defects of Keats’s poetry he is nearly always right; it is only in his
summing up and in his estimate of the comparative worth of his subject
that a less enthusiastic critic must part company with him. “I think it
probable that by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the
most Shakespearian spirit that has lived since Shakespeare.” Is not the
truth rather that, among real poets, Keats was the most un-Shakespearian
poet that ever lived? True poets may be divided into two distinct
classes, though there is a border-line at which they occasionally become
confused. In the first class, which contains all the greatest poets,
with Shakespeare at their head, intellect predominates; governing and
thereby strengthening passion, and evolving beauty and sweetness as
accidents--though inevitable accidents--of its operation. The vision of
such poets may almost be described in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas,
in speaking of the Beatific Vision. “The vision,” he writes, “is a
virtue, the beatitude an accident.” Such poets are truly spoken of as
masculine. In the other class--in which Keats stands as high as any
other, if not higher--the “beatitude,” the beauty and sweetness, is the
essential, the truth and power of intellect and passion the accident.
These poets are, without any figure of speech, justly described as
feminine (not necessarily effeminate); and they are separated from the
first class by a distance as great as that which separates a truly manly
man from a truly womanly woman. The trite saying that the spirit of the
great poet has always a feminine element is perfectly true
notwithstanding. “The man is not without the woman;” though “the man is
not for the woman, but the woman for the man.” The difference lies in
that which has the lead and mastery. In Keats the man had not the
mastery. For him a thing of beauty was not only a joy for ever, but was
the supreme and only good he knew or cared to know; and the consequence
is that his best poems are things of exquisite and most sensitively felt
beauty, and nothing else. But it is a fact of primary significance, both
in morals and in art (a fact which is sadly lost sight of just now),
that the highest beauty and joy are not attainable when they occupy the
first place as motives, but only when they are more or less the
accidents of the exercise of the manly virtue of the vision of truth.
There is at fitting seasons a serene splendour and a sunny sweetness
about that which is truly masculine, whether in character or in art,
which women and womanly artists never attain--an inner radiance of
original loveliness and joy which comes, and can only come, of the
purity of motive which regards external beauty and delight as
accidental.
In his individual criticisms of Keats’s poems Mr. Colvin fully
recognises their defect of masculine character. In speaking of
“Isabella” he says: “Its personages appeal to us, not so much humanly
and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery, and atmosphere
amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the
weakness, of modern romance: its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the
mediæval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at all;
its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both writer
and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral truth; and
without these no great literature can exist.” Again: “In Keats’s
conceptions of his youthful heroes there is at all times a touch, not
the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical softness, and the influence
of passion he is apt to make fever and unman them quite; as, indeed, a
helpless and enslaved submission of all the faculties to love proved,
when it came to the trial, to be the weakness of his own nature.” And
again: “In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a
little in common. Both alike were given to ‘luxuriating’ somewhat
effusively and fondly over the ‘deliciousness’ of whatever they liked in
art, books, and nature.” In these and other equally just and
unquestionable criticisms of Keats’s character and works, surely Mr.
Colvin sufficiently refutes his own assertion that this writer was “by
temperament” “the most Shakespearian” of poets since Shakespeare. And
whether he was also such (as Mr. Colvin further asserts him to have
been) “by power,” let the poet’s work declare. In his own lovely
line--which he faithfully kept to in “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “The Eve of
St. Agnes,” and the “Odes”--he is unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled.
When he is true to that line we do not feel the want of anything better,
though we may know that there is something better: as, in the presence
of a beautiful woman, we do not sigh because she is not a General Gordon
or a Sir Thomas More. But let Keats try to assume the man--as he does in
his latest work, his attempts at dramatic composition or at satirical
humour, in the “Cap and Bells”--and all his life and power seem to
shrivel and die, like the beauty of Lamia in the presence of Apollonius.
Some of his readers may object the semblance of Miltonic strength in
certain passages of the fragment “Hyperion”; but Keats himself knew and
admitted that it was only a semblance and an echo, and therefore wisely
abandoned the attempt, having satisfied himself with having shown the
world that there was no object of merely external nature, from “roses
amorous of the moon” to
The solid roar
Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse,
Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where,
which he had not nerves to feel and words so to utter that others should
feel as he did.
