For, evidently, it is in _Hyperion_, if anywhere, that we have to seek
the afterglow of that experience of ‘grander mountains’ which, in
June, he had set out to encounter. We must not indeed look in poetry
of this quality for those detailed reproductions of what he had seen
which Wordsworth condemned as ‘inventories’ in Scott, but which are
not strange either to the lower levels of his own verse. Even in the
letters written for the entertainment of a sick brother Keats rarely
describes; and constantly, to others, he breaks off impatiently when
he has begun. ‘My dear Reynolds--I cannot write about scenery and
visitings.’ His impressions come from him in brief, sudden, unsought
phrases; he left it to the methodic Brown to give the enchanting and
‘picturesque’ detail of mountains and valleys ‘in the manner of the
Laputan printing-press.’ ‘I have been among wilds and mountains too
much to break out much about their grandeur,’ he writes a little later
to Bailey. But there is no doubt of the impression. He had hoped that
his experience would ‘load’ him with grander mountains; and, in fact,
as he goes on to tell, ‘The first mountains I saw, though not so large
as some I have since seen, _weighed_ very solemnly upon me.’ And Brown
tells us that when Windermere first burst upon their view, ‘he stopped
as if stupefied with beauty.’[15]
Their actual experiences of mountain-climbing were few. Weather checked
them at Helvellyn, and expense at Ben Lomond; but in the ‘bleak air
atop’ of Skiddaw, as Lamb had called it, ‘I felt as if I were going to
a Tournament.’ What he felt about the Arran mountains we have seen.
Ailsa Craig--the seafowl-haunted ‘craggy ocean pyramid,’ evoked ‘the
only sonnet of any worth I have of late written.’ They found the north
end of Loch Lomond ‘grand to excess,’ and Keats made a rude pen-and-ink
sketch of ‘that blue place among the mountains.’ But their greatest
experience was doubtless the climb on Ben Nevis, on 2 August. The
chasms below the summit of Nevis seemed to him ‘the most tremendous
places I have ever seen,’ ‘the finest wonder of the whole--they appear
great rents in the very heart of the mountain, ... other huge crags
rising round ... give the appearance to Nevis of a shattered heart or
core in itself.’
The plan of a poem on the war of the gods and Titans was already
shaped or shaping in his mind when Keats set out for the north. As
early as September 1817 he had had in view ‘a new romance’ for the
following summer; in keeping with the new aspirations which that
summer brought, the ‘romance’ was now to be an epic. The most potent
influence governing the execution, that of Milton, is familiar, and
does not directly concern us here. Still less can we consider the
possible effect of companionship with those three little volumes of
Cary’s _Dante_, the single book taken with him on this tour.[16] But
while the spell of _Paradise Lost_ is apparent in the cast of the plot,
above all in the debate of the Titans, and in the style, an influence
to which Milton’s is wholly alien asserts itself in the delineation of
the Titanic ‘den’ itself. Clearly based upon the idea of an Inferno,
this ‘sad place’ where ‘bruised Titans’ are ‘chained in torture,’ is
yet full of traits which recall neither Milton nor Dante, but rather
one of those amazing chasms on Nevis, which seemed to be the very
‘core’ of the great mountain. He had, even, as he looked down into that
vaporous gulf, actually thought of the image of Hell. Milton’s Hell
is a plain of burning earth vaulted with fire and verging on a sea of
flame[17]; if there is a hill (i. 670) it is a volcano, belching fire,
or coated with a sulphurous scurf. The Keatsian Inferno is genuinely,
what he calls it, a ‘den,’ a yawning mountain dungeon overarched with
jutting crags, floored with hard flint and slaty ridge, and encompassed
by a deafening roar of waterfalls and torrents. A shattered rib of
rock, with his iron mace beside it, attests the spent fury of Creus.
