The not
very precocious boy of eighteen and twenty is on the verge of
the truly marvellous manhood of his twenty-fourth year, and
the man, as well as the genius, is awake.
very precocious boy of eighteen and twenty is on the verge of
the truly marvellous manhood of his twenty-fourth year, and
the man, as well as the genius, is awake.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v12
But poetry it
remains, despite some menace of the mock-heroic at the outset, and
of satire at the end. The ottava rima which Shelley uses here, as
for his Hymn to Mercury, had, for centuries, been the accepted
measure, in Italian, of playful poetry; and Byron had lately
adopted it for the epic mockery of Don Juan,
Tradition and example helped to suspend here the ‘shrill' and
'intense' notes of Shelley's poetry; but they set no check upon
the wayward loveliness of his music and imagery. To his wife,
as is well known, the poem did not appeal; it could have no
apter prelude than the charming 'apology' in which he bids her
prithee for this one time
Content thee with a visionary rhyme.
A few other experiments in narrative of the same time
A Vision of the Sea, Orpheus, Cosimo and Fiordispina-open up
alluring glimpses of beauty, but, on the whole, confirm the im-
pression that story with difficulty sustained itself in Shelley's
imagination unless it partook of the tone and temper of lyric.
The first-named is a kind of Shelleyan Ancient Mariner, woven of
beauty and horror, but less ‘visionary,' in the sense which troubled
Mrs Shelley, than The Witch of Atlas; and the anapaests crash
and surge-a new potency in a metre of which only the liquid
melodious lilt had appeared to be known to the poet of The Cloud
and The Sensitive Plant. Shelley's passion for the sea was
beginning to impress his poetry.
These adventures in poetic tale, however, even when highly fortu-
nate, like The Witch, did not draw their inspiration from the depths
of Shelley's nature. They were experiments in artistry, exercises of
## p. 72 (#96) ##############################################
72
[CH.
Shelley
his now ripe expressive power. But his artistry was also summoned
to the service of his political and social ideals. The revolutionary
fervour which, in the previous year, had provoked his satires and
squibs, now clothes itself in the intricate rhythms of the Pindaric
ode. The odes To Naples and To Liberty contain splendid bursts
of poetry, such as epode i B of the first, and the Athens stanza (v) of
the second; but do not, as complete poems, overcome the obstacle to
poetry presented by the abstract and political themes from which
he set out. The Ode to the West Wind, on the other hand,
originates directly in that impassioned intuition which is the
first condition of poetry; the wild autumn wind sweeping through
the forest possesses his imagination and becomes a living symbol
of the spiritual forces which regenerate the fading or decadent life
of nations, bring succour and 'alliance' to forlorn heroic spirits,
and scatter their burning words, ‘like ashes from an unextinguished
hearth,' among mankind. Nowhere does Shelley's voice reach
a more poignantly personal note or more perfect spontaneity.
Yet, this ode is no less his masterpiece in calculated symmetry of
structure, matching here the artistry of Keats's Grecian Urn or
Autumn. The 'Titan in a virgin's form' (so Leopardi called him)
finds consummate utterance in this great song, where we hear
together the forlorn wail and the prophetic trumpet-blast. The
symbolism, here, is too individual and too passionate to resemble
the instinctive rendering of natural phenomena in terms of con-
scious life, which we call ‘myth. But, much of Shelley's loveliest
lyric, as has often been observed, does provoke this comparison.
Arethusa, and the Hymns of Apollo and Pan, are of a serene and
radiant beauty almost untouched by the personal note, whether of
pathos or of prophecy. And, in The Cloud, Shelley quits the
guidance of Greek divinities, and, with superb and joyous ease,
makes myth for himself. There is nothing esoteric in this cloud's
life; all the familiar aspects of the cloud which ‘changes but
cannot die' are translated by a kind of brilliant poetic wit into
plastic image. Hence, in part, its universal appeal. In The
Skylark, closely akin in the entrancing swiftness and subtlety of
its music, the temper is wholly unlike. The skylark is divine, as
the cloud is immortal; but, instead of personating it, the poet
looks up with wistful longing to its 'clear keen joyance,' its love
which had never known love's sad satiety. The brief, quivering
pulsations of the verse contrast with the superb, pacing measure
of The Cloud.
The second year at Pisa (1821) brought new friendships and
## p. 73 (#97) ##############################################
111]
Epipsychidion
73
interests; and Shelley's poetry, henceforth, is more largely coloured,
or even inspired, by personal intimacy. The Letter to Maria
Gisborne, of the preceding August, had commemorated a purely
intellectual friendship. Unlike Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot—its
only rival among English letters in verse-it ‘imitates' neither
Horace nor anyone else, but, on the contrary, reveals, with trans-
parent and spontaneous frankness, the Shelley of sparkling and
sprightly converse, of fun shot through with poetry, and poetry
with fun, of human thoughtfulness, and keen common-sense, whom
only his best friends knew. Epipsychidion, Adonais and the lyrics
written to Jane Williams are monuments of kinds of friendship
more passionate and more individually Shelleyan, yet as diverse
as the poetry which enshrines them. Shelley had lately trans-
lated the Symposium of Plato. In Emilia Viviani, he thought he
saw realised the visionary beauty which, from 'youth's dawn,'
had beckoned and whispered to him in all the wonder and
romance of the world. A similar apparition had, at least once
before, crossed his path, in the wife whom he still sincerely, if not
passionately, loved. The situation was complex, and not in all its
aspects favourable to poetry. The rejected fragments show that he
did not without effort refrain from the mere defiant bravado of one
facing a groundless or specious charge. In what remains, nothing is
ignoble, nothing prosaic; but the passages in which he is explaining
and justifying are distinguished by their plainer phrasing from
those in which, as in the rapturous close, he soars, with beating
wings, above earth and its laws and limits to pierce into the rare
universe of love. The Godwinian doctrine of free love is, doubt-
less, discernible, on a last analysis, in the justification; but that
doctrine is taken up into the sublime Platonic faith that love
permeates the universe, and cannot, therefore, be completely
mirrored in the facet of any one human form. Thus, in defending
his passion for Emilia, Shelley is led to an argument which cuts
away the ground of the exclusive and absorbing adoration of her
which much of his language suggests. She is no mere symbol;
her womanhood and her beauty are real; but beauty more uni-
versal and enduring than her own is gathered up in her, as light
in the sun, and this ideal value, though the emphasis fluctuates, is
never absent from Shelley's thought. Yet, the comparison which
he invokes with the Vita Nuova is not wholly just; the virginal
passion of Dante repudiates every suggestion of union, even in
marriage; while Shelley's spiritual passion finds adequate utter-
ance only in the rapt imagery of possession.
## p. 74 (#98) ##############################################
74
Shelley
[ch.
a
The romance of Emilia Viviani had a somewhat sordid sequel,
and Shelley felt the bitterness of disillusionment. But illusion had
brought him thought, vision and song, which were not illusory.
Epipsychidion enshrines a rare and strange mode of feeling,
accessible only to the few; we pass, nevertheless, into a larger air
when we turn from this Platonist bridal hymn to the great elegy
with which, a few weeks later, he commemorated the death of
Keats. The two poets had never been intimate, and neither
thought of the other's poetry, as a whole, so highly as it deserved.
But Shelley put Hyperion on a level with the grandest poetry of
his time. Grief for a dead friend has hardly more part in Adonais
than in Lycidas; but it is, in a far greater degree, an impassioned
lament for a poet. The death of Edward King gave Milton an
occasion for a meditation of unequalled splendour upon poetic
fame; the death of Keats is felt by Shelley as a calamity for
poetry, and for everything in nature and humanity to which
poetry gives enduring expression, and the very soul of poetry
seems to utter itself, now in sorrow, now in retributive indignation,
through his lips. It is something more than literary artifice, or
,
the example of antique elegy, that leads him to picture muses
and seasons, dreams, desires and adorations, joining in his lament.
All he had loved and moulded into thought
From shape and hue and odour and sweet sound
Lamented Adonais;
and, Adonais being, for Shelley, chiefly the poet of Hyperion, his
chief mourner is the heavenly muse Urania. Even the persons
who are represented beside his grave, Byron, Hunt, Moore, Shelley
himself, are there not as friends but as fellow-poets. The stately
Spenserian stanza, to which Shelley communicates a new magni-
ficence of his own, accords well with the grandeur of the theme.
Solitary as he was, and echoless as his song, for the moment,
remained, he knew that he was speaking out of the heart of
humanity, and not merely ‘antheming a lonely grief. ' And, in the
,
triumphant closing movement, he gave expression more sublime
than either Milton or any ancient elegist had found, to the im-
mortality of poetry. The poet, like the lover, could transcend the
limits of personality, and become at one with eternal things.
It was in the spirit of these magnificent vindications of poet
and lover, and during the interval between them, that Shelley
wrote (February-March 1821) his memorable Defence of Poetry.
Peacock's essay, The Four Ages of Poetry, in Ollier's Literary Mis-
cellany, 1820, had stirred him to a 'sacred rage' by representing
## p. 75 (#99) ##############################################
11]
Last Poems
75
the revival of imagination, in his day, as a futile reversion to the
infantine culture of primitive man. Not poetry alone, as ordinarily
understood, but ethics, the very meaning of conduct, of history,
nay, of life itself, was, for Shelley, at stake; and his Defence
ranges far beyond the scope of literature. Poetry reveals the
order and beauty of the universe ; it is impossible without
imagination and without love, and these are the secret, also, of
all goodness, of all discovery, of all creation. 'A man to be greatly
good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively . . . the great
secret of morals is love. The Defence is a noble statement not
only of Shelley's own poetic ideals, but (despite some ambiguity
of expression) of what is most poetic in poetry at large.
In the flights of lovely song which came from Shelley during
the later Pisan time, and the three months by the Spezzian bay
which followed, the note of magnificent confidence which sounds in
the close of Adonais, and in the Defence, is more rarely heard.
Most of them are inspired by his tender intimacy with Jane
Williams; a 'desire of the moth for the star,' which touched even
the happiest of them with the sense of futility. Frailty and
evanescence are now the lot of all lovely things. The flower that
smiles today, tomorrow dies; the light of the shattered lamp
lies dead in the dust; the spirit of delight is a rare visitor. And
these thoughts are enshrined in verse of a like impalpable tenuity,
unsubstantial as a rose-petal, and floating on a subtler, more
tremulous and evasive music. For the splendid rhythmical sweep
of The Cloud, we have the plaintive suspensions and resumptions
of the music of When the lamp is shattered. Here and there, as
in Lines to Edward Williams (“The serpent is shut out from
Paradise'), the plaintiveness becomes a bitter cry, or, again, it
gives way to playful charm, as in Aziola; only the Lines on
Napoleon's death ("What! alive and so bold, O Earth ? ') have
a resonant and ringing music. With this requiem, blended of
anger and admiration, for the fallen conqueror, was published the
lyrical drama Hellas, inspired by the Greek war of liberation.
Hellas is, indeed, a prolonged lyric, conveyed partly through
dialogue as impassioned as the choric songs. The famous last
chorus is the noblest example of Shelley's command, when he
chose, of a classic simplicity and close-knit strength of speech.
The unfinished drama Charles I, which occupied much of the
later months at Pisa, shows, further, at moments, his advance in
genuine dramatic power. Charles and Henrietta are more alive
than other characters with whom Shelley was in closer sympathy,
## p. 76 (#100) #############################################
76
[CH.
Shelley
and whom he could make the mouthpiece of his own political
animus and ideas.
In April, the Pisan circle broke up, and Shelley, eager for the
sea, settled, with Mary, and Edward and Jane Williams, in a lonely
mansion, Casa Magni, on the wild Spezian bay. Several of the
lyrics to Jane were written here, but his central preoccupation
was the uncompleted Triumph of Life. Petrarch, in his Trionfi,
had portrayed men subjugated by love, chastity, time. For
Shelley, life itself, the 'painted veil' which obscures and dis-
guises the immortal spirit, is a more universal conqueror, and, in
vision, he sees this triumphal chariot pass, 'on the storm of its
own rushing splendour,' over the captive multitude of men.
Dante, rather than Petrarch, has inspired the conduct of the
vision, where Rousseau, the darkened light whence a thousand
beams had been kindled, interprets, like Vergil, to the rapt and
questioning poet. Much of the symbolism is obscure, but the
significant allusion to the Paradiso-
the rhyme
Of him whone from the lowest depths of hell
Through every Paradise and through all glory
Love led serene, and who returned to tell
In words of hate and awe—the wondrous story
How all things are transfigured except Love-
justifies the surmise that love, which arms heroic spirits against
the sway of life, was, in some way, to win the final triumph. The
terza rima is very nobly handled, with a dominant fluidity which
is more Petrarchian than Dantesque, but with moments of con-
centrated brevity which belong to the greater model. And the
passionate outlook upon life which pervades and informs it marks
Shelley's kinship. The sequel, doubtless, would have added clear-
ness to a poem which remains one of the grandest, but by no means
the least enigmatic, among the torsos of modern poetry.
The Triumph of Life was the occupation of summer days spent
afloat with Williams, on the Spezian bay. On 8 July, Shelley's
boat was run down, it is said deliberately, in a sudden squall.
