Life of John Keats Part 20

The sonnets are preserved. They were to be written, it was agreed, in a quarter of an hour. Sh.e.l.ley and Keats were up to time, but Hunt had to sit up half the night to finish his. It was worth the pains, and with it for once the small poet outdid the two great. 'I have been writing,'

continues Keats, 'at intervals, many songs and sonnets, and I long to be at Teignmouth to read them over to you.' With the help of his ma.n.u.scripts or of the transcripts made from them by his friends, it is possible to retrace the actual order of many of these fugitive pieces.

On the 16th of January was written the sonnet on Mrs Reynolds's cat, perhaps Keats's best thing in the humorous vein; on the 21st, after seeing in Leigh Hunt's possession a lock of hair reputed to be Milton's, the address to that poet beginning 'Chief of organic numbers!' which he sends to the prime Milton enthusiast among his friends, Benjamin Bailey, with the comment, 'This I did at Hunt's, at his request,--perhaps I should have done something better alone and at home.' The first two lines,--

Chief of organic numbers, Old scholar of the spheres!

read like an antic.i.p.ation in the rough of the first stanza of Tennyson's masterly set of alcaics already referred to, beginning 'O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' To the 22nd belongs the sonnet, 'O golden tongued Romance with serene lute,' in which Keats bids himself lay aside (apparently) his Spenser,[5] in order to read again the more rousing and human-pa.s.sionate pages of _Lear_. This is one of the last of his sonnets written in the Petrarchan form as followed by Milton and Wordsworth, and from henceforth he follows the Shakespearean form almost exclusively. On the 31st he writes to Reynolds in a rollicking mood, and sends him the lines to Apollo beginning 'Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,' part rant (the word is his own) pure and simple, part rant touched with genius, and giving words to a very frequent and intense phase of feeling in himself:--

Aye, when the soul is fled Too high above our head, Affrighted do we gaze After its airy maze, As doth a mother wild, When her young infant child Is in an eagle's claws-- And is not this the cause Of madness?--G.o.d of Song, Thou bearest me along Through, sights I scarce can bear: O let me, let me share With the hot lyre and thee, The staid Philosophy.

Temper my lonely hours, And let me see thy bowers More unalarm'd!

By way of a sober conclusion to the same letter, he adds the very fine and profoundly felt sonnet in the Shakespearean form beginning 'When I have fears that I may cease to be,' which be calls his last. On the 3rd of February he sends two spirited sets of verses in the favourite four-beat measure, heptasyllable varied with octosyllable, of the later Elizabethans and the youthful Milton, namely those to Robin Hood (suggested by a set of sonnets by Reynolds on Sherwood Forest) and those on the Mermaid Tavern. On the 4th comes another Shakespearean sonnet, that beginning 'Time's sea has been five years at its slow ebb,' in which he recalls the memory of an old, persistent, haunting love-fancy.

The two sonnets of January 31 and February 4 should be read strictly together:--

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charact'ry, Hold like full garners the full-ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love!--then on the sh.o.r.e Of the wide world I stand alone, and think, Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Time's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb; Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand; Since I was tangled in thy beauty's web, And snared by the ungloving of thine hand.

And yet I never look on midnight sky, But I behold thine eyes' well memoried light; I cannot look upon the rose's dye, But to thy cheek my soul doth take its flight; I cannot look on any budding flower, But my fond ear, in fancy at thy lips, And hearkening for a love-sound, doth devour Its sweets in the wrong sense:--Thou dost eclipse Every delight with sweet remembering, And grief unto my darling joys dost bring.

The former is far the richer in contents, and in the light of the tragedy to come its two first quatrains now seem to thrill with prophetic meaning. But what is singular is that in the third quatrain should be recalled, in the same high strain of emotion, the vision of a beauty seen but not even accosted three-and-a-half years earlier (not really five) in the public gardens at Vauxhall, and then (August, 1814) addressed in what are almost the earliest of Keats's dated verses, those in which he calls for a 'br.i.m.m.i.n.g bowl,'--

From my despairing heart to charm The Image of the fairest form That e'er my reveling eyes beheld, That e'er my wandering fancy spell'd....[6]

