Life of John Keats Part 8

Stop and consider! life is but a day; A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan?

Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown; The reading of an ever-changing tale; The light uplifting of a maiden's veil; A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air; A laughing school-boy, without grief or care, Riding the springy branches of an elm.

Then follows a cry for length enough of years (he will be content with ten) to carry out the poetic schemes which float before his mind; and here he returns to his ascending scale of poetic ambitions and sets it forth and amplifies it with a new richness of figurative imagery. First the realms of Pan and Flora, the pleasures of nature and the country and the enticements of toying nymphs (perhaps with a Virgilian touch in his memory from schoolboy days--_Panaque Silvanumque senem nymphasque sorores_--certainly with visions from Poussin's Baccha.n.a.ls in his mind's eye): then, the ascent to loftier regions where the imagination has to grapple with the deeper mysteries of life and experiences of the soul.

Here again he can only shadow forth his ideas by evoking shapes and actions of visible beings to stand for and represent them symbolically.

He sees a charioteer guiding his horses among the clouds, looking out the while 'with glorious fear,' then swooping downward to alight on a gra.s.sy hillside; then talking with strange gestures to the trees and mountains, then gazing and listening, 'awfully intent,' and writing something on his tablets while a procession of various human shapes, 'shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,' sweeps on before his view, as if in pursuit of some ever-fleeting music, in the shadow cast by a grove of oaks. The dozen lines calling up to the mind's eye the mult.i.tude and variety of figures in this procession--

Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways Flit onward--

contain less suggestion than we should have expected from what has gone before, of the events and tragedies of the world, 'the agonies, the strife of human hearts,'--and close with the vision of

a lovely wreath of girls Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls,

as if images of pure pagan joy and beauty would keep forcing themselves on the young aspirant's mind in spite of his resolve to train himself for the grapple with sterner themes.

This vision of the charioteer and his team remained in Keats's mind as a symbol for the imagination and its energies. For the moment, so his poem goes on, the vision vanishes, and the sense of every-day realities seems like a muddy stream bearing his soul into nothingness. But he clings to the memory of that chariot and its journey; and thereupon turns to consider the history of English poetry and the dearth of imagination from which it had suffered for so many years. Here comes the famous outbreak, first of indignant and then of congratulatory criticism, which was the most explicit battle-cry of the romantic revolution in poetry since the publication of Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ seventeen years earlier:--

Is there so small a range In the present strength of manhood, that the high Imagination cannot freely fly As she was wont of old? prepare her steeds, Paw up against the light, and do strange deeds Upon the clouds? Has she not shown us all?

From the clear s.p.a.ce of ether, to the small Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning Of Jove's large eye-brow, to the tender greening Of April meadows? Here her altar shone, E'en in this isle; and who could paragon The fervid choir that lifted up a noise Of harmony, to where it aye will poise Its mighty self of convoluting sound, Huge as a planet, and like that roll round, Eternally around a dizzy void?

Ay, in those days the Muses were nigh cloy'd With honors; nor had any other care Than to sing out and sooth their wavy hair.

Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land.

Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force They sway'd about upon a rocking horse And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd!

The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue Bared its eternal bosom,[9] and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious: beauty was awake!

Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of,--were closely wed To musty laws lined out with wretched rule And compa.s.s vile: so that ye thought a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!

That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it,--no, they went about, Holding a poor, decrepid standard out Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large The name of one Boileau!

The two great elder captains of poetic revolution, Coleridge and Wordsworth, have expounded their cause, in prose, with full maturity of thought and language: Wordsworth in the austere contentions of his famous prefaces to his second edition (1800), Coleridge in the luminous retrospect of the _Biographia Literaria_ (1816). In the interval a cloud of critics, including men of such gifts as Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, were in their several ways champions of the same cause. But none of these has left any enunciation of theory having power to thrill the ear and haunt the memory like the rimes of this young untrained recruit, John Keats. It is easy, indeed, to pick his verses to shreds, if we choose to fix a prosaic and rational attention on their faults. What is it, for instance, that imagination is asked to do? Fly, or drive? Is it she, or her steeds, that are to paw up against the light? And why paw?

