Life of John Keats Part 33

There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise Among immortals when a G.o.d gives sign, With hus.h.i.+ng finger, how he means to load His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, With thunder, and with music, and with pomp: Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines.

This is not a whit the less Keats for his use of the Miltonic 'turn' in rounding the period by a repet.i.tion in the last line of the 'bleak-grown pines' from the first. Again, of Ocea.n.u.s answering his fallen chief:--

So ended Saturn; and the G.o.d of the Sea, Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, But cogitation in his watery shades, Arose, with locks not oozy, and began, In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.

Here the affirmation by negation in the second and fourth lines is a Latin usage already employed by Keats in the _Pot of Basil_[4]: the 'locks not oozy' are a reminiscence from _Lycidas_ and the 'first-endeavouring tongue' from _The Vacation Exercise_. But into what a vitally apt and beautiful new music of his own has Keats moulded and converted all such echoes. Once more, of Clymene following Enceladus in debate:--

So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook That, lingering along a pebbled coast, Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met, And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath: The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks, Came booming thus.

In this last example the sublimity owes nothing to Milton except in the single case of the repet.i.tion in the third line. Even the scoffing Byron recognized after Keats's death the authentic 'large utterance of the early G.o.ds' in pa.s.sages like these, though Keats in his modesty had himself refused to recognize it.

Further to compare Keats with Milton,--the poet of _Hyperion_ is naturally no match for Milton in pa.s.sages where the elder master has been inspired by life-long impa.s.sioned meditation on his readings of history and romance, like that famous one ending with

What resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son.

Begirt with British and Armoric knights Or all who since, baptized or infidel Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebizond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric sh.o.r.e When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarrabia--

On the other hand Milton, even in the sweetness and the nearness to nature of _Comus_ and his other early work, is scarce a match for Keats when it comes to the evocation, even in a mode relatively simple, of nature's secret sources of delight,--as thus:

throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves Though scarcely heard in many a green recess:

while comparison is scarcely possible in the case of the nature images most characteristically Keats's own, for instance:--

As when, upon a tranced summer night, Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir--.

Neither to the Greek nor the Miltonic, but essentially to the modern, the romantic, sentiment of nature does it belong to try and express, by such a concourse of metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of the oaks among the other trees--their quasi-human venerableness--their verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky.

All good poems, it has been said, begin well. None begins better than _Hyperion_, with its 'Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,' and its grand mournful dialogue between the discrowned Saturn and the t.i.taness Thea, his would-be comforter. Then, with a rich contrast from this scene of despondency, comes the scene, dazzling and resplendent for all its ominousness, of the mingled wrath and terror of the threatened sun-G.o.d in his flaming palace. The second book, relating the council of the dethroned t.i.tans, has neither the contrasted sublimities of the first nor the intensity, rising almost to fever-point, of the unfinished third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his G.o.dhead. But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to my mind, fully on a level with the other two. And it is in this book, in the speech of Ocea.n.u.s, that Keats sets forth the whole symbolical purport and meaning of the myth as he had conceived it:--

Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain; O folly! for to bear all naked truths, And to envisage circ.u.mstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!

As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companions.h.i.+p, And thousand other signs of purer life; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pa.s.s In glory that old Darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, And feedeth still, more comely than itself?

Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?

Or shall the tree be envious of the dove Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings To wander wherewithal and find its joys?

We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves, But eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower Above us in their beauty, and must reign In right thereof; for 'tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might:

That difficulty, to which we have referred, of surmising how there could have remained material to fill out a poem on the t.i.tanomachia which had begun with the t.i.tans, all but one, dethroned already, seems to increase when we consider the above speech of Ocea.n.u.s, setting forth with resigned prophetic wisdom the fated necessity of their fall. It increases still further when Clymene, following on the same side as Ocea.n.u.s, tells how she has heard the strains of a new and ravis.h.i.+ng music from the lyre of Apollo which have made her cast away in despair the instrument of her own formless music, the sea-sh.e.l.l; and still further again when in the next book we witness the meeting of Apollo with the t.i.taness Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, who for his sake has 'forsaken old and sacred thrones,' and when we hear him proclaim how in the inspiration of her presence,

Knowledge enormous makes a G.o.d of me.

Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.

