Life of John Keats Part 30

And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.

Mr Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but Keats knew where his vowels were _not_ to be varied. On the occasion above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repet.i.tion of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:--

The _singing_ masons _building_ roofs of gold.

This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repet.i.tion was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare's negligence, if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.

The reader will remember how Bailey records this subject of the musical and emotional effect of vowel sounds, open and close, varied or iterated as the case might be, as one on which Keats's talk had often run at Oxford. Whatever his theories, he was by this time showing himself as fine a master of such effects as any, even the greatest, of our poets.

This same pa.s.sage, or interlude, of the feast of fruits has despite its beauty been sometimes blamed as a 'digression.' A stanza which in Keats's original draft stood near the beginning of the poem shows that in his mind it was no mere ornament and no digression at all, but an essential part of his scheme. In revision he dropped out this stanza, doubtless as being not up to the mark poetically: pity that he did not rather perfect it and let it keep its place: but even as it is the provision of the dainties made beforehand by the old nurse at Porphyro's request (stanza xx) proves the feast essential to the story.

While the unique charm of _The Eve of St Agnes_ lies thus in the richness and vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions of the personages are not less happily conceived as far as they go. What can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the old nurse Angela? How admirable in particular is the debate held by Angela with Porphyro in her

little moonlight room Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb.

Madeline, a figure necessarily in the main pa.s.sive, is none the less exquisite, whether in her gentle dealing with the nurse on the staircase, or when closing her chamber door she pants with quenched taper in the moonlight, and most of all when awakening she finds her lover beside her, and contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:--

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

Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!'[12]

In all the doings and circ.u.mstances attending the departure of the lovers for a destination left thrillingly vague in the words, 'For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee,'[13]--in the elfin storm sent to cover their flight (the only touch of the supernatural in the story), their darkling grope down the stairway, the hush that holds the house and guest-chambers, the wind-shaken arras, the porter sprawling asleep beside his empty flagon, the awakened bloodhound who recognizes his mistress and is quiet--in Keats's telling of all these things a like unflagging richness and felicity of imagination holds us spell-bound: and with the deaths of the old nurse and beadsman, once the house has lost its spirit of life and light in Madeline, the poet brings round the tale, after all its glow of pa.s.sionate colour and music, of trembling antic.i.p.ation and love-wors.h.i.+p enraptured or in suspense, to a chill and wintry close in subtlest harmony with its beginning:--

They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl, With a huge empty flaggon by his side: The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, But his sagacious eye an inmate owns: By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide: The chains lie silent on the footworn stones; The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.

And they are gone: aye, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the storm.

That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm, Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform; The Beadsman, after thousand aves told, For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.[14]

The last of the trio of Keats's tales in verse, _Lamia_, owed its origin, and perhaps part of its temper, to his readings in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_. His own experiences under the stings of love and jealousy had led him, during those spring months of 1819 when he could write nothing, to pore much over the treatise of that prodigiously read, satiric old commentator on the maladies of the human mind and body, and especially over those sections of it which deal with the cause and cure of love-melancholy. Entertainment in abundance, information in cartloads, Keats could draw from the matter acc.u.mulated and glossed by Burton, but little or nothing to gladden or soothe or fortify him. One story, however, he found which struck his imagination so much that he was moved to write upon it, and that was the old Greek story, quoted by Burton from Philostratus, of _Lamia_ the serpent-lady, at once witch and victim of witchcraft, who loved a youth of Corinth and lived with him in a palace of delights built by her magic, until their happiness was shattered by the scrutiny of intrusive and coldblooded wisdom.

