particles, for by this time he had been reading Shakespeare and
Milton, and knew a line of poetry when he saw it,[8] and, like the
man in the parable, he did not hesitate. He knew what he wanted. He
would sell all that he had and buy that field. “I begin,” he said, in
one of the earliest of his extant letters,--“I begin to fix my eye
upon one horizon.” He would be a poet, because he must. He would not
be a surgeon, because he must not. He had done well in his studies,
we are told, and was in good repute at the hospital, whither by this
time he had gone; but a voice was speaking within him, and there was
never an hour but he heard it. “The other day, during the lecture,” he
said, “there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop
of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon
and fairy-land.” “My last operation,” he tells another correspondent,
“was the opening of a man’s temporal artery. I did it with the utmost
nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my
dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.”
It was a bold stroke,--no prudent adviser would have borne him out in
it,--to forsake everything else to be a poet. But never was a luckier
one. He had but four or five years to live, and (a comfort indeed to
think of!) he did not waste them in making ready to earn a living he
was never to have. It was a plain case of losing one’s life to find it.
Only four or five years, but with what a zest he lived them! Misgivings
no doubt he had, enough and to spare. Now and then, to use his own
words, he was pretty well “down in the mouth.” “I have been in such a
state of mind,” he writes to Haydon, “as to read over my lines and hate
them. I am one that ‘gathers samphire, dreadful trade’--the Cliff of
Poesy towers above me.” He knew also the canker of pecuniary difficulty
(“like a nettle leaf or two in your bed,” his own expression is); and
then, when he was but beginning his work, there fell on him the stroke
of a mortal disease, recognized as such from almost the first moment.
But in spite of all, and through it all, what a fire he kept burning!
How gloriously happy he often was! He hungered and thirsted after
beauty, and he had the blessedness that rewards such a craving. For
blessedness (and that is the best of it) consists perfectly with a low
estate and all manner of outward misfortune. It can do without gold,
and even without health. As for resting in comforts and toys, easiness
and fine clothes, a great aim, if it does nothing else for a man, will
at least save him from that pitch of vulgarity. A great aim is of
itself a great part of the true riches. As Keats said, having found it
out early, “our prime objects are a refuge as well as a passion.”
Such delight as the right men must always take in some of his
letters!--especially, perhaps, some of the earlier ones, written in the
period of his first fervors as a reader. He had never been a bookish
boy (and no very serious harm done, it may be--for himself, at any
rate, he was no believer in precocity), and now, when he fell all at
once upon the great poets, it was as if he had been born again. What a
relish he has! How he smacks his lips over a line of Shakespeare,--who
“has left nothing to say about nothing or anything.” Here was a poet
who read the works of poets. Possibly if he had lived to be old,
he might have changed his practice in this regard, finding his own
works sufficient, as other elderly poets have before now been charged
with doing. As it is, his raptures make one think again and again of
Hazlitt’s outburst, “The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading,
while we are young;” which, if it does not hit the white, is at least
well within the outer circle.[9]
His method was unblushingly epicurean. Like a bee in a field of
flowers, he was always stopping to suck the sweetness of a line.
For that very purpose he was there. The happy boy! He had found out
what books were made for. For a second time, nay, rather, for the
first time, he had learned to read. A great discovery!--old as the
hills and new as the morning. But new or old, a great discovery.
For an intellectual youth there is none to match it, as there is no
schoolmaster to teach it. And with what a gusto he describes the
process! You would think he had found Aladdin’s lamp. His fancy cannot
see it from sides enough; as a child dances about a new toy, and can
never be done with looking.
“I had an idea,” he says, “that a man might pass a very pleasant life
in this manner. Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full
poesy or distilled prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it,
and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and
dream upon it: until it becomes stale. But when will it do so? Never.
