THE LETTERS OF KEATS

There is no lack of good criticism on the poetry of Keats. It has been

discussed by the leading poets of three generations or semi-generations;

by Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much more fully, by Mr.

Bridges. Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_ and Mr. Colvin's biography

both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the poems. And (to go no

further) they have lately been edited by Mr. de Selincourt in a volume

invaluable to students of Keats, and reflecting honour not only on its

author but on the Oxford School of English, to the strength of which he

has contributed so much. My principal object is to consider Keats's

attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas

set forth in previous lectures on Shelley's views and on the age of

Wordsworth. But I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to

prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to any reader of the

poems who may need it, to study the letters of Keats. If I may judge

from my experience, such readers are still far too numerous; and I am

sure that no one already familiar with the letters will be sorry to

listen to quotations from them.[1]

The best of Keats's poems, of course, can be fully appreciated without

extraneous help; but the letters throw light on all, and they are almost

necessary to the understanding of _Endymion_ and of some of the earlier

or contemporaneous pieces. They clearly reveal those changes in his mind

and temper which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever of the

fictions once current of a puny Keats who was 'snuffed out by an

article,' a sensual Keats who found his ideal in claret and 'slippery

blisses,' and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his country and

his fellow-creatures. Written in his last four years by a man who died

at twenty-five, they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity and his

faults, but they disclose a nature and character which command on the

whole not less respect than affection, and they show not a little of

that general intellectual power which rarely fails to accompany poetic

genius.

Of Keats's character, as the letters manifest it, Arnold has written.

While speaking plainly and decidedly of the weakness visible in those to

Miss Brawne, Arnold brought together the evidence which proves that

Keats 'had flint and iron in him,' 'had virtue in the true and large

sense of the word.' And he selected passages, too, which illustrate the

'admirable wisdom and temper' and the 'strength and clearness of

judgment' shown by Keats, alike in matters of friendship and in his

criticisms of his own productions, of the public, and of the literary

circles,--the 'jabberers about pictures and books,' as Keats in a bitter

mood once called them. We may notice, in addition, two characteristics.

In spite of occasional despondency, and of feelings of awe at the

magnitude of his ambition, Keats, it is tolerably plain from these

letters, had a clear and habitual consciousness of his genius. He never

dreamed of being a minor poet. He knew that he was a poet; sometimes he

hoped to be a great one. I remember no sign that he felt himself the

inferior of any living poet except Wordsworth. How he thought of Byron,

whom in boyhood he had admired, is obvious. When Shelley wrote, hinting

a criticism, but referring to himself as excelled by Keats in genius, he

returned the criticism without the compliment. His few references to

Coleridge are critical, and his amusing description of Coleridge's talk

is not more reverential than Carlyle's. Something, indeed, of the native

pugnacity which his friends ascribe to him seems to show itself in his

allusions to contemporaries, including even Wordsworth. Yet with all

this, and with all his pride and his desire of fame, no letters extant

breathe a more simple and natural modesty than these; and from end to

end they exhibit hardly a trace, if any trace, either of the irritable

vanity attributed to poets or of the sublime egotism of Milton and

Wordsworth. He was of Shakespeare's tribe.

The other trait that I wish to refer to appears in a particular series

of letters--sometimes mere notes--scattered through the collection. They

are addressed to Keats's school-girl sister Fanny, who was eight years

younger than he, and who died in the same year as Browning.[2] Keats, as

we see him in 1817 and 1818, in the first half of Mr. Colvin's

collection, was absorbed by an enthusiasm and ambition which his sister

was too young to understand. During his last two years he was, besides,

passionately and miserably in love, and, latterly, ill and threatened

with death. His soul was full of bitterness. He shrank into himself,

avoided society, and rarely sought even intimate friends. Yet, until he

left England, he never ceased to visit his sister when he could; and,

when he could not, he continued to write letters to her, full of amusing

nonsense, full of brotherly care for her, and of excellent advice

offered as by an equal who happened to be her senior; letters quite free

from thoughts of himself, and from the forced gaiety and the resentment

against fate which in parts of his later correspondence with others

betray his suffering. These letters to his sister are, in one sense, the

least remarkable in the collection, yet it would lose much by their

omission. They tell us next to nothing of his genius, but as we come

upon them the light in our picture of him, if it had grown for a moment

hard or troubled, becomes once more soft and bright.

To turn (with apologies for the distinction) from the character to the

mind of Keats, if the reader has formed a notion of him as a youth with

a genius for poetry and an exclusive interest in poetry, but otherwise

not intellectually remarkable, this error will soon be dispelled by the

letters. With Keats, no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were

passions more glowing than we have reason to attribute to his

contemporaries at the same time of life.[3] The letters remind us also

that, compared with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual

training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the

University wits. They show, too--the earlier far more than the later--in

certain literary mannerisms the unwholesome influence of Leigh Hunt and

his circle. But everywhere we feel in them the presence of an

intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open,

daring, rich, and strong; exceedingly poetic and romantic, yet

observant, acute, humorous, and sensible; intense without narrowness,

and quite as various both in its interests and its capacities as the

mind of Wordsworth or of Shelley. Fundamentally, and in spite of

abundant high spirits and a love of nonsense, the mind of Keats was very

serious and thoughtful. It was original, and not more imitative than an

original mind should be in youth; an intelligence which now startles by

flashes of sudden beauty, and now is seen struggling with new and deep

thoughts, which labour into shape, with scanty aid from theories, out of

personal experience. In quality--and I speak of nothing else--the mind

of Shakespeare at three and twenty may not have been very different.

