and directness of construction; and with this ease and directness combines (wherein lies the great secret of his ripened art) a never-failing richness and concentration of poetic meaning and suggestion. From the opening stanza, which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close, where the lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the friendly bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to throb in every line with the life of imagination and beauty. It indeed plays in great part about the external circ.u.mstances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. But in handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some writers vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life, movement, and feeling. Thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are brought before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our sympathy with the s.h.i.+vering fancy of the beadsman:--

"Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, He pa.s.seth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails."

Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the banqueting hall the poet strikes life:--

"The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s."

The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out their beauties in detail, he calls--

"Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--"

a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry. In the last line of the same stanza--

"A s.h.i.+elded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings,"

--the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on thoughts of her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that moonlight has not the power to transmit the hues of painted gla.s.s as Keats in this celebrated pa.s.sage represents it. Let us be grateful for the error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chast.i.ty and awe. When Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their l.u.s.tre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and speaks straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the wearer,--'her warmed jewels.' When Porphyro spreads the feast of dainties beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own natural richness, but with the a.s.sociations and the homage of all far countries whence they have been gathered--

"From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon."

If the unique charm of the _Eve of St Agnes_ lies thus in the richness and vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions of the personages are hardly less happily conceived as far as they go.

What can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the nurse, who live just long enough to share in the wonders of the night, and die quietly of age when their parts are over[55]: especially the debate of old Angela with Porphyro, and her gentle treatment by her mistress on the stair? Madeline is exquisite throughout, but most of all, I think, at two moments: first when she has just entered her chamber,--

"No uttered syllable, or, woe betide: But to her heart, her heart was voluble, Paining with eloquence her balmy side:"--

and afterwards when, awakening, she finds her lover beside her, and contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:--

"'Ah Porphyro!' said she, 'but even now Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear Made tunable with every sweetest vow; And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear; How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear'."

Criticism may urge, indeed, that in the 'growing faint' of Porphyro, and in his 'warm unnerved arm,' we have a touch of that swooning abandonment to which Keats's heroes are too subject. But it is the slightest possible; and after all the trait belongs not more to the poet individually than to his time. Lovers in prose romances of that date are constantly overcome in like manner. And we may well pardon Porphyro his weakness, in consideration of the spirit which has led him to his lady's side in defiance of her 'whole bloodthirsty race,' and will bear her safely, this night of happy marvels over, to the home 'beyond the southern moors' that he has prepared for her[56].

Nearly allied with the _Eve of St Agnes_ is the fragment in the four-foot ballad metre, which Keats composed on the parallel popular belief connected with the eve of St Mark. This piece was planned, as we saw, at Chichester, and written, it appears, partly there and partly at Winchester six months later: the name of the heroine, Bertha, seems farther to suggest a.s.sociations with Canterbury. Impressions of all these three cathedral cities which Keats knew are combined, no doubt, in the picture of which the fragment consists. I have said picture, but there are two: one the out-door picture of the city streets in their spring freshness and Sabbath peace: the other the indoor picture of the maiden reading in her quaint fire-lit chamber. Each in its way is of an admirable vividness and charm. The belief about St Mark's Eve was that a person stationed near a church porch at twilight on that anniversary would see entering the church the apparitions of those about to die, or be brought near death, in the ensuing year. Keats's fragment breaks off before the story is well engaged, and it is not easy to see how his opening would have led up to incidents ill.u.s.trating this belief. Neither is it clear whether he intended to place them in mediaeval or in relatively modern times. The demure Protestant air which he gives the Sunday streets, the Oriental furniture and curiosities of the lady's chamber, might seem to indicate the latter: but we must remember that he was never strict in his archaeology--witness, for instance, the line which tells how 'the long carpets rose along the gusty floor' in the _Eve of St Agnes_. The interest of the _St Mark's_ fragment, then, lies not in moving narrative or the promise of it, but in two things: first, its pictorial brilliance and charm of workmans.h.i.+p: and second, its relation to and influence on later English poetry. Keats in this piece antic.i.p.ates in a remarkable degree the feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools. The indoor scene of the girl over her book, in its insistent delight in vivid colour and the minuteness of far-sought suggestive and picturesque detail, is perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed and interested),--of his pictures even more than of his poems: while in the out-door work we seem to find forestalled the very tones and cadences of Mr Morris in some tale of the _Earthly Paradise_:--

"The city streets were clean and fair From wholesome drench of April rains; And on the western window panes The chilly sunset faintly told Of unmatured green valleys cold, Of the green th.o.r.n.y bloomless hedge, Of rivers new with springtide sedge."

Another poem of the same period, romantic in a different sense, is _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. The t.i.tle is taken from that of a poem by Alain Chartier,--the secretary and court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII.

of France,--of which an English translation used to be attributed to Chaucer, and is included in the early editions of his works. This t.i.tle had caught Keats's fancy, and in the _Eve of St Agnes_ he makes Lorenzo waken Madeline by playing beside her bed--

"an ancient ditty, long since mute, In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans merci'."

The syllables continuing to haunt him, he wrote in the course of the spring or summer (1819) a poem of his own on the theme, which has no more to do with that of Chartier than Chartier has really to do with Provence[57]. Keats's ballad can hardly be said to tell a story; but rather sets before us, with imagery drawn from the mediaeval world of enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love, when either adverse fate or deluded choice makes of love not a blessing but a bane. The plight which the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his own soul in thraldom. Every reader must feel how truly the imagery expresses the pa.s.sion: how powerfully, through these fascinating old-world symbols, the universal heart of man is made to speak. To many students (of whom the present writer is one) the union of infinite tenderness with a weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild yet simple magic of the cadences, the perfect 'inevitable' union of sound and sense, make of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ the master-piece, not only among the shorter poems of Keats, but even (if any single master-piece must be chosen) among them all.