Enceladus lies uneasily upon a craggy shelf. To render the spectacle
of the ruined and almost lifeless bodies lying ‘vast and edgeways,’ he
calls in a definite reminiscence, the ‘dismal cirque’ of Druid stones
near Keswick. He has felt too the silence of the mountains in the
pauses of the winter wind, though he speaks of it only to contrast it
with the organ voice of Saturn preceding the expectant murmur of his
audience of fallen divinities (ii. 123).[18] The darkness, too, in
which they languish is not eternal and ordained like that of Milton’s
Hell; the coming of the Sun-god will invade it with a splendour like
the morn and
... all the beetling gloomy steeps,
All the sad spaces of oblivion,
And every gulf, and every chasm old,
And every height, and every sullen depth,
Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams,
And all the everlasting cataracts,
And all the headlong torrents, far and near,
Mantled before in darkness and huge shade, (ii. 358)
will stand revealed in that terrible splendour.
It is clear that in this great passage Keats has deliberately invoked
the image of a sunrise among precipitous mountains; and these lines
assure him a lasting place amongst our poet interpreters of mountain
glory. We must beware, as we have seen, of overstressing the element
of realism in the poem. Keats was not _describing_ mountain scenery,
English, Scotch, or any other, but using certain aspects of it, which
had been vividly brought home to him as he climbed or trudged, to
render poetic inspirations of far richer compass and wider scope. Much
of the detail of this Titan prison belongs as little to his British
mountain experience as do the Titans themselves. Iapetus grasps a
strangled serpent; Asia, dreaming of palm-shaded temples and sacred
isles, leans upon an elephant tusk. We are conscious of no discord,
so pervading is the impress of a single potent imagination, whatever
the material it employs. But it is not immaterial to note that, as
Professor de Sélincourt has pointed out, Keats did alter the original
draft of Hyperion’s coming in such a way as to give it a close
resemblance to a sunrise among the mountains, omitting two lines which
preceded the last but one quoted above:
And all the Caverns soft with moss and weed,
Or dazzling with bright and barren gems.
The former of these lines may be described as a momentary reversion
to the tender ‘mossy’ luxuriance of the _Endymion_ scenery, like the
‘nest of pain’ (ii. 90), which, however, he allowed to stand.[19] Its
excision, in the final version, marks Keats’s sense of the incongruity
of that earlier symbolism with the sterner matter in hand, as does the
transformation of the dreamy, pastoral Oceanus of the earlier poem
into the master of Stoic wisdom, able ‘to bear all naked truths, and
to envisage circumstance, all calm,’ who offers his bitter balm to the
despairing Titans, in the later.
_Hyperion_, we know, was left a fragment, and with deliberate purpose.
The mighty shade of Milton, he came to feel, deflected him from his
proper purpose in poetry. It is less important, but not less true, that
his passing vision of grand mountains was not in complete consonance
with his genius, and that his brief anthem of mountain poetry had in it
something of the nature of a _tour de force_. The mountains were for
him neither strongholds of faith nor sources of sublime consolation.
Even in the letters written in their presence he could speak somewhat
impatiently, as we have seen, of ‘scenery’ compared with life and men.
And if he places his ruined Titans in this wild den among the crags and
torrents, it is because there was something in him, deeper than his
reverence for Wordsworth or for mountain grandeur, which felt the very
savagery of the scene, its naked aloofness from everything human, to be
in accord with the primeval rudeness of an outdone and superseded race.
It is not for nothing that, when the scene changes from the old order
to the new, we are transported from Hyperion’s sun-smitten precipices
to the sea-haunted lawns and woodlands of Delos, where the young Apollo
is seen wandering forth in the morning twilight
Beside the osiers of a rivulet,
Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.
Do we not hear in this the home-coming accents, as of one who has
escaped from barbarous Thynia and Bithynia, and tastes the joy that is
born
‘cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum’?
Keats had, in effect, come home.
Yet the deflection, if it strained, also braced; and if in the
following months his imagination, when he is most inspired, moves once
more habitually among mossy woodland ways and by enchanted waters, the
immense advance in robustness of artistic and intellectual sinew which
distinguishes the poet of the _Nightingale_ and _Autumn_ from the poet
of _Endymion_ was gained chiefly in that summer of enlarged ideals and
experience, of which the mountain vision was a small but a significant
and symbolical part.