Life of John Keats Part 13

in order to learn secrets of life, death, and destiny necessary to his enlightenment and discipline. Where else should he learn such secrets if not in the mysterious hollows of the earth and on the untrodden floor of ocean? 'Our friend Keats,' Endymion is made to say in one of the poet's letters from Oxford, 'has been hauling me through the earth and sea with unrelenting perseverance': and in like manner in the poem itself the hero asks,

Why am I not as are the dead, Since to a woe like this I have been led Through the dark earth, and through the wondrous sea?

But never a word to suggest any thought of the element fire--an element from which Keats's too often fevered spirit seems even to have shrunk, for except in telling of the blazing omens of _Hyperion's_ downfall it is scarce mentioned in his poetry at all. Lastly, it is again true that in the fourth book Endymion and his earthly love are carried by winged horses on an ethereal excursion among the stars (though only for two hundred and seventy lines out of a thousand, the rest of the action pa.s.sing, like that of the first book, on the soil of Caria). But this flight has nothing to do with the element air as such; it is the flight of the soul on the coursers of imagination through a region of dreams and visions destined afterwards to come true. Hints for such submarine and ethereal wanderings will no doubt have come into Keats's mind from various sources in his reading,--from the pa.s.sage of Drayton above quoted,--from the _Arabian Nights_,--it may be from like incidents in the mediaeval Alexander romances (in which the hero's crowning exploits are always a flight to heaven with two griffins and a plunge under-sea in a gla.s.s case), or possibly even from the _Endimion_ of Gombauld, a very wild and withal tiresome French seventeenth-century prose romance on Keats's own theme.[6]

BOOK I. This book is entirely introductory, and carries us no farther than the exposition by the hero of the trouble in which he finds himself. For its exordium Keats uses a line, and probably a whole pa.s.sage, which he had written many months before and kept by him. One day in 1816, while he was still walking the hospitals and sharing rooms in St Thomas's Street with his fellow students Mackereth and Henry Stephens, Keats called out to Stephens from his window-seat to listen to a new line he had just written,--'A thing of beauty is a constant joy,'--and asked him how he liked it. Stephens indicating that he was not quite satisfied, Keats thought again and came out with the amended line, now familiar and proverbial even to triteness, 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.'[7] Using this for the first line of his new poem, Keats runs on from it into a pa.s.sage, which may or may not have been written at the same time, declaring the virtues of those things of beauty--sun, moon, trees, rivulets, flowers, tales of beauty and heroism indiscriminately--which make for health and quietude amidst the gloom and distemper of the world. Then he tells of his own happiness in setting about his cherished task in the prime of spring, and his hopes of finishing it before winter. He takes us to a Pan-haunted forest on Mount Latmos, with many paths leading to an open glade. The hour is dawn, the scene in part manifestly modelled on a similar one in the Chaucerian poem, _The Floure and Lefe_, in which he took so much pleasure. First a group of little children come in from the forest paths and gather round the altar, then a bevy of damsels, then a company of shepherds; priests and people follow, and last of all the young shepherd-prince and hero Endymion, now wan and pining from a new, unexplained soul-sickness.

The festival opens with a speech of thanksgiving and exhortation from the priest, followed by a choral hymn in honour of the G.o.d: then come dances and games and story-telling. Meantime Endymion and the priest sit apart among the elder shepherds, who pa.s.s the time imagining what happy tasks and ministrations it will be theirs to ply in their 'homes ethereal' after death. In the midst of such conversation Endymion goes off into a distressful trance, during which there comes to him his sister Peona (this personage and her name are inventions of Keats, the name perhaps suggested by that of Paeana in the fourth book of the _Faerie Queene_, or by the Paeon mentioned in Lempriere as a son of Endymion in the Elean version of the tale, or by Paeon the physician of the G.o.ds in the _Iliad_, whom she resembles in her quality of healer and comforter; or very probably by all three together). Peona wakes her brother from his trance, and takes him in a shallop to an arbour of her own on a little island in a lake. Here she lulls him to rest, the poet first pausing to utter a fine invocation to Sleep--his second, the first having been at the beginning of _Sleep and Poetry_. Endymion awakens refreshed, and promises to be of better cheer in future. She sings soothingly to the lute, and then questions him concerning his troubles:--

Brother,'tis vain to hide That thou dost know of things mysterious, Immortal, starry; such alone could thus Weigh down thy nature.

