Chapter VIII: Part 8

And even when, for them or their descendants, that hope is realised, and with it the hope of a new great poetry, the atmosphere must assuredly still be one of 'criticism,' and Arnold's insistence on the necessity of the best criticism will still be as urgently required. It must indeed be more and more needed as the power of half-educated journalism grows. How poetry then will overcome the obstacles which, therefore, must in some measure still beset it, is a question for it, a question answerable not by the reflections of critics, but by the creative deeds of poets themselves. Accordingly, while one may safely prophesy that their long poems will differ from those of any past age, I have no idea of predicting the nature of this difference, and will refer in conclusion only to certain views which seem to me delusive.

It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an escape from modern difficulties by any attempt to withdraw himself from the atmosphere of free and scientific culture, to maintain by force simplicity of view and concreteness of imagination, to live in a past century or a sanctuary of esoteric art, whether secular or religious. Whatever of value such an attempt may yield--and that it may yield much I do not deny--it will never yield poems at once long and great.

Such poems, we may allow ourselves to hope, will sometimes deal with much of the common and painful and ugly stuff of life, and be in that sense more 'democratic' or universal than any poetry of the past. But it is vain to imagine that this can be done by a refusal to 'interpret' and an endeavour to photograph. Even in the most thorough-going prose 'realism' there is selection; and, to go no further, selection itself is interpretation. And, as for poetry, the mirror which the least theoretical of great poets holds up to nature is his soul. And that, whether he likes it or not, is an activity which divides, and sifts, and recombines into a unity of its own, and by a method of its own, the crude material which experience thrusts upon it. This must be so; the only question is of the choice of matter and the method of treatment. Nor can the end to be achieved be anything but beauty, though the meaning of that word may be extended and deepened. And beauty in its essence is something that gives satisfaction, however much of pain, repulsion, or horror that satisfaction may contain and overcome.

'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 Othello 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 massive, 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 passages of prose. And these passages _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 gratitude 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 antithesis 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 attitude of a judge which he assumes 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 Shelley.

[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 Shelley's poetry in particular, and must
supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him
to observe that Godwin's formulas are called sublime as well as
ridiculous. _Political Justice_ would never have fascinated such
young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, 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 assumed that it is _not_ so in
a narrative or drama. But the assumption 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 principal object is to consider Keats's attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas set forth in previous lectures on Shelley'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 passages, too, which illustrate 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 Shelley 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 Fanny, 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, passionately 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 passions 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 Shelley. 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 illustrate the variety of Keats's mind, and the passages 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 passages 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 surpass 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
Cumberland, 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 amusement, 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 passage 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 passion which helped to destroy him was itself a token of incipient disease?

I turn the leaf and come, in the same letter, to a passage 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 Shelley 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 passages 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 passages 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
passions 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 pass 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 disguisement. 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] Shelley 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 circumstances. On my word it is extraordinary. Women must want Imagination, and they may thank God for it: and so may we, that a delicate being can feel happy without any sense of crime.'[12] These passages, taken alone, even when we observe his qualifications, would give a false impression of Keats; but they supply a curious commentary on the legend of the sensuous Keats. We may connect with them his feeling of the inferiority of poets (or rather of such 'dreaming' poets as himself) to men of action.

In this same letter he copies out for his correspondents several recently written poems, and among them the ballad _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_. He copies it without a word of introduction. He could not say, 'Here is the record of my love and my despair,' for on this one subject he never opened his heart to his brother. But when he has finished the copy he adds a few lines referring to the stanza (afterwards altered):

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

'Why four kisses, you will say, why four? Because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse. She would have fain said "score" without hurting the rhyme: but we must temper the Imagination, as the Critics say, with Judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes might have fair play; and, to speak truly, I think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three and a half apiece--a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.' This is not very like the comments of Wordsworth on his best poems, but I dare say the author of _Hamlet_ made such jests about it. Is it not strange, let me add, to think that Keats and his friends were probably unconscious of the extraordinary merit of this poem? It was not published with the Odes in the volume of 1820.

