and to breathe the fragrance of those immortal trees. “Nor ever can
those trees be bare,” in the text has only a semicolon after it. Yet
here he paused, while three wavelets broke upon the beach, as if he
could not tear himself away from contemplating the deathless verdure,
and realising the prodigious edict pronounced upon it. “Bold lover,
never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal.” At the
terrible decree he raised his eyes and gazed with heavy-lidded, hopeless
commiseration at this being, who, still more unhappy than Tithonus, had
to immortality added perpetual youth, with passion for ever strong, and
denial for ever final.
“Yet do not grieve.” This he uttered as one who pleads forgiveness of a
corpse--merely to try to soothe a conscience sensible of an obligation
that can never now be discharged. “She cannot fade, though thou hast not
thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Here the reader,
with eyes fixed and rayless, seemed by voice and pose to be sunk,
beyond all power of hope, in an abyss of despair. The barren
immutability of the spectacle appeared to weigh upon him more
intolerably than the wreck of a people. He spoke the words in a long
drawn-out whisper, and, after a pause, dropped his head, and did not
resume.
I recollect that when the illusion he wrought up so fully in my mind had
passed away in that long pause, and when I remembered that the fancy of
the poet was expending itself, not on beings whom he conceived
originally as human, but on the figures of a mere vase, I was seized
with a fierce desire to get up and seek that vase through all the world
until I found it, and then smash it into ten thousand atoms.
When I had written the last sentence, I took up the volume to decide
where I should recommence, and I “turned the page, and turned the page.”
I lived over again the days not forgotten, but laid aside in memory to
be borne forth in periods of high festival. I could not bring myself
back from the comrades of old, and the marvels of the great magician, to
this poor street, this solitude, and this squalid company of my own
thoughts--thoughts so trivial and so mean compared with the imperial
visions into which I had been gazing, that I was glad for the weariness
which came upon me, and grateful to gray dawn that glimmered against the
blind and absolved me from further obligation for that sitting.
On turning over the leaves without reading, I find _Hyperion_ opens most
readily of all, and seems to have fared worst from deliberate and
unintentional comment. Much of the wear and tear and pencil marks are to
be set down against myself; for when I take the book with no definite
purpose I turn to _Hyperion_, as a blind man to the warmth of the sun.
Some qualities of the poem I can feel and appreciate; but always in its
presence I am weighed down by the consciousness that my deficiency in
some attribute of perception debars me from undreamed-of privileges.
I recall one evening in a pine glen, with one man and _Hyperion_. It
would be difficult to match this man or me as readers. I don’t think
there can be ten worse employing the English language to-day. I not
only do not by any inflection of voice expound what I utter, but I am
often incapable of speaking the words before me. I take in a line at a
glance, see its import with my own imagination apart from the verbiage,
which leaves not a shadow of an impression on my mind. When I come to
the next line I grow suddenly alive to the fact that I have to speak off
the former one. I am in a hurry to see what line two has to show; so,
instead of giving the poet’s words for line one, I give my own
description of the vision it has conjured up in my mind. This is bad
enough in all conscience; but the friend of whom I speak now, behaves
even worse. His plan of reading is to stop his voice in the middle of
line one, and proceed to discuss the merits of line two, which he had
read with his eye, but not with his lips, and of which the listener is
ignorant, unless he happen to know the poem by rote.
On that evening in the glen I pulled out Keats, and turned, at my
friend’s request, to _Hyperion_, and began to read aloud. He was more
patient than mercy’s self; but occasionally, when I did a most
exceptionally bad murder on the text, he would writhe and cry out, and I
would go back and correct myself, and start afresh.
He had a big burly frame, and a deep full voice that shouted easily, and
some of the comments shouted as I read are indicated by pencil marks in
the margin. The writing was not done then, but much later, when he and I
had shaken hands, and he had gone sixteen thousand miles away. As he was
about to set out on that long journey, he said, “In seven years more
I’ll drop in and have a pipe with you.” It had been seven years since I
saw him before. The notes on the margin are only keys to what was said;
for I fear the comment made was more bulky than the text, and the text
and comment together would far exceed the limits of such an essay as
this. I therefore curtail greatly, and omit much.
I read down the first page without meeting any interruption; but when I
came in page two on
“She would have ta’en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck,”
he cried out, “Stop! Don’t read the line following. It is bathos
compared with that line and a half. It is paltry and weak beside what
you have read. ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck.’ By Jove!
can you not see the white muscles start out in his throat, and the look
of rage, defeat and agony on the face of the Greek bruiser? But how flat
falls the next line: ‘Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.’ What’s the
good of stopping Ixion’s wheel? Besides, a crowbar would be much better
than a finger. It is a line for children, not for grown men. It exhausts
the subject. It is too literal. There is no question left to ask. But
the vague ‘Ta’en Achilles by the hair and _bent_ his neck’ is perfect.
