Keats Part 5

"Endymion now forsakes All the delights that shepherds do prefer, And sets his mind so generally on her That, all neglected, to the groves and springs He follows Phoebe, that him safely brings (As their great queen) unto the nymphish bowers, Where in clear rivers beautified with flowers The silver Naides bathe them in the bracke.

Sometime with her the sea-horse he doth back Among the blue Nereides: and when Weary of waters G.o.ddess-like again She the high mountains actively a.s.says, And there amongst the light Oriades, That ride the swift roes, Phoebe doth resort: Sometime amongst those that with them comport The Hamadriades, doth the woods frequent; And there she stays not, but incontinent Calls down the dragons that her chariot draw, And with Endymion pleased that she saw, Mounteth thereon, in twinkling of an eye Stripping the winds----"

Fletcher again, a writer with whom Keats was very familiar, and whose inspiration, in the idyllic and lyric parts of his work, is closely kindred to his own--Fletcher in the _Faithful Shepherdess_ makes Chloe tell, in lines beautifully paraphrased and amplified from Theocritus--

"How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove, First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes She took eternal fire that never dies; How she convey'd him softly in a sleep, His temples bound with poppy, to the steep Head of old Latmus, where she stoops each night, Gilding the mountain with her brother's light, To kiss her sweetest."

The subject thus touched by Drayton and Fletcher had been long, as we have seen already, in Keats's thoughts. Not only had the charm of this old pastoral nature-myth of the Greeks interwoven itself in his being with his natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual spell of moonlight: but deeper and more abstract meanings than its own had gathered about the story in his mind. The divine vision which haunts Endymion in dreams is for Keats symbolical of Beauty itself, and it is the pa.s.sion of the human soul for beauty which he attempts, more or less consciously, to shadow forth in the quest of the shepherd-prince after his love[33].

The manner in which Keats set about relating the Greek story, as he had thus conceived it, was as far from being a Greek or 'cla.s.sical' manner as possible. He indeed resembles the Greeks, as we have seen, in his vivid sense of the joyous and mult.i.tudinous life of nature: and he loved to follow them in dreaming of the powers of nature as embodied in concrete shapes of supernatural human activity and grace. Moreover, his intuitions for every kind of beauty being admirably swift and true, when he sought to conjure up visions of the cla.s.sic past, or images from cla.s.sic fable, he was able to do so often magically well. To this extent Keats may justly be called, as he has been so often called, a Greek, but no farther. The rooted artistic instincts of that race, the instincts which taught them in all the arts alike, during the years when their genius was most itself, to select and simplify, rejecting all beauties but the vital and essential, and paring away their material to the quick that the main ma.s.ses might stand out unconfused, in just proportions and with outlines rigorously clear--these instincts had neither been implanted in Keats by nature, nor brought home to him by precept and example. Alike by his aims and his gifts, he was in his workmanship essentially 'romantic,' Gothic, English.

A general characteristic of his favourite Elizabethan poetry is its prodigality of incidental and superfluous beauties: even in the drama, it takes the powers of a Shakspere to keep the vital play of character and pa.s.sion unsmothered by them, and in most narrative poems of the age the quality is quite unchecked. To Keats, at the time when he wrote _Endymion_, such incidental and secondary luxuriance const.i.tuted an essential, if not the chief, charm of poetry. "I think poetry," he says, "should surprise by a fine excess:" and with reference to his own poem during its progress, "it will be a test, a trial of my powers of imagination, and chiefly of my invention--which is a rare thing indeed--by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare circ.u.mstance, and fill them with poetry."