His ashes, by the care of Trelawney, were buried in the protestant
cemetery at Rome, side by side with those of the great brother-
poet whose requiem he had sung, and whose poetry had been his
companion in the hour of death.
A century has almost passed, and Shelley is still the subject of
keener debate than any of his poetic contemporaries, not excepting
Byron. That he is one of the greatest of lyric poets is eagerly
allowed by his most hostile critics; the old grounds, too, of hostility
## p. 77 (#101) #############################################
111]
Summary
77
man.
to him bave, in the main, long since spent their malice, or count on
his side; while some, which cannot be dismissed, are irrelevant to a
final estimate of his poetry. But many who feel the spell of his
'lovely wail' are repelled by his 'want of substance'; Matthew
Arnold's 'ineffectual angel’ ‘pinnacled dim in the intense inane'
expresses, for them, the whole truth about the poet and about the
And a part of the truth it undoubtedly does express. No
stranger apparition ever visited that robust matter-of-fact Georgian
England than this ‘frail form,' of whom, at the outset, Hazlitt might
have said with yet more truth than of Coleridge, that he had wings
but wanted hands and feet. ' Only, while Coleridge's wing “flagged'
more and more 'wearily' (as Shelley said), Shelley grew steadily,
not only in power of flight, but in his living hold, both as poet and
as man, upon certain orders of fact. His ‘strangeness' was a part
(not the whole) of his originality; and he paid its price. To most
of what was complex, institutional, traditional in his milieu, he
remained inaccessible, intransigent; he could not, like Wordsworth,
find his 'home' in these things, still less find it a 'kindred-point'
with his ‘heaven. ' For Shelley, society was rather the ground from
which (like his Skylark) he soared to a heaven far remote; or, to
use his yet more splendid image, the dome of many-coloured glass'
beyond which he strove to project himself into a white radiance of
eternity. As Bradley has aptly remarked, he forgot, not always
but often, that the white radiance itself persists transformed in the
many colours. That pure and intense aspiration, however, is the
first note of Shelley's authentic poetry. It would not be authentic,
it would hardly be memorable, if it merely expressed aspirations,
however ideal and intense; but the expression itself is already
creative and new. Shelley's mature verse and diction do not merely
serve as a channel for his thought and feeling: the temper of his
spirit penetrates and suffuses their very texture, evoking spon-
taneous felicities of rhythm and phrase, which are beautiful in
their own right as well as by their subtle symbolism. Of all the
poets of his time, Shelley's style carries us furthest from the close-
packed, tessellated brilliance, the calculated point and precision,
of the Augustans; to describe it we have to recur to images drawn
from the undulating contours of waves, the pure intensity and
splendour of flame. During the last years of his short life, his
soaring idealism abated nothing of its ardour; but he found in the
actual world of nature and of man more varied intimations of the
'Life of Life' they veiled, and his poetry, within its range, acquired
a piercing and profound human truth without losing its unearthly
## p. 78 (#102) #############################################
78
[ch. III
Shelley
beauty. The most 'subjective of modern English poets created
our one great modern English tragedy. And the most 'romantic'
of them had, almost alone, the secret of a truly classical' simplicity;
a speech nobly bare, even austere, familiar without banality, poetic
without artifice. Some kinds of poetic experience, and those not
the least vital, he expresses with a delicate precision not less than
that of the “subtle soul'd psychologist’ Coleridge; and he is some-
times most precise when he appears, to the ordinary reader, most
'vague. ' And, while the philosophic beliefs of Coleridge hardly
touch his poetry, and were deeply coloured by the interests of the
theologian and the political theorist, the ultimate metaphysic of
Shelley is the articulate interpretation of his most intense poetic
vision, and vitally supplements, where it does not rudely traverse,
the dogmas of his ‘atheistic' or 'democratic' creed. To all readers,
Shelley will remain the consummate inventor of lyric harmonies.
To some, he will be not less precious for the glimpses given, in
Adonais and in The Defence of Poetry, of a doctrine of universal
being more consonant than any other with the nature of poetry.
## p. 79 (#103) #############################################
CHAPTER IV
KEATS
JOHN KEATS was born on 29 or 31 October 1795, the eldest
son of a livery-stable keeper in Finsbury Pavement, London.
Sent, as a child of eight, to a school at Enfield, he attracted the
interest and, before long, the devoted friendship, of the junior
master, Charles Cowden Clark, to whom he owed his first
initiation into poetry. About 1813, Clark read to the young
. "
surgeon's apprentice Spenser's Epithalamion, and put into his
hands The Faerie Queene. In phrases as indispensable to the
portrayer of Keats as those of Hogg to the biographer of Shelley,
Clark tells us how
he went thro' it as a young horse thro' a spring meadow ramping. . . . Like
a true poet, too, he specially singled out epithets, . . . he hoisted himself up,
and looked burly and dominant, as he said, 'What an image that is,—"sea-
shouldring whales. ”'
His earliest extant poem (1813) was an Imitation of Spenser.
Yet, Spenser was to count for less in his poetry than other Eliza-
bethans to whom Spenser led him— Fletcher, Browne and
Chapman; and it was the arresting experience of 'first looking
into Chapman's Homer' that prompted, early in 1815, his earliest
outburst of great song. The writings of Leigh Hunt added an
influence kindred, in some points, to these, and quickened, from
the summer of 1816, by the spell of personal friendship. At
Hunt's Hampstead cottage, Keats met Hazlitt, Haydon and
Shelley. The former two won his deep admiration; Hazlitt's
'depth of taste' and Haydon's pictures he declared to be, with
The Excursion, the three things to rejoice in in this age,' a
dictum which, in each point, foreshadows a riper Keats than his
poetry at this date betokens. His first volume of poems, issued
in 1817, is still impressed, both for better and for worse, with the
influence of Hunt. For better, since Keats could still learn much
(
6
## p. 80 (#104) #############################################
80
[CH.
Keats
from his Ariosto-like charm and ease, and especially from his
revival of the flexible mode of the rimed couplet; for worse,
since Hunt's faults of looseness and bad taste were, for Keats, still
insidious and infectious. The volume marks the swiftness of his
upward flight. Between the stanzas To some Ladies and I stood
tiptoe or Sleep and Poetry, the distance is enormous, and
Hunt’s was the most powerful of the external forces which con-
curred with the most potent of all, his own ripening vision of
beauty and truth. This vision of beauty, steadily growing richer
as well as purer and more intense, inspires Sleep and Poetry, a
noble prelude and forecast of his own future song. Still a young
neophyte— not yet a glorious denizen of the heaven of poesy'-
he derides, with boyish emphasis, the mechanic practitioners who
'wore its mark. ' Keats was only renewing in fiery verse, when the
battle was far advanced, the challenge with which, in his prose preface,
Wordsworth had opened the affray. But Wordsworth had plainly
helped him, also, to grasp the ideal task of the poet, and, thus,
to formulate his own poetic aims. In Tintern Abbey, the older
poet had looked back upon the ecstasies of his youthful passion
for nature with a mind which had already reached a 'sublimer
mood', responsive to the burden and mystery of the world.
Keats finds in that retrospect the clue to his own forecast. He,
too, will pass from the region of thoughtless joy-the realm of
Flora and old Pan, where he chose each pleasure that his fancy
saw-to the agonies, the strife of human hearts'; for this he
already knows to be “the nobler life. ' But the parallel, though
real, must not be too closely pressed. Keats was no disciple even
of Wordsworth; he forged his own way, and his vision of beauty,
even in its present immature stage, is far richer and more various
than can be ascribed to the Wordsworth of 1793. Apart from his
greater opulence of sensation, he draws a delight, which never
counted for much with Wordsworth, from the imagination of
others; beauty, for him, is not only 'a living presence of the
earth’; the bright deities of Greeks and Elizabethans have their
part in it, and Keats revels in airy touches which give us
momentary glimpses of them. Is he indignant at the riot of
foppery and barbarism? Apollo is indignant too; and to read
the meaning of Jove's large eyebrow is no less a part of the
poetic vision than to paint the tender green of April meadows.
The caressing charm and joyance of manner, as well as the flowing
rimed couplets, are still reminiscent only of Hunt, and, at the close,
he turns from awed contemplation of the 'long perspective of
## p. 81 (#105) #############################################
iv]
Endymion
81
the realms of poesy' before him to describe, with a full heart, the
home of his good friend and mentor, and
The hearty grasp that sends a pleasant sonnet
Into the brain ere one can think upon it.
The sonnet was, indeed, at this stage, Keats's most familiar mode
of lyric expression. As early as 1814, he had stammered in this
form his boyish worship of Byron and Chatterton. The seventeen
sonnets published in the 1817 volume are mostly fresh utterances
of admiring friendship. Haydon, his future sister-in-law Geor-
giana (' nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance'), his
brothers, or ‘kind Hunt' are addressed or remembered in
eminently pleasant, but rarely accomplished, verse.
They all
follow the severe Petrarchian rime-form used by Wordsworth,
and often recall his more meditative sonnets both in phrase
and sentiment.
The little volume was discriminatingly reviewed by Hunt, but
made no impression. Keats, too acutely sensitive to his own
critical judgment to care much for the world's, was already
immersed in the great quest of beauty of which he had dreamed
in Sleep and Poetry.
Endymion, the work of the twelve months from April 1817 to
April 1818, has the invertebrate structure, the insecure style, the
weakness in narrative and the luxuriance of colour and music,
natural to one who still lived more in sensation than in thought;
but, also, the enchanted atmosphere and scenery, and the sudden
reaches of vision, possible only to one whose senses were irradiated
by imagination, and ‘half created,' 'half perceived. “Poetry must
surprise by a fine excess,' was a later dictum of Keats, justified
by some of his finest work. At present, he spends his wealth
wantonly, careless of the economies and reticences of great art.
Yet, there are strokes of magic which no artistry could achieve,
and many lines and phrases which help us to understand how,
from the effeminate sentiment, was evolved the tender delicacy
of The Eve of St Agnes, and, from the riot of luxurious fancy, the
noble and ordered opulence of the Autumn ode. Of such is the
wonderful picture of the wave
Down whose green back the short-liv'd foam, all hoar,
Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence.
The story of Endymion and the moon, as retold by the
Elizabethans, had early captivated Keats's imagination : the
loveliness of the moon-lit world-even in a London suburbhad
6
E. L. XII.
CH. IV.
## p. 82 (#106) #############################################
82
[ch.
Keats
become a kind of symbol for all beauty, and he himself a new
Endymion, the implicit hero of the story he told; and, by the
same symbolism, a lover of all loveliness, so that nothing in the
universe of real or imagined beauty was irrelevant to his quest.
Hence, we pass easily to and fro from this to other legends not
otherwise akin-Cybele, Glaucus and Scylla, Arethusa. Neither
his grip upon his subject nor his technical mastery yet avail to
make these felt otherwise than as digressions. On the other
hand, the Hymn to Pan (book 1), and the roundelay of Bacchus
(O Sorrow) (book iv), where the dreamy pacing of the verse
gathers into lyric concentration and intensity, mark the highest
reach of the whole poem.
In the brief, manly preface to Endymion—its sufficing com-
ment-Keats told his critics that he recognised in it
a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished. . . . It is just that this
youngster should die away; a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope
that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit
to live.
In particular, he dreamed of trying once more to touch, 'before
I bid it farewell,' the 'beautiful mythology of Greece. '
Before Endymion was complete, he had planned with his
friend Reynolds a volume of tales from Boccaccio. Keats chose
the fifth story of the fourth day of The Decameron, that of
Lisobeta and the pot of basil. It was, no doubt, an advantage
for the author of Endymion to work upon a story which, with
many openings for romantic and visionary imagination, was yet,
in substance, close-knit and coherent. Its setting in the business
world of an Italian city was less favourable to his art, and,
throughout the first half of the tale, Keats is not completely
at ease.
But the romance owes to him almost all its delicate
beauty. Boccaccio's lovers give some pretext to the brothers'
violence; Isabel and Lorenzo are the innocent victims of a sordid
crime, the memory of which comes back upon the perpetrators
like the smoke of Hinnom. But it is after Lorenzo's murder that
the poetic transformation of the romance is most complete. The
apparition in Boccaccio is a conventional ghost-scene; Keats
imagines the shadowy life of the murdered man in his forest-
grave, slowly growing one with the earth and strange to mortal
things, but quickened anew in the presence of Isabel. The great
scene in the forest is told with an impassioned calm like that of
Isabel herself, as she presses towards the kernel of the grave. '
Boccaccio had evaded the ghostlier suggestions of the scene by
## p. 83 (#107) #############################################
Iv]
83
Letters
making the body miraculously intact. Keats does not evade
them; but he ennobles what he will not conceal, and compels us
to see not the wormy circumstance but 'Love impersonate, cold-
dead indeed, but not dethroned. '
Great as is the advance of Isabella upon Endymion, it must
still be reckoned among his immature works, in view of the
wonderful creations of the following autumn and spring. The
six months which followed were a time of immensely rapid
growth, not merely in imaginative power and technical mastery,
but in intellectual range and vigour, and in moral grip.
