No More Learning

Everything in the drama seems to support the faith of Shelley's
most exalted hours, that love, even here and now, is the substance
of things, and evil a phantasmal shadow. In such hours, we know,
it was written : the vigorous awakening of the Roman spring
around him as he wrote, and the new life with which it drenches
the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama';
The speech is almost everywhere lyrical in temper where not in
form, and the ardour of Shelley suffuses itself into the atmosphere,
compelling even the forces of evil to speak in accents like his, as
if secretly persuaded of the fatuity of their own cause. Jupiter
speaks in lovely images of stars and sun, as if he, too, were a lover
of Asia, the lamp of earth; the fury, in the very act of tormenting
Prometheus, speaks as one who herself suffers what she inflicts.
Finally, in the fourth act, added as an afterthought, some
months later, this implicit lyricism becomes a sustained rapture of
song. Considered as the closing act of a drama, it is otiose, for it
adds nothing to the action ; but it is rather to be regarded as the
final movement of a symphony; a completion necessary in the
logic of emotion, though superfluous in the logic of event. In
the great choric songs of the earth and the moon, and in the
triumphant strains of the hours and the spirits of the mind, Shelley
reaches the sublimest note of his lyric. No modern poet has come
nearer than he to making the morning stars sing together. '
Almost all his other modes of song, from the simplest to the most
intricate, are to be found in the earlier acts; and on the deep organ


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111]
The Cenci
67
tone of Demogorgon, proclaiming that love and wisdom and
endurance are of the eternal truth of things, the poem closes.
Prometheus Unbound is not to be judged as an essay in the
philosophy of progress ; but neither is it to be treated merely as a
tissue of lovely imagery and music. Shelley's ardour, fortified and
misled by the cold extravagances of Godwin, hurried him over the
slow course of social evolution. He conceived both the evil in
human nature and the process of overcoming it with strange, sublime
simplicity. But the ideal of love and endurance, which he sees
fulfilled by regenerated man, stands on a different plane; it is
rooted in existing human nature, and expresses a state towards
which all genuine progress must advance. And, when he portrays
the universe as at one with the moral strivings of man, he is
uttering no fugitive or isolated extravagance, but the perennial
faith of idealists in all ages. Under forms of thought derived
from the atheist and materialist Godwin, Shelley has given, in
Prometheus Unbound, magnificent expression to the faith of
Plato and of Christ.
Though written at Rome, Prometheus does not bear any direct
trace of its origin. Any other flowering glades than those that
crowned the baths of Caracalla, and any other glowing Italian sky,
would have provided a like intoxicating milieu. Nor was Shelley
easily accessible to the specific traditions and character of Rome.
It was no city of the soul for him, as for Byron, but a beautiful
tomb, 'where empires and religions lie buried in the ravage they
have wrought'; and neither Vergil nor Lucretius, nor Lucan-a
name more honoured by Shelley than either—availed to endear to
him the metropolis of papacy. But one tradition of modern Rome
had, since his arrival in Italy, moved his deepest interest. The story
of Beatrice Cenci, in a form, as is now known, more favourable to
her than history warrants, was universally current among the Roman
populace, and ‘not to be mentioned in Roman society without
awakening a deep and breathless interest. ' Guido's portrait of
Beatrice, in the Colonna palace, heightened Shelley's passionate sym-
pathy with her personality. Her story was already a tragedy, and
' nothing remained, as I imagined, but to clothe it to the apprehen-
sions of my countrymen in such language and action as would bring
it home to their hearts. ' To bring his thoughts and convictions
home to the hearts of his countrymen had never been an aim
foreign to Shelley ; but he had never, as now, subordinated his
own artistic bent and technique to this aim. Though distrustful
of his power to write a drama for the stage, he yet chose this
a
a
5-2


