Oxford Lectures on Poetry Part 13

'But, even so,' it may be said, 'why should the poet trouble himself about figures, events, and actions? That inward tendency in which you see danger and difficulty is, on the contrary, simply and solely what on one side you admit it to be, the sign of our advance. What we really need is to make our long poems _entirely_ interior. We only want to know how Dante felt; we do not _wish_ to see his pity felling him to the ground; and much less do we wish to hear Oth.e.l.lo say "and smote him thus," or even to imagine the blow. We are not children or savages.' We do not want, I agree, attempts to repeat the Elizabethan drama. But those who speak thus forget, perhaps, in how many kinds of poem this inward tendency can display its power without any injury or drawback.

They fail to ask themselves, perhaps, whether a _long_ poem so entirely 'interior' can possibly have the clearness, variety, and solidity of effect that the best long poems have possessed; whether it can produce the same impression of a ma.s.sive, building, organising, 'architectonic'

power of imagination; and whether all this and much else is of little value. They can hardly have realised, one must suspect, how much of life they wish to leave unrepresented. They fail to consider, too, that perhaps the business of art is not to ignore, but at once to satisfy and to purify, the primitive instincts from which it arises; and that, in the case of poetic art, the love of a story, and of exceptional figures, scenes, events, and actions, is one of those instincts, and one that in the immense majority of men shows no sign of decay. And finally, if they suppose that the desire to see or imagine action, in particular, is a symptom of mere sensationalism or a relic of semi-barbarism, I am sure they are woefully mistaken. There is more virtue than their philosophy dreams of in deeds, in 'the motion of a muscle this way or that.'

Doubtless it is the soul that matters; but the soul that remains interior is not the whole soul. If I suppose that mere self-scrutiny can show me that, I deceive myself; and my deeds, good and evil, will undeceive me.

A last delusion remains. 'There is,' we may be told, 'a simple, final, and comfortable answer to all these doubts and fears. The long poem is not merely difficult, it is impossible. It is dead, and should be publicly buried, and there is not the least occasion to mourn it. It has become impossible not because we cannot write it, but because we see that we ought not. And, in truth, it never was written. The thing called a long poem was really, as any long poem must be, a number of short ones, linked together by pa.s.sages of prose. And these pa.s.sages _could_ be nothing except prose; for poetry is the language of a state of crisis, and a crisis is brief. The long poem is an offence to art.' I believe I have stated this theory fairly. It was, unless I mistake, the invention of Poe, and it is about as true as I conceive his story of the composition of _The Raven_ to be. It became a gospel with some representatives of the Symbolist movement in France; and in fact it would condemn not only the long poem, but the middle-sized one, and indeed all sizes but the smallest. To reject this theory is to imply no want of grat.i.tude for the lyrics of some of its adherents; but the theory itself seems strangely thoughtless. Naturally, in any poem not quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic intensity; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as a simple ant.i.thesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as we have seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one; and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes.

That the long poem is doomed is a possible, however groundless, belief; but it is futile to deny that, if it dies, something of inestimable worth will perish.[10]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The material of these pages belongs in part to the course mentioned on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905.

They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the prevalence of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the long poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the false impression that the writer's admiration for those poems is lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the Romantic Revival of Wordsworth's time.

[2] This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is the point.

[3] _Table-talk_, Feb. 16, 1833.

[4] The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this balance. Such, for instance, are _The Eve of St. Agnes_, _Lamia_, _Michael_, _The Vision of Judgment_, some of Crabbe's tales. It does not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the day in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of the time.

[5] See p. 110.

[6] Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.

[7] This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with which many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur's speech in that Idyll; but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies in the plan of the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far as Arthur is merely the blameless king and representative of Conscience, the att.i.tude of a judge which he a.s.sumes in the speech is appropriate, and, again, Lancelot's treachery to him is intelligible and, however wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience could never be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or shock us by uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the other hand, these utterances are appropriate, and if all along Lancelot and Guinevere have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold and wholly absorbed in his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not merely wrongly but abominably, and as the Lancelot of the _Idylls_ could not have behaved. The truth is that Tennyson's design requires Arthur to be at once perfectly ideal and completely human. And this is not imaginable.

Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I think the depreciation of Tennyson's genius now somewhat prevalent a mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.

[8] It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge, and forty years older than Byron and Sh.e.l.ley.

[9] The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as an exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of the poetry of the time, and of Sh.e.l.ley's poetry in particular, and must supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him to observe that G.o.dwin's formulas are called sublime as well as ridiculous. _Political Justice_ would never have fascinated such young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Sh.e.l.ley, unless a great truth had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth can be felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on its misapprehension.

