English Literature for Boys and Girls Part 77

Fled is the music:--Do I wake or sleep?"

As another poet* has said, speaking of Keats's odes, "Greater lyrical poetry the world may have seen than any that is in these; lovelier it surely has never seen, nor ever can it possibly see."

*Swinburne.

Hyperion, which also ranks among Keats's great poems, is an unfinished epic. In a far-off way the subject of the poem reminds us of Paradise Lost. For here Keats sings of the overthrow of the t.i.tans, or earlier Greek G.o.ds, by the Olympians, or later Greek G.o.ds, and in the majestic flow of the blank verse we sometimes seem to hear an echo of Milton.

Hyperion, who gives his name to the poem, was the Sun-G.o.d who was dethroned by Apollo. When the poem opens we see the old G.o.d Saturn already fallen--

"Old Saturn lifted up His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone, And all the gloom and sorrow of the place, And that fair kneeling G.o.ddess; and then spake, As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard Shook horrid with such aspen-malady: 'O tender spouse of gold Hyperion, Thea, I feel thee ere I see thy face; Look up, and let me see our doom in it; Look up, and tell me if this feeble shape Is Saturn's; if thou hear'st the voice Of Saturn; tell me, if this wrinkled brow, Naked and bare of its great diadem, Peers like the front of Saturn. Who had power To make me desolate? whence came the strength?

How was it nurtur'd to such bursting forth, While Fate seem'd strangled in my nervous grasp?

But it is so.'"

Saturn is king no more. Fate willed it so. But suddenly he rises and in helpless pa.s.sion cries out against Fate--

"Saturn must be King.

Yes, there must be a golden victory; There must be G.o.ds thrown down and trumpets blown

Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival Upon the gold clouds metropolitan, Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir Of strings in hollow sh.e.l.ls; and there shall be Beautiful things made new, for the surprise Of the sky-children; I will give command: Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?"

The volume containing these and other poems was published in 1820, little more than three years after Keats's first volume, and never, perhaps, has poet made such strides in so short a time. And this last book was kindly received. Success had come to Keats, but young though he still was, the success was too late. For soon it was seen that his health had gone and that his life's work was done. As a last hope his friends advised him to spend the winter in Italy. So with a friend he set out. He never returned, but died in Rome in the arms of his friend on the 23rd February 1821. He was only twenty-six. Before he died he asked that on his grave should be placed the words, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." He had his wish: but we, to whom he left his poetry, know that his name is written in the stars.

How Sh.e.l.ley mourned for him you have read. How the friends who knew and loved him mourned we learn from what they say of him.

"I cannot afford to lose him," wrote one. "If I know what it is to love, I truly love John Keats." Another says,* "He was the most unselfish of human creatures," and still another,** "a sweeter tempered man I never knew."

*Haydon.

**Bailey.

In a letter which reached Rome too late was this message for Keats, "Tell that great poet and n.o.ble-hearted man that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious parts of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it, as our loves do."

We bow our heads to his memory and say farewell to him in these words of his own fairy song--

"Shed no tea! oh shed no tear!

The flower will bloom another year.

Weep no more! oh weep no more!

Young buds sleep in the roots' white core.

Dry your eyes! oh dry your eyes!

For I was taught in Paradise To ease my heart of melodies-- Shed no tear.

"Overhear! look overhead!

'Mong the blossoms white and red-- Look up, look up. I flutter now On this flush pomegranate bough.

See me! 'tis this silvery bill Ever cures the good man's ill.

Shed not tear! oh shed not tear!

The flower will bloom another year.

Adieu! Adieu!--I fly, adieu!

I vanish in the heaven's blue-- Adieu! Adieu!"

Chapter Lx.x.xII CARLYLE--THE SAGE OF CHELSEA

JOHN KEATS was little more than a month old, when far away across the Border another little baby boy was born. His parent, too were simple folk, and he, too, was born to be great.

This boy's name was Thomas Carlyle. His father was a stone-mason and had built with his own hands the house in which his son Thomas was born. The little village of Ecclefechan was about six miles from the Solway Firth, among the pasture lands of the bale of Annan. Here Thomas grew to be a boy running about barefooted and st.u.r.dy with his many brothers and sisters, and one step- brother older than himself.

But he did not run about quite wild, for by the time he was five his mother had taught him to read and his father had taught him to do sums, and then he was sent to the village school.

James Carlyle was a good and steady workman. Long afterwards his famous son said of him, "Nothing that he undertook to do but he did it faithfully and like a true man. I shall look on the houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound to the heart all over his little district. No one that comes after him will ever say, 'Here was the finger of a hollow eye-servant.' They are little texts to me of the gospel of man's free will." But there were meanwhile many little folks to clothe, many hungry little mouths to fill, so their clothes were of the plainest, and porridge and milk, and potatoes forming their only fare. "It was not a joyful life," says Thomas--"what life is?--yet a safe, quiet one; above most others, or any others I have witnessed, a wholesome one."