You can see her knee in the hollow of his back, and her fingers twisted
in his hair. But the image of the goddess dabbling in that river of hell
after Ixion’s wheel is contemptible.”
He next stopped me at
“Until at length old Saturn lifted up
His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone.”
“What an immeasurable vision Keats must have had of the old bankrupt
Titan, when he wrote the second line! Taken in the context it is simply
overwhelming. Keats must have sprung up out of his chair as he saw the
gigantic head upraised, and the prodigious grief of the grey-haired god.
But Keats was not happy in the matter of full stops. Here again what
comes after weakens. We get no additional strength out of
“‘And all the gloom and sorrow of the place
And that fair kneeling Goddess.’
The ‘gloom and sorrow’ and the ‘goddess’ are abominably
anticlimacteric.”
“Yes, there must be a golden victory;
There must be gods thrown down and trumpets blown
Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival
Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,
Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir
Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be
Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
Of the sky-children; I will give command:
Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?”
“Read that again!” cried my friend, clinging to the grass and breathing
hard. “Again!” he cried, when I had finished the second time. And then,
before I could proceed, he sprang to his feet, carrying out the action
in the text immediately following:
“This passion lifted him upon his feet,
And made his hands to struggle in the air.”
“Come on, John Milton,” cried my friend, excitedly sparring at the
winds,--“come on, and beat that, and we’ll let you put all your
adjectives behind your nouns, and your verb last, and your nominative
nowhere! Why man,”--this being addressed to the Puritan poet--“it
carried Keats himself off his legs; that’s more than anything you ever
wrote when you were old did for you. There’s the smell of midnight oil
off your later spontaneous efforts, John Milton.
“When Milton went loafing about and didn’t mind much what he was writing
he could give any of them points”--(I deplore the language) “any of
them, ay, Shakespeare himself points in a poem. In a poem, sir” (this
to me), “Milton could give Shakespeare a hundred and one out of a
hundred and lick the Bard easily. How the man who was such a fool as to
write Shakespeare’s poems had the good sense to write Shakespeare’s
plays I can never understand. The most un-Shakesperian poems in the
language are Shakespeare’s. I never read Cowley, but it seems to me
Cowley ought to have written Shakespeare’s poems, and then his obscurity
would have been complete. If Milton only didn’t take the trouble to be
great he would have been greater. As far as I know there are no English
poets who improved when they ceased to be amateurs and became
professional poets, except Wordsworth and Tennyson. Shelley and Keats
were never regular race-horses. They were colts that bolted in their
first race and ran until they dropped. It was a good job Shakespeare
gave up writing rhymes and posing as a poet. It was not until he
despaired of becoming one and took to the drama that he began to feel
his feet and show his pace. If he had suspected he was a great poet he
would have adopted the airs of the profession and been ruined. In his
time no one thought of calling a play a poem--that was what saved the
greatest of all our poets to us. The only two things Shakespeare didn’t
know is that a play may be a poem and that his plays are the finest
poems finite man as he is now constructed can endure. It is all nonsense
to say man shall never look on the like of Shakespeare again. It is not
the poet superior to Shakespeare man now lacks, but the man to apprehend
him.”
I looked around uneasily, and found, to my great satisfaction, that
there was no stranger in view. My friend occupied a position of
responsibility and trust, and it would be most injurious if a rumour got
abroad that not only did he read and admire verse, but that he held
converse with the shades of departed poets as well. In old days men who
spoke to the vacant air were convicted of necromancy and burned; in our
times men offending in this manner are suspected of poetry and
ostracized.
As soon as my friend was somewhat calmed, and had cast himself down
again and lit a pipe, I resumed my reading. He allowed me to proceed
without interruption until I came to:
“His palace bright,
Bastion’d with pyramids of glowing gold,
And touch’d with shade of bronzed obelisks,
Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts,
Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;
And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
Flushed angerly: while sometimes eagles’ wings,
Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
Darken’d the place; and neighing steeds were heard,
Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.”
“Prodigious!” he shouted. “Go over that again. Keep the syllables wide
apart. It is a good rule of water-colour sketching not to be too nice
about joining the edges of the tints; this lets the light in. Keep the
syllables as far apart as ever you can, and let the silentness in
between to clear up the music. How the gods and the wondering men must
have wondered! Do you know, I am sure Keats often frightened, terrified
himself with his own visions. You remember he says somewhere he doesn’t
think any one could dare to read some one or another aloud at midnight.