The not
very precocious boy of eighteen and twenty is on the verge of
the truly marvellous manhood of his twenty-fourth year, and
the man, as well as the genius, is awake. His letters, after The
Prelude the most precious document we possess of the growth
of a poet's mind, are especially illuminating for the year 1818.
*To enjoy the things that others understand' might have satisfied
his aspiration in 1817; in April 1818, he turns away dissatisfied
from his own 'exquisite sense of the luxurious,' and feels the
need of 'philosophy, bracing experience and activity for his
fellow-men. He will learn Greek and Italian,
and in other ways prepare myself to ask Hazlitt in about a year's time the
best metaphysical road I can take. . . . I find there is no worthy pursuit but
the idea of doing some good in the world.
In July, during a foot-tour with his friend Brown through the
Highlands, he writes :
I should not have consented to these four months' tramping, . . . but that I
thought it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to
more hardship, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and
strengthen more my reach in poetry than would stopping at home among my
books.
The germ of such thoughts can be found, it is true, in much
earlier letters, and, as we have seen, in his first poetic profession
of faith ; for Keats was at no time the weakling suggested by
much of his youthful verse. But they are pronounced with new
conviction, they mark no fugitive aspiration, but a spiritual de-
liverance already, in effect, accomplished.
He had, indeed, 'great allies'; Shakespeare and Wordsworth
cooperated in deepening and enlarging the scope of his genius;
to its richness they could not add. All through 1817, Shakespeare
had been a companion ; Endymion is strewn with his diction; in
April 1818 (sonnet On sitting down to read King Lear once again),
the golden harmonies of romance seemed thin and poor beside the
6_2
## p. 84 (#108) #############################################
84
[CH.
Keats
P
f
>
passion and the heights and depths of Shakespearean tragedy.
He was already past Endymion, and knew it, as his contem-
porary preface attests. And Wordsworth led him, by other, not
less enthralling or less enduring, paths, to the same deeper under-
standing of sorrow. He was never weary, Brown tells us, of
repeating the Immortality ode; its sublime portrayal of a mind
redeemed by discipline and suffering and ' an eye that hath kept
watch o'er man's mortality' perhaps contributed to the doctrine.
of the world as a 'Vale of Soul-making' through pain and trouble,
which he unfolds in his beautiful letter of April 1819 to his
brother George.
And Wordsworth helped to draw him nearer to one whose
poetry provided a yet sterner discipline for the effeminate
elements of his genius. In Milton, he recognised a poet who
‘with an exquisite passion for poetic luxury, had yet preferred
the ardours to the pleasures of song. ' It was under these
conditions and in this temper that he prepared to carry out the
intention expressed in the preface to Endymion. Six months
after the completion of Endymion, Hyperion was begun. It was
a giant step forward, which neither the intimate study of Milton
nor his first experience, on the Highland tour, of grand scenery,
of mountain glory and gloom, or of the relics of fallen faiths (like
the druid cirque at Keswick), makes less wonderful. In the story
of Hyperion, he found a theme equal in its capacity for epic
grandeur to that of Paradise Lost, and, with apparent ease, he
rose to its demands, as if Milton had merely liberated a native
instinct of greatness from the lure of inferior poetic modes.
Endymion was a tissue of adventures, the romantic history of a
soul; in Hyperion, we watch a conflict of world-powers, the
passing of an old order and the coming of a new, the ruin and
triumph of gods. The indecisive dreamy composition gives place
to a noble architectonic. Keats was not at all points at a dis-
advantage in his bold rivalry with Milton. If he could not bring
the undefinable weight of experience, of prolonged and passionate
participation in great and memorable events, which is impressed
on every line of Paradise Lost, his austerest restraint is touched
with the freshness and entrain of young genius. If he has less than
Milton's energy, he has more than his magic; if he has less of dra-
matic passion and movement, he has more of sculpturesque repose.
It is here, however, that the doubt arises whether the magnificent
torso could have been completed on an epic scale. Milton's
theology introduced a conflict of purpose into his epic which is
7
## p. 85 (#109) #############################################
Iv]
85
Hyperion
>
never overcome; but it secured to the vanquished fiends a cause
and a triumph; they move us by their heroic resolve as well as by
their suffering. Keats's “theology' was the faith proper to a
devotee of the principle of beauty in all things, 'that first in
beauty shall be first in might'; but this law, recognised and pro-
claimed by the defeated Titans themselves, makes any enterprise
like Satan's not merely unnecessary to the scheme of things, but
in flagrant contradiction with it. The ruined Titans are inferior
not only in nobility, but in strength and spirit. The pathos of
a hopelessly and finally lost cause broods from the first over the
scene; the contrast between the passionate recovery of the still
mighty archangel from his fall, and the slow, sad awakening of aged
Saturn, is typical. Satan's defiance is more poetic and so, in the
deeper sense, more beautiful, than the sad resignation of Adam
and Eve; but, in Keats, it is sorrow, not hate, that is ‘more
beautiful than beauty's self. '
Hyperion, incomplete, perhaps inevitably incomplete, as it is,
remains the greatest achievement of Keats in poetry. Yet, its
want of root in his intimate experience compels us to class it
among the sublime tours de force, not among the supreme poems,
of the world. And the effort to be Miltonic, even in his own way,
finally grew oppressive. If Milton liberated, he also constrained,
and Keats, in the later parts of the fragment, is often himself
in a way that is un-Miltonic. After the close of 1818, Hyperion
was only fitfully pursued ; in September 1819, he writes that he
has definitively given it up. Two months later, however, he had
new plans with it. During November and December, he was
deeply engaged,' records Brown, 'in remodelling the fragment
of Hyperion into the form of a vision. ' Though The Fall of
Hyperion betrays the impending failure of his powers, it is of
surpassing interest as an index to the ways of his mind. There
is little doubt that, from Milton, he had passed, during 1819, to
a renewed study of Dante (in Cary's translation). In the pregnant
symbolism of The Divine Comedy, he found a mode of expressing
ideas more akin to his own than Milton's austere grandeur.
Dante's gradual purification, also, in Purgatory, by pain,
answered to his own youthful conception in Sleep and Poetry)
of a progress, through successive illusions, towards the true state
of the poet. And, as Dante has to climb the mountain and pass
through the fire before he can receive the vision of Beatrice,
so Keats represents himself as passing successively through the
indolent romance of the dreamer, the 'garden’and the 'temple,'
a
## p. 86 (#110) #############################################
86
[CH.
Keats
up to the 'shrine' where the poet, taught, at length, to grapple
directly with experience, endures the fiery proof of those
to whom the miseries of the world
Are miseries, and will not let them rest.
Only thus may he receive the vision of the meaning of beauty
disclosed in the story of Hyperion, now, at length, 'retold.
Moneta, the Beatrice of this vision, is, however, no radiant
daughter of heaven, but a 'forlorn divinity,' the 'pale Omega
of a wither'd race,' though, also, as the fostress of Apollo, the
' Alpha' of a new. Thus, insistently, did Keats, with symbol and
image, press home the thought that beauty, the ideal, can only
be won through pain, and that poetry is incomplete if it evade
and leave unexpressed 'the agonies, the strife of human hearts. '
Though The Fall does not approach Hyperion in sustained
splendour, and diverges from it in the passages common to both,
mostly for the worse, yet, it contains some lines which he never
surpassed; and his attempt to charge the myth with a richer
and deeper import, unskilful as it was, justifies the surmise that,
had his powers not failed, he might have given to England
a poem more nearly comparable than any other with Goethe's
Faust,
In the meantime, however, a rich harvest of poetry had been
gathered in. The Eve of St Agnes, begun at Chichester, January
1819, throws some light on the causes which had gradually detached
his interest from Hyperion. For it betrays an almost conscious
revulsion from the austere grandeur, the cosmic scenery and the
high prophetic theme of Milton. It is, in the loftiest sense of the
words, a young man's poem, pervaded by the glow, the romance,
the spiritual and sensuous exaltation of youth. Chatterton and
Spenser here take Milton's place with Keats, and both are more
nearly of his kin. A few lines of Burton's Anatomy, describing the
legend, were, probably, the sole nucleus of this magical creation.
The romance of Madeline and Porphyro, unlike that of Isabella
and Lorenzo, shone out to his imagination against the background
of harshly alien forces. But, everything that there made for drama
and conflict is here subdued, almost effaced, while everything of
purely beautiful and harmonious appeal, whether to soul or sense, is
enriched and heightened. The menace of murderous kinsmen is
now merely the distant clamour of gross revelry heard fitfully
through an opening door. The 'bitter chill' of the winter land-
scape, the snow and storm without, though drawn with an intensity
of imagination hardly matched in winter-painting elsewhere, merely
## p. 87 (#111) #############################################
IV]
87
The Eve of St Agnes
encompass with their aridity and torpor, but cannot invade or
impair, the glow and warmth of fragrance and gracious soul-light
of Madeline's chamber. Everything here—from the tender glories
of the painted window to the delicate cates of the banquet—is
imagined with a consummate instinct for beauty which explores
and exhausts all the sources of sensuous appeal, yet so transfigures
them that nothing merely sensuous is left. The stanza-handled
with a mastery equalled, save in The Faerie Queene, only in
Adonais, where it is much less Spenserian-shows, with certain
archaisms, that Spenser was in his mind. But, Porphyro and
Madeline are of a more breathing and human world than Spenser's ;
their passion and their purity, the high chivalry, the awed rapture
of the scene, are untouched by allegory; and, if Madeline, with
the exquisite naïveté of her maiden love, has any lineage, it is not
to be found in a Britomart or Una, radiant champions and symbols
of chastity, but in an Imogen or a Perdita.
What remains of the companion piece, The Eve of St Mark's,
though conceived at the same time, was written some months later,
and it remained unfinished. Once more, a saint's day legend sets
astir the devout heart of a young girl. But the pictorial artistry,
even more exquisite, is in the subtler, more reticent, manner of
Christabel. 'It is quite in the spirit of town quietude,' wrote
Keats. An old minster, 'on a coolish evening,' echoing footfall,
drowsy chimes and Bertha's chamber in the gloaming with the
play of her flickering shadow upon screen and panel-subdued
effects like these replace the 'bitter cold,' the gules and argent of
St Agnes. And there are hints of a delicate grotesquerie equally
foreign to that poem, but, like its delicate finished realism, ita
miniature description, foreshadowing Rossetti, who regarded it as,
together with La Belle Dame, 'in manner the choicest and chastest of
Keats's work. ' The other, not less wonderful, romance of this spring,
La Belle Dame sans Merci (April 1819), may, also, be called a com-
panion poem of The Eve of St Agnes; but the ways of Keats's genius
are here seen in a totally different, almost opposite, aspect. The
woeful knight at arms, like Madeline, has awakened from a dream;
but his awakening is poignant disillusion, not blissful fulfilment ;
the desolate moor, not the fragrant chamber and the lover's
presence. And his weird chant is in subtlest sympathy with his
forlornness. Instead of the jewelled richness, the saturated colour
of The Eve of St Agnes, we have a style of horror-stricken reticence
and suggestion, from which colour and definite form have been with-
drawn; and a music of brief haunting cadences, not of eloquent,
## p. 88 (#112) #############################################
88
[CH.
Keats
hl
articulated phrase. The character of each poem is accentuated
in the final line of its stanza: the Alexandrines of The Eve of
St Agnes are points of heightened entrain, the short slow closing
verses of La Belle Dame (And no birds sing'), moments of
keener suspense.
Lamia, last of the tales in verse, followed after an interval of
some months and under widely different intellectual conditions. The
summer of 1819 found Keats adventuring in regions more than ever
remote from the dream-world of Endymion. Shakespeare draws
him to the historic drama; to these months belong his experiments,
Otto the Great and Stephen ; a little later came The Cap and Bells.
And now it was the supple and sinewy narrative, the sensuous
splendour, the ringing, metallic rimes of Dryden's verse-tales that
attracted his emulation. The story of Lamia (June—September)
which he found in Burton resembled those of Isabella and of The
Eve of St Agnes in representing two lovers united by a secret and
mysterious bond; but, here, the mystery becomes sheer witchcraft.
The witch-maiden Lamia, in the hands of the author of La Belle
Dame, might well have yielded a counterpart of Coleridge's
Geraldine. The influence of Dryden's robust and positive genius
has almost banished the delicate reticences of the earlier poems.
Lamia's transformations have the hard brilliance of mosaics; the
'volcanian yellow' invades her silver mail 'as the lava ravishes
the mead. ' The same influence told more happily in the brilliant
precision of the picture of the city festival, each half-line a distinct
and living vignette. There are not wanting—there could not be-
touches of descriptive magic, but the charm of Lamia is rather
described than felt; whether woman be her true nature (1 118)
or her disguise (11 306) (and this is not made clear), she has not
the defined character of either; as a psychological portrait, she
cannot stand beside Isabel or Madeline. And the cynical tone
of restoration gallantry has, here and there, betrayed Keats into
lapses of taste elsewhere overcome, as in the terrible line i 330
('there is not such a treat among them all. . . . As a real woman'),
and the opening of part II. Keats felt intensely the contrast
between the romance of passion and the outer world of cold
reflection. In The Eve of St Agnes, the flame-like glow of light
colour which surrounds the lovers is symbolically contrasted with
the frozen world without. In Lamia, this symbolism is less
telling. But it is helped out by an explicit comment on the
climax of the story. The sophist's eye transfixes the serpent-lady,
and dissolves the pageant of her love. So, 'cold philosophy
## p. 89 (#113) #############################################
iv]
89
Odes
destroys romance. The ‘moral expressed an antagonism dear to
Keats's passionately intuitive mind; but its introduction implied
just such an obtrusion of reflection upon poetry as it purported
to condemn.
