France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never
lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more
delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and
cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering
like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh,
what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate
without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream
when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic,
distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry
the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little
did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen
upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour
and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped
from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her
with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters,
economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe
is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that
generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that
dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept
alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse
of manly sentiments and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone,
that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt
a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated
ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice
itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
As we read these sentences we cease to ask ourselves whether Burke
was on the right or the wrong side in the French Revolution. We are
content that a great artist has spoken from the depths of his soul. He
has released the truth that is in him to the eternal enrichment of the
human race.
V
KEATS
1. THE VARIOUS KEATSES
Most men who write in praise of Shakespeare write in praise of
themselves. Shakespeare is their mirror. Respectable middle-aged
professors generally think of him as the respectable middle-aged man
of the Stratford bust. Mr. Frank Harris sees him as Mr. Frank Harris
with a difference. Mr. Charles Whibley imagines him as a Whibleyesque
Tory with a knotted whip ever ready for the back of democracy. After
reading _The John Keats Memorial Volume_, consisting of appreciations
in prose and verse from all manner of contributors, great and little,
one comes to the conclusion that most men interpret Keats in the
same easy-going way. Thus, Mr. Bernard Shaw notes that the poet of
the _Ode to a Nightingale_ and the _Ode on Melancholy_ was “a merry
soul, a jolly fellow, who could not only carry his splendid burthen
of genius, but swing it round, toss it up and catch it again, and
whistle a tune as he strode along,” and he discovers in three verses
of _The Pot of Basil_ “the immense indictment of the profiteers and
exploiters with which Marx has shaken capitalistic civilisation to its
foundations, even to its overthrow in Russia.” To Dr. Arthur Lynch, on
the other hand, Keats is primarily a philosopher, whose philosophic
principles “account for his Republicanism as well as for his criticisms
of poetry.” Mr. Arthur Symons takes an opposite view. “John Keats,”
he tells us, “at a time when the phrase had not yet been invented,
practised the theory of art for art’s sake.... Keats had something
feminine and twisted in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves ...
which it is now the fashion to call decadent.” To Sir Ian Hamilton (who
contributes a beautiful comment, saved by its passion from the perils
of high-flownness) Keats was the prototype of the heroic youth that
sacrificed itself in the war. Did he not once declare his willingness
to “jump down Etna for any great public good”; and did he not write:
The Patriot shall feel
My stern alarum and unsheath his steel?
And, if we dip into the thousands of other things that have been
written about Keats, including the centenary appreciations, we shall
find this personal emphasis on the part of the critic again and again.
Lord Houghton even did his best to raise Keats a step nearer in the
social scale by associating him with “the upper rank of the middle
class”--an exaggeration, however, which is no more inaccurate than the
common view that Keats was brought up on the verge of pauperdom. As a
matter of fact, Keats’s father was an ostler who married his employer’s
daughter, and his grandfather, the livery stable keeper of Finsbury
Pavement, left a fortune of £13,000. But it is not only with regard to
his birth that attempts to bring Keats into the fold of respectability
are common. His character, and the character of his genius, are
unconsciously doctored to suit the tastes of those who do not
apparently care for Keats as he actually was. The Keats who thrashed
the butcher is more important for them than the Keats who fell in love
with Fanny Brawne. They prefer canonising Keats to knowing him, and the
logical consequence of their attitude is that the Keats who might have
been means more to them than the Keats who was. I do not deny that a
great deal that is said about Keats on all sides is true: possibly most
of it is true. But much of it is true only as an argument. The manly
Keats is the true answer to the effeminate Keats, as the effeminate
Keats is the true answer to the manly Keats. The Keats who said: “I
think I shall be among the English poets after my death,” and the Keats
who was “snuffed out by an article” similarly answer one another;
and the Keats of _The Fall of Hyperion_ is the perfect critic of the
Keats of the _Ode on Indolence_, and _vice versa_. Keats was a score
of Keatses. He was luxurious and ascetic, heroic and self-indulgent,
ambitious and diffident, an artist and a thinker, vulgar and an
æsthete, perfect in phrase and gauche in phrase, melancholy and merry,
sensual and spiritual, a cynic about women and one of the great lovers,
a teller of heart-easing tales and a would-be redeemer. The perfect
portrait of Keats will reveal him in all these contradictory lights,
and we shall never understand Keats if we merely isolate one group of
facts, such as the thrashing of the butcher, or another group, such
as that he thought for a moment of abandoning _Hyperion_ as a result
of the hostile reviews of _Endymion_. Keats’s life was not that of a
planet beautifully poised as it wheels on its lonely errand. He was
a man torn by conflicting demons--a martyr to poetry and love and,
ultimately, to ideals of truth and goodness.