When man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect, any one grand
and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all ‘the
two-and-thirty palaces.’ How happy is such a voyage of conception, what
delicious diligent indolence! A doze upon a sofa does not hinder it,
and a nap upon clover engenders ethereal finger-pointings; the prattle
of a child gives it wings, and the converse of middle-age a strength to
beat them; a strain of music conducts to ‘an odd angle of the Isle,’
and when the leaves whisper, it puts a girdle round the earth.”
This he calls a “sparing touch of noble books.” It is too much to
be expected, of course, that readers in general, whose idea of
intellectual delights is of a new novel every other day, should be
contented with a method so parsimonious. If this is what you call
epicureanism, they might say, pray count us among the Stoics. And for
all that, as applied to Keats’s own practice, “epicurean” was the right
word.
What he would have been at forty or fifty, there is no telling. For
the present he was not much concerned with whole poems as works of
great constructive art. He was of an age to be (what Edward FitzGerald
is said to have always been) “more of a connoisseur than a critic,
a taster of fragrant essences, an inhaler of subtle aromas.” He
loved beauty as at that stage he mostly found it (as the bee finds
sweetness), in the individual flower, thinking far more of that than of
the plant’s symmetrical structure, or the composition of the landscape.
In this particular he resembled Lamb, who, if he called himself “an
author by fits,” was no less truly a reader by fits. “I can vehemently
applaud,” he said with characteristic, half-true self-depreciation, “or
perversely stickle, at _parts_; but I cannot grasp at a whole.”
It was an admission of defect--he meant it so; but it is no slander
to say that lovers of poetry are in general of substantially the same
mind. Their taste is selective. They love short poems, or the beauties
of long ones. Many of them have confessed as much, and many others
could do no less were they called into the box. Lowell, whose standing
as a critic nobody questions, though some may be bold enough, or
“perverse” enough, now the man is dead, to rule him out of the class
of poets, bids us remember how few long poems will bear consecutive
reading. “For my part,” he says, “I know of but one,--the ‘Odyssey.’”
And Samuel Johnson, who, great critic or not, had “a good deal of
literature,” told Boswell, “that from his earliest years he loved to
read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end.”
The boy Keats, then, was not so utterly out of the way, at all events
he was not without the support of good company, in taking for his own
the motto of Ariel,--
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I.”
And a good time he had of it; reading and idling, reading and writing,
not too much in a hurry, no busier than a bee, following his bent,
finding Shakespeare and the “Paradise Lost” every day greater wonders
to him; looking upon fine phrases like a lover; more and more convinced
that “fine writing, next to fine doing, is the top thing in the world.”
“Next to fine doing,” he said,--and meant it; for his life and his
own doings chimed with the word. Nor does the word, even as a verbal
confession of faith, stand alone. On the testimony of his friends,
and on the testimony of his letters, Keats was no selfish weakling,
no puny luxuriator in his own emotions, no mere hectic taster and
maker of phrases. He worshiped beauty; he was born a poet, and rightly
enough he followed his genius; but he was born also affectionate and
generous; in his nature there was much of that glorious something which
we call chivalry; and he knew as well as all the preachers could tell
him that in any true assize high conduct must always bear away the
palm. No more than the apostle of old had he any “poor vanity that
works of genius were the first things. No! for that sort of probity and
disinterestedness which such men as Bailey possess does hold and grasp
the tiptop of any spiritual honors that can be paid to anything in this
world.” Truly said, of this world or any other; for many things may be
great, but the greatest of all is charity.
It might almost have been expected that genius so sudden in its
flowering, so amazingly exceptional, as Keats’s, one of the wonders
of human history, would be attended by some strain of disease, some
taint, more or less pronounced, of mental or moral unsoundness. It is
the more to be rejoiced in, therefore, that his nature, mental, moral,
and physical (except for the tuberculosis which he doubtless contracted
from his mother, over whom, in her last illness, he, a boy of fifteen,
watched with all a son’s and daughter’s faithfulness), was to all
appearance eminently sane and normal. As a boy, undersized though he
was, he would always be fighting (which is normal, surely), and as a
man he showed habitually, with one distressing exception, a manly,
self-respecting spirit.