[10] The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that this is so in a lyric, and then it is a.s.sumed that it is _not_ so in a narrative or drama. But the a.s.sumption is false. At first sight we may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem than of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the whole poetic content of the _Divine Comedy_ in a form not its own than you can the content of a song.

The theory is connected in some minds with the view that 'music is the true type or measure of perfected art.' That view again rests on the idea that 'it is the art of music which most completely realises [the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and matter,' and that accordingly 'the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises' (Pater, _The Renaissance_, pp. 144, 145). I have by implication expressed dissent from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its truth is granted, what follows is that poetry should endeavour _in its own way_ to achieve that perfect identification; but it does not in the least follow that it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as nearly as possible to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so far as I see) imply it. But others have.

THE LETTERS OF KEATS

THE LETTERS OF KEATS

There is no lack of good criticism on the poetry of Keats. It has been discussed by the leading poets of three generations or semi-generations; by Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much more fully, by Mr.

Bridges. Lord Houghton's _Life and Letters_ and Mr. Colvin's biography both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the poems. And (to go no further) they have lately been edited by Mr. de Selincourt in a volume invaluable to students of Keats, and reflecting honour not only on its author but on the Oxford School of English, to the strength of which he has contributed so much. My princ.i.p.al object is to consider Keats's att.i.tude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas set forth in previous lectures on Sh.e.l.ley's views and on the age of Wordsworth. But I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to any reader of the poems who may need it, to study the letters of Keats. If I may judge from my experience, such readers are still far too numerous; and I am sure that no one already familiar with the letters will be sorry to listen to quotations from them.[1]

The best of Keats's poems, of course, can be fully appreciated without extraneous help; but the letters throw light on all, and they are almost necessary to the understanding of _Endymion_ and of some of the earlier or contemporaneous pieces. They clearly reveal those changes in his mind and temper which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever of the fictions once current of a puny Keats who was 'snuffed out by an article,' a sensual Keats who found his ideal in claret and 'slippery blisses,' and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his country and his fellow-creatures. Written in his last four years by a man who died at twenty-five, they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity and his faults, but they disclose a nature and character which command on the whole not less respect than affection, and they show not a little of that general intellectual power which rarely fails to accompany poetic genius.

Of Keats's character, as the letters manifest it, Arnold has written.

While speaking plainly and decidedly of the weakness visible in those to Miss Brawne, Arnold brought together the evidence which proves that Keats 'had flint and iron in him,' 'had virtue in the true and large sense of the word.' And he selected pa.s.sages, too, which ill.u.s.trate the 'admirable wisdom and temper' and the 'strength and clearness of judgment' shown by Keats, alike in matters of friendship and in his criticisms of his own productions, of the public, and of the literary circles,--the 'jabberers about pictures and books,' as Keats in a bitter mood once called them. We may notice, in addition, two characteristics.

In spite of occasional despondency, and of feelings of awe at the magnitude of his ambition, Keats, it is tolerably plain from these letters, had a clear and habitual consciousness of his genius. He never dreamed of being a minor poet. He knew that he was a poet; sometimes he hoped to be a great one. I remember no sign that he felt himself the inferior of any living poet except Wordsworth. How he thought of Byron, whom in boyhood he had admired, is obvious. When Sh.e.l.ley wrote, hinting a criticism, but referring to himself as excelled by Keats in genius, he returned the criticism without the compliment. His few references to Coleridge are critical, and his amusing description of Coleridge's talk is not more reverential than Carlyle's. Something, indeed, of the native pugnacity which his friends ascribe to him seems to show itself in his allusions to contemporaries, including even Wordsworth. Yet with all this, and with all his pride and his desire of fame, no letters extant breathe a more simple and natural modesty than these; and from end to end they exhibit hardly a trace, if any trace, either of the irritable vanity attributed to poets or of the sublime egotism of Milton and Wordsworth. He was of Shakespeare's tribe.

The other trait that I wish to refer to appears in a particular series of letters--sometimes mere notes--scattered through the collection. They are addressed to Keats's school-girl sister f.a.n.n.y, who was eight years younger than he, and who died in the same year as Browning.[2] Keats, as we see him in 1817 and 1818, in the first half of Mr. Colvin's collection, was absorbed by an enthusiasm and ambition which his sister was too young to understand. During his last two years he was, besides, pa.s.sionately and miserably in love, and, latterly, ill and threatened with death. His soul was full of bitterness. He shrank into himself, avoided society, and rarely sought even intimate friends. Yet, until he left England, he never ceased to visit his sister when he could; and, when he could not, he continued to write letters to her, full of amusing nonsense, full of brotherly care for her, and of excellent advice offered as by an equal who happened to be her senior; letters quite free from thoughts of himself, and from the forced gaiety and the resentment against fate which in parts of his later correspondence with others betray his suffering. These letters to his sister are, in one sense, the least remarkable in the collection, yet it would lose much by their omission. They tell us next to nothing of his genius, but as we come upon them the light in our picture of him, if it had grown for a moment hard or troubled, becomes once more soft and bright.

