It is well that there should be at least one poet of Beauty--of Beauty
alone--of Beauty and naught else. It is well that one should dare to
follow that terrible goddess even to the bitter end. That pitiless
marble altar has its victims, as the other Altars. The "white
implacable Aphrodite" cries aloud for blood--for the blood of our
dearest affections; for the blood of our most cherished hopes; for the
blood of our integrity and faith; for the blood of our reason. She
drugs us, blinds us, tortures us, maddens us, and slays us--yet we
follow her--to the bitter end!
Beauty hath her Martyrs, as the rest; and of these Keats is the
Protagonist; the youngest and the fairest; the most enamoured victim.
From those extraordinary letters of his, to his friends and to his love,
we gather that this fierce amorist of Beauty was not without his
Philosophy. The Philosophy of Keats, as we gather up the threads of
it, one by one, in those fleeting confessions, is nothing but the old
polytheistic paganism, reduced to terms of modern life. He was a
born "Pluralist" to use the modern phrase; and for him, in this
congeries of separate and unique miracles, which we call the World,
there was neither Unity, nor Progress, nor Purpose, nor Over-soul--nothing
but the mystery of Beauty, and the Memory of great men!
His way of approaching Nature, his way of approaching every event
in life, was "pluralistic." He did not ask that things should come in
upon him in logical order or in rational coherence. He only asked
that each unique person who appeared; each unique hill-side or
meadow or hedgerow or vineyard or flower or tree; should be for
him a new incarnation of Beauty, a new avatar of the merciless One
he followed.
Never has there been a poet less _mystical_--never a poet less
_moral._ The ground and soil, and sub-soil, of his nature, was
Sensuality--a rich, quivering, tormented Sensuality!
If you will, you may use, for what he was, the word "materialistic";
but such a word gives an absurdly wrong impression. The physical
nerves of his abnormally troubled senses, were too exquisitely, too
passionately stirred, to let their vibrations die away in material
bondage. They quiver off into remotest psychic waves, these shaken
strings; and a touch will send them shuddering into the high regions
of the Spirit. For a nature like this, with the fever of consumption
wasting his tissues, and the fever of his thirst for Beauty ravaging
his soul, it was nothing less than the cruellest tragedy that he should
have been driven by the phantom-flame of sex-illusion to find all the
magic and wonder of the Mystery he worshiped, caught, imprisoned,
enclosed, _blighted,_ in the poisonous loveliness of one capricious
girl. An anarchist at heart--as so many great artists are--Keats hated,
with a furious hatred, any bastard claims and privileges that
insolently intruded themselves between the godlike senses of Man
and the divine madness of their quest. Society? the Public? Moral
Opinion? Intellectual Fashion? The manners and customs of the
Upper Classes? What were all these but vain impertinences,
interrupting his desperate Pursuit? "Every gentleman" he cried "is
my natural enemy!"
The feverish fanaticism of his devotion knew absolutely no limits.
His cry day and night was for "new sensations"; and such
"sensation," a mere epicurean indulgence to others, was a lust, a
madness, a frenzy, a fury, a rushing upon death, to him.
How young he was, how pitifully young, when the Foam-born,
jealous of him as she was jealous of Hippolytus, hurled him
bleeding to the ground!
But what Poetry he has left behind him! There is nothing like it in
the world. Nothing like it, for sheer, deadly, draining, maddening,
drowsing witchery of beauty. It is the very cup of Circe--the very
philtre of Sun-poison. "A thing of Beauty is a Joy forever"! A Joy?
Yes--but a Joy _drugged_ from its first pouring forth. We follow.
We have to follow. But, O the weariness of the way!
What an exultant hymn that is,--the one in honour of Pan, which
comes so soon in Endymion! The dim rich depths of the dark forests
are stirred by it, and its murmurs die away, over the wailing spaces
of the marshes. Obscure growths, and drowsy weeds overhanging
moon-lit paths, where fungoid things fumble for light and air, hear
that cry in their voluptuous dreams and move uneasily. The dumb
vegetable _expectancy_ of young tree-trunks is roused by it into
sensual terror. For this is the sound of the hoof of Pan, stamping on
the moist earth, as he rages for Syrinx. No one has ever understood
the torment of the Wood-god and his mad joy, as the author of
Endymion understood them. The tumultuous ground-swell of this
poet's insane craving for Beauty must in the end have driven him on
the rocks; but there came sometimes softer, gentler, less
"vermeil-tinctured" moods, which might have prolonged his days,
had he never met "that girl."