I believe that often in the midnight he sat and cowered before the
gigantic sights and sounds that reigned despotically over his fancy.”
“O dreams of day and night!
O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!
O lank-ear’d Phantoms of black-weeded pools!
Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why
Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new?
Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
Of all my lucent empire? It is left
Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry
I cannot see--but darkness, death and darkness.
Even here, into my centre of repose,
The shady visions come to domineer,
Insult, and blind and stifle up my pomp--
Fall!--No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
Over the fiery frontier of my realms
I will advance a terrible right arm
Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
And bid old Saturn take his throne again.”
“What more magnificent prelude ever was uttered to oath than the portion
of this speech preceding ‘No, by Tellus’! What more overpowering,
leading up to an overwhelming threat, than the whole passage going
before ‘Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible
right arm’! What menacing deliberativeness there is in this whole
speech, and what utter completeness of ruin to come is indicated by
those words, ‘I will advance a terrible right arm’! You feel no sooner
shall that arm move than ‘rebel Jove’s’ reign will be at an end, and
that chaos will be left for Saturn to rule and fashion once more into
order. Shut up the poem now. That’s plenty of _Hyperion_, and the other
books of it are inferior. There is more labour and more likeness to
_Paradise Lost_.” And so my friend, who is 16,000 miles away, and I
turned from the Titanic theme, and spoke of the local board of
guardians, or some young girl whose beauty was making rich misery in the
hearts of young men in those old days.
There is no other long poem in the volume bearing any marks which
indicate such close connection with any individual reader as in the case
of _Hyperion_. _Endymion_ boasts only one mark, and that expressing
admiration of the relief afforded from monotony of the heroic couplets
by the introduction in the opening of the double rhyming verses:
“Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing--”
The friend to whom this mark is due never handled the volume, never even
saw it; but once upon a time when he, another man, and I had got
together, and were talking of the “gallipot poet,” the first friend said
he always regarded this couplet as most happily placed where it appears.
So when I reached home I marked my copy at the lines. Now, when I open
the volume and find that mark, it is as good to me as, better than, a
photograph of my friend; for I not only see his face and figure, but
once more he places his index-finger on the table, as we three sit
smoking, and whispers out the six opening lines, ending with the two I
have quoted. Suppose I too should some day go 16,000 miles away from
London, and carry this volume with me, shall I not be able to open it
when I please, and recall what I then saw and heard, what I now see and
hear, as distinctly as though no long interval of ocean or of months lay
between to-night and that hour?
Can I ever forget my burly tenor friend, who sang and composed songs,
and dinted the line in _The Eve of St. Agnes_,
“The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide,”
and declared a hundred times in my unwearied ears that no more happy
epithet than snarling could be found for trumpets? He over and over
again assured me, and over and over again I loved to listen to his fancy
running riot on the line, how he heard and saw brazen and silver and
golden griffins quarrelling in the roof and around his ears as the
trumpets blared through the echoing halls and corridors. He, too, marked
“The music, yearning like a God in pain.”
“Keats,” he would say, “seems to have got not only at the spirit of the
music, but at the very flesh and blood of it. He has done one thing for
me,” my friend continued. “Before I read these lines, and others of the
same kind, in Keats, my favourite tunes always represented an emotion of
my own mind. Now they stand for individual characters in scenes, like
descriptions of people in a book. When I hear music now I am with the
Falstaffs or the Romolas, with Quasimodo or Julius Cæsar.”
I have been regarding the indentures in the volume chronologically. The
next marks of importance in the order of the years occur, one in _The
Eve of St. Agnes_, the other in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. These marks,
more than any others, I regard with grateful memory. They are not the
work of the hand of him for whom I value them. I have good reason to
look on him as a valid friend. For months between him and me there had
existed an acquaintance necessarily somewhat close, but wholly
uninformed with friendship. We spoke to one another as Mr. So-and-so.
Neither of us suspected that the other had any toleration of poets or
poetry. Our commerce had been in mere prose. One day, in mid-winter,
when a chilling fog hung over London, I chanced to go into a room where
he was writing alone. After a formal greeting, I complained of the cold.
He dropped his pen and looked up. “Yes,” he said, “very cold and dark as
night. Do you know the coldest night that ever was?” I answered that I
did not. “It was St. Agnes’s Eve, when
“‘The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.’”
