THE STABLE-KEEPER’S SON
There is one more poet of this period with whom we must deal, and that
is John Keats.
“And now you are going to have your hands full,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Everyone is quite sure that Keats is one poet who cannot possibly be
accused of propaganda.”
“Yes,” says her husband; “an amusing illustration of the extent to which
leisure-class criticism is able to take the guts out of art. Here is a
man whose life and personality constitute one of the greatest pieces of
radical propaganda in the history of English literature.”
“At least the issue is fairly joined,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Go to it!”
Let us first take the life and personality, and afterwards the writings.
John Keats was the son of a stable-keeper; and if you don’t know what
that meant to British snobbery there is no way I can convey it to you.
He did not attend a public school or a university; he did not learn to
walk and talk like an English gentleman. He was a simple, crude
fellow--a little chap not much over five feet high--and his social
experiences early taught him the lesson of extreme reserve; he held
himself aloof from everyone who might by any possibility spurn him
because of his low estate. Even with Shelley he would not forget that he
was dealing with the son of a baronet; everyone who surrounded Shelley
was trying to get money from him, and so Keats despised them and stayed
apart.
“He was of the skeptical, republican school,” wrote one of his boyhood
intimates. “A fault finder with everything established.” And the first
poem which he got up the courage to show was a sonnet upon the release
of Leigh Hunt, who had been sent to prison for two years for writing an
article denouncing the prince regent. This poem was published in Hunt’s
paper, the “Examiner,” and the notorious editor became the friend and
champion of this twenty-year-old poet.
Meantime Keats had been apprenticed to a surgeon, and became a dresser
in a hospital. He was called an apothecary’s apprentice; and so when he
published “Endymion,” the ruling-class critics of the day fell upon him.
The insolence of a low-bred fellow, imagining that he could write a poem
dealing with Greek mythology, the field above all others reserved to
university culture! “Back to your shop, John,” cried the “Quarterly
Review,” “back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes!”
You see, it was not a literary issue at all; it was a political and
social issue. In “Blackwood’s” appeared a ferocious article, denouncing
not merely Keats, but the whole “cockney school,” as it was called;
this including Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley and Keats. “Cockney”
is the word by which the cultured gentry of England describe the vulgar
populace of London, who drop their h’s and talk about their “dyly
pyper.” The Tory reviewers were only incidentally men of letters; they
were young country squires amusing themselves with radical-baiting, they
were “athletes, outdoor men, sportsmen, salmon-fishers, deer-stalkers.”
They gathered at Ambrose’s and drank strong Scotch whiskey, and sang a
rollicking song of which the chorus ran: “Curse the people, blast the
people, damn the lower orders.” And when they attacked the “Cockney”
poets, it was not merely because of their verses, but because of their
clothing and their faces and even their complexions. “Pimply Hazlitt”
was their phrase for the greatest essayist of their time; they alleged
that both Hazlitt and Lamb drank gin--and gin was the drink for
washerwomen.
Keats wrote “Endymion” at the age of twenty-one, and two years later he
suffered a hemorrhage, which meant the permanent breaking of his health.
He wrote his last lines at the age of twenty-four, and died early in his
twenty-fifth year. So you see he had not long to win his way against
these aristocratic rowdies. He was poor, and exquisitely sensitive; he
suffered under such brutal attacks, but he went on, and did the best
work he could, and said, very quietly: “I think I shall be among the
English poets after my death.” He realized the dignity of his calling,
and in his letters made clear that he did not take the ivory tower
attitude toward his art. “I am ambitious of doing the world some good,”
he wrote; “if I should be spared, that may be the work of future years.”
And in the course of his constant self-criticism and groping after new
methods and new powers, he traveled far from the naive sensuousness of
his early poems. His last work was a kind of prologue to “Hyperion,” in
which he discussed the poet and his function, and laid down the law that
only those can climb to the higher altar of art
to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery and will not let them rest.