Deeds to be done upon clouds by pawing can hardly be other than strange. What sort of a verb is 'I green, thou greenest?' Why should the hair of the muses require 'soothing'?--if it were their tempers it would be more intelligible. And surely 'foppery' belongs to civilization and not to 'barbarism': and a standard-bearer may be decrepit but not a standard, and a standard flimsy but not a motto. And so on without end, if we choose to let the mind a.s.sume that att.i.tude and to resent the contemptuous treatment of a very finished artist and craftsman by one as yet obviously raw and imperfect. Byron, in his controversy with Bowles a year or two later, adopted this mode of attack effectively enough; his spleen against a contemporary finding as usual its most convenient weapon in an enthusiasm, partly real and partly affected, for the genius and the methods of Pope. But controversy apart, if we have in us a touch of instinct for the poetry of imagination and beauty, as distinct from that of taste and reason and 'correctness',--however clearly we may see the weak points of a pa.s.sage like this, yet we cannot but feel that Keats touches truly the root of the matter: we cannot but admire the ring and power of his appeal to the elements, his fine spontaneous and effective turns of rhetoric, and the elastic life and variety of his verse.

So much for the indignant part of the pa.s.sage. The congratulatory part repeats with different imagery the sense of the sonnet to Haydon beginning 'Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,' and declares that fine sounds are once more floating wild about the earth, wherefore the Muses are now glad and happy. But the congratulations, it next occurs to the young poet, need to be qualified. To some of the recent achievements of poetry he demurs, declaring that their themes of song are 'ugly clubs' and the poets who fling them Polyphemuses 'disturbing the grand sea of song' (Keats is here remembering the huge club which Ulysses and his companions, in the Homeric story, find in the cave of Polyphemus, and confusing it with the rocks which the blinded giant later tears up and hurls after them into the sea).[10] The obvious supposition is that Keats is here referring to Byron's Eastern tales, with their clamour and heat and violence of melodramatic action and pa.s.sion. Leigh Hunt, indeed, who ought to have known, a.s.serts in his review of the volume that they are aimed against 'the morbidity which taints some of the productions of the poets of the Lake School.' I suspect that Hunt is here attributing to Keats some of his own poetical aversions. What productions can he mean? Southey's _Curse of Kehama_? Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_ or _Christabel_? Wordsworth's relatively few poems, or episodes, of tragic life--as the _Mad Mother_, _Ruth_, _Margaret_? For certainly the strained simplicities and trivialities of some of his country ballads, which were what Leigh Hunt and his friends most disliked in Wordsworth's work, could never be called thunders.

But these jarring things, Keats goes on, shall not disturb him. He will believe in and seek to enter upon the kingdom of poetry where all shall be gentle and soothing like a lawn beneath a myrtle tree,

And they shall be accounted poet-kings Who simply sing the most heart-easing things.

Then a momentary terror of his own presumption seizes him; but he puts it away, defies despondency, and declares that for all his youth and lack of learning and wisdom, he has a vast idea before him, and a clear conception of the end and aim of poetry. Dare the utmost he will--and then once more the sense of the greatness of the task comes over him, and he falls back for support on thoughts of recent friends.h.i.+p and encouragement. A score of lines follow, recalling happy talks at Hunt's over books and prints: the memory of these calls up by a.s.sociation a string of the delights ('luxuries' as in Huntian phrase he calls them) of nature: thence he recurs to the pleasures of sleep, or rather of a night when sleep failed him for thinking over the intercourse he had been enjoying and the place where he now rested--that is on the couch in Hunt's library. Here follow the lines quoted above (p. 53) about the prints on the library walls: and the piece concludes:--

The very sense of where I was might well Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came Thought after thought to nourish up the flame Within my breast; so that the morning light Surprised me even from a sleepless night; And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay, Resolving to begin that very day These lines; and howsoever they be done, I leave them as a father does his son.