When she has guessed in vain, he determines to confide in her: tells her how he fell asleep on a bed of poppies and other flowers which he had found magically new-blown on a place where there had been none before; how he dreamed that he was gazing fixedly at the stars shining in the zenith with preternatural glory, until they began to swim and fade, and then, dropping his eyes to the horizon, he saw the moon in equal glory emerging from the clouds; how on her disappearance he again looked up and there came down to him a female apparition of incomparable beauty (in whom it does not yet occur to him to recognize the moon-G.o.ddess); how she took him by the hand, and they were lifted together through mystic alt.i.tudes

Where falling stars dart their artillery forth And eagles struggle with the buffeting north That balances the heavy meteor stone;

how thence they swooped downwards in eddies of the mountain wind, and finally how, clinging to and embracing his willing companion in a delirium of happiness, he alighted beside her on a flowery alp, and there fell into a dream-sleep within his sleep; from which awakening to reality, he found himself alone on the bed of poppies, with the breeze at intervals bringing him 'Faint fare-thee-wells and sigh-shrilled adieus,' and with disenchantment fallen upon everything about him:--

All the pleasant hues Of heaven and earth had faded: deepest shades Were deepest dungeons: heaths and sunny shades Were full of pestilent light; and taintless rills Seem'd sooty, and o'erspread with upturn'd gills Of dying fish; the vermeil rose had blown In frightful scarlet, and its thorns outgrown Like spiked aloe.

Here we have the first of those mystic dream-flights of Endymion and his celestial visitant in company, prefiguring the union of the soul with the spirit of essential Beauty, which have to come true before the end but of which the immediate result is that all other delights lose their savour and turn to ashes. The spirit of man, so the interpretation would seem to run, having once caught the vision of transcendental Beauty and been allowed to embrace it, must pine after it evermore and in its absence can take no delight in nature or mankind. Another way would have been to make his hero find in every such momentary vision or revelation a fresh encouragement, a source of joy and inspiration until the next: but this was not Keats's way. Peona listens with sisterly sympathy, but her powers of help, being purely human, cannot in this case avail. She can only try to rouse him by contrasting his present forlorn and languid state with his former virility and ambition:--

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!

His reply in his own defence is long and much of it beautiful: but we follow the chain of thought and argument with difficulty, so hidden is it in flowers of poetry and so little are its vital links made obvious.

A letter of Keats, containing one of his very few explanatory comments on work of his own, shows that he attached great importance to the pa.s.sage and felt that its sequence and significance might easily be missed. Sending a correction of the proof to Mr Taylor, the publisher, he says--'The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere words, but I a.s.sure you that when I wrote it, it was a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a truth. My having written that argument will perhaps be of the greatest service to me of anything I ever did. It set before me the gradations of happiness, even like a kind of pleasure thermometer, and is my first step towards the chief attempt in the drama.' The first ten lines offer little difficulty:--

Peona! ever have I long'd to slake My thirst for the world's praises: nothing base, No merely slumberous phantasm, could unlace The stubborn canvas for my voyage prepar'd-- Though now 'tis tatter'd; leaving my bark bar'd And sullenly drifting: yet my higher hope Is of too wide, too rainbow-large a scope, To fret at myriads of earthly wrecks.

Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Our ready minds to fellowship divine, A fellowship with essence; till we shine, Full alchemiz'd, and free of s.p.a.ce. Behold The clear religion of heaven!