To turn (with apologies for the distinction) from the character to the mind of Keats, if the reader has formed a notion of him as a youth with a genius for poetry and an exclusive interest in poetry, but otherwise not intellectually remarkable, this error will soon be dispelled by the letters. With Keats, no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were pa.s.sions more glowing than we have reason to attribute to his contemporaries at the same time of life.[3] The letters remind us also that, compared with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the University wits. They show, too--the earlier far more than the later--in certain literary mannerisms the unwholesome influence of Leigh Hunt and his circle. But everywhere we feel in them the presence of an intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open, daring, rich, and strong; exceedingly poetic and romantic, yet observant, acute, humorous, and sensible; intense without narrowness, and quite as various both in its interests and its capacities as the mind of Wordsworth or of Sh.e.l.ley. Fundamentally, and in spite of abundant high spirits and a love of nonsense, the mind of Keats was very serious and thoughtful. It was original, and not more imitative than an original mind should be in youth; an intelligence which now startles by flashes of sudden beauty, and now is seen struggling with new and deep thoughts, which labour into shape, with scanty aid from theories, out of personal experience. In quality--and I speak of nothing else--the mind of Shakespeare at three and twenty may not have been very different.

Short extracts can give but little idea of all this; but they may at least ill.u.s.trate the variety of Keats's mind, and the pa.s.sages I am about to read have been chosen mainly with this intention, and not because the majority are among the most striking that might be found.

The earliest belong to the September of 1817, and I take them partly for their local interest. Keats spent most of that month here in Oxford, staying in the Magdalen Hall of those days with his friend Bailey, a man whose gentle and disinterested character he warmly admired. 'We lead,'

he writes to his sister, 'very industrious lives--he in general studies, and I in proceeding at a pretty good pace with a Poem which I hope you will see early in the next year.' It was _Endymion_: he wrote, it seems, the whole of the Third Book in Bailey's rooms. Unluckily the hero in that Book is wandering at the bottom of the sea; but even in those regions, as Keats imagined them, a diligent student may perhaps find some traces of Oxford. In the letters we hear of towers and quadrangles, cloisters and groves; of the deer in Magdalen Park; and how

The mouldering arch, Shaded o'er by a larch, Lives next door to Wilson the hosier

(that should be discoverable). But we hear most of the clear streams--'more clear streams than ever I saw together.' 'I take a walk by the side of one of them every evening.' 'For these last five or six days,' he writes to Reynolds, 'we have had regularly a boat on the Isis, and explored all the streams about, which are more in number than your eyelashes. We sometimes skim into a bed of rushes, and there become naturalised river-folks. There is one particularly nice nest, which we have christened "Reynolds's Cove," in which we have read Wordsworth and talked as may be.' Of those talks over Wordsworth with the grave religious Bailey came perhaps the thoughts expressed later in the best-known of all the letters (it is too well known to quote), thoughts which take their origin from the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_.[4]

About a year after this, Keats went with his friend Brown on a walking-tour to the Highlands; and I will quote two pa.s.sages from the letters written during this tour, for the sake of the contrast they exhibit between the two strains in Keats's mind. The first is the later.

The letter is dated 'Cairn-something July 17th':

Steam-boats on Loch Lomond, and Barouches on its sides, take a little from the pleasure of such romantic chaps as Brown and I. The banks of the Clyde are extremely beautiful--the north end of Loch Lomond grand in excess--the entrance at the lower end to the narrow part is precious good--the evening was beautiful--nothing could surpa.s.s our fortune in the weather. Yet was I worldly enough to wish for a fleet of chivalry Barges with trumpets and banners, just to die away before me into that blue place among the mountains.[5]

Keats all over! Yes; but so is this, which was written a fortnight earlier from Carlisle:

After Skiddaw, we walked to Ireby, the oldest market town in c.u.mberland, where we were greatly amused by a country dancing-school holden at the Tun. It was indeed 'no new cotillion fresh from France.' No, they kickit and jumpit with mettle extraordinary, and whiskit, and friskit, and toed it and go'd it, and twirl'd it and whirl'd it, and stamped it, and sweated it, tattooing the floor like mad. The difference between our country dances and these Scottish figures is about the same as leisurely stirring a cup o' tea and beating up a batter-pudding. I was extremely gratified to think that, if I had pleasures they knew nothing of, they had also some into which I could not possibly enter. I hope I shall not return without having got the Highland fling. There was as fine a row of boys and girls as you ever saw; some beautiful faces, and one exquisite mouth. I never felt so near the glory of Patriotism, the glory of making by any means a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.[6]

There is little enough here of the young poet who believes himself to care for nothing but 'Art'; and as little of the theoretic cosmopolitanism of some of Keats's friends.