In June 1819, soon after the inspiration which produced the Odes had pa.s.sed away, and before he left Hampstead for the Isle of Wight, Keats made a beginning on this new task; continued it at intervals, concurrently with his attempts in drama, at Shanklin and Winchester; and finished it by the first week in September. It happened that Thomas Love Peac.o.c.k had published the year before a tale in verse on a nearly similar theme,--that of the beautiful Thessalian enchantress Rhododaphne: one wonders whether Keats may not have felt in Peac.o.c.k's attempt a challenge and stimulus to his own. Peac.o.c.k's work, now unduly neglected, is that of an accomplished scholar and craftsman sitting down to tell an old Greek tale of magic in the form of narrative verse then most fas.h.i.+onable, the mixed four-stressed couplet and ballad measure of Scott and Byron, and telling it, for a poet not of genius, gracefully and well. Whether Keats's _Lamia_ is a work of genius there is no need to ask. No one can deny the truth of his own criticism of it when he says, 'I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way--give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation.' But personally I cannot agree with the opinion of the late Francis Turner Palgrave and other critics--I think they are the majority--who give it the first place among the tales. On the contrary, if an order of merit among them there must be, I should put it third and lowest, for several reasons of detail as well as for one reason affecting the whole design and composition.

As to the technical qualities of the poetry, let it be granted that Keats's handling of the heroic couplet, modelled this time on the example of Dryden and not of the Elizabethans, though retaining pleasant traces of the Elizabethan usages of the over-run or _enjambement_ and the varied pause,--let it be granted that his handling of this mode of the metre is masterly. Let it be admitted also that there are pa.s.sages in the narrative imagined as intensely as any in _Isabella_ or _The Eve of St Agnes_ and told quite as vividly in a style more rapid and condensed. Such is the pa.s.sage, in the introductory episode which fills so large a relative place in the poem, where Mercury woos and wins his wood-nymph after Lamia has lifted from her the spell of invisibility.

Such is the gorgeous, agonized transformation act of Lamia herself from serpent to woman: such again the scene of her waylaying and ensnaring of the youth on his way to Corinth. And such above all would be the whole final scene of the banquet and its break-up, from 'Soft went the music with soft air along' to the end, but for the perplexing apostrophe, presently to be considered, which interrupts it. Still counting up the things in the poem to be most praised, here is an example where the poetry of Greek mythology is very eloquently woven into the rhetoric of love:--

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

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

Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay!

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

And here a beautiful instance of power and justness in scenic imagination:--

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

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

Turning now to the other side of the account: for one thing, we find jarring and disappointing notes, such as had disappeared from Keats's works since _Endymion_, of the old tasteless manner of the Hunt-taught days: for instance the unpalatable pa.s.sage in the first book beginning 'Let the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and worse still, with a new note of idle cynicism added, the lines about love which open the second book. Misplaced archaisms also reappear, such as 'unshent' and the participle 'daft,' from the obsolete verb 'daff,' used as though it meant to puzzle or daze; with bad verbal coinages like 'piazzian,'

'psalterian.' Moreover, though many things in the poem are potently conceived, others are not so. The description of the magical palace-hall is surely a failure, except for the one fine note in the lines,--

A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone Supporters of the faery-roof, made moan Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.

The details of the structure, with its pairs of palms and plantains carved in cedar-wood, its walls lined with mirrors, its panels which change magically from plain marble to jasper, its fifty censers and 'Twelve sphered tables, by twelve seats insphered,'--all this seems feebly and even tastelessly invented in comparison with the impressive dream-architecture in some of Keats's other poems: I will even go farther, and say that it scarce holds its own against the not much dissimilar magic hall in the sixth canto of _Rhododaphne_.

But the one fundamental flaw in _Lamia_ concerns its moral. The word is crude: what I mean is the bewilderment in which it leaves us as to the effect intended to be made on our imaginative sympathies. Lamia is a serpent-woman, baleful and a witch, whose love for Lycius fills him with momentary happiness but must, we are made aware, be fatal to him.

Apollonius is a philosopher who sees through her and by one steadfast look withers up her magic semblance and destroys her, but in doing so fails to save his pupil, who dies the moment his illusion vanishes. Are these things a bitter parable, meaning that all love-joys are but deception, and that at the touch of wisdom and experience they melt away? If so, the tale might have been told either tragically or satirically, in either case leaving the reader impartial as between the sage and his victim. But Keats in this apostrophe, which I wish he had left out, deliberately points a moral and expressly invites us to take sides:--

What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?

