A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Part 9

Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of--were closely wed To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule And compa.s.s vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit; Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!

That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it,--no, they went about, Holding a poor decrepit standard out, Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large, The name of one Boileau!"

This complaint, so far as it relates to the _style_ of the rule-ridden eighteenth-century poetry, had been made before: by Cowper, by Wordsworth, by Coleridge. But Keats, with his instinct for beauty, pierces to the core of the matter. It was because of Pope's defective sense of the beautiful that the doubt arose whether he was a poet at all.

It was because of its

". . . forgetting the great end Of Poetry, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man,"

that the poetry of the cla.s.sical school was so unsatisfying. This is one of the very few pa.s.sages of Keats that are at all doctrinal[24] or polemic; and as such it has been repeatedly cited by biographers and essayists and literary historians. Lowell quotes it, in his essay on Dryden, and adds; "Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan authority save Milton." Mr. Gosse quotes it and says, "in these lines he has admirably summed up the conceptions of the first half of the present century with regard to cla.s.sical poetry." [25] The pa.s.sage was still fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March 15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young person learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such sentiments as the above. He says 'easy were the task' of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try before he is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will have _then_ written, and what he has now written, with the humblest and earliest compositions of Pope, produced in years still more youthful than those of Mr. Keats when he invented his new 'Essay on Criticism,'

ent.i.tled 'Sleep and Poetry' (an ominous t.i.tle) from whence the above canons are taken."

In a ma.n.u.script note on this pa.s.sage made after Keats' death, Byron wrote: "My indignation at Mr. Keats' depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius. . . . He is a loss to our literature, and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was reforming his style upon the more cla.s.sical models of the language,"

Keats made a study of Dryden's versification before writing "Lamia"; but had he lived to the age of Methusaleh, he would not have "reformed his style" upon any such cla.s.sical models as Lord Byron had in mind.

Cla.s.sical he might have become, in the sense in which "Hyperion" is cla.s.sical; but in the sense in which Pope was cla.s.sical--never. Pope's Homer he deliberately set aside for Chapman's--

"Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." [27]

Keats had read Virgil, but seemingly not much Latin poetry besides, and he had no knowledge of Greek. He made acquaintance with the h.e.l.lenic world through cla.s.sical dictionaries and a study of the casts in the British Museum. But his intuitive grasp of the antique ideal of beauty stood him in as good stead as Landor's scholarship. In such work as "Hyperion" and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" he mediates between the ancient and the modern spirit, from which Landor's clear-cut marbles stand aloof in chill remoteness. As concerns his equipment, Keats stands related to Scott in romance learning much as he does to Landor in cla.s.sical scholarship. He was no antiquary, and naturally made mistakes of detail.

In his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," he makes Cortez, and not Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific. _a propos_ of a line in "The Eve of St. Agnes"--

"And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor"--

Leigh Hunt called attention to the fact that rushes and not carpets covered the floors in the Middle Ages. In the same poem, Porphyro sings to his lute an ancient ditty,

"In Provence called 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'"

The ditty was by Alain Chartier, who was not a troubadour, but a Norman by birth and a French court poet of the fifteenth century. The t.i.tle, which Keats found in a note in an edition of Chaucer, pleased his fancy and suggested his ballad,[28] of the same name, which has nothing in common with Chartier's poem. The latter is a conventional love _estrif_ in the artificial taste of the time. But errors of this sort, which any encyclopaedia can correct, are perfectly unimportant.

Byron's sneer at Keats, as "a tadpole of the Lakes," was ridiculously wide of the mark. He was nearly of the second generation of romantics; he was only three years old when "The Ancient Mariner" was published; "Christabel" and Scott's metrical romances had all been issued before he put forth his first volume. But though he owes much to Coleridge[29] and more perhaps to Chatterton, he took no imprint from Wordsworth, and cared nothing for Scott. Keats, like his friend Hunt, turned instinctively away from northern to southern Gothic; from rough border minstrelsy to the mythology and romance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea.

