Life of John Keats Part 3

The first few lines are skilfully modulated, and in an ordinary domestic theme might be palatable enough; but what a couplet, good heavens! for the last. At the climax, Hunt's version of Dante is an example of milk-and-water in conditions where milk-and-water is sheer poison:--

As thus they sat, and felt with leaps of heart Their colour change, they came upon the part Where fond Genevra, with her flame long nurst, Smiled upon Launcelot when he kissed her first:-- That touch, at last, through every fibre slid; And Paulo turned, scarce knowing what he did, Only he felt he could no more dissemble, And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble.

The taste, we see, which guided Hunt so well in appreciating the work of others could betray him terribly in original composition. The pa.s.sages of light narrative in _Rimini_ are often vivacious and pleasant enough, those of nature description genuinely if not profoundly felt, and written with an eye on the object: but they are the only tolerable things in the poem. Hunt's idea of a true poetical style was to avoid everything strained, stilted, and conventional, and to lighten the stress of his theme with familiar graces and pleasantries in the manner of his beloved Ariosto. But he did not realize that while any style, from that of the _Book of Job_ to that of Wordsworth's _Idiot Boy_, may become poetical if only there is strength and intensity of feeling behind it, nothing but the finest social instinct and tradition can impart the tact for such light conversational graces as he attempted, and that to treat a theme of high tragic pa.s.sion in the tone and vocabulary of a suburban tea-party is intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any change from the stale conventions and tarnished glitter of eighteenth century poetic rhythm and diction, and perhaps sated for the moment with the rush and thrill of new romantic and exotic sensation they had owed in recent years, first to Scott's metrical tales of the Border and the Highlands, then to Byron's of Greece and the Levant,--contemporaries found something fresh and homefelt in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_, and sentimental ladies and gentlemen wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine as though they had been their own. No less a person than Byron, to whom the poem was dedicated, writes to Moore:--'Leigh Hunt's poem is a devilish good one--quaint here and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about it that will stand the test. I do not say this because he has inscribed it to me.' And to Leigh Hunt himself Byron reports praise of the poem from Sir Henry Englefield the dilettante, 'a mighty man in the blue circles, and a very clever man anywhere,' from Hookham Frere 'and all the arch _literati_,' and says how he had left his own sister and cousin 'in fixed and delighted perusal of it.' Byron's admiration cooled greatly in the sequel, with or even before the cooling of his regard for the author. But it is an instructive comment on standards of taste and their instability that cultivated readers should at any time have endured to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like that of the above quotations. When Keats and Sh.e.l.ley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a familiar ease of manner to variety of movement in this metre, Sh.e.l.ley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into Hunt's faults of triviality and under-breeding: but Keats was only too apt to be betrayed into them.

Hunt had spent the first months after his release in London, but by the end of 1815, some time before the publication of _Rimini_, had settled at Hampstead, where he soon made himself a sort of self-crowned laureate of the beauties of the place, and continued to vary his critical and political labours with gossiping complimentary verses to his friends in the form both of sonnet and epistle. The gravest of the epistles is one addressed in a spirit of good-hearted loyalty to Byron in that disastrous April when, after four years spent in the full blaze of popularity and fas.h.i.+on, he was leaving England under the storm of obloquy aroused by the scandals attending his separation from his wife.

This is in Hunt's reformed heroic couplet: the rest are in a chirruping and gossiping anapaestic sing-song which is perhaps the writer's most congenial vein. Here is a summer picture of Hampstead from a letter to Tom Moore:--

And yet how can I touch, and not linger a while, On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile?

On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades, Dark pines, and white houses, and long-allied shades, With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees The hills up above him with roofs in the trees?

Now too, while the season,--half summer, half spring,-- Brown elms and green oaks--makes one loiter and sing; And the bee's weighty murmur comes by us at noon, And the cuckoo repeats his short indolent tune, And little white clouds lie about in the sun, And the wind's in the west, and hay-making begun?--

and here an autumn night-sketch, from a letter expressing surprise that the wet weather has not brought a visit from Charles Lamb, that inveterate lover of walking in the rain:--

We hadn't much thunder and lightning, I own; But the rains might have led you to walk out of town; And what made us think your desertion still stranger, The roads were so bad, there was really no danger; At least where I live; for the nights were so groping, The rains made such wet, and the paths are so sloping, That few, unemboldened by youth or by drinking, Came down without lanthorns,--nor then without shrinking.

