our knowledge of the poet that we judge his book. This assured, we
accept his patient exposition of the theme of 'Endymion' with a friendly
interest that would certainly not be given to one with a lesser claim
upon us; and in this spirit we can also find a welcome for the minute
investigation of the pictorial and plastic material of Keats's
imagination. Under auspices less benign we might have found the former
mistaken and the latter irrelevant; but it so happens that when Sir
Sidney shows us over the garden every goose is a swan. Like travellers
who at the end of a long day's journey among an inhospitable peasantry
are, against their expectation received in a kindly farm, and find
themselves talking glibly to their host of matters which are unimportant
and unknown to them--the price of land, and the points of a pedigree
bull--so we follow with an intense and intelligent absorption a subtle
argument in 'Endymion' in which at no moment we really believe. On the
contrary, we are convinced (when we are free from our author's friendly
spell) that Keats wrote 'Endymion' at all adventure. The words of the
cancelled preface: 'Before I began I had no inward feel of being able to
finish; and as I proceeded my steps were all uncertain,' were, we are
sure, quite literally true, and if anything an under-statement of his
lack of argument and plan. Not that we believe that Keats was incapable
of or averse to 'fundamental brain-work'--he had an understanding more
robust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast upon
experience, than any one of his great contemporaries, Wordsworth not
excepted--but at that phase in his evolution he was simply not concerned
with understanding. 'Endymion' is not a record or sublimation of
experience; it is itself an experience. It was the liberation of a
verbal inhibition, and the magic word of freedom was Beauty. The story
of Endymion was to Keats a road to the unknown, in her course along
which his imagination might 'paw up against the sky.'
A refusal to admit that Keats built 'Endymion' upon any structure of
argument, however obscure--even Sir Sidney would acknowledge that the
argument he discovers is _very_ obscure--is so far from being a
derogation from his genius that it is in our opinion necessary to a full
appreciation of his idiosyncrasy. It is customary to regard the Odes as
the pinnacle of his achievement and to trace a poetical progression to
that point and a subsequent decline: we are shown the evidence of this
decline in the revised Induction to 'Hyperion.' As far as an absolute
poetical perfection is concerned there can be no serious objection to
the view. But the case of Keats is eminently one to be considered in
itself as well as objectively. There is no danger that Keats's poetry
will not be appreciated; the danger is that Keats may not be understood.
And precisely this moment is opportune for understanding him. As Mr T.S.
Eliot has lately pointed out, the development of English poetry since
the early nineteenth century was largely based on the achievement of two
poets of genius, Keats and Shelley, who never reached maturity. They
were made gods; and rightly, had not poets themselves bowed down to
them. That was ridiculous; there is something even pitiful in the
spectacle of Rossetti and Morris finding the culmination of poetry, the
one in 'The Eve of St Agnes,' the other in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'
And this undiscriminating submission of a century to the influence of
hypostatised phases in the development of a poet of sanity and genius is
perhaps the chief of the causes of the half-conscious, and for the most
part far less discriminating, spirit of revolt which is at work in
modern poetry.
A sense is abroad that the tradition has somehow been snapped, that
what has been accepted as the tradition unquestioningly for a hundred
years is only a _cul de sac_. Somewhere there has been a substitution.
In the resulting chaos the twittering of bats is taken for poetry, and
the critically minded have the grim amusement of watching verse-writers
gain eminence by imitating Coventry Patmore! The bolder spirits declare
that there never was such a thing as a tradition, that it is no use
learning, because there is nothing to learn. But they are a little
nervous for all their boldness, and they prefer to hunt in packs, of
which the only condition of membership is that no one should ask what it
is.
At such a juncture, if indeed not at all times, it is of no less
importance to understand Keats than to appreciate his poetry. The
culmination of the achievement of the Keats to be understood is not the
Odes, perfect as they are, nor the tales--a heresy even for objective
criticism--nor 'Hyperion'; but precisely that revised Induction to
'Hyperion' which on the other argument is held to indicate how the
poet's powers had been ravaged by disease and the pangs of unsatisfied
love. On the technical side alone the Induction is of extraordinary
interest. Keats's natural and proper revulsion from the Miltonic style,
the deliberate art of which he had handled like an almost master, is
evident but incomplete; he is hampered by the knowledge that the virus
is in his blood. The creative effort of the Induction was infinitely
greater than is immediately apparent. Keats is engaged in a war on two
fronts: he is struggling against the Miltonic manner, and struggling
also to deal with an unfamiliar content. The whole direction of his
poetic purpose had shifted since he wrote 'Hyperion.' 'Hyperion,' though
far finer as art, had been produced by an impulse substantially the same
as 'Endymion'; it was an exercise in a manner. Keats desired to prove to
himself, and perhaps a little at that moment to prove to the world, that
he was capable of Miltonic discipline and grandeur. It was, most
strictly, necessary for him to be inwardly certain of this. He had
drunk, as deeply as any of his contemporaries, of the tradition; he
needed to know that he had assimilated what he had drunk, that he could
employ a conscious art as naturally as the most deliberate artist of the
past, and, most of all, that he would begin, when he did begin, at the
point where his forerunners left off, and not at a point behind them.