Keats' sensuous nature longed for "a beaker full of the warm South." "I have tropical blood in my veins," wrote Hunt, deprecating "the criticism of a Northern climate" as applied to his "Story of Rimini." Keats' death may be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of the brutal attacks in _Blackwood's_--to which there is some reason for believing that Scott was privy--but because the hardships and exposure of his Scotch tour laid the foundation of his fatal malady. He brought back no literary spoils of consequence from the North, and the description of the journey in his letters makes it evident that his genius could not find itself there. This uncomfortable feeling of alienation is expressed in his "Sonnet on Visiting the Tomb of Burns." The Scotch landscape seems "cold--strange."

"The short-lived paly Summer is but won From Winter's ague."

And in the letter from Dumfries, enclosing the sonnet he writes: "I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish." _Charlemagnish_ is Keats' word for the true mediaeval-romantic. It is noteworthy that Keats avoided Scott's favourite verse forms. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is not in the minstrel ballad measure; and when Keats uses the eight-syllabled couplet, he uses it very differently from Scott, without the alternate riming which prevails in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and all the rest of the series.

A spark from Spenser kindled the flame of poetry in Keats. His friend, Cowden Clarke, read him the "Epithalamium" one day in 1812 in an arbour in the old school garden at Enfield, and lent him a copy of "The Faery Queene" to take home with him. "He romped through the scenes of the romance," reports Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." There is something almost uncanny--like the visits of a spirit--about these recurrent appearances of Spenser in English literary history. It must be confessed that nowadays we do not greatly romp through "The Faery Queene." There even runs a story that a certain professor of literature in an American college, being consulted about Spenser by one of his scholars, exclaimed impatiently, "Oh, d.a.m.n Spenser!" But it is worth while to have him in the literature, if only as a starter for young poets. Keats' earliest known verses are an "Imitation of Spenser" in four stanzas. His allusions to him are frequent, and his fugitive poems include a "Sonnet to Spenser" and a number of "Spenserian Stanzas." But his only really important experiment in the measure of "The Faery Queene" was "The Eve of St. Agnes." It was with fine propriety that Sh.e.l.ley chose that measure for his elegy on Keats in "Adonais." Keats made a careful study of Spenser's verse, the

"Spenserian vowels that elope with ease"--

and all the rest of it. His own work in this kind is thought to resemble most closely the "Psyche" of the Irish poetess, Mary Tighe, published in 1805[30] on the well-known fable of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. It is inferred that Keats knew the poem from a mention of the author in one of his pieces. He also wrote an "Ode to Psyche," which seems, however, to have been inspired by an engraving in Spenser's "Polymetis." Mrs. Tighe was one of the latest and best of the professed imitators of Spenser.

There is beauty of a kind in her languidly melodious verse and over-profuse imagery, but it is not the pa.s.sionate and quintessential beauty of Keats. She is quite incapable of such choice and pregnant word effects as abound in every stanza of "St. Agnes":

"Unclasps her _warmed_ jewels, one by one":

"_b.u.t.tressed_ from moonlight":

"The music, _yearning_ like a G.o.d in pain":

"The boisterous, _midnight_, festive clarion."

Keats' intimate a.s.sociation with Leigh Hunt, whose acquaintance he made in 1816, was not without influence on his literary development. He admired the "Story of Rimini," [31] and he adopted in his early verse epistles and in "Endymion" (1818), that free ante-Popean treatment of the couplet with _enjambement_, or overflow, double rimes, etc., which Hunt had practised in the poem itself and advocated in the preface. Many pa.s.sages in "Rimini" and in Keats' couplet poems antic.i.p.ate, in their easy flow, the relaxed versification of "The Earthly Paradise." This was the Elizabethan type of heroic couplet, and its extreme instance is seen in William Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" (1659). There is no proof of Keats' alleged indebtedness to Chamberlayne, though he is known to have been familiar with another specimen of the type, William Browne's "Britannia's Pastorals." Hunt also confirmed Keats in the love of Spenser, and introduced him to Ariosto whom he learned to read in the Italian, five or six stanzas at a time. Dante he read in Cary's translation, a copy of which was the only book that he took with him on his Scotch trip. "The fifth canto of Dante," he wrote (March, 1819), "pleases me more and more; it is that one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca." He afterwards dreamed of the story and wrote a sonnet upon his dream, which Rossetti thought "by far the finest of Keats'