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68
[CH.
Shelley
7
11
incomparable means of popular appeal; and he held his visionary
imagination in severe control, avoiding all ‘mere poetry,' and using
a speech which differs from the 'familiar speech of men' only in
its nobler, more classical, simplicity. That Shelley, after a few weeks'
interval, could carry out, with unfaltering hand, and with supreme
success, a poetic transition not less astonishing than would have
been the appearance of Samson Agonistes on the morrow of Comus,
marks his will power no less than his imaginative range.
The central theme and situation of The Cenci are still, it
is true, the heroic resistance to tyranny, of all situations the most
kindling to Shelley. It is no longer a mythic symbol, however, but
an actual event. And the chief actor and sufferer is a woman.
Shelley, by merely following the lead of his own ardent and
indignant sympathy, struck out a tragic type in effect new, and to
none of the great masters stranger than to Shakespeare himself.
Euripides, Sophocles, Massinger, Webster had nobly handled the
tragedy of heroic womanhood; but neither Medea nor Antigone,
nor Vittoria, nor Dorothea, nor the duchess of Malfi anticipated
Beatrice Cenci in her way of meeting an intolerable wrong. She
strikes down the criminal, not with the fierce vengeance of a Medea,
but as the instrument of divine justice-
Because my father's honour did demand
My father's life.
This is the Shelleyan magnanimity, and Shelley found no hint of it
in his source. But he wove into her character every positive trait
that it supplied ; his Beatrice, therefore, with all her ideal great-
ness of soul, is no abstraction, but an Italian girl, with flashing
moods and impulses. She thinks, in her agony, of suicide
Lucretia’s remedy-before she finds her own ; she is as sure as
Antigone that her guilt is innocence, yet fights her accusers with
the rare cunning of an advocate; she confronts the faltering
murderers with more than the fierce energy of Lady Macbeth,
yet has her moment of a young girls anguish at the thought of
passing for ever from the sunshine into a 'wide, grey, lampless,
deep, unpeopled world. Analysis may pronounce this or that
trait inconsistent; but the qualified reader will feel himself
in the grip of a character of Shakespearean richness of texture,
irradiated through and through by a flawless splendour of soul.
If Beatrice recalls Greek, as well as Elizabethan, analogies,
count Cenci is of the race of the Barabbases and Volpones who
mark the extremest divergence of Elizabethan from Greek tragedy.
Yet, he is drawn with a reticence of which no Elizabethan would


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69
Politics
have been capable, and the horror of his act is so far mitigated
that its motive is hate, not lust. He has moments almost of sublimity,
in which his hate appears a tragic doom :
The act I think shall soon extinguish all
For me: I bear a darker deadlier gloom
Than the earth's shade, or interlunar air;
or in which he imagines his piled wealth making a flaming pyre
out in the wide Campagna; which done,
My soul, which is a scourge, will I resign
Into the hands of him who wielded it.
The Cenci owes more to Shelley's intense self-projection into a
real story profoundly sympathetic to him than to conscious imita-
tion of any master or school. If the Elizabethans were most in
his mind, the absorbing interest for him of the person and the fate
of his heroine checked any disposition to diffuseness of plot or
luxury of style. No secondary interest gets foothold for a moment;
.
the mother and brothers, even the hapless Bernardo, are distinctly,
if faintly, drawn ; but their fate hardly moves us beside that of
Beatrice. And, if the Greeks, too, were in his mind, the same
passionate championship effectually overcame any Hellenic dis-
position to find a relative justification for both contending parties.
Cenci was beyond apology; but a blindly scrupulous, instead of a
basely mercenary, pope would have strengthened the play.
And a play Shelley did, in fact, intend it to be. In Beatrice
Cenci, he actually had in mind the great tragic actress Eliza O'Neill,
and, in sending the MS to the lessee of Covent Garden, intimated
his desire that she should play it. Harris, as was inevitable,
declined the proposal, but invited its author to write a play for him
on some other subject.
Shelley was already, however, absorbed in other tasks. 'I
have deserted the odorous gardens of literature,' he wrote, 'for
the great sandy desert of politics. ' From that 'desert,' in truth,
he had never averted his ken. And the provocation to enter it
was now unusually great. Popular hostility to the government,
fomented by the horrors of the factory system, the oppressiveness
of the corn laws and the high-handed toryism of the ministry, had,
in 1819, become acute. The Peterloo affair (16 August) roused
Shelley’s fierce indignation, and, in brief serried stanzas as of knotted
whipcord, he lashed the man whom he chose to hold responsible
for the threatened revolution. The Masque of Anarchy is much
more, however, than a derisive arraignment of the arch- anarch'
Castlereagh. Of Shelley's finest vein of poetry, it contains few
a
6