He bowed before altars that, even when he bowed, he seems to have
known were altars of the lesser gods. Not that he blasphemed the
greater gods in doing so. He believed that the altar at the foot of the
hill was a stage in the poet’s progress to the altar at the summit. As
he grew older, however, his vision of the summit became more intense,
and a greater Muse announced to him:
None can usurp this height
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are miseries and will not let them rest.
He was exchanging the worship of Apollo for the worship of Zeus and,
like Tolstoy, he seemed to condemn his own past work as a denial of the
genius of true art. Even here, however, Keats was still tortured by
conflicting allegiances, and it is on Apollo, not on Zeus, he calls in
his condemnation of Byron in _The Fall of Hyperion_:
Apollo! faded! O far-flown Apollo!
Where is thy misty pestilence to creep
Into the dwellings, through the door crannies
Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers
And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse?
Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.
But he was Zeus’s child, as he lay dying, and the very epitaph he left
for himself, remembering a phrase in _The Maid’s Tragedy_ of Beaumont
and Fletcher, “Here lies one whose name is writ in water,” was a last
farewell to an Apollo who seemed to have failed him.
The Keats who achieved perfection in literature, however, was Apollo’s
Keats--Apollo’s and Aphrodite’s. His odes, written out of a genius
stirred to its depths for the first time by his passion for Fanny
Brawne--he does not seem to have been subject to love, as most poets
are, in his boyhood--were but the perfect expression of that idolatry
that had stammered in _Endymion_. Keats in his masterpieces is still
the Prince breaking through the wood to the vision of the Sleeping
Beauty. He has not yet touched her into life. He almost prefers to
remain a spectator, not an awakener. He loves the picture itself more
than the reality, though he guesses all the while at the reality
behind. That, perhaps, is why men do not go to Keats for healing,
as they go to Wordsworth, or for hope, as they go to Shelley. Keats
enriches life rather with a sense of a loveliness for ever vanishing,
and with a dream of what life might be if the loveliness remained.
Regret means more to him than hope:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
The world at its most beautiful is for Keats a series of dissolving
pictures--of “fair attitudes” that only the artist can make immortal.
His indolence is the indolence of a man under the spell of beautiful
shapes. His energy is the energy of a man who would drain the whole cup
of worship in a beautiful phrase. His æsthetic attitude to life--as
æsthetic in its way as the early Pater’s--appears in that letter in
which he writes:
I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a
field-mouse peeping out of the withered grass--the creature hath
a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the
buildings of a city, and I see a Man hurrying along--to what? The
Creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.
In this very letter, no doubt, the disinterested philosopher as well
as the æsthete speaks, but it is Keats’s longing for philosophy, not
his philosophy itself, that touches us most profoundly in his greatest
work. Our knowledge of his sufferings gives his work a background of
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self
against which the exquisite images he wrought have a tragic and
spiritual appeal beyond that of any other poet of his kind. The Keats
we love is more than the Keats of the poems--more even than the Keats
of the letters. It is the Keats of these and of the life--that proud
and vehement spirit, that great-hearted traveller in the realms of
gold, caught in circumstances and done to death in the very temples
where he had worshipped.
2. THE ARTIFICER
It is an interesting fact that most of the writers who use words like
artificers have been townsmen. Milton and Gray, Keats and Lamb, were
all Londoners. It is as though to some extent words took the place of
natural scenes in the development of the townsman’s genius. The town
boy finds the Muse in a book rather than by a stream. He hears her
voice first, perhaps, in a beautiful phrase. It would be ridiculous to
speak as though the country-bred poet were uninfluenced by books or the
town-bred poet uninfluenced by bird and tree, by winds and waters. All
I suggest is that in the townsman the influence of literature is more
dominant, and frequently leads to an excitement over phrases almost
more intense than his excitement over things.
Milton was thus a stylist in a sense in which Shakespeare was not.
Keats was a stylist in a sense in which Shelley was not. Not that
Milton and Keats used speech more felicitously, but they used it more
self-consciously. Theirs, at their greatest, was the magic of art
rather than of nature. They had not, in the same measure as Shakespeare
and Shelley, the freedom of the air--the bird-like flight or the
bird-like song.
The genius of Keats, we know, was founded on the reading of books. He
did not even begin writing till he was nearly eighteen, when Cowden
Clarke lent him the treasures of his library, including _The Faëry
Queene_. The first of his great poems was written after reading
Chapman’s _Homer_, and to the end of his life he was inspired by works
of art to a greater degree than any other writer of genius in the
England of his time.