It is easy, in tracing the growth of an artist who studied so
intently the genius of others, to lay too much stress on his artistic
seriousness. His famous counsel to Shelley, too, might suggest
that he himself was, above all, a curious and elaborate artificer.
Some of his manuscripts, no doubt, support this impression.
Yet, Keats was not only extraordinarily spontaneous: he could
play lightly with the passing mood. His quick sensitiveness of
eye and ear and fancy tempted him along many poetic byways
beside the way he deliberately chose He did not write only in
his singing-robes, but delighted to weave pleasant rimes in familiar
undress. The brother and sister-in-law in America, and his friend
Reynolds, received many such rimed interludes in his letters-lively
fountains of verse springing up unbidden in the garden of his prose.
Such are the four poems, Robin Hood, Lines on the Mermaid
Tavern, Fancy and The Bards of Passion and of Mirth, all written
in the short couplet of L'Allegro, with a delicacy of music of which
Milton had helped him to the secret, and a daintiness and playful-
ness of fancy akin to Beaumont and Fletcher, and other haunters
of the Mermaid, bards of 'mirth’even more than of 'passion. '
It is natural to contrast with these light and sparkling improvisa-
tions the rich and concentrated style-loaded with gold in every
rift'-and the intricate interwoven harmonies of the majority of
the contemporary odes. But, most of these were impromptus, too,
.
born of the same sudden inspiration, and their crowded felicities
were not studiously inlaid, but of the vital essence of the speech.
A may morning, an autumn afternoon, a nightingale's song in a
Hampstead garden, a mood of dreamy relaxation after sleep-
from intense, almost momentary, experiences like these sprang
poems which, beyond anything else in Keats, touch a universal
note. In the earliest of these, the fragmentary Ode to Maia
(May 1818), the recent singer of Endymion breathes yet another
lyric prayer to the old divinities of antique Greece, seeking the
‘old vigour' of its bards, and, yet more, their noble simplicity,
'content' to make 'great verse' for few hearers. The author of
the preface to Endymion already possessed that temper; and, if
he ever won the pellucid purity of Greek speech, it was in these
lines. The other odes belonged to the spring of 1819, save Autumn,
the latest, written in September. Psyche, almost the last of the
6
>
7
## p. 90 (#114) #############################################
୨୦
Keats
[CH.
group, was, he tells his brother George, “the first and only one with
which I have taken even moderate pains. ' Yet this, like Indolence,
falls somewhat short of the flawless art of the rest. In both, he is,
at moments, luxuriant and unstrung like his earlier self. Psyche,
‘loveliest vision far' of faded Olympus, becomes now, like Maia, a
living symbol of the beauty he worships, and he will be the priest
of her sanctuary. The Miltonic reminiscences are palpable, and by
no means confined to an incidental phrase or image. The passing
of the gods of Greece, moving, in spite of himself, to the poet of the
Nativity Ode, Keats mourned more naively than Schiller had
done twenty years before; then, by a beautiful, perhaps 'illogical,'
transition, lament passes into a rapturous hymn to the deathless
Psyche whose living temple was the poet's mind. Indolence com-
memorates a mood, as genuine, indeed, but less nearly allied to the
creative springs of Keats’s genius. Love and ambition and poetry
itself appear as ghostly or masque-like figures on a 'dreamy urn’;
for them he builds no sanctuary, but turns away from their lure
to the honied joys of sense—the sweetness of 'drowsy noons,' his
'head cool-bedded in the flowery grass. '
In the nearly contemporary Ode on a Grecian Urn, the
symbolism of the urn-figures became far more vital. From the
drowsed intoxication of the senses, he rises to a glorious clear-eyed
apprehension of the spiritual eternity which art, with its unheard
melodies,' affords. The three consummate central stanzas have
themselves the impassioned serenity of great sculpture. Only less
noble are the daring and splendid imagery of the opening, and the
immortal paradox of the close. “Their lips touched not, but had
not bade adieu,' Keats later said of the sleeping lovers in Psyche,
recalling, perhaps, with the carved figures of the Grecian Urn,
the wistful joy of Melancholy. In both these great odes, however,
the words imply a more spiritual and complex passion than the
naïve bliss of Psyche and Cupid. They meant a stranger and rarer
insight into the springs of both joy and sorrow than was thus
conveyed. The worship of beauty is the clue to everything in
Keats; and, as he came to feel that an experience into which no
sadness enters belongs to an inferior order of beauty, so he found
the most soul-searching sorrow 'in the very Temple of Delight. '
But the emotional poise is other than in the Grecian Urn: there,
he contemplates the passing of 'breathing human beauty' from the
serene heights of eternal art; here, it fills him with a poignant,
yet subtly Epicurean, sadness. Melancholy is thus nearer to the
mood of Indolence, and, like it, suffers from some resurgence of
## p. 91 (#115) #############################################
IV]
91
Sonnets
the earlier Keats ; but the closing lines are of consummate quality.
In the Ode to a Nightingale, the work of a morning in his friend
Brown's Hampstead garden, the poignant sense of life as it is,
'where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,' and the reaching
out to a visionary refuge-the enchanted world created by the
bird's song—are present together, but with changing dominance,
the mood's ecstatic self-abandonment being shattered, at its very
acme, by the knell-like 'forlorn,' which 'tolls' him back to his
'sole self. '
In Autumn, finally, written after an interval of some months,
the sense that beauty, though not without some glorious com-
pensation, perishes, which, in varying degrees, dominates these
three odes, yields to a serene and joyous contemplation of beauty
itself. The 'season of mellow fruitfulness' wakens no romantic
vision, no romantic longing, like the nightingale's song; it satisfies
all senses, but enthralls and intoxicates none; everything breathes
contented fulfilment without satiety, and beauty, too, is fulfilled
and complete. Shelley, whose yet greater ode was written a few
weeks later, gloried in the 'breath of autumn's being'—the wild
west wind as the forerunner and 'creator' of spring. Keats feels
here no need either of prophecy or of retrospect. If, for a
moment, he asks 'Where are the songs of spring? ' it is only to
reply "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too. This is the
secret of his strength, if, also, of his limitation-to be able to
take the beauty of the present moment so completely into his
heart that it seems an eternal possession.
With one exception, the Autumn ode is the last great and
complete poem of Keats. The last of all, written a year later,
is, with Milton's Methought I saw, among the most moving of
English sonnets. Of the sixty-one sonnets he wrote, more than
thirty are later than those in the 1817 volume, already noticed,
and nearly all belong to the fifteen months following January
1818. He had written no sonnet during the last eight months
of 1817. But his close and eager study of Shakespeare's poems
towards the end of that year sent him back with renewed zest
to sonnet-writing, and, henceforth, after an interval of hesitation,
it was exclusively on the Shakespearean rime-scheme. The sonnet
which shows him most decisively under the spell of Shakespeare
(On sitting down to read King Lear once again, January 1818)
still, it is true, follows (save for the final couplet) the Petrarchian
form. But, a few days later, he wrote the noble When I have
fears, with the beautiful repetition of the opening phrase in each
## p. 92 (#116) #############################################
92
[CH.
Keats
quatrain, reminiscent of Shakespearean sonnets, such as In me
thou see'st. One or two, as the charming June's sea, copy the
Elizabethan manner too cleverly to be very like Keats, nor are
his mind and passion at all fully engaged. But, often, he pours
into the Shakespearean mould a phrase and music nobly his own.
To Homer (“Standing aloof') contains the line “There is a
budding morrow in midnight' which Rossetti pronounced the
noblest in English poetry. To Sleep is full of the poppied
enchantment of the Nightingale ode. A new, and tragic, note
sounds in The Day is gone, I cry you mercy-with one or
two exceptions (Ode to Fanny and To. . . ) the only reflection in
his poetry of the long agony of his passion for Fanny Brawne.
Finally, after a long interval, came that September day of 1820
when, 'for a moment,' writes Severn, he became like his former
self,' and wrote his last sonnet and last verse Bright star! He
still aspires, as in the great odes, towards something steadfast and
unchangeable; but now, when he is at the end of his career, and
aware that it is the end, the breathing human passion counts
more for him than the lone splendour of the star.
Save for this sonnet, the year 1820 was a blank. Even before
the seizure of 3 February, his poetic power had declined, though still
capable of glorious flashes such as redeem the revised Hyperion.
With the publication of his last volume, in July, some perception
of his real stature at length dawned in the high places of criticism.
Jeffrey, in The Edinburgh, did not conceal his admiration ; Byron
admitted that, in Hyperion, the surgeon's apprentice had really
'done something great’; Shelley, strangely indifferent to the rest
of the volume, declared that, if Hyperion were not grand poetry,
none had been written in his time. Neither Shelley nor Keats
completely understood each other ; but the younger poet here fell
short, both in critical discernment and in modesty, of the elder;
his chief recorded utterance about Shelley, and addressed to him,
expresses only the annoyance of a lover of fine phrases at the
‘magnanimity' of the idealist which stood in their way. Of the
fact that Shelley's mind, with some limitations from which he
was exempt, had a far larger reach than his own, he nowhere
betrays any perception. To Shelley's cordial overtures of friend-
ship, he had, throughout, responded with reserve; and an
invitation now received from him (August 1820), to spend the
winter with him in Italy, was declined. Even such companionship
could not be faced by a dying man. A month later, Keats set
out for Rome in care of the devoted Severn, who, during this
## p. 93 (#117) #############################################
IV]
93
Summary
6
last brief, sad phase of the poet's life, takes the place of the
no less devoted Brown. There, after a relapse from which he
never recovered, he died on 23 February 1821. Four days later,
he was buried in the protestant cemetery. In April, the self-
effacing epitaph which described him as 'one who had writ in
water' was magnificently belied by Adonais.
I am certain of nothing,' Keats once wrote, but the holiness
of the heart's affections and the Truth of Imagination. Neither
Wordsworth nor Shelley put so trenchantly the faith that was
implicit in the poetry of both. Nor would either have asserted
with the same daring simplicity that he had ' pursued the principle
of Beauty in all things. Abstractions distinguishable from beauty-
nature, liberty, love—and truths with which imagination had little
to do, counted for as much, or more, with both; and beauty itself is
with neither of them so comprehensive, with neither so near and
intimate, as it is with Keats. Shelley's worship is remote and
'intellectual,' at once too abstract and too simple to take in much
of the concrete and complex actual world. It was the 'Life of
Life,' and his gaze pressed home to it through the shimmering veil
of the material beauty by which other men's senses were arrested
and detained. It was a harmony, perfectly realised only in a
world completely at one with itself. The complexities and con-
flicts of life, and its resulting pain and sorrow, thus remained,
for him, purely evil things, of inferior status, even in poetry.
Keats could not compare with Shelley in range of ideas, but
neither was he weighted with Shelley's speculative incubus; if
his thought was not illuminated by Plato, neither was it distorted
by Godwin; if he had not access to the sublimities of Aeschylus,
he was steeped in the rich humanity of Shakespeare and Spenser
and Browne and Wordsworth. His whole imaginative and
emotional life was permeated by his eager and acute sensations ;
while his senses—it is but the other side of the same fact-were
transfigured by imagination and emotion. He projected himself
instinctively and eagerly into the nature of other living things, not
merely some 'immortal' nightingale whose song set wide the magic
casements of romance in his heart, but the mere sparrow picking
about the gravel before his window. He was no subtle-souled
psychologist like Coleridge, but he rendered emotions with a power
and richness in which exquisiteness of feeling and poignancy of
sensuous symbolism have equal part. Shelley's explanation of his
unlettered mastery of the myths of Greece— He was a Greek'
was more generous than apt; he was nearer akin to the Elizabethans,
## p. 94 (#118) #############################################
94
Keats
[CH. IV
6
nearer to Wordsworth, nearer even to Shelley himself; but he
recovered more completely than any of them the intense humanis-
ing vision of nature of which primeval myth was born. And he
won his way from the 'Asiatic 'luxury of his first work to a power
of striking home by the fewest and most familiar words, as in La
Belle Dame, which, utterly un-Greek in atmosphere and spirit, has
the magical simplicity of some lyrics of the Anthology. He did
not learn to express beauty so comprehensively as he perceived
and understood it; probably, he would never have approached in
drama the full compass of the beauty which lies, he knew, in the
agonies and strife of life--the beauty of
the fierce dispute
Between damnation and impassion'd clay
in King Lear or Macbeth. But, in the imaginative intensity of
single phrases, no English poet has come nearer to Shakespeare
or oftener recalls him.
