Life of John Keats Part 34

As in old pictures tender cherubim A child's soul thro' the sapphir'd canvas bear, So, thro' a real heaven, on they swim With the sweet princess on her plumag'd lair, Speed giving to the winds her l.u.s.trous hair.

Or this, telling how Bertha of Canterbury, in Keats's queer new conception of her, was really a changeling born in the jungle:--

She is a changeling of my management; She was born at midnight in an Indian wild; Her mother's screams with the striped tiger's blent, While the torch-bearing slaves a halloo sent Into the jungles.

Or again, some of the stanzas describing the welcome prepared in Elfinan's capital for the faery princess after her flight: note in the last the persistence with which Keats carries into these incongruous climates his pa.s.sion for the English spring flowers:--

The morn is full of holiday; loud bells With rival clamours ring from every spire; Cunningly-station'd music dies and swells In echoing places; when the winds respire, Light flags stream out like gauzy tongues of fire; A metropolitan murmur, lifeful, warm, Comes from the northern suburbs; rich attire Freckles with red and gold the moving swarm; While here and there clear trumpets blow a keen alarm.

And again:--

As flowers turn their faces to the sun, So on our flight with hungry eyes they gaze, And, as we shap'd our course, this, that way run, With mad-cap pleasure, or hand-clasp'd amaze; Sweet in the air a mild-ton'd music plays, And progresses through its own labyrinth; Buds gather'd from the green spring's middle-days, They scatter'd,--daisy, primrose, hyacinth,-- Or round white columns wreath'd from capital to plinth.

After his mornings spent in Brown's company over the strained frivolities of _The Cap and Bells_, Keats was in the same weeks striving, alone with himself of an evening, to utter the new thoughts on life and poetry which he found taking shape in the depths of his being.

He took up again the abandoned _Hyperion_, and began rewriting it no longer as a direct narrative, but as a vision shewn and interpreted by a supernatural monitress acting to him somewhat the same part as Virgil acts to Dante. In altering the form and structure of the poem Keats also takes pains to alter its style, de-Miltonizing and de-latinizing, sometimes terribly to their disadvantage, the pa.s.sages which he takes over from the earlier version. It is not in these, it is in the two hundred and seventy lines of its wholly new pre-amble or introduction that the value of the altered poem lies.

The reader remembers how Keats had broken off his work on the original _Hyperion_ at the point where Mnemosyne, G.o.ddess of Memory and mother of the Muses, is enkindling the brain of Apollo by mysteriously imparting to him her ancient wisdom and all-embracing knowledge. Following a clue which he had found in a Latin book of mythology he had lately bought,[6]

he now identifies this Greek Mnemosyne with the Roman Moneta, G.o.ddess of warning or admonition; and being possibly also aware that the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitol at Rome was not far from that of Saturn, makes his Mnemosyne-Moneta the priestess and guardian of Saturn's temple. His vision takes him first into a grove or garden of trees and flowers and fountains, with a feast of summer fruits spread on the moss before an embowered arbour. The events that follow, and the converse held between the poet and the priestess, are in their ethical and allegoric meanings at many points obscure, and capable, like all symbols that are truly symbolic, of various interpretations. But the leading ideas they embody can be recognised clearly enough.

