In Keats's magnificent fragment, _Hyperion_, there is a scene in which
the whole overthrown race of Titanic gods hold counsel in a dark,
underground cavern. Their chief, old Saturn, concludes his despondent
speech with the words:
"Yet ye are here,
O'erwhelm'd and spurred, and batter'd, ye are here!
O Titans, shall I say, 'Arise!'--Ye groan:
Shall I say 'Crouch!'--Ye groan. What can I then?
O Heaven wide! O unseen parent dear!
What can I? Tell me, all ye brethren Gods,
How we can war, how engine our great wrath!"
[Illustration: JOHN KEATS]
Then Oceanus, the thoughtful, meditative sea god, rises, shakes
his locks, no longer watery, and, in the murmuring voice which his
tongue has caught from the break of the waves on the shore, bids the
passion-stung deities take comfort from the thought that they have
fallen by the course of Nature's law, and not by the force of thunder
or of Jove:--
"Great Saturn, thou
Hast sifted well the atom-universe;
But for this reason, that thou art the King,
And only blind from sheer supremacy,
One avenue was shaded from thine eyes,
Through which I wandered to eternal truth.
And first, as thou wast not the first of powers,
So art thou not the last; it cannot be:
Thou art not the beginning nor the end.
From Chaos and parental Darkness came
Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil,
That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends
Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came,
And with it light, and light engendering
Upon its own producer, forthwith touch'd
The whole enormous matter into life.
Upon that very hour, our parentage,
The Heavens and the Earth, were manifest:
Then thou first-born, and we the giant race,
Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms.
Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain;
O folly! for to bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well!
As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
In form and shape compact and beautiful,
In will, in action free, companionship,
And thousand other signs of purer life;
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness: nor are we
Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule
Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil
Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed,
And feedeth still, more comely than itself?
Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves?
Or shall the tree be envious of the dove
Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings
To wander wherewithal and find its joys?
We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs
Have bred forth, not pale solitary doves,
But eagles golden-feather'd, who do tower
Above us in their beauty, and must reign
In right thereof; for 'tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might:
Yea by that law, another race may drive
Our conquerors to mourn as we do now.
Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas,
My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face?
Have ye beheld his chariot, foam'd along
By noble winged creatures he hath made?
I saw him on the calmed waters scud,
With such a glow of beauty in his eyes,
That it enforc'd me to bid sad farewell
To all my empire."
Thus speaks Oceanus. And the fallen deities, either convinced or in
sullen anger, keep silence. At last one, of whom no one has thought,
the goddess Clymene, breaks the long silence, speaking timidly among
the fierce, with hectic lips and gentle glances:--
"O Father, I am here the simplest voice,
And all my knowledge is that joy is gone,
And this thing woe crept in among our hearts.
There to remain for ever, as I fear:
I would not bode of evil, if I thought
So weak a creature could turn off the help
Which by just right should come of mighty Gods;
Yet let me tell my sorrow, let me tell
Of what I heard, and how it made me weep,
And know that we had parted from all hope.--
I stood upon a shore, a pleasant shore,
Where a sweet clime was breathed from a land
Of fragrance, quietness, and trees, and flowers.
Full of calm joy it was, as I of grief;
Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth;
So that I felt a movement in my heart
To chide, and to reproach that solitude
With songs of misery, music of our woes;
And sat me down, and took a mouthed shell
And murmured into it, and made melody--
O melody no more! for while I sang,
And with poor skill let pass into the breeze
The dull shell's echo, from a bowery strand
Just opposite, an island of the sea,
There came enchantment with the shifting wind,
That did both drown and keep alive my ears.
I threw my shell away upon the sand,
And a wave fill'd it, as my sense was fill'd
With that new blissful golden melody,
A living death was in each gush of sounds,
Each family of rapturous hurried notes,
That fell, one after one, yet all at once,
Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string:
And then another, then another strain,
Each like a dove leaving its olive perch,
With music wing'd instead of silent plumes,
To hover round my head, and make me sick
Of joy and grief at once. Grief overcame,
And I was stopping up my frantic ears,
When, past all hindrance of my trembling hands,
A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune,
And still it cried, 'Apollo! young Apollo!
The morning-bright Apollo! young Apollo!'
I fled, it followed me, and cried 'Apollo!'"