sonnets" next to that on Chapman's "Homer." [32] Mr. J. M. Robertson thinks that the influence of Gary's "Dante" is visible in "Hyperion,"

especially in the recast version "Hyperion: A Vision." [33] And Leigh Hunt suggests that in the lines in "The Eve of St. Agnes"--

"The sculptured dead on each side seem to freeze, Emprisoned in black, purgatorial rails: Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, He pa.s.seth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails"--

the germ of the thought is in Dante.[34] Keats wished that Italian might take the place of French in English schools. To Hunt's example was also due, in part, that fondness for neologisms for which the latter apologises in the preface to "Rimini," and with which Keats was wont to enrich his diction, as well as with Chattertonian archaisms, Chapmanese compounds, "taffeta phrases, silken terms precise" from Elizabethan English, and coinages like _poesied_, _jollying_, _eye-earnestly_--licenses and affectations which gave dire offence to Gifford and the cla.s.sicals generally.

In the 1820 volume, which includes Keats' maturest work, there was a story from the "Decameron," "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," which tells how a lady exhumes the body of her murdered lover, cuts off the head and buries it in a pot of sweet basil, which she keeps in her chamber and waters with her tears. It was perhaps symptomatic of a certain morbid sensibility in Keats to select this subject from so cheerful a writer as Boccaccio. This intensity of love surviving in face of leprosy, torment, decay, and material horrors of all kinds; this pa.s.sionate clinging of spirit to body, is a mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romantic school which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, O'Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine. Think of the unshrinking gaze which Dante fixes upon the tortures of the souls in pain; of the wasted body of Christ upon the cross; of the fasts, flagellations, mortifications of penitents; the unwashed friars, the sufferings of martyrs. Keats apologises for his endeavour "to make old prose in modern rime more sweet," and for his departure from the even, unexcited narrative of his original:

"O eloquent and famed Boccaccio, Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon. . . .

For venturing syllables that ill beseem The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme. . . .

"Ah! wherefore all this wormy circ.u.mstance?

Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?

O for the gentleness of old Romance, The simple plaining of the minstrel's song."

But it is just this wormy circ.u.mstance that rivets the poet's attention; his imagination lingers over Isabella kissing the dead face, pointing each eyelash, and washing away the loam that disfigures it with her tears; over the basil tufts growing rankly from the mouldering head,

"The thing was vile with green and livid spot,"

but Keats' tenderness pierces the grave.

It is instructive to compare "Isabella" with Dryden's "Sigismonda and Guiscardo," also from the "Decameron" and surcharged with the physically horrible. In this tale Tancred sends his daughter her lover's heart in a golden goblet. She kisses the heart, fills the cup with poison, drinks, and dies. The two poems are typical examples of romantic and cla.s.sical handling, though neither is quite a masterpiece in its kind. The treatment in Dryden is cool, unimpa.s.sioned, objective--like Boccaccio's, in fact. The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy of verse and language. Sigismonda and Tancred are characters, confronted wills, as in drama, and their speeches are like _tirades_ from a tragedy of Racine.

But here Dryden's rhetorical habit and his fondness for reasoning in rime run away with him, and make his art inferior to Boccaccio's. Sigismonda argues her case like counsel for the defendant. She even enjoys her own argument and carries it out with a gusto into abstractions.

