_Isabella_--_Hyperion_--_The Eve of St Agnes_--_The Eve of St
Mark_--_La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--_Lamia_--The Odes--The Plays.
During the twenty months ending with his return from Winchester as last
narrated, Keats had been able, even while health and peace of mind and
heart deserted him, to produce in quick succession the series of poems
which give us the true measure of his powers. In the sketches and epistles
of his first volume we have seen him beginning, timidly and with no
clearness of aim, to make trial of his poetical resources. A year
afterwards he had leapt, to use his own words, headlong into the sea, and
boldly tried his strength on the composition of a long mythological
romance--half romance, half parable of that passion for universal beauty
of which he felt in his own bosom the restless and compulsive workings. In
the execution, he had done injustice to the power of poetry that was in
him by letting both the exuberance of fancy and invention, and the caprice
of rhyme, run away with him, and by substituting for the worn-out verbal
currency of the last century a semi-Elizabethan coinage of his own, less
acceptable by habit to the literary sense, and often of not a whit greater
real poetic value. The experiment was rash, but when he next wrote, it
became manifest that it had not been made in vain. After _Endymion_ his
work threw off, not indeed entirely its faults, but all its weakness and
ineffectiveness, and shone for the first time with a full 'effluence' (the
phrase is Landor's) 'of power and light[50].'
His next poem of importance was _Isabella_, planned and begun, as we saw,
in February 1818, and finished in the course of the next two months at
Teignmouth. The subject is taken from the well-known chapter of Boccaccio
which tells of the love borne by a damsel of Messina for a youth in the
employ of her merchant-brothers, with its tragic close and pathetic
sequel[51]. Keats for some reason transfers the scene of the story from
Messina to Florence. Nothing can be less sentimental than Boccaccio's
temper, nothing more direct and free from superfluity than his style.
Keats invoking him asks pardon for his own work as what it truly is,--'An
echo of thee in the North-wind sung.' Not only does the English poet set
the southern story in a framework of northern landscape, telling us of the
Arno, for instance, how its stream--
"Gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan
Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
Keeps head against the freshets"--
he further adorns and amplifies it in a northern manner, enriching it with
tones of sentiment and colours of romance, and brooding over every image
of beauty or passion as he calls it up. These things he does--but no
longer inordinately as heretofore. His powers of imagination and of
expression have alike gained strength and discipline; and through the
shining veils of his poetry his creations make themselves seen and felt in
living shape, action, and motive. False touches and misplaced beauties are
indeed not wanting. For example, in the phrase
"his erewhile timid lips grew bold
And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme,"
we have an effusively false touch, in the sugared taste not infrequent in
his earliest verses. And in the call of the wicked brothers to Lorenzo--
"To-day we purpose, aye this hour we mount
To spur three leagues towards the Apennine.
Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
His dewy rosary on the eglantine,"--
the last two lines are a beauty indeed, and of the kind most
characteristic of the poet, yet a beauty (as Leigh Hunt long ago pointed
out) misplaced in the mouths that utter it. Moreover the language of
_Isabella_ is still occasionally slipshod, and there are turns and
passages where we feel, as we felt so often in _Endymion_, that the poetic
will has abdicated to obey the chance dictation or suggestion of the
rhyme. But these are the minor blemishes of a poem otherwise conspicuous
for power and charm.
For his Italian story Keats chose an Italian metre, the octave stanza
introduced in English by Wyatt and Sidney, and naturalised before long by
Daniel, Drayton, and Edward Fairfax. Since their day, the stanza had been
little used in serious poetry, though Frere and Byron had lately revived
it for the poetry of light narrative and satire, the purpose for which the
epigrammatic snap and suddenness of the closing couplet in truth best fit
it. Keats, however, contrived generally to avoid this effect, and handles
the measure flowingly and well in a manner suited to his tale of pathos.
Over the purely musical and emotional resources of his art he shows a
singular command in stanzas like that beginning, 'O Melancholy, linger
here awhile,' repeated with variations as a kind of melodious interlude of
the main narrative. And there is a brilliant alertness of imagination in
such episodical passages as that where he pauses to realize the varieties
of human toil contributing to the wealth of the merchant brothers. But the
true test of a poem like this is that it should combine, at the essential
points and central moments of action and passion, imaginative vitality and
truth with beauty and charm. This test _Isabella_ admirably bears. For
instance, in the account of the vision which appears to the heroine of her
lover's mouldering corpse:--
"Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy-bright
With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof
From the poor girl by magic of their light."
With what a true poignancy of human tenderness is the story of the
apparition invested by this touch, and all its charnel horror and grimness
mitigated! Or again in the stanzas describing Isabella's actions at her
lover's burial place:--
"She gazed into the fresh thrown mould, as though
One glance did fully all its secrets tell;
Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;
Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow,
Like to a native lily of the dell:
Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
To dig more fervently than misers can.
Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon
Her silk had play'd in purple phantasies;
She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone,
And put it in her bosom, where it dries
And freezes utterly unto the bone
Those dainties made to still an infant's cries:
Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care,
But to throw back at times her veiling hair."