And, in Hyperion, he showed himself master, not only of a
poetic speech for which no theme was too noble or too great, but
of a power of construction by no means to be explained by the
great example he had before him.
remains, despite some menace of the mock-heroic at the outset, and
of satire at the end. The ottava rima which Shelley uses here, as
for his Hymn to Mercury, had, for centuries, been the accepted
measure, in Italian, of playful poetry; and Byron had lately
adopted it for the epic mockery of Don Juan,
Tradition and example helped to suspend here the ‘shrill' and
'intense' notes of Shelley's poetry; but they set no check upon
the wayward loveliness of his music and imagery. To his wife,
as is well known, the poem did not appeal; it could have no
apter prelude than the charming 'apology' in which he bids her
prithee for this one time
Content thee with a visionary rhyme.
A few other experiments in narrative of the same time
A Vision of the Sea, Orpheus, Cosimo and Fiordispina-open up
alluring glimpses of beauty, but, on the whole, confirm the im-
pression that story with difficulty sustained itself in Shelley's
imagination unless it partook of the tone and temper of lyric.
The first-named is a kind of Shelleyan Ancient Mariner, woven of
beauty and horror, but less ‘visionary,' in the sense which troubled
Mrs Shelley, than The Witch of Atlas; and the anapaests crash
and surge-a new potency in a metre of which only the liquid
melodious lilt had appeared to be known to the poet of The Cloud
and The Sensitive Plant. Shelley's passion for the sea was
beginning to impress his poetry.
These adventures in poetic tale, however, even when highly fortu-
nate, like The Witch, did not draw their inspiration from the depths
of Shelley's nature. They were experiments in artistry, exercises of
## p. 72 (#96) ##############################################
72
[CH.
Shelley
his now ripe expressive power. But his artistry was also summoned
to the service of his political and social ideals. The revolutionary
fervour which, in the previous year, had provoked his satires and
squibs, now clothes itself in the intricate rhythms of the Pindaric
ode. The odes To Naples and To Liberty contain splendid bursts
of poetry, such as epode i B of the first, and the Athens stanza (v) of
the second; but do not, as complete poems, overcome the obstacle to
poetry presented by the abstract and political themes from which
he set out. The Ode to the West Wind, on the other hand,
originates directly in that impassioned intuition which is the
first condition of poetry; the wild autumn wind sweeping through
the forest possesses his imagination and becomes a living symbol
of the spiritual forces which regenerate the fading or decadent life
of nations, bring succour and 'alliance' to forlorn heroic spirits,
and scatter their burning words, ‘like ashes from an unextinguished
hearth,' among mankind. Nowhere does Shelley's voice reach
a more poignantly personal note or more perfect spontaneity.
Yet, this ode is no less his masterpiece in calculated symmetry of
structure, matching here the artistry of Keats's Grecian Urn or
Autumn. The 'Titan in a virgin's form' (so Leopardi called him)
finds consummate utterance in this great song, where we hear
together the forlorn wail and the prophetic trumpet-blast. The
symbolism, here, is too individual and too passionate to resemble
the instinctive rendering of natural phenomena in terms of con-
scious life, which we call ‘myth. But, much of Shelley's loveliest
lyric, as has often been observed, does provoke this comparison.
Arethusa, and the Hymns of Apollo and Pan, are of a serene and
radiant beauty almost untouched by the personal note, whether of
pathos or of prophecy. And, in The Cloud, Shelley quits the
guidance of Greek divinities, and, with superb and joyous ease,
makes myth for himself. There is nothing esoteric in this cloud's
life; all the familiar aspects of the cloud which ‘changes but
cannot die' are translated by a kind of brilliant poetic wit into
plastic image. Hence, in part, its universal appeal. In The
Skylark, closely akin in the entrancing swiftness and subtlety of
its music, the temper is wholly unlike. The skylark is divine, as
the cloud is immortal; but, instead of personating it, the poet
looks up with wistful longing to its 'clear keen joyance,' its love
which had never known love's sad satiety. The brief, quivering
pulsations of the verse contrast with the superb, pacing measure
of The Cloud.
The second year at Pisa (1821) brought new friendships and
## p. 73 (#97) ##############################################
111]
Epipsychidion
73
interests; and Shelley's poetry, henceforth, is more largely coloured,
or even inspired, by personal intimacy. The Letter to Maria
Gisborne, of the preceding August, had commemorated a purely
intellectual friendship. Unlike Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot—its
only rival among English letters in verse-it ‘imitates' neither
Horace nor anyone else, but, on the contrary, reveals, with trans-
parent and spontaneous frankness, the Shelley of sparkling and
sprightly converse, of fun shot through with poetry, and poetry
with fun, of human thoughtfulness, and keen common-sense, whom
only his best friends knew. Epipsychidion, Adonais and the lyrics
written to Jane Williams are monuments of kinds of friendship
more passionate and more individually Shelleyan, yet as diverse
as the poetry which enshrines them. Shelley had lately trans-
lated the Symposium of Plato. In Emilia Viviani, he thought he
saw realised the visionary beauty which, from 'youth's dawn,'
had beckoned and whispered to him in all the wonder and
romance of the world. A similar apparition had, at least once
before, crossed his path, in the wife whom he still sincerely, if not
passionately, loved. The situation was complex, and not in all its
aspects favourable to poetry. The rejected fragments show that he
did not without effort refrain from the mere defiant bravado of one
facing a groundless or specious charge. In what remains, nothing is
ignoble, nothing prosaic; but the passages in which he is explaining
and justifying are distinguished by their plainer phrasing from
those in which, as in the rapturous close, he soars, with beating
wings, above earth and its laws and limits to pierce into the rare
universe of love. The Godwinian doctrine of free love is, doubt-
less, discernible, on a last analysis, in the justification; but that
doctrine is taken up into the sublime Platonic faith that love
permeates the universe, and cannot, therefore, be completely
mirrored in the facet of any one human form. Thus, in defending
his passion for Emilia, Shelley is led to an argument which cuts
away the ground of the exclusive and absorbing adoration of her
which much of his language suggests. She is no mere symbol;
her womanhood and her beauty are real; but beauty more uni-
versal and enduring than her own is gathered up in her, as light
in the sun, and this ideal value, though the emphasis fluctuates, is
never absent from Shelley's thought. Yet, the comparison which
he invokes with the Vita Nuova is not wholly just; the virginal
passion of Dante repudiates every suggestion of union, even in
marriage; while Shelley's spiritual passion finds adequate utter-
ance only in the rapt imagery of possession.
## p. 74 (#98) ##############################################
74
Shelley
[ch.
a
The romance of Emilia Viviani had a somewhat sordid sequel,
and Shelley felt the bitterness of disillusionment. But illusion had
brought him thought, vision and song, which were not illusory.
Epipsychidion enshrines a rare and strange mode of feeling,
accessible only to the few; we pass, nevertheless, into a larger air
when we turn from this Platonist bridal hymn to the great elegy
with which, a few weeks later, he commemorated the death of
Keats. The two poets had never been intimate, and neither
thought of the other's poetry, as a whole, so highly as it deserved.
But Shelley put Hyperion on a level with the grandest poetry of
his time. Grief for a dead friend has hardly more part in Adonais
than in Lycidas; but it is, in a far greater degree, an impassioned
lament for a poet. The death of Edward King gave Milton an
occasion for a meditation of unequalled splendour upon poetic
fame; the death of Keats is felt by Shelley as a calamity for
poetry, and for everything in nature and humanity to which
poetry gives enduring expression, and the very soul of poetry
seems to utter itself, now in sorrow, now in retributive indignation,
through his lips. It is something more than literary artifice, or
,
the example of antique elegy, that leads him to picture muses
and seasons, dreams, desires and adorations, joining in his lament.
All he had loved and moulded into thought
From shape and hue and odour and sweet sound
Lamented Adonais;
and, Adonais being, for Shelley, chiefly the poet of Hyperion, his
chief mourner is the heavenly muse Urania. Even the persons
who are represented beside his grave, Byron, Hunt, Moore, Shelley
himself, are there not as friends but as fellow-poets. The stately
Spenserian stanza, to which Shelley communicates a new magni-
ficence of his own, accords well with the grandeur of the theme.
Solitary as he was, and echoless as his song, for the moment,
remained, he knew that he was speaking out of the heart of
humanity, and not merely ‘antheming a lonely grief. ' And, in the
,
triumphant closing movement, he gave expression more sublime
than either Milton or any ancient elegist had found, to the im-
mortality of poetry. The poet, like the lover, could transcend the
limits of personality, and become at one with eternal things.
It was in the spirit of these magnificent vindications of poet
and lover, and during the interval between them, that Shelley
wrote (February-March 1821) his memorable Defence of Poetry.
Peacock's essay, The Four Ages of Poetry, in Ollier's Literary Mis-
cellany, 1820, had stirred him to a 'sacred rage' by representing
## p. 75 (#99) ##############################################
11]
Last Poems
75
the revival of imagination, in his day, as a futile reversion to the
infantine culture of primitive man. Not poetry alone, as ordinarily
understood, but ethics, the very meaning of conduct, of history,
nay, of life itself, was, for Shelley, at stake; and his Defence
ranges far beyond the scope of literature. Poetry reveals the
order and beauty of the universe ; it is impossible without
imagination and without love, and these are the secret, also, of
all goodness, of all discovery, of all creation. 'A man to be greatly
good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively . . . the great
secret of morals is love. The Defence is a noble statement not
only of Shelley's own poetic ideals, but (despite some ambiguity
of expression) of what is most poetic in poetry at large.
In the flights of lovely song which came from Shelley during
the later Pisan time, and the three months by the Spezzian bay
which followed, the note of magnificent confidence which sounds in
the close of Adonais, and in the Defence, is more rarely heard.
Most of them are inspired by his tender intimacy with Jane
Williams; a 'desire of the moth for the star,' which touched even
the happiest of them with the sense of futility. Frailty and
evanescence are now the lot of all lovely things. The flower that
smiles today, tomorrow dies; the light of the shattered lamp
lies dead in the dust; the spirit of delight is a rare visitor. And
these thoughts are enshrined in verse of a like impalpable tenuity,
unsubstantial as a rose-petal, and floating on a subtler, more
tremulous and evasive music. For the splendid rhythmical sweep
of The Cloud, we have the plaintive suspensions and resumptions
of the music of When the lamp is shattered. Here and there, as
in Lines to Edward Williams (“The serpent is shut out from
Paradise'), the plaintiveness becomes a bitter cry, or, again, it
gives way to playful charm, as in Aziola; only the Lines on
Napoleon's death ("What! alive and so bold, O Earth ? ') have
a resonant and ringing music. With this requiem, blended of
anger and admiration, for the fallen conqueror, was published the
lyrical drama Hellas, inspired by the Greek war of liberation.
Hellas is, indeed, a prolonged lyric, conveyed partly through
dialogue as impassioned as the choric songs. The famous last
chorus is the noblest example of Shelley's command, when he
chose, of a classic simplicity and close-knit strength of speech.
The unfinished drama Charles I, which occupied much of the
later months at Pisa, shows, further, at moments, his advance in
genuine dramatic power. Charles and Henrietta are more alive
than other characters with whom Shelley was in closer sympathy,
## p. 76 (#100) #############################################
76
[CH.
Shelley
and whom he could make the mouthpiece of his own political
animus and ideas.
In April, the Pisan circle broke up, and Shelley, eager for the
sea, settled, with Mary, and Edward and Jane Williams, in a lonely
mansion, Casa Magni, on the wild Spezian bay. Several of the
lyrics to Jane were written here, but his central preoccupation
was the uncompleted Triumph of Life. Petrarch, in his Trionfi,
had portrayed men subjugated by love, chastity, time. For
Shelley, life itself, the 'painted veil' which obscures and dis-
guises the immortal spirit, is a more universal conqueror, and, in
vision, he sees this triumphal chariot pass, 'on the storm of its
own rushing splendour,' over the captive multitude of men.
Dante, rather than Petrarch, has inspired the conduct of the
vision, where Rousseau, the darkened light whence a thousand
beams had been kindled, interprets, like Vergil, to the rapt and
questioning poet. Much of the symbolism is obscure, but the
significant allusion to the Paradiso-
the rhyme
Of him whone from the lowest depths of hell
Through every Paradise and through all glory
Love led serene, and who returned to tell
In words of hate and awe—the wondrous story
How all things are transfigured except Love-
justifies the surmise that love, which arms heroic spirits against
the sway of life, was, in some way, to win the final triumph. The
terza rima is very nobly handled, with a dominant fluidity which
is more Petrarchian than Dantesque, but with moments of con-
centrated brevity which belong to the greater model. And the
passionate outlook upon life which pervades and informs it marks
Shelley's kinship. The sequel, doubtless, would have added clear-
ness to a poem which remains one of the grandest, but by no means
the least enigmatic, among the torsos of modern poetry.
The Triumph of Life was the occupation of summer days spent
afloat with Williams, on the Spezian bay. On 8 July, Shelley's
boat was run down, it is said deliberately, in a sudden squall.
His ashes, by the care of Trelawney, were buried in the protestant
cemetery at Rome, side by side with those of the great brother-
poet whose requiem he had sung, and whose poetry had been his
companion in the hour of death.
