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Footnote 36:
Prefixed to the Selection from Keats in Ward’s _English Poets_, vol.
iv. 1880.
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Poetry, according to Milton’s famous saying, should be “simple,
sensuous, impassioned.” No one can question the eminency, in Keat’s
poetry, of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly
and enchantingly sensuous; the question with some people will be,
whether he is anything else. Many things may be brought forward which
seem to show him as under the fascination and sole dominion of sense,
and desiring nothing better. There is the exclamation in one of his
letters: “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!” There is
the thesis, in another, “that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty
overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all
consideration.” There is Haydon’s story of him, how “he once covered his
tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order
to appreciate the delicious coldness of claret in all its glory—his own
expression.” One is not much surprised when Haydon further tells us, of
the hero of such a story, that once for six weeks together he was hardly
ever sober. “He had no decision of character,” Haydon adds; “no object
upon which to direct his great powers.”
Character and self-control, the _virtus verusque labor_ so necessary for
every kind of greatness, and for the great artist, too, indispensable,
appear to be wanting, certainly, to this Keats of Haydon’s portraiture.
They are wanting also to the Keats of the _Letters to Fanny Brawne_.
These letters make as unpleasing an impression as Haydon’s anecdotes.
The editor of Haydon’s journals could not well omit what Haydon said of
his friend, but for the publication of the _Letters to Fanny Brawne_ I
can see no good reason whatever. Their publication appears to me, I
confess, inexcusable; they ought never to have been published. But
published they are, and we have to take notice of them. Letters written
when Keats was near his end, under the throttling and unmanning grasp of
mortal disease, we will not judge. But here is a letter written some
months before he was taken ill. It is printed just as Keats wrote it.
“You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as
though I was dissolving—I should be exquisitely miserable without the
hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far
from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will
it? I have no limit now to my love.... Your note came in just here. I
cannot be happier away from you. ’Tis richer than an Argosy of
Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that
Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have shuddered at it. I shudder
no more—I could be martyred for my Religion—Love is my religion—I
could die for that. I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are
its only tenet. You have ravished me away by a Power I cannot resist;
and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you
I have endeavoured often ‘to reason against the reasons of my Love.’ I
can do that no more—the pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I
cannot breathe without you.”
A man who writes love-letters in this strain is probably predestined,
one may observe, to misfortune in his love-affairs; but that is nothing.
The complete enervation of the writer is the real point for remark. We
have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all
reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of the man who
“is passion’s slave.” Nay, we have them in such wise that one is tempted
to speak even as _Blackwood_ or the _Quarterly_ were in the old days
wont to speak; one is tempted to say that Keats’s love-letter is the
love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice. It has in its relaxed
self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill
brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some
constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the
sort of love-letter of a surgeon’s apprentice which one might hear read
out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. The sensuous
man speaks in it, and the sensuous man of a badly bred and badly trained
sort. That many who are themselves also badly bred and badly trained
should enjoy it, and should even think it a beautiful and characteristic
production of him whom they call their “lovely and beloved Keats,” does
not make it better. These are the admirers whose pawing and fondness
does not good but harm to the fame of Keats; who concentrate attention
upon what in him is least wholesome and most questionable; who worship
him, and would have the world worship him too, as the poet of
‘Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair,
Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast.’
This sensuous strain Keats had, and a man of his poetic powers could
not, whatever his strain, but show his talent in it. But he has
something more, and something better. We who believe Keats to have been
by his promise, at any rate, if not fully by his performance, one of the
very greatest of English poets, and who believe also that a merely
sensuous man cannot either by promise or by performance be a very great
poet, because poetry interprets life, and so large and noble a part of
life is outside of such a man’s ken,—we cannot but look for signs in him
of something more than sensuousness, for signs of character and virtue.
And indeed the elements of high character Keats undoubtedly has, and the
effort to develop them; the effort is frustrated and cut short by
misfortune, and disease, and time, but for the due understanding of
Keats’s worth the recognition of this effort, and of the elements on
which it worked, is necessary.
Lord Houghton, who praises very discriminatingly the poetry of Keats,
has on his character also a remark full of discrimination. He says: “The
faults of Keats’s disposition were precisely the contrary of those
attributed to him by common opinion.” And he gives a letter written
after the death of Keats by his brother George, in which the writer,
speaking of the fantastic _Johnny Keats_ invented for common opinion by
Lord Byron and by the reviewers, declares indignantly: “John was the
very soul of manliness and courage, and as much like the Holy Ghost as
_Johnny Keats_.” It is important to note this testimony, and to look
well for whatever illustrates and confirms it.