And really, to see the bright spots come and go, As the path rose or fell, was a fanciful shew.

Like fairies they seemed, pitching up from their nooks, And twinkling upon us their bright little looks.

Such were Leigh Hunt's antecedents, and such his literary performances and reputation, when Keats at the age of twenty-one became his intimate.

So far as opinions and public sympathies were concerned, those of Keats had already, as we have seen, been largely formed in boyhood by familiarity, under the lead of Cowden Clarke, with Leigh Hunt's writings in the _Examiner_. Hunt was a confirmed Voltairian and sceptic as to revealed religion, and supplied its place with a private gospel of cheerfulness, or system of sentimental optimism, inspired partly by his own invincibly sunny temperament and partly by the hopeful doctrines of eighteenth-century philosophy in France. Keats shared the natural sympathy of generous youth for Hunt's liberal and kind-hearted view of things, and he had a mind naturally unapt for dogma: ready to entertain and appreciate any set of ideas according as his imagination recognized their beauty or power, he could never wed himself to any as representing ultimate truth. In matters of poetic feeling and fancy the two men had up to a certain point not a little in common. Like Hunt, Keats at this time was given to 'luxuriating' too effusively and fondly over the 'deliciousness' of whatever he liked in art, books, or nature. To the every-day pleasures of summer and the English fields Hunt brought in a lower degree the same alertness of perception and acuteness of enjoyment which in Keats were intense beyond parallel. In his lighter and shallower way Hunt also truly felt with Keats the perennial charm and vitality of cla.s.sic fable, and was scholar enough to produce about this time some agreeable translations of the Sicilian pastorals, and some, less adequate, of Homer. But behind such pleasant faculties in Hunt nothing deeper or more potent lay hidden. Whereas with Keats, as time went on, delighted sensation became more and more surely and instantaneously trans.m.u.ted and spiritualized into imaginative emotion; his words and cadences came every day from deeper sources within him and more fully charged with the power of far-reaching and symbolic suggestion. Hence, as this profound and pa.s.sionate young genius grew, he could not but be aware of what was shallow in the talent of his senior and cloying and distasteful in his ever-voluble geniality. But for many months the harmony of their relations was complete.

The 'little cottage' in the Vale of Health must have been fairly overcrowded, one would suppose, with Hunt's fast-growing family of young children, but a bed was made up for Keats on a sofa, 'in a parlour no bigger than an old mansion's closet,' says Hunt, which nevertheless served him for a library and had prints after Stothard hung on the walls and casts of the heads of poets and heroes crowning the bookshelves.

Here the young poet was made always welcome. The sonnet beginning 'Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there' records a night of October or November 1816, when, instead of staying to sleep, he preferred to walk home under the stars, his head full of talk about Petrarch and the youth of Milton, to the city lodgings where he lived with his brothers the life affectionately described in that other pleasant sonnet written on Tom's birthday, November 18, beginning 'Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals.' The well-known fifty lines at the end of _Sleep and Poetry_, a poem on which Keats put forth the best of his half-fledged strength this winter, give the fullest and most engaging account of the pleasure and inspiration he drew from Hunt's hospitality:--

The chimes Of friendly voices had just given place To as sweet a silence, when I 'gan retrace The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease.

It was a poet's house who keeps the keys Of pleasure's temple. Round about were hung The glorious features of the bards who sung In other ages--cold and sacred busts Smiled at each other. Happy he who trusts To clear Futurity his darling fame!

Then there were fauns and satyrs taking aim At swelling apples with a frisky leap And reaching fingers, 'mid a luscious heap Of vine-leaves. Then there rose to view a fane Of liny marble, and thereto a train Of nymphs approaching fairly o'er the sward: One, loveliest, holding her white hand toward The dazzling sun-rise: two sisters sweet Bending their graceful figures till they meet Over the trippings of a little child: And some are hearing, eagerly, the wild Thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.