Keats has surpassed himself in this passage, which is as profound in
thought as it is beautiful. It is not only a proof of the quality of
his poetic gift, but the announcement of the appearance of a younger
generation of poets in the field held by the poets of the Lake School
and Scott. In the name of the reigning deities, the human intellect is
too often condemned to inactivity and stagnation. If there is to be
progress, a change of rulers is frequently called for. Wordsworth and
Scott were mighty Titans whose glory paled when the younger generation
appeared. Keats himself was the golden-feathered bird that rose high
into the air above Wordsworth's leafy old oak. And Byron--was not he
the new ocean god, who "troubled the waters" of passion with such
power that the greatest literary genius of the day abdicated in his
favour, assured that it was in vain to compete with him? And Shelley's
melodies, intoxicatingly sweet, unprecedentedly daring--were they not
borne on all the winds, and are they not still penetrating everywhere,
though many, like Clymene, stop their ears and refrain as long as
possible from listening to the new tones? The struggle is a vain one,
for now on every side resounds the cry: "Apollo! morning-bright Apollo!"
The old gods, as in the poem, assumed different attitudes at this
crisis in their fates. Scott, the noblest of them all, acknowledged
his defeat by Byron with an amiable dignity which still further
enhanced his reputation. Wordsworth retired to his Lakes, muttering
an accusation of plagiarism. Southey poured forth volleys of abuse.
Meanwhile the new, young gods mounted the thrones of the old, and round
their heads shone the bright halo of the light that they gave forth.
Keats was the youngest of the young race of giants, and he had
peculiar qualities and a peculiar domain of his own, into which none
of the others intruded. He is one of the many examples of singularly
delicate and refined organisms appearing in the most unlikely outward
surroundings and developing almost unaided by circumstances. This youth
who, dying at the age of twenty-six, has left behind him master-works
which none who read them can forget, and whose name is immortalised
in Shelley's _Adonais_, was the son of a London livery-stable keeper,
and was bred an apothecary. Few of the elder literary celebrities knew
him. Wordsworth, the only one among them on whom his eyes were steadily
turned, and with more reverence than was felt by any of the other young
men--even Wordsworth showed himself cold. At Haydon the painter's,
one evening, when Wordsworth was present, Keats was induced to repeat
to him the famous Hymn to Pan from the First Book of _Endymion_. The
"iron-grey poet" heard it to the end, and then only remarked that it
was "a pretty piece of paganism." And so, praise be to Keats, it is!
Wordsworth, however, meant nothing flattering by the remark. Such
was the verdict of the most influential member of the elder school
of poetry. The elder school of criticism was distinctly adverse.
Its verdict was harsh and scathing. Both the _Quarterly Review_ and
_Blackwood's Magazine_ jeered foolishly at _Endymion_. The author was
told that "it is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary
than a starved poet," and was bidden "back to his gallipots." Calmly as
the young poet writes of the ignominious treatment he received, there
can be no doubt that the sting rankled deeply. It is most improbable
that the report spread among Keats's acquaintances of the ruinous
effect of these criticisms on his health, was, as is now maintained,
entirely without foundation. He certainly was not, as Byron in _Don
Juan_ declares him to have been, killed by a savage article in the
_Quarterly_; and his own utterances give ample proof of his profound
contempt for these disparagements of his art and his personality; but
his ambition was excessive, his susceptibility equally so, and his body
contained the germs of a fatal disease; and it would be surprising if
rancorous attacks from without had not affected an organism which was
preyed upon from within by consuming passion and consuming disease.
John Keats was born in October 1795. At the age of nine he lost his
father. His mother sent him to a good school; but she, too, to his
inexpressible grief, died while he was still a boy. His appearance
corresponded to the impression which his poetry makes on us. Whilst
the feminine and ethereal Shelley had a slender, slightly-built,
narrow-chested figure and a shrill voice, the heavier footed, more
earth-bound Keats was deep-chested and broad-shouldered; his lower
limbs were small in comparison with the upper; and he had a deep, grave
voice. His small head was covered with thick brown curls; the eyes were
large and of a dark, on occasion glowing, blue; the handsome mouth had
a projecting lower lip, which gave the face a defiant and pugnacious
expression. And as a matter of fact he was, as a boy, a perfect little
terrier for resoluteness and pugnacity, and seemed much more likely to
distinguish himself in war than in literature. He early displayed great
personal courage, and was an adept in all athletic exercises; just
before he was attacked by consumption he thrashed an insolent butcher
in a regular stand-up fight.
