Life of John Keats Part 40

Both led him to hold that the true power of poetry, the true test by which posterity must judge it, lies in the direct relations which it bears to the social and political activities of its period. That the re-awakening of the Western mind and imagination to nature and romance in the days of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars was a spiritual phenomenon not less important in human history than the wars themselves would have been a conception that his mind was incapable of entertaining. He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But of history he was in fact an a.s.siduous reader, and the secret of his indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in re-instating a number of ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history, to the general destinies and tribulations of the race, he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only too acutely and tragically sensitive.

Turning to the chief real contributions to our appreciation and knowledge of Keats, I should give the first place to Matthew Arnold's well-known essay[11] of 1880. With his cunning art in the minting and throwing into circulation of phrases that cannot be forgotten, Arnold balanced the weaknesses against the strength of Keats's work and character, blaming the gus.h.i.+ng admirers who injured his memory by their 'pawing and fondness,' insisting on the veins of 'flint and iron' in his nature, insisting on his clear-sightedness, his lucidity, his perception of the vital connexion of beauty with truth and of both with joy, declaring that 'no one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness,' and clenching all, with reference to Keats's own saying, 'I think I shall be among the English poets after my death,' by the comment, 'he is, he is with Shakespeare.[11] Almost simultaneously with Matthew Arnold's essay, there appeared the very thoughtful and original study of Mrs F.M. Owen, in which were laid the foundations of a true understanding of _Endymion_ as a parable of the experiences of a poet's soul in its quest after Beauty.

The years 1883 and 1884 were great Keats years. In them there appeared the edition of the poems by the late W.T. Arnold, the first which contained a scholar's investigations into the special sources of Keats's poetic style and vocabulary: also the edition for the Golden Treasury Series by Francis Turner Palgrave, with a studiously collated text and a preface of more glowing and scarcely less just critical admiration than Matthew Arnold's, only flawed, as I think, by a revival of that obsolete heresy of the 'deadness' of the Grecian mythology: and thirdly, the first issue of the late Mr Buxton Forman's edition of the poetry and prose works together. All students know the results of this editor's devoted and unremitting industry, maintained through a full quarter of a century, in the textual criticism of his author and in the publication and re-publication of editions containing every variant reading and every sc.r.a.p of scattered prose or verse that could be recovered. To the same worker is due the unearthing and giving to the world of two groups of the poet's letters which had been unknown to Monckton Milnes, the wholly admirable and delightful series addressed to his young sister, and the series, in great part distressing and deplorable, to f.a.n.n.y Brawne. About 1887, I was myself able to put straight two matters that needed it by publis.h.i.+ng the true text of the letters to America and by rectifying the current notion that the revised _Hyperion_ had been a first draft. Before long came the essay of Mr Robert Bridges, pa.s.sing the whole of Keats's poetry under review, and dealing out judgments in a terse authoritative style to which, as one poet estimating another, he was fully ent.i.tled, and which at all moments commands interest and respect if it sometimes challenges contradiction. On some matters, and especially on the relations of Keats's early poetry to Wordsworth, Mr Bridges has thrown a light too clear and convincing to be questioned.

When in 1892 the late Mr William Sharp compiled his _Life of Joseph Severn_ from the vast, almost unmanageable ma.s.s of papers in the possession of the artist's family (I had had them previously through my hands and can realize the difficulty of the task), he furnished valuable new material for our knowledge both of the life of Keats and of his after life in the opinions of men. Coming down to more recent years, we have the admirable editorial work of Professor de Selincourt, as good, I think, as has been bestowed on any English poet, carrying out to the farthest point the researches initiated by W.T. Arnold, and illuminating the text throughout with the comments and ill.u.s.trations of a keen scholar in cla.s.sical and English literature. Nor can I leave unmentioned the several lectures by two successive Oxford professors of poetry, that of Mr A.C. Bradley on Keats's letters and that of Mr. J.W. Mackail on his poetry. From these two minds, ripened in daily familiarity with the best literatures of the world, we have, after a hundred years, praise of Keats which almost makes Sh.e.l.ley's seating of him among 'Inheritors of unfulfilled renown' seem like an irony,--praise more splendid than he would have hoped for had he lived to fulfil even the most daring of his ambitions. A special point in Mr Mackail's work is to make clear how strong had been upon Keats the influence of the _Divine Comedy_, his pocket companion on his Scottish tour, and how in _Hyperion_, written in the next months after his return, there appears here and there, amid the general Miltonic strain of the verse, a quality of thought and vision drawn straight from and almost matching Dante. Lastly, there has recently come from America a tribute of quite another kind, showing how for purposes of systematic study Keats has been thought worthy of an apparatus. .h.i.therto only bestowed on the great cla.s.sics of literature: I refer to the elaborate and monumental _Concordance_ to his poems lately issued from Cornell University.

