One of the things that surprized and bewildered old Colonel Newcome
when he gathered his boy’s friends around the mahogany tree in the
dull, respectable dining-room at 12 Fitzroy Square, was to hear George
Warrington declare, between huge puffs of tobacco smoke, “that young
Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael.”
At this Charles Honeyman sagely nodded his ambrosial head, while Clive
Newcome assented with sparkling eyes. But to the Colonel, sitting kindly
grave and silent at the head of the table, and recalling (somewhat
dimly) the bewigged and powdered poetry of the age of Queen Anne, such a
critical sentiment seemed radical and revolutionary, almost ungentlemanly.
How astonished he would have been sixty years later if he had taken up
Mr. Sidney Colvin’s _Life of Keats_, in the “English Men of Letters
Series,” and read in the concluding chapter the deliberate and
remarkable judgment that “by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he
was the most Shakespearean spirit that has lived since Shakespeare”!
In truth, from the beginning the poetry of Keats has been visited too
much by thunder-storms of praise. It was the indiscriminate enthusiasm
of his friends that drew out the equally indiscriminate ridicule of his
enemies. It was the premature salutation offered to him as a supreme
master of the most difficult of all arts that gave point and sting to
the criticism of evident defects in his work. _The Examiner_ hailed
him, before his first volume had been printed, as one who was destined
to revive the early vigour of English poetry. _Blackwood’s Magazine_
retorted by quoting his feeblest lines and calling him “Johnny Keats.”
The suspicion of log-rolling led to its usual result in a volley of
stone-throwing.
Happily, the ultimate fame and influence of a true poet are not
determined by the partizan conflicts which are waged about his name.
He may suffer some personal loss by having to breathe, at times, a
perturbed atmosphere of mingled flattery and abuse instead of the still
air of delightful studies. He may be robbed of some days of a life
already far too short, by the pestilent noise and confusion arising from
that scramble for notoriety which is often unduly honoured with the
name of “literary activity.” And there are some men whose days of real
inspiration are so few, and whose poetic gift is so slender, that this
loss proves fatal to them. They are completely carried away and absorbed
by the speculations and strifes of the market-place. They spend their
time in the intrigues of rival poetic enterprises, and learn to regard
current quotations in the trade journals as the only standard of value.
Minor poets at the outset, they are tempted to risk their little all on
the stock exchange of literature, and, losing their last title to the
noun, retire to bankruptcy on the adjective.
But Keats did not belong to this frail and foolish race. His lot was cast
in a world of petty conflict and ungenerous rivalry, but he was not of
that world. It hurt him a little, but it did not ruin him. His spiritual
capital was too large, and he regarded it as too sacred to be imperilled
by vain speculations. He had in Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and
Chapman, Milton and Petrarch, older and wiser friends than Leigh Hunt.
For him
“The blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!”
He perceived, by that light which comes only to high-souled and
noble-hearted poets,
“The great end
Of poesy, that it should be a friend
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man.”
To that end he gave the best that he had to give, freely, generously,
joyously pouring himself into the ministry of his art. He did not dream
for a moment that the gift was perfect. Flattery could not blind him
to the limitations and defects of his early work. He was his own best
and clearest critic. But he knew that so far as it went his poetic
inspiration was true. He had faithfully followed the light of a pure
and elevating joy in the opulent, manifold beauty of nature and in the
eloquent significance of old-world legends, and he believed that it
had already led him to a place among the poets whose verse would bring
delight, in far-off years, to the sons and daughters of mankind. He
believed also that if he kept alive his faith in the truth of beauty and
the beauty of truth it would lead him on yet further, into a nobler life
and closer to those immortal bards whose
“Souls still speak
To mortals of their little week;
Of their sorrows and delights;
Of their passions and their spites;
Of their glory and their shame;
What doth strengthen and what maim.”
He expressed this faith very clearly in the early and uneven poem called
“Sleep and Poetry,” in a passage which begins
“Oh, for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy! so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.”
And then, ere four years had followed that brave wish, his voice fell
silent under a wasting agony of pain and love, and the daisies were
growing upon his Roman grave.
The pathos of his frustrated hope, his early death, has sometimes
blinded men a little, it seems to me, to the real significance of his
work and the true quality of his influence in poetry. He has been
lamented in the golden verse of Shelley’s “Adonaïs,” and in the prose
of a hundred writers who have shared Shelley’s error without partaking
of his genius, as the loveliest innocent ever martyred by the cruelty
of hostile critics. But, in fact, the vituperations of Gifford and his
crew were no more responsible for the death of Keats, than the stings
of insects are for the death of a man who has perished of hunger on the
coast of Labrador. They added to his sufferings, no doubt, but they did
not take away his life. Keats had far too much virtue in the old Roman
sense—far too much courage, to be killed by a criticism. He died of
consumption, as he clearly and sadly knew that he was fated to do when he
first saw the drop of arterial blood upon his pillow.