In making this distinction between poetry of a masculine and that of a
feminine order, it must be understood that no sort of disrespect is
intended to the latter in saying a good word for that “once important
sex” of poetry which the bewitching allurements of Keats and Shelley and
their followers have caused, for a season, to be comparatively despised.
The femininity of such poets as these is a glorious and immortal gift,
such as no mortal lady has ever attained or ever will attain. It has
been proved to us how well a mortal lady may become able to read the
classics; but, humbled as some of us may feel by her having headed the
Tripos, it is still some compensation for those of our sex to remember
that we alone can write “classics,” even of the feminine order. Nor let
it be thought that we have been insisting upon a modern and fanciful
distinction in thus dividing great men into two classes, in one of which
the masculine and in the other the feminine predominates. It is a fact
the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the
parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed to the
union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by
more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the
commerce of goddesses with men.
XIV
WHAT SHELLEY WAS
Professor Dowden has had access to a very large quantity of hitherto
unpublished correspondence and other matter, some of which throws much
new light upon Shelley’s singular character; and, but for one most
important point--his sudden separation from Harriet Westbrook, for which
no substantial reason is given--the Professor’s eleven hundred closely
printed pages contain all and more than all that any reasonable person
can want to know about the subject. Professor Dowden’s arrangement of
this mass of material is so lucid that interest seldom flags; and the
whole work reads like a first-class sensational novel, of which the only
faults are that the characters are unnatural and the incidents
improbable. A beautiful youth of almost superhuman genius,
sensitiveness, and self-abnegation, is the hero. He is given early to
blaspheming whatever society has hitherto respected; and to cursing the
King and his father--an old gentleman whose chief foible seems to have
been attachment to the Church of England. His charity is so angelical
that he remains on the best of terms with one man who has tried to
seduce his wife, and with another--a beautiful young lord with a
club-foot, whom he finds wallowing in a society given to vices which
cannot be named, and who is also a supreme poet--notwithstanding the
fact that this lord has had a child by one of the ladies of his (the
hero’s) wife’s family and treats her with the most unmerited contempt
and cruelty. He adores three really respectable and attractive young
ladies--by name Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, and Emilia
Viviani--with a passion which eternity cannot exhaust, and praises them
in music like that of the spheres (witness “Epipsychidion”); and, anon,
Harriet is “a frantic idiot,” Elizabeth a “brown demon,” and Emilia a
“centaur.” “It was,” says his biographer, “one of the infirmities of
Shelley’s character that, from thinking the best of a friend or
acquaintance, he could of a sudden, and with insufficient cause, pass
over to the other side and think the worst.” It is, perhaps, fortunate
that Providence should afflict supreme sanctities and geniuses with such
“infirmities”; otherwise we might take them for something more than
mere saints and poets. The hero, as became absolute charity, gave every
one credit--at least, when it suited his mood and convenience--for being
as charitable as himself: witness his soliciting Harriet Westbrook for
money after he had run away with his fresh “wife,” her rival. He was
addicted even from his babyhood to the oddest and most “charming”
eccentricities. “When Bysshe,” then quite a child, “one day set a
fagot-stack on fire, the excuse was a charming one: he did so that he
might have ‘a little hell of his own.’” At Eton “in a paroxysm of rage
he seized the nearest weapon, a fork, and stuck it into the hand of his
tormentor.” On another occasion, when his tutor found him apparently
setting fire to himself and the house, and asked him “What on earth are
you doing, Shelley?” he replied, “Please, sir, I’m raising the devil.”