Such, Woodhouse a.s.sures us, is the case, and the same memory fills the second sonnet: but this it might be possible to take rather as a fine Shakespearean exercise than as an expression of profound feeling. On the 5th, Keats sends another sonnet postponing compliance for the present with an invitation of Leigh Hunt's to compose something in honour, or in emulation, of Spenser; and on the 8th, the sonnet in praise of the colour blue composed by way of protest against one of Reynolds preferring black, at least in the colouring of feminine eyes. About the same time he agreed with Reynolds that they should each write some metrical tales from Boccaccio, and publish them in a joint volume; and began at once for his own part with the first few stanzas of _Isabella_ or the _Pot of Basil_. A little later in this so prolific month of February we find him rejoicing in the song of the thrush and blackbird, and melted into feelings of indolent pleasure and receptivity under the influence of spring winds and dissolving rain. He theorizes pleasantly in a letter to Reynolds on the virtues and benefits of this state of mind, translating the thrush's music into some blank-verse lines of subtle and haunting cadence, in which, disowning for the nonce his habitual doctrine of the poet's paramount need of knowledge, he makes the thrush say,

O fret not after knowledge--I have none, And yet my song comes native with the warmth, O fret not after knowledge--I have none, And yet the evening listens.

In the course of the next fortnight we find him in correspondence with Taylor about the corrections to _Endymion_; and soon afterwards making a clearance of borrowed books, and otherwise preparing to flit. His brother George, who had been taking care of Tom at Teignmouth since December, was now obliged to come to town, bent on a scheme of marriage and emigration; and Tom's health having made a momentary rally, Keats was unwilling that he should leave Teignmouth, and determined to join him there. He started in the second week of March, and stayed almost two months. It was an unlucky season for weather,--the soft-buffeting sheets and misty drifts of Devons.h.i.+re rain renewing themselves wave on wave, in the inexhaustible way all lovers of that country know, throughout almost the whole spring, and preventing him from getting more than occasional tantalizing s.n.a.t.c.hes of enjoyment in the beauty of the scenery, the walks, and flowers. His letters are full of whimsical objurgations not only against the climate, but against the male inhabitants, whose fibre he chooses to conceive relaxed by it:--

You may say what you will of Devons.h.i.+re: the truth is, it is a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, slipshod county. The hills are very beautiful, when you get a sight of 'em--the primroses are out, but then you are in--the Cliffs are of a fine deep colour, but then the Clouds are continually vieing with them--the women like your London people in a sort of negative way--because the native men are the poorest creatures in England--because Government never have thought it worth while to send a recruiting party among them. When I think of Wordsworth's Sonnet, 'Vanguard of Liberty! ye men of Kent!' the degenerated race about me are Pulvis ipecac.

simplex--a strong dose. Were I a corsair, I'd make a descent on the south coast of Devon; if I did not run the chance of having Cowardice imputed to me. As for the men, they'd run away into the Methodist meeting-houses, and the women would be glad of it.... Such a quelling Power have these thoughts over me that I fancy the very air of a deteriorating quality. I fancy the flowers, all precocious, have an Acrasian spell about them--I feel able to beat off the Devons.h.i.+re waves like soap-froth. I think it well for the honour of Britain that Julius Caesar did not first land in this County. A Devons.h.i.+rer standing on his native hills is not a distinct object--he does not show against the light--a wolf or two would dispossess him.

A man of west-country descent should have known better. Why did not the ghost of William Browne of Tavistock arise and check Keats's hand, and recite for his rebuke the burst in praise of Devon from _Britannia's Pastorals_, with its happy echo of the Virgilian _Salve magna parens_ and _Haec genus acre virum_?--

Hail thou my native soil: thou blessed plot Whose equal all the world affordeth not!

Shew me who can so many christall rills, Such sweet-clothed vallies, or aspiring hills, Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines, Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly s.h.i.+nes: And if the earth can shew the like again; Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men.

Time never can produce men to o'er-take The fames of Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake, Or worthy Hawkins or of thousands more That by their power made the Devonian sh.o.r.e Mock the proud Tagus.

Of the Devons.h.i.+re girls Keats thought better than of their menkind, and writes and rimes on them with a certain skittishness of admiration. With one local family, a Mrs Jeffrey and her daughters, he and his brothers were on terms of warm friends.h.i.+p, as is shown by his correspondence with them a year later. One of the daughters married afterwards a Mr Prowse, and published two volumes of very tolerable sentimental verse: some of their contents, as interpreted (says Mr Buxton Forman) by Teignmouth tradition, would indicate that her heart had been very deeply touched by the young poet during his stay: but of responsive feelings on his own part his letters give no hint, and it was only a few weeks later that he wrote how his love for his brothers had hitherto stifled any impression that a woman might have made on him.