Nor is it just, although it may seem generous, to estimate his fame
chiefly by the anticipation of what he might have accomplished if he
had lived longer; to praise him for his promise at the expense of his
performance; and to rest his claim to a place among the English poets
upon an uncertain prophecy of rivalry with Shakespeare. I find a far
sounder note in Lowell’s manly essay, when he says: “No doubt there is
something tropical and of strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but
it _was_ maturity nevertheless.” I hear the accent of a wiser and saner
criticism in the sonnet of one of our American poets:
“Touch not with dark regret his perfect fame,
Sighing, ‘Had he but lived he had done so’;
Or, ‘Were his heart not eaten out with woe
John Keats had won a prouder, mightier name!’
Take him for what he was and did—nor blame
Blind fate for all he suffered. Thou shouldst know
Souls such as his escape no mortal blow—
No agony of joy, or sorrow, or shame.”
“Take him for what he was and did”—that should be the key-note of our
thought of Keats as a poet. The exquisite harmony of his actual work
with his actual character; the truth of what he wrote to what his young
heart saw and felt and enjoyed; the simplicity of his very exuberance of
ornament, and the naturalness of his artifice; the sincerity of his love
of beauty and the beauty of his sincerity—these are the qualities which
give an individual and lasting charm to his poetry, and make his gift to
the world complete in itself and very precious, although,—or perhaps we
should even say because,—it was unfinished.
Youth itself is imperfect: it is impulsive, visionary, and unrestrained;
full of tremulous delight in its sensations, but not yet thoroughly awake
to the deeper meanings of the world; avid of novelty and mystery, but not
yet fully capable of hearing or interpreting the still, small voice of
divine significance which breathes from the simple and familiar elements
of life.
Yet youth has its own completeness as a season of man’s existence. It is
justified and indispensable. Alfred de Musset’s
“We old men born yesterday”
are simply monstrous. The poetry which expresses and represents youth,
the poetry of sensation and sentiment, has its own place in the
literature of the world. This is the order to which the poetry of Keats
belongs.
He is not a feminine poet, as Mr. Coventry Patmore calls him, any more
than Theocritus or Tennyson is feminine; for the quality of extreme
sensitiveness to outward beauty is not a mark of femininity. It is found
in men more often and more clearly than in women. But it is always most
keen and joyous and overmastering in the morning of the soul.
Keats is not a virile poet, like Dante or Shakespeare or Milton; that he
would have become one if he had lived is a happy and loving guess. He is
certainly not a member of the senile school of poetry, which celebrates
the impotent and morbid passions of decay, with a _café chantant_ for its
temple, and the smoke of cigarettes for incense, and cups of absinthe for
its libations, and for its goddess not the immortal Venus rising from the
sea, but the weary, painted, and decrepit Venus sinking into the gutter.
He is in the highest and best sense of the word a juvenile poet—“mature,”
as Lowell says, but mature, as genius always is, within the boundaries
and in the spirit of his own season of life. The very sadness of his
lovely odes, “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “To
Psyche,” is the pleasant melancholy of the springtime of the heart. “The
Eve of St. Agnes,” pure and passionate, surprizing us by its fine excess
of colour and melody, sensuous in every line, yet free from the slightest
taint of sensuality, is unforgettable and unsurpassable as the dream
of first love. The poetry of Keats, small in bulk and slight in body
as it seems at first sight to be, endures, and will endure, in English
literature, because it is the embodiment of _the spirit of immortal
youth_.
Here, I think, we touch its secret as an influence upon other poets. For
that it has been an influence,—in the older sense of the word, which
carries with it a reference to the guiding and controlling force supposed
to flow from the stars to the earth,—is beyond all doubt. The _History
of English Literature_, with which Taine amused us some fifty years ago,
nowhere displays its narrowness of vision more egregiously than in its
failure to take account of Gray, Collins, and Keats as fashioners of
English poetry. It does not mention Gray and Collins at all; the name
of Keats occurs only once, with a reference to “sickly or overflowing
imagination,” but to Byron nearly fifty pages are devoted. The American
critic, Stedman, showed a far broader and more intelligent understanding
of the subject when he said that “Wordsworth begot the mind, and Keats
the body, of the idyllic Victorian School.”
