I have been reading all to-day the Letters of Keats, a thing which I do
at irregular intervals. Perhaps what I am going to say may sound
affected, but it is perfectly true: it is a book that always has a very
peculiar effect on me, not so much a mental effect as what, for want of
a better word, I will call a spiritual effect. It sets my soul on
flame. I feel as though I had drawn near to a spirit burning like a
fiery lamp, and that my own torpid and inert spirit had been kindled at
it. That flame will burn out again, as it has burnt out many times
before; but while the fire still leaps and glances in my heart I will
try to put down exactly what it makes me feel I believe there are few
books that give one, in the first place, more of the author's own
heart. Is there in the world any book which gives so fully the
youthful, ebullient thoughts of a man of the highest poetical genius as
this? I cannot recall any. Keats, to his brothers, his sister, and to
one or two intimate friends, allowed his long, vague letters to be an
absolutely intimate diary of what he was thinking. You see his genius
rise and flush and blaze and grow cold again before your eyes. Not to
multiply instances, take the wonderful letter written in October 1818
to Richard Woodhouse, where he sketches his own poetical temperament,
differentiating it from what he calls the "Wordsworthian Character--the
egotistically sublime." He goes on to say that he feels that he has no
identity of his own, but that he is a kind of sensitive mirror on which
external things imprint themselves for a lucid moment and are gone
again; he says that it is a torture to him to be in a room with other
people, because the identity of everyone presses on him so insistently.
He adds in a fine elation that "the faint conceptions that he has of
poems to come, bring the blood frequently into his forehead."
Such a letter as this admits one to the very penetralia of the
supremely artistic mind--but the wonder of Keats' confession is that he
saw himself as clearly and distinctly as he saw everyone else. And
further, I do not think that there is anything in literature that gives
one a sharper feeling of the reality of genius than to find the
immortal poems, such as _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, copied down in the
middle of a letter, as an unconsidered trifle which may amuse his
correspondent.
Now, in saying this, I do not for a moment say that Keats was an
entirely admirable or even a wholly lovable character--though his
tenderness, his consideration, his affectionateness constantly emerge.
He had strongly marked faults: his taste is often questionable; his
humour is frequently deplorable. He makes and repeats jokes which cause
one to writhe and blush--he was, and I say it boldly, occasionally
vulgar; but it is not an innate vulgarity, only the superficial
vulgarity which comes of living among second-rate suburban literary
people. One cannot help feeling every now and then that some of Keats'
friends were really impossible--but I am glad that _he_ did not feel
them to be so, that he was loyal and generous about them. There have
been great critics, of whom Matthew Arnold was one, who have said
frankly that the aroma of Keats' letters is intolerable. That does not
seem to me a large judgment, but it is quite an intelligible one. If
one has been brought up in a certain instinctive kind of refinement,
there are certain modes of life, certain ways of looking at things,
which grate hopelessly upon one's idea of what is refined; and perhaps
life is not long enough to try and overcome it, to try and argue
oneself out of it. I think it is quite possible that if one had only
known Keats slightly, one might have thought him a very underbred young
man, as when he showed himself suspicious and ill at ease in the
company of Shelley, because of his social standing. "A loose, slack,
ill-dressed youth," was Coleridge's impression of Keats, when he met
him in a lane near Highgate. But I honestly believe that this would
have been only an external and superficial feeling. Again, Keats as a
lover is undeniably disconcerting. His zealousness, his uncontrolled
luxuriance of passion, though partly attributable to his fevered and
despondent condition of health, are lacking in dignity. But as a
friend, Keats seems to me almost above praise; and I can imagine that
if one had been of his circle, and had won his regard, it would have
been difficult not to have idealised him. He seems to me to have
displayed that frank, affectionate brotherliness, untainted by
sentimentality, which is the essence of equal friendship; and then,
too, he gave his heart and his thoughts and his dreams to his friends
so prodigally and lavishly--not egotistically, as some have given--with
no self-absorption, no lack of sympathy, but in the spirit of the old
fisherman in Theocritus, who says to his comrade, "Come, be a sharer of
my dreams as of my fishing," and then tells his pretty vision. With no
lack of sympathy, I say, because the lavish generosity with which Keats
bestowed his money upon his friends, when he had but a small store left
and when financial difficulties were staring him in the face, is one of
the finest things about him. There is a correspondence with that
strange, selfish spendthrift Haydon, which shows the endless trouble
Keats would take to raise money for a friend when he was in worse
straits himself. Haydon treated him with insolent frankness, and hinted
that Keats was parsimonious and ungenerous; even so, Keats never lost
his temper, but described with perfect simplicity the extraordinary