They are primarily the same ideas, developed in a deeper and more sombre spirit, as had been present in Keats's mind almost from the beginning: the idea that in the simple delights of nature and of art as unreflectingly felt in youth there is no abiding place for the poetic spirit, that from the enjoyment of such delights it must rise to thoughts higher and more austere and prompting to more arduous tasks: the further idea that to fit it for such tasks two things above all are necessary, growth in human sympathy through the putting down of self, and growth in knowledge and wisdom through strenuous study and meditation. Such ideas had already been thrown out by Keats in _Sleep and Poetry_; they had been developed with much more fullness, though in a manner made obscure from redundance of imagery, in _Endymion_, especially in the third book: they had been expressed with a difference under the new and clearer symbolism of the Two Chambers of Thought in Keats's letter to Reynolds from Teignmouth. About the same hour, the hour, as I think, of the finest achievement of Keats's genius as well as of its highest promise,--there had appeared in his letters and some of his verses the quite new idea, which would have been inconceivable to him a year earlier, of questioning whether poetry was a worthy pursuit at all in a world full of pain and destruction. Musing beside the sea on a calm evening of April, he antic.i.p.ates the Tennysonian vision of 'nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine.' In letters written during the next few weeks he insists over and over again alike upon the acuteness of his new sense that the world is 'full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression,' and upon the poet's need of knowledge, and again knowledge, and ever more knowledge, to take away the heat and fever and ease 'the Burden of the Mystery.' The first pa.s.sage that shows the dawn of a desire in his mind to do good to a suffering world by means possibly other than his art is that well-known and deeply significant one:--

I find earlier days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to the world. Some do it with their society--some with their wit--some with their benevolence--some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet--and in a thousand ways, all dutiful to the command of great Nature--there is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.

The next time he expresses such an idea, it comes struck from him in a darker mood and in phrases of greater poignancy:--'were it in my choice, I would reject a Petrarcal coronation,--on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers ... I am never alone without rejoicing that there is such a thing as death--without placing my ultimate in the glory of dying for a great human purpose.'

The pressure of the sense of human misery, the hunger of the soul for knowledge and vision to lighten it, though they naturally do not colour his impersonal work of the next year and a half, nevertheless set their mark, the former strain in especial, upon his most deeply felt meditative verse, as in the odes to the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn, and reappear occasionally in his private confessions to his friends.

Now, after intense experience both of personal sorrow and of poetic toil, and under the strain of incipient disease and consuming pa.s.sion, it is borne in upon his solitary hours that such poetry as he has written, the irresponsible poetry of beauty and romance, has been mere idle dreaming, a refuge of the spirit from its prime duty of sharing and striving to alleviate the troubles of the world. It seems to him that every ordinary man and woman is worth more to mankind than such a dreamer. If poetry is to be worth anything to the world, it must be a different kind of poetry from this: the true poet is something the very opposite of the mere dreamer: he is one who has prepared himself through self-renunciation and arduous effort and extreme probation of the spirit to receive and impart the highest wisdom, the wisdom that comes from full knowledge of the past and foresight into the future. Of such wisdom _The Fall of Hyperion_ in its amended form, as revealed and commented by Mnemosyne-Moneta, the great priestess and prophetess, remembrancer and admonisher in one, was meant to be a sample,--or such an attempt at a sample as Keats at the present stage of his mental growth could supply.

But the attempt soon proved beyond his strength and was abandoned.

The preamble, or induction, he had finished; and this, if we leave out the futile eighteen lines with which it begins, contains much lofty thought conveyed in n.o.ble imagery and in a style of blank verse quite his own and independent of all models. Take the feast of fruits, symbolic of the poet's early unreflecting joys, and the new thirst for some finer and more inspiring elixir which follows it:--

On a mound Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits, Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal By angel tasted or our Mother Eve; For empty sh.e.l.ls were scattered on the gra.s.s, And grape-stalks but half bare, and remnants more Sweet-smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know.

Still was more plenty than the fabled horn Thrice emptied could pour forth at banqueting, For Proserpine return'd to her own fields, Where the white heifers low. And appet.i.te, More yearning than on earth I ever felt, Growing within, I ate deliciously,-- And, after not long, thirsted; for thereby Stood a cool vessel of transparent juice Sipp'd by the wander'd bee, the which I took, And pledging all the mortals of the world, And all the dead whose names are in our lips, Drank. That full draught is parent of my theme.

The draught plunges him into a profound sleep, from which he awakens a changed being among utterly changed surroundings. The world in which he finds himself is no longer a delicious garden but an ancient and august temple,--the n.o.blest and most n.o.bly described architectural vision in all Keats's writings:--

I look'd around upon the curved sides Of an old sanctuary, with roof august, Builded so high, it seemed that filmed clouds Might spread beneath as o'er the stars of heaven.

