A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Part 10

"Shadows haunting fairily The brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay Of old Romance."

In Keats is the romantic escape, the longing to

"leave the world unseen.

And with thee fade away into the forest dim." [39]

Keats cared no more for history than he did for contemporary politics.

Courthope[40] quotes a pa.s.sage from "Endymion" to ill.u.s.trate his indifference to everything but art;

"Hence, pageant history! Hence, gilded cheat! . . .

Many old rotten-timbered boats there be Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified To goodly vessels, many a sail of pride, And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry.

But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly About the great Athenian admiral's mast?

What care though striding Alexander past The Indus with his Macedonian numbers?

. . . Juliet leaning Amid her window-flowers,--sighing,--weaning Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow, Doth more avail than these: the silver flow Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den, Are things to brood on with more ardency Than the death-day of empires."

This pa.s.sage should be set beside the complaint in "Lamia" of the disenchanting touch of science:

"There was an awful rainbow once in heaven," etc.

Keats is the poet of romantic emotion, as Scott of romantic action.

Professor Gates says that Keats' heroes never _do_ anything.[41] It puzzles the reader of "The Eve of St. Agnes" to know just why Porphyro sets out the feast of cates on the little table by Madeline's bedside unless it be to give the poet an opportunity for his luscious description of "the lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon" and other like delicacies. In the early fragment "Calidore," the hero--who gets his name from Spenser--does nothing in some hundred and fifty lines but a.s.sist two ladies to dismount from their palfreys. To revert, as before, to Ariosto's programme, it was not the _arme_ and _audaci imprese_ which Keats sang, but the _donne_, the _amori_, and the _cortesie_. Feudal war array was no concern of his, but the "argent revelry" of masque and dance, and the "silver-snarling trumpets" in the musicians' gallery. He was the poet of the lute and the nightingale, rather than of the shock of spear in tourney and crusade. His "Specimen of an Induction to a Poem"

begins

"Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry."

But he never tells it. The piece evaporates in visions of pure loveliness; "large white plumes"; sweet ladies on the worn tops of old battlements; light-footed damsels standing in sixes and sevens about the hall in courtly talk. Meanwhile the lance is resting against the wall.

"Ah! shall I ever tell its cruelty, When the fire flashes from a warrior's eye, And his tremendous hand is grasping it?"

"No," answers the reader, "I don't think you ever will. Leave that sort of thing to Walter Scott, and go on and finish your charming fragment of 'The Eve of St. Mark,' which stops provokingly just where Bertha was reading the illuminated ma.n.u.script, as she sat in her room of an April evening, when

"'On the western window panes, The chilly sunset faintly told Of unmatured green valleys cold.'" [42]

This quaintly attractive fragment of Keats was written while he was living in the old cathedral and college city of Winchester. "Some time since," he writes to his brother George, September, 1819, "I began a poem called 'The Eve of St. Mark,' quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town in a coolish evening." The letter describes the maiden-lady-like air of the side streets, with doorsteps fresh from the flannel, the doors themselves black, with small bra.s.s handles and lion's head or ram's head knockers, seldom disturbed. He speaks of his walks through the cathedral yard and two college-like squares, gra.s.sy and shady, dwelling-places of deans and prebendaries, out to St. Cross Meadows with their Gothic tower and Alms Square. Mr. Colvin thinks that Keats "in this piece antic.i.p.ates in a remarkable degree the feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools"; and that it is "perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed and interested)." Mr. Forman, indeed, quotes Rossetti's own _dictum_ (works of John Keats, vol. ii., p. 320) that the poem "shows astonishingly real mediaevalism for one not bred as an artist."

It is in the Pre-Raphaelites that Keats' influence on our later poetry is seen in its most concentrated shape. But it is traceable in Tennyson, in Hood, in the Brownings, and in many others, where his name is by no means written in water. "Wordsworth," says Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms."

[1] Scott's friend, William Stewart Rose--to whom the first verse epistle in "Marmion" is addressed. He also translated the "Orlando Furioso"

(1823-31). His "Partenopex" was made from a version in modern French.

[2] A new translation of the "Orlando," by Hoole, appeared in 1773-83; of Ta.s.so's "Jerusalem" in 1763; and of Metastasio's dramas in 1767. These were in the heroic couplets of Pope.

[3] "Childe Harold," Canto iv., x.x.xviii. And _Cf._ vol. i., pp. 25, 49, 100, 170, 219, 222-26.

[4] _Vide supra_, p. 5.

[5] _Vide supra_, p. 40. Goethe p.r.o.nounced the "Inferno" abominable, the "Purgatorio" doubtful, and the "Paradise" tiresome (Plumptre's "Dante,"

London, 1887, vol. ii., p. 484).

[6] See Walpole's opinion, vol. i., p. 235.

[7] For early ma.n.u.script renderings see "Les Plus Anciennes Traductions Francaises de la Divine Comedie," par C. Morel, Paris, 1897.

[8] Lowell says Kannegiesser's, 1809.

[9] "Present State of Polite Learning" (1759).

[10] "Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse, L'altro piangeva s, che di pietade I venni men, cos com' io morisse: E cadde come corpo morte cade."

--"Inferno," Canto v.

[11] Vol. i., p. 236.

[12] Plumptre's "Dante," vol. ii., p. 439.

[13] "Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried, by the upbraiding sh.o.r.e."

--"Childe Harold," iv., 57.

[14] See vol. i., p. 49; and "Purgatorio," xxviii., 19-20.

"Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie Per la pineta in sal lito di Chia.s.si."

[15] He did better in free paraphrase than in literal translation. _Cf._ Stanza cviii., in "Don Juan," Canto iii.--

"Soft hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart"--

with its original in the "Purgatorio," viii., 1-6.

[16] Dedication to La Guiccioli.

[17] But in this poem each thirteenth and fourteenth line make a couplet, thus breaking up the whole into a series of loose sonnets.

[18] T. W. Parsons' "Lines on a Bust of Dante" appeared in the Boston _Advertiser_ in 1841. His translation of the first ten cantos of the "Inferno" was published in 1843: later instalments in 1867 and 1893.

Longfellow's version of the "Divine Comedy" with the series of sonnets by the translator came out in 1867-70. For the Dante work of the Rossettis, _vide infra_, pp. 282 ff.

[19] "The Seer."

[20] He named a daughter, born while he was in prison, after Spenser's Florimel.

[21] "Autobiography," p. 200 (ed. of 1870).

[22] See d.i.c.kens' caricature of him as Harold Skimpole in "Bleak House."

[23] "When I was last at Haydon's," wrote Keats to his brother George in 1818-19, "I looked over a book of prints taken from the fresco of the church at Milan, the name of which I forget. In it were comprised specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy. I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance and the most tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael's--but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as there was left so much room for imagination."

[24] Against the hundreds of maxims from Pope, Keats furnishes a single motto--the first line of "Endymion"--

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."