The pet virtue of the hero was tolerance. “Here I swear,” he writes to
Mr. Hogg, “and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity blast
me--here I swear that never will I forgive intolerance! It is the only
point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge ... not one that
leaves the wretch at rest, but lasting, long revenge.” His resolutions
to be himself tolerant often broke down, and he could not abide “men who
pray” and such-like; but what could be expected from such a hero in such
a world! He had all the naïveté as well as the self-reliance of true
greatness. He had no sooner become an undergraduate at Oxford than he
printed a pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism,” and sent copies to the
Vice-Chancellor, the heads of houses, and all the bishops, with “a
pretty letter in his own handwriting” to each. He was summoned before
the University authorities, who “pleaded, implored, and threatened; on
the other side, the unabashed and beardless boy maintaining his right to
think, and declare his thoughts to others.” Much evil as he believed of
such vermin, he does not seem to have dreamed of the intolerance of
which they were capable. Hogg--the dear and life-long friend who tried
to seduce his wife--writes: “He rushed in; he was terribly agitated. ‘I
am expelled,’ he said, as soon as he had recovered himself a little; ‘I
am expelled!’... He sat on the sofa, repeating with convulsive
vehemence the words ‘Expelled! expelled!’” Professor Dowden thinks “it
was natural and perhaps expedient that measures should have been taken
to vindicate the authority of the heads of the institution; ... but good
feeling” would not have punished so severely what “was more an offence
of the intellect than of the heart and will”: for what was it “to fling
out a boy’s defiance against the first article of the Creed,” compared
with the drinking and disorderly life of some other undergraduates who
were yet allowed to remain in the University? The conduct of the
authorities was the less excusable that we have Mr. Hogg’s authority for
the fact that at this time “the purity and sanctity of his life were
most conspicuous,” and that “in no individual, perhaps, was the moral
sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley.” Of course, in
face of such an authority as Mr. Hogg, the assertion of Thornton Hunt
that “he was aware of facts which gave him to understand that Shelley
while at college, in tampering with venal passions, had seriously
injured his health; and that this was followed by a reaction ‘marked by
horror,’” is not to be listened to, and is therefore relegated to a
footnote. Professor Dowden rightly thinks that Shelley might have been
all the better had he left the University at the usual time, and with
his mind weighted with more discipline and knowledge. “His voyage,” says
his biographer, “must needs have been fleet and far, and the craft, with
fore and flying sails set, must often have run upon her side and drunk
the water; all the more reason, therefore, for laying in some ballast
below before she raced into the gale.” Every one knows how the craft
raced into the gale, with Miss Westbrook on board, as soon as the Oxford
hawser was cut. Shelley might have done much worse. She was a good and
attractive person. He began by liking her. “There are some hopes,” he
says, “of this dear little girl; she would be a divine little scion of
infidelity if I could get hold of her.” She seems to have been sincerely
devoted to him and he afterwards to her, until circumstances unknown or
undivulged made his home insupportable to her, and she became the
“frantic idiot” who, though she would give Shelley money when she had
it, was apparently not sufficiently “tolerant” upon other points--such
as that of his proposition that she should enjoy the scenery of
Switzerland in his company and that of her supplanter; and it certainly
showed some narrowness of mind to cast herself, upon his final desertion
of her, first into some desperation of living and afterwards into the
Serpentine, when she might have shared, or at least witnessed, the
“eternal rapture” and “divine aspirations” which her husband was
enjoying in the arms of another woman. Poor little “idiot” as she was,
she constitutes almost the only point in all this bewildering “romance
of reality” upon which the mind can rest with any peace or pleasure.
What Shelley was at first he remained to the last: a beautiful,
effeminate, arrogant boy--constitutionally indifferent to money,
generous by impulse, self-indulgent by habit, ignorant to the end of
all that it most behoves a responsible being to know, and so conceited
that his ignorance was incurable; showing at every turn the most
infallible sign of a feeble intellect, a belief in human perfectibility;
and rushing at once to the conclusion, when he or others met with
suffering, that some one, not the sufferer, was doing grievous wrong. If
to do what is right in one’s own eyes is the whole of virtue, and to
suffer for so doing is to be a martyr, then Shelley was the saint and
martyr which a large number of--chiefly young--persons consider him to
have been as a man; and if to have the faculty of saying everything in
the most brilliant language and imagery, without having anything
particular to say beyond sublime commonplaces and ethereal fallacies
about love and liberty, is to be a “supreme” poet, then Shelley
undoubtedly was such. But, as a man, Shelley was almost wholly devoid of
the instincts of the “political animal,” which Aristotle defines a man
to be. If he could not see the reasons for any social institution or
custom, he could not _feel_ any; and forthwith set himself to convince
the world that they were the invention of priests and tyrants. He was
equally deficient in what is commonly understood by natural affection.