Before the glory of this new-deified Apollo, what could long have delayed the defeat or abdication of the elder sun-G.o.d Hyperion?--what could have remained for Keats to invent that should have much enriched or lengthened out his poem? The sense of the difficulty of sustaining the battle of the primeval powers against these new and n.o.bler successors may well have been one of the things (even had he not had Milton's comparative failure with the warfare in heaven to warn him) that hindered his going on with his poem. To the reader there occurs another and even greater difficulty: and that is that Keats had already given to his fallen elder G.o.ds or t.i.tans so much not only of majesty but of n.o.bleness and goodness that it is hard to see wherein he could have shown their successors excelling them. He had represented Saturn as wroth, indeed, at his downfall, but chiefly because it leaves him

--smother'd up, And buried from all G.o.dlike exercise Of influence benign on planets pale, Of admonition to the winds and seas, Of peaceful sway above man's harvesting, And all those acts which Deity supreme Doth ease its heart of love in.

Increase of knowledge, of skill in the arts of life and of beauty, the G.o.ds of the new dynasty might indeed extend to mankind, but what increase of love and beneficence? Even the relations of Saturn to his father Coelus (the Greek Ura.n.u.s), which in the ancient cosmogony are of the crudest barbarity, Keats in _Hyperion_ makes benignant and sympathetic.

Such inherent difficulties as these might well have made Keats diffident of his power to complete his poem as a rounded or satisfying whole had its intended scope been what we are told. But I am sometimes tempted to conjecture that his root idea had been other than what his friends attributed to him,--that battle, and the victory of the Olympians over the t.i.tans or Giants or both, would not in fact have been his main theme, but that he intended to present to us Apollo, enthroned after the abdication of Hyperion, in the character of a prophet and to have put into his mouth revelations of things to come, a great monitory vision of the world's future. To such a supposition some colour is surely lent by the speech of Apollo above quoted on the 'knowledge enormous' just poured into his brain by Mnemosyne. On the other hand it has to be remembered that Keats himself, in a forecast of his work made ten months before it was written, shows clearly that he then meant his Apollo to be above all things a G.o.d of action.

Keats himself, writing some eight months later, when he had finally decided to give up his epic attempt, cites as his chief reason a re-action of his critical judgment against the Miltonic style, at least as a style suitable for him, Keats, to work in:--

I have given up _Hyperion_--there were too many Miltonic inversions in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from _Hyperion_, and put a mark * to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul 'twas imagination--I cannot make the distinction--Every now and then there is a Miltonic intonation--But I cannot make the division properly.

And again: 'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.' This re-action was certainly not fully conscious or formulated in Keats's mind by the previous winter. But it would seem none the less to have been working in him instinctively: for the moment he had turned, in _The Eve of St Agnes_, to a romance in the flowing, straightforward, Spenserian-Chattertonian manner of narration, he had been able to carry his task through with felicity and ease.

This was on his excursion to Hamps.h.i.+re in the latter half of January.

Within three weeks of his return he was at work again on a kindred theme of popular and traditional belief, _The Eve of St Mark_. The belief was that a person standing in the church porch of any town or village on the evening before St Mark's day (April 24th) might thereby gain a vision of all the inhabitants fated to die or fall grievously sick within the year. Those destined to die would be seen pa.s.sing in but not returning, those who were to be in peril and recover would go in and after a while come out. The heroine of the poem, to whom this vision would appear, was to be a maiden of Canterbury named Bertha, no doubt after the first Christian queen of Kent, the Frankish wife of Ethelbert; the scene, Canterbury itself, memories of the poet's stay there in 1817 mingling apparently with impressions of his recent visit to Chichester.

Keats never got on with this poem after his first three or four days'

work (February 14th-17th 1819), and it remains a mere fragment, tantalizing and singular, of a hundred and twenty lines' length. Why?

Perhaps merely because it was begun almost at the very hour when he became the accepted lover of f.a.n.n.y Brawne. We have seen how various causes, but chiefly the obsession of that pa.s.sion, paralysed his power of work for the next two months, and what were the thoughts and tasks that held him fully occupied afterwards. It has been suggested by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Keats meant to give the story a turn applicable to himself and his mistress, and that the present fragment would have served as the opening of a poem which afterwards, in sickness, he mentioned to her as being in his mind:--'I would show some one in love, as I am, with a person living in such Liberty as you do.' I can find no sure evidence, internal or external, either to refute the suggestion or confirm it.