This may help to explain why he was, as Mr. John Bailey has pointed
out, the poet of stillness. Books, pictures, and Grecian urns are
still. They fix life for us in the wonder of a trance, and, if Keats
saw Cortes “silent upon a peak in Darien,” and
grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
and figure after figure in the same sculptured stillness, may this not
have been due to the fact that his genius fed so largely on the arts?
Keats, however, was the poet of trance, even apart from his stay in
the trance-world of the artists. One of his characteristic moods was
an ecstatic indolence, like that of a man who has tasted an enchanted
herb. He was a poet, indeed, whose soul escaped in song as on the
drowsy wings of a dream. He may be said to have turned from the fever
of life to the intoxication of poetry. He loved poetry--“my demon
poesy”--as a thing in itself, as, perhaps, no other poet equally great
has done. This was his quest: this was his Paradise. He prayed, indeed:
That I may die a death
Of luxury, and my young spirit follow
The morning sunbeams to the great Apollo
Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear
The o’erwhelming sweets, ’twill bring me to the fair
Visions of all places: a bowery nook
Will be elysium--an eternal book
Whence I may copy many a lovely saying
About the leaves and flowers--about the playing
Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade
Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid.
This was the mood in which he wrote his greatest work. At the same time
Keats was not an unmixed æsthete. He recognised from the first, as we
see in this early poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” that the true field of
poetry is not the joys of the senses, but the whole of human life:
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
Modern critics, reading these lines, are tempted to disparage the
work Keats actually accomplished in comparison with the work that he
might have accomplished, had he not died at twenty-five. They prefer
“The Fall of Hyperion,” that he might have written, to “The Eve of
St. Agnes,” the “Nightingale,” and the “Grecian Urn” that he did
write. They love the potential middle-aged Keats more than the perfect
youthful Keats.
This seems to me a perversity, but the criticism has value in reminding
us how rich and deep was the nature that expressed itself in the work
even of the young Keats. Keats was an æsthete, but he was always
something more. He was a man continually stirred by a divine hunger for
things never to be attained by the ecstasies of youth--for knowledge,
for truth, for something that might heal the sorrows of men. His nature
was continually at war with itself. His being was in tumult, even
though his genius found its perfect hour in stillness.
But it was the tumult of love, not the tumult of noble ideals, that led
to the production of his greatest work. Fanny Brawne, that beautiful
minx in her teens, is denounced for having murdered Keats; but she
certainly did not murder his genius. It was after meeting her that he
wrote the Odes and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia” and “La Belle
Dame Sans Merci.” There has been too much cursing of Fanny. She may
have been the cause of Keats’s greatest agony, but she was also the
cause of his greatest ecstasy. The world is in Fanny’s debt, as Keats
was. It was Fanny’s Keats, in a very real sense, who wrote the immortal
verse that all the world now honours.
3. FANNY BRAWNE
“My dear Brown,” wrote the dying Keats, with Fanny Brawne in his
thoughts, in almost the last of his surviving letters, “for my sake,
be her advocate for ever.” “You think she has many faults,” he had
written a month earlier, when leaving England; “but, for my sake, think
she has none.” Thus did Keats bequeath the perfect image of Fanny
Brawne to his friend. And the bequest is not only to his friend but
to posterity. We, too, must study her image in the eyes of Keats, and
hang the portrait of the lady who had no faults in at least as good a
position on the wall with those other portraits of the flawed lady--the
minx, the flirt, the siren, the destroyer.
Sir Sidney Colvin, in his noble and monumental biography of Keats,
found no room for this idealised portrait. He was scrupulously fair
to Fanny Brawne as a woman, but he condemned her as the woman with
whom Keats happened to fall in love. To Sir Sidney she was not
Keats’s goddess, but Keats’s demon. Criticising the book on its first
appearance, I pointed out that almost everything that is immortal in
the poetry of Keats was written when he was under the influence of his
passion for Fanny Brawne, and I urged that, had it not been for the
ploughing and harrowing of love, we should probably never have had the
rich harvest of his genius. Sir Sidney has now added a few pages to
his preface, in which he replies to this criticism, and declares that
to write of Fanny Brawne in such a manner is “to misunderstand Keats’s
whole career.” He admits that “most of Keats’s best work was done after
he had met Fanny Brawne,” but it was done, he insists, “not because of
her, but in spite of her.” “At the hour when his genius was naturally
and splendidly ripening of itself,” he writes, “she brought into his
life an element of distracting unrest, of mingled pleasure and torment,
to use his own words, but of torment far more than of pleasure.... In
writing to her or about her he never for a moment suggests that he owed
to her any of his inspiration as a poet.... In point of fact, from
the hour when he passed under her spell he could never do any long or
sustained work except in absence from her.” Now all this means little
more than that Fanny Brawne made Keats suffer. On that point everybody
is agreed. The only matter in dispute is whether this suffering was a
source of energy or of destruction to Keats’s genius.