Great weight is laid by Lord Houghton on such a direct profession of
faith as the following: “That sort of probity and disinterestedness,”
Keats writes to his brothers, “which such men as Bailey possess, does
hold and grasp the tip-top of any spiritual honors that can be paid to
anything in this world.” Lord Houghton says that “never have words more
effectively expressed the conviction of the superiority of virtue above
beauty than those.” But merely to make a profession of faith of the kind
here made by Keats is not difficult; what we should rather look for is
some evidence of the instinct for character, for virtue, passing into
man’s life, passing into his work.
Signs of virtue, in the true and large sense of the word, the instinct
for virtue passing into the life of Keats and strengthening it, I find
in the admirable wisdom and temper of what he says to his friend Bailey
on the occasion of a quarrel between Reynolds and Haydon:—
“Things have happened lately of great perplexity; you must have heard
of them; Reynolds and Haydon retorting and recriminating, and parting
forever. The same thing has happened between Haydon and Hunt. It is
unfortunate; men should bear with each other; there lives not the man
who may not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest side. The
best of men have but a portion of good in them.... The sure way,
Bailey, is first to know a man’s faults, and then be passive. If,
after that, he insensibly draws you towards him, then you have no
power to break the link. Before I felt interested in either Reynolds
or Haydon, I was well read in their faults; yet, knowing them, I have
been cementing gradually with both. I have an affection for them both,
for reasons almost opposite; and to both must I of necessity cling,
supported always by the hope that when a little time, a few years,
shall have tried me more fully in their esteem, I may be able to bring
them together.”
Butler has well said that “endeavoring to enforce upon our own minds a
practical sense of virtue, or to beget in others that practical sense of
it which a man really has himself, is a virtuous _act_.” And such an
“endeavoring” is that of Keats in those words written to Bailey. It is
more than mere words; so justly thought and so discreetly urged as it
is, it rises to the height of a virtuous _act_. It is proof of
character.
The same thing may be said of some words written to his friend Charles
Brown, whose kindness, willingly exerted whenever Keats chose to avail
himself of it, seemed to free him from any pressing necessity of earning
his own living. Keats felt that he must not allow this state of things
to continue. He determined to set himself to “fag on as others do” at
periodical literature, rather than to endanger his independence and his
self-respect; and he writes to Brown:—
“I had got into a habit of mind of looking towards you as a help in
all difficulties. This very habit would be the parent of idleness and
difficulties. You will see it is a duty I owe to myself to break the
neck of it. I do nothing for my subsistence—make no exertion. At the
end of another year you shall applaud me, not for verses, but for
conduct.”
He had not, alas, another year of health before him when he announced
that wholesome resolve; it then wanted but six months of the day of his
fatal attack. But in the brief time allowed to him he did what he could
to keep his word.
What character, again, what strength and clearness of judgment, in his
criticism of his own productions, of the public, and of the “literary
circles!” His words after the severe reviews of _Endymion_ have often
been quoted; they cannot be quoted too often:—
“Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of
beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. My
own criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what
_Blackwood_ or the _Quarterly_ could possibly inflict; and also, when
I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my
own solitary reperception and ratification of what is fine. J. S. is
perfectly right in regard to the “slip-shod Endymion.” That it is so
is no fault of mine. No! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it
is as good as I had power to make it by myself.”
And again, as if he had foreseen certain of his admirers gushing over
him, and was resolved to disengage his responsibility:—
“I have done nothing, except for the amusement of a few people who
refine upon their feelings till anything in the un-understandable way
will go down with them. I have no cause to complain, because I am
certain anything really fine will in these days be felt. I have no
doubt that if I had written _Othello_ I should have been cheered. I
shall go on with patience.”
Young poets almost inevitably overrate what they call “the might of
poesy,” and its power over the world which now is. Keats is not a dupe
on this matter any more than he is a dupe about the merit of his own
performances:—
“I have no trust whatever in poetry. I don’t wonder at it; the marvel
is to me how people read so much of it.”
His attitude towards the public is that of a strong man, not of a
weakling avid of praise, and made to “be snuff’d out by an article”:—
“I shall ever consider the public as debtors to me for verses, not
myself to them for admiration, which can I do without.”
