_Endymion._
In the old Grecian world, the myth of Endymion and Selene was one deeply
rooted in various shapes in the popular traditions both of Elis in the
Peloponnese, and of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The
central feature of the tale, as originally sung by Sappho, was the nightly
descent of the goddess to kiss her lover where he lay spell-bound, by the
grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos.
The poem of Sappho is lost, and the story is not told at length in any of
our extant classical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the
poets, as Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and of the late
prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias. Of such ancient
sources Keats of course knew only what he found in his classical
dictionaries. But references to the tale, as every one knows, form part of
the stock repertory of classical allusion in modern literature: and
several modern writers before Keats had attempted to handle the subject at
length. In his own special range of Elizabethan reading, he was probably
acquainted with Lyly's court comedy of _Endimion_, in prose, which had
been edited, as it happened, by his friend Dilke a few years before: but
in it he would have found nothing to his purpose. On the other hand I
think he certainly took hints from the _Man in the Moon_ of Michael
Drayton. In this piece Drayton takes hold of two post-classical notions
concerning the Endymion myth, both in the first instance derived from
Lucian,--one that which identifies its hero with the visible 'man in the
moon' of popular fancy,--the other that which rationalises his story, and
explains him away as a personification or mythical representative of early
astronomy. These two distinct notions Drayton weaves together into a short
tale in rhymed heroics, which he puts into the mouth of a shepherd at a
feast of Pan. Like most of his writings, the _Man in the Moon_ has strong
gleams of poetry and fancy amidst much that is both puerile and pedantic.
Critics, so far as I know, have overlooked Keats's debt to it: but even
granting that he may well have got elsewhere, or invented for himself, the
notion of introducing his story with a festival in honour of Pan--do not,
at any rate, the following lines of Drayton contain evidently the hint for
the wanderings on which Keats sends his hero (and for which antiquity
affords no warrant) through earth, sea, and air[32]?--
"Endymion now forsakes
All the delights that shepherds do prefer,
And sets his mind so generally on her
That, all neglected, to the groves and springs
He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings
(As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers,
Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers
The silver Naides bathe them in the bracke.
Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back
Among the blue Nereides: and when
Weary of waters goddess-like again
She the high mountains actively assays,
And there amongst the light Oriades,
That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort:
Sometime amongst those that with them comport
The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent;
And there she stays not, but incontinent
Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw,
And with Endymion pleased that she saw,
Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye
Stripping the winds----"
Fletcher again, a writer with whom Keats was very familiar, and whose
inspiration, in the idyllic and lyric parts of his work, is closely
kindred to his own--Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_ makes Chloe
tell, in lines beautifully paraphrased and amplified from Theocritus--
"How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she convey'd him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest."
The subject thus touched by Drayton and Fletcher had been long, as we have
seen already, in Keats's thoughts. Not only had the charm of this old
pastoral nature-myth of the Greeks interwoven itself in his being with his
natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moonlight: but
deeper and more abstract meanings than its own had gathered about the
story in his mind. The divine vision which haunts Endymion in dreams is
for Keats symbolical of Beauty itself, and it is the passion of the human
soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less consciously, to shadow
forth in the quest of the shepherd-prince after his love[33].
The manner in which Keats set about relating the Greek story, as he had
thus conceived it, was as far from being a Greek or 'classical' manner as
possible. He indeed resembles the Greeks, as we have seen, in his vivid
sense of the joyous and multitudinous life of nature: and he loved to
follow them in dreaming of the powers of nature as embodied in concrete
shapes of supernatural human activity and grace. Moreover, his intuitions
for every kind of beauty being admirably swift and true, when he sought to
conjure up visions of the classic past, or images from classic fable, he
was able to do so often magically well. To this extent Keats may justly be
called, as he has been so often called, a Greek, but no farther. The
rooted artistic instincts of that race, the instincts which taught them in
all the arts alike, during the years when their genius was most itself, to
select and simplify, rejecting all beauties but the vital and essential,
and paring away their material to the quick that the main masses might
stand out unconfused, in just proportions and with outlines rigorously
clear--these instincts had neither been implanted in Keats by nature, nor
brought home to him by precept and example. Alike by his aims and his
gifts, he was in his workmanship essentially 'romantic,' Gothic, English.