The lines are not all of equal workmanship: but the scene is realised with
unerring vision. The swift despairing gaze of the girl, anticipating with
too dire a certainty the realization of her dream: the simile in the third
and fourth lines, emphasizing the clearness of that certainty, and at the
same time relieving its terror by an image of beauty: the new simile of
the lily, again striking the note of beauty, while it intensifies the
impression of her rooted fixity of posture and purpose: the sudden
solution of that fixity, with the final couplet, into vehement action, as
she begins to dig 'more fervently than misers can' (what a commentary on
the relative strength of passions might be drawn from this simple
text):--then the first reward of her toil, in the shape of a relic not
ghastly, but beautiful both in itself and for the tenderness of which it
is a token: her womanly action in kissing it and putting it in her bosom,
while all the woman and mother in her is in the same words revealed to us
as blighted by the tragedy of her life: then the resumption and
continuance of her labours, with gestures once more of vital dramatic
truth as well as grace:--to imagine and to write like this is the
privilege of the best poets only, and even the best have not often
combined such concentrated force and beauty of conception with such a
limpid and flowing ease of narrative. Poetry had always come to Keats, as
he considered it ought to come, as naturally as leaves to a tree; and now
that it came of a quality like this, he had fairly earned the right, which
his rash youth had too soon arrogated, to look down on the fine artificers
of the school of Pope. In comparison with the illuminating power of true
imaginative poetry, the closest rhetorical condensations of that school
seem loose and thin, their most glittering points and aphorisms dull: nay,
those who admire them most justly will know better than to think the two
kinds of writing comparable.
After the completion of _Isabella_ followed the Scotch tour, of which the
only poetic fruits of value were the lines on Meg Merrilies and those on
Fingal's Cave. Returning in shaken health to the bedside of a brother
mortally ill, Keats plunged at once into the most arduous poetic labour he
had yet undertaken. This was the composition of _Hyperion_[52]. The
subject had been long in his mind, and both in the text and the preface of
_Endymion_ he indicated his intention to attempt it. At first he thought
of the poem to be written as a 'romance': but under the influence of
_Paradise Lost_, and no doubt also considering the height and vastness of
the subject, his plan changed to that of a blank verse epic in ten books.
His purpose was to sing the Titanomachia, or warfare of the earlier
Titanic dynasty with the later Olympian dynasty of the Greek gods; and in
particular one episode of that warfare, the dethronement of the sun-god
Hyperion and the assumption of his kingdom by Apollo. Critics, even
intelligent critics, sometimes complain that Keats should have taken this
and other subjects of his art from what they call the 'dead' mythology of
ancient Greece. As if that mythology could ever die: as if the ancient
fables, in passing out of the transitory state of things believed, into
the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put
on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. Faiths,
as faiths, perish one after another: but each in passing away bequeaths
for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained
of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of ancient Greece,
embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest-gifted human race to
explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the
thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and
control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements;
and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern
mind which is in so far dead and not they. One of the great symptoms of
returning vitality in the imagination of Europe, toward the close of the
last century, was its awakening to the forgotten charm of past modes of
faith and life. When men, in the earlier part of that century, spoke of
Greek antiquity, it was in stale and borrowed terms which showed that they
had never felt its power; just as, when they spoke of nature, it was in
set phrases that showed that they had never looked at her. On matters of
daily social experience the gifts of observation and of reason were
brilliantly exercised, but all the best thoughts of the time were thoughts
of the street, the mart, and the assembly. The human genius was for the
time being like some pilgrim long detained within city walls, and unused
to see or think of anything beyond them. At length resuming its march, it
emerged on open ground, where it fell to enjoying with a forgotten zest
the beauties of the earth and sky, and whence at the same time it could
turn back to gaze on regions it had long left behind, discerning with new
clearness and a new emotion, here under cloud and rainbow the forests and
spired cities of the Middle Age, there in serener light the hills and
havens and level fanes of Hellas.
The great leader and pioneer of the modern spirit on this new phase of its
pilgrimage was Goethe, who with deliberate effort and self-discipline
climbed to heights commanding an equal survey over the mediæval and the
classic past. We had in England had an earlier, shyer, and far less
effectual pioneer in Gray. As time went on, poet after poet arose and sang
more freely, one the glories of nature, another the enchantments of the
Middle Age, another the Greek beauty and joy of life. Keats when his time
came showed himself, all young and untutored as he was, freshly and
powerfully inspired to sing of all three alike. He does not, as we have
said, write of Greek things in a Greek manner. Something indeed in
_Hyperion_--at least in the first two books--he has caught from _Paradise
Lost_ of the high restraint and calm which was common to the Greeks and
Milton. But to realise how far he is in workmanship from the Greek purity
and precision of outline, and firm definition of individual images, we
have only to think of his palace of Hyperion, with its vague far-dazzling
pomps and phantom terrors of coming doom. This is the most sustained and
celebrated passage of the poem. Or let us examine one of its most
characteristic images from nature:--
"As when, upon a tranced summer night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir--."