I will quote, finally, three passages to illustrate in different ways Keats's insight into human nature. It appears, on the whole, more decidedly in the letters than in the poems, and it helps us to believe that, so far as his gifts were concerned, his hope of ultimate success in dramatic poetry was well founded. The first is a piece of 'nonsense,' rattled off on the spur of the moment to amuse his correspondents, and worth quoting only for its last sentence. He has been describing 'three witty people, all distinct in their excellence'; and he goes on:

I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his
excellence--A, B, and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a
negative. A makes you yawn, B makes you hate, as for C you never see
him at all though he were six feet high. I bear the first, I forbear
the second, I am not certain that the third is. The first is gruel,
the second ditch-water, the third is spilt--he ought to be wiped up.

C, who is spilt and ought to be wiped up, how often we have met and still shall meet him! Shakespeare, I think, would gladly have fathered the phrase that describes him, and the words that follow are not much out of the tune of Falstaff: 'C, they say, is not his mother's true child, but she bought him of the man who cries, Young lambs to sell.'[13]

In the second passage Keats is describing one of his friends:

Dilke is a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he
has made up his mind about everything. The only means of strengthening
one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing--to let the
mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party. The genus
is not scarce in population: all the stubborn arguers you meet are of
the same brood. They never begin on a subject they have not
pre-resolved on. They want to hammer their nail into you, and if you
turn the point, still they think you wrong. Dilke will never come at a
truth so long as he lives, because he is always trying at it. He is a
Godwin Methodist.[14]

These lines illustrate the instinctive feeling of Keats that it is essential to the growth of the poetic mind to preserve its natural receptiveness and to welcome all the influences that stream in upon it. They illustrate also his dislike of the fixed theories held and preached by some members of his circle. We shall have to consider later the meaning of his occasional outbreaks against 'thought,' 'knowledge,' 'philosophy.' It is important not to be misled by them, and not to forget the frequent expressions of his feeling that what he lacks and must strive to gain is this very 'knowledge' and 'philosophy.' Here I will only observe that his polemics against them, though coloured by his temperament, coincide to a large extent with Wordsworth's dislike of 'a reasoning self-sufficing thing,' his depreciation of mere book-knowledge, and his praise of a wise passiveness. And, further, what he objects to here is not the pursuit of truth, it is the 'Methodism,' the stubborn argument, and the habit of bringing to the argument and maintaining throughout it a ready-made theory. He offers his own thoughts and speculations freely enough to Bailey and to his brother--men willing to probe with him any serious idea--but not to Dilke. It is clear that he neither liked nor rated high the confident assertions and negations of Shelley and his other Godwinian friends and acquaintances. Probably from his ignorance of theories he felt at a disadvantage in talking with them. But he did not dismiss their theories as something of no interest to a poet. He thought about them, convinced himself that they were fundamentally unsound, and himself philosophises in criticising them. The following passage, from a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, is the nearest approach to be found in his writings to a theory of the world, a theology as he jestingly calls it; and although it is long, I make no apology for quoting it. He has been reading, he says, Robertson's _History of America_ and Voltaire's _Siecle de Louis XIV._, and he observes that, though the two civilisations described are so different, the case of the great body of the people is equally lamentable in both. And he goes on thus:

The whole appears to resolve into this--that man is originally a poor
forked creature, subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the
forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other.
If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts, at
each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for him a fresh set of
annoyances--he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars
above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us
is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom-appearing
Socrates mankind may be made happy. I can imagine such happiness
carried to an extreme, but what must it end in? Death--and who could
in such a case bear with death? The whole troubles of life, which are
now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for
the last days of a being who, instead of hailing its approach, would
leave this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth I do not at all
believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will
not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to
itself. Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the rivers in
winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight
of summer. Look at the Poles, and at the sands of Africa--whirlpools
and volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may
arrive at earthly happiness. The point at which man may arrive is as
far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For
instance, suppose a rose to have sensation; it blooms on a beautiful
morning; it enjoys itself; but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun. It
cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they are as native
to the world as itself. No more can man be happy in spite [?], the
worldly elements will prey upon his nature.