A general characteristic of his favourite Elizabethan poetry is its
prodigality of incidental and superfluous beauties: even in the drama, it
takes the powers of a Shakspere to keep the vital play of character and
passion unsmothered by them, and in most narrative poems of the age the
quality is quite unchecked. To Keats, at the time when he wrote
_Endymion_, such incidental and secondary luxuriance constituted an
essential, if not the chief, charm of poetry. "I think poetry," he says,
"should surprise by a fine excess:" and with reference to his own poem
during its progress, "it will be a test, a trial of my powers of
imagination, and chiefly of my invention--which is a rare thing indeed--by
which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circumstance, and fill them with
poetry."
The 'one bare circumstance' of the story was in the result expanded
through four long books of intricate and flowery narrative, in the course
of which the young poet pauses continually to linger or deviate,
amplifying every incident into a thousand circumstances, every passion
into a world of subtleties. He interweaves with his central Endymion myth
whatever others pleased him best, as those of Pan, of Venus and Adonis, of
Cybele, of Alpheus and Arethusa, of Glaucus and Scylla, of Circe, of
Neptune, and of Bacchus; leading us through labyrinthine transformations,
and on endless journeyings by subterranean antres and aërial gulfs and
over the floor of ocean. The scenery of the tale, indeed, is often not
merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy; there is something of Oriental
bewilderment,--an Arabian Nights jugglery with space and time,--in the
vague suddenness with which its changes are effected. Such organic plan as
the poem has can best be traced by fixing our attention on the main
divisions adopted by the author of his narrative into books, and by
keeping hold at the same time, wherever we can, of the thread of allegoric
thought and purpose that seems to run loosely through the whole. The first
book, then, is entirely introductory, and does no more than set forth the
predicament of the love-sick shepherd-prince, its hero; who appears at a
festival of his people held in honour of the god Pan, and is afterwards
induced by his sister Peona[34] to confide to her the secret of the
passion which consumes him. The account of the feast of Pan contains
passages which in the quality of direct nature-interpretation are scarcely
to be surpassed in poetry:--
"rain-scented eglantine
Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
Man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass
Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold,
To feel this sun-rise and its glories old."
What can be more fresh and stirring?--what happier in rhythmical
movement?--or what more characteristic of the true instinct by which
Keats, in dealing with nature, avoided word-painting and palette-work,
leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and
forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry
alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined
rather than seen, with the living activities and operant magic of the
earth? Not less excellent is the realisation, in the course of the same
episode, of the true spirit of ancient pastoral life and worship; the hymn
to Pan in especial both expressing perfectly the meaning of the Greek myth
to Greeks, and enriching it with touches of northern feeling that are
foreign to, and yet most harmonious with, the original. Keats having got
from Drayton, as I surmise, his first notion of an introductory feast of
Pan, in his hymn to that divinity borrowed recognizable touches alike from
Chapman's Homer's hymn, from the sacrifice to Pan in Browne's
_Britannia's Pastorals_[35], and from the hymns in Ben Jonson's masque,
_Pan's Anniversary_: but borrowed as only genius can, fusing and
refashioning whatever he took from other writers in the strong glow of an
imagination fed from the living sources of nature:--
"O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang
From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth
Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death
Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness;
Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress
Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;
And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken
The dreary melody of bedded reeds--
In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds
The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth;
Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth
Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now,
By thy love's milky brow!
By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan!
* * * * *
O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears,
While ever and anon to his shorn peers
A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn,
When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn
Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms,
To keep off mildews, and all weather harms:
Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,
That come a-swooning over hollow grounds,
And wither drearily on barren moors:
Dread opener of the mysterious doors
Leading to universal knowledge--see,
Great son of Dryope,
The many that are come to pay their vows
With leaves about their brows!"