The 'one bare circ.u.mstance' of the story was in the result expanded through four long books of intricate and flowery narrative, in the course of which the young poet pauses continually to linger or deviate, amplifying every incident into a thousand circ.u.mstances, every pa.s.sion into a world of subtleties. He interweaves with his central Endymion myth whatever others pleased him best, as those of Pan, of Venus and Adonis, of Cybele, of Alpheus and Arethusa, of Glaucus and Scylla, of Circe, of Neptune, and of Bacchus; leading us through labyrinthine transformations, and on endless journeyings by subterranean antres and aerial gulfs and over the floor of ocean. The scenery of the tale, indeed, is often not merely of a Gothic vastness and intricacy; there is something of Oriental bewilderment,--an Arabian Nights jugglery with s.p.a.ce and time,--in the vague suddenness with which its changes are effected. Such organic plan as the poem has can best be traced by fixing our attention on the main divisions adopted by the author of his narrative into books, and by keeping hold at the same time, wherever we can, of the thread of allegoric thought and purpose that seems to run loosely through the whole. The first book, then, is entirely introductory, and does no more than set forth the predicament of the love-sick shepherd-prince, its hero; who appears at a festival of his people held in honour of the G.o.d Pan, and is afterwards induced by his sister Peona[34] to confide to her the secret of the pa.s.sion which consumes him. The account of the feast of Pan contains pa.s.sages which in the quality of direct nature-interpretation are scarcely to be surpa.s.sed in poetry:--

"rain-scented eglantine Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run To warm their chilliest bubbles in the gra.s.s; Man's voice was on the mountains; and the ma.s.s Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold, To feel this sun-rise and its glories old."

What can be more fresh and stirring?--what happier in rhythmical movement?--or what more characteristic of the true instinct by which Keats, in dealing with nature, avoided word-painting and palette-work, leaving all merely visible beauties, the stationary world of colours and forms, as they should be left, to the painter, and dealing, as poetry alone is able to deal, with those delights which are felt and divined rather than seen, with the living activities and operant magic of the earth? Not less excellent is the realisation, in the course of the same episode, of the true spirit of ancient pastoral life and worship; the hymn to Pan in especial both expressing perfectly the meaning of the Greek myth to Greeks, and enriching it with touches of northern feeling that are foreign to, and yet most harmonious with, the original. Keats having got from Drayton, as I surmise, his first notion of an introductory feast of Pan, in his hymn to that divinity borrowed recognizable touches alike from Chapman's Homer's hymn, from the sacrifice to Pan in Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_[35], and from the hymns in Ben Jonson's masque, _Pan's Anniversary_: but borrowed as only genius can, fusing and refashioning whatever he took from other writers in the strong glow of an imagination fed from the living sources of nature:--

"O Thou, whose mighty palace roof doth hang From jagged trunks, and overshadoweth Eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death Of unseen flowers in heavy peacefulness; Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken; And through whole solemn hours dost sit, and hearken The dreary melody of bedded reeds-- In desolate places, where dank moisture breeds The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth; Bethinking thee, how melancholy loth Thou wast to lose fair Syrinx--do thou now, By thy love's milky brow!

By all the trembling mazes that she ran, Hear us, great Pan!

O Hearkener to the loud clapping shears, While ever and anon to his shorn peers A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms, To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, And wither drearily on barren moors: Dread opener of the mysterious doors Leading to universal knowledge--see, Great son of Dryope, The many that are come to pay their vows With leaves about their brows!"

In the subsequent discourse of Endymion and Peona he tells her the story of those celestial visitations which he scarce knows whether he has experienced or dreamed. In Keats's conception of his youthful heroes there is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical softness, and the influence of pa.s.sion he is apt to make fever and unman them quite: as indeed a helpless and enslaved submission of all the faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be a weakness of his own nature. He partly knew it, and could not help it: but the consequence is that the love-pa.s.sages of _Endymion_, notwithstanding the halo of beautiful tremulous imagery that often plays about them, can scarcely be read with pleasure. On the other hand, in matters of subordinate feeling he shows not only a great rhetorical facility, but the signs often of lively dramatic power; as for instance in the remonstrance wherein Peona tries to make her brother ashamed of his weakness:--

"Is this the cause?

This all? Yet it is strange, and sad, alas!

That one who through this middle earth should pa.s.s Most like a sojourning demi-G.o.d, and leave His name upon the harp-string, should achieve No higher bard than simple maidenhood, Sighing alone, and fearfully,--how the blood Left his young cheek; and how he used to stray He knew not where; and how he would say, _Nay_, If any said 'twas love: and yet 'twas love; What could it be but love? How a ring-dove Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path; And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe The gentle heart, as Northern blasts do roses.