Short extracts can give but little idea of all this; but they may at

least illustrate the variety of Keats's mind, and the passages I am

about to read have been chosen mainly with this intention, and not

because the majority are among the most striking that might be found.

The earliest belong to the September of 1817, and I take them partly for

their local interest. Keats spent most of that month here in Oxford,

staying in the Magdalen Hall of those days with his friend Bailey, a man

whose gentle and disinterested character he warmly admired. 'We lead,'

he writes to his sister, 'very industrious lives--he in general studies,

and I in proceeding at a pretty good pace with a Poem which I hope you

will see early in the next year.' It was _Endymion_: he wrote, it seems,

the whole of the Third Book in Bailey's rooms. Unluckily the hero in

that Book is wandering at the bottom of the sea; but even in those

regions, as Keats imagined them, a diligent student may perhaps find

some traces of Oxford. In the letters we hear of towers and quadrangles,

cloisters and groves; of the deer in Magdalen Park; and how

The mouldering arch,

Shaded o'er by a larch,

Lives next door to Wilson the hosier

(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of the clear

streams--'more clear streams than ever I saw together.' 'I take a walk

by the side of one of them every evening.' 'For these last five or six

days,' he writes to Reynolds, 'we have had regularly a boat on the Isis,

and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your

eyelashes. We sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become

naturalised river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we

have christened "Reynolds's Cove," in which we have read Wordsworth and

talked as may be.' Of those talks over Wordsworth with the grave

religious Bailey came perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the

best-known of all the letters (it is too well known to quote), thoughts

which take their origin from the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_.[4]

About a year after this, Keats went with his friend Brown on a

walking-tour to the Highlands; and I will quote two passages from the

letters written during this tour, for the sake of the contrast they

exhibit between the two strains in Keats's mind. The first is the later.

The letter is dated 'Cairn-something July 17th':

Steam-boats on Loch Lomond, and Barouches on its sides, take a little

from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I. The banks of

the Clyde are extremely beautiful--the north end of Loch Lomond grand

in excess--the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part is

precious good--the evening was beautiful--nothing could surpass our

fortune in the weather. Yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet

of chivalry Barges with trumpets and banners, just to die away before

me into that blue place among the mountains.[5]

Keats all over! Yes; but so is this, which was written a fortnight

earlier from Carlisle:

After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in

Cumberland, where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-school

holden at the Tun. It was indeed 'no new cotillion fresh from

France.' No, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and

whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go'd it, and twirl'd it and

whirl'd it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like

mad. The difference between our country dances and these Scottish

figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o' tea and

beating up a batter-pudding. I was extremely gratified to think that,

if I had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which

I could not possibly enter. I hope I shall not return without having

got the Highland fling. There was as fine a row of boys and girls as

you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never

felt so near the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means

a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.[6]

There is little enough here of the young poet who believes himself to

care for nothing but 'Art'; and as little of the theoretic

cosmopolitanism of some of Keats's friends.

Some three months later we find Keats writing from London to his brother

and his sister-in-law in America; and he tells them of a young lady from

India whom he has just met:

She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich

Eastern look. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the

same as the beauty of a leopardess.... You will by this time think I

am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am

not--she kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I

speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can

feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very

'yes' and 'no' of whose lips is to me a banquet.... I believe, though,

she has faults--the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet

she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way: for there are two

distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,--the worldly,

theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and

ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian,

hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop

Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the

conquering feelings.[7]

I do not read this passage merely for its biographical interest, but a

word may be ventured on that. The lady was not Miss Brawne; but less

than a month later, on meeting Miss Brawne, he immediately became her

slave. When we observe the fact, and consider how very unlike the words

I have quoted are to anything in Keats's previous letters, we can hardly

help suspecting that he was at this time in a peculiar condition and

ripe for his fate. Then we remember that he had lately returned from his

Scotch tour, which was broken off because the Inverness doctor used the

most menacing language about the state of his throat; and further, that

he was now, in the late autumn, nursing his brother Tom, who died of

consumption before the year was out. And an idea suggests itself which,

if exceedingly prosaic, has yet some comfort in it. How often have

readers of Keats's life cried out that, if only he had never met Miss

Brawne, he might have lived and prospered! Does it not seem at least as

probable that, if Miss Brawne had never existed, what happened would

still have happened, and even that the fever of passion which helped to

destroy him was itself a token of incipient disease?

I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a passage on politics.