Some three months later we find Keats writing from London to his brother and his sister-in-law in America; and he tells them of a young lady from India whom he has just met:

She is not a Cleopatra, but she is at least a Charmian. She has a rich Eastern look. When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the beauty of a leopardess.... You will by this time think I am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am not--she kept me awake one night as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amus.e.m.e.nt, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very 'yes' and 'no' of whose lips is to me a banquet.... I believe, though, she has faults--the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way: for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things,--the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian, hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings.[7]

I do not read this pa.s.sage merely for its biographical interest, but a word may be ventured on that. The lady was not Miss Brawne; but less than a month later, on meeting Miss Brawne, he immediately became her slave. When we observe the fact, and consider how very unlike the words I have quoted are to anything in Keats's previous letters, we can hardly help suspecting that he was at this time in a peculiar condition and ripe for his fate. Then we remember that he had lately returned from his Scotch tour, which was broken off because the Inverness doctor used the most menacing language about the state of his throat; and further, that he was now, in the late autumn, nursing his brother Tom, who died of consumption before the year was out. And an idea suggests itself which, if exceedingly prosaic, has yet some comfort in it. How often have readers of Keats's life cried out that, if only he had never met Miss Brawne, he might have lived and prospered! Does it not seem at least as probable that, if Miss Brawne had never existed, what happened would still have happened, and even that the fever of pa.s.sion which helped to destroy him was itself a token of incipient disease?

I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a pa.s.sage on politics.

The friends of Keats were, for the most part, advanced liberals. His own sympathies went that way. A number of lines in the poems of his boyhood show this, and so do many remarks in the letters. And his sympathies were not mere sentiments. 'I hope sincerely,' he wrote in September, 1819, 'I shall be able to put a mite of help to the liberal side of the question before I die'; and a few days later, when he tells Brown of his wish to act instead of dreaming, and to work for his livelihood, composing deliberate poems only when he can afford to, he says that he will write as a journalist for whoever will pay him, but he makes it a condition that he is to write 'on the liberal side of the question.' It is a mistake to suppose that he had no political interests. But he cared nothing for the mere quarrels of Whig and Tory; a 'Radical' was for him the type of an 'obstinate and heady' man; and the perfectibility theories of friends like Sh.e.l.ley and Dilke slipped from his mind like water from a duck's back. We have seen the concrete shape his patriotism took. He always saw ideas embodied, and was 'convinced that small causes make great alterations.' I could easily find pa.s.sages more characteristic than the following; but it is short, it shows that Keats thought for himself, and it has a curious interest just now (1905):[8]

Notwithstanding the part which the Liberals take in the cause of Napoleon, I cannot but think he has done more harm to the life of Liberty than anyone else could have done. Not that the divine right gentlemen have done, or intend to do, any good. No, they have taken a lesson of him, and will do all the further harm he would have done, without any of the good. The worst thing he has done is that he has taught them how to organise their monstrous armies. The Emperor Alexander, it is said, intends to divide his Empire as did Diocletian, creating two Czars beside himself, and continuing the supreme monarch of the whole. Should he do this, and they for a series of years keep peaceable among themselves, Russia may spread her conquest even to China. I think it a very likely thing that China itself may fall; Turkey certainly will. Meanwhile European North Russia will hold its horns against the rest of Europe, intriguing constantly with France.

Still aiming chiefly to show the variety there is in these letters, I may take next one or two pa.s.sages which have an interest also from their bearing on Keats's poems. Here we have, for example, the unmistakable origin of the _Ode on Indolence_:

This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless.

I long after a stanza or two of Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_. My pa.s.sions are all asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation, about three degrees on this side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies, I should call it languor, but as I am* I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement, and pain no unbearable power.[9] Neither Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pa.s.s by me. They seem rather like figures on a Greek vase--a man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguis.e.m.e.nt. This is the only happiness, and is a rare instance of the advantage of the body overpowering the mind.[10]

* Especially as I have a black eye.

'This is the only happiness'--the sentence will surprise no one who has even dipped into Keats's letters. It expresses a settled conviction.

Happiness, he feels, belongs only to childhood and early youth. A young man thinks he can keep it, but a little experience shows him he must do without it. The mere growth of the mind, if nothing else, is fatal to it. To think is to be full of sorrow, because it is to realise the sorrow of the world and to feel the burden of the mystery. 'Health and spirits,' he says, 'can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man.'[11]

Sh.e.l.ley might be speaking. 'To see an entirely disinterested girl quite happy is the most pleasant and extraordinary thing in the world. It depends upon a thousand circ.u.mstances. On my word it is extraordinary.