How Keats felt on the subject of the class struggle was startlingly
indicated in the last days of his life. Dying of consumption, he took a
sea voyage to Italy, a journey which was a frightful strain upon him. He
landed in Naples; and Naples, as we know, is warm and beautiful, a place
for a poet to rest and dream in. But Keats would not dream; he smelt the
foul atmosphere of royalist intrigue and tyranny, and would not stay. A
friend took him to the theater, and he saw a gendarme standing on either
side of the stage, and took that for a symbol of censorship and
despotism, and would not sit out the performance!
He died in Rome, and after his death Shelley wrote “Adonais,” a eulogy
of Keats and an attack on his detractors. Little by little his fame
began to spread, and everywhere it was recognized by the Tories as part
of the class struggle of the time. Sir Walter Scott had been pained by
the personal venom of Lockhart’s attack in “Blackwood’s”; but not enough
to cause him to withdraw his subsidy from the magazine, nor to prevent
his accepting Lockhart as his son-in-law and future biographer. A young
Englishman of radical sympathies defended Keats, and a friend of
Lockhart’s intervened in the argument, and forced a duel with Keats’
defender, and killed him. That is the way literary questions were
settled in those days!
When you fight for the fame of Keats you are asserting the idea that
genius is not a privilege of rank and wealth, but that the precious fire
smoulders also among the masses of the people, so that a stable-keeper’s
son, self-taught, may become one of his country’s greatest poets. Some
critics would accept that doctrine now; but not all, it would appear.
Here is Henry A. Beers, eminent scholar and professor of English
literature in Yale University, writing in the Yale “Review,” and saying:
“There _was_ something a little underbred about Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt,
and even perhaps about Keats.”
So much for the man; now for the poetry. The first thing to be got clear
is that it is _young_ poetry; it was all written before the age of
twenty-four. An ignorant boy, brought up in uncultured surroundings,
gropes his way out into the beauty and splendor of art. He is
enraptured, quivering with delight; nature to him is a perpetual
ecstasy, and words are jewels out of which he makes ravishment for the
senses. He has a marvelous gift of language, splendor like a flood of
moonlight flung out upon a mountain lake. He is in love, first with
nature, then with a young lady of eighteen, whom he describes by the
adjectives “stylish” and “ignorant”; nevertheless, he falls under her
spell, and after he is dead the young lady says that the kindest thing
people can do for him is to forget him. So little does a great poet’s
dream of feminine loveliness understand his true character and
greatness! We may be sure that if Keats had lived to marry Fanny Brawne
he would not have been happy, and would have realized only too quickly
that love is not merely a thrill of young sensibility, a rapturous
“Dream of St. Agnes,” but a grave problem requiring for its solution
both reason and conscience.
The early poetry of Keats represents that stage of simple, instinctive,
unreflecting delight which we call by the name “Greek.” He chose Greek
themes and Greek imagery, and was never more Greek than when he tried to
be medieval. But the most significant thing about his work is the quick
maturing of it, even in those scant four years. A shadow of pain darkens
his being, the pangs of frustrated love wring cries of anguish from him;
and so we come to the second stage of the Greek spirit--the sense of
fate, of cruelty hidden at the heart of life, the terror and despair of
loveliness that knows it is doomed. Out of this mood came his greatest
poems, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode
to Melancholy.” If anyone denies that this poet is trying to teach us
something about life, if anyone thinks there is no message in this
infinite mournfulness, he has indeed a feeble apprehension.
But let us, for the sake of argument, assume with the art for art’s
sakers that Keats was an esthete, and produced “pure beauty,” unalloyed
by any preaching. Would that mean that we had found some art which is
not propaganda? Assuredly not; and those who besiege us with contentious
examples--Keats, Gautier, Whistler, Hearn, etc.--simply show that they
have not understood what we mean by the thesis that all art is
propaganda. It is that, fundamentally, as an inescapable psychological
fact; and it does not cease to be that just because the artist preaches
enjoyment instead of effort.