What for the sage, old Apollonius?

Upon her aching forehead be there hung The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue; And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage, Let spear-gra.s.s and the spiteful thistle wage War on his temples. Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

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

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

These lines to my mind have not only the fault of breaking the story at a critical point and antic.i.p.ating its issue, but challenge the mind to untimely questionings and reflections. The wreaths of ominous growth distributed to each of the three personages may symbolize the general tragedy: but why are we asked to take sides with the enchantress, ignoring everything about her except her charm, and against the sage? If she were indeed a thing of bale under a mask of beauty, was not the friend and tutor bound to unmask her? and if the pupil could not survive the loss of his illusion,--if he could not confront the facts of life and build up for himself a new happiness on a surer foundation,--was it not better that he should be let perish? Is there not in all this a slackening of imaginative and intellectual grasp? And especially as to the last lines, do we not feel that they are but a cheap and unilluminating repet.i.tion of a rather superficial idea, the idea phrased shortly in Campbell's _Rainbow_ and at length in several well-known pa.s.sages of Wordsworth's _Excursion_, particularly that in the fifth book beginning--

Ambitious spirits!-- Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh The planets in the hollow of their hand; And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains Have solved the elements, or a.n.a.lysed The thinking principle--shall they in fact Prove a degraded Race?

Wordsworth had fifteen years earlier written more wisely, 'Poetry is the impa.s.sioned expression in the countenance of all science.' The latter-day Wordsworth, and Keats after him, should have realised that the discoveries of 'philosophy,' meaning science, create new mysteries while they solve the old, and leave the world as full of poetry as they found it: poetry, it may be, with its point of view s.h.i.+fted, poetry of a new kind, but none the less poetical. Leigh Hunt, in his review of _Lamia_ published on the appearance of the volume, has some remarks partly justifying and partly impugning Keats's treatment of the story in this respect:--

Mr Keats has departed as much from common-place in the character and moral of this story, as he has in the poetry of it. He would see fair play to the serpent, and makes the power of the philosopher an ill-natured and disturbing thing. Lamia though liable to be turned into painful shapes had a soul of humanity; and the poet does not see why she should not have her pleasures accordingly, merely because a philosopher saw that she was not a mathematical truth. This is fine and good. It is vindicating the greater philosophy of poetry.

So far, this is a manifest piece of special pleading by Hunt on Lamia's behalf. If she is nothing worse than a being with a soul of humanity liable to be turned into painful shapes, why must Apollonius feel it his duty to wither and destroy her for the safeguarding of his pupil, even at the cost of that pupil's life? Her witchcraft must consist in something much worse than not being a mathematical truth, else why is he her so bitter enemy? Hunt proceeds, more to the purpose, to protest against the poet's implication--

that modern experiment has done a deadly thing to poetry by discovering the nature of the rainbow, the air, etc., that is to say, that the knowledge of natural history and physics, by shewing us the nature of things, does away with the imaginations that once adorned them. This is a condescension to a learned vulgarism, which so excellent a poet as Mr Keats ought not to have made. The world will always have fine poetry, so long as it has events, pa.s.sions, affections, and a philosophy that sees deeper than this philosophy.

There will be a poetry of the heart, so long as there are tears and smiles: there will be a poetry of the imagination, as long as the first causes of things remain a mystery. A man who is no poet, may think he is none, as soon as he finds out the physical cause of the rainbow; but he need not alarm himself:--he was none before. The true poet will go deeper. He will ask himself what is the cause of that physical cause; whether truths to the senses are after all to be taken as truths to the imagination; and whether there is not room and mystery enough in the universe for the creation of infinite things, when the poor matter-of-fact philosopher has come to the end of his own vision.

In _Endymion_ Keats had impeded and confused his narrative by working into it much incident and imagery symbolic of the cogitations and aspirations, the upliftings and misgivings, of his own unripe spirit.