These necessities were not present in this form to Keats's mind when he
began 'Hyperion'; most probably he began merely with the idea of holding
his own with Milton, and with a delight in an apt and congenial theme.
Keats was not a poet of definite and deliberate plans, which indeed are
incident to a certain tenuity of soul; his decisions were taken not by
the intellect, but by the being.
He dropped 'Hyperion' because it was inadequate to the whole of him. He
was weary of its deliberate art because it interposed a veil between him
and that which he needed to express; it was an imposition upon himself.
'I have given up "Hyperion"--there were too many Miltonic inversions
in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather
artist's, humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations.
English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick
out some lines from "Hyperion" and a mark + to the false beauty
proceeding from art and one || to the true voice of
feeling....'--(Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Sept. 22, 1819.)
That outwardly negative reaction is packed with positive implications.
'English ought to be kept up' meant, on Keats's lips, a very great deal.
But there is other and more definite authority for the positive
direction in which he was turning. To his brother George he wrote, at
the same time:--
'I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him
would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written, but is the
verse of art. I wish to devote myself to another verse alone.'
More definite still is the letter of November 17, 1819, to his friend
and publisher, John Taylor:--
'I have come to a determination not to publish anything I have now
ready written; but for all that to publish a poem before long and
that I hope to make a fine one. As the marvellous is the most
enticing and the surest guarantee of harmonious numbers I have been
endeavouring to persuade myself to untether fancy and to let her
manage for herself. I and myself cannot agree about this at all.
Wonders are no wonders to me. I am more at home amongst Men and
Women. I would rather read Chaucer than Ariosto. The little dramatic
skill I may as yet have, however badly it might show in a Drama,
would, I think, be sufficient for a Poem. I wish to diffuse the
colouring of St Agnes Eve throughout a poem in which Character and
Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery. Two or three such
poems if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six
years would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I mean they
would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays--my greatest
ambition--when I do feel ambitious....'
No letter could be saner, nor more indicative of calm resolve. Yet the
precise determination is that nothing that went to make the 1820 volume
should be published, neither Odes, nor Tales, nor 'Hyperion.' This is
that mood of Keats which Sir Sidney Colvin, in his comment upon a
passage in the revised Induction, calls one of 'fierce injustice to his
own achievements and their value.' But a poet, if he is a real one,
judges his own achievements not by those of his contemporaries, but by
the standard of his own intention.
The evidence that Keats's mind had passed beyond the stage at which it
could be satisfied by the poems of the 1820 volume is overwhelming. His
letters to George of April, 1819, show that he was naturally evolving
towards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive than
could be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspiration
and emotion as the Odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that had
invaded them belongs to the new Keats. They mark the transition to the
new poetry which he vaguely discerned. The problem was to find the
method. The letters we have quoted to show his reaction from the
Miltonic influence display the more narrowly 'artistic' aspect of the
same evolution. A technique more responsive to the felt reality of
experience must be found--'English ought to be kept up'--the apparatus
of Romantic story must be abandoned--'Wonders are no wonders to me'--yet
the Romantic colour must be kept to restore to a realistic psychology
the vividness and richly various quality that are too often lost by
analysis We do not believe that we have in any respect forced the
interpretation of the letters; the terminology of that age needs to be
translated to be understood 'Men and Women ... Characters and
Sentiments' are called, for better or worse, 'psychology' nowadays. And
our translation has this merit, that some of our ultra-moderns will
listen to the word 'psychology,' where they would be bat-blind to
'Characters' and stone-deaf to 'Sentiments.'
Modern poetry is still faced with the same problem; but very few of its
adepts have reached so far as to be able to formulate it even with the
precision of Keats's scattered allusions. Keats himself was struck down
at the moment when he was striving (against disease and against a
devouring, hopeless love-passion) to face it squarely. The revised
Induction reveals him in the effort to shape the traditional (and
perhaps still necessary) apparatus of myth to an instrument of his
attitude. The meaning of the Induction is not difficult to discover; but
current criticism has the habit of regarding it dubiously. Therefore we
may be forgiven for attempting, with the brevity imposed upon us, to
make its elements clear. The first eighteen lines, which Sir Sidney
Colvin on objective grounds regrets are, we think, vital.