The friends of Keats were, for the most part, advanced liberals. His own

sympathies went that way. A number of lines in the poems of his boyhood

show this, and so do many remarks in the letters. And his sympathies

were not mere sentiments. 'I hope sincerely,' he wrote in September,

1819, 'I shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the

question before I die'; and a few days later, when he tells Brown of his

wish to act instead of dreaming, and to work for his livelihood,

composing deliberate poems only when he can afford to, he says that he

will write as a journalist for whoever will pay him, but he makes it a

condition that he is to write 'on the liberal side of the question.' It

is a mistake to suppose that he had no political interests. But he

cared nothing for the mere quarrels of Whig and Tory; a 'Radical' was

for him the type of an 'obstinate and heady' man; and the perfectibility

theories of friends like Shelley and Dilke slipped from his mind like

water from a duck's back. We have seen the concrete shape his patriotism

took. He always saw ideas embodied, and was 'convinced that small causes

make great alterations.' I could easily find passages more

characteristic than the following; but it is short, it shows that Keats

thought for himself, and it has a curious interest just now (1905):[8]

Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause of

Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of

Liberty than anyone else could have done. Not that the divine right

gentlemen have done, or intend to do, any good. No, they have taken a

lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done,

without any of the good. The worst thing he has done is that he has

taught them how to organise their monstrous armies. The Emperor

Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian,

creating two Czars beside himself, and continuing the supreme monarch

of the whole. Should he do this, and they for a series of years keep

peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to

China. I think it a very likely thing that China itself may fall;

Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its

horns against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France.

Still aiming chiefly to show the variety there is in these letters, I

may take next one or two passages which have an interest also from their

bearing on Keats's poems. Here we have, for example, the unmistakable

origin of the _Ode on Indolence_:

This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless.

I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_. My

passions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven

and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation,

about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl

and the breath of lilies, I should call it languor, but as I am* I

must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the

brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a

happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement, and pain no

unbearable power.[9] Neither Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any

alertness of countenance as they pass by me. They seem rather like

figures on a Greek vase--a man and two women whom no one but myself

could distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happiness,

and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the

mind.[10]

* Especially as I have a black eye.

'This is the only happiness'--the sentence will surprise no one who has

even dipped into Keats's letters. It expresses a settled conviction.

Happiness, he feels, belongs only to childhood and early youth. A young

man thinks he can keep it, but a little experience shows him he must do

without it. The mere growth of the mind, if nothing else, is fatal to

it. To think is to be full of sorrow, because it is to realise the

sorrow of the world and to feel the burden of the mystery. 'Health and

spirits,' he says, 'can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man.'[11]

Shelley might be speaking. 'To see an entirely disinterested girl quite

happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It

depends upon a thousand circumstances. On my word it is extraordinary.

Women must want Imagination, and they may thank God for it: and so may

we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of

crime.'[12] These passages, taken alone, even when we observe his

qualifications, would give a false impression of Keats; but they supply

a curious commentary on the legend of the sensuous Keats. We may connect

with them his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of such

'dreaming' poets as himself) to men of action.

In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several

recently written poems, and among them the ballad _La Belle Dame Sans

Merci_. He copies it without a word of introduction. He could not say,

'Here is the record of my love and my despair,' for on this one subject

he never opened his heart to his brother. But when he has finished the

copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza (afterwards altered):

She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she wept and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

'Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because I wish to restrain the

headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said "score"

without hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the Imagination, as the

Critics say, with Judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that

both eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I think two apiece

quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three

and a half apiece--a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my

side.' This is not very like the comments of Wordsworth on his best

poems, but I dare say the author of _Hamlet_ made such jests about it.

Is it not strange, let me add, to think that Keats and his friends were

probably unconscious of the extraordinary merit of this poem? It was not

published with the Odes in the volume of 1820.

I will quote, finally, three passages to illustrate in different ways

Keats's insight into human nature. It appears, on the whole, more

decidedly in the letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe

that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope of ultimate success

in dramatic poetry was well founded. The first is a piece of 'nonsense,'

rattled off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents, and

worth quoting only for its last sentence. He has been describing 'three

witty people, all distinct in their excellence'; and he goes on:

I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his

excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a

negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see

him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first, I forbear

the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel,

the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.

C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often we have met and

still shall meet him! Shakespeare, I think, would gladly have fathered

the phrase that describes him, and the words that follow are not much

out of the tune of Falstaff: 'C, they say, is not his mother's true

child, but she bought him of the man who cries, Young lambs to

sell.'[13]

In the second passage Keats is describing one of his friends:

Dilke is a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he

has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening

one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the

mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. The genus

is not scarce in population: all the stubborn arguers you meet are of

the same brood. They never begin on a subject they have not

pre-resolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you, and if you

turn the point, still they think you wrong. Dilke will never come at a

truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a

Godwin Methodist.[14]

These lines illustrate the instinctive feeling of Keats that it is

essential to the growth of the poetic mind to preserve its natural

receptiveness and to welcome all the influences that stream in upon it.