And must not, it may be asked, all this labour spent upon Keats's memory and remains, all this load of editing and re-editing and commentary and biography and scholiast-work laid upon a poet who declared that all poems ought to be understood without any comment,--must it not by this time have fairly smothered, or is it not at least in danger of smothering, Keats himself and his poetry? Naturally in the course of my own work I have asked myself this question with qualms, bethinking myself of Tennyson's phrase about swamping the sacred poets with themselves. The answer is,--No, such a poet can carry any weight we may choose to lay upon him, and more: he can never be smothered, inasmuch as he has both given the world something it can nevermore cease to want and suggested the existence within him of a power, quenched before its time, to give it something much more and greater yet. If the result of all our commentaries should be to provoke a reaction among readers, and to make them crave for a naked text both of the poems and letters and insist upon being left alone with that and their own meditations upon it,--well, so much the better. Every reader of the English tongue that has the works of Keats often enough in his hands, with or without comment, will find his life enriched with much of the best that poetry can do for human life, with achievements, very near to perfection, of that faculty which is the essential organ of poetry,--to which all others, spiritual and intellectual, are in poetry subordinate,--the faculty of imagination transfusing the vital beauty and magic and secret rhythm of things into the other magic and beauty and rhythm of words.

Over and above this, he will find himself living in the familiarity of a great and lovable spirit, dowered at birth with capacities for joy and misery more intense almost than any of which we have record, and retaining its lovableness to the last in spite of circ.u.mstances that gave misery too cruelly the upper hand.

But, again the objector may ask, is it so certain that in the coming time the desire of readers for what Keats has to give them will survive without abatement? Have not the last three years been an utterly unprecedented, overwhelming and transforming experience for mankind?

Will not the new world after the war be a new world indeed, on the one hand filled, nay, gorged, with recollections of doing and undergoing, of endurance and adventure, of daring and suffering and horror, of h.e.l.lishness and heroism, beside which all the dreams of bygone romance must forever seem tame and vapid; and on the other hand straining with a hungry forecast towards a future of peace and justice such as mankind has not known before, which it will be its tremendous task to try and establish? Will not this world of so prodigiously intensified experiences and enlarged hopes and besetting anxieties require and produce new poets and a new poetry of its own that shall deal with the realities it has gone through and those it is striving for, and put away and cease to care for the old dreams and thrills and glamours of romance? Have we not in fact witnessed the first-fruits of this new tremendous stimulus in the cloud of young poets who have appeared--too many of them alas! only to perish--since the war began?

And again the answer is, No. However changed the world, work like that of Keats is not what it will ever let perish. The thrills and glamours which pa.s.s away are only those of the second-rate and the second-hand sort that come in and go out with literary fas.h.i.+on; not those which have sprung from and struck deep into the innermost places of the spirit.

Doubtless there will arise and is arising a new poetry which will be very different from any phase of poetry produced by the romantic revolution and the generations that followed and nourished themselves on it. The new poetry may not be able fully to share Keats's inspiring conviction of the sovereign, the transcendental truth of whatsoever ideas the imagination seizes as beauty. It may perhaps even abjure the direct search for beauty as its primary aim and impulse. But no matter: provided that its organ be the imagination, working with intensity on whatever themes the genius of the age may dictate, it cannot but achieve some phase, some incarnation, of beauty by the way. But gains like those which were made for the human spirit by the poetry of which Keats was one of the chief masters will never be lost again. Those who care for poetry at all must always care for those refres.h.i.+ng and inspiring draughts, as I have called them, from the innermost wells of antiquity, of nature, and of romance, those meditations of mingled joy and sorrow that search into the soul of things. Moreover they will never cease to interest themselves in the question,--If only this great spirit had survived, what would have been those unwritten poems of which he saw in the sky the cloudy symbols, of which he felt the pressure and prescience forcing the blood into his brain or bringing about his heart an awful warmth 'like a load of immortality,' and the peris.h.i.+ng of which unborn within him was one of the two great haunting distresses of his dying days?

In letting speculation wander in this field, we are brought up by many problems as to what kind of manhood could have followed a youth like that of Keats, had he had better fortune and had the conditions and accidents of his life been such as to fortify his bodily const.i.tution instead of sapping it. Youth, especially half-trained youth, is always subject to such storms and strains as those which Keats experienced with a violence proportionate to the fervour of his being. To the sane and sweet, the manly and courageous, elements in his character we have found his friends bear unanimous evidence, amply supported by the self-revelation of his letters. But self-revealed also we see the morbid, the corroding elements which lay beneath these, just as beneath his vigorous frame and gallant bearing there lay the bodily susceptibilities that with ill-luck enabled lung disease to fasten on and kill him. What must under any conditions have made life hard for him was the habitual inner contention and disquiet of his instincts and emotions in regard to that most momentous of human matters, love. When he lets his mind dwell on the opposed extremes of human impulse and experience, from the vilest to the most exalted, which the word-of-all-work, love, is used to cover, he is more savagely perplexed and out of conceit with life than from any other cause or thought whatever.[12] The ruling power in himself, as he declares over and over again, was the abstract pa.s.sion for beauty, the love of the principle of beauty in all things. But even in the poem specially designed to embody and celebrate that pa.s.sion, in _Endymion_, we find his conception of realized and s.e.xual human love to be mawkish and unworthy. When the actual experience befalls himself, he falls utterly and almost ignominiously a slave, at once enraptured and desperately resentful, to the jealous cravings which absorb and paralyse all his other faculties.

Would ripened manhood or a happier experience have been able to bring health and peace to his spirit on this supremely vital matter and to turn him into a poet of love, love both human and transcendental, such as at the outset he had longed and striven to be?

Again, along with his admirable capacity for loyal devotion and sympathy in friends.h.i.+p, we find in him capacities of quite another kind, capacities for disillusionment and for seeing through and chafing at human and social shams and pretensions and absurdities; and we ask ourselves, would this strain in him, which we find expressed with a degree of pettish and premature cynicism, for instance in the _Cap and Bells_ and in some of his later letters, have matured with time into a power either of virile satire or genial, reconciling comedy?

And once more, would that haunting, that irrepressible sense of the miseries of the world which we find breaking through from time to time amid the beauty of the odes, or the playfulness and affectionate confidences of the letters, or dictating that tragical return against himself and his achievements in the revised _Hyperion_,--could it and would it with experience have mellowed into such compa.s.sionate wisdom as might have made him one of the rare great healers and sages among the poets of the world?

Such speculations are as vain as they are inevitable. Let us indulge ourselves at any rate by remembering that it is the greatest among his successors who have held the most sanguine view as to the powers that were in him. Here are more words of Tennyson's,--'Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us.

There is something magic and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything which he wrote.' Leaving with these words the question of what he might have done, and looking only at what he did, it is enough for any man's glory. The days of the years of his life were few and evil, but above his grave the double aureole of poetry and friends.h.i.+p s.h.i.+nes eternally.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Everyone knows Wordsworth's beautiful sonnet of G.o.d-speed to him.

Haydon went to call on the great man, who had always been kind to him, as he pa.s.sed through London, and except for two unfortunately chosen words, is at his very best in this picture of their parting:--'After a quarter of an hour I took my leave, and as I arose he got up, took his stick, with that sidelong look of his, and then burst forth that beautiful smile of heart and feeling, geniality of soul, manly courage and tenderness of mien, which neither painter nor sculptor has ever touched. It was the smile of a superior creature who would have gathered humanity under the shelter of its wings and while he was amused at its follies would have saved it from sorrow and sheltered it from pain.' (_Life of B. R. Haydon_, ed. Taylor, ii, 321.)

[2] John Sterling, _Essays and Tales_, ii, 53.

[3] Carefully edited, it is believed by Cyrus Redding, formerly an employe of the house.

[4] _Noctes Ambrosianae_, ii, 146: from _Blackwood_ for December, 1828.

[5] _Quarterly Review_, April 1833, page 81. The article was long supposed to be by Lockhart himself, but Mr Prothero has proved that it was by Croker.

[6] In W. Smith's _Standard Library_, exactly reprinted from the Galignani edition. America had in this matter been in advance of England, an edition of the poet's works having appeared at Buffalo in 1834.

[7] _Essays and Tales_, p. clxviii.

[8] _Notes on Gilfillan's Literary Portraits_: Collected Works, xi, 393. It is fair to add that twelve years later De Quincey went a good way in recantation of this outburst.

[9] See _Byron's Collected Works_, Prose, iii, 46, note.

[10] See particularly Chaps. iv and v of Holman Hunt's _Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_.

[11] First published in T.H. Ward's _Selections from the English poets_, and re-printed in the second series of _Essays in Criticism_ (1892). To this essay I possess a curious postscript in a note of Arnold's written a few years later to myself. I had thought his treatment of _Endymion_ too slighting. His answer shows how fastidiousness could prevail in him over judgment. 'If Keats,' he writes, 'had left nothing but _Endymion_, it would have alone shown his remarkable power and have been worth preserving on that account: but when he has left plenty which shows it much better I cannot but wish _Endymion_ away from his volume.'

[12] See the bitter comment on a pa.s.sage in Burton's _Anatomy_ quoted in Mr Buxton Forman's _Complete Works of J. K._ iii, 268, where Keats runs his head against the problem with which Plato had tried to deal in his myth of the two Aphrodites, Pandemos and Urania. 'The word-of-all-work, love,' is a phrase of George Eliot's.

APPENDIX

I. _The Alexander fragment_ (page 33). Here is the text:--

Whenne Alexandre the Conqueroure was wayfayringe in y^e londe of Inde, there mette hym a damoselle of marveillouse beautie slepynge uponne the herbys and flourys. He colde ne loke uponne her withouten grete plesance, and he was welle nighe loste in wondrement. Her forme was everyche whytte lyke y^e fayrest carvynge of Quene Cythere, onlie thatte y^t was swellyd and blushyd wyth warmthe and lyffe wythalle.

Her forhed was as whytte as ys the snowe whyche y^e talle hed of a Norwegian pyne stelythe from y^e northerne wynde. One of her fayre hondes was yplaced thereonne, and thus whytte wyth whytte was ymyngld as y^e G.o.de Arthure saythe, lyke whytest lylys yspredde on whyttest snowe; and her bryght eyne whenne she them oped, sparklyd lyke Hesperus through an evenynge cloude.

Theye were yclosyd yn slepe, save that two slauntynge raies shotte to her mouthe, and were theyre bathyd yn sweetenesse, as whenne by chaunce y^e moone fyndeth a banke of violettes and droppethe thereonne y^e silverie dewe.

The authoure was goynge onne withouthen descrybynge y^e ladye's breste, whenne lo, a genyus appearyd--'Cuthberte,' sayeth he, 'an thou canst not descrybe y^e ladye's breste, and fynde a simile thereunto, I forbyde thee to proceede yn thy romaunt.' Thys, I kennd fulle welle, far surpa.s.syd my feble powres, and forthwythe I was fayne to droppe my quille.

This queer youthful pa.s.sage in a would-be Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde spelling seems scarcely worth taking trouble about, but I thought it worth while to try and trace what reading Keats must have been fresh from when he wrote it, and consulted both Prof. Israel Gollancz and Mr Henry Bradley, with the result stated briefly in the text. At first I had thought Keats must have drawn his idea from some one of the many versions of the great mediaeval Alexander romance--especially considering that in all forms of that romance a flight into the skies and a trip under the sea are regular incidents, and might later have suggested the parallel incidents in _Endymion_. But neither in the version which Keats is most likely to have known, the English _Alisaunder_ as published in Weber's collection of metrical romances, 1810, nor indeed, I believe, in any other, is there any incident closely parallel to this of the Indian maiden; although love and marriage generally come into the story towards the close. In the English version there is a beautiful Candace who declares her pa.s.sion for the hero: he puts her off for the time being, but goes disguised as an amba.s.sador to her court, where he is recognized and imprisoned. Among things derived from the main mediaeval cycle, the nearest approach to such an idea as Keats was working on is to be found in the _Orlando Innamorato_ of Boiardo, book ii, canto i, stanzas 6, 21-29; but here the beauty is a lady of Egypt whom Boiardo calls Elidonia. His description of the great painted hall of the giant Agramante at Biserta, adorned with pictures of the life and deeds of Alexander, closes with the following:--

In somma, ogni sua guerra ivi e dipinta Con gran richezza e bella a riguardare.

Poscia che fu la terra da lui vinta, A due grifon nel ciel si fe portare, Col scudo in braccia e con la spada cinta; Poi dentro un vetro si cala nel mare, E vede le balene e ogni gran pesce E campa e ancor quivi di fuor n'esce.

Da poi che vinto egli ha ben ogni cosa, Vedesi lui che vinto e dall' amore, Perche Elidonia, quella graziosa, Co' suoi begli occhi gli ha pa.s.sato il core--

And then ensues the history of their loves and of the hero's death.

But Keats in his hospital days knew no Italian, and could only have heard of such a pa.s.sage in Boiardo through Leigh Hunt. So I think the derivation of his fragment from any of the regular Alexander romances must be given up, and the source indicated in the text be accepted, namely the popular _fabliau_ of the _Lai d'Aristote_ (probably in Way's rimed version), where the thing happens exactly as Keats tells it, and whence the idea of the sudden encounter with an Indian maiden probably lingered in his mind till he revived it in _Endymion_. As for the sources of the attempt at voluptuous description, it is a little surprising to find Milton's 'tallest pine hewn on Norwegian hills'

remembered in such a connexion: other things are an easily recognizable farrago from _Cymbeline_,--

'Cytherea, How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets!'

from _Venus and Adonis_,--

'A lily prison'd in a gaol of snow;'

'Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white;'

from _Lucrece_,--

--'the morning's silver-melting dew;'

from _Twelfth Night_,

--'like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets;'

and so forth. Prof. Gollancz suggests that 'Cuthberte' as the name of the author is a reminiscence from the 'Cuddie' of Spenser's _Shepheard's Calendar_, and that the 'good Arthure' may also be some kind of Spenserian reference: but I suspect 'Arthure' here to be a mis-transcription (we have no autograph) for 'authoure.'