And then the ballad of his sad life closes With sighs, and an alas! Endymion!"

In the second book the hero sets out in quest of his felicity, and is led by obscure signs and impulses through a mysterious and all but trackless region of adventure. In the first vague imaginings of youth, conceptions of natural and architectural marvels, unlocalised and half-realised in mysterious s.p.a.ce, are apt to fill a large part: and to such imaginings Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. A Naiad, in the disguise of a b.u.t.terfly, leads Endymion to her spring, and there reveals herself and bids him be of good hope: an airy voice next invites him to descend 'Into the sparry hollows of the world': which done, he gropes his way to a subterranean temple of dim and most un-Grecian magnificence, where he is admitted to the presence of the sleeping Adonis, and whither Venus herself presently repairing gives him encouragement. Thence, urged by the haunting pa.s.sion within him, he wanders on by dizzy paths and precipices, and forests of leaping, ever-changing fountains. Through all this phantasmagoria engendered by a brain still teeming with the rich first fumes of boyish fancy, and in great part confusing and inappropriate, shine out at intervals strokes of the true old-world poetry admirably felt and expressed:--

"He sinks adown a solitary glen, Where there was never sound of mortal men, Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences Melting to silence, when upon the breeze Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet To cheer itself to Delphi:"--

or presences of old religion strongly conceived and realised:--

"Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, Came mother Cybele--alone--alone-- In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown About her majesty, and front death-pale, With turrets crowned."

After seeing the vision of Cybele, Endymion, still travelling through the bowels of the earth, is conveyed on an eagle's back down an unfathomable descent, and alighting, presently finds a 'jasmine bower,' whither his celestial mistress again stoops to visit him. Next he encounters the streams, and hears the voices, of Arethusa and Alpheus on their fabled flight to Ortygia: as they disappear down a chasm, he utters a prayer to his G.o.ddess in their behalf, and then--

"He turn'd--there was a whelming sound--he stept, There was a cooler light; and so he kept Towards it by a sandy path, and lo!

More suddenly than doth a moment go, The visions of the earth were gone and fled-- He saw the giant sea above his head."

Hitherto Endymion has been wholly absorbed in his own pa.s.sion and adventures: but now the fates of others claim his sympathy: first those of Alpheus and Arethusa, and next, throughout nearly the whole of the third book, those of Glaucus and Scylla. Keats handles this latter legend with great freedom, omitting its main point, the transformation of Scylla by Circe into a devouring monster, and making the enchantress punish her rival not by this vile metamorphosis, but by death; or rather a trance resembling death, from which after many ages Glaucus is enabled by Endymion's help to rescue her, and together with her the whole sorrowful fellowship of true lovers drowned at sea. From the point in the hero's submarine adventures where he first meets Glaucus,--

"He saw far in the green concave of the sea An old man sitting calm and peacefully.

Upon a weeded rock this old man sat, And his white hair was awful, and a mat Of weeds was cold beneath his cold thin feet"--

--from this pa.s.sage to the end of the book, in spite of redundance and occasional ugly flaws, Keats brings home his version of the myth with strong and often exquisite effect to the imagination. No picture can well be more vivid than that of Circe pouring the magic phial upon her victims: and no speech much more telling than that with which the detected enchantress turns and scathes her unhappy lover. In the same book the description of the sunk treasures c.u.mbering the ocean-floor challenges comparison, not all unequally, with the famous similar pa.s.sage in Shakspere's _Richard III._ In the halls of Neptune Endymion again meets Venus, and receives from her more explicit encouragement than heretofore.

Thence Nereids bear him earthward in a trance, during which he reads in spirit words of still more rea.s.suring omen written in starlight on the dark. Since, in his adventure with Glaucus, he has allowed himself to be diverted from his own quest for the sake of relieving the sorrows of others, the hope which before seemed ever to elude him draws at last nearer to fulfilment.