Not to the simplicity of the Greek, but to the complexity of the modern,
sentiment of nature, it belongs to try and express, by such a concourse of
metaphors and epithets, every effect at once, to the most fugitive, which
a forest scene by starlight can have upon the mind: the pre-eminence of
the oaks among the other trees--their aspect of human venerableness--their
verdure, unseen in the darkness--the sense of their preternatural
stillness and suspended life in an atmosphere that seems to vibrate with
mysterious influences communicated between earth and sky[53].
But though Keats sees the Greek world from afar, he sees it truly. The
Greek touch is not his, but in his own rich and decorated English way he
writes with a sure insight into the vital meaning of Greek ideas. For the
story of the war of Titans and Olympians he had nothing to guide him
except scraps from the ancient writers, principally Hesiod, as retailed by
the compilers of classical dictionaries; and from the scholar's point of
view his version, we can see, would at many points have been arbitrary,
mixing up Latin conceptions and nomenclature with Greek, and introducing
much new matter of his own invention. But as to the essential meaning of
that warfare and its result--the dethronement of an older and ruder
worship by one more advanced and humane, in which ideas of ethics and of
arts held a larger place beside ideas of nature and her brute powers,--as
to this, it could not possibly be divined more truly, or illustrated with
more beauty and force, than by Keats in the speech of Oceanus in the
Second Book. Again, in conceiving and animating these colossal shapes of
early gods, with their personalities between the elemental and the human,
what masterly justice of instinct does he show,--to take one point
only--in the choice of similitudes, drawn from the vast inarticulate
sounds of nature, by which he seeks to make us realize their voices. Thus
of the assembled gods when Saturn is about to speak:--
"There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a God gives sign,
With hushing finger, how he means to load
His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,
With thunder, and with music, and with pomp:
Such noise is like the roar of bleak-grown pines."
Again, of Oceanus answering his fallen chief:--
"So ended Saturn; and the God of the Sea,
Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,
But cogitation in his watery shades,
Arose, with locks not oozy, and began,
In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue
Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands."
And once more, of Clymene followed by Enceladus in debate:--
"So far her voice flow'd on, like timorous brook
That, lingering along a pebbled coast,
Doth fear to meet the sea: but sea it met,
And shudder'd; for the overwhelming voice
Of huge Enceladus swallow'd it in wrath:
The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves
In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks,
Came booming thus."
This second book of _Hyperion_, relating the council of the dethroned
Titans, has neither the sublimity of the first, where the solemn opening
vision of Saturn fallen is followed by the resplendent one of Hyperion
threatened in his 'lucent empire'; nor the intensity of the unfinished
third, where we leave Apollo undergoing a convulsive change under the
afflatus of Mnemosyne, and about to put on the full powers of his godhead.
But it has a rightness and controlled power of its own which place it, to
my mind, quite on a level with the other two.
With a few slips and inequalities, and one or two instances of verbal
incorrectness, _Hyperion_, as far as it was written, is indeed one of the
grandest poems in our language, and in its grandeur seems one of the
easiest and most spontaneous. Keats, however, had never been able to apply
himself to it continuously, but only by fits and starts. Partly this was
due to the distractions of bereavement, of material anxiety, and of
dawning passion amid which it was begun and continued: partly (if we may
trust the statement of the publishers) to disappointment at the reception
of _Endymion_: and partly, it is clear, to something not wholly congenial
to his powers in the task itself. When after letting the poem lie by
through the greater part of the spring and summer of 1819, he in September
made up his mind to give it up, he wrote to Reynolds explaining his
reasons as follows. "There were too many Miltonic inversions in
it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful, or rather, artist's
humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be
kept up." In the same connection he declares that Chatterton is the purest
writer in the English language. "He has no French idiom or particles, like
Chaucer; it is genuine English idiom in English words." In writing about
the same time to his brother, he again expresses similar opinions both as
to Milton and Chatterton.
The influence, and something of the majesty, of _Paradise Lost_ are in
truth to be found in _Hyperion_: and the debate of the fallen Titans in
the second book is obviously to some extent modelled on the debate of the
fallen angels. But Miltonic the poem hardly is in any stricter sense.
Passing by those general differences that arise from the contrast of
Milton's age with Keats's youth, of his austerity with Keats's luxuriance
of spirit, and speaking of palpable and technical differences only:--in
the matter of rhythm, Keats's blank verse has not the flight of Milton's.
Its periods do not wheel through such stately evolutions to so solemn and
far-foreseen a close; though it indeed lacks neither power nor music, and
ranks unquestionably with the finest blank-verse written since
Milton,--beside that of Shelley's _Alastor_,--perhaps a little below that
of Wordsworth when Wordsworth is at his infrequent best. As to diction and
the poetic use of words, Keats shows almost as masterly an instinct as
Milton himself: but while of Milton's diction the characteristic colour is
derived from reading and meditation, from an impassioned conversance with
the contents of books, the characteristic colour of Keats's diction is
rather derived from conversance with nature and with the extreme
refinements of physical sensation. He is no match for Milton in a passage
of this kind:--
"Eden stretch'd her line
From Auran eastward to the royal towers
Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings,
Or where the sons of Eden long before
Dwelt in Telassar."