'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect; the savage, too,
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at heaven; pity these have not
Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
The shadows of melodious utterance,
But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;
For poesy alone can tell her dreams,--
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable chain
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
'Thou art no poet--mays't not tell thy dreams'?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions and would speak, if he had loved,
And been well-nurtured in his mother-tongue.
Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.'
We may admit that the form of these lines is unfortunate; but we cannot
wish them away. They bear most closely upon the innermost argument of
the poem as Keats endeavoured to reshape it. All men, says Keats, have
their visions of reality; but the poet alone can express his, and the
poet himself may at the last prove to have been a fanatic, one who has
imagined 'a paradise for a sect' instead of a heaven for all humanity.
This discovery marks the point of crisis in Keats's development. He is
no longer content to be the singer; his poetry must be adequate to all
experience. No wonder then that the whole of the new Induction centres
about this thought. He describes his effort to fight against an invading
death and to reach the altar in the mighty dream palace. As his foot
touches the altar-step life returns, and the prophetic voice of the
veiled goddess reveals to him that he has been saved by his power 'to
die and live again before Thy fated hour.'
'"None can usurp this height," return'd that shade.
"But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they come,
Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half."'
Because he has been mindful of the pain in the world, the poet has been
saved. But the true lovers of humanity,--
'Who love their fellows even to the death,
Who feel the giant agony of the world,'
are greater than the poets; 'they are no dreamers weak.'
'They come not here, they have no thought to come,
And thou art here for thou are less than they.'
It is a higher thing to mitigate the pain of the world than to brood
upon the problem of it. And not only the lover of mankind, but man the
animal is pre-eminent above the poet-dreamer. His joy is joy; his pain,
pain. 'Only the dreamer venoms _all_ his days.' Yet the poet has his
reward; it is given to him to partake of the vision of the veiled
Goddess--memory, Moneta, Mnemosyne, the spirit of the eternal reality
made visible.
'Then saw I a wan face
Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
It works a constant change, which happy death
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage; it had past
The lily and the snow; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face.
But for her eyes I should have fled away;
They held me back with a benignant light
Soft, mitigated by divinest lids
Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed
Of all external things; they saw me not,
But in blank splendour beam'd like the mild moon
Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not
What eyes are upward cast....'
This vision of Moneta is the culminating point of Keats's evolution. It
stands at the summit, not of his poetry, but of his achievement regarded
as obedient to its own inward law. Moneta was to him the discovered
spirit of reality; her vision was the vision of necessity itself. In
her, joy and pain, life and death compassion and indifference, vision
and blindness are one; she is the eternal abode of contraries, the Idea
if you will, not hypostatised but immanent. Before this reality the poet
is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but
below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is the
prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his
victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph.
Here, not unfittingly, in his struggle with a conception too big to
express, came the end of Keats the poet. None have passed beyond him;
few have been so far. Of the poetry that might have been constructed on
the basis of an apprehension so profound we can form only a conjecture,
each after his own image: we do not know the method of the 'other verse'
of which Keats had a glimpse; we only know the quality with which it
would have been saturated, the calm and various light of united
contraries.
We fear that Sir Sidney Colvin will not agree with our view. The angles
of observation are different. The angle at which we have placed
ourselves is not wholly advantageous--from it Sir Sidney's book could
not have been written--but it has this advantage, that from it we can
read his book with a heightened interest. As we look out from it, some
things are increased and some diminished with the change of
perspective; and among those which are increased is our gratitude to Sir
Sidney. In the clear mirror of his sympathy and sanity nothing is
obscured. We are shown the Keats who wrote the perfect poems that will
last with the English language, and in the few places where Sir Sidney
falls short of the spirit of complete acceptance, we discern behind the
words of rebuke and regret only the idealisation of a love which we are
proud to share.
[JULY, 1919.
_Thoughts on Tchehov_
We do not know if the stories collected in this volume[7] stand together
in the Russian edition of Tchehov's works, or if the selection is due to
Mrs Constance Garnett. It is also possible that the juxtaposition is
fortuitous. But the stories are united by a similarity of material.
Whereas in the former volumes of this admirable series Tchehov is shown
as preoccupied chiefly with the life of the _intelligentsia_, here he
finds his subjects in priests and peasants, or (in the story _Uprooted_)
in the half-educated.
[Footnote 7: _The Bishop; and Other Stories_. By Anton Tchehov.
Translated by Constance Garnett. (Chatto & Windus.)]