It might seem fanciful to suppose that Keats had really in his mind a meaning such as this, but for the conviction he habitually declares that the pursuit of beauty as an aim in life is only justified when it is accompanied by the idea of devotion to human service. And in his fourth book he leads his hero through a chain of adventures which seem certainly to have a moral and allegorical meaning or none at all. Returning, in that book, to upper air, Endymion before long half forgets his G.o.ddess for the charms of an Indian maiden, the sound of whose lamentations reaches him while he is sacrificing in the forest, and who tells him how she has come wandering in the train of Bacchus from the east. This mysterious Indian maiden proves in fact to be no other than his G.o.ddess herself in disguise.

But it is long before he discovers this, and in the mean time he is conducted by her side through a bewildering series of aerial ascents, descents, enchanted slumbers and Olympian visions. All these, with his infidelity which is no infidelity after all, his broodings in the Cave of Quietude, his illusions and awakenings, his final farewell to mortality and to Peona, and reunion with his celestial mistress in her own shape, make up a narrative inextricably confused, which only becomes partially intelligible when we take it as a parable of a soul's experience in pursuit of the ideal. Let a soul enamoured of the ideal--such would seem the argument--once suffer itself to forget its goal, and to quench for a time its longings in the real, nevertheless it will be still haunted by that lost vision; amidst all intoxications, disappointment and la.s.situde will still dog it, until it awakes at last to find that the reality which has thus allured it derives from the ideal its power to charm,--that it is after all but a reflection from the ideal, a phantom of it. What chiefly or alone makes the episode poetically acceptable is the strain of lyric poetry which Keats has put into the mouth of the supposed Indian maiden when she tells her story. His later and more famous lyrics, though they are free from the faults and immaturities which disfigure this, yet do not, to my mind at least, show a command over such various sources of imaginative and musical effect, or touch so thrillingly so many chords of the spirit. A mood of tender irony and wistful pathos like that of the best Elizabethan love-songs; a sense as keen as Heine's of the immemorial romance of India and the East; a power like that of Coleridge, and perhaps partly caught from him, of evoking the remotest weird and beautiful a.s.sociations almost with a word; clear visions of Greek beauty and wild wood-notes of Celtic imagination; all these elements come here commingled, yet in a strain perfectly individual. Keats calls the piece a 'roundelay,'--a form which it only so far resembles that its opening measures are repeated at the close. It begins with a tender invocation to sorrow, and then with a first change of movement conjures up the image of a deserted maidenhood beside Indian streams; till suddenly, with another change, comes the irruption of the Asian Bacchus on his march; next follows the detailed picture of the G.o.d and of his rout, suggested in part by the famous t.i.tian at the National Gallery; and then, arranged as if for music, the challenge of the maiden to the Maenads and Satyrs, and their choral answers:

"'Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye!

So many, and so many, and such glee?

Why have ye left your bowers desolate, Your lutes, and gentler fate?'

'We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing, A conquering!

Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide, We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide:-- Come hither, lady fair, and joined be To our wild minstrelsy!'

'Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs! Whence came ye!

So many, and so many, and such glee?

Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?'--

'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms, And cold mushrooms; For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth; Great G.o.d of breathless cups and chirping mirth!-- Come hither, lady fair, and joined be To our mad minstrelsy!'"

The strophes recounting the victorious journeys are very unequal; and finally, returning to the opening motive, the lyric ends as it began with an exquisite strain of lovelorn pathos:--

"Come then, sorrow!

Sweetest sorrow!

Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast: I thought to leave thee, And deceive thee, But now of all the world I love thee best.

There is not one, No, no, not one But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid; Thou art her mother And her brother, Her playmate, and her wooer in the shade."

The high-water-mark of poetry in _Endymion_ is thus reached in the two lyrics of the first and fourth book. Of these at least may be said with justice that which Jeffrey was inclined to say of the poem as a whole, that the degree to which any reader appreciates them will furnish as good a test as can be obtained of his having in him "a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm." In the main body of the work, beauties and faults are so bound up together that a critic may well be struck almost as much by one as by the other. Admirable truth and charm of imagination, exquisite freshness and felicity of touch, mark such brief pa.s.sages as we have quoted above: the very soul of poetry breathes in them, and in a hundred others throughout the work: but read farther, and you will in almost every case be brought up by hardly tolerable blemishes of execution and of taste. Thus in the tale told by Glaucus, we find a line of strong poetic vision such as--

"aeaea's isle was wondering at the moon,"

standing alone in a pa.s.sage of rambling and ineffective over-honeyed narrative; or again, a couplet forced and vulgar like this both in rhyme and expression--

"I look'd--'twas Scylla! Cursed, cursed Circe!