A century has almost passed, and Shelley is still the subject of
keener debate than any of his poetic contemporaries, not excepting
Byron. That he is one of the greatest of lyric poets is eagerly
allowed by his most hostile critics; the old grounds, too, of hostility
## p. 77 (#101) #############################################
111]
Summary
77
man.
to him bave, in the main, long since spent their malice, or count on
his side; while some, which cannot be dismissed, are irrelevant to a
final estimate of his poetry. But many who feel the spell of his
'lovely wail' are repelled by his 'want of substance'; Matthew
Arnold's 'ineffectual angel’ ‘pinnacled dim in the intense inane'
expresses, for them, the whole truth about the poet and about the
And a part of the truth it undoubtedly does express. No
stranger apparition ever visited that robust matter-of-fact Georgian
England than this ‘frail form,' of whom, at the outset, Hazlitt might
have said with yet more truth than of Coleridge, that he had wings
but wanted hands and feet. ' Only, while Coleridge's wing “flagged'
more and more 'wearily' (as Shelley said), Shelley grew steadily,
not only in power of flight, but in his living hold, both as poet and
as man, upon certain orders of fact. His ‘strangeness' was a part
(not the whole) of his originality; and he paid its price. To most
of what was complex, institutional, traditional in his milieu, he
remained inaccessible, intransigent; he could not, like Wordsworth,
find his 'home' in these things, still less find it a 'kindred-point'
with his ‘heaven. ' For Shelley, society was rather the ground from
which (like his Skylark) he soared to a heaven far remote; or, to
use his yet more splendid image, the dome of many-coloured glass'
beyond which he strove to project himself into a white radiance of
eternity. As Bradley has aptly remarked, he forgot, not always
but often, that the white radiance itself persists transformed in the
many colours. That pure and intense aspiration, however, is the
first note of Shelley's authentic poetry. It would not be authentic,
it would hardly be memorable, if it merely expressed aspirations,
however ideal and intense; but the expression itself is already
creative and new. Shelley's mature verse and diction do not merely
serve as a channel for his thought and feeling: the temper of his
spirit penetrates and suffuses their very texture, evoking spon-
taneous felicities of rhythm and phrase, which are beautiful in
their own right as well as by their subtle symbolism. Of all the
poets of his time, Shelley's style carries us furthest from the close-
packed, tessellated brilliance, the calculated point and precision,
of the Augustans; to describe it we have to recur to images drawn
from the undulating contours of waves, the pure intensity and
splendour of flame. During the last years of his short life, his
soaring idealism abated nothing of its ardour; but he found in the
actual world of nature and of man more varied intimations of the
'Life of Life' they veiled, and his poetry, within its range, acquired
a piercing and profound human truth without losing its unearthly
## p. 78 (#102) #############################################
78
[ch. III
Shelley
beauty. The most 'subjective of modern English poets created
our one great modern English tragedy. And the most 'romantic'
of them had, almost alone, the secret of a truly classical' simplicity;
a speech nobly bare, even austere, familiar without banality, poetic
without artifice. Some kinds of poetic experience, and those not
the least vital, he expresses with a delicate precision not less than
that of the “subtle soul'd psychologist’ Coleridge; and he is some-
times most precise when he appears, to the ordinary reader, most
'vague. ' And, while the philosophic beliefs of Coleridge hardly
touch his poetry, and were deeply coloured by the interests of the
theologian and the political theorist, the ultimate metaphysic of
Shelley is the articulate interpretation of his most intense poetic
vision, and vitally supplements, where it does not rudely traverse,
the dogmas of his ‘atheistic' or 'democratic' creed. To all readers,
Shelley will remain the consummate inventor of lyric harmonies.
To some, he will be not less precious for the glimpses given, in
Adonais and in The Defence of Poetry, of a doctrine of universal
being more consonant than any other with the nature of poetry.
## p. 79 (#103) #############################################
CHAPTER IV
KEATS
JOHN KEATS was born on 29 or 31 October 1795, the eldest
son of a livery-stable keeper in Finsbury Pavement, London.
Sent, as a child of eight, to a school at Enfield, he attracted the
interest and, before long, the devoted friendship, of the junior
master, Charles Cowden Clark, to whom he owed his first
initiation into poetry. About 1813, Clark read to the young
. "
surgeon's apprentice Spenser's Epithalamion, and put into his
hands The Faerie Queene. In phrases as indispensable to the
portrayer of Keats as those of Hogg to the biographer of Shelley,
Clark tells us how
he went thro' it as a young horse thro' a spring meadow ramping. . . . Like
a true poet, too, he specially singled out epithets, . . . he hoisted himself up,
and looked burly and dominant, as he said, 'What an image that is,—"sea-
shouldring whales. ”'
His earliest extant poem (1813) was an Imitation of Spenser.
Yet, Spenser was to count for less in his poetry than other Eliza-
bethans to whom Spenser led him— Fletcher, Browne and
Chapman; and it was the arresting experience of 'first looking
into Chapman's Homer' that prompted, early in 1815, his earliest
outburst of great song. The writings of Leigh Hunt added an
influence kindred, in some points, to these, and quickened, from
the summer of 1816, by the spell of personal friendship. At
Hunt's Hampstead cottage, Keats met Hazlitt, Haydon and
Shelley. The former two won his deep admiration; Hazlitt's
'depth of taste' and Haydon's pictures he declared to be, with
The Excursion, the three things to rejoice in in this age,' a
dictum which, in each point, foreshadows a riper Keats than his
poetry at this date betokens. His first volume of poems, issued
in 1817, is still impressed, both for better and for worse, with the
influence of Hunt. For better, since Keats could still learn much
(
6
## p. 80 (#104) #############################################
80
[CH.
Keats
from his Ariosto-like charm and ease, and especially from his
revival of the flexible mode of the rimed couplet; for worse,
since Hunt's faults of looseness and bad taste were, for Keats, still
insidious and infectious. The volume marks the swiftness of his
upward flight. Between the stanzas To some Ladies and I stood
tiptoe or Sleep and Poetry, the distance is enormous, and
Hunt’s was the most powerful of the external forces which con-
curred with the most potent of all, his own ripening vision of
beauty and truth. This vision of beauty, steadily growing richer
as well as purer and more intense, inspires Sleep and Poetry, a
noble prelude and forecast of his own future song. Still a young
neophyte— not yet a glorious denizen of the heaven of poesy'-
he derides, with boyish emphasis, the mechanic practitioners who
'wore its mark. ' Keats was only renewing in fiery verse, when the
battle was far advanced, the challenge with which, in his prose preface,
Wordsworth had opened the affray. But Wordsworth had plainly
helped him, also, to grasp the ideal task of the poet, and, thus,
to formulate his own poetic aims. In Tintern Abbey, the older
poet had looked back upon the ecstasies of his youthful passion
for nature with a mind which had already reached a 'sublimer
mood', responsive to the burden and mystery of the world.
Keats finds in that retrospect the clue to his own forecast. He,
too, will pass from the region of thoughtless joy-the realm of
Flora and old Pan, where he chose each pleasure that his fancy
saw-to the agonies, the strife of human hearts'; for this he
already knows to be “the nobler life. ' But the parallel, though
real, must not be too closely pressed. Keats was no disciple even
of Wordsworth; he forged his own way, and his vision of beauty,
even in its present immature stage, is far richer and more various
than can be ascribed to the Wordsworth of 1793. Apart from his
greater opulence of sensation, he draws a delight, which never
counted for much with Wordsworth, from the imagination of
others; beauty, for him, is not only 'a living presence of the
earth’; the bright deities of Greeks and Elizabethans have their
part in it, and Keats revels in airy touches which give us
momentary glimpses of them. Is he indignant at the riot of
foppery and barbarism? Apollo is indignant too; and to read
the meaning of Jove's large eyebrow is no less a part of the
poetic vision than to paint the tender green of April meadows.
The caressing charm and joyance of manner, as well as the flowing
rimed couplets, are still reminiscent only of Hunt, and, at the close,
he turns from awed contemplation of the 'long perspective of
## p. 81 (#105) #############################################
iv]
Endymion
81
the realms of poesy' before him to describe, with a full heart, the
home of his good friend and mentor, and
The hearty grasp that sends a pleasant sonnet
Into the brain ere one can think upon it.
The sonnet was, indeed, at this stage, Keats's most familiar mode
of lyric expression. As early as 1814, he had stammered in this
form his boyish worship of Byron and Chatterton. The seventeen
sonnets published in the 1817 volume are mostly fresh utterances
of admiring friendship. Haydon, his future sister-in-law Geor-
giana (' nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance'), his
brothers, or ‘kind Hunt' are addressed or remembered in
eminently pleasant, but rarely accomplished, verse.
They all
follow the severe Petrarchian rime-form used by Wordsworth,
and often recall his more meditative sonnets both in phrase
and sentiment.
The little volume was discriminatingly reviewed by Hunt, but
made no impression. Keats, too acutely sensitive to his own
critical judgment to care much for the world's, was already
immersed in the great quest of beauty of which he had dreamed
in Sleep and Poetry.
Endymion, the work of the twelve months from April 1817 to
April 1818, has the invertebrate structure, the insecure style, the
weakness in narrative and the luxuriance of colour and music,
natural to one who still lived more in sensation than in thought;
but, also, the enchanted atmosphere and scenery, and the sudden
reaches of vision, possible only to one whose senses were irradiated
by imagination, and ‘half created,' 'half perceived. “Poetry must
surprise by a fine excess,' was a later dictum of Keats, justified
by some of his finest work. At present, he spends his wealth
wantonly, careless of the economies and reticences of great art.
Yet, there are strokes of magic which no artistry could achieve,
and many lines and phrases which help us to understand how,
from the effeminate sentiment, was evolved the tender delicacy
of The Eve of St Agnes, and, from the riot of luxurious fancy, the
noble and ordered opulence of the Autumn ode. Of such is the
wonderful picture of the wave
Down whose green back the short-liv'd foam, all hoar,
Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence.
The story of Endymion and the moon, as retold by the
Elizabethans, had early captivated Keats's imagination : the
loveliness of the moon-lit world-even in a London suburbhad
6
E. L. XII.
CH. IV.
## p. 82 (#106) #############################################
82
[ch.
Keats
become a kind of symbol for all beauty, and he himself a new
Endymion, the implicit hero of the story he told; and, by the
same symbolism, a lover of all loveliness, so that nothing in the
universe of real or imagined beauty was irrelevant to his quest.
Hence, we pass easily to and fro from this to other legends not
otherwise akin-Cybele, Glaucus and Scylla, Arethusa. Neither
his grip upon his subject nor his technical mastery yet avail to
make these felt otherwise than as digressions. On the other
hand, the Hymn to Pan (book 1), and the roundelay of Bacchus
(O Sorrow) (book iv), where the dreamy pacing of the verse
gathers into lyric concentration and intensity, mark the highest
reach of the whole poem.
In the brief, manly preface to Endymion—its sufficing com-
ment-Keats told his critics that he recognised in it
a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished. . . . It is just that this
youngster should die away; a sad thought for me, if I had not some hope
that while it is dwindling I may be plotting, and fitting myself for verses fit
to live.
In particular, he dreamed of trying once more to touch, 'before
I bid it farewell,' the 'beautiful mythology of Greece. '
Before Endymion was complete, he had planned with his
friend Reynolds a volume of tales from Boccaccio. Keats chose
the fifth story of the fourth day of The Decameron, that of
Lisobeta and the pot of basil. It was, no doubt, an advantage
for the author of Endymion to work upon a story which, with
many openings for romantic and visionary imagination, was yet,
in substance, close-knit and coherent. Its setting in the business
world of an Italian city was less favourable to his art, and,
throughout the first half of the tale, Keats is not completely
at ease.
But the romance owes to him almost all its delicate
beauty. Boccaccio's lovers give some pretext to the brothers'
violence; Isabel and Lorenzo are the innocent victims of a sordid
crime, the memory of which comes back upon the perpetrators
like the smoke of Hinnom. But it is after Lorenzo's murder that
the poetic transformation of the romance is most complete. The
apparition in Boccaccio is a conventional ghost-scene; Keats
imagines the shadowy life of the murdered man in his forest-
grave, slowly growing one with the earth and strange to mortal
things, but quickened anew in the presence of Isabel. The great
scene in the forest is told with an impassioned calm like that of
Isabel herself, as she presses towards the kernel of the grave. '
Boccaccio had evaded the ghostlier suggestions of the scene by
## p. 83 (#107) #############################################
Iv]
83
Letters
making the body miraculously intact. Keats does not evade
them; but he ennobles what he will not conceal, and compels us
to see not the wormy circumstance but 'Love impersonate, cold-
dead indeed, but not dethroned. '
Great as is the advance of Isabella upon Endymion, it must
still be reckoned among his immature works, in view of the
wonderful creations of the following autumn and spring. The
six months which followed were a time of immensely rapid
growth, not merely in imaginative power and technical mastery,
but in intellectual range and vigour, and in moral grip.
