Life of John Keats Part 11

Another object of his enthusiastic admiration was the Homeric character of Achilles--especially when he is described as 'shouting in the trenches.' One of his favourite topics of discourse was the principle of melody in verse, upon which he had his own notions, particularly in the management of open and close vowels. I think I have seen a somewhat similar theory attributed to Mr Wordsworth. But I do not remember his laying it down in writing. Be this as it may, Keats's theory was worked out by himself. It was, that the vowels should be so managed as not to clash one with another, so as to hear the melody,--and yet that they should be interchanged, like differing notes of music to prevent monotony....[3]

Bailey here tries to reconstruct and ill.u.s.trate from memory Keats's theory of vowel sounds, but his attempt falters and breaks down.

Keats's own first account of himself from Oxford is in a letter of September 5th to the Reynolds sisters, then on holiday at Littlehampton: a piece of mere lively foolery and rattle meant to amuse, in a taste which is not that of to-day. Five days later he writes the first of that series of letters to his young sister f.a.n.n.y which acquaints us with perhaps the most loveable and admirable parts of his character. She was now just fourteen, and living under the close guardians.h.i.+p of the Abbeys, who had put her to a boarding school at Walthamstow. Keats shows a tender and considerate elder-brotherly anxiety to get into touch with her and know her feelings and likings:--

Let us now begin a regular question and answer--a little pro and con; letting it interfere as a pleasant method of my coming at your favourite little wants and enjoyments, that I may meet them in a way befitting a brother.

We have been so little together since you have been able to reflect on things that I know not whether you prefer the _History of King Pepin_ to Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_--or _Cinderella_ and her gla.s.s slipper to Moor's _Almanack_. However in a few Letters I hope I shall be able to come at that and adapt my scribblings to your Pleasure. You must tell me about all you read if it be only six Pages in a Week and this transmitted to me every now and then will procure full sheets of Writing from me pretty frequently.--This I feel as a necessity for we ought to become intimately acquainted, in order that I may not only, as you grow up love you as my only Sister, but confide in you as my dearest friend. When I saw you last I told you of my intention of going to Oxford and 'tis now a Week since I disembark'd from his Whips.h.i.+p's Coach the Defiance in this place. I am living in Magdalen Hall on a visit to a young Man with whom I have not been long acquainted, but whom I like very much--we lead very industrious lives--he in general Studies and I in proceeding at a pretty good rate with a Poem which I hope you will see early in the next year.--Perhaps you might like to know what I am writing about. I will tell you. Many Years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his flocks on a Mountain's Side called Latmus he was a very contemplative sort of a Person and lived solitary among the trees and Plains little thinking that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love with him.--However so it was; and when he was asleep on the Gra.s.s she used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively for a long time; and at last could not refrain from carrying him away in her arms to the top of that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming--but I dare say you have read this and all the other beautiful Tales which have come down from the ancient times of that beautiful Greece. If you have not let me know and I will tell you more at large of others quite as delightful. This Oxford I have no doubt is the finest City in the world--it is full of old Gothic buildings--Spires--towers--Quadrangles--Cloisters--Groves etc and is surrounded with more clear streams than ever I saw together. I take a Walk by the Side of one of them every Evening and, thank G.o.d, we have not had a drop of rain these days.

He goes on to tell her (herein echoing Hunt's opinion) how much better it would be if Italian instead of French were taught everywhere in schools, and winds up:--

Now f.a.n.n.y you must write soon--and write all you think about, never mind what--only let me have a good deal of your writing--You need not do it all at once--be two or three or four days about it, and let it be a diary of your Life. You will preserve all my Letters and I will secure yours--and thus in the course of time we shall each of us have a good Bundle--which, hereafter, when things may have strangely altered and G.o.d knows what happened, we may read over together and look with pleasure on times past--that now are to come.