"The Pot of Basil" expresses one of these. Wistful and heart-breaking,
it has a tender yearning _pity_ in it, a gentle melancholy
brooding, over the irremediable pain of love-loss, which haunts one
like the sound of drowned Angelus-bells, under a hushed sea. The
description of the appearance of the ghost of the dead boy and his
vague troubled speech, is like nothing else that has ever been written.
St. Agnes Eve too, in its more elaborate, more premeditated art, has
a beauty so poignant, so _sensuously unearthly,_ that one dare not
quote a line of it, in a mere "critical essay," for fear of breaking such
a spell!
The long-drawn solemn harmonies of "Hyperion"--Miltonian, and
yet troubled by a thrilling sorcery that Milton never knew--madden
the reader with anger that he never finished it; an anger which is
only increased when in that other "Version," the influence of Dante
becomes evident. "La Belle Dame Sans Merci!" Ah, there we find
him--there we await him--the poet of _the tragedy of bodily
craving,_ transferred, with all its aching, famished nerves, on to the
psychic plane!
For "La Belle Dame" is the Litany of the Beauty-Maniac--his
death-in-life Requiem, his eternal Dirge! Those who have ever met Her,
this "Lady in the mead, full-beautiful, a fairy-child," whose foot
"was light" and whose hair "was long" and whose eyes "were wild,"
will know--and only they--the meaning of "the starved lips, through
the gloom, with horrid warning, gaping wide"! And has the secret of
the gasping pause of that broken half-line, "where no birds sing,"
borrowed originally from poor Ophelia's despair, and echoed
wonderfully by Mr. Hardy in certain of his incomparable lyrics,
been conveyed to my reader?
But it is, of course, in his five great Odes, that Keats is most
supreme, most entirely, without question, the unapproachable artist.
Heaven forbid that I should shatter the sacred silence that such
things produce, by any profane repetition! They leave behind them,
every one of them, an echo, a vibration, a dying fall, leaving us
enchanted and trembling; as when we have been touched, before the
twittering of the birds at dawn, by the very fingers of Our Lady of
sweet Pain!
Is it possible that words, mere words, can work such miracles? Or
are they not words at all, but chalices and Holy graals, of human
passion, full of the life-blood, staining the lips that approach them
scarlet, of heart-drained pulse-wearied ravishment?
Certainly he has the touch, ineffable, final, absolute, of the supreme
Beauty. And over it all, over the ardours and ecstasies, hangs the
shadow of Death; and in the heart of it, an adder in the deep drugged
cup, coiled and waiting, the poisonous bite of incurable anguish! We
may stand mesmerized, spell-bound, amid "the hushed cool-rooted
flowers, fragrant-eyed" watching Psyche sleep. We may open those
"charmed magic casements" towards "the perilous foam." We may
linger with Ruth "sick for home amid the alien corn." We may gaze,
awed and hushed, at the dead, cold, little, mountain-built town,
"emptied of its folks"--We may "glut our sorrow on the morning
rose, or on the wealth of globed Peonies." We may "imprison our
mistress's soft hand, and gaze, deep, deep, within her peerless eyes."
We may brood, quieted and sweetly-sad, upon the last melancholy
"oozings" of the rich year's vintage. But across all these things lies,
like a streak of red, breath-catching, spilled heart's blood, the
knowledge of _what it means_ to have been able to turn all this into
poetry!
It means Torment. It means Despair. It means _that cry,_ out of the
dust of the cemetery at Rome, "O God! O God! has there ever been
such pain as my pain?"
I suppose Keats suffered more in his brief life than any mortal child
of the Muses. These ultimate creations of supreme Beauty are
evoked in no other way. Everything has to be sacrificed--everything--if
we are to be--like the gods, _creators of Life._ For Life is a thing
that can only be born in _that soil_--only planted where the wound
goes deepest--only watered when we strike where that fountain
flows! He wrote for himself. The crowd, the verdict of his friends--what
did all that matter? He wrote for himself; and for those who
dare to risk the taste of that wine, which turns the taste of all else to
a weary irrelevance!
One is unwilling to leave our Adonais, whose "annual wound in
Lebanon allures" us thus fatally, with nothing but such a bitter cry.
One has a pathetic human longing to think of him _as he was,_ in
those few moments of unalloyed pleasure the gods allowed him
before "consumption," and "that girl," poisoned the springs of his
life! And those moments, how they have passed into his poetry like
the breath of the Spring!
When "the grand obsession" was not upon him, who, like Keats, can
make us feel the cool, sweet, wholesome touch of our great Mother,
the Earth? That sleep, "full of sweet dreams and health and quiet
breathing," which the breast that suckled Persephone alone can give
may heal us also for a brief while.
We, too, on this very morning--listen reader!--may wreath "a
flowery band to bind us to the Earth, spite of despondence." Some
"shape of beauty may yet move away the pall from our dark spirits."
Even with old Saturn under his weight of grief, we may drink in the
loveliness of those "green-robed senators of mighty woods, tall oaks,
branch-charmed by the earnest stars." And in the worst of our moods
we can still call aloud to the things of beauty that pass not away. We
can even call out to them from her very side who is "the cause," "the
cause, my soul," of what we suffer.
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art!
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores--"
This desperate, sensuous pain which makes us cry out to the
"midnight" that we might "cease upon it," need not harden our hearts
before we pass hence. The "gathering swallows twittering in the
sky" of our little interludes of peace may still attune us to some
strange, sad thankfulness that we have been born into life, even
though life turned out to mean _this!_
And the vibrating, stricken nerves of our too great devotion may
have at least the balm of feeling that they have not languished
untouched by the fingers that thrill while they slay. After all, "we
have lived"; we also; and we would not "change places" with those
"happy innocents" who have never known the madness of what it
may be to have been born a son of man!
But let none be deluded. The tragic life upon earth is not the life of
the spirit, but the life of the senses. The senses are the aching doors
to the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of our tyranny over one
another. Does anyone think that that love is greater, more real, more
poignant, which can stand over the dead body of its One-of-all, and
dream of encounters and reconciliations, in other worlds? It is not so!
What we have loved is cold, cold and dead, and has become _that
thing_ we scarcely recognise. Can any vague, spiritual reunion make
up for the loss of the little gestures, the little touches, _the little
ways,_ we shall never through all eternity know again? Ah! those
reluctances and hesitations, over now, quite over now! Ah! those
fretful pleadings, those strange withdrawals, those unheeded protests;
nothing, less than nothing, and mere memories! When the life of the
senses invades the affections of the heart--then, then, mon enfant,
comes the pinch and the sting!
And this is what happens with such doomed sensualists as Keats was.
What tortured him in death was the thought that he must leave his
darling--and the actual look, touch, air, ways and presence of her,
forever. "Vain," as that inspired Lover, Emily Bronte, cries, "vain,
unutterably vain, are 'all the creeds' that would console!" Tired of
hearing "simple truth miscalled simplicity"; tired of all the weariness
of life--from these we "would begone"--"save that to die we leave
our love alone"!
But it is not only in the fatal danger of eternal separation from the
flesh that has become to us more necessary than sun or moon, that
_the tragedy of the senses lies._ It lies in the very intensity with
which we have sifted, winnowed, tormented and refined these
panthers of holy lust. Those who understand the poetry of Keats
recognise that in the passion which burns him for the "heavenly
quintessence" as Marlowe calls it, there is also the ghastly danger of
reaction. The pitiless hands of Joy "are ever at his lips, bidding
adieu" and "veiled melancholy has her 'sovran shrine' in the heart of
all delight."
This is the curse upon those who follow the _supreme Beauty_--that
is to say, the Beauty that belongs, not to ideas and ideals, but to
living forms. They are driven by the gross pressure of circumstance
to forsake her, to leave her, to turn aside and eat husks with the
swine!
It is the same with that supreme mystery of _words_ themselves, put
of which such an artist as this one was creates his spells and his
sorcery. How, after tasting, drop by drop, that draught of "lingered
sweetness long drawn-out" of his unequalled style, can we bear to
fall back upon the jabbering and screeching, the howling and hissing,
of the voices we have to listen to in common resort? Ah, child, child!
Think carefully before you turn your candid-innocent eyes to the
fatal entrance to these mysteries! It is better never to have known
what the high, terrible loveliness of Her of Melos is than, _having
seen her,_ to pass the rest of our days with these copies, and
prostitutions, and profanations, and parodies, "which mimic
humanity so abominably"!
That is the worst of it. That is the sting of it. All the _great quests_
in this world tempt us and destroy us, for, though they may touch
our famished lips once and again before we perish, one thing they
cannot do--one thing Beauty herself, the most sacred of all such
quests, cannot do--and that is to make the arid intervals of our
ordinary life tolerable, when we have to return to the common world,
and the people and things that stand gaping in that world, like stupid,
staring idols!
But what matter? Let us pay the penalty. Let us pay the price. _Is it
not worth it?_ Beauty! O divine, O cruel Mistress! Thee, thee we
must worship still, and with thee the acolytes who bear thy censers!
For the secret of life is to take every risk without fear; even the risk
of finding one's self an exile, with "no shrine, no grove, no oracle,
no heat of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming" in the land without
memories, without altars, without Thee!