THE ‘love of mountains’ which plays so large a part in the poetry of
the age of Wordsworth, and has so few close analogies in that of any
other country or any earlier time, offers matter of still unexhausted
interest to the student of poetic psychology. This is not the place
to consider how it happened that any mass of boldly crumpled strata,
on a certain scale, became in the course of the eighteenth century
charged with a kind of spiritual electricity which set up powerful
answering excitements in the sensitive beholder. Gray already in 1739
expressed the potential reach and compass of these excitements in our
psychical life when he called the scenery of the Grande Chartreuse
‘pregnant with religion and poetry’--a thought which Wordsworth’s
sublime verses on the Simplon, sixty years later, only made explicit.
Not all the mountain-excitement of the time was of this quality; and
we can distinguish easily enough between the ‘picturesque,’ ‘romantic’
mountain sentiment of Scott, to whom the Trossachs and Ben Venue spoke
most eloquently when they sounded to the pad of a horseman’s gallop,
and the ‘natural religion’ of Wordsworth, to whom the same pass wore
the air of a ‘Confessional’ apt for autumnal meditation on the brevity
of life. In the younger poets of the age mountain sentiment is less
original and profound than in Wordsworth, less breezily elemental than
in Scott. The mountain poetry of Wordsworth concurred, as an explicit
stimulus to mountain sentiment, with the inarticulate spell of the
mountains themselves, transforming in some degree the native feeling
and experience of almost all mountain-lovers of the next twenty years,
even when they were of the calibre of Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley.
Yet even where the Wordsworthian colour is most perceptible, as in _The
Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni_, in _Alastor_, _Mont Blanc_, and in the
Third Canto of _Childe Harold_, the younger poet has seen his mountains
with his own eyes and through the glamour of his own passions,
impregnated them with his own genius and temperament. Shelley’s
mountains are no longer the quiet brotherhood of Grasmere, with a
listening star atop, but peaks of flamelike aspiration, or embodied
protests against men’s code of crime and fraud; Byron’s are warriors
calling joyously to one another over the lit lake across the storm. For
all these poets--even for Scott when he _was_ a poet--mountain scenery
was not so much new matter to be described as a new instrument of
expression, a speaking symbol for their own spiritual appetencies and
ideal dreams. Of its importance for the poetry of any one of them there
cannot be a moment’s doubt. There remains, however, another poet, the
youngest, the shortest-lived, but in some respects the most gifted
of the whole group. On a general view Keats appears to be sharply
distinguished, in regard to the characteristic here in question, from
all the rest. Mountains and mountain sentiment seem to have a quite
negligible place in his poetry. It may be worth while to consider how
far this is really the case.
I
If we look to the sources of his experience, Keats was more nearly
secluded from the stimulus of mountain scenery than any of his
compeers. By the outward circumstances, of his birth and breeding
he was in reality the ‘cockney poet’ of later derisive criticism.
During the whole formative period of youth he hardly encountered even
‘wild’ scenery; what lay about him in his infancy was at best the
semi-suburban meadow and woodland landscape of Edmonton, or the ‘little
hill’ (of Hampstead) on which he ‘stood tiptoe’ to command a wider
view. Before the summer of 1818 there is no sign that either ‘mountain
power’ or ‘mountain mystery’ had any meaning for him. He deeply admired
Wordsworth, and regarded _The Excursion_ as one of the three things
to rejoice at in that age; but it was Wordsworth as an interpreter of
human life, the poet who ‘thought into the human heart’ (to Reynolds,
May 1818), rather than the mountain lover. There is no clear trace as
yet in his earlier poetry of Cumberland fells; there is none whatever
of the great mountain mythology of Wordsworth. No menacing peak had
ever towered up between him and the stars, no far-distant hills had
sent an alien sound of melancholy to his ear. Not that he owes nothing
as a poet to the mythic rendering of mountains. On the contrary, up to
this date, all his imagining of mountains, in the stricter sense, is
derived from, or at least touched with, myth. Only it is the myth of
classic legend, not of modern ‘natural religion.’ Had not the ‘lively
Grecians’ inhabited a ‘land of hills,’ these would hardly have entered
even as largely as they do into the enchanted scenery of _Endymion_;
and on the whole it is a scenery of woods and waters, flowery glades
and ocean caverns, not of Olympian heights. But if Keats’s experience
of nature is still limited, it is used to the full. _Endymion_, at
first sight a tissue of exquisite dreams, is full of the evidence
of his no less exquisite perception of the living nature within his
reach. From the very outset we are aware that the ‘things of beauty’
he loved best and knew most intimately in the natural world were woods
and flowers and streams. There is no mention, in that opening survey,
of hills, and when they come perforce into the story they are arrayed
as far as may be in the semblance of these beloved things. ‘A mighty
forest’ is ‘outspread upon the sides of Latmus’ (i. 62); in the summons
to the Shepherds, the highland homes are touched vaguely and without
interest (‘whether descended from beneath the rocks that overtop your
mountains’), while he lingers with evident delight upon the ‘swelling
downs’
... where sweet air stirs
Blue hare-bells lightly and where prickly furze
Buds lavish gold. (i. 201.)
as later, no less daintily, upon the
... hill-flowers running wild
In pink and purple chequer. (ii. 286.)
The ideal dwelling for Endymion and his ‘swan of Ganges’ will be under
the brow of a steep hill, but they will be embowered in ivy and yew,
and the hill itself, like their bridal couch, will be ‘mossy’--the
haunting character of the Keatsian woodland and its ‘winding ways’ (iv.
670).
On the other hand, some of the hills in _Endymion_, like ‘fountain’d
Helicon,’ are purely legendary, and the higher and bolder ones derive
their characters from the tales of Olympus or Cyllene. Between nature
and classic myth there was for Keats no trace of the disparity which
so deeply offended Wordsworth; his imagination passed without thought
of discord from one to the other, or blended them together; it was
probably the Nature poet yet more than the Christian in Wordsworth
who responded so coldly (‘A pretty piece of paganism’) when the young
poet brought his train of Bacchanals ‘over the light-blue hills.’
It is of Arcadian boar-hunts that we have to think when Endymion on
the mountain-heights will ‘once more make his horn parley from their
foreheads hoar’ (i. 478), or sees the thunderbolt hurled from his
threshold (ii. 203); it is an Arcadian shepherd whose ‘pipe comes clear
from aery steep’ (iii. 359). And it is at least no English mountain
of whose ‘icy pinnacles’ we have a momentary and here quite isolated
glimpse.