Such a distinction is, indeed, irrelevant. As Tchehov presents them to
our minds, the life of the country and the life of the town produce the
same final impression, arouse in us an awareness of an identical
quality; and thus, the distinction, by its very irrelevance, points us
the more quickly to what is essential in Tchehov. It is that his
attitude, to which he persuades us, is complete, not partial. His
comprehension radiates from a steady centre, and is not capriciously
kindled by a thousand accidental contacts. In other words, Tchehov is
not what he is so often assumed to be, an impressionist. Consciously or
unconsciously he had taken the step--the veritable _salto mortale_--by
which the great literary artist moves out of the ranks of the minor
writers. He had slowly shifted his angle of vision until he could
discern a unity in multiplicity. Unity of this rare kind cannot be
imposed as, for instance, Zola attempted to impose it. It is an
emanation from life which can be distinguished only by the most
sensitive contemplation.
The problem is to define this unity in the case of each great writer in
whom it appears. To apprehend it is not so difficult. The mere sense of
unity is so singular and compelling that it leaves room for few
hesitations. The majority of writers, however excellent in their
peculiar virtues, are not concerned with it: at one moment they
represent, at another they may philosophise, but the two activities have
no organic connection, and their work, if it displays any evolution at
all, displays it only in the minor accidents of the craft, such as style
in the narrower and technical sense, or the obvious economy of
construction. There is no danger of mistaking these for great writers.
Nor, in the more peculiar case of writers who attempt to impose the
illusion of unity, is the danger serious. The apparatus is always
visible; they cannot afford to do without the paraphernalia of argument
which supplies the place of what is lacking in their presentation. The
obvious instance of this legerdemain is Zola; a less obvious, and
therefore more interesting example is Balzac.
To attempt the more difficult problem. What is most peculiar to
Tchehov's unity is that it is far more nakedly æsthetic than that of
most of the great writers before him. Other writers of a rank equal to
his--and there are not so very many--have felt the need to shift their
angle of vision until they could perceive an all-embracing unity; but
they were not satisfied with this. They felt, and obeyed, the further
need of taking an attitude towards the unity they saw They approved or
disapproved, accepted or rejected it. It would be perhaps more accurate
to say that they gave or refused their endorsement. They appealed to
some other element than their own sense of beauty for the final verdict
on their discovery; they asked whether it was just or good.
The distinguishing mark of Tchehov is that he is satisfied with the
unity he discovers. Its uniqueness is sufficient for him. It does not
occur to him to demand that it should be otherwise or better. The act of
comprehension is accompanied by an instantaneous act of acceptance. He
is like a man who contemplates a perfect work of art; but the work of
creation has been his, and has consisted in the gradual adjustment of
his vision until he could see the frustration of human destinies and the
arbitrary infliction of pain as processes no less inevitable, natural,
and beautiful than the flowering of a plant. Not that Tchehov is a
greater artist than any of his great predecessors; he is merely more
wholly an artist, which is a very different thing. There is in him less
admixture of preoccupations that are not purely æsthetic, and probably
for this reason he has less creative vigour than any other artist of
equal rank. It seems as though artists, like cattle and fruit trees,
need a good deal of crossing with substantial foreign elements, in order
to be very vigorous and very fruitful. Tchehov has the virtues and the
shortcomings of the pure case.
I do not wish to be understood as saying that Tchehov is a manifestation
of _l'art pour l'art_, because in any commonly accepted sense of that
phrase, he is not. Still, he might be considered as an exemplification
of what the phrase might be made to mean. But instead of being diverted
into a barren dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bring
into prominence an aspect of Tchehov which has an immediate
interest--his modernity. Again, the word is awkward. It suggests that he
is fashionable, or up to date. Tchehov is, in fact, a good many phases
in advance of all that is habitually described as modern in the art of
literature. The artistic problem which he faced and solved is one that
is, at most, partially present to the consciousness of the modern
writer--to reconcile the greatest possible diversity of content with the
greatest possible unity of æsthetic impression. Diversity of content we
are beginning to find in profusion--Miss May Sinclair's latest
experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with a
settled manner and a fixed reputation--but how rarely do we see even a
glimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified æsthetic
impression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has
been, present to consciousness is _ipso facto_ unified æsthetically. The
result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of
language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical
method.
The classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving æsthetic unity
by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an
arbitrary (because non-æsthetic) argument. This argument was let down
like a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a
unified crystalline structure congregated about it. Of all great artists
of the past Shakespeare is the richest in his departures from this
method. How much deliberate artistic purpose there was in his
employment of songs and madmen and fools (an employment fundamentally
different from that made by his contemporaries) is a subject far too big
for a parenthesis. But he, too, is at bottom a classic artist. The
modern problem--it has not yet been sufficiently solved for us to speak
of a modern method--arises from a sense that the classical method
produces over-simplification. It does not permit of a sufficient sense
of multiplicity. One can think of a dozen semi-treatments of the problem
from Balzac to Dostoevsky, but they were all on the old lines. They
might be called Shakespearean modifications of the classical method.