Besides his constant occupation in watching and cheering the invalid Tom, who had a relapse just after he came down, Keats was busy during these Devons.h.i.+re days seeing through the press the last sheets of _Endymion_. He also composed, with the exception of the few verses he had begun at Hampstead, the whole of _Isabella_ or _The Pot of Basil_, the first of his longer poems written with real maturity of art and certainty of touch. At the same time, no doubt with his great intended effort, _Hyperion_, in mind, he was studying and appreciating Milton as he had never done before. He had been steeped since boyhood in the charm of the minor poems, from the _Vacation Exercise_ to _Lycidas_, and had read but not greatly cared for _Paradise Lost_, until first Severn, and then more energetically Bailey, had insisted that this was a reproach to him: and he now threw himself upon that poem, and penetrated with the grasp and swiftness of genius, as his marginal criticisms show, into the very essence of its power and beauty. His correspondence with his friends, particularly Bailey and Reynolds, is during this same time unusually sustained and full. Sometimes his vein is light and t.i.tterly (to use a word of his own) as I have indicated, and sometimes he masks an anxious heart beneath a lively manner, as thus:--

But ah Coward! to talk at this rate to a sick man, or, I hope, to one that was sick--for I hope by this you stand on your right foot. If you are not--that's all,--I intend to cut all sick people if they do not make up their minds to cut Sickness--a fellow to whom I have a complete aversion, and who strange to say is harboured and countenanced in several houses where I visit--he is sitting now quite impudent between me and Tom--he insults me at poor Jem Rice's--and you have seated him before now between us at the Theatre, when I thought he looked with a longing eye at poor Kean. I shall say, once for all, to my friends, generally and severally, cut that fellow, or I cut you.

On another day he recurs to the mood of half real half mock impatience against those who rub the bloom off things of beauty by over-commenting and over-interpreting them, a mood natural to a spirit dwelling so habitually and intuitively at the heart of beauty as his:--

It has as yet been a Mystery to me how and where Wordsworth went. I can't help thinking he has returned to his Sh.e.l.l--with his beautiful Wife and his enchanting Sister. It is a great Pity that People should by a.s.sociating themselves with the finest things, spoil them. Hunt has d.a.m.ned Hampstead and masks and sonnets and Italian tales. Wordsworth has d.a.m.ned the lakes. Milman has d.a.m.ned the old drama--West has d.a.m.ned wholesale. Peac.o.c.k has d.a.m.ned satire--Ollier has d.a.m.n'd Music--Hazlitt has d.a.m.ned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the Man? he is your only good d.a.m.ner, and if ever I am d.a.m.n'd--d.a.m.n me if I shouldn't like him to d.a.m.n me.

Once, writing to Reynolds, he resumes his habit of a year and a half earlier, and casts his fancies and reflections into rime. Beginning playfully, he tells of an odd jumble of incongruous images that had crossed his brain, a kind of experience expressed by him elsewhere in various strains of verse, _e.g._ the finished poem _Fancy_ and the careless lines beginning 'Welcome Joy, and welcome Sorrow.' He supposes that some people are not subject to such freaks of the mind's eye, but have it consistently haunted by fine things such as he next proceeds to conjure up from memory,--

Some t.i.tian colours touch'd into real life,-- The sacrifice goes on; the pontiff knife Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows, The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows; A white sail shows above the green-head cliff, Moves round the point, and throws her anchor stiff; The mariners join hymn with those on land.