The single exception has to do with his passion for Fanny Brawne,
concerning which it may be enough to say that when a man is head over
ears in love with a pretty girl, or a girl whom he thinks pretty,
and is by her, or by some perversity of Fate, put off, he is _never_
sane. The letters that Keats wrote to his inamorata may have been, as
his friendly critic says, “the letters of a surgeon’s apprentice.”
For ourselves we will take the critic’s word for it. We have never
read them (in our opinion it was indecent or worse to print them),
nor should we feel sure of our ability to tell in what respect the
love letters of a young doctor might be expected to differ from those
of a young schoolmaster or a young duke of the realm. To be crazy
is to be crazy. Enough to say that they were not the letters of the
poet Keats. Alas, alas! What a tragedy is human life! What a weak and
silly thing is the human heart! A man sees a girl’s face, and behold,
he is no longer a reasonable being; his peace of mind is gone, his
work hindered, his day shortened, his fame tarnished, his name a
laughing-stock. It is that which hath been, and it is that which shall
be. As was said of old, so one may feel like saying still, “A man hath
no preëminence above a beast; for all is vanity.”
And for all that, considering Keats’s genius, its early development and
its miraculous quality, and comparing him with men of his own kind,
we must account him on the whole a man surprisingly well-balanced
and sane. Call the roll of his famous poetic contemporaries, and few
of them will be found saner. Good Archdeacon Bailey, who had abundant
opportunity to know, said that common sense was “a conspicuous part of
his character.” Of how many of the others would it ever have occurred
to any one to say the like?
He seems not to have been either crotchety or boastful, though he
believed in aiming high, and made no scruple of professing, in so many
words, that he “would rather fail than not be among the greatest.”
Born fighter that he was, born, too, of the _genus irritabile vatum_
(“when I have any little vexation,” he once wrote, with Lamb-like
exaggeration, “it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles”),
he loved peace, and in the Biblical phrase pursued it, for which Mr.
Arnold, it is pleasant to see, awards him full credit; but he was not
to be trodden upon, he held the popular judgment of poetry in something
like contempt (as all poets do, it is to be presumed), and he would
not be crowded too hard even by the chiefest of his brethren. The
most thoroughgoing Wordsworthian must read with amusement, if not with
temptations to applause, the few clever sentences in which the youthful
aspirant for poetic honors, in one of his letters, hits off some of
that great man’s foibles. He has no thought of denying Wordsworth’s
grandeur, he declares; but not for the sake of a few fine imaginative
or domestic passages will he “be bullied into a certain philosophy
engendered in the whims of an egoist.” “Every man,” he goes on, “has
his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them
till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself.... We hate poetry
that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems
to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and
unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle
it or amaze it with itself--but with its subject. How beautiful are the
retired flowers!--how would they lose their beauty were they to throng
into the highway, crying out, ‘Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me,
I am a primrose!’”
To another correspondent he expresses a fear that Wordsworth has gone
away from town “rather huffed” about something or other, the nature of
which does not precisely appear; but adds that he ought not to expect
but that every man of worth should be “as proud as himself;” a remark
concerning which we are bound to acknowledge, loyal Wordsworthians as
within reason we esteem ourselves, that we rather like the sound of it.
An artist cannot well be without some of the defects--or what more
steady-going, lower-flying people are wont to account the defects--that
go naturally, if not of necessity, with the artistic temperament.