Next follows another letter to Jane Reynolds; partly making fun, much better fun than in the last, about Dilke's shooting and about the rare havoc he would like to make in Mrs Dilke's garden were he at Hampstead: partly grave in the high style into which he is apt at any moment to change from nonsense:--

Now let us turn to the sea-sh.o.r.e. Believe me, my dear Jane, it is a great happiness to see that you are, in this finest part of the year, winning a little enjoyment from the hard world. In truth, the great Elements we know of, are no means comforters: the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of state--the Earth is our throne and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before it--able, like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget almost the tempest cares of life. I have found in the ocean's music,--varying (tho' self-same) more than the pa.s.sion of Timotheus, an enjoyment not to be put into words; and, 'though inland far I be,' I now hear the voice most audibly while pleasing myself in the idea of your sensations.

To Reynolds Keats writes on September the 21st:--

For these last five or six days, we have had regularly a Boat on the Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eye-lashes. We sometimes skim into a Bed of rushes, and there become naturalized river-folks,--there is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened 'Reynolds's Cove,' in which we have read Wordsworth, and talked as may be; I think I see you and Hunt meeting in the Pit.--What a very pleasant fellow he is, if he would give up the sovereignty of a room pro bono. What evenings we might pa.s.s with him, could we have him from Mrs H. Failings I am always rather rejoiced to find in a man than sorry for; they bring us to a level.

Then follows a diatribe against the literary and intellectual pretensions of certain sets of ladies, from which he has felt an agreeable relief in some verses he has found on taking down from Bailey's shelves the poems of Katherine Philips, 'the matchless Orinda.'

The verses which pleased him, truly of her best, are those _To M. A. at parting_, and Keats goes on to copy them in full. Had Orinda been a contemporary, he might not, indeed, have failed to recognize in her a true woman of letters: but would he not also have found something to laugh and chafe at in the poses of that high-flying coterie of mutual admirers, Silvander and Poliarchus, Lucasia and Rosania and Palaemon, of which she was the centre? This is one of the very few instances to be found in Keats's work or correspondence of interest in the poetry of the Caroline age.

Quite in the last days of his visit Keats, whose mind and critical power had been growing while he worked upon _Endymion_, and whom moreover the long effort of composition was clearly beginning to fatigue, confides to Haydon his dissatisfaction with what he has done:--'You will be glad to hear that within these last three weeks I have written 1000 lines--which are the third Book of my Poem. My Ideas with respect to it I a.s.sure you are very low--and I would write the subject thoroughly again--but I am tired of it and think the time would be better spent in writing a new Romance which I have in my eye for next summer--Rome was not built in a day--and all the good I expect from my employment this summer is the fruit of Experience which I hope to gather in my next Poem.'

Coming back in the first week of October to Hampstead, whither his brothers had by this time also returned from a trip to Paris, Keats was presently made uncomfortable by evidences of discord among his friends and reports of what seemed like disloyalty on the part of one of them, Leigh Hunt, to himself. Haydon had now left the studio in Great Marlborough Street for one in Lisson Grove, and the Hunts, having come away from Hampstead and paid a long late-summer visit to the Sh.e.l.leys at Marlow, were lodging near him in the same street. 'Everybody seems at loggerheads,' Keats writes to Bailey. 'There's Hunt infatuated--there's Haydon's picture in statu quo--There's Hunt walks up and down his painting-room--criticizing every head most unmercifully.' Both Haydon and Reynolds, he goes on, keep telling him tales of Hunt: How Hunt has been talking flippantly and patronizingly of _Endymion_, saying that if it is four thousand lines long now it would have been seven thousand but for him, and giving the impression that Keats stood to him in the relation of a pupil needing and taking advice. He declares in consequence that he is quite disgusted with literary men and will never know another except Wordsworth; and then, more coolly and sensibly, 'now, is not this a most paltry thing to think about?... This is, to be sure, the vexation of a day, nor would I say so many words about it to any but those whom I know to have my welfare and reputation at heart.'