The ties of relationship were no ties to him: for he could only _see_
them as accidents. “I, like the God of the Jews,” writes Shelley, “set
up myself as no respecter of persons; and relationship is regarded by me
as bearing that relation to reason which a band of straw does to fire.”
As these deficiencies were the cause of all the abnormal phenomena of
his life, so they are at the root of, or rather are, the imperfections
of his poetry, which is all splendour and sentiment and sensitiveness,
and little or no true wisdom or true love. The very texture of his verse
suffers from these causes. In his best poems it is firm, fluent,
various, and melodious; but the more serious and subtle music of life
which he had not in his heart he could not put into his rhythms; which
no one who knows what rhythm is will venture to compare with the best of
Tennyson’s or Wordsworth’s, far less with the best of our really
“supreme” poets. A very great deal of his poetry is much like the
soap-bubbles he was so fond of blowing--its superficies beauty, its
substance wind; or like many a young lady who looks and moves and
modulates her speech like a goddess, and chatters like an ape.
After Shelley, the chief male figure in this romance--which would be
altogether incredible were it not real--is that of the guide,
philosopher, and friend of the poet’s youth, Godwin. Pecksniff is
genteel comedy compared with the grim farce of this repulsive lover of
wisdom as embodied in himself. Like the German poet who was entrusted by
one friend to be the bearer of a sausage to another, and, bit by bit,
ate it all on his way, Godwin “sincerely abhorred all that was sordid
and mean; but he liked sausage”; and the way he combined the necessity
for nibbling at Shelley’s future fortune by making incessant claims,
which the latter could only satisfy by repeated and ruinous post-obits,
with the other necessity for keeping up the insulted and injured dignity
of a man whom Shelley had wronged past pardon, is funny beyond
description. His writing to tell Shelley that he had insulted him by
giving him a heavy sum of money in the form of a cheque made payable to
his (Godwin’s) own name, thereby making the gift liable to be construed
as such by the banker, and threatening solemnly not to receive the gift
at all, unless the name was changed to “Hume” or any other the poet
might select, is a touch which Shakespeare might have coveted for
Ancient Pistol.
It appears that there still exists a good deal of writing by and
concerning Shelley which it has not been deemed expedient to publish. A
footnote, for instance, assures us that “a poetical epistle to Graham
referring to his father in odious terms” is still “in existence”; and
various other unprinted letters and poems are alluded to. But it is
scarcely to be supposed that any future _Life of Shelley_ will supersede
Professor Dowden’s--unless, indeed, it should be an abridgment, more
suitable in bulk and perhaps in tone than the present publication is,
for the use of those who, undazzled, or possibly repelled, by the
glamour of Shelley’s personality and revolutionary convictions, admire
the meteoric splendour of his genius and allow it its not unimportant
place in the permanent literature of England.
XV
BLAKE
Blake’s poetry, with the exception of four or five lovely lyrics and
here and there in the other pieces a startling gleam of unquestionable
genius, is mere drivel. A sensible person can easily distinguish between
that which he cannot understand and that in which there is nothing to be
understood. Mr. W. Rossetti, who is an enthusiast for “the much-maligned
Paris Commune” and for Blake’s poetry, says of some of the latter, where
it is nearly at its worst, “We feel its potent and arcane influence, but
cannot dismember this into articulated meanings.” This sentence, if put
into less exalted English, expresses tolerably well the aspect of mind
with which we regard much of the writing of the Prophets and of the
great ancient and modern mystics. Some light of their meaning forces
itself through the, in most cases, purposely obscure cloud of their
words and imagery; but when, by chance, a glimpse of the disk itself is
caught, it is surprisingly strong, bright, and intelligible. Such
writers are only spoken of with irreverence by those that would have
given their verdict in favour of the famous Irishman who, being
confronted with one witness swearing to having seen him take a
handkerchief from another gentleman’s pocket, brought four who testified
with equal solemnity to not having seen him do any such thing. The
obvious rule in regard to such writers is, “When you cannot understand a
man’s ignorance, think yourself ignorant of his understanding.” Again,
if a man’s sayings are wholly unintelligible to us, he may claim the
benefit of a small possibility of a doubt that his meanings may be too
great and necessarily “arcane” for our powers of reception. But when a
writer’s works consist of a few passages of great beauty and such
simplicity that a child may understand them--like Blake’s
“Chimney-Sweep,” “Tiger,” “Piping down the valleys wild,” “Why was Cupid
a boy?” and “Auguries of Innocence”--and a great deal more that is mere
ill-expressed but perfectly intelligible platitude and commonplace mixed
with petty spite, and a far larger quantity still which to the ear of
the natural understanding is mere gibberish, he has no right to claim,
as Blake does, that the latter shall be regarded as plenarily inspired,
or, indeed, as being anything better than the delirious rubbish it
obviously is.
Mr. W. Rossetti, though he goes a great way further in his admiration of
Blake than reason can be shown for, does the cause of reason a good
service in declaring his opinion that the poet was probably mad. “When,”
says he, “I find a man pouring forth conceptions and images for which he
professes himself not responsible, and which are in themselves in the
highest degree remote, nebulous, and intangible, and putting some of
these, moreover, into words wherein congruent sequence and significance
of expression or analogy are not to be traced, then I cannot resist a
strong presumption that that man was in some true sense of the word
mad.” As Pope “could not take his tea without a stratagem,” so Blake
could not “mix his colours with diluted glue” without declaring that
“the process was revealed to him by St. Joseph”; and it was the ghost of
his brother who taught him the new, though, had we not been told
otherwise, the not supernaturally wonderful device of saving the expense
of ordinary typography by etching the words of his verses on the copper
plate which bore their illustrations. Blake was morally as well as
intellectually mad; proposing on one occasion, for example, that his
wife should allow him to introduce a second partner to his bed, and
doing so with a _bonâ fide_ unconsciousness of anything amiss in such a
suggestion as perfect as that with which Shelley urged his wife to come
and share the delights of a tour in Switzerland with him and his
mistress Mary Godwin.
That “great wits to madness nearly are allied” is not true; but it is
not only true but psychologically explicable that small “geniuses” often
are so. Most children are geniuses before the dawn of moral and
intellectual responsibilities; and there are some who remain, not
children, but moral and intellectual manikins, all their lives. It must
be confessed that conscience makes, not only cowards, but more or less
dullards, of us all. The child, that
Mighty prophet, seer blest,
On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
owes his power of vision to his not being able to see the flaming sword
of conscience which turns every way, and hinders all men but a very few
from getting a glimpse through the closed gates of Paradise. Yet it is
better to be a purblind man with a conscience than a seeing manikin with
none. It is better still, and best of all, when the man of developed
intellect and fully accepted responsibilities retains a cherished memory
of and an innocent sympathy with the knowledge that came to him in
childhood and early youth, and uses his trained powers of expression in
order to make the world partakers of those thoughts and feelings which
had no tongue when they first arose in him, and leave no memory in the
mass of men until the man of true and sane genius touches chords of
recollection that would otherwise have slept in them for ever. One of
the few really good things ever said by Hazlitt is that “men of genius
spend their lives in teaching the world what they themselves learned
before they were twenty.”
For the time, however, the manikin type of genius is all the fashion,
especially with a class of critics who have it in their power to give
notoriety, if they cannot give fame. Craziness alone passes at present
for a strong presumption of genius, and where genius is really found in
company therewith it is at once pronounced “supreme.” This is partly
because most people can see that craziness has something abnormal about
it, and are ready, therefore, to identify it with genius, of which most
persons only know that it also is “abnormal”; and partly because the
manikin mind is always red republican, and ardent in its hatred of
kings, priests, “conventions,” the “monopoly” of property and of women,
and all other hindrances put in the way of virtue, liberty, and
happiness by the wicked “civilizee.”