For one thing, he must work more or less by fits and starts. Poems
are not to be made--unless it be by a Southey--as a shoemaker makes
shoes, so many strokes to the minute. It is a wonder how much Keats
accomplished in his few years, and this even if we take no reckoning
of his experiments and failures; but there were times, of course, when
he could do nothing, and then, equally of course, he could invent the
prettiest kind of excuses for himself, excuses that were themselves
hardly less than works of genius. At such a minute he would say, for
instance, “Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness
of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a
Greek vase.” Or, if the beauty of the morning operated upon a sense
of idleness, he would declare it “more noble to sit like Jove than to
fly like Mercury.” “Let us open our leaves like a flower,” he would
say, “and be passive and receptive; budding patiently under the eye
of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favors us
with a visit.... I have not read any books--the Morning said I was
right--I had no idea but of the Morning, and the Thrush said I was
right--seeming to say,--
“‘O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth,
O fret not after knowledge--I have none,
And yet the Evening listens.’”
Not that he was ever foolish enough to despise knowledge, or trust
overmuch to impulses “from a vernal wood,” as if a poet could subsist
on inspiration. A few weeks after the date of the letter just quoted,
a letter which he himself qualified before he was done as “a mere
sophistication,” we find him renouncing a proposed pleasure trip. There
is but one thing to prevent his going, he tells his correspondent. “I
know nothing,” he says, “I have read nothing, and I mean to follow
Solomon’s directions, ‘Get learning, get understanding.’ I find earlier
days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but
continual drinking of knowledge.... There is but one way for me. The
road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.”
But as we counted it fortunate that he had already had the courage
to forsake everything else for the pursuit of poetry, so we must be
thankful that now, feeling his educational deficiencies, he did not do
what nine professors out of ten, had he had the ill-fortune to consult
them, would--very properly, no doubt--have advised him to do; that is
to say, cease production for the time being and devote himself to
study. That would have been a loss irreparable. His sun was so soon to
go down! A mercy it was that he made hay while it shone.
For much of the hay that he made was as good as the sun ever shone on.
That it was a short season’s crop may pass unsaid. It is not within
the possibilities of human nature, however miraculously endowed, to
be mature at twenty-five. Enough, surely, if at that age a man has
done a good bit of work of the rarest, divinest quality, work that,
within its range and scope, the greatest and ripest genius could never
dream of bettering. That is Keats’s glory. So much as that one need
not be either a poet or a critic to affirm; the critics and poets have
agreed to affirm it for us. If Tennyson said, as reported, that “Keats,
with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the
greatest of us all; there is something magical and of the innermost
soul of poetry in almost everything which he wrote;” and if Arnold put
him, in two words, “with Shakespeare,” why, then, for the present, at
least, the case is judged, and we who are neither poets nor critics,
but only tasters and relishers, can have no call to argue it.
So much being admitted, however, it is not to be assumed that here is
an end of things. One may still like to talk a little. Hearing him
praised, one may still say,--
“‘’Tis so, ’tis true,’
And to the most of praise add something more.”
Life would be a dull affair for the smaller men if comment and side
remark were forever debarred as soon as the bigwigs had settled the
main contention.
Leaving on one side, then, the odes and other pieces which by
universal consent are perfect, or as nearly so as consists with human
frailty,[10] let us content ourselves with intimating the profit which
readers of a proper youthfulness and other needful, not over-critical,
qualifications may derive from some of the other and longer poems,
which by the same common consent, as well as by the acknowledgment of
the man who wrote them, are in every sense imperfect.
Indeed, there are few things in Keats’s letters more interesting in
themselves, or more characteristic of their author, than his apologies
for these same longer pieces, especially for “Endymion.”
“Why endeavor after a long poem?” he has heard some one ask. And this
is his answer:--
“Do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in,
where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous
that many are forgotten and found new in a second reading; which may be
food for a week’s stroll in the summer? Do not they like this better
than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes downstairs?
a morning work at most.”
Evidently his “lovers of poetry” are of the tribe of those whose
practice we have heard him describing as “a sparing touch of noble
books;” lovers rather than critics or students; browsers and
ruminators; not determined upon devouring whole forests, or even entire
trees, but content with getting here and there the goodness of a leaf
or the sweetness of a blossom. He foresees that “Endymion” is doomed
to be in one way a failure; he knows that his mind at present, in its
nonage, is “like a pack of scattered cards.” The words are his own.