They illustrate also his dislike of the fixed theories held and preached

by some members of his circle. We shall have to consider later the

meaning of his occasional outbreaks against 'thought,' 'knowledge,'

'philosophy.' It is important not to be misled by them, and not to

forget the frequent expressions of his feeling that what he lacks and

must strive to gain is this very 'knowledge' and 'philosophy.' Here I

will only observe that his polemics against them, though coloured by his

temperament, coincide to a large extent with Wordsworth's dislike of 'a

reasoning self-sufficing thing,' his depreciation of mere

book-knowledge, and his praise of a wise passiveness. And, further, what

he objects to here is not the pursuit of truth, it is the 'Methodism,'

the stubborn argument, and the habit of bringing to the argument and

maintaining throughout it a ready-made theory. He offers his own

thoughts and speculations freely enough to Bailey and to his

brother--men willing to probe with him any serious idea--but not to

Dilke. It is clear that he neither liked nor rated high the confident

assertions and negations of Shelley and his other Godwinian friends and

acquaintances. Probably from his ignorance of theories he felt at a

disadvantage in talking with them. But he did not dismiss their theories

as something of no interest to a poet. He thought about them, convinced

himself that they were fundamentally unsound, and himself philosophises

in criticising them. The following passage, from a letter to George and

Georgiana Keats, is the nearest approach to be found in his writings to

a theory of the world, a theology as he jestingly calls it; and although

it is long, I make no apology for quoting it. He has been reading, he

says, Robertson's _History of America_ and Voltaire's _Siecle de Louis

XIV._, and he observes that, though the two civilisations described are

so different, the case of the great body of the people is equally

lamentable in both. And he goes on thus:

The whole appears to resolve into this--that man is originally a poor

forked creature, subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the

forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other.

If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts, at

each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for him a fresh set of

annoyances--he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars

above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us

is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom-appearing

Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such happiness

carried to an extreme, but what must it end in? Death--and who could

in such a case bear with death? The whole troubles of life, which are

now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for

the last days of a being who, instead of hailing its approach, would

leave this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all

believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will

not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to

itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in

winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight

of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa--whirlpools

and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may

arrive at earthly happiness. The point at which man may arrive is as

far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For

instance, suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful

morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It

cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native

to the world as itself. No more can man be happy in spite [?], the

worldly elements will prey upon his nature.

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and

superstitious is 'a vale of tears,' from which we are to be redeemed

by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven. What

a little circumscribed straitened notion! Call the world if you please

'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world

(I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it

to be immortal, which I will here take for granted for the purpose of

showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say

'_Soul-making_'--Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence.[15] There

may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they

are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is

personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know

and they see and they are pure; in short they are God. How then are

souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have

identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each

one's individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like

this? This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a

grander system of salvation than the Christian religion--or rather it

is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand

materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These

three materials are the _Intelligence_, the _human heart_ (as

distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the World or elemental

space suited for the proper action of _Mind_ and _Heart_ on each other

for the purpose of forming the _Soul_ or _Intelligence destined to

possess the sense of Identity_. I can scarcely express what I but

dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it. That you may judge the

more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will

call the _world_ a School instituted for the purpose of teaching

little children to read. I will call the _human heart_ the horn-book

read in that School. And I will call the _Child able to read_, the

_Soul_ made from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how

necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence

and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a

thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, it is the

Mind's Bible, it is the mind's experience, it is the text from which

the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives

of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus does God make

individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the sparks of his own

essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation

which does not offend our reason and humanity.[16]

Surely, when Keats's education is considered, this, with all its

crudity, is not a little remarkable. It would not be easy to find

anything written at the same age by another poet of the time which shows

more openness of mind, more knowledge of human nature, or more original

power of thought.

About a fortnight after Keats wrote that description of A, B, and C, he

received what he recognised at once for his death-warrant. He had yet

fourteen months to endure, but at this point the development of his mind

was arrested. During the three preceding years it had been very rapid,

and is easy to trace; and it is all the more interesting because, in

spite of its continuity, we are aware of a decided difference between

the Keats of the earlier letters and the Keats of the later. The tour in

Scotland in the summer of 1818 may be taken with sufficient accuracy as

a dividing-line. The earlier Keats is the youth who had written the

_Sonnet on first_ _looking into Chapman's Homer_, and _Sleep and

Poetry_, and who was writing _Endymion_. He is thoughtful, often grave,

sometimes despondent; but he is full of the enthusiasm of beauty, and of

the joy and fear, the hope and the awe, that accompanied the sense of

poetic power. He is the poet who looked, we are told, as though he had

been gazing on some glorious sight; whose eyes shone and whose face

worked with pleasure as he walked in the fields about Hampstead; who is

described watching with rapture the billowing of the wind through the

trees and over meadow-grasses and corn, and looking sometimes like a

young eagle and sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the

forest depths. This is the Keats who wrote 'A thing of beauty is a joy

for ever'; who found 'the Religion of Joy' in the monuments of the Greek

spirit, in sculpture and vases, and mere translations and mere handbooks

of mythology; who never ceased, he said, to wonder at all that incarnate

delight, and would point out to Severn how essentially modern, how

imperishable, the Greek spirit is--a joy for ever.

Yet, as we have seen already, he was aware, and we find him becoming

more and more aware, that joy is not the only word. He had not read for

nothing Wordsworth's great Ode, and _Tintern Abbey_, and the

_Excursion_. We know it from _Endymion_, and the letter about the

'burden of the mystery' was written before the tour in Scotland. But

after this we feel a more decided change, doubtless hastened by outward

events. The Blackwood and Quarterly reviews of _Endymion_

appeared--reviews not less inexcusable because we understand their

origin. Then came his brother's death. A few weeks later he met Miss

Brawne. Henceforth his youth has vanished. There are traces of morbid

feeling in the change, painful traces; but they are connected, I think,

solely with his passion. His brother's death deepened his sympathies.