The fragment of _The Eve of St Mark_ is Keats's only attempt at narrative writing in the eight-syllabled four-stress couplet. Its pace and movement are nearer to Chaucer in _The Romaunt of the Rose_ or _The House of Fame_ than to Coleridge or Scott or any other model of Keats's own time. That he was writing with Chaucer in his mind is proved by some lines in which he tries in Rowley fas.h.i.+on to reproduce Chaucer's actual style and vocabulary, thus:--

Gif ye wol stonden hardie wight-- Amiddes of the blacke night-- Righte in the churche porch, pardie Ye wol behold a companie Approchen thee full dolourouse For sooth to sain from everich house Be it in city or village Wol come the Phantom and image Of ilka gent and ilka carle Who colde Deathe hath in parle And wol some day that very year Touchen with foule venime spear And sadly do them all to die-- Hem all shalt thou see verilie-- And everichon shall by thee pa.s.s All who must die that year, Alas.

These lines give us a sure key to the main motive of the story which was to follow. With some others in the same style, they are quoted by the poet as composing a gloss written in minute script on the margin of a wonderful illuminated book over which the damsel is found poring and which is to have some mysterious influence on her destiny. More noticeable and interesting than their somewhat random Rowleyism is the way in which some of the descriptive lines in the body of the poem antic.i.p.ate the very cadences of Chaucer's great latter-day disciple, William Morris. The first eight or ten lines of the following might have come straight from _The Man born to be King_ or _The Land East of the Sun_, and provide, as it were, in the history of our poetry a direct stepping-stone between Chaucer and Morris:--

The city streets were clean and fair From wholesome drench of April rains; And, on the western window panes, The chilly sunset faintly told Of unmatur'd green vallies cold, Of the green th.o.r.n.y bloomless hedge, Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge, Of primroses by shelter'd rills, And daisies on the aguish hills.

Twice holy was the Sabbath-bell: The silent streets were crowded well With staid and pious companies, Warm from their fire-side orat'ries; And moving, with demurest air, To even-song, and vesper prayer.

Each arched porch, and entry low, Was fill'd with patient folk and slow, With whispers hush, and shuffling feet, While play'd the organ loud and sweet.

The relation of this fragment to the Pre-Raphaelites of the mid nineteenth century and their work is altogether curious and interesting.

It was natural that it should appeal to them by the pure and living freshness of English nature-description with which it opens, by the perfectly imagined scene of hushed movement in the twilight streets that follows, perhaps most of all by the insistent delight in vivid colour, and in minuteness of animated and suggestive detail, which marks the final indoor scene of the maiden Bertha over her book by firelight. But what is strange is that Rossetti should not only have coupled the fragment with _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ as 'the chastest and choicest example of Keats's maturing manner,' an opinion which may well pa.s.s, but that he should have claimed it as showing 'astonis.h.i.+ngly real mediaevalism for one not bred an artist,' and even as the finest picture of the Middle Age period ever done. The truth is that the description of the Sabbath streets and the maiden's chamber are not mediaeval at all and probably not intended to be, while the one thing so intended, the illuminated ma.n.u.script from which she reads, is a quite impossible invention jumbling fantastically together things that never could have figured in the same ma.n.u.script, things from the Golden Legend, from the book of Exodus, the book of Revelation, with others from no possible ma.n.u.script source at all. Keats evidently took some interest in mediaeval illuminations, for in speculating on the old skulls of supposed monks at Beauly Abbey he had apostrophized one of them,--

Poor Skull, thy fingers set ablaze With silver saint in golden rays, The holy Missal: thou didst craze Mid bead and spangle, While others pa.s.s'd their idle days In coil and wrangle.

But he can have seen few and made no study of them, and his imagined mystically illuminated book in _The Eve of St Mark_ is invented with no such fine instinctive tact or likelihood as his imagined Grecian urn of the ode.

An elder member of the Rossetti circle, that shrewd and caustic, very originally minded if only half accomplished Scottish poet and painter, William Bell Scott, was much exercised over his friend's misconception in this matter. I will give his comment, certainly in some points just, as written to me in 1885. 'On reading the fragment it seems to me impossible to resist the conclusion that the scene represented is of the present day. The dull and quiet Sunday evening represented is of our time in any cathedral town in England, not the Sunday evening of old when morning Ma.s.s was the religious observance, and the evening was spent in long-bow and popinjay games and practice. The weary girl sits at a coal fire with a screen behind her, a j.a.panese screen apparently,'

[j.a.panese or old English lacquer imitating Oriental the screen certainly is]. 'Every item of the description is modern. But alas! what shall we say to the ancient illuminated MS. she has in hand, with the pictures of early martyrs dying by fire, the Inquisition punishment of heretics, and the writing annotated, the notes referred to modern printers' signs? As he describes a mediaeval MS. book so badly, it may be said he intended the scene of the poem to be mediaeval, but did the description also so badly. But no, the description of the dreariness of Sunday evening, utterly silent but for the pa.s.sing of the people going to evening sermon, is admirable.' By 'badly' my old friend meant inexactly. But Keats never was nor tried to be exact in his antiquarianism. If we take _The Eve of St Agnes_ as intended to be a faithful picture from the Middle Ages, it simply goes to pieces in the line--

And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.