It seems clear that we have here shadowed forth the highest hope and craving of the poetic soul, the hope to be wedded in full communion or 'fellowship divine'--or shall we say with Wordsworth in love and holy pa.s.sion?--with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world. In the next lines we shall find, if we read them carefully enough, that Keats, having thus defined his ultimate hope, breaks off and sets out again from the foot of a new ascending scale of poetical pleasure and endeavour which he asks us to consider. It differs from the ascending scale of the earlier poems inasmuch as it begins, not with the toying of nymphs in shady places and the like, but with thoughts of olden minstrelsy and romantic tales and prophecies. The verse here is of Keats's finest:--

--hist, when the airy stress Of music's kiss impregnates the free winds, And with a sympathetic touch unbinds aeolian magic from their lucid wombs: Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs; Old ditties sigh above their father's grave; Ghosts of melodious prophecyings rave Round every spot where trod Apollo's foot; Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit, Where long ago a giant battle was; And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pa.s.s In every place where infant Orpheus slept.

It is impressed upon us in the next lines that this is a relatively unexalted phase of imaginative feeling, and our thoughts are directed to other experiences of the poetic soul more enthralling and more 'self-destroying' (that is more effectual in purging it of egotism), namely the experiences of friendship and love, those of love above all:--

Aye, so delicious is the unsating food, That men, who might have tower'd in the van Of all the congregated world, to fan And winnow from the coming step of time All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime Left by men-slugs and human serpentry, Have been content to let occasion die, Whilst they did sleep in love's elysium.

And, truly, I would rather be struck dumb, Than speak against this ardent listlessness: For I have ever thought that it might bless The world with benefits unknowingly; As does the nightingale, upperched high, And cloister'd among cool and bunched leaves-- She sings but to her love, nor e'er conceives How tiptoe Night holds back her dark-grey hood.

If a man, next pleads Endymion, may thus reasonably give up even the n.o.blest of worldly ambitions for the joys of a merely mortal love, how much more may he do so for those of an immortal. No, he re-a.s.sures Peona in reply to her questioning glance, he is not fancy-sick:--

no, no, I'm sure My restless spirit never could endure To brood so long upon one luxury, Unless it did, though fearfully, espy A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.

We have now been carried back to the top of the scale, and these lines again express, although vaguely, the aspirations of the poetic soul at their highest pitch, rising through thoughts and experiences of mortal love to the hope of communion with immortal Beauty. But that longed-for, loftiest phase of the imaginative life, that hope beyond the shadow of a dream, too vast and too rainbow-bright to be quenched by any fear of earthly disaster, Endymion cannot attempt to define, least of all to the practically-minded Peona. He can only try to convince her of its reality by telling her of later momentary visitations with which the divinity of his dreams has favoured him--her face reflected at him from a spring--her voice murmuring to him from a cave--and how miserably in the intervals he has pined and hungered for her. But now, he ends by a.s.suring his sister, he will be patient and pine no longer. Yet it is but a sickly half-a.s.surance after all.

There is a paly flame of hope that plays Where'er I look: but yet, I'll say 'tis naught, And here I bid it die. Have I not caught, Already, a more healthy countenance?

And with this, as she rows him back from her island, the anxious sister must rest content.

BOOK II. opens with a renewed declamation on the power and glory of love, and the relative unimportance of the wars and catastrophes of history. Juliet leaning from her balcony, the swoon of Imogen, Hero wrongfully accused by Claudio, Spenser's Pastorella among the bandits, he declares,

Are things to brood on with more ardency Than the death-day of empires.

The pa.s.sage has caused some critics to reproach Keats as a mere mawkish amorist indifferent to the great affairs and interests of the world. But must one not believe that all poor flawed and fragmentary human loves, real or fabled, happy or miserable, are far off symbols and shadowings of that Love which, unless the universe is quite other than we have trusted, 'moves the sun and the other stars?' Are they not related to it as to their source and spring? It is quite true that Keats was not yet able to tell of such loves except in terms which you may call mawkish if you will (he called them so himself a little later). But being a poet he knew well enough their worth and parentage. And when the future looks back on today, even on today, a death-day of empires in a sterner and vaster sense than any the world has known, will all the waste and hatred and horror, all the hope and heroism of the time, its tremendous issues and catastrophes, be really found to have eclipsed and superseded love as the thing fittest to fill the soul and inspire the songs of a poet?