But then neither is Milton a match for Keats in work like this:--
"throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retired cave
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves,
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess."
After the pomp and glow of learned allusion, the second chief technical
note of Milton's style is his partiality for a Latin use of the relative
pronoun and the double negative, and for scholarly Latin turns and
constructions generally. Already in _Isabella_ Keats is to be found
attempting both notes, thus:--
"With duller steel than the Persean sword
They cut away no formless monster's head--."
Similar Miltonic echoes occur in _Hyperion_, as in the introduction
already quoted to the speech of Oceanus: or again thus:--
"Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope
In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes,
Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet
And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies."
But they are not frequent, nor had Keats adopted as much of Milton's
technical manner as he seems to have supposed. Yet he had adopted more of
it than was natural to him or than he cared to maintain.
In turning away from Milton to Chatterton, he was going back to one of his
first loves in literature. What he says of Chatterton's words and idioms
seems paradoxical enough, as applied to the archaic jargon concocted by
the Bristol boy out of Kersey's _Dictionary_[54]. But it is true that
through that jargon can be discerned, in the Rowley poems, not only an
ardent feeling for romance and an extraordinary facility in composition,
but a remarkable gift of plain and flowing construction. And after Keats
had for some time moved, not perfectly at his ease, though with results to
us so masterly, in the paths of Milton, we find him in fact tempted aside
on an excursion into the regions beloved by Chatterton. We know not how
much of _Hyperion_ had been written when he laid it aside in January to
take up the composition of _St Agnes' Eve_, that unsurpassed example--nay,
must we not rather call it unequalled?--of the pure charm of coloured and
romantic narrative in English verse. As this poem does not attempt the
elemental grandeur of _Hyperion_, so neither does it approach the human
pathos and passion of _Isabella_. 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.
Keats takes in this poem the simple, almost threadbare theme of the love
of an adventurous youth for the daughter of a hostile house,--a story
wherein something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young
Lochinvar,--and brings it deftly into association with the old popular
belief as to the way a maiden might on this anniversary win sight of her
lover in a dream. Choosing happily, for such a purpose, the Spenserian
stanza, he adds to the melodious grace, the 'sweet-slipping movement,' as
it has been called, of Spenser, a transparent ease and directness of
construction; and with this ease and directness combines (wherein lies the
great secret of his ripened art) a never-failing richness and
concentration of poetic meaning and suggestion. From the opening stanza,
which makes us feel the chill of the season to our bones,--telling us
first of its effect on the wild and tame creatures of wood and field, and
next how the frozen breath of the old beadsman in the chapel aisle 'seem'd
taking flight for heaven, without a death,'--from thence to the close,
where the lovers make their way past the sleeping porter and the friendly
bloodhound into the night, the poetry seems to throb in every line with
the life of imagination and beauty. It indeed plays in great part about
the external circumstances and decorative adjuncts of the tale. But in
handling these Keats's method is the reverse of that by which some writers
vainly endeavour to rival in literature the effects of the painter and
sculptor. He never writes for the eye merely, but vivifies everything he
touches, telling even of dead and senseless things in terms of life,
movement, and feeling. Thus the monuments in the chapel aisle are brought
before us, not by any effort of description, but solely through our
sympathy with the shivering fancy of the beadsman:--
"Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries,
He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails."
Even into the sculptured heads of the corbels in the banqueting hall the
poet strikes life:--
"The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,
Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests,
With wings blown back, and hands put cross-wise on their breasts."
The painted panes in the chamber window, instead of trying to pick out
their beauties in detail, he calls--
"Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings,--"
a gorgeous phrase which leaves the widest range to the colour-imagination
of the reader, giving it at the same time a sufficient clue by the simile
drawn from a particular specimen of nature's blazonry. In the last line of
the same stanza--
"A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings,"
--the word 'blush' makes the colour seem to come and go, while the mind is
at the same time sent travelling from the maiden's chamber on thoughts of
her lineage and ancestral fame. Observation, I believe, shows that
moonlight has not the power to transmit the hues of painted glass as Keats
in this celebrated passage represents it. Let us be grateful for the
error, if error it is, which has led him to heighten, by these saintly
splendours of colour, the sentiment of a scene wherein a voluptuous glow
is so exquisitely attempered with chivalrous chastity and awe. When
Madeline unclasps her jewels, a weaker poet would have dwelt on their
lustre or other visible qualities: Keats puts those aside, and speaks
straight to our spirits in an epithet breathing with the very life of the
wearer,--'her warmed jewels.' When Porphyro spreads the feast of dainties
beside his sleeping mistress, we are made to feel how those ideal and rare
sweets of sense surround and minister to her, not only with their own
natural richness, but with the associations and the homage of all far
countries whence they have been gathered--
"From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon."
If the unique charm of the _Eve of St Agnes_ lies thus in the richness and
vitality of the accessory and decorative images, the actions and emotions
of the personages are hardly less happily conceived as far as they go.