Probably neither _The Eve of St Agnes_ nor _St Mark's Eve_ were dated with any definiteness in the poet's mind at all. A reference he makes to the last-named piece in a letter from Winchester the following autumn lends no definite support either to the modern or the mediaeval interpretation:--'Some time since I began a poem called _The Eve of St Mark_, quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town on a coolish evening.' The impression of mediaevalism which the two poems convey is not by any evidence of antiquarian knowledge or accuracy but by the intense spirit of romance that is in them,--by that impa.s.sioned delight in vivid colour and beautiful, imaginative detail which we have noted.

After his four days' start on this poem in February came the spell of two months' idleness which towards its close yielded _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ and came to an end with the _Ode to Psyche_, followed in the course of May by the four other odes. The choral _Song of the Four Fairies_, for some inchoate opera, sent by Keats to his brother together with _La Belle Dame_, is not worth pausing upon, and we may pa.s.s to Keats's main work of the ensuing July and August, _Otho the Great_. This is no fragment, having been duly finished to the last scene of the last act; but it is very much of an experiment. The question whether Keats, had he lived, might have become a great dramatic poet and creator is one of the most interesting possible. His intense and growing interest in humankind, together with his recorded and avowed liability to receive ('like putty,' as modern criticism has conjectured of Shakespeare) the impression of any character he might come in contact with, has led many students to believe that he had in him the stuff of a great creative playwright. _Otho the Great_ does nothing to solve the question. The plot and construction, as we have said, were entirely Brown's, building with quite arbitrary freedom on certain bald historical facts of the rebellion raised against Otho, in the course of his Hungarian wars, by his son Ludolf and the Red Duke Conrad of Lorraine, whom the emperor subsequently forgave. Creation demands fore-knowledge, premeditation on the characters you desire to create and the situations in which they are to be placed, and Keats, Brown tells us, only foreknew what was coming in any scene after they had sat down at the table to work on it. His business was to supply the words, and what the result shows is only the surprising facility with which he could by this time improvise poetry to order. The speeches in Otho are much more than pa.s.sably poetical, they are often quite brilliant and touched with Keats's unique genius for felicity in lines and phrases. But they affect us as put into the mouths of puppet speakers, not as coming out of the hearts and pa.s.sions of men and women.

In rhythm they are vital and varied enough, in style extremely high-pitched, and they resemble much Elizabethan work of the second order in smothering action and pa.s.sion under a redundance and feverish excess of poetry. There is violence amounting to hysteria alike in the villainy of Conrad and of his sister Auranthe, the remorse of Albert, and the mixture of filial devotion and lover's blindness in Ludolf, with his vengeful frenzy when he finds how he has been gulled. Keats, it is recorded, had in his eye the special gift of Edmund Kean for enacting frantic extremes and long-drawn agonies of pa.s.sion; and it is possible that as played by him the last act, of which Keats took the conduct as well as the writing into his own hands, might have proved effective on the stage. It shows the maddened Conrad bent on executing vengeance on the traitress Auranthe, and insanely stabbing empty air while he imagines he is stabbing his victim, until curtains drawn aside disclose an inner apartment where she has at the very moment fallen self-slain.

But it is doubtful whether any acting could carry off a plot so ultra-romantically extravagant and in places so obscure, or characters so incommensurably more eloquent than they are alive. Nor do lovers of Keats commonly care to read the play twice, for all its bursts and coruscations of fine poetry, feeling that these do not spring from the poet's own inner self and imagination, but are rather as fireworks fitted by a man of genius on to a frame which another man, barely of talent, has put together.

The case is different when we come to _King Stephen_, the brief dramatic fragment on which Keats wrought alone after _Otho the Great_ was finished. This teaches us one thing at any rate about Keats, that he could at will call away his imagination from matters luxurious or refres.h.i.+ng to the spirit, from themes broodingly meditative or tragically tender, to deal in a manner of fiery energy with the clash of war. He is still enough a child of the Renaissance to make his twelfth-century knights and princes quote Homer in their taunts and counter-taunts; but in the three-and-a-half scenes which he wrote he makes us feel his Stephen, defiant in defeat, a real elemental force and not a mere mouther of valiant rhetoric, fine and concentrated as the rhetoric sometimes is, as for instance when an enemy taunts him with being disarmed and helpless and he cries back, 'What weapons has the lion but himself?'