difficulties he was himself involved in, with as much patience and
good-humour as though he had been himself the borrower; and the
delicious letters that he wrote, all through his own anxieties, to his
little sister Fanny, then a girl at a boarding-school, reveal, like
nothing else, the faithful and-tender spirit of the boy--for he was
hardly more than a boy. Of course there are letters, like those of Lamb
and FitzGerald, which bring one very close to the spirit of the writer;
but with this difference, that they rarely seem to lay bare their
inmost thought; but Keats had no reserve with his best friends. He put
into words the very things that we most of us are ashamed, from a fear
of being accused of pose and affectation, to reveal--his loftiest hopes
and aspirations, the wide remote prospects seen from the hills of life,
the deep ambitions, the exaltations of spirit, the raptures of art. I
do not mean that one can share these in their fulness; but Keats seems
to have experienced daily and hourly, in his best days, those august
shocks of experience and insight of which any man who loves and
worships art, however fitfully, can register a few. There is a little
picture of Keats, done, I think, after his death by Severn, which
represents him sitting in the tiny parlour of Wentworth Place, with the
window open to the orchard, where, under the plum-tree, he wrote the
_Ode to the Nightingale_. He sits on one chair, with his arm on the
back of another, his hand upon his hair, reading a volume of
Shakespeare with a smile of satisfaction. He is neatly dressed, and has
pumps with bows on his feet. That picture, like the letters, seems to
bring Keats curiously near to life; I always fancy-that Severn must
have had in his mind a charming passage in one of Keats' letters to his
sister Fanny, where he says he would like to have a house with a big
bow-window with some stained glass in it, looking out on the Lake of
Geneva, with a bowl of gold-fish by his side, where he would sit and
read all day, like a portrait of a gentleman reading. The picture is
somehow so characteristic that one feels for a moment in his presence.
Well, what do I deduce from all this? Partly that Keats was a man of
incomparable genius; partly that he was a man whom one could have loved
for himself; partly, too, that one ought not to be ashamed of one's
far-reaching thoughts, if one is fortunate enough to have them, and
that one receives and gives more good by telling them frankly and
unsuspiciously than if one keeps them to oneself for fear of being
thought a fool.
Of course the whole career of Keats opens a door to a host of uneasy
speculations. If the purpose of our Creator is to educate the world on
certain lines, if he desires by the memory and the utterance of men of
high genius to kindle the human spirit to fine and generous dreams and
to the appreciation of beauty, it is terribly hard to discern why he
should have created a spirit so fiery-sweet as that of Keats, and then
cut short his career by a series of hard strokes of misfortune and
disease just when he was finding fullest utterance. One looks round
upon the world, and one sees temperaments of all kinds--religious,
artistic, philosophical temperaments on the one hand; commercial;
commonplace, animal, selfish temperaments on the other. The percentage
of the higher spirits is few and does not seem to increase; yet the
human race owes much of its advance in purity, nobility, and kindliness
to them. We cannot be wholly mistaken in thinking that it is these rare
spirits which sustain, enliven, and enrich the world. And yet they seem
to be regarded with no special favour by the Creator; they have to
contend with insuperable obstacles; the very sensitiveness of their
spirit is a torturing disability. The selfish, worldly, hard, brutal
temperaments have almost invariably a far better time of it in the
world; yet both the exalted spirit and the brutal spirit are undeniable
facts; the lofty, unselfish, pure spirit is as real and existent as the
vile and sensual spirit. Are we all under a lamentable mistake in the
matter? Is the heart of God more on the side of what is noble and pure
and enthusiastic than it is on the side of what is base and vile; or is
it only the enthusiasts who think so? If an enlightened nation is
engaged in a war with a brutal nation, do not the patriots on both
sides pray with equal fervour and hope to God to protect what they call
the right? Do not both sides hope and believe that he will support them
and confound their opponents?
These are dark mysteries of thought; but if we argue in the cold light
of reason we dare not, it seems, think that God has any favourites in
the battle. He silences the poet, he smites the preacher down; while he
sustains in wealth and comfort and honour the man of low and selfish
ambitions. The Psalmist said that he saw the wicked flourishing like a
green bay-tree, and he was pleased to observe a little after that he
was gone and that his place was no more to be found. If he had looked a
little closer he might have seen the virtuous man oppressed, and
presently removed as indifferently as the wicked. One cannot feel the
justice or the mercy in the case of Keats. He was made to give
utterance to a certain pure and delicate music of the mind, which has
refreshed and inspired many a yearning spirit; but he was swept away
ruthlessly at the very height of his genius, and it is still more
bewildering to reflect that his life was probably sacrificed to his
devoted tendance on his consumptive brother.