What can be better touched than the figures of the beadsman and the nurse,
who live just long enough to share in the wonders of the night, and die
quietly of age when their parts are over[55]: especially the debate of old
Angela with Porphyro, and her gentle treatment by her mistress on the
stair? Madeline is exquisite throughout, but most of all, I think, at two
moments: first when she has just entered her chamber,--
"No uttered syllable, or, woe betide:
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side:"--
and afterwards when, awakening, she finds her lover beside her, and
contrasts his bodily presence with her dream:--
"'Ah Porphyro!' said she, 'but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear
Made tunable with every sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear;
How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear'."
Criticism may urge, indeed, that in the 'growing faint' of Porphyro, and
in his 'warm unnerved arm,' we have a touch of that swooning abandonment
to which Keats's heroes are too subject. But it is the slightest
possible; and after all the trait belongs not more to the poet
individually than to his time. Lovers in prose romances of that date are
constantly overcome in like manner. And we may well pardon Porphyro his
weakness, in consideration of the spirit which has led him to his lady's
side in defiance of her 'whole bloodthirsty race,' and will bear her
safely, this night of happy marvels over, to the home 'beyond the southern
moors' that he has prepared for her[56].
Nearly allied with the _Eve of St Agnes_ is the fragment in the four-foot
ballad metre, which Keats composed on the parallel popular belief
connected with the eve of St Mark. This piece was planned, as we saw, at
Chichester, and written, it appears, partly there and partly at Winchester
six months later: the name of the heroine, Bertha, seems farther to
suggest associations with Canterbury. Impressions of all these three
cathedral cities which Keats knew are combined, no doubt, in the picture
of which the fragment consists. I have said picture, but there are two:
one the out-door picture of the city streets in their spring freshness and
Sabbath peace: the other the indoor picture of the maiden reading in her
quaint fire-lit chamber. Each in its way is of an admirable vividness and
charm. The belief about St Mark's Eve was that a person stationed near a
church porch at twilight on that anniversary would see entering the church
the apparitions of those about to die, or be brought near death, in the
ensuing year. Keats's fragment breaks off before the story is well
engaged, and it is not easy to see how his opening would have led up to
incidents illustrating this belief. Neither is it clear whether he
intended to place them in mediæval or in relatively modern times. The
demure Protestant air which he gives the Sunday streets, the Oriental
furniture and curiosities of the lady's chamber, might seem to indicate
the latter: but we must remember that he was never strict in his
archæology--witness, for instance, the line which tells how 'the long
carpets rose along the gusty floor' in the _Eve of St Agnes_. The interest
of the _St Mark's_ fragment, then, lies not in moving narrative or the
promise of it, but in two things: first, its pictorial brilliance and
charm of workmanship: and second, its relation to and influence on later
English poetry. Keats in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the
feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools. The indoor scene
of the girl over her book, in its insistent delight in vivid colour and
the minuteness of far-sought suggestive and picturesque detail, is
perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply
impressed and interested),--of his pictures even more than of his poems:
while in the out-door work we seem to find forestalled the very tones and
cadences of Mr Morris in some tale of the _Earthly Paradise_:--
"The city streets were clean and fair
From wholesome drench of April rains;
And on the western window panes
The chilly sunset faintly told
Of unmatured green valleys cold,
Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,
Of rivers new with springtide sedge."
Another poem of the same period, romantic in a different sense, is _La
Belle Dame sans Merci_. The title is taken from that of a poem by Alain
Chartier,--the secretary and court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII.
of France,--of which an English translation used to be attributed to
Chaucer, and is included in the early editions of his works. This title
had caught Keats's fancy, and in the _Eve of St Agnes_ he makes Lorenzo
waken Madeline by playing beside her bed--
"an ancient ditty, long since mute,
In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans merci'."
The syllables continuing to haunt him, he wrote in the course of the
spring or summer (1819) a poem of his own on the theme, which has no more
to do with that of Chartier than Chartier has really to do with
Provence[57]. Keats's ballad can hardly be said to tell a story; but
rather sets before us, with imagery drawn from the mediæval world of
enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love, when
either adverse fate or deluded choice makes of love not a blessing but a
bane. The plight which the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his
own soul in thraldom. Every reader must feel how truly the imagery
expresses the passion: how powerfully, through these fascinating old-world
symbols, the universal heart of man is made to speak. To many students (of
whom the present writer is one) the union of infinite tenderness with a
weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild
yet simple magic of the cadences, the perfect 'inevitable' union of sound
and sense, make of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ the master-piece, not only
among the shorter poems of Keats, but even (if any single master-piece
must be chosen) among them all.
Before finally giving up _Hyperion_ Keats had conceived and written,
during his summer months at Shanklin and Winchester, another narrative
poem on a Greek subject: but one of those where Greek life and legend come
nearest to the mediæval, and give scope both for scenes of wonder and
witchcraft, and for the stress and vehemence of passion. I speak, of
course, of _Lamia_, the story of the serpent-lady, both enchantress and
victim of enchantments, who loves a youth of Corinth, and builds for him
by her art a palace of delights, until their happiness is shattered by the
scrutiny of intrusive and cold-blooded wisdom. Keats had found the germ of
the story, quoted from Philostratus, in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_.