The reviews, so long as health remained to him, did him nothing but

good. He rated them at their true value, but they gave him a salutary

shock. They quickened his perception, already growing keen, of the

weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt's verse and his own. Through them he

saw a false but useful picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into

self-worship by foolish friends, and posturing as a man of genius. He

kept his faith in his genius, but he felt that he must prove it. He

became impatient of dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and

rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of fierceness. He turns

against his old self harshly. Some of his friends, he says, think he has

lost his old poetic ardour, and perhaps they are right. He speaks

slightingly of wonders, even of scenery: the human heart is something

finer,--not its dreams, but its actions and its anguish. His gaze is as

intent as ever,--more intent; but the glory he would see walks in a

fiery furnace, and to see it he must think and learn. He is young, he

says, writing at random, straining his eyes at particles of light in the

midst of a great darkness. He knows at times the 'agony' of ignorance.

In one year he writes six or seven of the best poems in the language,

but he is little satisfied. 'Thus far,' he says, 'I have a consciousness

of having been pretty dull and heavy, both in subject and phrase.' Two

months later he ends a note to Haydon with the words, 'I am afraid I

shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone.' And so it was.

It is important to remember this change in Keats in considering his

ideas about poetry; but we have first to look at them in a more general

way. Many of the most interesting occur in detached remarks or

aphorisms, and these I must pass by. The others I intended at first to

deal with in connection with Shelley's view of poetry; and, although

that plan proved to be too large for a single lecture, I do not wish

altogether to abandon it, because in the extracts which I have been

reading the difference between the minds of the two poets has already

appeared, and because it re-appears both in their poetic practice and in

their opinions about their art. Indeed, with so much difference, it

might be thought unlikely that these opinions would show also a marked

resemblance. For Keats, it may be said, was of all the great poets then

alive the one least affected by the spirit of the time, or by that

'revolutionary' atmosphere of which I spoke in a previous lecture. He

did not concern himself, we may be told, with the progress of humanity,

or with Manchester Massacres or risings in Naples. He cared nothing for

theories, abstractions, or ideals. He worshipped Beauty, not Liberty;

and the beauty he worshipped was not 'intellectual,' but visible,

audible, tangible. 'O for a life of sensations,' he cried, 'rather than

of thoughts.' He was an artist, intent upon fashioning his material

until the outward sensible form is perfectly expressive and delightful.

In all this he was at the opposite pole to Shelley; and he himself felt

it. He refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might keep his own

unfettered scope; and he never speaks of Shelley cordially. He told him,

too, that he might be more of an artist and load every rift of his

subject with ore; and that, while many people regard the purpose of a

work as the God, and the poetry as the Mammon, an artist must serve

Mammon. And his practice, like his opinions, proves that, both in his

strength and his limitations, he belongs to quite a different type.

In such a plea there would certainly be much truth; and yet it is not

_the_ truth, for it ignores other truths which must somehow be combined

with it. There are great differences between the two poets, but then in

Keats himself there are contending strains. Along with the differences,

too, we find very close affinities. And these affinities with Shelley

also show that Keats was deeply influenced by the spirit of his time.

Let me illustrate these statements.

The poet who cried, 'O for a life of sensations,' was consoled, as his

life withered away, by the remembrance that he 'had loved the principle

of beauty in all things.' And this is not a chance expression; it

repeats, for instance, a phrase used two years before, 'the mighty

abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things.' If Shelley had used this

language, it would be taken to prove his love of abstractions. How does

it differ from the language of the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_?[17]

Again, we noticed in a previous lecture the likeness between _Alastor_

and _Endymion_, each the first poem of any length in which the writer's

genius decisively declared itself. Both tell the story of a young poet;

of a dream in which his ideal appears in human form, and he knows the

rapture of union with it; of the passion thus enkindled, and the search

for its complete satisfaction. We may prefer to read _Endymion_ simply

as we read _Isabella_; but the question here is not of our preferences.

If we examine the poem without regard to them, we shall be unable to

doubt that to some extent the story symbolises or allegorises this

pursuit of the principle of beauty by the poetic soul. This is one of

the causes of its failure as a narrative. Keats had not in himself the

experience required by parts of his design, and hence in them he had to

write from mere imagination. And the poem, besides, shows in a flagrant

degree the defect felt here and there in _Prometheus Unbound_. If we

wish to read it as the author meant it, we must ask for the significance

of the figures, events, and actions. Yet it is clear that not all of

them are intended to have this further significance, and we are

perplexed by the question where, and how far, we are to look for it.[18]

Take, again, some of the most famous of the lyrical poems. Is it true

that Keats was untroubled by that sense of contrast between ideal and

real which haunted Shelley and was so characteristic of the time? So far

is this from being the case that a critic might more plausibly object to

his monotonous insistence on that contrast. Probably the best-known

lyrics of the two poets are the stanzas _To a Skylark_ and the _Ode to a

Nightingale_. Well, if we summarise prosaically the subject of the one

poem we have summarised that of the other. 'Our human life is all unrest

and sorrow, an oscillation between longing and satiety, a looking before

and after. We are aware of a perfection that we cannot attain, and that

leaves us dissatisfied by everything attainable. And we die, and do not

understand death. But the bird is beyond this division and dissonance;

it attains the ideal;

Das Unzulaengliche,

Hier wird's Ereigniss.'