The invocation ended, we set out with the hero on the adventures that await him. He gathers a wild-rose bud which on expanding releases a b.u.t.terfly from its heart: the b.u.t.terfly takes wing and he follows its flight with eagerness. At last they reach a fountain spouting near the mouth of a cave, and in touching the water the b.u.t.terfly is suddenly transformed into a nymph of the fountain, who speaking to Endymion pities, encourages, and warns him in one breath. Endymion sits and soliloquizes beside the fountain, at first in wavering terms which express the ebb and flow of Keats's own inner aspirations and misgivings about his poetic calling. Anon he invokes the virgin G.o.ddess Cynthia to quell the tyranny of love in him (not yet guessing that his dream visitant is really she). But no, insensibility would be the worst of all; the G.o.ddess must, he is a.s.sured, know of some form of love higher and purer than the Cupids are concerned with; he prays to her to be propitious; dreams again that he is sailing through the sky with her; and makes a wild appeal to her which is answered by a voice from within the cavern bidding him descend 'into the sparry hollows of the world.'

He obeys, (this plunge into a spring or fountain and thence into the under-world is a regular incident in a whole group of folk tales, one or another of which was no doubt in Keats's mind): and we follow him at first into a region

nor bright, nor sombre wholly, But mingled up; a gleaming melancholy; A dusky empire and its diadems; One faint eternal eventide of gems.

A vein of gold sparkling with jewels serves him for path, and leads him through twilight vaults and pa.s.sages to a ridge that towers over many waterfalls: and the l.u.s.tre of a pendant diamond guides him further till he reaches a temple of Diana. What imaginative youth but has known his pa.s.sive day-dreams haunted by visions, mysteriously impressive and alluring, of natural and architectural marvels, huge sculptured caverns and glimmering palace-halls in endless vista? To such imaginings, fed by his readings and dreamings on

Memphis, and Nineveh, and Babylon,

Keats in this book lets himself go without a check. Now we find ourselves in a temple, described as complete and true to sacred custom, with an image of Diana; and in a trice either we have pa.s.sed, or the temple itself has dissolved, into a structure which by its 'abysmal depths of awe,' its gloomy splendours and intricacies of aisle and vault and corridor, its dimly gorgeous and most un-Grecian magnificence, reminds us of nothing so much as of Vathek and the halls of Eblis or some of the magical subterranean palaces of the _Arabian Nights_.

(Beckford's _Vathek_ and the _Thousand and One Nights_ were both among Keats's familiar reading.) Endymion is miserable there, and appeals to Diana to restore him to the pleasant light of earth. Thereupon the marble floor breaks up beneath and before his footsteps into a flowery sward. Endymion walks on to the sound of a soft music which only intensifies his yearnings: is led by a light through the alleys of a myrtle grove; and comes to an embowered chamber where Adonis lies asleep among little ministering Loves, with Cupid himself, lute in hand, for their chief.

Here follows a long and highly wrought episode of the winter sleep of Adonis and the descent of Venus to awaken him. The original idea for the scene comes from Ovid, in part direct, in part through Spenser (_Faerie Queene_, iii, 6) and Shakespeare. But the detail is entirely Keats's own and on the whole is a happy example of his early luxuriant manner; especially the description of the entrance of Venus and the looks and presence of Cupid as bystander and interpreter. The symbolic meaning of the story is for him evidently much the same as it was to the ancients,--the awakening of nature to love and life after the sleep of winter, with all the ulterior and a.s.sociated hopes implied by such a resurrection. The first embracements over, Endymion is about to intreat the favour of Venus for his quest when she antic.i.p.ates him encouragingly, telling him that from her upper regions she has perceived his plight and has guessed (here is one of the echoes from Drayton to which I have referred above) that some G.o.ddess, she knows not which, has condescended to him. She bids her son be propitious to him, and she and Adonis depart. Endymion wanders on by miraculous grottoes and palaces, and then mounts by a diamond bal.u.s.trade,

Leading afar past wild magnificence, Spiral through ruggedst loopholes, and thence Stretching across a void, then guiding o'er Enormous chasms, where, all foam and roar, Streams subterranean teaze their granite beds; Then heighten'd just above the silvery heads Of a thousand fountains, so that he could dash The waters with his spear; but at the splash, Done heedlessly, those spouting columns rose Sudden a poplar's height, and 'gan to enclose His diamond path with fretwork, streaming round Alive, and dazzling cool, and with a sound, Haply, like dolphin tumults, when sweet sh.e.l.ls Welcome the float of Thetis.

The fountains a.s.sume all manner of changing and interlacing imitative shapes which he watches with delight (this and much else on the underground journey seems to be the outcome of pure fancy and day-dreaming on the poet's part, without symbolic purpose). Then pa.s.sing on through a dim tremendous region of vaults and precipices he has a momentary vision of the earth-G.o.ddess Cybele with her team of lions issuing from an arch below him. At this point the diamond bal.u.s.trade suddenly breaks off in mid-s.p.a.ce and ends in nothing.[8] Endymion calls to Jove for help and rescue, and is taken up on the wings of an eagle, (is this the eagle of Dante in the _Purgatory_ and of Chaucer in The _House of Fame_?) who swoops down with him,--all this still happening, be it remembered, deep within the bowels of the earth,--to a place of sweet airs of flowers and mosses. He is deposited in a jasmine bower, wonders within himself who and what his unknown love may be, longs to force his way to her, but as that may not be, to sleep and dream of her.

He sleeps on a mossy bed; she comes to him; and their endearments are related, unluckily in a very cloying and distasteful manner of amatory e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n. It was a flaw in Keats's art and a blot on his genius--or perhaps only a consequence of the rawness and ferment of his youth?--that thinking n.o.bly as he did of love, yet when he came to relate a love-pa.s.sage, even one intended as this to be symbolical of ideal things, he could only realize it in terms like these.

The visitant, whose ident.i.ty is still unrecognized, again disappears; he resumes his quest, and next finds himself in a huge vaulted grotto full of sea treasures and sea sounds and murmurs. Here he goes over in memory his past life and aspirations,

--the spur Of the old bards to mighty deeds: his plans To nurse the golden age 'mong shepherd clans: That wondrous night: the great Pan-festival: His sister's sorrow; and his wanderings all, Until into the earth's deep maw he rush'd: Then all its buried magic, till it flush'd High with excessive love. 'And now,' thought he, 'How long must I remain in jeopardy Of blank amazements that amaze no more?

Now I have tasted her sweet soul to the core All other depths are shallow: essences, Once spiritual, are like muddy lees, Meant but to fertilize my earthly root, And make my branches lift a golden fruit Into the bloom of heaven: other light, Though it be quick and sharp enough to blight The Olympian eagle's vision, is dark, Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark!

My silent thoughts are echoing from these sh.e.l.ls; Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swells Of noises far away?--list!--'

The poet seems here to mean that in the seeker's transient hour of union with his unknown divinity capacities for thought and emotion have been awakened in him richer and more spiritually illuminating than he has known before. The strange sounds which reach him are the rushing of the streams of the river-G.o.d Alpheus and the fountain-nymph Arethusa; Arethusa fleeing, Alpheus pursuing (according to that myth which is told most fully by Ovid and which Sh.e.l.ley's lyric has made familiar to all English readers); he entreating, she longing to yield but fearing the wrath of Diana. Endymion, who till now has had no thought of anything but his own plight, is touched by the pangs of these lovers and prays to his G.o.ddess to a.s.suage them. We are left to infer that she a.s.sents: they plunge into a gulf and disappear: he turns to follow a path which leads him in the direction of a cooler light and a louder sound:

--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.

Throughout this second book Keats has been content to let the mystery and 'buried magic' of the under-world reveal itself in nothing of more original invention or of deeper apparent significance than the spring awakening of Adonis and the vision of the earth-G.o.ddess Cybele. His under-world is no Tartarus or Elysium, no place of souls: he attempts nothing like the calling-up of the ghosts of dead heroes by Ulysses in the _Odyssey_, still less like the mystic revelation of a future state of rewards and punishments in the sixth book of the _Aeneid_. Possibly the visit of the disguised Diana is meant to have a double meaning, and of her three characters as 'Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and h.e.l.l,' to refer to the last, that of a G.o.ddess of the under-world and of the dead, and at the same time to symbolize the power of the spirit of Beauty to visit the poet's soul with joy and illumination even among the 'dismal elements' of that nether sphere. Into the rest of the underground scenery and incidents it is hard to read any symbolical meaning or anything but the uncontrolled and aimless-seeming play of invention. But in what is now to follow we are conscious of a fuller meaning and a stricter plan. That from Diana, conscious of her own weakness, indulgence for the weakness of her nymph Arethusa should be won by the prayer of Endymion, now for the first time wrought to sympathy with the sorrows of others, is a clear stage in the development of the poet's scheme. The next stage is more decisive and significant still.

Book III. Keats begins his third book with a denunciation of kings, conquerors, and worldly 'regalities' in general, amplifying in his least fortunate style the ideas contained in the sonnet 'On receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt' written the previous March in the copy of his _Poems_ which he gave to Reynolds (see above, p. 57). When Keats read this pa.s.sage to Bailey at Oxford, Bailey very justly found fault with some forced expressions in it such as 'baaing vanities,' and also, he tells us, with what seemed to him an over-done defiance of the traditional way of handling the rimed couplet. From denunciation the verse pa.s.ses into narrative with the question, 'Are then regalities all gilded masks?' The answer is, No, there are a thousand mysterious powers throned in the universe--cosmic powers, as we should now say--most of them far beyond human ken but a few within it; and of these, swears the poet, the moon is 'the gentlier-mightiest.' Having once more, in a strain of splendid nature-poetry, praised her, he resumes his tale, and tells how Cynthia, pining no less than Endymion, sends a shaft of her light down to him where he lies on an under-sea bed of sand and pearls; how this comforts him, and how at dawn he resumes his fated journey.

Here follows a description of the litter of the Ocean floor which, as we shall see later, is something of a challenge to Shakespeare and was in its turn something of an inspiration to Sh.e.l.ley. Endymion now in his own person takes up the inexhaustible theme of the moon's praise, asking her pardon at the same time for having lately suffered a more rapturous, more absorbing pa.s.sion to come between him and his former youthful worship of her. At this moment the wanderer's attention is suddenly diverted,--

For as he lifted up his eyes to swear How his own G.o.ddess was past all things fair, 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 were cold beneath his cold thin feet.

The old man is Glaucus, and the rest of the book is taken up almost entirely with his story. Keats's reading of Ovid had made him familiar with this story:[9] but he remodels it radically for his own ethical and symbolic purpose, giving it turns and a sequel quite unknown to antiquity, and even helping himself as he felt the need to certain incidents and machinery of Oriental magic from the _Arabian Nights_.

Glaucus at first sight of Endymion greets him joyfully, seeing in him his predestined deliverer from the spell of palsied age which binds him.

But Endymion cannot endure the thought of being diverted from his own private quest, and meets the old man's welcome first with suspicious terror and then with angry defiance. The grey-haired creature weeps: whereupon Endymion, newly awakened to human sympathies, is struck with remorse.