In versifying it he went back once more to rhymed heroics; handling them,
however, not as in _Endymion_, but in a manner founded on that of Dryden,
with a free use of the Alexandrine, a more sparing one of the overflow and
the irregular pause, and of disyllabic rhymes none at all. In the measure
as thus treated by Keats there is a fire and grace of movement, a lithe
and serpentine energy, well suited to the theme, and as effective in its
way as the victorious march of Dryden himself. Here is an example where
the poetry of Greek mythology is finely woven into the rhetoric of love:--
"Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, goddess, see
Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee!
For pity do not this sad heart belie--
Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.
Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay!
To thy far wishes will thy streams obey:
Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain,
Alone they can drink up the morning rain:
Though a descended Pleiad, will not one
Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune
Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?"
And here an instance of the power and reality of scenic imagination:--
"As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all,
Throughout her palaces imperial,
And all her populous streets and temples lewd,
Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd,
To the wide-spreaded night above her towers.
Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours,
Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white,
Companion'd or alone; while many a light
Flar'd, here and there, from wealthy festivals,
And threw their moving shadows on the walls,
Or found them cluster'd in the cornic'd shade
Of some arch'd temple door, or dusty colonnade."
No one can deny the truth of Keats's own criticism on _Lamia_ when he
says, "I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold
of people in some way--give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation."
There is perhaps nothing in all his writing so vivid, or that so burns
itself in upon the mind, as the picture of the serpent-woman awaiting the
touch of Hermes to transform her, followed by the agonized process of the
transformation itself. Admirably told, though perhaps somewhat
disproportionately for its place in the poem, is the introductory episode
of Hermes and his nymph: admirably again the concluding scene where the
merciless gaze of the philosopher exorcises his pupil's dream of love and
beauty, and the lover in forfeiting his illusion forfeits life. This
thrilling vividness of narration in particular points, and the fine
melodious vigour of much of the verse, have caused some students to give
_Lamia_ almost the first, if not the first, place among Keats's narrative
poems. But surely for this it is in some parts too feverish, and in others
too unequal. It contains descriptions not entirely successful, as for
instance that of the palace reared by Lamia's magic; which will not bear
comparison with other and earlier dream-palaces of the poet's building.
And it has reflective passages, as that in the first book beginning, 'Let
the mad poets say whate'er they please,' and the first fifteen lines of
the second, where from the winning and truly poetic ease of his style at
its best, Keats relapses into something too like Leigh Hunt's and his own
early strain of affected ease and fireside triviality. He shows at the
same time signs of a return to his former rash experiments in language.
The positive virtues of beauty and felicity in his diction had never been
attended by the negative virtue of strict correctness: thus in the _Eve of
St Agnes_ we had to 'brook' tears for to check or forbear them, in
_Hyperion_ 'portion'd' for 'proportion'd;' eyes that 'fever out;' a
chariot 'foam'd along.' Some of these verbal licences possess a force that
makes them pass; but not so in _Lamia_ the adjectives 'psalterian' and
'piazzian,' the verb 'to labyrinth,' and the participle 'daft,' as if from
an imaginary active verb meaning to daze.
In the moral which the tale is made to illustrate there is moreover a
weakness. Keats himself gives us fair warning against attaching too much
importance to any opinion which in a momentary mood we may find him
uttering. But the doctrine he sets forth in _Lamia_ is one which from the
reports of his conversation we know him to have held with a certain
consistency:--
"Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine--
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade."
Campbell has set forth the same doctrine more fully in _The Rainbow_: but
one sounder, braver, and of better hope, by which Keats would have done
well to stand, is preached by Wordsworth in his famous Preface.
Passing, now, from the narrative to the reflective portion of Keats's work
during this period--it was on the odes, we saw, that he was chiefly
occupied in the spring months of 1819, from the completion of _St Agnes'
Eve_ at Chichester in January until the commencement of _Lamia_ and _Otho
the Great_ at Shanklin in June. These odes of Keats constitute a class
apart in English literature, in form and manner neither lineally derived
from any earlier, nor much resembling any contemporary, verse. In what he
calls the 'roundelay' of the Indian maiden in _Endymion_ he had made his
most elaborate lyrical attempt until now; and while for once approaching
Shelley in lyric ardour and height of pitch, had equalled Coleridge in
touches of wild musical beauty and far-sought romance. His new odes are
comparatively simple and regular in form. They are written in a strain
intense indeed, but meditative and brooding, and quite free from the
declamatory and rhetorical elements which we are accustomed to associate
with the idea of an ode. Of the five composed in the spring of 1819, two,
those on _Psyche_ and the _Grecian Urn_, are inspired by the old Greek
world of imagination and art; two, those on _Melancholy_ and the
_Nightingale_, by moods of the poet's own mind; while the fifth, that on
_Indolence_, partakes in a weaker degree of both inspirations.
In the _Psyche_, (where the stanza is of a lengthened type approaching
those of Spenser's nuptial odes, but not regularly repeated,) Keats recurs
to a theme of which he had long been enamoured, as we know by the lines in
the opening poem of his first book, beginning--
"So felt he, who first told how Psyche went
On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment."