We can trace the influence of Keats not merely in the conscious or
unconscious imitations of his manner, like those which are so evident in
the early poems of Tennyson and Procter, in Hood’s _Plea of the Midsummer
Fairies_ and _Lycus the Centaur_, in Rossetti’s _Ballads and Sonnets_,
and William Morris’s _Earthly Paradise_, but also in the youthful spirit
of delight in the retelling of old tales of mythology and chivalry;
in the quickened sense of pleasure in the luxuriance and abundance of
natural beauty; in the freedom of overflowing cadences transmuting
ancient forms of verse into new and more flexible measures; in the large
liberty of imaginative diction, making all nature sympathize with
the joy and sorrow of man,—in brief, in many of the finest marks of a
renascence, a renewed youth, which characterize the poetry of the early
Victorian era.
I do not mean to say that Keats alone, or chiefly, was responsible for
this renascence. He never set up to lead a movement or to found a school.
His genius is not to be compared to that of a commanding artist like
Giotto or Leonardo or Michelangelo, but rather to that of a painter like
Botticelli, whose personal and expressive charm makes itself felt in the
work of many painters, who learned secrets of grace and beauty from him,
though they were not his professed disciples or followers.
Take for example Matthew Arnold. He called himself, and no doubt rightly,
a Wordsworthian. But it was not from Wordsworth that he caught the
strange and searching melody of “The Forsaken Merman,” or learned to
embroider the laments for “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar-Gypsy” with such
opulence of varied bloom as makes death itself seem lovely. It was from
John Keats. Or read the description of the tapestry on the castle walls
in “Tristram and Iseult.” How perfectly that repeats the spirit of
Keats’s descriptions in “The Eve of St. Agnes”! It is the poetry of the
picturesque.
Indeed, we shall fail to do justice to the influence of Keats unless
we recognize also that it has produced direct and distinct effects
in the art of painting. The English pre-Raphaelites owed much to his
inspiration. Holman Hunt found two of his earliest subjects for pictures
in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Pot of Basil.” Millais painted
“Lorenzo and Isabella,” and Rossetti “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” There
is an evident sympathy between the art of these painters, which insisted
that every detail in a picture is precious and should be painted with
truthful care for its beauty, and the poetry of Keats, which is filled,
and even overfilled, with minute and loving touches of exquisite
elaboration.
But it must be remembered that in poetry, as well as in painting, the
spirit of picturesqueness has its dangers. The details may be multiplied
until the original design is lost. The harmony and lucidity of a poem
may be destroyed by innumerable digressions and descriptions. In some of
his poems—in “Endymion” and in “Lamia”—Keats fell very deep into this
fault, and no one knew it better than himself. But when he was at his
best he had the power of adding a hundred delicate details to his central
vision, and making every touch heighten and enhance the general effect.
How wonderful in its unity is the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”! How completely
magical are the opening lines of “Hyperion”:
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery Noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud.”
How large and splendid is the imagery of the sonnet “On First Looking
into Chapman’s Homer”! And who that has any sense of poetry does not
recognize the voice of a young master in the two superb lines of the last
poem that Keats wrote?—the sonnet in which he speaks of the bright star
“watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”
The poets of America have not been slow to recognize the charm and power
of Keats. Holmes and Longfellow and Lowell paid homage to him in their
verse. Lanier inscribed to his memory a poem called “Clover.” Gilder
wrote two sonnets which celebrate his “perfect fame.” Robert Underwood
Johnson has a lovely lyric on “The Name Writ in Water.”
But I find an even deeper and larger tribute to his influence in the
features of resemblance to his manner and spirit which flash out here
and there, unexpectedly and unconsciously, in the poetry of our New
World. Emerson was so unlike Keats in his intellectual constitution as
to make all contact between them appear improbable, if not impossible.
Yet no one can read Emerson’s “May-Day,” and Keats’ exquisitely truthful
and imaginative lines on “Fancy,” one after the other, without feeling
that the two poems are very near of kin. Lowell’s “Legend of Brittany”
has caught, not only the measure, but also the tone and the diction of
“Isabella.” The famous introduction to “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” with
its often quoted line,
“What is so rare as a day in June?”
finds a parallel in the opening verses of “Sleep and Poetry”—
“What is more gentle than a wind in summer?”
Lowell’s “Endymion,” which he calls “a mystical comment on Titian’s
‘Sacred and Profane Love,’” is full of echoes from Keats, like this:
“My day began not till the twilight fell
And lo! in ether from heaven’s sweetest well
The new moon swam, divinely isolate
In maiden silence, she that makes my fate
Haply not knowing it, or only so
As I the secrets of my sheep may know.”
In Lanier’s rich and melodious “Hymns of the Marshes” there are
innumerable touches in the style of Keats; for example, his apostrophe to
the
“Reverend marsh, low-couched along the sea,
Old chemist, wrapped in alchemy,
Distilling silence,——”
or his praise of the
“Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,
Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves.”