There exists no such picture of a sacrifice by t.i.tian, and what Keats was thinking of, I feel sure, was the n.o.ble 'Sacrifice to Apollo' by Claude from the Leigh Court collection, which he had seen at the British Inst.i.tution in 1816 (hung, as it happened, next to t.i.tian's Europa from Cobham Hall), and which evidently worked deeply on his mind. To memory of it is probably due that magic vision of a little town emptied of its folk on a morning of sacrifice, which he evoked a year later in the ode on a Grecian Urn. It shows to the right an altar in front of a temple of Apollo, and about the altar a group including king and priest and a young man holding down a victim ox by the horns; people with baskets and offerings coming up from behind the temple; and to the left tall trees with a priest leading in another victim by the horns, and a woman with a jar bringing in libation; a little back, two herdsmen with their goats; a river spanned by a bridge and winding towards a sea-bay partly encircled by mountains which close the view, and on the edge of the bay the tower and roofs of a little town indistinctly seen. Recollection of this Claude leads Keats on quickly to that of another, the famous 'Enchanted Castle,' which he partly mixes up with it, and partly transforms by fantasy into something quite different from what it really is. He forgets the one human figure in the foreground, describes figures and features of the landscape which are not there, and remembering that the architecture combines ancient Roman with mediaeval castellated and later Palladian elements, invents for it far-fetched origins and a.s.sociations which in a more careless fas.h.i.+on almost remind one of those invented by Pope for his Temple of Fame. (A year later, all this effervescence of the imagination about the picture had subsided, and the distilled and concentrated essence of its romance was expressed--so at least I conceive--in the famous 'magic cas.e.m.e.nt' phrase at the end of the Nightingale ode).[7]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. VI

A SACRIFICE TO APOLLO

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY VIVARES AND WOOLLETT AFTER CLAUDE]

From this play of fancy about two half-remembered pictures Keats turns suddenly to reflections, which he would like to banish but cannot, on the 'eternal fierce destruction' which is part of nature's law:--

But I saw too distinct into the core Of an eternal fierce destruction, And so from happiness I far was gone.

Still am I sick of it, and tho', to-day, I've gathered young spring-leaves, and flowers gay Of periwinkle and wild strawberry, Still do I that most fierce destruction see, The Shark at savage prey,--the Hawk at pounce,-- The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce, Ravening a worm,--Away, ye horrid moods!

Moods of one's mind!

The letters of this date should be read and re-read by all who want to get to the centre of Keats's mind or to hold a key to the understanding of his deepest poetry. The richest of them all is that in which he sends the fragments of an ode to Maia written on May day with the (alas!

unfulfilled) promise to finish it 'in good time.' The same letter contains the re-a.s.sertion of a purpose declared in a letter of a week before to Mr Taylor in the phrases, 'I find I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world.... There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study and thought. I will pursue it.' The mood of the verses interpreting the song of the thrush a few weeks earlier has pa.s.sed, the reader will note, clean out of the poet's mind. To Reynolds his words are:--

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people--it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery, a thing which I begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again, without wings, and with all [the] horror of a bare-shouldered creature--in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and s.p.a.ce without fear.

Let it never be forgotten that 'sensations' contrasted with 'thoughts'

mean for Keats not pleasures and experiences of the senses as opposed to those of the mind, but direct intuitions of the imagination as opposed to deliberate processes of the understanding; and that by 'philosophy'

he does not mean metaphysics but knowledge and the fruits of reading generally.

The same letter, again, contains an interesting meditation on the relative qualities of genius in Milton and Wordsworth as affected by the relative stages of history at which they lived, and on the further question whether Wordsworth was a greater or less poet than Milton by virtue of being more taken up with human pa.s.sions and problems. This speculation leads on to one of Keats's finest pa.s.sages of life-wisdom:--

And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether Milton's apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or not than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic pa.s.sion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song. In regard to his genius alone--we find what he says true as far as we have experienced and we can judge no further but by larger experience--for axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.--I know this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when I say that now I shall relish _Hamlet_ more than I have ever done--Or, better--you are sensible no man can set down Venery as a b.e.s.t.i.a.l or joyless thing until he is sick of it, and therefore all philosophising on it would be mere wording. Until we are sick, we understand not; in fine, as Byron says, 'Knowledge is sorrow'; and I go on to say that 'Sorrow is wisdom'--and further for aught we can know for certainty 'Wisdom is folly.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. VII

THE ENCHANTED CASTLE

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY VIVARES AND WOOLLETT AFTER CLAUDE]

Presently follows the famous chain of images by which Keats, searching and probing for himself along pathways of the spirit parallel to those followed by Wordsworth in the _Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey_, renders account to himself of the stage of development to which his mind has now reached:--

Well--I compare human life to a large Mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me. The first we step into we call the Infant, or Thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think. We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle within us--we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight. However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of Man--of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness, and oppression--whereby this Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set open--but all dark--all leading to dark pa.s.sages. We see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, _we_ are now in that state, we feel the 'Burden of the Mystery.'