In the subsequent discourse of Endymion and Peona he tells her the story
of those celestial visitations which he scarce knows whether he has
experienced or dreamed. In Keats's conception 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 a weakness of
his own nature. He partly knew it, and could not help it: but the
consequence is that the love-passages of _Endymion_, notwithstanding the
halo of beautiful tremulous imagery that often plays about them, can
scarcely be read with pleasure. On the other hand, in matters of
subordinate feeling he shows not only a great rhetorical facility, but the
signs often of lively dramatic power; as for instance in the remonstrance
wherein Peona tries to make her brother ashamed of his weakness:--
"Is this the cause?
This all? Yet it is strange, and sad, alas!
That one who through this middle earth should pass
Most like a sojourning demi-god, and leave
His name upon the harp-string, should achieve
No higher bard than simple maidenhood,
Sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood
Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray
He knew not where; and how he would say, _Nay_,
If any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love;
What could it be but love? How a ring-dove
Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path;
And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe
The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses.
And then the ballad of his sad life closes
With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!"
In the second book the hero sets out in quest of his felicity, and is led
by obscure signs and impulses through a mysterious and all but trackless
region of adventure. In the first vague imaginings of youth, conceptions
of natural and architectural marvels, unlocalised and half-realised in
mysterious space, are apt to fill a large part: and to such imaginings
Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. A Naiad, in the
disguise of a butterfly, leads Endymion to her spring, and there reveals
herself and bids him be of good hope: an airy voice next invites him to
descend 'Into the sparry hollows of the world': which done, he gropes his
way to a subterranean temple of dim and most un-Grecian magnificence,
where he is admitted to the presence of the sleeping Adonis, and whither
Venus herself presently repairing gives him encouragement. Thence, urged
by the haunting passion within him, he wanders on by dizzy paths and
precipices, and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. Through all
this phantasmagoria engendered by a brain still teeming with the rich
first fumes of boyish fancy, and in great part confusing and
inappropriate, shine out at intervals strokes of the true old-world poetry
admirably felt and expressed:--
"He sinks adown a solitary glen,
Where there was never sound of mortal men,
Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences
Melting to silence, when upon the breeze
Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet
To cheer itself to Delphi:"--
or presences of old religion strongly conceived and realised:--
"Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below,
Came mother Cybele--alone--alone--
In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown
About her majesty, and front death-pale,
With turrets crowned."
After seeing the vision of Cybele, Endymion, still travelling through the
bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an eagle's back down an unfathomable
descent, and alighting, presently finds a 'jasmine bower,' whither his
celestial mistress again stoops to visit him. Next he encounters the
streams, and hears the voices, of Arethusa and Alpheus on their fabled
flight to Ortygia: as they disappear down a chasm, he utters a prayer to
his goddess in their behalf, and then--
"He turn'd--there was a whelming sound--he stept,
There was a cooler light; and so he kept
Towards it by a sandy path, and lo!
More suddenly than doth a moment go,
The visions of the earth were gone and fled--
He saw the giant sea above his head."
Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own passion and
adventures: but now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of
Alpheus and Arethusa, and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third
book, those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this latter legend with
great freedom, omitting its main point, the transformation of Scylla by
Circe into a devouring monster, and making the enchantress punish her
rival not by this vile metamorphosis, but by death; or rather a trance
resembling death, from which after many ages Glaucus is enabled by
Endymion's help to rescue her, and together with her the whole sorrowful
fellowship of true lovers drowned at sea. From the point in the hero's
submarine adventures where he first meets Glaucus,--
"He saw far in the green concave of the sea
An old man sitting calm and peacefully.
Upon a weeded rock this old man sat,
And his white hair was awful, and a mat
Of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet"--
--from this passage to the end of the book, in spite of redundance and
occasional ugly flaws, Keats brings home his version of the myth with
strong and often exquisite effect to the imagination. No picture can well
be more vivid than that of Circe pouring the magic phial upon her victims:
and no speech much more telling than that with which the detected
enchantress turns and scathes her unhappy lover. In the same book the
description of the sunk treasures cumbering the ocean-floor challenges
comparison, not all unequally, with the famous similar passage in
Shakspere's _Richard III._ In the halls of Neptune Endymion again meets
Venus, and receives from her more explicit encouragement than heretofore.