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and
superstitious is 'a vale of tears,' from which we are to be redeemed
by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven. What
a little circumscribed straitened notion! Call the world if you please
'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world
(I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it
to be immortal, which I will here take for granted for the purpose of
showing a thought which has struck me concerning it). I say
'_Soul-making_'--Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence.[15] There
may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they
are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is
personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know
and they see and they are pure; in short they are God. How then are
souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have
identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each
one's individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like
this? This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a
grander system of salvation than the Christian religion--or rather it
is a system of Spirit-creation. This is effected by three grand
materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These
three materials are the _Intelligence_, the _human heart_ (as
distinguished from intelligence or mind), and the World or elemental
space suited for the proper action of _Mind_ and _Heart_ on each other
for the purpose of forming the _Soul_ or _Intelligence destined to
possess the sense of Identity_. I can scarcely express what I but
dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it. That you may judge the
more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will
call the _world_ a School instituted for the purpose of teaching
little children to read. I will call the _human heart_ the horn-book
read in that School. And I will call the _Child able to read_, the
_Soul_ made from that School and its horn-book. Do you not see how
necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence
and make it a Soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a
thousand diverse ways. Not merely is the Heart a horn-book, it is the
Mind's Bible, it is the mind's experience, it is the text from which
the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives
of men are, so various become their Souls; and thus does God make
individual beings, Souls, identical Souls, of the sparks of his own
essence. This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of Salvation
which does not offend our reason and humanity.[16]

Surely, when Keats's education is considered, this, with all its crudity, is not a little remarkable. It would not be easy to find anything written at the same age by another poet of the time which shows more openness of mind, more knowledge of human nature, or more original power of thought.

About a fortnight after Keats wrote that description of A, B, and C, he received what he recognised at once for his death-warrant. He had yet fourteen months to endure, but at this point the development of his mind was arrested. During the three preceding years it had been very rapid, and is easy to trace; and it is all the more interesting because, in spite of its continuity, we are aware of a decided difference between the Keats of the earlier letters and the Keats of the later. The tour in Scotland in the summer of 1818 may be taken with sufficient accuracy as a dividing-line. The earlier Keats is the youth who had written the _Sonnet on first_ _looking into Chapman's Homer_, and _Sleep and Poetry_, and who was writing _Endymion_. He is thoughtful, often grave, sometimes despondent; but he is full of the enthusiasm of beauty, and of the joy and fear, the hope and the awe, that accompanied the sense of poetic power. He is the poet who looked, we are told, as though he had been gazing on some glorious sight; whose eyes shone and whose face worked with pleasure as he walked in the fields about Hampstead; who is described watching with rapture the billowing of the wind through the trees and over meadow-grasses and corn, and looking sometimes like a young eagle and sometimes like a wild fawn waiting for some cry from the forest depths. This is the Keats who wrote 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'; who found 'the Religion of Joy' in the monuments of the Greek spirit, in sculpture and vases, and mere translations and mere handbooks of mythology; who never ceased, he said, to wonder at all that incarnate delight, and would point out to Severn how essentially modern, how imperishable, the Greek spirit is--a joy for ever.

Yet, as we have seen already, he was aware, and we find him becoming more and more aware, that joy is not the only word. He had not read for nothing Wordsworth's great Ode, and _Tintern Abbey_, and the _Excursion_. We know it from _Endymion_, and the letter about the 'burden of the mystery' was written before the tour in Scotland. But after this we feel a more decided change, doubtless hastened by outward events. The Blackwood and Quarterly reviews of _Endymion_ appeared--reviews not less inexcusable because we understand their origin. Then came his brother's death. A few weeks later he met Miss Brawne. Henceforth his youth has vanished. There are traces of morbid feeling in the change, painful traces; but they are connected, I think, solely with his passion. His brother's death deepened his sympathies. The reviews, so long as health remained to him, did him nothing but good. He rated them at their true value, but they gave him a salutary shock. They quickened his perception, already growing keen, of the weaknesses and mannerism of Hunt's verse and his own. Through them he saw a false but useful picture of himself, as a silly boy, dandled into self-worship by foolish friends, and posturing as a man of genius. He kept his faith in his genius, but he felt that he must prove it. He became impatient of dreaming. Poetry, he felt, is not mere luxury and rapture, it is a deed. We trace at times a kind of fierceness. He turns against his old self harshly. Some of his friends, he says, think he has lost his old poetic ardour, and perhaps they are right. He speaks slightingly of wonders, even of scenery: the human heart is something finer,--not its dreams, but its actions and its anguish. His gaze is as intent as ever,--more intent; but the glory he would see walks in a fiery furnace, and to see it he must think and learn. He is young, he says, writing at random, straining his eyes at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness. He knows at times the 'agony' of ignorance. In one year he writes six or seven of the best poems in the language, but he is little satisfied. 'Thus far,' he says, 'I have a consciousness of having been pretty dull and heavy, both in subject and phrase.' Two months later he ends a note to Haydon with the words, 'I am afraid I shall pop off just when my mind is able to run alone.' And so it was.