And again, in a passage where one may perhaps find fault with the
capital letters, but surely with nothing else:—
“I have not the slightest feel of humility towards the public or to
anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty,
and the Memory of great Men.... I would be subdued before my friends,
and thank them for subduing me; but among multitudes of men I have no
feel of stooping; I hate the idea of humility to them. I never wrote
one single line of poetry with the least shadow of thought about their
opinion. Forgive me for vexing you, but it eases me to tell you; I
could not live without the love of my friends: I would jump down Etna
for any great public good—but I hate a mawkish popularity. I cannot be
subdued before them. My glory would be to daunt and dazzle the
thousand jabberers about pictures and books.”
Against these artistic and literary “jabberers,” amongst whom Byron
fancied Keats, probably, to be always living, flattering them and
flattered by them, he has yet another outburst:—
“Just so much as I am humbled by the genius above my grasp, am I
exalted and look with hate and contempt upon the literary world. Who
could wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous, who
are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?”
And he loves Fanny Brawne the more, he tells her, because he believes
that she has liked him for his own sake and for nothing else. “I have
met with women who I really think would like to be married to a Poem and
to be given away by a Novel.”
There is a tone of too much bitterness and defiance in all this, a tone
which he with great propriety subdued and corrected when he wrote his
beautiful preface to _Endymion_. But the thing to be seized is, that
Keats had flint and iron in him, that he had character; that he was, as
his brother George says, “as much like the Holy Ghost as _Johnny
Keats_,”—as that imagined sensuous weakling, the delight of the literary
circles of Hampstead.
It is a pity that Byron, who so misconceived Keats, should never have
known how shrewdly Keats, on the other hand, had characterized _him_, as
“a fine thing” in the sphere of “the worldly, theatrical, and
pantomimical.” But indeed nothing is more remarkable in Keats than his
clear-sightedness, his lucidity; and lucidity is in itself akin to
character and to high and severe work. In spite, therefore, of his
overpowering feeling for beauty, in spite of his sensuousness, in spite
of his facility, in spite of his gift of expression, Keats could say
resolutely:—
“I know nothing, I have read nothing; and I mean to follow Solomon’s
directions: ‘Get learning, get understanding.’ There is but one way
for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will
pursue it.”
And of Milton, instead of resting in Milton’s incomparable phrases,
Keats could say, although indeed all the while “looking upon fine
phrases,” as he himself tells us, “like a lover”—
“Milton had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of
ease and pleasure, poetical luxury; and with that, it appears to me,
he would fain have been content, if he could, so doing, preserve his
self-respect and feeling of duty performed; but there was working in
him, as it were, that same sort of thing which operates in the great
world to the end of a prophecy’s being accomplished. Therefore he
devoted himself rather to the ardors than the pleasures of song,
solacing himself at intervals with cups of old wine.”
In his own poetry, too, Keats felt that place must be found for “the
ardors rather than the pleasures of song,” although he was aware that he
was not yet ripe for it—
“But, my flag is not unfurl’d
On the Admiral-staff, and to philosophize
I dare not yet.”
Even in his pursuit of “the pleasures of song,” however, there is that
stamp of high work which is akin to character, which is character
passing into intellectual production. “_The best sort of poetry_—that,”
he truly says, “is all I care for, all I live for.” It is curious to
observe how this severe addiction of his to the best sort of poetry
affects him with a certain coldness, as if the addiction had been to
mathematics, towards those prime objects of a sensuous and passionate
poet’s regard, love and women. He speaks of “the opinion I have formed
of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would
rather give a sugar-plum than my time.” He confesses “a tendency to
class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats—they never see
themselves dominant;” and he can understand how the unpopularity of his
poems may be in part due to “the offense which the ladies,” not
unnaturally “take at him” from this cause. Even to Fanny Brawne he can
write “a flint-worded letter,” when his “mind is heaped to the full”
with poetry:—
“I know the generality of women would hate me for this; that I should
have so unsoftened, so hard a mind as to forget them; forget the
brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own brain.... My
heart seems now made of iron—I could not write a proper answer to an
invitation to Idalia.”
The truth is that “the yearning passion for the Beautiful,” which was
with Keats, as he himself truly says, the master-passion, is not a
passion, of the sensuous or sentimental man, is not a passion of the
sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual
passion. It is “connected and made one,” as Keats declares that in his
case it was, “with the ambition of the intellect.” It is, as he again
says, “the mighty _abstract idea_ of Beauty in all things.” And in his
last days Keats wrote: “If I should die, I have left no immortal work
behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory; _but I have
loved the principle of beauty in all things_, and if I had had time I
would have made myself remembered.” He _has_ made himself remembered,
and remembered as no merely sensuous poet could be; and he has done it
by having “loved the principle of beauty in all things.”