To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he wrote _Tintern Abbey_, and it seems to me that his genius is explorative of those dark Pa.s.sages. Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them.

Here is a typical case of the method of evocation as against the method of exposition. Wordsworth's lines are written with a high, almost an inspired, power of describing and putting into direct words the successive moods of a spirit gradually ripening and deepening in the power of communion with nature, and through nature, with all life. But Keats, fully as he has pondered them, cannot be satisfied that they fit his own case until he has called up the history of his similar experiences in the form natural to him, the form, that is, of concrete similitudes or visions of the imagination--the Thoughtless Chamber, the Chamber of Maiden Thought with its gradual darkening and its many outlets standing open to be explored. It is significant that such visions should still be of architecture, of halls and chambers in an imagined mysterious building.

Apart from his growing sense of the darker sides of human existence and of the mysteries of good and evil, Keats was suffering at this time from the pain of a family break-up now imminent. George Keats had made up his mind to emigrate to America, and embark his capital, or as much of it as he could get possession of, in business there. Besides the wish to push his own fortunes, a main motive of this resolve on George's part was the desire to be in a position as quickly as possible to help or if need be support, his poet-brother. He persuaded the girl to whom he had long been attached, Miss Georgiana Wylie, to share his fortunes, and it was settled that they were to be married and sail early in the summer. Some of Keats's letters during the last weeks of his stay at Teignmouth are taken up with his plans for the time immediately following this change.

He wavered for a while between two incompatible purposes. One was to go for a summer's walking tour through Scotland with Charles Brown. 'I have many reasons,' he writes to Reynolds, 'for going wonder-ways; to make my winter chair free from spleen; to enlarge my vision; to escape disquisitions on poetry, and Kingston-criticism; to promote digestion and economize shoe-leather.' (How 'economize,' one wonders?) 'I'll have leather b.u.t.tons and belt, and if Brown hold his mind, "over the hills we go." If my books will keep me to it, then will I take all Europe in turn, and see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.' Here we find Keats in his turn caught by the romance of wild lands and of travel which had in various ways been so much of an inspiration to Byron and Sh.e.l.ley before him. A fortnight later we find him inclining to give up this purpose under an overmastering sense of the inadequacy of his own attainments, and of the necessity of acquiring knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to sustain the flight of poetry.

The habit of close self-observation and self-criticism is in most natures that possess it allied with vanity and egoism; but it was not so in Keats, who without a shadow of affectation judges himself, both in his strength and weakness, as the most clear-sighted and disinterested friend might judge. He is inclined, when not on the defensive against what he felt to be foolish criticism, to under-rate rather than to overrate his own work, and in his correspondence of the previous year we have found him perfectly aware that in writing _Endymion_ he has rather been working off a youthful ferment of the mind than producing a sound or satisfying work of poetry. And when the time comes to write a preface to the poem, he in a first draft makes confession to the public of his 'non-opinion of himself' in terms both a little too intimate and too fidgeting and uneasy. Reynolds seeing the draft at once recognised that it would not do, and in criticizing it to Keats seems to have told him that it was too much in the manner of Leigh Hunt. In deference to his judgment Keats at once abandoned it, and a second attempt says briefly, with perfect dignity and taste, all that can justly be said in dispraise of his work. He warns the reader to expect 'great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished,' and adds most unboastfully:--'it is just that this youngster should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit to live.'

Keats and Tom, the latter for the moment easier in health, were back at Hampstead in the last week of May, in time for the marriage of their brother George with Miss Georgiana Wylie. This was the young lady to whom Keats had rimed a valentine for his brother two years earlier (the lines beginning 'Hadst thou liv'd in days of old') and to whom he had also on his own account addressed the charming sonnet, 'Nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance.' With no other woman or girl friend was he ever on such easy and cordial terms of intimacy. The wedding took place 'a week ago,' writes Keats on June 4, and about the same date, in order that he may not miss seeing as much of the young couple as possible before their departure, he declines a warm invitation from Bailey to visit him again at Oxford. Writing, as usual to this correspondent, with absolute openness, Keats shows that he is suffering from one of his moods of overmastering depression. First it takes the form of apathy. Bailey had written eagerly and judiciously in praise of _Endymion_ in the _Oxford Herald_. Keats replies on June 1:--