It is important to remember this change in Keats in considering his ideas about poetry; but we have first to look at them in a more general way. Many of the most interesting occur in detached remarks or aphorisms, and these I must pass by. The others I intended at first to deal with in connection with Shelley's view of poetry; and, although that plan proved to be too large for a single lecture, I do not wish altogether to abandon it, because in the extracts which I have been reading the difference between the minds of the two poets has already appeared, and because it re-appears both in their poetic practice and in their opinions about their art. Indeed, with so much difference, it might be thought unlikely that these opinions would show also a marked resemblance. For Keats, it may be said, was of all the great poets then alive the one least affected by the spirit of the time, or by that 'revolutionary' atmosphere of which I spoke in a previous lecture. He did not concern himself, we may be told, with the progress of humanity, or with Manchester Massacres or risings in Naples. He cared nothing for theories, abstractions, or ideals. He worshipped Beauty, not Liberty; and the beauty he worshipped was not 'intellectual,' but visible, audible, tangible. 'O for a life of sensations,' he cried, 'rather than of thoughts.' He was an artist, intent upon fashioning his material until the outward sensible form is perfectly expressive and delightful. In all this he was at the opposite pole to Shelley; and he himself felt it. He refused to visit Shelley, in order that he might keep his own unfettered scope; and he never speaks of Shelley cordially. He told him, too, that he might be more of an artist and load every rift of his subject with ore; and that, while many people regard the purpose of a work as the God, and the poetry as the Mammon, an artist must serve Mammon. And his practice, like his opinions, proves that, both in his strength and his limitations, he belongs to quite a different type.

In such a plea there would certainly be much truth; and yet it is not _the_ truth, for it ignores other truths which must somehow be combined with it. There are great differences between the two poets, but then in Keats himself there are contending strains. Along with the differences, too, we find very close affinities. And these affinities with Shelley also show that Keats was deeply influenced by the spirit of his time. Let me illustrate these statements.

The poet who cried, 'O for a life of sensations,' was consoled, as his life withered away, by the remembrance that he 'had loved the principle of beauty in all things.' And this is not a chance expression; it repeats, for instance, a phrase used two years before, 'the mighty abstract idea I have of Beauty in all things.' If Shelley had used this language, it would be taken to prove his love of abstractions. How does it differ from the language of the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_?[17]

Again, we noticed in a previous lecture the likeness between _Alastor_ and _Endymion_, each the first poem of any length in which the writer's genius decisively declared itself. Both tell the story of a young poet; of a dream in which his ideal appears in human form, and he knows the rapture of union with it; of the passion thus enkindled, and the search for its complete satisfaction. We may prefer to read _Endymion_ simply as we read _Isabella_; but the question here is not of our preferences. If we examine the poem without regard to them, we shall be unable to doubt that to some extent the story symbolises or allegorises this pursuit of the principle of beauty by the poetic soul. This is one of the causes of its failure as a narrative. Keats had not in himself the experience required by parts of his design, and hence in them he had to write from mere imagination. And the poem, besides, shows in a flagrant degree the defect felt here and there in _Prometheus Unbound_. If we wish to read it as the author meant it, we must ask for the significance of the figures, events, and actions. Yet it is clear that not all of them are intended to have this further significance, and we are perplexed by the question where, and how far, we are to look for it.[18]

Take, again, some of the most famous of the lyrical poems. Is it true that Keats was untroubled by that sense of contrast between ideal and real which haunted Shelley and was so characteristic of the time? So far is this from being the case that a critic might more plausibly object to his monotonous insistence on that contrast. Probably the best-known lyrics of the two poets are the stanzas _To a Skylark_ and the _Ode to a Nightingale_. Well, if we summarise prosaically the subject of the one poem we have summarised that of the other. 'Our human life is all unrest and sorrow, an oscillation between longing and satiety, a looking before and after. We are aware of a perfection that we cannot attain, and that leaves us dissatisfied by everything attainable. And we die, and do not understand death. But the bird is beyond this division and dissonance; it attains the ideal;

Das Unzulaengliche,
Hier wird's Ereigniss.'