Following these lines, in his early piece, came others disfigured by
cloying touches of the kind too common in his love-scenes. Nor are like
touches quite absent from the ode: but they are more than compensated by
the exquisite freshness of the natural scenery where the mythic lovers are
disclosed--'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed.' What other
poet has compressed into a single line so much of the true life and charm
of flowers, of their power to minister to the spirit of man through all
his senses at once? Such felicity in compound epithets is by this time
habitual with Keats, and of Spenser, with his 'sea-shouldering whales,' he
is now in his own manner the equal. The 'azure-lidded sleep' of the maiden
in _St Agnes' Eve_ is matched in this ode by the 'moss-lain Dryads' and
the 'soft-conchèd ear' of Psyche; though the last epithet perhaps jars on
us a little with a sense of oddity, like the 'cirque-couchant' snake in
_Lamia_. For the rest, there is certainly something strained in the turn
of thought and expression whereby the poet offers himself and the homage
of his own mind to the divinity he addresses, in lieu of the worship of
antiquity for which she came too late; and especially in the terms of the
metaphor which opens the famous fourth stanza:--
"Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new-blown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind."
Yet over such difficulties the true lover of poetry will find himself
swiftly borne, until he pauses breathless and delighted at the threshold
of the sanctuary prepared by the 'gardener Fancy,' his ear charmed by the
glow and music of the verse, with its hurrying pace and artfully iterated
vowels towards the close, his mind enthralled by the beauty of the
invocation and the imagery.
Less glowing, but of finer conception and more rare poetic value, is the
_Ode on a Grecian Urn_. Instead of the long and unequal stanza of the
_Psyche_, it is written in a regular stanza of five rhymes, the first two
arranged in a quatrain, and the second three in a sestet; a plan to which
Keats adhered in the rest of his odes, only varying the order of the
sestet, and in one instance--the ode to Melancholy--expanding it into a
septet. The sight, or the imagination, of a piece of ancient sculpture had
set the poet's mind at work, on the one hand conjuring up the scenes of
ancient life and worship which lay behind and suggested the sculptured
images; on the other, speculating on the abstract relations of plastic art
to life. The opening invocation is followed by a string of questions which
flash their own answer upon us out of the darkness of
antiquity--interrogatories which are at the same time pictures,--'What men
or gods are these, what maidens loth,' &c. The second and third stanzas
express with perfect poetic felicity and insight the vital differences
between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety
and decay, and art, which in forfeiting reality gains in exchange
permanence of beauty, and the power to charm by imagined experiences even
richer than the real. Then the questioning begins again, and yields the
incomparable choice of pictures,--
"What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"
In the answering lines--
"And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return,--"
in these lines there seems a dissonance, inasmuch as they speak of the
arrest of life as though it were an infliction in the sphere of reality,
and not merely, like the instances of such arrest given farther back, a
necessary condition in the sphere of art, having in that sphere its own
compensations. But it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can
easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice
it. Finally, dropping the airy play of the mind backward and forward
between the two spheres, the poet consigns the work of ancient skill to
the future, to remain,--
"in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--"
thus proclaiming, in the last words, what amidst the gropings of reason
and the flux of things is to the poet and artist--at least to one of
Keats's temper--an immutable law.
It seems clear that no single extant work of antiquity can have supplied
Keats with the suggestion for this poem. There exists, indeed, at Holland
House an urn wrought with just such a scene of pastoral sacrifice as is
described in his fourth stanza[58]: and of course no subject is commoner
in Greek relief-sculpture than a Bacchanalian procession. But the two
subjects do not, so far as I know, occur together on any single work of
ancient art: and Keats probably imagined his urn by a combination of
sculptures actually seen in the British Museum with others known to him
only from engravings, and particularly from Piranesi's etchings. Lord
Holland's urn is duly figured in the _Vasi e Candelabri_ of that admirable
master. From the old Leigh Hunt days Keats had been fond of what he
calls--
"the pleasant flow
Of words at opening a portfolio:"
and in the scene of sacrifice in _Endymion_ (Book L, 136-163) we may
perhaps already find a proof of familiarity with this particular print, as
well as an anticipation of the more masterly poetic rendering of the
subject in the ode.
The ode _On Indolence_ stands midway, not necessarily in date of
composition, but in scope and feeling, between the two Greek and the two
personal odes, as I have above distinguished them. In it Keats again calls
up the image of a marble urn, but not for its own sake, only to illustrate
the guise in which he feigns the allegoric presences of Love, Ambition,
and Poetry to have appeared to him in a day-dream. This ode, less highly
wrought and more unequal than the rest, contains the imaginative record
of a passing mood (mentioned also in his correspondence) when the wonted
intensity of his emotional life was suspended under the spell of an
agreeable physical languor. Well had it been for him had such moods come
more frequently to give him rest. Most sensitive among the sons of men,
the sources of joy and pain lay close together in his nature: and
unsatisfied passion kept both sources filled to bursting. One of the
attributes he assigns to his enchantress Lamia is a
"sciential brain
To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain."