Keats has left us in one of his letters his own view of the part
suffering plays in the making of a soul. Scoffing at the conception
of the world as a “vale of tears,” he urges that we should regard it
instead as “the vale of soul-making,” and asks: “Do you not see how
necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence
and make it a soul?” Thus, according to his own philosophy, there is
no essential contradiction between a love that harrows and a love that
enriches. As for his never having suggested that he owed any of his
inspiration to his love for Fanny, he may not have done this in so many
words, but he makes it clear enough that she stirred his nature to the
depths for the first time and awakened in him that fiery energy which
is one of the first conditions of genius in poetry. “I cannot think of
you,” he wrote, “without some sort of energy--though _mal à propos_.
Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of
you would uncrystallise and dissolve me. I must not give way to it--but
turn to my writing again--if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your
lips are growing sweet again to my fancy--I must forget them.” Sir
Sidney would read this letter as a confession that love and genius
were at enmity in Keats. It seems to me a much more reasonable view
that in the heat of conflict Keats’s genius became doubly intense, and
that, had there been no struggle, there would have been no triumph. It
is not necessary to believe that Fanny Brawne was the ideal woman for
Keats to have loved: the point is that his love of her was the supreme
event in his life. “I never,” he told her, “felt my mind repose upon
anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment--upon no person but
you.” “I have been astonished,” he wrote in another letter, “that men
could die martyrs for religion--I have shuddered at it. I shudder no
more--I could be martyr’d for my religion--love is my religion--I could
die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its
only tenet.” And still earlier he had written: “I have two luxuries
to brood over in my walks--your loveliness and the hour of my death.
O, that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.... I
will imagine you Venus to-night and pray, pray, pray to your star like
a heathen.” It is out of emotional travail such as we find in these
letters that poetry is born. Is it possible to believe that, if Keats
had never fallen in love--and he had never been in love till he met
Fanny--he would have been the great poet we know?
I hold that it is not. Hence I still maintain the truth of the
statement which Sir Sidney Colvin sets out to controvert, that, while
Fanny “may have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man, she was his good
fairy as a poet.”
Keats’s misfortune in love was a personal misfortune, not a misfortune
to his genius. He was too poor to marry, and, in his own phrase, he
“trembled at domestic cares.” He was ill and morbid: he had longed
for the hour of his death before ever he set eyes on Fanny. Add to
this that he was young and sensual and as jealous as Othello. His own
nature had in it all the elements of tragic suffering, even if Fanny
had been as perfect as St. Cecilia. And she was no St. Cecilia. He had
called her “minx” shortly after their first meeting in the autumn of
1818, and described her as “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly,
fashionable and strange.” Even then, however, he was in love with her.
“The very first week I knew you,” he told her afterwards, “I wrote
myself your vassal.... If you should ever feel for man at the first
sight what I did for you, I am lost.” It is clear from this that his
heart and his head quarrelled about Fanny. At the same time, after
those first censures, he never spoke critically of her again, even to
his most intimate friends. Some of his friends evidently disliked Fanny
and wished to separate the lovers. He refers to this in a letter in
which he speaks angrily of “these laughers who do not like you, who
envy you for your beauty,” and writes of himself as “one who, if he
never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory.”
But Keats himself could not be certain that she was a saint. “My
greatest torment since I have known you,” he tells her, “has been the
fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid.” He is so jealous
that, when he is ill, he tells her that she must not even go into town
alone till he is well again, and says: “If you would really what is
called enjoy yourself at a party--if you can smile in people’s faces,
and wish them to admire you _now_--you never have nor ever will love
me.” But he adds a postscript: “No, my sweet Fanny--I am wrong--I do
not wish you to be unhappy--and yet I do, I must while there is so
sweet a beauty--my loveliest, my darling! Good-bye! I kiss you--O the
torments!” In a later letter he returns to his jealousy, and declares:
“Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to
Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’” He tells this fragile little
worldly creature that she should be prepared to suffer on the rack
for him, accuses her of flirting with Brown, and, in one of the most
painful of his letters, cries out:
I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in: Do not
write to me if you have done anything this month which it would
have pained me to have seen. You may have altered--if you have
not--if you still believe in dancing rooms and other societies as
I have seen you--I do not want to live--if you have done so I wish
the coming night may be my last. I cannot live without you, and
not only you, but _chaste you, virtuous you_.... Be serious! Love
is not a plaything--and again do not write unless you can do it
with a crystal conscience.