This is the burden of both poems. In style, metre, tone, atmosphere,

they are far apart; the 'idea' is identical. And what else is the idea

of the _Ode_ _on a Grecian Urn_, where a moment, arrested in its

ideality by art and made eternal, is opposed to the change and decay of

reality? And what else is the idea of the playful lines _To

Fancy_,--Fancy who brings together the joys which in life are parted by

distances of time and place, and who holds in sure possession what life

wins only to lose? Even a poem so pictorial and narrative and free from

symbolism as the _The Eve of St. Agnes_ rests on the same feeling. The

contrast, so exquisitely imagined and conveyed, between the cold, the

storm, the old age, the empty pleasure and noisy enmity of the world

outside Madeline's chamber, and the glow, the hush, the rich and dreamy

bliss within it, is in effect the contrast which inspired the _Ode to a

Nightingale_.

It would be easy to pursue this subject. It would be easy, too, to show

that Keats was far from indifferent to the 'progress of humanity.' He

conceived it in his own way, but it is as much the theme of _Hyperion_

as of _Prometheus Unbound_. We are concerned however here not with the

interpretation of his poems, but with his view of poetry, and especially

with certain real or apparent inconsistencies in it. For in the letters

he now praises 'sensation' and decries thought or knowledge, and now

cries out for 'knowledge' as his greatest need; in one place declares

that an artist must have self-concentration, perhaps selfishness, and in

others insists that what he desires is to be of use to his fellow-men.

We shall gain light on these matters and on his relation to Shelley if I

try to reduce his general view to a precise and prosaic form.

That which the poet seeks is Beauty. Beauty is a 'principle'; it is One.

All things beautiful manifest it, and so far therefore are one and the

same. This idea of the unity of all beauty comes out in many crucial

passages in the poems and letters. I take a single example. The goddess

Cynthia in _Endymion_ is the Principle of Beauty. In this story she is

also identified with the Moon. Accordingly the hero, gazing at the moon,

declares that in all that he ever loved he loved _her_:

thou wast the deep glen--

Thou wast the mountain-top--the sage's pen--

The poet's harp--the voice of friends--the sun;

Thou wast the river--thou wast glory won;

Thou wast my clarion's blast--thou wast my steed--

My goblet full of wine--my topmost deed:--

Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!

O what a wild and harmonised tune

My spirit struck from all the beautiful!

When he says this he does not yet understand that the Moon and his

strange visitant are one; he thinks they are rivals. So later, when he

loves the Indian maid, and is in despair because he fancies himself

therefore false to his goddess, he is in error; for she is only his

goddess veiled, the shaded half of the moon.

Still the mountain-top and the voice of friends differ. Indeed, the one

Beauty is infinitely various. But its manifestations, for Keats, tend to

fall into two main classes. On the one hand there is the kind of beauty

that comes easily and is all sweetness and pleasure. In receiving it we

seem to suppress nothing in our nature. Though it is not merely

sensuous, for the Principle of Beauty is in it, it speaks to sense and

delights us. It is 'luxury.' But the other kind is won through thought,

and also through pain. And this second and more difficult kind is also

the higher, the fuller, the nearer to the Principle. That it is won

through pain is doubly true. First, because the poet cannot reach it

unless he consents to suffer painful sympathies, which disturb his

enjoyment of the simpler and sweeter beauty, and may even seem to lead

him away from beauty altogether. Thus Endymion can attain union with his

goddess only by leaving the green hill-sides where he met her first, and

by wandering unhappily in cold moonless regions inside the earth and

under the sea. Here he feels for the woes of other lovers, and to help

them undertakes tasks which seem to interrupt his search for Cynthia.

Returning to earth he becomes enamoured of a maiden devoted to sorrow,

and gains his goddess just when he thinks he has resigned her. The

highest beauty, then, is reached through the poet's pain; and, in the

second place, it has pain in itself, or at least appears in objects that

are painful. In his early poem _Sleep and Poetry_ Keats asks himself the

question,

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?

And he answers:

Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,

Where I may find the agonies, the strife

Of human hearts.

He felt himself as yet unequal to this task. He never became equal to

it, but the idea was realised to some extent in _Isabella_ and _Lamia_

and _Hyperion_. The first two of these are tales of passion, 'agony,'

and death. The third, obviously, is on one side a story of 'strife.'

Such, in its bare outline, is Keats's habitual view of poetry. What,

then, are the points where, in spite of its evident resemblance to

Shelley's, we feel a marked difference? The most important seem to be

two. In the first place Keats lays far the heavier stress on the idea

that beauty is manifested in suffering and conflict. The idea itself is

to be found in Shelley, but (as we saw in another lecture) it is not

congenial to him; it appears almost incidentally and is stated

half-heartedly; and of the further idea that beauty is not only

manifested in this sphere, but is there manifested most fully, we find,

I believe, no trace. And this was inevitable; for the whole tendency of

Shelley's mind was to regard suffering and conflict with mere distress

and horror as something senseless and purely evil, and to look on the

world as naturally a paradise entirely free from them, but ruined by an

inexplicable failure on the part of man. To this world of woe his

Intellectual Beauty does not really belong; it appears there only in

flashes; its true home is a place where no contradictions, not even

reconciled contradictions, exist. The idealism of Keats is much more

concrete. He has no belief either in this natural paradise or in

'Godwinian perfectibility.' Pain and conflict have a meaning to him.

