But while the mountain-drawing in _Endymion_ is on the whole vague and
derivative, there are hints that Keats was already becoming alive to
the imaginative spell of great mountains, to their power in poetry, and
for his poetry. When he imagines the moonlit earth, he sees it partly
in delicate miniature like the image of the nested wren, who takes
glimpses of the moon from beneath a sheltering ivy-leaf, but this is
coupled with a picture of Miltonic grandeur and tumult:
Innumerable mountains rise, and rise,
Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes. (iii. 59.)
He was already on the way to that clear recognition of his need of
great mountains which speaks from his famous explanation of the motives
of the northern tour which he undertook, with Brown, in the summer of
1818--the crucial event of his history from our present point of view.
‘I should not have consented to myself,’ he wrote to Bailey, ‘these
four months tramping in the highlands, but that I thought that it
would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to more
hardship, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and
strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among
books, even though I should read Homer.’[11] The passage has great
psychological value, for it shows how closely involved his nascent
apprehension of mountains was with the other spiritual appetencies
urgent within him in these months. To be ‘loaded with grander
mountains’ he thought of as an integral part of an inner process of
much wider scope, of which the common note was to be the bracing and
hardening of a mind which had not yet won complete control of its
supreme gift of exquisite sensation. The ‘grander mountains’ were to
be only one of the bracing forces, but it is clear that he felt this
new force, under whose sway he was for a while about to live, akin to
others which his letters show to have been alluring him during these
months. The bare rugged forms of the mountains he was now to explore
accorded subtly for him with the hardihood and endurance of the
climber, and not less with the severity of the epic poet, who, like
Milton, preferred ‘the ardours to the pleasures of song,’ or who, like
Homer, allowed us fugitive but sublime glimpses of the mountains which
looked down upon the scene of his Tale. When Keats and Brown came down
upon the town of Ayr, they had before them ‘a grand Sea view terminated
by the black Mountains of the isle of Arran. As soon as I saw them
so nearly I said to myself: How is it they did not beckon Burns to
some grand attempt at Epic?’[12] Keats perhaps thought of the Isle of
Tenedos, which similarly dominates the plain of Troy across a reach of
sea; ‘You would lift your eyes from Homer only to see close before you
the real Isle of Tenedos,’ he was writing to Reynolds in a different
context on the same day. That one peaked Isle should stand out in
Keats’s mind from all the other imagery of Homer, and that he should
wonder at the failure of another to beget new Iliads in the unhomeric
Burns, shows with much precision how his literary passion for the
Homeric poetry was now quickened and actualized by the visible presence
of grand mountains.
It is needless (though not irrelevant) to dwell here upon other
kindred features of the expanding horizons which came into view for
Keats in this momentous year: the resolve to renounce his ‘luxurious’
art for philosophy and knowledge;[13] and the disdain for women, for
effeminate characters, for the pleasures of domesticity. In each
case the urgency of this passion for what he felt more bracing, more
intellectually fortifying, more masculine, found vent, for a time, in
language too peremptory and exclusive to be true to the needs of his
rich and complex nature.[14] Philosophy would, had he lived, assuredly
have ministered more abundantly to his poetry, but _Lamia_ shows how
far she was from becoming its master, or its substitute; the Miltonic
ardours of _Hyperion_ were to be qualified in the renewed but chastened
and ennobled ‘luxury’ of _St. Agnes’ Eve_ and the _Odes_. The man who
wrote: ‘the roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the
windowpane are my children,’ would yet have found a place for noble
womanhood within his ‘masculine’ ideal, had not a tragical influence
intervened. And, similarly, the traces of his mountain experience fade
after 1818, a new order of symbols, more congenial at bottom to the
ways of his imagination, asserts or reasserts itself in his poetry; and
it is hardly an accident that in the revised _Hyperion_ of a year later
we approach the granite precipices and everlasting cataracts of the
original poem by way of a garden, a temple, and a shrine.