During the six or seven autumn weeks spent at Hampstead after his return from Oxford Keats was getting on, a little flaggingly, with the fourth book of _Endymion_, besides writing an occasional lyric or two. Fresh from the steadying and sympathetic companions.h.i.+p of Bailey, he keeps up their intimacy by affectionate letters in which he discloses much of that which lay deepest and was best in him. Writing in the first days of November he congratulates Bailey on having got a curacy in c.u.mberland and promises some day to visit him there; says he is in a fair way to have finished _Endymion_ in three weeks; mentions an idea he has of s.h.i.+pping his brother Tom, who has been looking worse, off to Lisbon for the winter and perhaps going with him; and gets in by a side wind a masterly criticism of Wordsworth's poem _The Gipsies_ and also of Hazlitt's criticism of it in the _Round Table_. A fragment of another letter, dated November the 5th, alludes with annoyance, not for the first time, to some failure of Haydon's to keep his word or take trouble about a young man from Oxford named Cripps whom he had promised to receive as pupil and in whom Bailey and Keats were interested. The same fragment records the appearance in _Blackwood_ (the _Endinburgh Magazine_, as Keats calls it) of the famous first article of the c.o.c.kney School series, attacking Hunt with a virulence far beyond even the accustomed licence of the time, and seeming by the motto prefixed to it (verses of Cornelius Webb coupling the names of Hunt and Keats) to threaten a similar handling of Keats later on. 'I don't mind the thing much,' says Keats, 'but if he should go to such lengths with me as he has done with Hunt, I must infallibly call him to an Account if he be a human being, and appears in Squares and Theatres, where we might possibly meet--I don't relish his abuse.'

Some time about mid-November Keats, his health and strength being steadier than in the spring, felt himself in the mood for a few weeks of solitude and went to spend them at Burford Bridge Inn, in the beautiful vale of Mickleham between Leatherhead and Dorking. The outing, he wrote, was intended 'to change the scene--change the air---and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting 500 lines.' Keats dearly loved a valley: he loved even the sound of the names denoting one. In his marginal notes to a copy of _Paradise Lost_ he gave a friend we find the following:--

'Or have ye chosen this place After the toil of battle to repose Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?'

There is cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and h.e.l.l with the very utter affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of Delphic Abstraction--a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry:--

'Others, more mild, Retreated in a silent valley, sing With notes angelical to many a harp Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall By doom of battle.'

How much of the charm is in the valley!

There, from his inmost self, speaks a poet of another poet, and as if to and for poets, deep calling unto deep. But in his every-day vein of speech or writing Keats was always reticent in regard to the scenery of places he visited, disliking nothing more than the glib ecstasies of the tourist in search of the picturesque. When he has looked round him in his new quarters at Burford Bridge he says simply, writing to Reynolds on November the 22nd, 'I like this place very much. There is Hill and Dale and a little river. I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon--"you a' seen the Moon"--came down and wrote some lines.' 'Whenever I am separated from you,' he continues, 'and not engaged in a continuous Poem, every letter shall bring you a lyric--but I am too anxious for you to enjoy the whole to send you a particle:' the whole, that is, of _Endymion_. The sequel shows him to be just as deep and ardent in the study of Shakespeare as when he was beginning his poem at Carisbrooke in the spring. 'I never found so many beauties in the Sonnets--they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally--in the intensity of working out conceits:' and he goes on to quote pa.s.sages and phrases both from them and from _Venus and Adonis_. Next, with a sudden change of mind about letting Reynolds see a sample of _Endymion_, 'By the Whim-King!

I'll give you a stanza, because it is not material in connexion, and when I wrote it I wanted you to give your vote, pro or con.'--The stanza he gives is from the song of the Constellations in the fourth book, certainly one of the weakest things in the poem: pity Reynolds had not been there indeed, to give his vote _contra_.

On the same day, November 22, Keats writes to Bailey a letter even richer in contents and more self-revealing than this to Reynolds. It gives the indispensable key both to much in his own character and much of the deeper speculative and symbolic meanings underlying his work, from _Endymion_ to the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Beginning with a wise and tolerant reference to the Haydon trouble, and throwing out a pa.s.sing hint of the distinction between men of Genius, who have not, and men of Power, who have, a proper individual self or determined character of their own, Keats pa.s.ses at the close to an illuminating self-confession which is also a contrast between himself and his correspondent:--

You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out,--you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away--I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness--I look not for it if it be not in the present hour,--nothing startles me beyond the moment. The Setting Sun will always set me to rights, or if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having befallen another is this--'Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his Spirit'--and I beg now, my dear Bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction--for I a.s.sure you I sometimes feel not the influence of a pa.s.sion or affection during a whole Week--and so long this sometimes continues, I begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other times--thinking them a few barren Tragedy Tears.