At the age of fifteen he left school, and was apprenticed by his
relations to a clever surgeon-apothecary at Edmonton, with whom he
remained till he was twenty, when he began, as a medical student, to
walk the London hospitals. He soon, however, gave up medicine for
literature, and lived for several years in close companionship with
some of the rising young literary men and artists of the day. Then he
was attacked by the disease which had carried off his mother and his
younger brother. The absence of any prospect of earning a living, and
the ever-increasing pressure of poverty, favoured its development,
which was farther hastened by a violent and hopeless passion for a
young Anglo-Indian lady--a passion only rendered hopeless by Keats's
poverty and ill-health--his love being returned. His health obliged him
to quit the neighbourhood of his beloved and take a journey to Italy,
where he died.
Glancing over the non-literary part of Keats's life, we distinguish
three facts of leading importance--his want of any real prospect of
gaining a livelihood (he had thoughts of emigrating to South America,
or applying for a post as surgeon on an Indiaman); the ardent and
hopeless passion for the woman without whom life was worthless to him;
and the wasting disease.
Miss Fanny Brawne was eighteen, five years younger than Keats, when he
made her acquaintance in 1818. He and his friend, Brown, had settled
at Hampstead, in a semidetached house, the other half of which was
occupied by Miss Brawne and her mother. The first six months after he
fell in love were to Keats months of real happiness. In December 1818
he began _Hyperion_. In February 1819, the most fruitful month in his
life, he wrote the _Ode to Psyche, The Eve of St Agnes_, and great part
of _Hyperion_. And early in the spring, sitting under a plum-tree in
the Brawnes' garden, he wrote his _Ode to the Nightingale_. In other
words--his most beautiful poetry was written in the half year during
which he took long walks with Fanny, and was still a healthy man.
Unfortunately, it being possible for him to see his beloved every day,
we have not a single love-letter dating from this, his short period of
happiness. In July 1819 he wrote to her for the first time; and all the
letters which he sent her from that date until the time of his death
were published in 1878.
They are not melancholy to begin with. In one of the earliest he
writes: "I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair;"
and to some objection made by her he answers: "Why may I not speak of
your Beauty, since without that I could never have lov'd you?--I cannot
conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There
may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have
the highest respect and can admire it in others; but it has not the
richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my
own heart."
Very soon, however, the jealousy which was to have such a wearing
effect upon the lover appears in his letters. Again and again he exacts
promises of eternal devotion. Though not yet ill, he has a vague
presentiment that his end is not far off. "I have two luxuries to brood
over in my walks," he writes; "your Loveliness and the hour of my
death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute!"
Her letters had really only a depressing effect on him. He read them
so often that each sentence assumed a distorted proportion; and
they seemed to him now cold, now full of reproaches. He tortured
first himself and then her with his suspicious irritableness and
perversity; he would, for example, pass her door without going in,
though he was longing to see her, and knew that his not appearing
was a disappointment to her. There are a few perfectly happy, tender
letters, dated October 1819. But in February 1820 commences a period
of miserable excitement. He begins to spit blood, and "reads his
death-warrant in its colour." After this the letters are short, some of
them still playful and hopeful, others suspicious and violent in their
jealousy--all brimming over with passion. Here is a fragment: "You
know our situation--what hope is there if I should be recovered ever
so soon--my very health will not suffer me to make any great exertion.
I am recommended not even to read poetry, much less write it. I cannot
say forget me--but I would mention that there are impossibilities in
the world. No more of this. I am not strong enough to be weaned--take
no notice of it in your goodnight."
During his apparent convalescence he is constantly begging her to come
and show herself only for half a minute outside of the window through
which he can see her, or to walk a little in the garden. Then he asks
her not to come every day, because he cannot always bear to see her.
But when, according to his wish, she does not come, he is restless and
jealous.
As the end approaches, the letters become ever sadder and more
distressing to read. The last of them are positively harrowing. He is
as wild and helpless in his passionate despair as a child who believes
himself forgotten. It is the mental death-struggle preceding the
physical.