So old the place was, I remember'd none The like upon the earth: what I had seen Of grey cathedrals, b.u.t.tress'd walls, rent towers, The superannuations of sunk realms, Or Nature's rocks toil'd hard in waves and winds, Seem'd but the faulture of decrepit things To that eternal domed monument.

The sights the poet sees and the experiences which befall him within this temple; the black gates closed against the east,--which must symbolize the forgotten past of the world; the stupendous image enthroned aloft in the west, with the altar at its foot, approachable only by an interminable flight of steps; the wreaths of incense veiling the altar and spreading a mysterious sense of happiness; the voice of one ministering at the altar and shrouded in the incense--a voice at once of invitation and menace, bidding the dreamer climb to the summit of the steps by a given moment or he will perish utterly; the sense of icy numbness and death which comes upon him before he can reach even the lowest step; the new life that pours into him as he touches the step; his accosting of the mysterious veiled priestess who stands on the altar platform when he has climbed to it; all these phases of the poet's ordeal are impressively told, but are hard to interpret otherwise than dubiously and vaguely. Matters become more definite a moment afterwards, when in answer to the poet's questions the priestess tells him that none can climb to the altar beside which he stands,--the altar, we must suppose, of historic and prophetic knowledge where alone, after due sacrifice of himself, the poet can find true inspiration,--except those

to whom the miseries of the world Are misery and will not let them rest.

The poet pleads that there are thousands of ordinary men and women who feel the sorrows of the world and do their best to mitigate them, and is answered,--

'Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries'

Rejoin'd that voice; 'they are no dreamers weak; They seek no wonder but the human face, No music but a happy-noted voice: They come not here, they have no thought to come; And thou art here, for thou art less than they.

What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself: think of the earth; What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?

What haven? every creature hath its home, Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low-- The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.

What a pilgrimage has the soul of Keats gone through, when he utters this heartrending cry, from the day, barely three years before, when he was never tired of singing by antic.i.p.ation the joys and glories of the poetic life and of the end that awaits it:--

These are the living pleasures of the bard, But richer far posterity's award.

What shall he murmur with his latest breath, When his proud eye looks through the film of death?

The truth is that, in all this, Keats in his depression of mind and body has become fiercely unjust to his own achievements and their value: for if posterity were asked, would it not reply that the things of sheer beauty his youth has left us, draughts drawn from the inmost wells of nature and antiquity and romance, are of greater solace and refreshment to his kind than anything he could have been likely to achieve by deliberate effort in defiance of his natural genius or in premature antic.i.p.ation of its maturity?

At this point there follows a fretful pa.s.sage, ill-written or rather only roughly drafted, and therefore not included in the transcripts of the fragments by his friends, in which his monitress affirms contemptuously the gulf that separates the romantic dreamer from the true poet. He accepts the reproof and the threatened punishment, the more willingly if they are to extend to certain 'hectorers in proud bad verse' (he means Byron) who have aroused his spleen. Reverting to a loftier strain, and acknowledging the grace she has so far shown him, the poet asks his monitress to reveal herself. He had probably long before been impressed by engravings of the well-known ancient statue of the seated Mnemosyne sitting forward with her chin resting on her hand, her arm and shoulder heavily swathed in drapery: but his vision of her here seems wholly independent, and is n.o.ble and mystically haunting.

When she has signified to him in a softened voice that the gigantic image above the altar is that of Saturn, and that the scenes of the world's past she is about to evoke before him are those of the fall of Saturn, the poet relates:--

As near as an immortal's sphered words Could to a mother's soften were these last: And yet I had a terror of her robes, And chiefly of the veils that from her brow Hung pale, and curtain'd her in mysteries, That made my heart too small to hold its blood.

This saw that G.o.ddess, and with sacred hand Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face, Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd By an immortal sickness which kills not; It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to; deathwards progressing To no death was that visage; it had past The lilly and the snow; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face.