In the fragmentary ode _On Melancholy_ (which has no proper beginning, its
first stanza having been discarded) he treats the theme of Beaumont and of
Milton in a manner entirely his own: expressing his experience of the
habitual interchange and alternation of emotions of joy and pain with a
characteristic easy magnificence of imagery and style:--
"Aye, in the very Temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovereign shrine,
Though known to none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst joy's grape against his palate fine:
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung."
The same crossing and intermingling of opposite currents of feeling finds
expression, together with unequalled touches of the poet's feeling for
nature and romance, in the _Ode to a Nightingale_. Just as his Grecian urn
was no single specimen of antiquity that he had seen, so it is not the
particular nightingale he had heard singing in the Hampstead garden that
he in his poem invokes, but a type of the race imagined as singing in some
far-off scene of woodland mystery and beauty. Thither he sighs to follow
her: first by aid of the spell of some southern vintage--a spell which he
makes us realize in lines redolent of the southern richness and joy. Then
follows a contrasted vision of all his own and mankind's tribulations
which he will leave behind him. Nay, he needs not the aid of
Bacchus,--Poetry alone shall transport him. For a moment he mistrusts her
power, but the next moment finds himself where he would be, listening to
the imagined song in the imagined woodland, and divining in the darkness,
by that gift whereby his mind is a match for nature, all the secrets of
the season and the night. In this joy he remembers how often the thought
of death has seemed welcome to him, and thinks it would be more welcome
now than ever. The nightingale would not cease her song--and here, by a
breach of logic which is also, I think, a flaw in the poetry, he contrasts
the transitoriness of human life, meaning the life of the individual, with
the permanence of the song-bird's life, meaning the life of the type. This
last thought leads him off into the ages, whence he brings back those
memorable touches of far-off Bible and legendary romance in the stanza
closing with the words 'in faery lands forlorn': and then, catching up his
own last word, 'forlorn,' with an abrupt change of mood and meaning, he
returns to daily consciousness, and with the fading away of his forest
dream the poem closes. In this group of the odes it takes rank beside the
_Grecian Urn_ in the other. Neither is strictly faultless, but such
revealing imaginative insight and such conquering poetic charm, the touch
that in striking so lightly strikes so deep, who does not prefer to
faultlessness? Both odes are among the veriest glories of our poetry. Both
are at the same time too long and too well known to quote. Let us
therefore place here, as an example of this class of Keats's work, the
ode _To Autumn_, which is the last he wrote, and contains the record of
his quiet September days at Winchester. It opens out, indeed, no such
far-reaching avenues of thought and feeling as the two last mentioned, but
in execution is perhaps the completest of them all. In the first stanza
the bounty, in the last the pensiveness, of the time are expressed in
words so transparent and direct that we almost forget they are words at
all, and nature herself and the season seem speaking to us: while in the
middle stanza the touches of literary art and Greek personification have
an exquisite congruity and lightness.
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies."
To pass from our poet's work at this time in the several fields of
romance, epic, ballad, and ode, to those in the field of drama, is to pass
from a region of happy and assured conquest to one of failure, though of
failure not unredeemed by auguries of future success, had any future been
in store for him. At his age no man has ever been a master in the drama:
even by the most powerful intuitive genius, neither human nature nor the
difficulties of the art itself can be so early mastered. The manner in
which Keats wrote his first play, merely supplying the words to a plot
contrived as they went along by a friend of gifts radically inferior to
his own, was moreover the least favourable that he could have attempted.
He brought to the task the mastery over poetic colour and diction which we
have seen: he brought an impassioned sentiment of romance, and a mind
prepared to enter by sympathy into the hearts of men and women: while
Brown contributed his amateur stage-craft, such as it was. But these
things were not enough. The power of sympathetic insight had not yet
developed in Keats into one of dramatic creation: and the joint work of
the friends is confused in order and sequence, and far from masterly in
conception. Keats indeed makes the characters speak in lines flashing
with all the hues of poetry. But in themselves they have the effect only
of puppets inexpertly agitated: Otho, a puppet type of royal dignity and
fatherly affection, Ludolph of febrile passion and vacillation, Erminia of
maidenly purity, Conrad and Auranthe of ambitious lust and treachery. At
least until the end of the fourth act these strictures hold good. From
that point Keats worked alone, and the fifth act, probably in consequence,
shows a great improvement. There is a real dramatic effect, of the violent
kind affected by the old English drama, in the disclosure of the body of
Auranthe, dead indeed, at the moment when Ludolph in his madness vainly
imagines himself to have slain her: and some of the speeches in which his
frenzy breaks forth remind us strikingly of Marlowe, not only by their
pomp of poetry and allusion, but by the tumult of the soul and senses
expressed in them. Of the second historical play, _King Stephen_, which
Keats began by himself at Winchester, too little was written to afford
matter for a safe judgment. The few scenes he finished are not only marked
by his characteristic splendour and felicity of phrase: they are full of a
spirit of heady action and the stir of battle: qualities which he had not
shown in any previous work, and for which we might have doubted his
capacity had not this fragment been preserved.
But in the mingling of his soul's and body's destinies it had been
determined that neither this nor any other of his powers should be
suffered to ripen farther upon earth.