See, in another picture, nymphs are wiping Cheris.h.i.+ngly Diana's timorous limbs;-- A fold of lawny mantle dabbling swims At the bath's edge, and keeps a gentle motion With the subsiding crystal: as when ocean Heaves calmly its broad swelling smoothness o'er Its rocky marge, and balances once more The patient weeds; that now unshent by foam Feel all about their undulating home...

Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green, Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they!

For over them was seen a free display Of out-spread wings, and from between them shone The face of Poesy: from off her throne She overlook'd things that I scarce could tell.

It is easy from the above and from some of Keats's later work to guess at most of the prints which had caught his attention on Hunt's walls and in his portfolios and worked on his imagination afterwards:--Poussin's 'Empire of Flora' for certain: several, probably, of his various 'Baccha.n.a.ls,' with the G.o.d and his leopard-drawn car, and groups of nymphs dancing with fauns or strewn upon the foreground to right or left: the same artist's 'Venus and Adonis': Stothard's 'Bathers' and 'Vintage,' his small print of Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura and her friend; Raphael's 'Poetry' from the Vatican; and so forth. These things are not without importance in the study of Keats, for he was quicker and more apt than any of our other poets to draw inspiration from works of art,--prints, pictures, or marbles,--that came under his notice, and it is not for nothing that he alludes in this same poem to

--the pleasant flow Of words on opening a portfolio.

A whole treatise might be written on matters which I shall have to mention briefly or not at all,--how such and such a descriptive phrase in Keats has been suggested by this or that figure in a picture; how pictures by or prints after old masters have been partly responsible for his vision alike of the Indian maiden and the blind Orion; what various originals, paintings or antiques or both, we can recognize as blending themselves into his evocation of the triumph of Bacchus or his creation of the Grecian Urn.

On December the 1st, 1816, Hunt, as has been said, did Keats the new service of printing the Chapman sonnet as a specimen of his work in an essay in the _Examiner_ on 'Young Poets,' in which the names of Sh.e.l.ley and Reynolds were bracketed with his as poetical beginners of high promise. With reference to the custom mentioned by Hunt of Keats and himself sitting down of an evening to write verses on a given subject, Cowden Clarke pleasantly describes one such occasion on December 30 of the same year, when the chosen theme was _The Gra.s.shopper and the Cricket_:--'The event of the after scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement. His sincere look of pleasure at the first line:--

The poetry of earth is never dead.

"Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines:--

On a lone winter morning, when the frost Hath wrought a silence--

"Ah that's perfect! Bravo Keats!" And then he went on in a dilatation on the dumbness of Nature during the season's suspension and torpidity.'

The affectionate enthusiasm of the younger and the older man (himself, be it remembered, little over thirty) for one another's company and verses sometimes took forms which to the mind of the younger and wiser of the two soon came to seem ridiculous. One day in early spring (1817) the whim seized them over their wine to crown themselves 'after the manner of the elder bards.' Keats crowned Hunt with a wreath of ivy, Hunt crowned Keats with a wreath of laurel, and each while sitting so adorned wrote a pair of sonnets expressive of his feelings. While they were in the act of composition, it seems, three lady callers came in--conceivably the three Misses Reynolds, of whom we shall hear more anon, Jane, afterwards Mrs Thomas Hood, Marianne, and their young sister Charlotte. When visitors were announced Hunt took off his wreath and suggested that Keats should do the same: he, however, 'in his enthusiastic way, declared he would not take off his crown for any human being,' and accordingly wore it as long as the visit lasted.[9] Here are Hunt's pair of sonnets, which are about as good as any he ever wrote, and which he not long afterwards printed:--

A crown of ivy! I submit my head To the young hand that gives it,--young, 'tis true, But with a right, for 'tis a poet's too.

How pleasant the leaves feel! and how they spread With their broad angles, like a nodding shed Over both eyes! and how complete and new, As on my hand I lean, to feel them strew My sense with freshness,--Fancy's rustling bed!