But for her eyes I should have fled away; They held me back with a benignant light, Soft, mitigated by divinest lids Half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd Of all external things; they saw me not, But in blank splendour beam'd, like the mild moon, Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast.

The aspirant now adoringly entreats her to disclose the tragedy that he perceives to be working in her brain: she consents, and from this point begins the original _Hyperion_ re-cast and narrated as a vision within the main vision, with comments put into the mouth of the prophetess. But the scheme, which under no circ.u.mstances, one would say, could have been a prosperous one, was soon abandoned, and this, the last of Keats's great fragments, breaks off near the beginning of the second book.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Carm._ iii. 4, which probably Keats knew also at first hand.

[2] The daughter of Styx is Victory, and 'halecret' is a corslet.

[3] The pa.s.sage ending, 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.'

[4]

With duller steel than the Persean sword They cut away no formless monster's head.

[5] See the letter to Taylor quoted above, pp. 380, 381.

[6] _Auctores Mythographi Latini_, ed. Van Staveren, Leyden, 1742.

Keats's copy of the book was bought by him in 1819, and pa.s.sed after his death into the hands first of Brown, and afterwards of Archdeacon Bailey (Houghton MSS.). The pa.s.sage about Moneta which had wrought in Keats's mind occurs at p. 4, in the notes to Hyginus.

CHAPTER XV

FEBRUARY-AUGUST 1820: HAMPSTEAD AND KENTISH TOWN: PUBLICATION OF _LAMIA_ VOLUME.

Letters from the sick-bed--To f.a.n.n.y Brawne--To James Rice--Barry Cornwall--Hopes of returning health--Haydon's private view--Improvement not maintained--Summer at Kentish Town--Kindness of Leigh Hunt--Misery and jealousy--Severn and Mrs Gisborne--Invitation from Sh.e.l.ley--Keats on _The Cenci_--_La Belle Dame_ published--A disfigured version--The _Lamia_ volume published--Charles Lamb's appreciation--The _New Monthly_--Other favourable reviews--Taylor and Blackwood--A skirmish--Impenitence--And impertinence--Jeffrey in the _Edinburgh_--Appreciation full though tardy--Fury of Byron--Sh.e.l.ley on _Hyperion_--And on Keats in general--Impressions of Crabb Robinson.

Such and so gloomy, although with no ign.o.ble gloom, had been Keats's deeper thoughts on poetry and life, and such the imagery under which he figured them, during the last weeks when the state of his health enabled his mind to work with anything approaching its natural power. From the night of his seizure on February 3rd 1820, which was three months after his twenty-fourth birthday, he never wrote verse again: unless indeed the lines found on the margin of his ma.n.u.script of _The Cap and Bells_ were written from his sick-bed and in a moment of bitterness addressed in his mind to f.a.n.n.y Brawne: but from a certain pitch and formality of style in them, I should take them rather to be meant for putting into the mouth of one of the characters in some such historical play as he had been meditating in the weeks before Christmas:--

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm'd--see here it is-- I hold it towards you.

For several days after the haemorrhage he was kept to his room and his bed, and for nearly two months had to lead a strictly invalid life. At first he could bear no one in the room except the doctor and Brown.

'While I waited on him day and night,' testifies Brown, 'his instinctive generosity, his acceptance of my offices, by a glance of his eye, a motion of his hand, made me regard my mechanical duty as absolutely nothing compared to his silent acknowledgment.' (How often have these words come home to the heart of the present writer in days when he used to be busy about the mute sick-bed of another of these shining ones!) Severn, nursing Keats later under conditions even more trying and hopeless, bears similar testimony to his unabated charm and sweetness in suffering. Almost from the first he was able to write little letters to his sister f.a.n.n.y, and is careful to give them a cheering and re-a.s.suring turn. When after some days he is down on a sofa-bed made up for him in the front parlour he tells her what an improvement it is:--