Without them souls could not be made; and the business of the world, he

conjectures, is the making of souls. They are not therefore simply

obstacles to the ideal. On the contrary, in this world it manifests

itself most fully in and through them. For 'scenery is fine, but human

nature is finer';[19] and the passions and actions of man are finer than

his enjoyments and dreams. In the same way, the conflict in _Hyperion_

is not one between light and darkness, the ideal and mere might, as in

_Prometheus Unbound_. The Titans must yield to the Olympians because, in

a word, they are less beautiful, and

'tis the eternal law

That first in beauty should be first in might.

But the Titans, though less beautiful, _are_ beautiful; it is one and

the same 'principle' that manifests itself in them and more fully in

their victors. Their defeat therefore is not, in the end, defeat, but

the completion of their own being. This, it seems probable, the hero in

_Hyperion_ would have come to recognise, so that the poem, at least so

far as he is concerned, would have ended with a reconciliation born of

strife.

Man is 'finer,' Keats says, and the Titans must submit because they are

less 'beautiful.' The second point of difference between him and

Shelley lies in this emphasis on beauty. The ideal with Shelley has many

names, and one of them is beauty, but we hardly feel it to be the name

nearest to his heart. The spirit of his worship is rather

that sustaining Love

Which, through the web of being blindly wove

By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst;

and 'love' is a word less distinctively aesthetic, if the term must be

used, than 'beauty.' But the ideal for Keats is always and emphatically

beauty or the 'principle of beauty.' When he sets the agonies and

strifes of human hearts above a painless or luxurious loveliness, it is

because they are the more beautiful. He would not have said that the

_Midsummer Night's Dream_ is superior to _King Lear_ in beauty, but

inferior to it in some other respect; it is inferior in _beauty_ to

_King Lear_. Let art only be 'intense' enough, let the poet only look

hard enough and feel with force enough, so that the pain in his object

is seen truly as the vesture of great passion and action, and all

'disagreeables' will 'evaporate,' and nothing will remain but

beauty.[20] Hence, though well aware how little he has as yet of the

great poet's power of vision, he is still content when he can feel that

a poem of his has intensity, has (as he says of _Lamia_) 'that sort of

fire in it that must take hold of people some way.'[21] And an earlier

and inferior poem, _Isabella_, may show his mind. The mere subject is

exceedingly painful, and Keats by no means suppresses the painful

incidents and details; but the poem can hardly be called painful at all;

for the final impression is that of beauty, almost as decidedly so as

the final impression left by the blissful story of _St. Agnes' Eve_. And

this is most characteristic of Keats. If the word beauty is used in his

sense, and not in the common contracted sense, we may truly say that he

was, and must have remained, more than any other poet of his time, a

worshipper of Beauty.

When, then--to come to his apparent inconsistencies--he exalts sensation

and decries thought or knowledge, what he is crying out for is beauty.

The word 'sensation,' as a comparison of passages would readily show,

has not in his letters its usual meaning. It stands for _poetic_

sensation, and, indeed, for much more. It is, to speak broadly, a name

for _all_ poetic or imaginative experience; and the contents of the

speech of Oceanus are, in kind, just as much 'sensation' as the eating

of nectarines (which may well be poetic to the poetic). This is, I

repeat, to speak broadly. For it is true that sometimes in the earlier

letters we find Keats false to his better mind. Knowing that the more

difficult beauty is the fuller, he is yet, to our great advantage, so

entranced by the delight or glory of the easier, that he rebels against

everything that would disturb its magic or trouble his 'exquisite sense

of the luxurious.' And then he is tempted to see in thought only that

vexatious questioning that 'spoils the singing of the nightingale,' and

to forget that it is necessary to the fuller and more difficult kind of

beauty. But these moods are occasional. He knew that there was something

wilful and weak about them; and they gradually disappear. On the whole,

the gist of his attitude to 'thought' or 'philosophy' may be stated as

follows.

He was far from being indifferent to truth, or from considering it

unimportant for poetry. In an early letter, when he criticises a poem of

Wordsworth's, he ventures to say that 'if Wordsworth had thought a

little deeper at that moment he would not have written it,' and that 'it

is a kind of sketchy intellectual landscape, not a search after

truth.'[22] He writes of a passage in _Endymion_: 'The whole thing

must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a

thing almost of mere words, but I assure you that, when I wrote it, it

was the regular stepping of Imagination towards a truth.'[23] And many

passages show his conviction that for his progress towards this truth

'thought,' 'knowledge,' 'philosophy,' are indispensable;[24] that he

must submit to the toil and the solitude that they involve, just as he

must undergo the pains of sympathy; that 'there is but one way for him,'