Thence Nereids bear him earthward in a trance, during which he reads in
spirit words of still more reassuring omen written in starlight on the
dark. Since, in his adventure with Glaucus, he has allowed himself to be
diverted from his own quest for the sake of relieving the sorrows of
others, the hope which before seemed ever to elude him draws at last
nearer to fulfilment.
It might seem fanciful to suppose that Keats had really in his mind a
meaning such as this, but for the conviction he habitually declares that
the pursuit of beauty as an aim in life is only justified when it is
accompanied by the idea of devotion to human service. And in his fourth
book he leads his hero through a chain of adventures which seem certainly
to have a moral and allegorical meaning or none at all. Returning, in that
book, to upper air, Endymion before long half forgets his goddess for the
charms of an Indian maiden, the sound of whose lamentations reaches him
while he is sacrificing in the forest, and who tells him how she has come
wandering in the train of Bacchus from the east. This mysterious Indian
maiden proves in fact to be no other than his goddess herself in disguise.
But it is long before he discovers this, and in the mean time he is
conducted by her side through a bewildering series of aerial ascents,
descents, enchanted slumbers and Olympian visions. All these, with his
infidelity which is no infidelity after all, his broodings in the Cave of
Quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell to mortality
and to Peona, and reunion with his celestial mistress in her own shape,
make up a narrative inextricably confused, which only becomes partially
intelligible when we take it as a parable of a soul's experience in
pursuit of the ideal. Let a soul enamoured of the ideal--such would seem
the argument--once suffer itself to forget its goal, and to quench for a
time its longings in the real, nevertheless it will be still haunted by
that lost vision; amidst all intoxications, disappointment and lassitude
will still dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality which
has thus allured it derives from the ideal its power to charm,--that it is
after all but a reflection from the ideal, a phantom of it. What chiefly
or alone makes the episode poetically acceptable is the strain of lyric
poetry which Keats has put into the mouth of the supposed Indian maiden
when she tells her story. His later and more famous lyrics, though they
are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do
not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of
imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of
the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the
best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial
romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps
partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful
associations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild
wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled,
yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piece a
'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far resembles that its opening
measures are repeated at the close. It begins with a tender invocation to
sorrow, and then with a first change of movement conjures up the image of
a deserted maidenhood beside Indian streams; till suddenly, with another
change, comes the irruption of the Asian Bacchus on his march; next
follows the detailed picture of the god and of his rout, suggested in part
by the famous Titian at the National Gallery; and then, arranged as if for
music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and Satyrs, and their
choral answers:
"'Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye!
So many, and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your bowers desolate,
Your lutes, and gentler fate?'
'We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing,
A conquering!
Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide,
We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:--
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our wild minstrelsy!'
'Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye!
So many, and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left
Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'--
'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;
For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms,
And cold mushrooms;
For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth;
Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!--
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our mad minstrelsy!'"
The strophes recounting the victorious journeys are very unequal; and
finally, returning to the opening motive, the lyric ends as it began with
an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:--
"Come then, sorrow!
Sweetest sorrow!
Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:
I thought to leave thee,
And deceive thee,
But now of all the world I love thee best.
There is not one,
No, no, not one
But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid;
Thou art her mother
And her brother,
Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade."
The high-water-mark of poetry in _Endymion_ is thus reached in the two
lyrics of the first and fourth book. Of these at least may be said with
justice that which Jeffrey was inclined to say of the poem as a whole,
that the degree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as good
a test as can be obtained of his having in him "a native relish for
poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm." In the main
body of the work, beauties and faults are so bound up together that a
critic may well be struck almost as much by one as by the other. Admirable
truth and charm of imagination, exquisite freshness and felicity of touch,
mark such brief passages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry
breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read
farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly
tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. Thus in the tale told by
Glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as--
"Ææa's isle was wondering at the moon,"
standing alone in a passage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed
narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme
and expression--
"I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe!