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70
[ch.
Shelley
6
hints; but, without it, we should more unreservedly discredit his
sense for the realities of a free national life. From the visionary
freedom of Prometheus, this practical and attainable freedom of the
'comely table spread' and the 'neat and happy home' is as far re-
moved as is the human tragedy of the Cenci palace from the mythic
pangs of the pale sufferer on Caucasus. The publication, the same
autumn, of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell (written in 1798) drew an out-
burst of sardonic mockery, not the less bitter for its sportive form,
upon the tory poet. It had already been reviewed by Hunt (whose
notice Shelley read with great amusement') and parodied by
J. H. Reynolds. In Peter Bell the Third, Shelley attacks at once
the reactionary politician and the 'dull' poet, but the reactionary
who had once hailed with rapture the 'dawn' of the revolution,
and the dull poet who had once stood on the heights of poetry. And
the two indictments, for Shelley, hung together. Wordsworth was
dull because he had been false to his early ideals. To convey this
by identifying the poet with Peter Bell, his own symbol of the
dull man, was an ingenious satiric device and not unfair retribution.
Under cover of it, moreover, Shelley delivers (in part iv) some
shafts of criticism which illuminate as well as pierce, and he can
pointedly recall the older Wordsworth who made songs
on moor and glen and rocky lake
And on the heart of man.
In the most elaborate of these satires, on the other hand, the quasi-
Aristophanic drama Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820), on the scandal
of George IV and the queen, Shelley's humour crackles drearily.
Its hideous symbolism is unredeemed.
In the meantime (January 1820), the Shelleys had moved to
Pisa, their home, with occasional intervals by the sea or in the
mountains, for the next two years. His vaster poetic schemes
during the first of these years fell into the background; Prometheus
and The Cenci had no successors. But he was himself in the full
tide of growth; in lyric, at least, he now showed a finished mastery
which, even in his great lyric drama, he had not always reached;
and he struck out upon fresh and delightful adventures. In The
Sensitive Plant, the loveliness of an Italian flower garden in
spring, and its autumn decay, inspired a Shelleyan myth, akin
in purport to Alastor, but with a new, delicate plasticity, like that
of the contemporary Skylark. His flowers, commonly impressionist
hints of colour and perfume, are now finely articulated and
characterised; they are Shelleyan flowers, but, like those of
Shakespeare, they are, recognisably, nature's too. In 'the sensitive


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111]
71
The Witch of Atlas
>
plant’ itself, Shelley found a new symbol for his own 'love of
love,''companionless,' like the poet in Alastor and the 'one frail
form' of Adonais ; and, as in Adonais, the mood of lament at the
passing of beauty and the seeming frustration of love merges in a
note of assurance, here not ecstatic but serene, that beauty and
love are, in reality, the eternal things. The anapaestic verse is
nearer than any other to that of Christabel ; it lent itself with,
perhaps, excessive ease to the fluid undulations of Shelley's rhythms,
but he discovers in it new and exquisite effects.
The Witch of Atlas is a more airily playful essay in poetic
myth-making. Imagined on a solitary mountain climb, after days
spent in translating the delightful rogueries of the Homeric
Hymn to Mercury, The Witch is a hymn in kindred vein: the
deeper harmonies of his thought and aspiration transposed into
blithe irresponsible fancy and dainty arabesque. 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


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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


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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.


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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


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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,


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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,


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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


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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.