Fanny Brawne's tenderness for her lover never wavered. It is now
evident that, as was only natural, this young girl with the touch of
coquetry in her nature had no suspicion whatever of the gifts and
powers of the poor consumptive youth who worshipped and tortured her.
But she loved him for his own sake, and when, from the last letter,
she learned in what a sad condition he really was, she and her mother
would no longer leave him to the care of his friend, but took him into
their own house in Wentworth Place, where he lived for the last month
before he left for Italy. A stay in that country had been prescribed,
as giving him a last chance of recovery.
The man to whom, in other circumstances, the prospect of seeing the
country for which he had always longed, and whose gods he had awakened
from the dead, would have given supreme happiness, now writes: "This
journey to Italy wakes me at daylight every morning, and haunts me
horribly. I shall endeavour to go, though it be with the sensation of
marching up against a Battery." On board ship he writes, referring
to his attachment to Miss Brawne: "Even if my body would recover of
itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live
most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it.... I
wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and
then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which
are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great
separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.... I seldom
think of my brother and sister in America. The thought of leaving Miss
Brawne is beyond everything horrible--the sense of darkness coming over
me--I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing." And in another
letter he writes: "The persuasion that I shall see her no more will
kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health,
and I should have remained well. I can bear to die--I cannot bear to
leave her. O God! God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds
me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my
travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about
her--I see her--I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient
interest to divert me from her for a moment.... I cannot say a word
about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties
around me. I am afraid to write to her--I should like her to know that
I do not forget her. Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It
surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing
so much misery. Was I born for this end?"
On the last day of November 1820, Keats wrote his last letter. His
intimate old friend, Dr. Clark, a skilful physician, preserved his life
till the end of the winter. While in Naples, Keats received a letter
from his brother poet, Shelley, inviting him to come to Pisa, where
he would be nursed and cared for in every way. But this invitation he
did not accept. After several weeks of great suffering came rest and
sleep, resignation and tranquillity. He desired that a letter from
his beloved, which he had not dared to read, along with a purse and a
letter which he had received from his sister, should be placed in his
coffin; and that on his gravestone should be inscribed:
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
The touch of Shelley's magic wand stiffened the water into crystal, and
the name stands inscribed for all time.[1]
Keats's poetry is the most fragrant flower of English Naturalism.
Before he appeared, this Naturalism had had a long period of vigorous
growth. Its active principle had been evolved by Wordsworth, who
developed it so methodically that he divided his poems into groups,
corresponding to the different periods of human life and the different
faculties of the soul. Coleridge provided it with the support of a
philosophy of nature which had a strong resemblance to Schelling's.
In Scott it assumes the highly successful form of a study of men,
manners, and scenery, inspired by patriotism, by interest in history,
and by a wonderful apprehension of the significance of race. Both in
Moore and Keats it takes the form of gorgeous sensuousness, is the
literary expression of the perceptions of beings whose sensitiveness
to impressions of the beauty of the external world makes that of the
average human being seem blunt and dull. But the sensuousness of
Moore's poetry, which reveals itself artistically in his warm, bright
colouring, is confined to the erotic domain, and is of a light and
playful character. Keats's is full-blooded, serious sensuousness,
by no means specially erotic, but all-embracing, and, in this its
comprehensiveness, one of the most admirable developments of English
Naturalism. This Naturalism led Wordsworth into one extreme, which
has already been referred to; Keats it led into a different and more
poetical one.
Keats was more of the artist than any of his English brother poets.
He troubled himself less about principles than any of them. There is
no groundwork of patriotism in his poetry as there is in Scott's and
Moore's; no message of liberty, as in Shelley's and Byron's; it is pure
art, owing its origin to nothing but the power of imagination. It was
one of his favourite sayings, that the poet should have no principles,
no morality, _no self_. Why? Because the true poet enjoys both light
and shade--has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.
All poets who have forgotten themselves in the theme of their flights
of fancy, have, when engaged in production, to the best of their
ability banished their private peculiarities and preferences. Few have
managed to make such a clean sweep as Keats of their personal hopes,
enthusiasms, and principles. His study was, as one of his admirers has
said, "a painter's studio with very little in it besides the easel."