Use your common sense upon the proposition. When an artist takes the
trouble to embody his emotions in an art form, he does so because he
wishes to convey those emotions to other people; and insofar as he
succeeds in doing that, he will change the emotions of the other people,
and change their attitudes toward life and hence their actions. Is it
not just as much “teaching” to proclaim the supremacy of the sensuous
delights, as to proclaim the supremacy of reason, or of any system of
reasoned thought? When an artist composes a song on the theme, “Let us
eat, drink and be merry,” is he not setting forth a doctrine of life? If
not, why does he not go ahead and eat, drink and be merry? Why does he
trouble to give advice to you and me? When Keats writes, “A thing of
beauty is a joy forever,” it is perfectly plain that he is making
propaganda--and false propaganda, since standards of beauty are matters
of fashion, varying with every social change. He is making propaganda
when he declares that
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Incidentally he is revealing to us that he has done very little thinking
about either truth or beauty, but is content to use abstract words
without meaning behind them.
I have made clear, I hope, that I consider the art of Keats an
exquisitely beautiful art, fine and clean, and a perfectly proper art
for any lad to produce between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. There
is a stage of naïve trust in instinct through which youth passes,
especially poetical youth. But when this stage is continued into
maturity then it becomes something entirely different, neither fine, nor
clean, nor beautiful; it becomes stale self-indulgence, empty-minded
irresolution, dawdling decadence. All those things manifested themselves
in the later periods of Greek art, and they may be observed in our own
period of the breakdown of capitalism.
The Tory party came in the end to realize that there was nothing really
dangerous in the poetry of this unhappy boy. Wise old Tories like Sir
Walter Scott had known it from the beginning, and young Tories like
Tennyson and Rossetti proclaimed it. Keats himself was no longer alive
to offend them with his Cockney manners, so they took up his writings,
and made them a bulwark of leisure-class culture in a stage of arrested
mentality, a resource of critics who wish to keep the young from
thinking about dangerous modern questions. But I venture the opinion
that if this Cockney stable-keeper’s son had grown to manhood, he would
have taken care of his own destiny, and seen to it that dilettanti
idlers and aesthetic decadents should find no comfort in his name and
example. His letters give abundant evidence of his capable mind, and
assure us that if he had been blessed with health he would have matured
into a thinker, even as John Milton, the great companion of his later
days.
How much the lip-servers of Keats really understand him, was proven by a
peculiar incident which befell me in my own youth. Twenty-two years ago
I published “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” a passionate defense of
the right of young poets to survive; and of course I sang enraptured
praise of Keats, and made him a text for excited tirades. At that time
there was a newspaper in New York called the “Evening Telegram,” owned
by James Gordon Bennett, a dissipated rowdy who might have been a blood
brother to the Tory crowd which conducted “Blackwood’s” and the
“Quarterly” a hundred years ago. This “Evening Telegram” published a
page of book reviews every Saturday, boasting it the most widely
circulated book page in the United States. Its opinion, therefore, was
of importance to a young writer hoping to live by his pen. It reviewed
“The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” saying that we might have sympathized
with the struggles of an unfortunate poet, had he not committed the
indiscretion of giving us samples of his writings, which enabled us to
be certain that he had no idea whatever of poetry. For example, said the
editor, here was one of Arthur Stirling’s effusions. Read it:
Sit thee by the ingle, when
The sear faggot blazes bright,
Spirit of a winter’s night!--
Sit thee there, and send abroad
With a mind self-overaw’d
Fancy, high-commission’d;--send her!
She has vassals to attend her;
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heapèd Autumn’s wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth;
She will mix these pleasures up,
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it!--
Poor Arthur Stirling was supposed to be dead, so I asked a friend to
write to the editor of the “Evening Telegram” and point out to him that
he had misunderstood the book; the lines quoted were not submitted as
the work of Arthur Stirling, they happened to be the work of John Keats!
The editor published this reply with an easygoing comment; it made a
good joke, he said, but as a matter of fact he was justified in his
criticism, because the lines belonged to the very early work of Keats,
which was practically without poetic merit. My friend wrote again,
expressing surprise that the editor should make such a statement; for
this poem, entitled “Fancy,” belonged to the last two years of Keats’
life, the wonderful years which produced all his greatest writings.
Palgrave, whose authority none would dispute, had included it in the
“Golden Treasury,” which contained only thirteen poems by Keats. The
editor of the “Evening Telegram” was unable to find space for that
letter!