O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?"

is followed three lines farther on by a masterly touch of imagination and the heart:--

"Cold, O cold indeed Were her fair limbs, and like a common weed The sea-swell took her hair."

One, indeed, of the besetting faults of his earlier poetry Keats has shaken off--his muse is seldom tempted now to echo the familiar sentimental chirp of Hunt's. But that tendency which he by nature shared with Hunt, the tendency to linger and luxuriate over every imagined pleasure with an over-fond and doting relish, is still strong in him. And to the weaknesses native to his own youth and temperament are joined others derived from an exclusive devotion to the earlier masters of English poetry. The creative impulse of the Elizabethan age, in its waywardness and lack of discipline and discrimination, not less than in its luxuriant strength and freshness, seems actually revived in him. He outdoes even Spenser in his p.r.o.neness to let Invention ramble and loiter uncontrolled through what wildernesses she will, with Imagination at her heels to dress if possible in living beauty the wonders that she finds there: and sometimes Imagination is equal to the task and sometimes not: and even busy Invention herself occasionally flags, and is content to grasp at any idle clue the rhyme holds out to her:--

"--a nymph of Dian's Wearing a coronal of tender scions":--

"Does yonder thrush, Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush About the dewy forest, whisper tales?-- Speak not of grief, young stranger, or cold snails Will slime the rose to-night."

Chapman especially among Keats's masters had this trick of letting thought follow the chance dictation of rhyme. Spenser and Chapman--to say nothing of Chatterton--had farther accustomed his ear to experimental and rash dealings with their mother tongue. English was almost as unsettled a language for him as for them; and he strives to extend its resources, and make them adequate to the range and freshness of his imagery, by the use of compound and other adjectival coinages in Chapman's spirit--'far-spooming Ocean', 'eye-earnestly', 'dead-drifting', 'their surly eyes brow-hidden', 'nervy knees', 'surgy murmurs'--coinages sometimes legitimate or even happy, but often fantastic and tasteless: as well as by sprinkling his nineteenth-century diction with such archaisms as 'shent', 'sith', and 'seemlihed' from Spenser, 'eterne' from Spenser and William Browne; or with arbitrary verbal forms, as 'to folly', 'to monitor', 'gordian'd up', to 'fragment up'; or with neuter verbs used as active, as to 'travel' an eye, to 'pace' a team of horses, and _vice versa_. Hence even when in the other qualities of poetry his work is good, in diction and expression it is apt to be lax and wavering, and full of oddities and discords.

In rhythm Keats adheres in _Endymion_ to the method he had adopted in _Sleep and Poetry_, deliberately keeping the sentence independent of the metre, putting full pauses anywhere in his lines rather than at the end, and avoiding any regular beat upon the rhyme. Leigh Hunt thought Keats had carried this method too far, even to the negation of metre. Some later critics have supposed the rhythm of _Endymion_ to have been influenced by the _Pharonnida_ of Chamberlayne: a fourth-rate poet remarkable chiefly for two things, for the inextricable trailing involution of his sentences, exceeding that of the very worst prose of his time, and for a perverse persistency in ending his heroic lines with the lightest syllables--prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions--on which neither pause nor emphasis is possible[36].

But Keats, even where his verse runs most diffusely, rarely fails in delicacy of musical and metrical ear, or in variety and elasticity of sentence structure. There is nothing in his treatment of the measure for which precedent may not be found in the work of almost every poet who employed it during the half-century that followed its brilliant revival for the purposes of narrative poetry by Marlowe. At most, he can only be said to make a rule of that which with the older poets was rather an exception; and to seek affinities for him among the tedious by-ways of provincial seventeenth-century verse seems quite superfluous.