Keats's poetical indifference to theories and principles was, however,
in itself a theory and a principle--was the philosophy which has its
foundation in poetic worship of nature. To the consistent pantheistic
poet all forms, all shapes, all expressions of life on earth which
engage the imagination, are precious, and all equally precious. Keats,
as poet, recognises no truth of the kind that means improvement or
exclusion; but he has an almost religious faith in imagination as the
source of truth. In one of his letters he expresses himself thus:--"I
am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections,
and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty
must be Truth, whether it existed before or not;--for I have the same
idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime,
creative of essential Beauty.... The Imagination may be compared
to Adam's dream; he awoke and found it truth." He enlarges on the
difference between this kind of truth and the truth arrived at by
consecutive reasoning, and concludes with an exclamation which is a
key to the whole of his poetry:--"However it may be, O for a life of
sensations rather than of thoughts!"
He led in great part a life of passive sensation, of pleasure and pain
through the senses. "Take," says Masson, "a book of physiology and go
over the so-called classes of sensations one by one--the sensations
of the mere muscular states; the sensations connected with such vital
processes as circulation, alimentation, respiration, and electrical
intercommunication with surrounding bodies; the sensations of taste;
those of odour; those of hearing; and those of sight--and Keats will be
found to have been unusually endowed in them all."
He had, for example, an extreme sensitiveness to the pleasures of the
palate, and tried to heighten them by extraordinary stimulants. A
friend tells us that he once saw Keats covering his tongue with cayenne
pepper, that he might enjoy the delicious sensation of a draught of
cold claret after it. "Talking of pleasure," he says himself in one
of his letters, "this moment I was writing with one hand and with the
other holding to my mouth a nectarine." It is therefore not surprising
that imagery drawn from the domain of the sense of taste is of frequent
occurrence in Keats's poetry. In his deservedly famous _Ode to
Melancholy_ we are told that this goddess has her sovran shrine in the
very temple of Delight--
"Though seen of none save him _whose strenuous tongue_
_Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine!_"
And in one of his last sonnets he characteristically mentions "the
palate of my mind losing its gust" as an indication of approaching
death.
Naturally the senses of hearing and sight provided him with a much
greater proportion of his imagery than the inferior, less noble senses.
He had a musician's love of music and a painter's eye for variations
of light and colour. And for all the different kinds of sound and
smell and taste and sensations of touch, he possessed a store of words
which any of the greatest poets might have envied. In short, he was by
nature endowed with qualities which in combination, and in their full
development, constituted supreme capacity to perceive and to reproduce
all the beauty of nature.
To be able to reproduce it was from the very beginning his dream;
and the man who affirmed that, except in the matter of art, he had
no "opinions," expressed enthusiastic approval of the revolution of
opinion in regard to the artificial, so-called classical, poetry of
the eighteenth century, which had been brought about by Wordsworth
and Coleridge. Spenser was Keats's idol, the classic poets were his
aversion. In his poem, _Sleep and Poetry_, he has embodied an artistic
confession of faith in language which could not well be more violent.
After describing the old poetic triumphs of England, he exclaims:
"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories; with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse
And thought it Pegasus. Ah! Dismal-soul'd!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd
Its gathering waves; ye felt it not. The blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer night collected still to make
The morning precious; Beauty was awake!
Why were _ye_ not awake? . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . No, they went about.
Holding a poor decrepit standard out,
Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large,
The name of one Boileau!"
Long before the French assault upon this ancient, honoured name, Keats
blows the war-trumpet! Théophile Gautier himself does not treat it with
greater contempt.
It was probably the above passage, the energetic style of which reminds
one of that picture of Kaulbach's in Munich, in which the artist of
the rococo period is painted asleep with the lay-figure in his arms,
which gave occasion to Byron's repeated thrusts at Keats as the
traducer of Pope. For Keats never published a line against Pope; and
when Countess Guiccioli, in her naïve work on Byron, refers to attacks
which infuriated her lover, she is only repeating vague remarks she has
heard. It is, however, highly probable that Keats included Pope among
those whom he reproached with being deaf to the music of the waves and
the winds, and with sleeping whilst the morning unfolded its beauties.
He himself was not of that company. If we examine the distinctive
individuality of Keats's genius, we find its determining element to be
the all-embracing sensuousness already alluded to. Read this stanza of
the _Ode to a Nightingale_:--
"O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim."