Life of John Keats Part 32

[8] In both the chapel monuments and the banquet-hall corbels there may be a memory of the following pa.s.sage from Cary's _Dante_ (quoted by Mr Buxton Forman and Prof. de Selincourt):--

As to support inc.u.mbent floor or roof, For corbel is a figure sometimes seen That crumples up its knees into its breast; With the feign'd posture, stirring ruth unfeign'd In the beholder's fancy; so I saw These fas.h.i.+on'd--.

[9] It may be noted that in the corresponding scene in the _Filocolo_ a single special colour effect is got by describing the room as lit up by two great pendent self-luminous carbuncles.

[10] _Paradise Lost_, v. 341-347.

[11] Ed. 1860, pp. 269, 270.

[12] The final couplet of this stanza, as Keats wrote it after several attempts, is weak. Madeline continues,--

Oh leave me not in this eternal woe, For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go.

In the alternative version, intended to leave no doubt of what had happened, which he read to Woodhouse and Woodhouse disapproved, Madeline's speech breaks off and the poet in his own name adds,--

See while she speaks his arms encroaching slow Have zon'd her, heart to heart,--loud, loud, the dark winds blow.

[13] Keats, mentally placing his story in England and writing it at Teignmouth, had at first turned this line otherwise,--'For o'er the bleak Dartmoor I have a home for thee.'

[14] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the death of the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of rime. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the beadsman in the lines,

But no--already had his death-bell rung; The joys of all his life were said and sung;

that of Angela where she calls herself

A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, Whose pa.s.sing bell may ere the midnight toll.

The touch of flippant realism which Keats had, again to Woodhouse's distress, proposed to throw into his story at this point was as follows. For the four last lines of the last stanza Keats had proposed to write,--

Angela went off Twitch'd with the palsy: and with face deform The beadsman stiffen'd, 'twixt a sigh and laugh Ta'en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough.

In printing the poem Keats, probably at the instance of Taylor and Woodhouse, reverted to the earlier and better version.

[15] May the following be counted evidence to the same effect? The old woman in _Apuleius_, chap. xxi, just as she is about to tell her daughter the story of Cupid and Psyche, says, 'as the visions of the day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night do often chance contrary.' Compare Keats at the end of the _Ode on Indolence_:--

Farewell! I yet have visions for the night, And for the day faint visions there is store.

[16] The _Musee Napoleon_ is a set of four volumes ill.u.s.trating with outline engravings the works of cla.s.sic art collected by Napoleon Bonaparte as spoils of war and brought to Paris. Keats's original tracing from the Sosibios vase was in the collection of Sir Charles Dilke and is reproduced on the frontispiece of the Clarendon Press edition of Keats's poems, 1906. The subject has been much discussed, but only from the point of view of the cla.s.sical archaeologist, which ignores the part played by paintings as well as antiques in stimulating Keats's imagination. From that point of view the nearest approach, as I hold, to a right solution is set out in a paper by Paul Wolters, in _Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen_, Band xx, Heft 1/2: Braunschweig; though I think he is too positive in ruling out Roman representations of the _Suovetaurilia_ such as the fine urn at Holland House suggested as Keats's source by the late Mr A. S. Murray and reproduced in _The Odes of Keats_, by A. C. Downer, M.A. (Oxford, 1897).

[17]

Sweet Philomela (then he heard her sing) I do not envy thy sweet carolling, But do admire thee each even and morrow Canst carelessly thus sing away thy sorrow.

CHAPTER XIV

WORK OF 1818, 1819.--II. THE FRAGMENTS AND EXPERIMENTS

s.n.a.t.c.hes expressive of moods--_Ode to Maia_--_Hyperion_: its scheme and scale--Sources: Homer and Hesiod--Pierre Ronsard--Miltonisms--Voices of the t.i.tans--A match and no match for Milton--A great beginning--Question as to sequel--Difficulties and a suggestion--The scheme abandoned--_The Eve of St Mark_--Chaucer and Morris--Judgement of Rossetti--Dissent of W. B. Scott--The solution--Keats as dramatist--_Otho_ and _King Stephen_--_The Cap and Bells_--Why a failure--Flashes of Beauty--Recast of _Hyperion_--Its leading ideas--Their history in Keats's mind--Preamble: another feast of fruits--The sanctuary--The admonition--The monitress--The attempt breaks off.

Much of our clearest insight into Keats's mind and genius is gained from the cla.s.s of his fragments which do not represent any definite poetical purpose or plan, and were never meant to be more than mere s.n.a.t.c.hes and momentary outpourings. Such, though they only express a pa.s.sing mood, are the lines in his letter to Reynolds of February 1818, translating the early song of the thrush into a warning not to fret after knowledge.

Such is the contrasted pa.s.sage of s.h.i.+fting, perplexed meditation on the problems of life, and the failure of the imagination to solve them alone, in the rimed epistle to the same friend six weeks later. Such, very especially, is the cry declaring that the true poet is the soul sympathetic with every form and mode of life and ready to merge its ident.i.ty in that of any and every sentient creature: compare the pa.s.sage in one of his letters where he tells how his own can enter into that of a sparrow picking about the gravel:--

Where's the Poet? show him! show him, Muses nine! that I may know him.

'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he King, Or poorest of the beggar-clan, Or any other wondrous thing A man may be'twixt ape and Plato; 'Tis the man who with a bird, Wren, or Eagle, finds his way to All its instincts; he hath heard The Lion's roaring, and can tell What his h.o.r.n.y throat expresseth, And to him the Tiger's yell Comes articulate and presseth On his ear like mother-tongue.

Such again are the several pa.s.sages in which he expressed a mood that frequently beset him, that of being rapt in spirit too high above earth to breathe, too far above his body not to feel an awful intoxication and fear of coming madness:--

It is an awful mission, A terrible division; And leaves a gulph austere To be fill'd with worldly fear.

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 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!

But our main business in this chapter must be not with illuminating s.n.a.t.c.hes such as these, but with things begun of set purpose and not carried through.

When Keats, drawing near the end of his work on _Endymion_, was meditating what he meant to be his second long and arduous poem, _Hyperion_, he still thought and spoke of it as a 'romance.' But a phrase he uses elsewhere shows him conscious that its style would have to be more 'naked and Grecian' than that of _Endymion_. Was he trying an experiment in the naked and Grecian style when on May day 1818 he wrote at Teignmouth the beginning of an ode on Maia? He never went on with it, and the fragment as it stands is of fourteen lines only; but these are in a more truly Greek manner than anything else he wrote, not even excepting, as I have just said, the _Ode to Autumn_. The words figuring what Greek poets were and did for Greek communities, and expressing the aspiration to be even as they, bear the true, the cla.s.sic, mint-mark of absolute economy and simplicity in absolute rightness. Considering how meagre are the hints antiquity has left us concerning Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades and mother of Hermes, and her late identification with the Roman divinity to whom sacrifice was paid on the first of May, and hence how little material for development the theme seems to offer,--considering these things, perhaps it is as well that Keats, despite his promise to finish it 'all in good time,' should have tantalized posterity by breaking off this beautiful thing where he did.

The next fragment we come to is colossal,--it is _Hyperion_ itself. From the poem as far as it was written no reader could guess either that it was taken up as a 'feverous relief' from tendance on his dying brother, or that in continuing it later under Brown's roof he had to put force upon himself against the intrusion of private cares and affections upon his thoughts, as well as against a reaction from his own mode of conceiving and handling the task itself. The impression _Hyperion_ makes is one, as Woodhouse on first reading it justly noted, of serene mastery by the poet both over himself and over his art:--'It has an air of calm grandeur about it which is indicative of true power': and again,--'the above lines give but a faint idea of the sustained grandeur and quiet power which characterize the poem.' Woodhouse goes on to tell what he knew of the scheme of the work as Keats had first conceived it:--

The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former G.o.d of the Sun, by Apollo,--and incidentally of those of Ocea.n.u.s by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, etc., and of the war of the giants for Saturn's reestablishment-- with other events, of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact the incidents would have been pure creations of the Poet's brain.

The statement inserted by the publishers at the head of the volume in which the poem appeared in 1820, that _Hyperion_ was intended to be as long as _Endymion_, is probably also due to Woodhouse, their right-hand man (Keats, we know, had nothing to do with it), and may represent what he had gathered in conversation to have been the poet's original idea.

Mr de Selincourt has shown grounds for inferring that when Keats came to actual grips with the subject he decided to treat it much more briefly and partially. Clearly the essential meaning of the story was for him symbolical; it meant the dethronement of an older and ruder wors.h.i.+p by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers. Into this story the poet plunges, not even in the middle but near the close. When his poem opens, the younger G.o.ds, the Olympians, have won their victory, and the t.i.tans, all except Hyperion, are already overthrown. In their debate whether to fight again general despondency prevails, and only one of the fallen, Enceladus, strikes a note of defiance; so that it seems as if there were nothing left to tell except the coming defeat or abdication of Hyperion in favour of Apollo. Hyperion, it is true, has not yet spoken when we are called away from the council, and Keats might have made him side with Enceladus and rouse his brethren to a temporary renewal of the strife. Or leaving the t.i.tans conquered, he might, as Woodhouse suggests, have gone on to narrate the second warfare, that waged against the Olympians not by them but later by the Giants in revolt. In either case we should have seen the poet try his hand, hitherto untested in such themes, on scenes of superhuman battle and violence.

Woodhouse is right at any rate in saying that the hints for handling the theme to be found in the ancient poets are few and uncertain, leaving a modern writer free to invent most of his incidents for himself. Beyond the bald notices in his cla.s.sical dictionaries, Chapman's _Iliad_ would have given Keats a picture of the dethroned Saturn: Chapman's Homer's hymn to Apollo might have filled his imagination, even to overflowing, with visions of the youth of that G.o.d in Delos,--'Chief isle of the embowered Cyclades': Hesiod's _Theogony_ (which he had doubtless read in the translation of Pope's b.u.t.t and enemy, Thomas Cooke) would have taught him more, but very confusedly, about the warfare of G.o.ds, t.i.tans, and Giants in general, besides inspiring his vision of the den where the t.i.tans lie vanquished; while he would have gleaned other stray matters from Sandys's notes on certain pa.s.sages of Ovid. As far as his beloved English poets are concerned, brief allusions occur in the _Faerie Queene_ and in _Paradise Lost_, where Milton includes the fallen t.i.tans among the rebel hosts that flock to the standard of Satan in h.e.l.l. But I think the source freshest in his mind at the moment when he began to write is one which has not hitherto been suggested, the ode of the famous French Renaissance poet Ronsard to his friend Michel de l'Hopital. We know by his translation of the sonnet _Nature ornant Ca.s.sandre_ that Keats had the works of Ronsard in his hands--lent, it would seem, by Mr Taylor--exactly about this time. The ode in question, partly founded on Hesiod, partly on Horace,[1] but largely on Ronsard's own invention, relates the birth of the Muses, their training by their mother Memoire (= Mnemosyne), their desire as young girls to visit their father Jupiter, their mother's consent, their undersea journey to the palace of Ocea.n.u.s where Jupiter is present at a high festival, their choral singing before him, first of the strife of Neptune and Pallas for the soil of Attica, and then of the battle of the G.o.ds and giants:--

Apres sur la plus grosse corde D'un bruit qui tonnait jusqu'aux cieux, Le pouce des Muses accorde L'a.s.saut des Geants et des Dieux.

Keats, although he writes of the battle of the G.o.ds not against the Giants but against the earlier t.i.tans, yet when he rolls out rebel names like this,--

Coeus, and Gyges, and Briareus; Typhon, and Dolor, and Porphyrion Were pent in regions of laborious breath Dungeon'd in opaque elements,--

Keats, when he rolls out these rebel names, has surely been haunted by the strophes of Ronsard:--

Styx d'un noir halecret rempare Ses bras, ses jambes, et son sein, Sa fille amenant par la main Contre Cotte, Gyge, et Briare.[2]

Neptune a la fourche estofee De trois crampons vint se mesler Par la troupe contre Typhee Qui rouoit une fonde en l'air: Ici Phoebus d'un trait qu'il jette Fit Encelade trebucher, La Porphyre lui fit broncher Hors des poings l'arc et la sagette.

For such an epic theme Keats felt instinctively, when he set to work, that an epic and not a romance treatment was necessary; and for an English poet the obvious epic model is Milton. Ever since his visit to Bailey at Oxford, and especially during his stay at Teignmouth the next year, Keats had been absorbing Milton and taking him into his being, as formerly he had taken Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, and now he can utter his own thoughts and imaginations almost with Milton's voice.

Speaking generally of the blank verse of _Hyperion_, its rhythms are almost as full and sonorous as Milton's own, but simpler; its march more straightforward, with less of what De Quincey calls 'solemn planetary wheelings'; its periods do not sweep through such complex evolutions to so stately and far foreseen a close. The Miltonisms in _Hyperion_ are rather matters of diction and construction--construction almost always derived from the Latin--than of rhythm: sometimes also they are matters of direct verbal echo and reminiscence. To take a single instance out of many:--

For as among us mortals omens drear Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he.

It is only in _Hyperion_ that Keats habitually thus puts the noun Latin-wise before the adjective: and the omens that 'perplex' are derived from the eclipse which in _Paradise Lost_ 'with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.' Throughout the fragment Keats uses frequently and with fine effect the Miltonic figure of the 'turn' or rhetorical iteration of identical words to a fresh purport, as in that n.o.ble phrase which seems to have inspired one of the finest pa.s.sages in Sh.e.l.ley's _Defence of Poesy_[3]:

How beautiful, if Sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.

It has been said, and justly, that Keats has done nothing greater than the debate of the fallen t.i.tans in their cave of exile, modelled frankly in its main outlines on that of the rebel angels in _Paradise Lost_, but with the personages and utterances nevertheless entirely his own. In creating and animating these colossal figures between the elemental and the human, what masterly imaginative instinct does he show--to take one point only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realise their voices. Thus of the murmuring of the a.s.sembled G.o.ds when Saturn is about to speak:--