O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?"
is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and
the heart:--
"Cold, O cold indeed
Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed
The sea-swell took her hair."
One, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry Keats has
shaken off--his muse is seldom tempted now to echo the familiar
sentimental chirp of Hunt's. But that tendency which he by nature shared
with Hunt, the tendency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined
pleasure with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. And
to the weaknesses native to his own youth and temperament are joined
others derived from an exclusive devotion to the earlier masters of
English poetry. The creative impulse of the Elizabethan age, in its
waywardness and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in
its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived in him. He
outdoes even Spenser in his proneness to let Invention ramble and loiter
uncontrolled through what wildernesses she will, with Imagination at her
heels to dress if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds
there: and sometimes Imagination is equal to the task and sometimes not:
and even busy Invention herself occasionally flags, and is content to
grasp at any idle clue the rhyme holds out to her:--
"--a nymph of Dian's
Wearing a coronal of tender scions":--
"Does yonder thrush,
Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush
About the dewy forest, whisper tales?--
Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails
Will slime the rose to-night."
Chapman especially among Keats's masters had this trick of letting thought
follow the chance dictation of rhyme. Spenser and Chapman--to say nothing
of Chatterton--had farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash
dealings with their mother tongue. English was almost as unsettled a
language for him as for them; and he strives to extend its resources, and
make them adequate to the range and freshness of his imagery, by the use
of compound and other adjectival coinages in Chapman's
spirit--'far-spooming Ocean', 'eye-earnestly', 'dead-drifting', 'their
surly eyes brow-hidden', 'nervy knees', 'surgy murmurs'--coinages
sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often fantastic and tasteless: as
well as by sprinkling his nineteenth-century diction with such archaisms
as 'shent', 'sith', and 'seemlihed' from Spenser, 'eterne' from Spenser
and William Browne; or with arbitrary verbal forms, as 'to folly', 'to
monitor', 'gordian'd up', to 'fragment up'; or with neuter verbs used as
active, as to 'travel' an eye, to 'pace' a team of horses, and _vice
versa_. Hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work is good,
in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and wavering, and full of
oddities and discords.
In rhythm Keats adheres in _Endymion_ to the method he had adopted in
_Sleep and Poetry_, deliberately keeping the sentence independent of the
metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the end,
and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought Keats had
carried this method too far, even to the negation of metre. Some later
critics have supposed the rhythm of _Endymion_ to have been influenced by
the _Pharonnida_ of Chamberlayne: a fourth-rate poet remarkable chiefly
for two things, for the inextricable trailing involution of his sentences,
exceeding that of the very worst prose of his time, and for a perverse
persistency in ending his heroic lines with the lightest
syllables--prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions--on which neither pause
nor emphasis is possible[36].
But Keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, rarely fails in
delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of
sentence structure. There is nothing in his treatment of the measure for
which precedent may not be found in the work of almost every poet who
employed it during the half-century that followed its brilliant revival
for the purposes of narrative poetry by Marlowe. At most, he can only be
said to make a rule of that which with the older poets was rather an
exception; and to seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of
provincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous.
As the best criticism on Keats's _Endymion_ is in his own preface, so its
best defence is in a letter he wrote six months after it was printed. "It
is as good," he says, "as I had power to make it by myself." Hunt had
warned him against the risks of a long poem, and Shelley against those of
hasty publication. From much in his performance that was exuberant and
crude the classical training and now ripening taste of Shelley might
doubtless have saved him, had he been willing to listen. But he was
determined that his poetry should at all times be the true spontaneous
expression of his mind. "Had I been nervous," he goes on, "about its being
a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over every
page, it would not have been written; for it is not in my nature to
fumble. I will write independently. I have written independently _without
judgment_. I may write independently and _with judgment_ hereafter. The
genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be
matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself."
How well Keats was able to turn the fruits of experience to the benefit of
his art, how swift the genius of poetry in him was to work out, as he
says, its own salvation, we shall see when we come to consider his next
labours.