The best reason for thinking that the poem '_I stood tip-toe_,' though probably finished quite as late as _Sleep and Poetry_, was begun earlier, is that in it Keats again follows the practice which he had attempted in _Calidore_ and its _Induction_ but gave up in _Sleep and Poetry_, namely that of occasionally introducing a lyrical effect with a six-syllable line, in the manner used by Spenser in the _Epithalamion_ and Milton in _Lycidas_,--

Open afresh your round of starry folds, Ye ardent marigolds!

No conclusion as to the date when the piece was begun can be drawn from the scene of summer freshness with which it opens, or from Leigh Hunt's statement that this description was suggested by a summer's day when he stood at a certain spot on Hampstead Heath. This may be quite true, but in the mind of a poet such scenes ripen by recollection, and Keats may at any after day have evoked it for his purpose, which was to bring his imagination to the right taking-off place--to plant it, so to speak, on the right spring-board--from which to start on its flight through a whole succession of other and kindred images of natural beauty. Some of the series of evocations that follow are already almost in the happiest vein of Keats's lighter nature-poetry, especially the four lines about the sweet peas on tip-toe for a flight, and the long pa.s.sage recalling his boyish delights by the Edmonton brookside and telling (in lines which Tennyson has remembered in his idyll of _Enid_) how the minnows would scatter beneath the shadow of a lifted hand and come together again. When in the course of his recapitulation there comes to him the image of the moon appearing from behind a cloud, he breaks off to apostrophize that G.o.ddess of his imaginative idolatry, that source at once and symbol, for such to his instinct she truly was, of poetic inspiration. But for the moment he does not pursue the theme: he pauses to trace the affinities between several kinds of nature-delight and corresponding moods of poetry,--

In the calm grandeur of a sober line, We see the waving of the mountain pine; And when a tale is beautifully staid, We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade,--

and so forth. And then, having in his mind's eye, as I should guess, some of the mythological prints from Hunt's portfolios, he asks what moods or phases of nature first inspired the poets of old with the fables of Cupid and Psyche and of Pan and Syrinx, of Narcissus and Echo, and most beautiful of all, that of Cynthia and Endymion,--and for the remaining fifty lines of the poem moonlight and the Endymion story take full possession. The lines imagining the occasion of the myth's invention are lovely:--

He was a Poet, sure a lover too, Who stood on Latmus' top, what time there blew Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below; And brought in faintness solemn, sweet, and slow A hymn from Dian's temple; while upswelling, The incense went to her own starry dwelling.

But though her face was clear as infant's eyes, Though she stood smiling o'er the sacrifice, The Poet wept at her so piteous fate, Wept that such beauty should be desolate: So in fine wrath some golden sounds he won, And gave meek Cynthia her Endymion.

Then, treating the bridal night for the moment not as a myth but as a thing that actually happened, he recounts, in a strain of purely human tenderness which owes something to his hospital experience and which he was hardly afterwards to surpa.s.s, the sweet and beneficent influences diffused on that night about the world:--

The breezes were ethereal and pure, And crept through half-closed lattices to cure The languid sick; it cool'd their fever'd sleep, And soothed them into slumbers full and deep.

Soon they awoke clear eyed, nor burnt with thirsting, Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting: And springing up, they met the wondering sight Of their dear friends, nigh foolish with delight; Who feel their arms and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and kiss and stare, And on their placid foreheads part the hair.

Young men and maidens at each other gaz'd With hands held back, and motionless, amaz'd To see the brightness in each other's eyes.

Then, closing, he asks himself the momentous question, 'Was there a poet born?' which he intended that his next year's work should answer.

In neither of these poems is the use of Elizabethan verbal forms, or the coinage of similar forms by a.n.a.logy, carried nearly as far as we shall find it carried later on, especially in _Endymion_. The abstract nouns expressing qualities pleasant to the senses or the sensuous imagination, on the model of those in Chapman's _Hymn to Pan_, increase in number, and we get the 'quaint mossiness of aged roots,' the 'hurrying freshnesses' of a stream running over gravel, the 'pure deliciousness'

of the Endymion story, the 'pillow silkiness' of clouds, the 'blue cragginess' of other clouds, and the 'widenesses' of the ocean of poetry. Once, evidently with William Browne's 'roundly form' in his mind, Keats invents, infelicitously enough, an adjective 'boundly' for 'bounden.' In the matter of metre, he is now fairly well at home in the free Elizabethan use of the couplet, letting his periods develop themselves unhampered, suffering his full pauses to fall at any point in the line where the sense calls for them, the rime echo to come full and emphatic or faint and light as may be, and the pause following the rime-word to be shorter or longer or almost non-existent on occasion. If his ear was for the moment attuned to the harmonies of any special master among the Elizabethans, it was by this time Fletcher rather than Browne: at least in _Sleep and Poetry_ the double endings no longer come in cl.u.s.ters as they did in the earlier epistle, nor are the intervening couplets so nearly regular, while there is a marked preference for emphasizing an adjective by placing it at the end of a line and letting its noun follow at the beginning of the next,--'the high | Imagination,'--'the small | Breath of new buds unfolding.' The reader will best see my point if he will compare the movement of the pa.s.sages in _Sleep and Poetry_ where these things occur with the Endymion pa.s.sage he will find quoted later on from the _Faithful Shepherdess_ (p. 168).

As to contemporary influences apparent in Keats's first volume, enough has been said concerning that of Leigh Hunt. The influence of an incommensurably greater poet, of Wordsworth, is also to be traced in it.

That Keats was by this time a diligent and critical admirer of Wordsworth we know: both of the earlier poems and of the _Excursion_, which had appeared when his pa.s.sion for poetry was already at its height in the last year of his apprentices.h.i.+p at Edmonton. There is a famous pa.s.sage in the fourth book of _The Excursion_ where Wordsworth treats of the spirit of Greek religion and imagines how some of its conceptions first took shape:--

In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched On the soft gra.s.s through half a summer's day, With music lulled his indolent repose: And, in some fit of weariness, if he, When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched, Even from the blazing chariot of the sun, A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute, And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.

The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed That timely light, to share his joyous sport: And hence, a beaming G.o.ddess with her Nymphs, Across the lawn and through the darksome grove, Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes By echo multiplied from rock or cave, Swept in the storm of chase; as moon and stars Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven, When winds are blowing strong.

Keats, we know, was familiar with this pa.s.sage, and a little later on we shall find him criticizing it in conversation with a friend. Leigh Hunt, in a review written at the time, hints that it was in his mind when he wrote the lines in '_I stood tip-toe_,' asking in what mood or under what impulse a number of the Grecian fables were first invented and giving the answers to his own questions. We may take Hunt's word for the fact, seeing that he was constantly in Keats's company at the time.

Other critics have gone farther and supposed it was from Wordsworth that Keats first learned truly to understand Greek mythology. I do not at all think so. He would never have pored so pa.s.sionately over the stories in the cla.s.sical dictionaries as a schoolboy, nor mused on them so intently in the field walks of his apprentice days by sunset and moonlight, had not some inborn instinct made the world of ancient fable and the world of natural beauty each equally living to his apprehension and each equally life-giving to the other. Wordsworth's interpretations will no doubt have appealed to him profoundly, but not as something new, only as putting eloquently and justly what he had already felt and divined by native instinct.

Again, it has been acutely pointed out by Mr Robert Bridges how some of the ideas expressed by Keats in his own way in _Sleep and Poetry_ run parallel with some of those expressed in a very different way by Wordsworth in _Tintern Abbey_, a poem which we know from other evidence to have been certainly much in Keats's mind a year and a half later.