One of the finest pieces of elegiac verse that have yet been produced in
America, George E. Woodberry’s poem called “The North Shore Watch,” has
many passages that recall the young poet who wrote
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
Indeed, we hear the very spirit of Endymion speaking in Woodberry’s lines:
“Beauty abides, nor suffers mortal change,
Eternal refuge of the orphaned mind.”
Father John B. Tabb, who had the exquisite art of the Greek epigram at
his command, in one of his delicately finished little poems, imagined
Sappho listening to the “Ode to a Nightingale”:
“Methinks when first the nightingale
Was mated to thy deathless song,
That Sappho with emotion pale
Amid the Olympian throng,
Again, as in the Lesbian grove,
Stood listening with lips apart,
To hear in thy melodious love
The pantings of her heart.”
Yes; the memory and influence of Keats endure, and will endure, because
his poetry expresses something in the heart that will not die so long
as there are young men and maidens to see and feel the beauty of the
world and the thrill of love. His poetry is complete, it is true, it is
justified, because it is the fitting utterance of one of those periods of
mental life which Keats himself has called “the human seasons.”
But its completeness and its truth depend upon its relation, in itself
and in the poet’s mind, to the larger world of poetry, the fuller life,
the rounded year of man. Nor was this forward look, this anticipation of
something better and greater yet to come, lacking in the youth of Keats.
It flashes out, again and again, from his letters, those outpourings
of his heart and mind, so full of boyish exuberance and manly vigour,
so rich in revelations of what this marvellous, beautiful, sensitive,
courageous little creature really was,—a great soul in the body of a lad.
It shows itself clearly and calmly in the remarkable preface in which he
criticizes his own “Endymion,” calling it “a feverish attempt, rather
than a deed accomplished.” “It is just,” he writes, “that this youngster
should die away: a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope that while
it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit
to live.” The same fine hope of a sane and manly youth is expressed in
his early verses entitled “Sleep and Poetry.” He has been speaking of
the first joys of his fancy, in the realm of Flora and old Pan: the
merry games and dances with white-handed nymphs: the ardent pursuit of
love, and the satisfied repose in the bosom of a leafy world. Then his
imagination goes on to something better.
“And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts: for lo! I see afar,
O’ersailing the blue cragginess, a car
And steeds with streamy manes—the charioteer
Looks out upon the winds with glorious fear:
And now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly
Along a huge cloud’s ridge: and now with sprightly
Wheel downward come they into fresher skies,
Tipt round with silver from the sun’s bright eyes.
... And there soon appear
Shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,
Passing along before a dusky space
Made by some mighty oaks: as they would chase
Some ever-fleeting music, on they sweep.
Lo! how they murmur, laugh, and smile, and weep:
Some with upholden hand and mouth severe;
Some with their faces muffled to the ear
Between their arms; some, clear in youthful bloom,
Go glad and smilingly across the gloom;
Some looking back, and some with upward gaze;
Yes, thousands in a thousand different ways
Flit onward—now a lovely wreath of girls
Dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls;
And now broad wings. Most awfully intent
The driver of those steeds is forward bent,
And seems to listen: O that I might know
All that he writes with such a hurrying glow.
The visions all are fled—the car is fled
Into the light of heaven, and in their stead
A sense of real things comes doubly strong,
And, like a muddy stream, would bear along
My soul to nothingness: but I will strive
Against all doubtings, and will keep alive
The thought of that same chariot, and the strange
Journey it went.”
How young-hearted is this vision, how full of thronging fancies and
half-apprehended mystic meanings! Yet how unmistakably it has the long,
high, forward look toward manhood, without which youth itself is not
rounded and complete!
After all, that look, that brave expectation, is vital in our picture of
Keats. It is one of the reasons why we love him. It is one of the things
which make his slender volume of poetry so companionable, even as an
ardent, dreamy man is doubly a good comrade when we feel in him the hope
of a strong man. We cannot truly understand the wonderful performance of
Keats without considering his promise; we cannot appreciate what he did
without remembering that it was only part of what he hoped to do.
He was not one of those who believe that the ultimate aim of poetry is
sensuous loveliness, and that there is no higher law above the law of
“art for art’s sake.” The poets of arrested development, the artificers
of mere melody and form, who say that art must always play and never
teach, the musicians who are content to remain forever
“The idle singers of an empty day,”
are not his true followers.
He held that “beauty is truth.” But he held also another article that has
been too often left out in the repetition of his poetic creed: he held
“truth, beauty,” and he hoped one day to give a clear, full utterance to
that higher, holier vision. Perhaps he has, but not to mortal ears.