and that this one 'road lies through application, study, and

thought.'[25] On the other hand he had, in the first place, as we saw, a

strong feeling that a man, and especially a poet, must not be in a hurry

to arrive at results, and must not shut up his mind in the box of his

supposed results, but must be content with half-knowledge, and capable

of 'living in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable

reaching after fact and reason.' And, in the second place, a poet, he

felt, will never be able to rest in thoughts and reasonings which do not

also satisfy imagination and give a truth which is also beauty; and in

so far as they fail to do this, in so far as they are _mere_ thoughts

and reasonings, they are no more than a means, though a necessary means,

to an end, which end is beauty,--that beauty which is also truth. This

alone is the poet's end, and therefore his law. 'With a great poet the

sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather

obliterates all consideration.'[26] Thought, knowledge, philosophy, if

they fall short of this, are nothing but a 'road' to his goal. They

bring matter for him to mould to his purpose of beauty; but he must not

allow them to impose _their_ purpose on him, or to ask that it shall

appear in his product. These statements formulate Keats's position more

than he formulates it, but I believe that they represent it truly. He

was led to it mainly by the poetic instinct in him, or because, while

his mind had much general power, he was, more than Wordsworth or

Coleridge or Shelley, a poet pure and simple.[27]

We can now deal more briefly with another apparent inconsistency. Keats

says again and again that the poet must not live for himself, but must

feel for others and try to help them; that 'there is no worthy pursuit

but the idea of doing some good for the world'; that he is ambitious to

do some good or to serve his country. Yet he writes to Shelley about the

_Cenci_: 'There is only one part of it I am judge of--the poetry and

dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is considered the Mammon.

A modern work, it is said, must have a purpose, which may be the God. An

artist must serve Mammon; he must have "self-concentration"--selfishness,

perhaps.'[28] These are ungracious sentences, especially when we remember

the letter to which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to

Shelley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of having an ultra-poetic

purpose, and whose Count Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination than

any figure drawn by Keats. But it is ungracious too to criticise the

irritability of a man condemned to death; and in any case these sentences

are perfectly consistent with Keats's expressed desire to do good. The

poet is to do good; yes, but by being a poet. He is to have a purpose of

doing good by his poetry; yes, but he is not to obtrude it in his

poetry, or to show that he has a design upon us.[29] To make beauty is

_his_ philanthropy. He will not succeed in it best by making what is only

in part beauty,--something like the _Excursion_, half poem and half

lecture. He must be unselfish, no doubt, but perhaps by being selfish; by

refusing, that is, to be diverted from his poetic way of helping by the

desire to help in another way. This is the drift of Keats's thought. If

we remember what he means by 'beauty' and 'poet,' and how he

distinguishes the poet from the 'dreamer,'[30] we shall think it sound

doctrine.

Keats was by nature both dreamer and poet, and his ambition was to

become poet pure and simple. There was, in a further sense, a double

strain in his nature. He had in him the poetic temper of his time, the

ever-present sense of an infinite, the tendency to think of this as an

ideal perfection manifesting itself in reality, and yet surpassing

reality, and so capable of being contrasted with it. He was allied here

especially to Wordsworth and to Shelley, by the former of whom he was

greatly influenced. But there was also in him another tendency; and

this, it would seem, was strengthening at the expense of the first, and

would in time have dominated it. It was perhaps the deeper and more

individual. It may be called the Shakespearean strain, and it works

against any inclination to erect walls between ideal and real, or to

magnify differences of grade into oppositions of kind. Keats had the

impulse to interest himself in everything he saw or heard of, to be

curious about a thing, accept it, identify himself with it, without

first asking whether it is better or worse than another, or how far it

is from the ideal principle. It is this impulse that speaks in the

words, 'If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence

and pick about the gravel';[31] and in the words, 'When she comes into a

room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess';

and in the feeling that she is fine, though Bishop Hooker is finer. It

too is the source of his complaint that he has no personal identity, and

of his description of the poetical character; 'It has no self; it is

everything and nothing.... It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto,

be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has

as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the

virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from

its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for

the bright one, because they both end in speculation.[32] A poet is the

most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity. He

is continually in, for, and filling some other body.'[33] That is not a

description of Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley; neither does it apply

very fully to Keats; but it describes something at least of the spirit

of Shakespeare.

Now this spirit, it is obvious, tends in poetry, I do not say to a

realistic, but to what may be called a concrete method of treatment; to

the vivid presentment of scenes, individualities, actions, in preference

to the expression of unembodied thoughts and feelings. The atmosphere of

Wordsworth's age, as we have seen, was not, on the whole, favourable to

it, and in various degrees it failed in strength, or it suffered, in all

the greater poets. Scott had it in splendid abundance and vigour; but

he had too little of the idealism or the metaphysical imagination which

was common to those poets, and which Shakespeare united with his

universal comprehension; nor was he, like Shakespeare and like some of

them, a master of magic in language. But Keats had that magic in fuller

measure, perhaps, than any of our poets since Milton; and, sharing the

idealism of Wordsworth and Shelley, he possessed also wider sympathies,

and, if not a more plastic or pictorial imagination than the latter, at

least a greater freedom from the attraction of theoretic ideas. To what

results might not this combination have led if his life had been as long

as Wordsworth's or even as Byron's? It would be more than hazardous, I

think, to say that he was the most highly endowed of all our poets in

the nineteenth century, but he might well have written its greatest long

poems.

1905.