Readers of _Endymion_ will recognize a symbolic embodiment of a mood akin to this in the Cave of Quietude in the fourth book. But the great value of the letter, especially great as a help to the study of _Endymion_ in general, is in the long central pa.s.sage setting forth his speculations as to the relation of imagination to truth, meaning truth ultimate or transcendental. He finds his clue in the eighth book of _Paradise Lost_, where Adam, recounting to Raphael his first experiences as new-created man, tells how twice over he fell into a dream and awoke to find it true: his first dream thus confirmed in the result being how 'One of shape divine' took him by the hand and led him into the garden of Paradise:[4] his second, how the same glorious shape came to him and opened his side and from his rib fas.h.i.+oned a creature:

Manlike, but different s.e.x, so lovely fair, That what seem'd fair in all the World, seem'd now Mean, or in her sum'd up, in her contain'd And in her looks, which from that time infus'd Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before, And into all things from her Air inspir'd The spirit of love and amorous delight.

She disappear'd, and left me dark, I wak'd To find her, or for ever to deplore Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure: When out of hope, behold her, not far off, Such as I saw her in my dream, adorn'd With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow To make her amiable.[5]

It was no doubt this second of Adam's dreams that was chiefly in Keats's mind. His way of explaining his speculations to his friend is quite unstudied and inconsecutive; he is, as he says, 'continually running away from the subject,' or shall we say letting the stream of his ideas branch out into side channels from which he finds it difficult to come back? But yet their main current and purport will be found not difficult to follow, if only the reader will bear one thing well in mind: that when Keats in this and similar pa.s.sages speaks of 'Sensations' as opposed to 'Thoughts' he does not limit the word to sensations of the body, of what intensity or exquisiteness soever or howsoever instantaneously transforming themselves from sensation into emotion: what he means are intuitions of the mind and spirit as immediate as these, as thrillingly convincing and indisputable, as independent of all consecutive stages and formal processes of thinking: almost the same things, indeed, as in a later pa.s.sage of the same letter he calls 'ethereal musings.' And now let the poet speak for himself:--

O! I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same idea of all our pa.s.sions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. In a Word you may know my favourite speculation by my first Book, and the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters. The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream, he awoke and found it truth:--I am more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning--and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is 'a Vision in the form of Youth,' a shadow of reality to come--and this consideration has further convinced me,--for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine,--that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam's dream will do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and its spiritual repet.i.tion. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repet.i.tion of its own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness. To compare great things with small, have you never, by being surprised with an old Melody, in a delicious place by a delicious voice, _felt_ over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul? Do you not remember forming to yourself the Singer's face--more beautiful than it was possible, and yet, with the elevation of the Moment, you did not think so? Even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination, so high that the prototype must be hereafter--that delicious face you will see.

There is one sentence in the above which gives us special matter for regret. Keats speaks of 'the little Song I sent in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters.' Such a song, if we had it, would doubtless put forth clearly and melodiously in concrete imagery the ideas which Keats in his letter tries to expound in the abstract language of which he is by nature so much less a master. Of 'my last,' that is of his preceding letter to Bailey, unhappily but a fragment is preserved, and the song must have been lost with the sheet or sheets which went astray, seeing that none of Keats's preserved lyrics can be held to answer to his account of this one. His words have a further interest as proving that now in these days of approaching winter, with his long poem almost finished, he allowed himself to digress into some lyric experiments, as in its earlier stages he had not done. External testimony and reasonable inference enable us to identify some of these experiments. Two or three lightish love-lyrics, whether impersonal or inspired by pa.s.sing adventures of his own, are among the number. That beginning 'Think not of it, sweet one, so,' dates definitely from November 11, before he left Hampstead. To nearly about the same time belongs almost certainly the very daintily finished stanzas 'Unfelt, unheard, unseen,' which one at least of Keats's subtlest critics[6] considers (I cannot agree with her) the first of his technically faultless achievements. So also, I am convinced, does that much less happily wrought thing, the little love-plaint discovered only two years ago and beginning--

You say you love, but with a voice Chaster than a nun's who singeth The soft vespers to herself When the chime-bell ringeth-- O love me truly!

You say you love; but with a smile Cold as sunrise in September, As you were St Cupid's nun, And kept his week of Ember.

O love me truly!--

and so forth. Here again, it seems evident, we have an instance of an echo from one of the old Elizabethan poets (this time an anonymous song-writer) lingering like a chime in Keats's memory. Listen to the first three stanzas of _A Proper Wooing Song_, written to the tune of the _Merchant's Daughter_ and printed in Clement Robinson's _Handful of Pleasant Delites_, 1584:--

Maide will ye loue me yea or no?

tell me the trothe and let me go.

It can be no lesse than a sinful deed, trust me truly, To linger a Louer that lookes to speede, in due time duly.

You maides that thinke yourselves as fine, as Venus and all the Muses nine: The Father Himselfe when He first made man, trust me truly, Made you for his helpe when the world began, in due time duly.

Then sith G.o.d's will was even so why should you disdaine your Louer tho?

But rather with a willing heart, loue him truly; For in so doing you do your part let reason rule ye.

The metrical form of Keats's verses is not, indeed, the same as that of the Elizabethan song, but I think he must certainly have had the cadence of its refrains more or less consciously in his mind's ear.[7]

A definite and dated case of a lyrical experiment suggested to Keats at this time by an older model is the famous little 'drear-nighted December' song in which he re-embodies, with new and seasonable imagery, the ancient moral of the misery added to misery by the remembrance of past happiness. This was composed, as Woodhouse on the express testimony of Jane Reynolds informs us, in the beginning of this same December, 1817, when Keats was finis.h.i.+ng _Endymion_ at Burford Bridge. Any reader familiar with the aspect of the spot at that season, when the overhanging trees have shed their last gold, and spars of ice have begun to fringe the sluggish meanderings of the Mole, will realize how deeply the sentiment of the scene and season has sunk into Keats's verse. Well as the piece is known, I shall quote it entire, not in the form in which it is printed in the editions, but in that in which alone it exists in his own hand-writing and in the transcripts by his friends Woodhouse and Brown[8]:--

In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity: The north cannot undo them, With a sleety whistle through them; Nor frozen thawings glue them From budding at the prime.

In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne'er remember Apollo's summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time.

Ah! would 'twere so with many A gentle girl and boy!

But were there ever any Writh'd not at pa.s.sed joy?

The feel of _not_ to feel it, When there is none to heal it, Nor numbed sense to steel it, Was never said in rhyme.[9]

Keats's model in this instance is a song from Dryden's _Spanish Fryar_, a thing rather beside his ordinary course of reading: can he perhaps have taken the volume containing it from Bailey's shelves, as he took the poems of Orinda? Here is a verse to show the tune as set by Dryden:--

Farewell ungrateful Traitor, Farewell my perjured swain, Let never injured creature Believe a man again.

The pleasure of possessing Surpa.s.ses all expressing, But 'tis too short a blessing, And Love too long a pain.

Do readers recall what the greatest of metrical magicians, who would be so very great a poet if metrical magic were the whole of poetry, or if the body of thought and imagination in his work had commonly half as much vitality as the verbal music which is its vesture,--do readers recall what Mr Swinburne made of this same measure when he took it up half a century later in the _Garden of Proserpine_?

But in attending to these incidental lyrics we risk losing sight of what was Keats's main business in these weeks, namely the bringing to a close his eight months' task upon _Endymion_. In finis.h.i.+ng the poem he was only a little behind the date he had fixed when he wrote its opening lines at Carisbrooke:--

Many and many a verse I hope to write, Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white, Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas, I must be near the middle of my story.

O may no wintry season, bare and h.o.a.ry, See it half finish'd: but let Autumn bold, With universal tinge of sober gold, Be all about me when I make an end.