Tress-tossing girls, with smell of flowers and grapes Come dancing by, and downward piping cheeks, And up-thrown cymbals, and Silenus old Lumpishly borne, and many trampling shapes,-- And lastly, with his bright eyes on her bent, Bacchus,--whose bride has of his hand fast hold.

It is a lofty feeling, yet a kind, Thus to be topped with leaves;--to have a sense Of honour-shaded thought,--an influence As from great Nature's fingers, and be twined With her old, sacred, verdurous ivy-bind, As though she hallowed with that sylvan fence A head that bows to her benevolence, Midst pomp of fancied trumpets in the wind.

'Tis what's within us crowned. And kind and great Are all the conquering wishes it inspires,-- Love of things lasting, love of the tall woods, Love of love's self, and ardour for a state Of natural good befitting such desires, Towns without gain, and haunted solitudes.

Keats had the good sense not to print his efforts of the day; they are of slight account poetically, but have a real biographical interest:--

ON RECEIVING A LAUREL CROWN FROM LEIGH HUNT

Minutes are flying swiftly, and as yet Nothing unearthly has enticed my brain Into a delphic labyrinth--I would fain Catch an immortal thought to pay the debt I owe to the kind poet who has set Upon my ambitious head a glorious gain.

Two bending laurel sprigs--'tis nearly pain To be conscious of such a coronet.

Still time is fleeting, and no dream arises Gorgeous as I would have it--only I see A trampling down of what the world most prizes, Turbans and crowns and blank regality; And then I run into most wild surmises Of all the many glories that may be.

TO THE LADIES WHO SAW ME CROWNED

What is there in the universal earth More lovely than a wreath from the bay tree?

Haply a halo round the moon--a glee Circling from three sweet pair of lips in mirth; And haply you will say the dewy birth Of morning roses--ripplings tenderly Spread by the halcyon's breast upon the sea-- But these comparisons are nothing worth.

Then there is nothing in the world so fair?

The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?

Or June that breathes out life for b.u.t.terflies?

No, none of these can from my favourite bear Away the palm--yet shall it ever pay Due reverence to your most sovereign eyes.

Here we have expressed in the first sonnet the same mood as in some of the holiday rimes of the previous summer, the mood of ardent expectancy for an inspiration that declines (and no wonder considering the circ.u.mstances) to come. It was natural that the call for an impromptu should bring up phrases already lying formed or half formed in Keats's mind, and the sestet of this sonnet is interesting as containing in its first four lines the germs of the well-known pa.s.sage at the beginning of the third book of _Endymion_,--

There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel--

and in its fifth a repet.i.tion of the 'wild surmise' phrase of the Chapman sonnet. The second sonnet has a happy line or two in its list of delights, and its opening is noticeable as repeating the interrogative formula of the opening lines of _Sleep and Poetry_, Keats's chief venture in verse this winter.

Very soon after the date of this scene of intercoronation (the word is Hunt's, used on a different occasion) Keats became heartily ashamed of it, and expressed his penitence in a strain of ranting verse (his own name for compositions in this vein) under the form of a hymn or palinode to Apollo:--

G.o.d of the golden bow, And of the golden lyre, And of the golden hair, And of the golden fire, Charioteer Of the patient year, Where--where slept thine ire, When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath, Thy laurel, thy glory, The light of thy story, Or was I a worm--too low crawling, for death?

O Delphic Apollo!

And so forth: the same half-amused spirit of penitence is expressed in a letter of a few weeks later to his brother George: and later still he came to look back, with a smile of manly self-derision, on those days as a time when he had been content to play the part of 'A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Another account says Mitch.e.l.l.

[2] In _The Asclepiad_, April 1884.

[3] Houghton MSS.

[4] Le Grand: _Fabliaux ou Contes, 1781_. G. L. Way: _Fabliaux or Tales_, London, 1800; 2nd ed. 1815. See Appendix I.

[5] This note-book is in the collection bequeathed by the late Sir Charles Dilke to the public library at Hampstead.