Between the earnest and frugal father and mother and their children there was a great and reverent though quiet love, and poor though they were, the parents determined that their children should be well taught, so when Thomas was ten he was sent to a school at Annan some five miles away, where he could learn more than in the little village school.

On a bright May morning Thomas set out trotting gayly by his father's side. This was his first venture into the world, and his heart was full of hopes just dashed with sadness at leaving his mother. But the wonderful new world of school proved a bitter disappointment to the little fellow. He had a violent temper, and his mother, fearing into what he might be led when far from her, made him promise never to return a blow. Thomas kept his promise, with the result that his fellows, finding they might torment him with safety, tormented him without mercy.

In a book called Sartor Resartus which Carlyle wrote later, and which here and there was called forth by a memory of his own life, he says:

"My schoolfellows were boys, most rude boys, and obeyed the impulse of rude nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any stricken hart, the duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all hands the strong tyrannise over the weak."

So Thomas at school was unhappy and lonely and tormented. But one day, unable to bear the torment longer, he flew at one of the biggest bullies in the school.

The result was a fight in which Thomas got the worst, but, he had shown his fellows what he could do, he was tormented no longer.

Yet ever afterwards he bore an unhappy remembrance of those days at school.

After three years his school-days came to an end. He was not yet fourteen, but he had proved himself so eager a scholar that his father decided to send him to college and let him become a minister.

So early one November morning he set out in the cold and dark upon his long tramp of more than eighty miles to Edinburgh. It was dark when he left the house, and his father and mother went with him a little way, and then they turned back and left Tom to trudge along in the growing light, with another boy a year or two older who was returning to college.

Little is known of Carlyle's college days. After five years'

study, at nineteen he became a schoolmaster, still with the intention of later becoming a minister as his father wished. But for teaching Carlyle had no love, and after some years of it, first in schools and then as a private tutor, he gave it up. He gave up, too, the idea of becoming a minister, for he found he had lost the simple faith of his fathers and could not with good conscience teach to others what he did not thoroughly believe himself. He gave up, too, the thought of becoming a barrister, for after a little study he found he had no bent for law.

Already he had begun to write. Besides other things he had translated and published Wilhelm Meister, a story by the great German poet, Goethe. It was well received. The great Goethe himself wrote a kind letter to his translator. It came to him, said Carlyle, "like a message from fairyland." And thus encouraged, after drifting here and there, trying first one thing and then another, Carlyle gave himself up to literature.

Meanwhile he had met and loved a beautiful and clever lady named Jane Walsh. She was above him in station, witty, and sought after. Admiring the genius of Carlyle she yet had no mind she said to marry a poor genius. But she did, and so began a long mistake of forty years.

The newly married couple took a cottage on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and there Carlyle settled down to his writing. But money coming in slowly, Carlyle found he could no longer afford to live in Edinburgh. So after a year and a half of cheerful, social life, surrounded by many cultured friends, he and his wife moved to Craigenputtock, a lonely house fourteen miles from Dumfries, which belonged to Mrs. Carlyle. Here was solitude indeed. The air was so quiet that the very sheep could be heard nibbling. For miles around there was no house, the post came only once a week, and months at a time would go past without a visitor crossing the doorstep.

To Carlyle, who hated noises, who all his life long waged war against howling dogs and "demon" fowls, the silence and loneliness were delightful. His work took all his thoughts, filled all his life. He did not remember that what to him was simply peaceful quiet was for his witty, social wife a dreary desert of loneliness. Carlyle was not only, as his mother said, "gey ill to deal wi'," but also "gey ill to live wi'." For he was a genius and a sick genius. He was nervous and bilious and suffered tortures from indigestion which made him often gloomy and miserable.

It was not a happy fortune which cast Jane and Thomas Carlyle together into this loneliness. Still the days pa.s.sed not all in gloom, Thomas writing a wonderful book, Sartor Resartus, and Jane using all her cleverness to make the home beautiful and comfortable. For they were very poor, and Jane, who before her marriage had no knowledge of housekeeping, found herself obliged to cook and do much of the housework herself.

Nearly all Carlyle's first books had to do with German literature. He translated stories from great German writers and wrote about the authors. And just as Byron had taught people on the Continent to read English literature, so Carlyle taught English people to read German literature. He steeped himself so thoroughly in German that he himself came to write English, if I may so express it, with a German accent. Carlyle's style is harsh and rugged. It has a vividness and picturesqueness all his own, but when Carlyle began to write people cared neither for his style nor for his subjects. He found publishers hard to persuade, and life was by no means easy.

When Sartor was finished Carlyle took it to London, but could find no one willing to publish it. So it was cut up into articles and published in a magazine "and was then mostly laughed at," says Carlyle, and many declared they would stop taking the magazine unless these ridiculous papers ceased. Not until years had pa.s.sed was it published in book form.

I do not think I can make you understand the charm of Sartor. It is a prose poem and a book you must leave for the years to come.

Sartor Resartus means "The tailor patched again." And under the guise of a philosophy of clothes Carlyle teaches that man and everything belonging to him is only the expression of the one great real thing--G.o.d. "Thus in this one pregnant subject of Clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been."