Life of John Keats Part 18

FROM A SARCOPHAGUS RELIEF AT WOBURN ABBEY]

It is usually said that this description of Bacchus and his rout was suggested by t.i.tian's famous picture of Bacchus and Ariadne (after Catullus) which is now in the National Gallery, and which Severn took Keats to see when it was exhibited at the British Inst.i.tution in 1816.

But this will account for a part at most of Keats's vision. Tiger and leopard panting along with Asian elephants on the march are not present in that picture, nor anything like them. Keats might have found suggestions for them in the text both of G.o.dwin's little handbook just quoted and in Spence's _Polymetis_: but it would have been much more like him to work from something seen with his eyes: and these animals, with Indian prisoners mounted on the elephants, are invariable features of the triumphal processions of Bacchus through India as represented on a certain well-known type of ancient sarcophagus. From direct sight of such sarcophagus reliefs or prints after such Keats, I feel sure, must have taken them,[4] while the children mounted on crocodiles may have been drawn from the plinth of the famous ancient rec.u.mbent statue of the Nile, and the pigmy rowers, in all likelihood, from certain reliefs which Keats will have noticed in the Townley collection at the British Museum: so that the whole brilliant picture is a composite (as we shall see later was the case with the Grecian Urn) which had shaped itself from various sources in Keats's imagination and become more real than any reality to his mind's eye. But I am holding up the reader, with this digression as to sources, from the fine rush of verse with which the lyric sweeps on to tell how the singer dropped out of the train of Bacchus to wander alone into the Carian forest, and finally, returning to the opening motive, 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.

An intensely vital imaginative feeling, such as can afford to dispense with scholarship, for the spirit of Greek and Greco-Asiatic myths and cults inspires these lyrics respectively; and strangely enough the result seems in neither case a whit impaired by the fact that the nature-images Keats invokes in them are almost purely English.

Bean-fields in blossom and poppies among the corn, hemlock growing in moist places by the brookside, field mushrooms with the morning dew upon them, cowslips and strawberries and the song of linnets, oak, hazel and flowering broom, holly trees smothered from view under the summer leaf.a.ge of chestnuts, these are the things of nature that he has loved and lived with from a child, and his imagination cannot help importing the same delights not only into the forest haunts of Pan but into the regions ranged over by Bacchus with his train of yoked tiger and panther, of elephant, crocodile and zebra.

Contemporary influences as well as Elizabethan and Jacobean are naturally discernible in the poem. The strongest and most permeating is that of Wordsworth, not so much to be traced in actual echoes of his words, though these of course occur, as in adoptions of his general spirit. We have recognized a special instance in that deep and brooding sense of mystery, of 'something far more deeply interfused,' of the working of an unknown spiritual force behind appearances, which finds expression in the hymn to Pan. Endymion's prayer to Cynthia from underground in the second book will be found to run definitely and closely parallel with Wordsworth's description of the huntress Diana in his account of the origin of Greek myths (see above, pp. 125-6). When Keats likens the many-tinted mists enshrouding the litter of Sleep to the fog on the top of Skiddaw from which the travellers may

With an eye-guess towards some pleasant vale Descry a favourite hamlet faint and far,

we know that his imagination is answering to a stimulus supplied by Wordsworth. But it is for the undercurrent of ethical symbolism in _Endymion_ that Keats will have owed the most to that master. Both Sh.e.l.ley and he had been profoundly impressed by the reading of _The Excursion_, published when Sh.e.l.ley was in his twenty-second year and Keats in his nineteenth, and each in his own way had taken deeply to heart Wordsworth's inculcation, both in that poem and many others, of the doctrine that a poet must learn to go out of himself and to live and feel as a man among fellow men,--that it is a kind of spiritual suicide for him to attempt to live apart from human sympathies,

Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!

A large part of _Endymion_, as we have seen, is devoted to the symbolical setting forth of this conviction. For the rest, that essential contrast between the mental processes and poetic methods of the elder and the younger man which we have noted in discussing Keats's first volume continues to strike us in the second. In interpreting the relations of man to the natural world, Wordsworth's poetry is intensely personal and 'subjective,' Keats's intensely impersonal and 'objective.'

Wordsworth expounds, Keats evokes: the mind of Wordsworth works by strenuous after-meditation on his experiences of life and nature and their effect upon his own soul and consciousness: the mind of Keats works by instantaneous imaginative partic.i.p.ation, instinctive and self-oblivious, in nature's doings and beings, especially those which make for human refreshment and delight.

The second contemporary influence to be considered is that of Sh.e.l.ley.

Sh.e.l.ley's _Alastor_, it will be remembered, published early in 1816, had been praised by Hunt in _The Examiner_ for December of that year, and in the following January Hunt printed in the same paper Sh.e.l.ley's _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_. In the course of that same December and January Keats had seen a good deal of Sh.e.l.ley at Hunt's and taken part with him in many talks on poetry. It is certain that Keats read and was impressed by _Alastor_: doubtless he also read the _Hymn_. How much did either or both influence him in the composition of _Endymion_? Mr Andrew Bradley thinks he sees evidence that _Alastor_ influenced him strongly. That poem is a parable, as _Endymion_ is, of the adventures of a poet's soul; and it enforces, as much of _Endymion_ does, the doctrine that a poet cannot without ruin to himself live in isolation from human sympathies.

But there the resemblance between the two conceptions really ends. In _Alastor_ the poet, having lived in solitary communion 'with all that is most beautiful and august in nature and in human thought and the world's past' (the words are Sh.e.l.ley's own prose summary of the imagined experiences which the first part of the poem relates in splendid verse), is suddenly awakened, by a love-vision which comes to him in a dream, to the pa.s.sionate desire of finding and mating with a kindred soul, the living counterpart of his dream, who shall share with him the delight of such communion. The desire, ever unsatisfied, turns all his former joys to ashes, and drives him forth by unheard-of ways through monstrous wildernesses until he pines and dies, or in the strained Sh.e.l.leyan phrase, 'Blasted by his disappointment, he descends into an untimely grave.' The essence of the theme is the quest of the poetic soul for perfect spiritual sympathy and its failure to discover what it seeks.

Sh.e.l.ley does not make it fully clear whether the ideal of his poet's dream is a purely abstract ent.i.ty, an incarnation of the collective response which he hopes, but fails, to find from his fellow creatures at large; or whether, or how far, he is transcendentally expressing his own personal longing for an ideally sympathetic soul-companion in the shape of woman. Both strains no doubt enter into his conception; so far as the private strain comes in, many pa.s.sages of his life furnish a mournfully ironic comment on his dream. But in any case his conception is fundamentally different from that of Keats in _Endymion_. The essence of Keats's task is to set forth the craving of the poet for full communion with the essential spirit of Beauty in the world, and the discipline by which he is led, through the exercise of the active human sympathies and the toilsome acquisition of knowledge, to the prosperous and beatific achievement of his quest.

It is rather the preface to _Alastor_ than the poem itself which we can trace as having really worked in the mind of Keats. In it the evil fate of those who shut themselves out from human sympathies is very eloquently set forth, in a pa.s.sage which is only partly relevant to the design of the poem, inasmuch as its warning is addressed not only to the poet in particular but to human beings in general. The pa.s.sage may have had some influence on Keats when he framed the scheme of _Endymion_: what is certain is that we shall find its thoughts and even its words recurring forcibly to his mind in an hour of despondency some thirty months later: let us therefore postpone its consideration until then.

For the rest, it is not difficult to show correspondence between some of the descriptive pa.s.sages of _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, especially those telling of the natural and architectural marvels amid which the heroes wander. Endymion's wanderings we are fresh from tracing. Alastor before him had wandered--

where the secret caves Rugged and dark, winding amid the springs Of fire and poison, inaccessible To avarice or pride, their starry domes Of diamond and of gold expand above Numerous and immeasurable halls, Frequent with crystal columns, and clear shrines Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite.

But these are the kind of visions which may rise spontaneously in common in the minds of almost any pair of youthful dreamers. Sh.e.l.ley's poetic style is of course as much sounder and less experimental than that of Keats at this time as his range and certainty of penetrating and vivifying imagination are, to my apprehension at least, less: he had a trained and scholarly feeling both for the resources of the language and for its purity, and Keats might have learnt much from him as to what he should avoid. But as we have seen, Keats was firmly on his guard against letting any outside influence affect his own development, and would not visit Sh.e.l.ley at Marlow during the composition of _Endymion_, in order 'that he might have his own unfettered scope' and that the spirit of poetry might work out its own salvation in him.

As to the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, written though it was by Sh.e.l.ley under the fresh impression of the glory of the Alps and also in the first flush of his acquaintance with and enthusiasm for Plato, I think Keats would have felt its strain of aspiration and invocation too painful, too near despair, to make much appeal to him, and that Sh.e.l.ley's

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon,

would have seemed to him something abstract, remote, and uncomforting.

His own imagination insisted on the existence of something in the ultimate nature of the universe to account for what he calls the 'wild and harmonised tune' which he found his spirit striking from all the scattered and broken beauties of the world. Vague and floating his conception of that something might be, but it was extraordinarily intense, partaking of the concentrated essence of a thousand thrilling joys of perception and imagination. He had read no Plato, though he was of course familiar enough with Spenser's mellifluous dilution of Platonic and neo-Platonic doctrine in his four _Hymns_. In _Endymion_, as in the speculative pa.s.sages of the letters we have quoted, his mind has to go adventuring for itself among those ancient, for him almost uncharted, mysteries of Love and Beauty. He does not as yet conceive himself capable of anything more than steppings, to repeat his own sober phrase, of the imagination towards truth. He does not light, he does not expect to light, upon revelations of truth abstract or formal, and seems to waver between the Adam's dream idea of finding in some transcendental world all the several modes of earthly happiness 'repeated in a finer tone' but yet retaining their severalness, and an idea, nearer to the Platonic, of a single principle of absolute or abstract Beauty, the object of a purged and perfected spiritual contemplation, from which all the varieties of beauty experienced on earth derive their quality and oneness. But in his search he strikes now and again, for the attentive reader, notes of far reaching symbolic significance that carry the mind to the verge of the great mysteries of things: he takes us with him on exploratory sweeps and fetches of figurative thought in regions almost beyond the reach of words, where we gain with him glimmering adumbrations of the super-sensual through distilled and spiritualized remembrance of the joys of sense-perception at their most intense.

So much for Keats's possible debt to Sh.e.l.ley in regard to _Endymion_.

There is an interesting small debt to be recorded on the other side, which critics, I think, have hitherto failed to notice. Sh.e.l.ley, notwithstanding his interest in Keats, did not read _Endymion_ till a year or more after its publication. He had in the meantime gone to live in Italy, and having had the volume sent out to him at Leghorn, writes: 'much praise is due to me for having read it, the author's intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of the highest and finest gleams of poetry: indeed, everything seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think if he had printed about fifty pages of fragments from it, I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger.' Nothing can be more just; and in the same spirit eight months later, in May 1820, he writes, 'Keats, I hope, is going to show himself a great poet; like the sun, to burst through the clouds, which, though dyed in the finest colours of the air, obscured his rising.' About the same time, having heard of Keats's haemorrhage and sufferings and of their supposed cause in the hostility of the Tory critics, Sh.e.l.ley drafted, but did not send, his famous indignant letter to the editor of the _Quarterly Review_. In this draft he shows himself a careful student of _Endymion_ by pointing out particular pa.s.sages for approval. One of these pa.s.sages is that near the beginning of the third book describing the wreckage seen by the hero as he traversed the ocean floor before meeting Glaucus. Everybody knows, in Shakespeare's _Richard III_, Clarence's dream of being drowned and of what he saw below the sea:--

What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!

What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!

Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks; Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon; Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, All scatter'd in the bottom of the sea.

Keats, no doubt remembering, and in a sense challenging, this pa.s.sage, wrote,--

Far had he roam'd, With nothing save the hollow vast, that foam'd, Above, around, and at his feet; save things More dead than Morpheus' imaginings: Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe; Rudders that for a hundred years had lost The sway of human hand; gold vase emboss'd With long-forgotten story, and wherein No reveller had ever dipp'd a chin But those of Saturn's vintage; mouldering scrolls, Writ in the tongue of heaven, by those souls Who first were on the earth; and sculptures rude In ponderous stone, developing the mood Of ancient Nox;--then skeletons of man, Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan, And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw Of nameless monster.

Jeffrey in his review of the _Lamia_ volume has a fine phrase about this pa.s.sage. It 'comes of no ign.o.ble lineage,' he says, 'nor shames its high descent.' How careful Sh.e.l.ley's study of the pa.s.sage had been, and how completely he had a.s.similated it, is proved by his, doubtless quite unconscious, reproduction and amplification of it in the fourth act of _Prometheus Unbound_, which he added as an afterthought to the rest of the poem in December 1819. The wreckage described is not that of the sea, but that which the light flashing from the forehead of the infant Earth-spirit reveals at the earth's centre.

The beams flash on And make appear the melancholy ruins Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships; Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears, And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, Round which death laughed, sepulchred emblems Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin!

The wrecks beside of many a city vast, Whose population which the earth grew over Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie, Their monstrous works, and uncouth skeletons, Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes Huddled in gray annihilation, split, Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these, The anatomies of unknown winged things, And fishes which were isles of living scale, And serpents, bony chains, twisted around The iron crags, or within heaps of dust To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs Had crushed the iron crags; and over these The jagged alligator, and the might Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once Were monarch beasts.

The derivation of this imagery from the pa.s.sage of Keats seems evident alike from its general conception and sequence and from details like the anchors, beaks, targes, the prodigious primeval sculptures, the skeletons of behemoth and alligator and antediluvian monsters without name. Another possible debt of Sh.e.l.ley to _Endymion_ has also been suggested in the list of delights which the poet, in the closing pa.s.sage of _Epipsychidion_, proposes to share with his spirit's mate in their imagined island home in the aegean. If Sh.e.l.ley indeed owes anything to _Endymion_ here, he has etherealized and transcendentalized his original even more than Keats did Ovid. Possibly, it may also be suggested, it may have been Sh.e.l.ley's reading of _Endymion_ that led him at this time to take two of the myths handled in it by Keats as subjects for his own two lyrics, _Arethusa_ and the _Hymn to Pan_ (both of 1820); but he may just as well have thought of these subjects independently; and in any case they are absolutely in his own vein, nor was their exquisite leaping and liquid lightness of rhythm a thing at any time within Keats's compa.s.s. It would be tempting to attribute to a desire of emulating and improving on Keats Sh.e.l.ley's beautifully accomplished use of the rimed couplet with varied pause and free overflow in the _Epistle to Maria Gisborne_ (1819) and _Epipsychidion_ (1820), but that he had already made a first experiment in the same kind with _Julian and Maddalo_, written before his copy of _Endymion_ had reached him, so that we must take his impulse in the matter to have been drawn not intermediately through Keats but direct from Leigh Hunt.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Why will my friend Professor Saintsbury, in range of reading and industry the master of us all, insist on trying to persuade us that in the metre of _Endymion_ Keats owed something to the _Pharonnida_ of William Chamberlayne? There is absolutely no metrical usage in Keats's poem for which his familiar Elizabethan and Jacobean masters do not furnish ample precedent: he differs from them only in taking more special care to avoid any prolonged run of closed couplets. I do not believe he could have brought himself to read two pages of _Pharonnida_. But that is only an opinion, and the matter can be decided by a simple computation on the fingers. The fact is that there are no five pages of _Pharonnida_ which do not contain more of those unfortunate rimings on 'in' and 'by' and 'to' and 'on' and 'of'

followed by their nouns in the next line, or worse still, on 'to'

followed by its infinitive,--on 'it' and 'than' and 'be' and 'which,'

and all the featherweight particles and prepositions and auxiliaries and relatives impossible to stress or pause on for a moment,--than can be found in any whole book of _Endymion_. It is also a fact that the average proportion of lines not ending with a comma or other pause is in _Pharonnida_ about ten to one, and in _Endymion_ not more than two and a half to one. That the sentence-structure of _Pharonnida_ is as detestably disjointed and invertebrate as that of _Endymion_ is graceful and well-articulated I hesitate to insist, because that again is a matter of ear and feeling, and not, like my other points, of sheer arithmetic.

[2] The flaw here is of course the use of the forced rime-word 'unseam.' The only authority for the word is Shakespeare, who uses it in _Macbeth_, in a sufficiently different sense and context--

'Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps.'

The vision in Keats's mind was probably of a track dividing, or as it were ripping apart, the two sides of a valley.

[3] 'All the strange, mysterious and unaccountable sounds which were heard in solitary places, were attributed to Pan, the G.o.d of rural scenery' (Baldwin's _Pantheon_, ed. 1806, p. 104). Keats possessed a copy of this well-felt and well-written little primer of mythology, by William G.o.dwin the philosopher writing under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin; and the above is only one of several suggestions directly due to it which are to be found in his poetry.

[4] Two cla.s.ses of sarcophaguses are concerned, those figuring the triumph of Bacchus and Hercules with their Indian captives, and those which show the march of Silenus and his rout of fauns and maenads.

Now it so happens that an excellent original of each cla.s.s, and with them also a fine Endymion sarcophagus, had been bought by the Duke of Bedford from the Villa Aldobrandini in 1815 and were set up in his grand new gallery at Woburn five years later. Where they were housed in the meanwhile is not recorded, but wherever it was Haydon could easily have obtained access to them, (the Duke's agent in the purchase having been also secretary to Lord Elgin) and I cannot resist the conviction, purely conjectural as it is, that Keats must have seen them in Haydon's company some time in the winter of 1816/17, and drawn inspiration from them both in this and some other pa.s.sages of _Endymion_. The Triumph relief is the richest extant of its cla.s.s, especially in its mult.i.tude of sporting children: see plate opposite.

CHAPTER VIII

DECEMBER 1817-JUNE 1818: HAMPSTEAD AND TEIGNMOUTH: EMIGRATION OF GEORGE KEATS

Hampstead again: stage criticism--Hazlitt's lectures--Life at Well Walk--Meeting with Wordsworth--The 'immortal dinner'--Lamb forgets himself--More of Wordsworth--A happy evening--Wordsworth on Bacchus--Disillusion and impatience--Winter letters--Maxims and reflections--Quarrels among friends--Haydon, Hunt and Sh.e.l.ley--A prolific February--Rants and sonnets--A haunting memory--Six weeks at Teignmouth--Soft weather and soft men--_Isabella_ or _the Pot of Basil_--Rich correspondence--Epistle to Reynolds--Thirst for knowledge--Need of experience--The two chambers of thought--Summer plans--Preface to _Endymion_--A family break-up--To Scotland with Brown.

From finishing _Endymion_ at Burford Bridge Keats returned some time before mid-December to his Hampstead lodging. The exact date is uncertain; but it was in time to see Kean play _Richard III_ at Drury Lane on the 15th--the actor's first performance after a break of some weeks due to illness. J. H. Reynolds had gone to Exeter for a Christmas holiday, and Keats, acting as his subst.i.tute, wrote four dramatic criticisms for the _Champion_: the first, printed on December 21, on Kean in general and his re-appearance as Richard III in particular; a second on a hash of the three parts of Shakespeare's _Henry VI_ produced under the t.i.tle _Richard Duke of York_, with Kean in the name-part and probably Kean also as compiler; a third on a tragedy of small account by one Dillon, called _Retribution_, or the _Chieftain's Daughter_, in which the young Macready played the part of the villain; and a fourth on a pantomime of _Don Giovanni_. No one, least of all one living in Keats's circle, could well attempt stage criticism at this time without trying to write like Hazlitt. Keats acquits himself on the whole rather youthfully and crudely. In one point he is cruder than one would have expected, and that is where, after re-reading the three parts of _Henry VI_ for his purpose, he retracts what he had begun to say about them and declares that they are 'perfect works,' apparently without any suspicion that Shakespeare's part in them is at most that of a beginner of genius touching up the hackwork of others with a fine pa.s.sage here and there.

It is only in the notice of Kean as Richard III that the genius in Keats really kindles. Here his imagination teaches him phrases beyond the reach of Hazlitt, to express (there is nothing more difficult) the specific quality and very thrill of the actor's voice and utterance. The whole pa.s.sage is of special interest, both what is groping in it and what is masterly, and alike for itself and for such points as its familiar use of tags from the then recent _Christabel_ and _Siege of Corinth_:--

A melodious pa.s.sage in poetry is full of pleasures both sensual and spiritual. The spiritual is felt when the very letters and points of charactered language show like the hieroglyphics of beauty; the mysterious signs of our immortal free-masonry! 'A thing to dream of, not to tell'! The sensual life of verse springs warm from the lips of Kean and to one learned in Shakespearian hieroglyphics--learned in the spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual grandeur; his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left them honeyless! There is an indescribable _gusto_ in his voice, by which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and future while speaking of the instant. When he says in _Oth.e.l.lo_, 'Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,' we feel that his throat had commanded where swords were as thick as reeds. From eternal risk, he speaks as though his body were una.s.sailable. Again, his exclamation of 'blood, blood, blood!' is direful and slaughterous to the deepest degree; the very words appear stained and gory. His nature hangs over them, making a prophetic repast. The voice is loosed on them, like the wild dog on the savage relics of an eastern conflict; and we can distinctly hear it 'gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb.' In Richard, 'Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk!' comes from him as through the morning atmosphere towards which he yearns....

Surely this intense power of anatomizing the pa.s.sions of every syllable, of taking to himself the airings of verse, is the means by which he becomes a storm with such fiery decision; and by which, with a still deeper charm, he does his spiriting gently. Other actors are continually thinking of their sum-total effect throughout a play. Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a thought about anything else. He feels his being as deeply as Wordsworth, or any other of our intellectual monopolists. From all his comrades he stands alone, reminding us of him, whom Dante has so finely described in his h.e.l.l:

and sole apart retir'd the Soldan fierce.[1]