Before finally giving up _Hyperion_ Keats had conceived and written, during his summer months at Shanklin and Winchester, another narrative poem on a Greek subject: but one of those where Greek life and legend come nearest to the mediaeval, and give scope both for scenes of wonder and witchcraft, and for the stress and vehemence of pa.s.sion. I speak, of course, of _Lamia_, the story of the serpent-lady, both enchantress and victim of enchantments, who loves a youth of Corinth, and builds for him by her art a palace of delights, until their happiness is shattered by the scrutiny of intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. Keats had found the germ of the story, quoted from Philostratus, in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_.

In versifying it he went back once more to rhymed heroics; handling them, however, not as in _Endymion_, but in a manner founded on that of Dryden, with a free use of the Alexandrine, a more sparing one of the overflow and the irregular pause, and of disyllabic rhymes none at all. In the measure as thus treated by Keats there is a fire and grace of movement, a lithe and serpentine energy, well suited to the theme, and as effective in its way as the victorious march of Dryden himself. Here is an example where the poetry of Greek mythology is finely woven into the rhetoric of love:--

"Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, G.o.ddess, see Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee!

For pity do not this sad heart belie-- Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.

Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay!

To thy far wishes will thy streams obey: Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain, Alone they can drink up the morning rain: Though a descended Pleiad, will not one Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy s.h.i.+ne?"

And here an instance of the power and reality of scenic imagination:--

"As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, Throughout her palaces imperial, And all her populous streets and temples lewd, Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd, To the wide-spreaded night above her towers.

Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours, Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, Companion'd or alone; while many a light Flar'd, here and there, from wealthy festivals, And threw their moving shadows on the walls, Or found them cl.u.s.ter'd in the cornic'd shade Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade."

No one can deny the truth of Keats's own criticism on _Lamia_ when he says, "I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way--give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation."

There is perhaps nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so burns itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the touch of Hermes to transform her, followed by the agonized process of the transformation itself. Admirably told, though perhaps somewhat disproportionately for its place in the poem, is the introductory episode of Hermes and his nymph: admirably again the concluding scene where the merciless gaze of the philosopher exorcises his pupil's dream of love and beauty, and the lover in forfeiting his illusion forfeits life. This thrilling vividness of narration in particular points, and the fine melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused some students to give _Lamia_ almost the first, if not the first, place among Keats's narrative poems. But surely for this it is in some parts too feverish, and in others too unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, as for instance that of the palace reared by Lamia's magic; which will not bear comparison with other and earlier dream-palaces of the poet's building.

And it has reflective pa.s.sages, as that in the first book beginning, 'Let the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and the first fifteen lines of the second, where from the winning and truly poetic ease of his style at its best, Keats relapses into something too like Leigh Hunt's and his own early strain of affected ease and fireside triviality. He shows at the same time signs of a return to his former rash experiments in language.

The positive virtues of beauty and felicity in his diction had never been attended by the negative virtue of strict correctness: thus in the _Eve of St Agnes_ we had to 'brook' tears for to check or forbear them, in _Hyperion_ 'portion'd' for 'proportion'd;' eyes that 'fever out;' a chariot 'foam'd along.' Some of these verbal licences possess a force that makes them pa.s.s; but not so in _Lamia_ the adjectives 'psalterian' and 'piazzian,' the verb 'to labyrinth,' and the participle 'daft,' as if from an imaginary active verb meaning to daze.

In the moral which the tale is made to ill.u.s.trate there is moreover a weakness. Keats himself gives us fair warning against attaching too much importance to any opinion which in a momentary mood we may find him uttering. But the doctrine he sets forth in _Lamia_ is one which from the reports of his conversation we know him to have held with a certain consistency:--

"Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven; We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine-- Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade."

Campbell has set forth the same doctrine more fully in _The Rainbow_: but one sounder, braver, and of better hope, by which Keats would have done well to stand, is preached by Wordsworth in his famous Preface.

Pa.s.sing, now, from the narrative to the reflective portion of Keats's work during this period--it was on the odes, we saw, that he was chiefly occupied in the spring months of 1819, from the completion of _St Agnes'

Eve_ at Chichester in January until the commencement of _Lamia_ and _Otho the Great_ at Shanklin in June. These odes of Keats const.i.tute a cla.s.s apart in English literature, in form and manner neither lineally derived from any earlier, nor much resembling any contemporary, verse. In what he calls the 'roundelay' of the Indian maiden in _Endymion_ he had made his most elaborate lyrical attempt until now; and while for once approaching Sh.e.l.ley in lyric ardour and height of pitch, had equalled Coleridge in touches of wild musical beauty and far-sought romance. His new odes are comparatively simple and regular in form. They are written in a strain intense indeed, but meditative and brooding, and quite free from the declamatory and rhetorical elements which we are accustomed to a.s.sociate with the idea of an ode. Of the five composed in the spring of 1819, two, those on _Psyche_ and the _Grecian Urn_, are inspired by the old Greek world of imagination and art; two, those on _Melancholy_ and the _Nightingale_, by moods of the poet's own mind; while the fifth, that on _Indolence_, partakes in a weaker degree of both inspirations.

In the _Psyche_, (where the stanza is of a lengthened type approaching those of Spenser's nuptial odes, but not regularly repeated,) Keats recurs to a theme of which he had long been enamoured, as we know by the lines in the opening poem of his first book, beginning--

"So felt he, who first told how Psyche went On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment."