Life of John Keats Part 16

appealing groans From their poor b.r.e.a.s.t.s went sueing to her ear In vain; _remorseless as an infant's bier_ She whisk'd against their eyes the sooty oil.

Does yonder thrush, Schooling its half-fledg'd little ones to brush About the dewy forest, whisper tales.

Speak not of grief, young stranger, or _cold snails Will slime the rose to-night_.

He rose: he grasp'd his stole, With convuls'd clenches waving it abroad, And in a voice of solemn joy, _that aw'd Echo into oblivion_, he said:--

Yet hourly had he striven To hide the cankering venom, that had _riven_ His fainting recollections.

The wanderer Holding his forehead to keep off the _burr_ Of smothering fancies.

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.

In some of these cases the trouble is, not that the rime drags in a train of far-fetched or intrusive ideas, but only that words are used for the rime's sake in inexact and inappropriate senses. Such laxity in the employment of words is one of the great weaknesses of Keats's style in _Endymion_, and is no doubt partly connected with his general disposition to treat language as though it were as free and fluid in his own day as it had been two hundred years earlier. The same disposition makes him reckless in turning verbs into nouns (a 'complain,' an 'exclaim,' a 's.h.i.+ne,' a 'pierce,' a 'quell') and nouns into verbs (to 'throe,' to 'pa.s.sion,' to 'monitor,' to 'fragment up'); in using at his convenience active verbs as pa.s.sive and pa.s.sive verbs as active; and in not only reviving archaic participial forms ('dight,' 'fight,' 'raft,'

etc.) but in giving currency to participles of the cla.s.s Coleridge denounced as demoralizing to the ear, and as hybrids equivocally generated of noun-substantives ('emblem'd,' 'gordian'd,' 'mountain'd,'

'phantasy'd'), as well as to adjectives borrowed from Elizabethan use or new-minted more or less in accordance with it ('pipy,' 'paly,' 'ripply,'

'sluicy,' 'slumbery,' 'towery,' 'bowery,' 'orby,' 'nervy,' 'surgy,'

'sparry,' 'spangly).' It was these and such like technical liberties with language which scandalized conservative critics, and caused even De Quincey, becoming tardily acquainted with Keats's work, to dislike and utterly under-rate it. He himself came before long to condemn the style of 'the slipshod Endymion.' Nevertheless the consequence of his experiments in reviving or imitating the usages of the great Renaissance age of English poetry is only in part to be regretted. His rashness led him into almost as many felicities as faults, and the examples of the happier liberties in _Endymion_ has done much towards enriching the vocabulary and diction of English poetry in the nineteenth century.

Other faults that more gravely mar the poem are not technical but spiritual: intimate failures of taste and feeling due partly to mere rawness and inexperience, partly to excessive intensity and susceptibility of temperament, partly to second-rateness of social training and a.s.sociation. A habit of cloying over-luxuriance in description, the giving way to a sort of swooning abandonment of the senses in contact with the 'deliciousness' of things, is the most besetting of such faults. Allied with it is Keats's treatment of love as an actuality, which in this poem is in unfortunate and distasteful contrast with his high conception of love in the abstract as the inspiring and enn.o.bling power of the world and all things in it. Add the propensity to make Glaucus address Scylla as 'timid thing!' and Endymion beg for 'one gentle squeeze' from his Indian maiden, with many a like turn in the simpering, familiar mood which Keats at this time had caught from or naturally shared with Leigh Hunt. It should, however, be noted as a mark of progress in self-criticism that, comparing the drafts of the poem with the printed text, we find that in revising it for press he had turned out more and worse pa.s.sages in this vein than he left in.

From flaws or disfigurements of one or other of these kinds the poem is never free for more than a page or two, and rarely for so much, at a time. But granting all weaknesses and immaturities whether of form or spirit, what a power of poetry is in _Endymion_: what evidence, unmistakeable, one would have said, to the blindest, of genius. Did any poet in his twenty-second year ever write with so prodigal an activity of invention, however undisciplined and unbraced, or with an imagination so penetrating to divine and so swift to evoke beauty? Were so many faults and failures ever interspersed with felicities of married sound and sense so frequent and absolute, and only to be matched in the work of the ripest masters? Lost as the reader may often feel himself among the phantasmagoric intricacies of the tale, cloyed by its amatory insipidities, bewildered by the redundancies of an invention stimulated into over-activity by any and every chance feather-touch of a.s.sociation or rime-suggestion, he can afford to be patient in the certainty of coming, from one page to another, upon touches of true and fresh inspiration in almost every strain and mode of poetry. Often the inspired poet and the raw c.o.c.kney rimester come inseparably coupled in the limit of half a dozen lines, as thus in the narrative of Glaucus:--

Upon a dead thing's face my hand I laid; I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe!

O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?

Could not thy harshest vengeance be content, But thou must nip this tender innocent Because I loved her?--_Cold, O cold indeed Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed The sea-swell took her hair._

or thus from the love-making of Cynthia:--

Now I swear at once That I am wise, that Pallas is a dunce-- Perhaps her love like mine is but unknown-- O I do think that I have been alone In chast.i.ty: yes, Pallas has been sighing, _While every eve saw me my hair uptying, With fingers cool as aspen leaves_.

In like manner the unfortunate opening of Book III above cited leads on, as Mr de Selincourt has justly observed, to a pa.s.sage in praise of the moon which is among the very finest and best sustained examples of Keats's power in nature-poetry. For quotation I will take not this but a second invocation to the moon which follows a little later, for the reason that in it the raptures and longings which the poet puts into the mouth of his hero are really in a large measure his own:--

What is there in thee, Moon! that thou shouldst move My heart so potently? When yet a child I oft have dry'd my tears when thou hast smil'd.

Thou seem'dst my sister: hand in hand we went From eve to morn across the firmament.

No apples would I gather from the tree, Till thou hadst cool'd their cheeks deliciously: No tumbling water ever spake romance, But when my eyes with thine thereon could dance: No woods were green enough, no bower divine, Until thou liftedst up thine eyelids fine: In sowing time ne'er would I dibble take, Or drop a seed, till thou wast wide awake; And, in the summer tide of blossoming, No one but thee hath heard me blythly sing And mesh my dewy flowers all the night.

No melody was like a pa.s.sing spright If it went not to solemnize thy reign.

Yes, in my boyhood every joy and pain By thee were fas.h.i.+oned in the self-same end; And as I grew in years, still didst thou blend With all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen; Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen-- The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun; Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won; Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed-- My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:-- Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!

O what a wild and harmonized tune My spirit struck from all the beautiful!

In the last two lines of the above Keats gives us the essential master key to his own poetic nature and being. The eight preceding, from 'As I grew in years' offer in their rhetorical form a curious parallel with a pa.s.sage of similar purport in Drayton's _Endimion and Phoebe_:--

Be kind (quoth he) sweet Nymph unto thy lover, My soul's sole essence and my senses' mover, Life of my life, pure Image of my heart, Impression of Conceit, Invention, Art.

My vital spirit receives his spirit from thee, Thou art that all which ruleth all in me, Thou art the sap and life whereby I live, Which powerful vigour doth receive and give.

Thou nourishest the flame wherein I burn, The North whereto my heart's true touch doth turn.

Was Keats, then, after all familiar with the rare volume in which alone Drayton's early poem had been printed, or does the similar turn of the two pa.s.sages spring from some innate affinity between the two poets,--or perhaps merely from the natural suggestion of the theme?

In nature-poetry, and especially in that mode of it in which the poet goes out with his whole being into nature and loses his ident.i.ty in delighted sympathy with her doings, Keats already shows himself a master scarcely excelled. Take the lines near the beginning which tell of the 'silent workings of the dawn' on the morning of Pan's festival:--

Rain-scented eglantine Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run To warm their chilliest bubbles in the gra.s.s; Man's voice was on the mountains; and the ma.s.s Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold, To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.

The freshness and music and felicity of the first two lines are nothing less than Shakespearean: in the rest note with how true an instinct the poet evokes the operant magic and living activities of the dawn, single instances first and then in a sudden outburst the sum and volume of them all: how he avoids word-painting and palette-work, leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined rather than seen, delights which the poet instinctively attributes to nature as though she were as sentient as himself. It is like Keats here so to place and lead up to the word 'old' as to make it pregnant with all the meanings which it bore to him: that is with all the wonder and romance of ancient Greece, and at the same time with a sense of awe, like that expressed in the opening chorus of Goethe's _Faust_, at nature's eternal miracle of the sun still rising 'glorious as on creation's day.'

It is interesting to note how above all other nature-images Keats, whose blood, when his faculties were at their highest tension, was always apt to be heated even to fever-point, prefers those of nature's coolness and refreshment. Here are two or three out of a score of instances. Endymion tells how he had been gazing at the face of his unknown love smiling at him from the well:--

I started up, when lo! refreshfully, There came upon my face in plenteous showers Dew-drops, and dewy buds, and leaves, and flowers, Wrapping all objects from my smothered sight, Bathing my spirit in a new delight.

Coming to a place where a brook issues from a cave, he says to himself--

'Tis the grot Of Proserpine, when h.e.l.l, obscure and hot, Doth her resign; and where her tender hands She dabbles on the cool and sluicy sands:

A little later, and

Now he is sitting by a shady spring, And elbow-deep with feverous fingering, Stems the upbursting cold.

For many pa.s.sages where the magic of nature is mingled instinctively and inseparably with the magic of Greek mythology, the prayer of Endymion to Cynthia above quoted (p. 210) may serve as a sample: and all readers of poetry know the famous lines where the beautiful evocation of a natural scene melts into one, more beautiful still, of a scene of ancient life and wors.h.i.+p which comes floated upon the poet's inner vision by an imagined strain of music from across the sea:--

It seem'd he flew, the way so easy was; And like a new-born spirit did he pa.s.s Through the green evening quiet in the sun, O'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun, Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams The summer time away. One track unseams A wooded cleft, and, far away, the blue Of ocean fades upon him; then, anew, He sinks adown a solitary glen, Where there was never sound of mortal men, Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences Melting to silence, when upon the breeze Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet, To cheer itself to Delphi.[2]

Often in thus conjuring up visions of the cla.s.sic past, Keats effects true master strokes of imaginative concentration. Do we not feel half the romance of the _Odyssey_, with the spell that is in the sound of the vowelled place-names of Grecian story, and the breathing mystery of moonlight falling on magic islands of the sea, distilled into the one line--

Aeaea's isle was wondering at the moon?

And again in the pair of lines--

Like old Deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood Or blind Orion hungry for the morn,

do not the two figures evoked rise before us full-charged each with the vital significance of his story? Mr de Selincourt is no doubt right in suggesting that in the Orion line Keats's vision has been stimulated by the print from that picture of Poussin's which Hazlitt has described in so rich a strain of eulogy.

One of the great symptoms of returning vitality in the imagination of Europe, as the eighteenth century pa.s.sed into the nineteenth, was its re-awakening to the significance and beauty of the Greek mythology. For a hundred years and more the value of that mythology for the human spirit had been forgotten. There never had been a time when the names of the ancient, especially the Roman, G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses were used so often in poetry, but simply in cold obedience to tradition and convention; merely as part of the accepted mode of speech of persons cla.s.sically educated, and with no more living significance than belonged to the trick of personifying abstract forces and ideas by putting capital initials to their names. So far as concerned any real effect upon men's minds, it was tacitly understood and accepted that the Greek mythology was 'dead.' As if it could ever die; as if the 'fair humanities of old religion,' in pa.s.sing out of the transitory state of things believed into the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first.

Faiths, as faiths, perish one after another; but each in pa.s.sing away bequeaths for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of ancient Greece, embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest gifted human race to explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern mind which is in so far dead and not they. Some words of Johnson's written forty years before Keats's time may help us to realize the full depth of the deadness from which in this respect it had to be awakened:--

He (Waller) borrows too many of his sentiments and ill.u.s.trations from the old Mythology, for which it is in vain to plead the example of ancient poets: the deities, which they introduced so frequently, were considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination, whatever sober reason might even then determine. But of these images time has tarnished the splendour. A fiction, not only detected but despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion, or slight ill.u.s.tration.

To rescue men's minds from this mode of deadness was part of the work of the English poetical revival of 1800 and onwards, and Keats was the poet who has contributed most to the task. Wordsworth could understand and expound the spirit of Grecian myths, and on occasion, as in his cry for a sight of Proteus and a sound of old Triton's horn, could for a moment hanker after its revival. Sh.e.l.ley could feel and write of Apollo and Pan and Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, with ardent delight and lyric emotion. But it was the gift of Keats to make live by imagination, whether in few words or many, every ancient fable that came up in his mind. The couple of lines telling of the song with which Peona tries to soothe her brother's pining are a perfect example alike of appropriate verbal music and of imagination following out a cla.s.sic myth, that of the birth and nurture of Pan, from a mere hint to its recesses and finding the human beauty and tenderness that lurk there:--

'Twas a lay More subtle cadenced, more forest wild Than Dryope's lone lulling of her child:

Even in setting before us so trite a personification as the G.o.d of love, Keats manages to escape the traditional and the merely decorative, and to endow him with a new and subtle vitality--

awfully he stands; A sovereign quell is in his waving hands; No sight can bear the lightning of his bow; His quiver is mysterious, none can know What themselves think of it; from forth his eyes There darts strange light of varied hues and dyes: A scowl is sometimes on his brow, but who Look full upon it feel anon the blue Of his fair eyes run liquid through their souls.

Keats in one place defines his purpose in his poem, if only he can find strength to carry it out, as a

striving to uprear Love's standard on the battlements of song.

His actual love scenes, as we have said, are the weakest, his ideal invocations to and celebrations of love among the strongest, things in the poem. One of these, already quoted, comes near the end of the first book: the second book opens with another: in the third book the incident of the moonlight spangling the surface of the sea and penetrating thence to the under-sea caverns where Endymion lies languis.h.i.+ng is used to point an essential moral of the narrative:--

O love! how potent hast thou been to teach Strange journeyings! Wherever beauty dwells, In gulph or aerie, mountains or deep dells, In light, in gloom, in star or blazing sun, Thou pointest out the way, and straight 'tis won.