In persuading Keats to work with him on a tragedy for the stage, Brown had had the entirely laudable motive of putting his friend in the way of earning money for them both. But what would we not have given that the time and labour thus, as it turned out, thrown away should have yielded us from Keats's self another _Isabella_ or _Eve of St Agnes_, or a finished _Eve of St Mark_, or even another _Lamia_? Brown's next piece of suggestion and would-be help was far more unfortunate still. We have seen how in the unhappy weeks after Keats's return from Winchester in October, he spent his mornings in Brown's company spinning the verses of a comic and satiric fairy tale the scheme of which they had concocted together,--_The Cap and Bells_ or _The Jealousies_. The idea of the friends in this was no doubt to throw a challenge to Byron, the first cantos of whose _Don Juan_ had lately been launched upon a dazzled and scandalized world. Byron's genius, the spirit, that is, of brilliant devilry and worldly mockery which was the sincerest part of his genius, with his rich experiences of life, travel and society, of pa.s.sion and dissipation and the extremes of fame and obloquy, and his incomparable address and versatility in playing tricks of legerdemain with ideas and language, had here all found their perfect opportunity for display.

Attempts at worldly banter and satire by the tender-hearted, intensely loving and imagining Keats, with his narrow and in the main rather second-rate social experience, were never more than wry-mouthed as I have called them, ineffectual, and essentially against the grain.

His collaborator Brown imagined he had a gift for satiric fairy tales, but his recorded efforts in that kind are silly and dull as well as inclining to coa.r.s.eness. What happier result could be expected from their new joint work than that which posterity deplores in _The Cap and Bells_? The story is of an Indian Faery emperor Elfinan,--a name suggested by Spenser,--enamoured of an English maiden Bertha Pearl,--the very Bertha of _The Eve of St Mark_, resuscitated to our amazement,--but having for political reasons to seek in marriage a Faery princess Bellanaine, who herself is in love with an English youth named Hubert.

The eighty-eight stanzas which Keats wrote on those autumn mornings in Brown's room carry the tale no farther than Elfinan's despatching his chancellor Crafticanto on an emba.s.sy to fetch Bellanaine on an aerial journey from her home in Imaus, his consultation with his magician Hum as to the means of escaping the marriage and conveying himself secretly to England, his departure, and the arrival of Bellanaine and her escort to find the palace empty and the emperor flown. How the seriously, perhaps tragically, conceived Bertha of _St Mark's Eve_, with the mystic book fated to have influence on her life, could have been worked, as they were evidently meant to be worked, into this new ridiculous narrative, we cannot guess, nor how the relations of Bellanaine with her mortal lover would have been managed.

Before Keats's deepening despondency and recklessness caused him to drop writing altogether, which apparently happened early in December, he was evidently out of conceit with _The Cap and Bells_.[5] One of the most unfortunate things about the attempt is the choice of the Spenserian stanza for its metre. Keats had probably wished to avoid seeming merely to imitate Byron, as he might have seemed to do had he written in the _ottava rima_ of Don Juan, the one perfectly fit measure for such a blend of fantasy and satire as he was attempting. But not even Keats's power over the Spenserian stanza could make it a fit vehicle for his purpose. Thomson and Shenstone had used it in work of mild and leisurely playfulness, but to bite in satire or sting in epigram it cannot effectively be bent. To my sense the precedent most in Keats's mind was not these, but the before-mentioned translation of Wieland's _Oberon_ by Sotheby. Sotheby had invented a modified form of the Spenserian stanza riming _abbaccddc_ instead of _abcbbdbdd_ and keeping the final alexandrine. Much of the machinery and spirit of _The Cap and Bells_--the magic journeys through the air--the comic atmosphere and adventures of the courts--are closely akin to the jocular parts of this _Oberon_. Some of the pa.s.sages of mere fun and playfulness are pleasant enough, like that description of a dilapidated hackney coach (much resembling the four-wheeler of our youth) which Hunt selected to publish in the _Indicator_ while Keats was lying sick in his house the next year: but the attempts at social satire are almost always feeble and tiresome, and still more so those at political satire, turning for the most part rather obscurely on the scandals, then at their height, attending the relations of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In the faery narrative itself there break forth momentary flashes from the true genius of the poet, such as might delight the reader if he could lose his sense of irritation at the rubbish from amidst which they gleam. As thus, of the princess's flight through the air (was Keats thinking, in the first line, of the children carried heavenward by angels in Orcagna's _Triumph of Death_?)