Yet he confides that there will be poetry in his long poem, and that
the right spirits will find it. And so they do. He has touched their
disposition to a nicety. They love to “wander in it.” They may never
have tried very hard to follow the story; they may not care to read
any special student’s supposed discoveries as to just how this part of
the action is related to that or the other. But they like the poetry.
They never read the poem, or read _in_ it, without finding some. They
do not wish it shorter, nor are they conscious of any very sharp regret
that it is not better. Wisely or unwisely, they accept it as it is, and
are thankful that the young man wrote it, and, having written it, took
nobody’s advice against printing it. If they read _in_ it, as we say,
why, that is mostly what they do with the “Fairy Queen” and “Paradise
Lost.” It may be the fault of the poem, or it may be the fault of the
reader; or it may be nobody’s fault.
In the case of “Endymion,” indeed, it requires no exceptional acumen to
perceive that the work hangs feebly together, that its construction,
its architectonic, if that be the word, is defective past all mending.
“Utterly incoherent,” is Mr. Arnold’s dictum, and for ourselves we have
no inclination to dispute him. Our fault or the poet’s, we have always
found it so. But like Mr. Arnold, we feel the breath of genius blowing
through it, and therefore, as we say, we find in it not infrequently an
hour of good reading.
Such reading, it has sometimes seemed to us (and the poet’s apology,
now we think of it, comes to much the same thing), is like walking in
a forest, where we cannot see the wood for the trees. All about us
they stand, dwindling away and away as we look, till, whichever way
we turn, there is no looking farther. Above our heads is a canopy of
interlacing branches,--
“overwove
By many a summer’s silent fingering,”--
through which, densely as it is woven, steals here and there a sunbeam
to play upon the carpet underneath. In such a place we know little and
care less whither we may be going. Standing still is a good progress.
Not a step but something offers itself,--a flower, a bed of moss, a
trailing, berry-covered vine, a tuft of ferns. A brook talks to us,
a bird sings to us, a vista invites us, a leafy spray, as we brush
against it, whispers of beauty and the summer. These, and trifles like
these, are what we could specify. All of them together do not make the
forest, yet the least of them is not only part of the forest, but is
what it is because of the forest. The soul of the forest speaks through
it. How incomparably significant becomes of a sudden every common
sound. If two branches but rub together, we must stop and listen. If
a thrush whistles, we could stand forever to hear it. Not a sight or
sound of them all would mean the same, or anything like the same, if
it were encountered in the open and by itself. It is the old lesson.
The sparrow’s note must come from the alder bough, the shell must be
seen on the beach with the tide rippling over it.
And the magical verse, if it is to exercise its full charm, must be
found, not in a book of extracts, nor as a fragment, but at home in its
native surroundings. It must have been born in the poem, and we must
discover it there! The poem which has made the verse must also have put
us into the mood to receive it. How often have all readers found this
true by its opposite. How often a line quoted is a line from which the
glory seems to have departed, a line _dépaysé!_--as the tree, the bird,
the leaf, if we see them in the open country and in the mood of the
open country, can never be the same as if we saw them in the forest and
in the mood which the forest induces.
We think, then, that the poet’s plea is sound; that his long poem,
whatever its shortcomings, is abundantly justified as a good place
to wander about in; that there is poetry (one of the rare things of
the world) in it which never would have been produced elsewhere, and
which, now that it has been produced, can only be appreciated when
read, as scientific men say, _in situ_. To transfer its beauties to a
commonplace book would be like putting roses into a herbarium, or, more
justly, perhaps, like setting a seashell on a parlor mantel.
In the long poem, too, as in the forest, though we were near forgetting
to speak of it, there is always the chance of finding something
unexpected; a line, an epithet, an image, that seems to have come into
being since we were last here. Every perusal is thus a kind of voyage
of discovery. It is as if the season had changed. New flowers have
blossomed, new birds have come from the South, and the wood is a new
place.