Wordsworth in _Tintern Abbey_ defines three stages of his own emotional and imaginative development in relation to nature: first the stage of mere boisterous physical and animal pleasure: then that of intense and absorbing, but still unreflecting pa.s.sion,--

An appet.i.te, a feeling and a love That had no need of a remoter charm By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye,--

and lastly the higher, more humanized and spiritualized pa.s.sion doubly enriched by the ever-present haunting of 'the still, sad music of humanity,' and by the

sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Mr Bridges finds Wordsworth's conception of these three stages more or less accurately paralleled in various pa.s.sages of Keats's _Sleep and Poetry_. One pa.s.sage which he quotes, that in which Keats figures human life under the string of joyous images beginning, 'A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air', seems to me irrelevant, as being simply the answer of the poet's soul to certain melancholy promptings of its own. On the other hand there certainly is something that reminds us of Wordsworth's three stages in Keats's repeated indication of the ascending scale of theme and temper along which he hopes to work. And his long figurative pa.s.sage beginning--

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?

Yes, I must pa.s.s them for a n.o.bler life--

may fairly, at its outset, be compared with Wordsworth's final stage: only, as I have asked the reader to note, the procession of symbolic and enigmatic forms and actions which Keats summons up before our mind's eye, so far from having any fixed or increasing character of pensiveness or gravity, winds up with a figure of sheer animal happiness and joy of life.

Mr Bridges further notes, very justly, the striking contrast between the methods of the elder and the younger poet in these pa.s.sages, defining Wordsworth's as a subjective and Keats's as an objective method. I should be inclined to describe the same difference in another way, and to say that both by gift and purpose it was the part of Wordsworth to meditate and expound, while the part of Keats was to imagine and evoke.

Wordsworth, bringing strong powers of abstract thinking to bear on his intense and intensely realized personal experience, expounds the spiritual relations of man to nature as he conceives them, sometimes, as in _Tintern Abbey_ and many pa.s.sages of _The Prelude_ and _Excursion_, with more revealing insight and a more exalted pa.s.sion than any other poet has attained; sometimes, alas! quite otherwise, when his pa.s.sion has subsided, and he must needs to go back upon his experiences and droningly and flatly a.n.a.lyse and explain them. Keats, on the other hand, had a mind const.i.tutionally unapt for abstract thinking. When he conceives or wishes to express general ideas, his only way of doing so is by calling up, from the mult.i.tudes of concrete images with which his memory and imagination are haunted, such as strike him as fitted by their colour and significance, their quality of a.s.sociation and suggestion, to stand for and symbolize the abstractions working in his mind; and in this concrete and figurative fas.h.i.+on he will be found, by those who take the pains to follow him, to think coherently and purposefully enough. Again, Keats's sense of personal ident.i.ty was ever ready to be dissolved and carried under by the strength of his imaginative sympathies. It is not the effect of nature on his personal self that he realizes and ponders over; what he does is with ever-partic.i.p.ating joy and instantaneous instinct to go out into the doings of nature and lose himself in them. In the result he neither strives for or attains, as Mr Bridges truly points out, the sheer intellectual lucidity which Wordsworth in his most impa.s.sioned moments never loses. But as, in regard to nature, Wordsworth's is the genius of luminous exposition, so Keats's, even among the immaturities of his first volume, is the genius of living evocation.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The lines I mean are--

This canopy mark: 'tis the work of a fay; Beneath its rich shade did King Oberon languish, When lovely t.i.tania was far, far away, And cruelly left him to sorrow, and anguish.

Shakespeare's hint for his Oberon and t.i.tania was taken, as is well known, from the French prose romance _Huon of Bordeaux_ translated by Lord Berners. The plot of Wieland's celebrated poem is founded entirely on the same romance. With its high-spiced blend of the marvellous and the voluptuous, the cynically gay and the heavily moral and pathetic, it had a considerable vogue in Sotheby's translation (published 1798) and played a part in the English romantic movement of the time. There are several pa.s.sages in Keats, notably in _The Cap and Bells_, where I seem to catch a strain reminiscent of this _Oberon_, and one instance where a definite phrase from it seems to have lingered subconsciously in his memory and been turned to gold, thus:--