For to see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth, and
Keats knew it. “What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth,” he
says in prose; and in immortal verse he has said the same thing—
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
No, it is not all; but it is true, deeply true, and we have deep need to
know it. And with beauty goes not only truth, joy goes with her also;
and this too Keats saw and said, as in the famous first line of his
_Endymion_ it stands written—
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
It is no small thing to have so loved the principle of beauty as to
perceive the necessary relation of beauty with truth, and of both with
joy. Keats was a great spirit, and counts for far more than many even of
his admirers suppose, because this just and high perception made itself
clear to him. Therefore a dignity and a glory shed gleams over his life,
and happiness, too, was not a stranger to it. “Nothing startles me
beyond the moment,” he says; “the setting sun will always set me to
rights, or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its
existence and pick about the gravel.” But he had terrible
bafflers,—consuming disease and early death. “I think,” he writes to
Reynolds, “If I had a free and healthy and lasting organization of
heart, and lungs as strong as an ox’s, so as to be able to bear unhurt
the shock of extreme thought and sensation without weariness, I could
pass my life very nearly alone, though it should last eighty years. But
I feel my body too weak to support me to the height; I am obliged
continually to check myself, and be nothing.” He had against him even
more than this; he had against him the blind power which we call
Fortune. “O that something fortunate,” he cries in the closing months of
his life, “had ever happened to me or my brothers!—then I might
hope,—but despair is forced upon me as a habit.” So baffled and so
sorely tried,—while laden, at the same time, with a mighty formative
thought requiring health, and many days, and favoring circumstances, for
its adequate manifestation,—what wonder if the achievement of Keats be
partial and incomplete?
Nevertheless, let and hindered as he was, and with a short term and
imperfect experience,—“young,” as he says of himself, “and writing at
random, straining after particles of light in the midst of a great
darkness, without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one
opinion,”—notwithstanding all this, by virtue of his feeling for beauty
and of his perception of the vital connection of beauty with truth,
Keats accomplished so much in poetry, that in one of the two great modes
by which poetry interprets, in the faculty of naturalistic
interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with
Shakespeare. “The tongue of Kean,” he says in an admirable criticism of
that great actor and of his enchanting elocution, “the tongue of Kean
must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them honeyless. There
is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice; in _Richard_, ‘Be stirring
with the lark tomorrow, gentle Norfolk!’ comes from him as through the
morning atmosphere towards which he yearns.” This magic, this
“indescribable _gusto_ in the voice,” Keats himself, too, exhibits in
his poetic expression. No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare,
has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his
perfection of loveliness. “I think,” he said humbly, “I shall be among
the English poets after my death.” He is; he is with Shakespeare.
For the second great half of poetic interpretation, for that faculty of
moral interpretation which is in Shakespeare, and is informed by him
with the same power of beauty as his naturalistic interpretation, Keats
was not ripe. For the architectonics of poetry, the faculty which
presides at the evolution of works like the _Agamemnon_ or _Lear_, he
was not ripe. His _Endymion_, as he himself well saw, is a failure, and
his _Hyperion_, fine things as it contains, is not a success. But in
shorter things, where the matured power of moral interpretation, and the
high architectonics which go with complete poetic development, are not
required, he is perfect. The poems which follow prove it,—prove it far
better by themselves than anything which can be said about them will
prove it. Therefore I have chiefly spoken here of the man, and of the
elements in him which explain the production of such work. Shakespearian
work it is; not imitative, indeed, of Shakespeare, but Shakespearian,
because its expression has that rounded perfection and felicity of
loveliness of which Shakespeare is the great master. To show such work
is to praise it. Let us now end by delighting ourselves with a fragment
of it, too broken to find a place among the pieces which follow, but far
too beautiful to be lost. It is a fragment of an ode for May-day. O
might I, he cries to May, O might I
“... thy smiles
Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles,
By bards who died content on pleasant sward,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan!
O, give me their old vigor, and unheard
Save of the quiet primrose, and the span
Of heaven, and few years,
Rounded by thee, my song should die away,
Content as theirs,
Rich in the simple worship of a day!”