Three years later, writing to Sh.e.l.ley from his sickbed, he contrasts that former state of his mind with its present state, saying that it was then like a scattered pack of cards but is now sorted to a pip. The three tales just discussed, written in the interval, show how quickly the power of sorting and controlling his imaginations had matured itself in him. In them he is already an artist standing outside of his own conceptions, certain of his own aim in dealing with them (subject perhaps to some reservation in the case of _Lamia_), and scarcely letting his personal self intrude upon his narrative at all to complicate or distract it.

For the expression of his private moods and meditations he had perfected during the same interval a new and beautiful vehicle in the ode. He had been accustomed to try his hand at odes, or what he called such, from his earliest riming days: and odes also, to all intents and purposes, are the two great lyrics in _Endymion_, the choral hymn to Pan and the song of the Indian maiden to Sorrow. But those which he composed in quick succession, as we have seen, in the late spring of 1819 are of a reflective and meditative type, new in his work and highly personal.

That which I have shown reason for believing to be the earliest of the group, the _Ode to Psyche_ written in the last days of April, differs somewhat from the rest both in form and spirit. Its strophes are longer and more irregular: its strain less inward and brooding, with more of lyric ardour and exaltation. It tells of the poet's delight in that late, exquisitely and spiritually symbolic product of the mythologic spirit of expiring paganism, the story of Cupid and Psyche. What may have especially turned his attention to this fable at that moment we cannot tell. Possibly the mention of it in Burton's _Anatomy_ may have set him on to reading the original source, the _Golden a.s.s_ of Apuleius, in Adlington's translation: there are pa.s.sages in _Lamia_ which suggest such a reading,[15] and the n.o.ble, rhythmical English of that Elizabethan version, loose as it may be in point of scholars.h.i.+p, could not fail to charm his ear. Or possibly recent study of the plates in the _Musee Napoleon_ (as to which more by and by) may have brought freshly to his memory the sculptured group in which the story is embodied. But that he had always loved the story we know from the pa.s.sage 'I stood tip-toe' beginning--

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

as well as from his confession that in boyhood he used to admire its languid and long-drawn romantic treatment in the poem of Mrs Tighe.

Cloying touches of languor, such as often disfigure his own earlier work, are not wanting in the opening lines in which he tells how he came upon the fabled couple in a dream, but are more than compensated by the charm of the scene where he finds them reposing, 'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other poet has compressed into a single line so much of the essential virtue of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time habitual with Keats; and of Spenser with his 'sea-shouldering whales' he is now more than the equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden in _St Agnes' Eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'soft-conched ear' of Psyche,--though the compound is perhaps a little forced and odd, like the 'cirque-couchant'

snake in _Lamia_. The invocation in the third and fourth stanzas expresses, with the fullest reach of Keats's felicity in style and a singular freshness and fire of music in the verse, both his sense of the meaning of Greek nature-religion and his delight in imagining the beauty of its shrines and ritual. For the rest, there seems at first something strained in the turn of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the wors.h.i.+p of antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:--

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind.

But in a moment we are carried beyond criticism by that incomparable distillation of one, or many, of his impressions among the Lakes or in Scotland,--

Far, far around shall those dark-cl.u.s.ter'd trees Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep.

For such a master-stroke of concentrated imaginative description no praise, much as has been showered on it by Ruskin and lesser critics, can be too great.

Keats declares to his brother that this is the first of his poems with which he has taken even moderate pains. That being so, it is remarkable that he should have let stand in it as many as three unrimed line-endings: and what the poem truly bears in upon the reader is a sense less of special care and finish than of special glow and ardour, till he is left breathless and delighted at the threshold of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his mind enthralled by the imagery and his ear by the verse, with its swift, mounting music and rich, vehemently iterated a.s.sonances towards the close:--

A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign, With breeding flowers, will never breed the same; And thither will I bring all soft delights That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a cas.e.m.e.nt ope at nights, To let the warm Love in!