The not
very precocious boy of eighteen and twenty is on the verge of
the truly marvellous manhood of his twenty-fourth year, and
the man, as well as the genius, is awake. His letters, after The
Prelude the most precious document we possess of the growth
of a poet's mind, are especially illuminating for the year 1818.
*To enjoy the things that others understand' might have satisfied
his aspiration in 1817; in April 1818, he turns away dissatisfied
from his own 'exquisite sense of the luxurious,' and feels the
need of 'philosophy, bracing experience and activity for his
fellow-men. He will learn Greek and Italian,
and in other ways prepare myself to ask Hazlitt in about a year's time the
best metaphysical road I can take. . . . I find there is no worthy pursuit but
the idea of doing some good in the world.
In July, during a foot-tour with his friend Brown through the
Highlands, he writes :
I should not have consented to these four months' tramping, . . . but that I
thought it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to
more hardship, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and
strengthen more my reach in poetry than would stopping at home among my
books.
The germ of such thoughts can be found, it is true, in much
earlier letters, and, as we have seen, in his first poetic profession
of faith ; for Keats was at no time the weakling suggested by
much of his youthful verse. But they are pronounced with new
conviction, they mark no fugitive aspiration, but a spiritual de-
liverance already, in effect, accomplished.
He had, indeed, 'great allies'; Shakespeare and Wordsworth
cooperated in deepening and enlarging the scope of his genius;
to its richness they could not add. All through 1817, Shakespeare
had been a companion ; Endymion is strewn with his diction; in
April 1818 (sonnet On sitting down to read King Lear once again),
the golden harmonies of romance seemed thin and poor beside the
6_2
## p. 84 (#108) #############################################
84
[CH.
Keats
P
f
>
passion and the heights and depths of Shakespearean tragedy.
He was already past Endymion, and knew it, as his contem-
porary preface attests. And Wordsworth led him, by other, not
less enthralling or less enduring, paths, to the same deeper under-
standing of sorrow. He was never weary, Brown tells us, of
repeating the Immortality ode; its sublime portrayal of a mind
redeemed by discipline and suffering and ' an eye that hath kept
watch o'er man's mortality' perhaps contributed to the doctrine.
of the world as a 'Vale of Soul-making' through pain and trouble,
which he unfolds in his beautiful letter of April 1819 to his
brother George.
And Wordsworth helped to draw him nearer to one whose
poetry provided a yet sterner discipline for the effeminate
elements of his genius. In Milton, he recognised a poet who
‘with an exquisite passion for poetic luxury, had yet preferred
the ardours to the pleasures of song. ' It was under these
conditions and in this temper that he prepared to carry out the
intention expressed in the preface to Endymion. Six months
after the completion of Endymion, Hyperion was begun. It was
a giant step forward, which neither the intimate study of Milton
nor his first experience, on the Highland tour, of grand scenery,
of mountain glory and gloom, or of the relics of fallen faiths (like
the druid cirque at Keswick), makes less wonderful. In the story
of Hyperion, he found a theme equal in its capacity for epic
grandeur to that of Paradise Lost, and, with apparent ease, he
rose to its demands, as if Milton had merely liberated a native
instinct of greatness from the lure of inferior poetic modes.
Endymion was a tissue of adventures, the romantic history of a
soul; in Hyperion, we watch a conflict of world-powers, the
passing of an old order and the coming of a new, the ruin and
triumph of gods. The indecisive dreamy composition gives place
to a noble architectonic. Keats was not at all points at a dis-
advantage in his bold rivalry with Milton. If he could not bring
the undefinable weight of experience, of prolonged and passionate
participation in great and memorable events, which is impressed
on every line of Paradise Lost, his austerest restraint is touched
with the freshness and entrain of young genius. If he has less than
Milton's energy, he has more than his magic; if he has less of dra-
matic passion and movement, he has more of sculpturesque repose.
It is here, however, that the doubt arises whether the magnificent
torso could have been completed on an epic scale. Milton's
theology introduced a conflict of purpose into his epic which is
7
## p. 85 (#109) #############################################
Iv]
85
Hyperion
>
never overcome; but it secured to the vanquished fiends a cause
and a triumph; they move us by their heroic resolve as well as by
their suffering. Keats's “theology' was the faith proper to a
devotee of the principle of beauty in all things, 'that first in
beauty shall be first in might'; but this law, recognised and pro-
claimed by the defeated Titans themselves, makes any enterprise
like Satan's not merely unnecessary to the scheme of things, but
in flagrant contradiction with it. The ruined Titans are inferior
not only in nobility, but in strength and spirit. The pathos of
a hopelessly and finally lost cause broods from the first over the
scene; the contrast between the passionate recovery of the still
mighty archangel from his fall, and the slow, sad awakening of aged
Saturn, is typical. Satan's defiance is more poetic and so, in the
deeper sense, more beautiful, than the sad resignation of Adam
and Eve; but, in Keats, it is sorrow, not hate, that is ‘more
beautiful than beauty's self. '
Hyperion, incomplete, perhaps inevitably incomplete, as it is,
remains the greatest achievement of Keats in poetry. Yet, its
want of root in his intimate experience compels us to class it
among the sublime tours de force, not among the supreme poems,
of the world. And the effort to be Miltonic, even in his own way,
finally grew oppressive. If Milton liberated, he also constrained,
and Keats, in the later parts of the fragment, is often himself
in a way that is un-Miltonic. After the close of 1818, Hyperion
was only fitfully pursued ; in September 1819, he writes that he
has definitively given it up. Two months later, however, he had
new plans with it. During November and December, he was
deeply engaged,' records Brown, 'in remodelling the fragment
of Hyperion into the form of a vision. ' Though The Fall of
Hyperion betrays the impending failure of his powers, it is of
surpassing interest as an index to the ways of his mind. There
is little doubt that, from Milton, he had passed, during 1819, to
a renewed study of Dante (in Cary's translation). In the pregnant
symbolism of The Divine Comedy, he found a mode of expressing
ideas more akin to his own than Milton's austere grandeur.
Dante's gradual purification, also, in Purgatory, by pain,
answered to his own youthful conception in Sleep and Poetry)
of a progress, through successive illusions, towards the true state
of the poet. And, as Dante has to climb the mountain and pass
through the fire before he can receive the vision of Beatrice,
so Keats represents himself as passing successively through the
indolent romance of the dreamer, the 'garden’and the 'temple,'
a
## p. 86 (#110) #############################################
86
[CH.
Keats
up to the 'shrine' where the poet, taught, at length, to grapple
directly with experience, endures the fiery proof of those
to whom the miseries of the world
Are miseries, and will not let them rest.
Only thus may he receive the vision of the meaning of beauty
disclosed in the story of Hyperion, now, at length, 'retold.
Moneta, the Beatrice of this vision, is, however, no radiant
daughter of heaven, but a 'forlorn divinity,' the 'pale Omega
of a wither'd race,' though, also, as the fostress of Apollo, the
' Alpha' of a new. Thus, insistently, did Keats, with symbol and
image, press home the thought that beauty, the ideal, can only
be won through pain, and that poetry is incomplete if it evade
and leave unexpressed 'the agonies, the strife of human hearts. '
Though The Fall does not approach Hyperion in sustained
splendour, and diverges from it in the passages common to both,
mostly for the worse, yet, it contains some lines which he never
surpassed; and his attempt to charge the myth with a richer
and deeper import, unskilful as it was, justifies the surmise that,
had his powers not failed, he might have given to England
a poem more nearly comparable than any other with Goethe's
Faust,
In the meantime, however, a rich harvest of poetry had been
gathered in. The Eve of St Agnes, begun at Chichester, January
1819, throws some light on the causes which had gradually detached
his interest from Hyperion. For it betrays an almost conscious
revulsion from the austere grandeur, the cosmic scenery and the
high prophetic theme of Milton. It is, in the loftiest sense of the
words, a young man's poem, pervaded by the glow, the romance,
the spiritual and sensuous exaltation of youth. Chatterton and
Spenser here take Milton's place with Keats, and both are more
nearly of his kin. A few lines of Burton's Anatomy, describing the
legend, were, probably, the sole nucleus of this magical creation.
The romance of Madeline and Porphyro, unlike that of Isabella
and Lorenzo, shone out to his imagination against the background
of harshly alien forces. But, everything that there made for drama
and conflict is here subdued, almost effaced, while everything of
purely beautiful and harmonious appeal, whether to soul or sense, is
enriched and heightened. The menace of murderous kinsmen is
now merely the distant clamour of gross revelry heard fitfully
through an opening door. The 'bitter chill' of the winter land-
scape, the snow and storm without, though drawn with an intensity
of imagination hardly matched in winter-painting elsewhere, merely
## p. 87 (#111) #############################################
IV]
87
The Eve of St Agnes
encompass with their aridity and torpor, but cannot invade or
impair, the glow and warmth of fragrance and gracious soul-light
of Madeline's chamber. Everything here—from the tender glories
of the painted window to the delicate cates of the banquet—is
imagined with a consummate instinct for beauty which explores
and exhausts all the sources of sensuous appeal, yet so transfigures
them that nothing merely sensuous is left. The stanza-handled
with a mastery equalled, save in The Faerie Queene, only in
Adonais, where it is much less Spenserian-shows, with certain
archaisms, that Spenser was in his mind. But, Porphyro and
Madeline are of a more breathing and human world than Spenser's ;
their passion and their purity, the high chivalry, the awed rapture
of the scene, are untouched by allegory; and, if Madeline, with
the exquisite naïveté of her maiden love, has any lineage, it is not
to be found in a Britomart or Una, radiant champions and symbols
of chastity, but in an Imogen or a Perdita.
What remains of the companion piece, The Eve of St Mark's,
though conceived at the same time, was written some months later,
and it remained unfinished. Once more, a saint's day legend sets
astir the devout heart of a young girl. But the pictorial artistry,
even more exquisite, is in the subtler, more reticent, manner of
Christabel. 'It is quite in the spirit of town quietude,' wrote
Keats. An old minster, 'on a coolish evening,' echoing footfall,
drowsy chimes and Bertha's chamber in the gloaming with the
play of her flickering shadow upon screen and panel-subdued
effects like these replace the 'bitter cold,' the gules and argent of
St Agnes. And there are hints of a delicate grotesquerie equally
foreign to that poem, but, like its delicate finished realism, ita
miniature description, foreshadowing Rossetti, who regarded it as,
together with La Belle Dame, 'in manner the choicest and chastest of
Keats's work. ' The other, not less wonderful, romance of this spring,
La Belle Dame sans Merci (April 1819), may, also, be called a com-
panion poem of The Eve of St Agnes; but the ways of Keats's genius
are here seen in a totally different, almost opposite, aspect. The
woeful knight at arms, like Madeline, has awakened from a dream;
but his awakening is poignant disillusion, not blissful fulfilment ;
the desolate moor, not the fragrant chamber and the lover's
presence. And his weird chant is in subtlest sympathy with his
forlornness. Instead of the jewelled richness, the saturated colour
of The Eve of St Agnes, we have a style of horror-stricken reticence
and suggestion, from which colour and definite form have been with-
drawn; and a music of brief haunting cadences, not of eloquent,
## p. 88 (#112) #############################################
88
[CH.
Keats
hl
articulated phrase. The character of each poem is accentuated
in the final line of its stanza: the Alexandrines of The Eve of
St Agnes are points of heightened entrain, the short slow closing
verses of La Belle Dame (And no birds sing'), moments of
keener suspense.
Lamia, last of the tales in verse, followed after an interval of
some months and under widely different intellectual conditions. The
summer of 1819 found Keats adventuring in regions more than ever
remote from the dream-world of Endymion. Shakespeare draws
him to the historic drama; to these months belong his experiments,
Otto the Great and Stephen ; a little later came The Cap and Bells.
And now it was the supple and sinewy narrative, the sensuous
splendour, the ringing, metallic rimes of Dryden's verse-tales that
attracted his emulation. The story of Lamia (June—September)
which he found in Burton resembled those of Isabella and of The
Eve of St Agnes in representing two lovers united by a secret and
mysterious bond; but, here, the mystery becomes sheer witchcraft.
The witch-maiden Lamia, in the hands of the author of La Belle
Dame, might well have yielded a counterpart of Coleridge's
Geraldine. The influence of Dryden's robust and positive genius
has almost banished the delicate reticences of the earlier poems.
Lamia's transformations have the hard brilliance of mosaics; the
'volcanian yellow' invades her silver mail 'as the lava ravishes
the mead. ' The same influence told more happily in the brilliant
precision of the picture of the city festival, each half-line a distinct
and living vignette. There are not wanting—there could not be-
touches of descriptive magic, but the charm of Lamia is rather
described than felt; whether woman be her true nature (1 118)
or her disguise (11 306) (and this is not made clear), she has not
the defined character of either; as a psychological portrait, she
cannot stand beside Isabel or Madeline. And the cynical tone
of restoration gallantry has, here and there, betrayed Keats into
lapses of taste elsewhere overcome, as in the terrible line i 330
('there is not such a treat among them all. . . . As a real woman'),
and the opening of part II. Keats felt intensely the contrast
between the romance of passion and the outer world of cold
reflection. In The Eve of St Agnes, the flame-like glow of light
colour which surrounds the lovers is symbolically contrasted with
the frozen world without. In Lamia, this symbolism is less
telling. But it is helped out by an explicit comment on the
climax of the story. The sophist's eye transfixes the serpent-lady,
and dissolves the pageant of her love. So, 'cold philosophy
## p. 89 (#113) #############################################
iv]
89
Odes
destroys romance. The ‘moral expressed an antagonism dear to
Keats's passionately intuitive mind; but its introduction implied
just such an obtrusion of reflection upon poetry as it purported
to condemn.