"But leaving that: search we the secret springs, And backward trace the principles of things; There shall we find, that when the world began One common ma.s.s composed the mould of man," etc.

Dryden's grossness of taste mars his narrative at several points. The satirist in him will not let him miss the chance for a sneer at priests and another at William III.'s standing army. He makes his heroine's love ign.o.bly sensual. She is a widow, who having "tasted marriage joys," is unwilling to live single. Dryden's _bourgeois_ manner is capable even of ludicrous descents.

"The sudden bound awaked the sleeping sire, And showed a sight no parent can desire."

In Keats' poem there are no characters dramatically opposed. Lorenzo and Isabella have no individuality apart from their love; pa.s.sion has absorbed character. The tale is not evolved firmly and continuously, but with lyrical outbursts, a poignancy of sympathy at the points of highest tragic tensity and a swooning sensibility all through, that sometimes breaks into weakness. There can be no question, however, which poem is the more _felt_; no question, either, as to which method is superior--at least as between these two artists, and as applied to subjects of this particular kind.

"Isabella" is in _ottava rima_, "The Eve of St. Agnes" in the Spenserian stanza. This exquisite creation has all the insignia of romantic art and has them in a dangerous degree. It is brilliant with colour, richly ornate, tremulous with emotion. Only the fine instinct of the artist saved it from the overladen decoration and cloying sweetness of "Endymion," and kept it chaste in its warmth. As it is, the story is almost too slight for its descriptive mantle "rough with gems and gold."

Such as it is, it is of Keats' invention and of the "Romeo and Juliet"

variety of plot. A lover who is at feud with his mistress' clan ventures into his foemen's castle while a revel is going on, penetrates by the aid of her nurse to his lady's bower, and carries her off while all the household are sunk in drunken sleep. All this in a night of wild weather and on St. Agnes' Eve, when, according to popular belief, maidens might see their future husbands in their dreams, on the performance of certain conditions. The resemblance of this poem to "Christabel" at several points, has already been mentioned,[35] and especially in the description of the heroine's chamber. But the differences are even more apparent.

Coleridge's art is temperate and suggestive, spiritual, too, with an unequalled power of haunting the mind with a sense of ghostly presences.

In his scene the touches are light and few; all is hurried, mysterious, shadowy. But Keats was a word painter, his treatment more sensuous than Coleridge's, and fuller of imagery. He lingers over the figure of the maiden disrobing, and over the furnishings of her room. The Catholic elegancies of his poem, as Hunt called them, and the architectural details are there for their own sake--as pictures; the sculptured dead in the chapel, the foot-worn stones, the cobwebbed arches, broad hall pillar, and dusky galleries; the "little moonlight room, pale, _latticed_, chill"; the chain-drooped lamp:

"The carven angels ever eager-eyed"

that

"Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With hair blown back and wings put crosswise on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s."

Possibly "La Belle Dame sans Merci" borrows a hint from the love-crazed knight in Coleridge's "Love," who is haunted by a fiend in the likeness of an angel; but here the comparison is to Keats' advantage. Not even Coleridge sang more wildly well than the singer of this weird ballad strain, which has seemed to many critics[36] the masterpiece of this poet, wherein his "natural magic" reaches its most fascinating subtlety and purity of expression.

The famous picture of the painted "cas.e.m.e.nt, high and triple-arched" in Madeline's chamber, "a burst of richness, noiseless, coloured, suddenly enriching the moonlight, as if a door of heaven were opened," [37] should be compared with Scott's no less famous description of the east oriel of Melrose Abbey by moonlight, and the comparison will ill.u.s.trate a distinction similar to that already noted between the romanticism of Coleridge and Scott. The latter is here depicting an actual spot, one of the great old border abbeys; national pride and the pathos of historic ruins mingle with the description. Madeline's castle stood in the country of dream; and it was an "elfin storm from fairyland" that came to aid the lovers' flight,[38] and all the creatures of his tale are but the