And so we fell to talking about Keats, and talked and talked for hours;
and before the first hour of our talk had passed we had ceased
“Mistering” one another for ever. The fire of his enthusiasm rose higher
and higher as the minutes swept by. He knew one poet personally, for
whose verse I had profound respect, and this poet, he told me,
worshipped Keats. Often in our talks I laid plots for bringing him back
to the simple sentence, “You should hear M. talk about Keats.” The
notion that any one who knew M. could think M. would talk to me about
Keats intoxicated me. “He would not let me listen to him?” I said half
fearfully. “M. would talk to any one about Keats--to even a lawyer.” How
I wished at that moment I was a Lord Chancellor who might stand in M.’s
path. I have, in a way, been near to that poet since. I might almost
have said to him,
“So near, too! You could hear my sigh,
Or see my case with half an eye;
But must not--there are reasons why.”
So this friend I speak of now and I came to be great friends indeed. We
often met and held carnivals of verse, carnivals among the starry lamps
of poetry. He had a subtle instinct that saw the jewel, however it might
be set. He owned himself the faculty of the poet, which gave him ripe
knowledge of all matters technical in the setting.
“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”
He would quote these two lines and cry, “Was ever death so pangless as
that spoken of here? ‘To _cease_ upon the midnight!’ Here is no
struggle, no regret, no fear. This death is softer and lighter and
smoother than the falling of the shadow of night upon a desert of
noiseless sand.”
For a long time the name of one man had been almost daily in my ears. I
had been hearing much through the friend to whom I have last referred
about his intuitive eye and critical acumen. That friend had informed me
of the influence which his opinion carried; and of how this man held
Keats high above poets to whom we have statues of brass, whose names we
give to our streets. My curiosity was excited, and, while my desire to
meet this man was largely mingled with timidity, I often felt a jealous
pang at thinking that many of the people with whom I was acquainted knew
him. At length I became distantly connected with an undertaking in which
he was prominently concerned. Through the instrumentality of one
friendly to us both, we met. It was a sacred night for me, and I sat and
listened, enchanted. After some hours the talk wheeled round upon
sonnets. “Sonnets!” he cried, starting up; “who can repeat the lines
about Cortez in Keats? You all know it.” Some one began to read or
repeat the sonnet. Until coming upon the words, “or like stout Cortez.”
“That’s it, that’s it! Now go on.”
“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
“‘And all his men looked at each other with a _wild_ surmise,’” he
repeated, “‘_silent_ upon a peak in Darien.’ The most enduring group
ever designed. They are standing there to this day. They will stand
there for ever and for ever; they are immutable. When an artist carves
them you may know that Buonarotti is risen from the dead and is once
more abroad.”
That portion of a book which is called a preface and put first, is
always the last written. It may be human, but it is not logical, that
when a man starts he does not know what he has to say first, until he
finds out by an elaborate guess of several hundred pages what he wants
to say last. It would be unbecoming of me in a collection of ignorant
essays to affect to know less than a person of average intelligence; but
I am quite sincere when I say I am not aware who the author is of the
great aphorism that “After all, there is a great deal of human nature in
man.” There is, I would venture to say, more human nature than logic in
man. My copy of Keats is no exception to the general rule of books. The
preface ought to precede immediately the colophon. Yet it is in the
forefront of the volume, before even the very title page itself. It
forms no integral part of the volume, and is unknown to the printer or
publisher. It was given to me by a thoughtful and kind-hearted friend at
whose side I worked for a considerable while. One time, years ago, he
took a holiday and vanished, going from among us I knew not whither. On
coming back he presented each of his associates with something out of
his store of spoil. That which now forms the preface to my copy he gave
me. It consists of twelve leaves; twelve myrtle leaves on a spray. When
he was in Rome he bore me in mind and plucked this sprig at the grave of
the poet. It is consoling to remember Keats is buried so far away from
where he was born, when we cannot forget that the abominable infamy of
publishing his love-letters was committed in his own country--here in
England. His spirit was lent to earth only for a little while, and he
gave all of it to us. But we were not satisfied. We must have his
heart’s blood and his heart too. The gentlemen who attacked his poetry
when he was alive really knew no better, and tried, perhaps, to be as
honest as would suit their private ends. But the publication of the dead
man’s love-letters, fifty years after he had passed away, cannot be
attributed even to ignorance. If any money was made out of the book it
would be a graceful act to give it to some church where the burial
ground is scant, and the parish is in need of a Potter’s Field.
When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I
feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends.
It is the only album of photographs I possess. The faces I see in it
are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in
which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are
intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of
the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain
the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new
hands--into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it
posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart--he will know
nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone
before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature
he digs up this key--this Rosetta stone.
DECAY OF THE SUBLIME.
The sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last
dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of
Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the
sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by
the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain
more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its
cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it.
To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the
sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy
and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although,
being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is
cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so
long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is
one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases,
but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and
Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of
nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States
and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.