It is easy, in tracing the growth of an artist who studied so
intently the genius of others, to lay too much stress on his artistic
seriousness. His famous counsel to Shelley, too, might suggest
that he himself was, above all, a curious and elaborate artificer.
Some of his manuscripts, no doubt, support this impression.
Yet, Keats was not only extraordinarily spontaneous: he could
play lightly with the passing mood. His quick sensitiveness of
eye and ear and fancy tempted him along many poetic byways
beside the way he deliberately chose He did not write only in
his singing-robes, but delighted to weave pleasant rimes in familiar
undress. The brother and sister-in-law in America, and his friend
Reynolds, received many such rimed interludes in his letters-lively
fountains of verse springing up unbidden in the garden of his prose.
Such are the four poems, Robin Hood, Lines on the Mermaid
Tavern, Fancy and The Bards of Passion and of Mirth, all written
in the short couplet of L'Allegro, with a delicacy of music of which
Milton had helped him to the secret, and a daintiness and playful-
ness of fancy akin to Beaumont and Fletcher, and other haunters
of the Mermaid, bards of 'mirth’even more than of 'passion. '
It is natural to contrast with these light and sparkling improvisa-
tions the rich and concentrated style-loaded with gold in every
rift'-and the intricate interwoven harmonies of the majority of
the contemporary odes. But, most of these were impromptus, too,
.
born of the same sudden inspiration, and their crowded felicities
were not studiously inlaid, but of the vital essence of the speech.
A may morning, an autumn afternoon, a nightingale's song in a
Hampstead garden, a mood of dreamy relaxation after sleep-
from intense, almost momentary, experiences like these sprang
poems which, beyond anything else in Keats, touch a universal
note. In the earliest of these, the fragmentary Ode to Maia
(May 1818), the recent singer of Endymion breathes yet another
lyric prayer to the old divinities of antique Greece, seeking the
‘old vigour' of its bards, and, yet more, their noble simplicity,
'content' to make 'great verse' for few hearers. The author of
the preface to Endymion already possessed that temper; and, if
he ever won the pellucid purity of Greek speech, it was in these
lines. The other odes belonged to the spring of 1819, save Autumn,
the latest, written in September. Psyche, almost the last of the
6
>
7
## p. 90 (#114) #############################################
୨୦
Keats
[CH.
group, was, he tells his brother George, “the first and only one with
which I have taken even moderate pains. ' Yet this, like Indolence,
falls somewhat short of the flawless art of the rest. In both, he is,
at moments, luxuriant and unstrung like his earlier self. Psyche,
‘loveliest vision far' of faded Olympus, becomes now, like Maia, a
living symbol of the beauty he worships, and he will be the priest
of her sanctuary. The Miltonic reminiscences are palpable, and by
no means confined to an incidental phrase or image. The passing
of the gods of Greece, moving, in spite of himself, to the poet of the
Nativity Ode, Keats mourned more naively than Schiller had
done twenty years before; then, by a beautiful, perhaps 'illogical,'
transition, lament passes into a rapturous hymn to the deathless
Psyche whose living temple was the poet's mind. Indolence com-
memorates a mood, as genuine, indeed, but less nearly allied to the
creative springs of Keats’s genius. Love and ambition and poetry
itself appear as ghostly or masque-like figures on a 'dreamy urn’;
for them he builds no sanctuary, but turns away from their lure
to the honied joys of sense—the sweetness of 'drowsy noons,' his
'head cool-bedded in the flowery grass. '
In the nearly contemporary Ode on a Grecian Urn, the
symbolism of the urn-figures became far more vital. From the
drowsed intoxication of the senses, he rises to a glorious clear-eyed
apprehension of the spiritual eternity which art, with its unheard
melodies,' affords. The three consummate central stanzas have
themselves the impassioned serenity of great sculpture. Only less
noble are the daring and splendid imagery of the opening, and the
immortal paradox of the close. “Their lips touched not, but had
not bade adieu,' Keats later said of the sleeping lovers in Psyche,
recalling, perhaps, with the carved figures of the Grecian Urn,
the wistful joy of Melancholy. In both these great odes, however,
the words imply a more spiritual and complex passion than the
naïve bliss of Psyche and Cupid. They meant a stranger and rarer
insight into the springs of both joy and sorrow than was thus
conveyed. The worship of beauty is the clue to everything in
Keats; and, as he came to feel that an experience into which no
sadness enters belongs to an inferior order of beauty, so he found
the most soul-searching sorrow 'in the very Temple of Delight. '
But the emotional poise is other than in the Grecian Urn: there,
he contemplates the passing of 'breathing human beauty' from the
serene heights of eternal art; here, it fills him with a poignant,
yet subtly Epicurean, sadness. Melancholy is thus nearer to the
mood of Indolence, and, like it, suffers from some resurgence of
## p. 91 (#115) #############################################
IV]
91
Sonnets
the earlier Keats ; but the closing lines are of consummate quality.
In the Ode to a Nightingale, the work of a morning in his friend
Brown's Hampstead garden, the poignant sense of life as it is,
'where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,' and the reaching
out to a visionary refuge-the enchanted world created by the
bird's song—are present together, but with changing dominance,
the mood's ecstatic self-abandonment being shattered, at its very
acme, by the knell-like 'forlorn,' which 'tolls' him back to his
'sole self. '
In Autumn, finally, written after an interval of some months,
the sense that beauty, though not without some glorious com-
pensation, perishes, which, in varying degrees, dominates these
three odes, yields to a serene and joyous contemplation of beauty
itself. The 'season of mellow fruitfulness' wakens no romantic
vision, no romantic longing, like the nightingale's song; it satisfies
all senses, but enthralls and intoxicates none; everything breathes
contented fulfilment without satiety, and beauty, too, is fulfilled
and complete. Shelley, whose yet greater ode was written a few
weeks later, gloried in the 'breath of autumn's being'—the wild
west wind as the forerunner and 'creator' of spring. Keats feels
here no need either of prophecy or of retrospect. If, for a
moment, he asks 'Where are the songs of spring? ' it is only to
reply "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too. This is the
secret of his strength, if, also, of his limitation-to be able to
take the beauty of the present moment so completely into his
heart that it seems an eternal possession.
With one exception, the Autumn ode is the last great and
complete poem of Keats. The last of all, written a year later,
is, with Milton's Methought I saw, among the most moving of
English sonnets. Of the sixty-one sonnets he wrote, more than
thirty are later than those in the 1817 volume, already noticed,
and nearly all belong to the fifteen months following January
1818. He had written no sonnet during the last eight months
of 1817. But his close and eager study of Shakespeare's poems
towards the end of that year sent him back with renewed zest
to sonnet-writing, and, henceforth, after an interval of hesitation,
it was exclusively on the Shakespearean rime-scheme. The sonnet
which shows him most decisively under the spell of Shakespeare
(On sitting down to read King Lear once again, January 1818)
still, it is true, follows (save for the final couplet) the Petrarchian
form. But, a few days later, he wrote the noble When I have
fears, with the beautiful repetition of the opening phrase in each
## p. 92 (#116) #############################################
92
[CH.
Keats
quatrain, reminiscent of Shakespearean sonnets, such as In me
thou see'st. One or two, as the charming June's sea, copy the
Elizabethan manner too cleverly to be very like Keats, nor are
his mind and passion at all fully engaged. But, often, he pours
into the Shakespearean mould a phrase and music nobly his own.
To Homer (“Standing aloof') contains the line “There is a
budding morrow in midnight' which Rossetti pronounced the
noblest in English poetry. To Sleep is full of the poppied
enchantment of the Nightingale ode. A new, and tragic, note
sounds in The Day is gone, I cry you mercy-with one or
two exceptions (Ode to Fanny and To. . . ) the only reflection in
his poetry of the long agony of his passion for Fanny Brawne.
Finally, after a long interval, came that September day of 1820
when, 'for a moment,' writes Severn, he became like his former
self,' and wrote his last sonnet and last verse Bright star! He
still aspires, as in the great odes, towards something steadfast and
unchangeable; but now, when he is at the end of his career, and
aware that it is the end, the breathing human passion counts
more for him than the lone splendour of the star.
Save for this sonnet, the year 1820 was a blank. Even before
the seizure of 3 February, his poetic power had declined, though still
capable of glorious flashes such as redeem the revised Hyperion.
With the publication of his last volume, in July, some perception
of his real stature at length dawned in the high places of criticism.
Jeffrey, in The Edinburgh, did not conceal his admiration ; Byron
admitted that, in Hyperion, the surgeon's apprentice had really
'done something great’; Shelley, strangely indifferent to the rest
of the volume, declared that, if Hyperion were not grand poetry,
none had been written in his time. Neither Shelley nor Keats
completely understood each other ; but the younger poet here fell
short, both in critical discernment and in modesty, of the elder;
his chief recorded utterance about Shelley, and addressed to him,
expresses only the annoyance of a lover of fine phrases at the
‘magnanimity' of the idealist which stood in their way. Of the
fact that Shelley's mind, with some limitations from which he
was exempt, had a far larger reach than his own, he nowhere
betrays any perception. To Shelley's cordial overtures of friend-
ship, he had, throughout, responded with reserve; and an
invitation now received from him (August 1820), to spend the
winter with him in Italy, was declined. Even such companionship
could not be faced by a dying man. A month later, Keats set
out for Rome in care of the devoted Severn, who, during this
## p. 93 (#117) #############################################
IV]
93
Summary
6
last brief, sad phase of the poet's life, takes the place of the
no less devoted Brown. There, after a relapse from which he
never recovered, he died on 23 February 1821. Four days later,
he was buried in the protestant cemetery. In April, the self-
effacing epitaph which described him as 'one who had writ in
water' was magnificently belied by Adonais.
I am certain of nothing,' Keats once wrote, but the holiness
of the heart's affections and the Truth of Imagination. Neither
Wordsworth nor Shelley put so trenchantly the faith that was
implicit in the poetry of both. Nor would either have asserted
with the same daring simplicity that he had ' pursued the principle
of Beauty in all things. Abstractions distinguishable from beauty-
nature, liberty, love—and truths with which imagination had little
to do, counted for as much, or more, with both; and beauty itself is
with neither of them so comprehensive, with neither so near and
intimate, as it is with Keats. Shelley's worship is remote and
'intellectual,' at once too abstract and too simple to take in much
of the concrete and complex actual world. It was the 'Life of
Life,' and his gaze pressed home to it through the shimmering veil
of the material beauty by which other men's senses were arrested
and detained. It was a harmony, perfectly realised only in a
world completely at one with itself. The complexities and con-
flicts of life, and its resulting pain and sorrow, thus remained,
for him, purely evil things, of inferior status, even in poetry.
Keats could not compare with Shelley in range of ideas, but
neither was he weighted with Shelley's speculative incubus; if
his thought was not illuminated by Plato, neither was it distorted
by Godwin; if he had not access to the sublimities of Aeschylus,
he was steeped in the rich humanity of Shakespeare and Spenser
and Browne and Wordsworth. His whole imaginative and
emotional life was permeated by his eager and acute sensations ;
while his senses—it is but the other side of the same fact-were
transfigured by imagination and emotion. He projected himself
instinctively and eagerly into the nature of other living things, not
merely some 'immortal' nightingale whose song set wide the magic
casements of romance in his heart, but the mere sparrow picking
about the gravel before his window. He was no subtle-souled
psychologist like Coleridge, but he rendered emotions with a power
and richness in which exquisiteness of feeling and poignancy of
sensuous symbolism have equal part. Shelley's explanation of his
unlettered mastery of the myths of Greece— He was a Greek'
was more generous than apt; he was nearer akin to the Elizabethans,
## p. 94 (#118) #############################################
94
Keats
[CH. IV
6
nearer to Wordsworth, nearer even to Shelley himself; but he
recovered more completely than any of them the intense humanis-
ing vision of nature of which primeval myth was born. And he
won his way from the 'Asiatic 'luxury of his first work to a power
of striking home by the fewest and most familiar words, as in La
Belle Dame, which, utterly un-Greek in atmosphere and spirit, has
the magical simplicity of some lyrics of the Anthology. He did
not learn to express beauty so comprehensively as he perceived
and understood it; probably, he would never have approached in
drama the full compass of the beauty which lies, he knew, in the
agonies and strife of life--the beauty of
the fierce dispute
Between damnation and impassion'd clay
in King Lear or Macbeth. But, in the imaginative intensity of
single phrases, no English poet has come nearer to Shakespeare
or oftener recalls him.
And, in Hyperion, he showed himself master, not only of a
poetic speech for which no theme was too noble or too great, but
of a power of construction by no means to be explained by the
great example he had before him.