Perhaps these are but fruitless reveries! but it is hard to resist
them. The only course is to hold fast to one's faith in what is pure
and beautiful, and to give thanks that such spirits as the spirit of
Keats are allowed to pass in flame across the dark heaven, calling from
horizon to horizon among the interstellar spaces; and to be sure that
the glow, the ardour, the aspirations that they impart to the soul are
real and true--an essential part of the mind of God, however small a
part they may be of that Eternal and all-embracing Will.
L
I saw this morning in the paper, half with amusement and half with
shame, a letter signed by a long list of the sort of people whom a
schoolboy would designate as "buffers," inviting the public to come
forward and subscribe for the purchase of the house where Keats died at
Rome, in order to make it a sort of Museum, sacred to him and Shelley.
I was amused, because of the strange ineptitude and clumsiness of the
proposal. In the first place, to make a shrine of pilgrimage for two of
our great English poets in _Rome_, of all places--that is fantastic
enough; but to select the house which Keats entered a dying man, and
where he spent about four months in horrible torture of both mind and
body, from which he wrote to his friend Brown, "I have an habitual
feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a
posthumous existence,"--could anything be more inappropriate? It is not
too much, in fact, to say that the house selected to enshrine his
memory is the house where he was less himself than at any other period
of his short life. If the house in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which I
believe has been lately identified with absolute certainty, could have
been purchased,--the house where, on the verge of disaster and doom,
Keats spent a brief ecstatic interval of life,--there would have been
some meaning in that; but one might almost as well purchase the inn at
Dumfries where Keats once spent a few nights as the house at Rome; in
fact, if the Dumfries inn had been purchased, it might have been made a
Keats-Burns museum, if the idea was to kill two birds with one
stone--for to associate Shelley with Keats in the house at Rome is
another piece of well-meaning stupidity. Their acquaintance was really
of the slightest, though Shelley was extraordinarily kind and generous
to Keats, offering to receive him into his own house as an invalid, and
of course regarding him with the deepest admiration, as the _Adonais_
testifies. But Keats never took very much to Shelley, and was always a
little suspicious that he was being patronised; and consequently he
never opened his heart and mind to Shelley as he did to some of his
friends. Indeed, Shelley knew very little of Keats, and supposed him to
be a very different character to what he really was. Shelley supposed
that Keats had had both his happiness and his health undermined by
severe criticism; as a matter of fact Keats had been, for a young and
unknown poet, respectfully enough criticised--and his letters show how
extremely indifferent he was to external criticism of any kind. Keats
said--and there is no reason to doubt the truth of the words, because
they are borne out by many similar sayings in his most candid and most
intimate letters--that his own perception of his poetical deficiencies
had given him far more pain than the strictures of any critic could
possibly do. The fact that the two poets both happened to die in Italy
is no reason for selecting Italy as the place in which to give them a
permanent _joint_ memorial.
But one can excuse the inappropriateness and the tactlessness of
commemorating the two poets together in Italy, because it is so
well-meant and sincere an attempt to do them honour. What one finds it
harder to do is to pardon the solemnity, the snobbishness, of the whole
proceeding. The names of those eminent people who have signed the
letter include a certain number of eminent men of letters, but they
include also the names of people like the Headmaster of Eton,
presumably because Shelley was at Eton. When one remembers how Shelley
was treated at Eton, and the sentiments which he entertained about the
place, one cannot help recalling the verse about the men who built the
sepulchres of the prophets whom their forefathers had stoned. An almost
incredible instance of this occurred at Oxford. Shelley, as is well
known, was at University College. He lived his own life there, tried
his chemical experiments, took long walks in the neighbourhood, in the
company of Hogg, for the purpose of practising pistol-shooting or
sailing paper boats. No one took the slightest trouble to befriend or
advise him, though he was one who responded eagerly to affectionate
interest. When he published his atheistical pamphlet, which was the
whim of a clever, fantastic, and isolated young man, the authorities
expelled him with scorn and fury; and now that he has become a great
national poet; they have commemorated him there by setting up a very
beautiful figure of a drowned youth in a state of nudity, though
Shelley's body was naturally found clothed when it was recovered on the
seabeach--indeed it is recorded that he had a volume of Keats and a
Sophocles in his pocket. This figure is placed in a singular shrine,
lighted by a dome, that somehow contrives to suggest a mixture between
a swimming-bath and the smoking-room of a hotel. Well, it may be said
that the least we can do is to give posthumous honour to those whom we
bullied and derided in their lifetime. A memorial placed in a seat of
learning and education is a sort of stimulus to the young men who are
trained there to go and do likewise; but do the worthy men who placed
this memorial at Oxford really wish their students to emulate the
example of Shelley? If a sensitive young man of wild ideas went up to
Oxford now, how would he be treated? Probably nowadays some virtuous
and enthusiastic young tutor would feel a certain sense of
responsibility for the young man. He would endeavour to influence him;
he would implore him to play games, to go to lectures, to attend early
chapel. He would do his best to check any symptom of originality or
free thought. He would try to make him dutiful and orthodox, and to
discourage all his fantastic theories.
Which of these eminently respectable gentlemen who have brought before
the public the necessity of commemorating two great poets are on the
lookout for talent of the kind that Keats and Shelley exhibited? How
many of them, if they came across a latter-day young poet, indolent,
unconventional, crude, fantastic, would encourage him to be true to his
ideas and to work out his own salvation on his own lines? Which of
them, if they had been confronted with our two poets in the flesh,
would have encouraged Keats to be Keats and Shelley to be Shelley?
Would they not rather have done their best to inculcate into them their
own tamer conceptions of culture and righteousness?
Of course there is something impressive in the posthumous fame of these
two men of genius collecting in their wake a crowd of adoring
respectabilities, like the people in the German story who touch the
magic spear carried by the young hero, and are unable to withdraw their
hands, but trot grotesquely behind their conqueror through street and
market-place. The melancholy part of the situation is that one feels
that these excellent people, for all their admiration, have not learnt
the real lesson of the incident in the least. They would be prepared to
browbeat and contemn originality just as vigorously as their
predecessors. They would speak of a modern Keats as a self-indulgent
dilettante; of a modern Shelley as an immoral Republican. The fact that
the two have stepped silently into Parnassus, receiving nothing but
contempt and neglect from those whose duty it was to encourage them,
does not seem to enlighten the minds of those who are ready enough to
applaud as soon as they find the world applauding. Of course teachers
are in a difficult position. There are always at school and college a
certain number of wild, fantastic, crude young men, who indulge in
unconventional speculations, who have not the genius of Keats and
Shelley in the background, but who share their distaste and disgust for
the conventionality, the tameness, the vulgarity of the world. It is
the duty, no doubt, of people who are responsible for the education of
these young men to try and turn them into respectable citizens,
Sometimes the process is successful; sometimes it is not. Often enough
these visionary, perverse people are misunderstood and shunted till
they make shipwreck of their lives. The path of originality is even
harder than the path of the transgressor, because the stakes for which
the man of genius plays are so tremendous. It is the applause of a
nation, the approbation of connoisseurs, the heart-felt gratitude of
idealists if you win; and if you fail, a contemptuous pity for gifts
wasted and misapplied. But one of the reasons why we are so
unintellectual, so conventional, so commonplace a nation is because we
do not care for ideas, we do not admire originality, we do not want to
be made to think and feel; what we admire is success and
respectability; and if a poet can so far force himself upon the
attention of timid idealists, who worship beauty in secret, as to sell
large editions of his works and make a good income, then we reward him
in our clumsy way with glory and worship. It is horrible to reflect
that if Shelley had succeeded to his father's baronetcy he would
probably have had at once an increased circulation. If Keats had been a
peer like Byron, he would have been loaded with vapid commendation. We
still cling pathetically in our seats of education to the study of
Greek, but whenever the Greek spirit appears, that insatiable appetite
for impressions of beauty, that intense desire for mental activity, we
think it rather shocking and disreputable. We are at heart commercial
Puritans all the time; we loathe experiments and originality and
independence; we think that God rewards respectability, because we
believe that material rewards--wealth, comfort, position--are the only
things worth having. We call ourselves Christians, and we crucify the
Christ-like spirit of simplicity and liberty. But let us at least make
up our minds as to what we desire, and not try to arrive at a
disgusting compromise. Our way is to persecute genius living and to
crown it dead. Can we not make a sincere attempt to recognise it when
it is among us, to look out for it, to encourage it, instead of acting
in the spirit of Pickwickian caution, and when there are two mobs, to
shout with the largest?