one of the things that surprized and bewildered old colonel newcome when he gathered his boy’s friends around the mahogany tree in the dull, respectable dining-room at 12 fitzroy square, was to hear george warrington declare, between huge puffs of tobacco smoke, “that young keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young raphael.” at this charles honeyman sagely nodded his ambrosial head, while clive newcome assented with sparkling eyes. but to the colonel, sitting kindly grave and silent at the head of the table, and recalling (somewhat dimly) the bewigged and powdered poetry of the age of queen anne, such a critical sentiment seemed radical and revolutionary, almost ungentlemanly.
how astonished he would have been sixty years later if he had taken up mr. sidney colvin’s life of keats, in the “english men of letters series,” and read in the concluding chapter the deliberate and
[168]
remarkable judgment that “by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most shakespearean spirit that has lived since shakespeare”!
in truth, from the beginning the poetry of keats has been visited too much by thunder-storms of praise. it was the indiscriminate enthusiasm of his friends that drew out the equally indiscriminate ridicule of his enemies. it was the premature salutation offered to him as a supreme master of the most difficult of all arts that gave point and sting to the criticism of evident defects in his work. the examiner hailed him, before his first volume had been printed, as one who was destined to revive the early vigour of english poetry. blackwood’s magazine retorted by quoting his feeblest lines and calling him “johnny keats.” the suspicion of log-rolling led to its usual result in a volley of stone-throwing.
happily, the ultimate fame and influence of a true poet are not determined by the partizan conflicts which are waged about his name. he may suffer some personal loss by having to breathe, at times, a perturbed atmosphere of mingled flattery
[169]
and abuse instead of the still air of delightful studies. he may be robbed of some days of a life already far too short, by the pestilent noise and confusion arising from that scramble for notoriety which is often unduly honoured with the name of “literary activity.” and there are some men whose days of real inspiration are so few, and whose poetic gift is so slender, that this loss proves fatal to them. they are completely carried away and absorbed by the speculations and strifes of the market-place. they spend their time in the intrigues of rival poetic enterprises, and learn to regard current quotations in the trade journals as the only standard of value. minor poets at the outset, they are tempted to risk their little all on the stock exchange of literature, and, losing their last title to the noun, retire to bankruptcy on the adjective.
but keats did not belong to this frail and foolish race. his lot was cast in a world of petty conflict and ungenerous rivalry, but he was not of that world. it hurt him a little, but it did not ruin him. his spiritual capital was too large, and he regarded it as too sacred to be imperilled by vain speculations.
[170]
he had in chaucer and spenser, shakespeare and chapman, milton and petrarch, older and wiser friends than leigh hunt. for him
“the blue
bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
of summer nights collected still to make
the morning precious: beauty was awake!”
he perceived, by that light which comes only to high-souled and noble-hearted poets,
“the great end
of poesy, that it should be a friend
to soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man.”
to that end he gave the best that he had to give, freely, generously, joyously pouring himself into the ministry of his art. he did not dream for a moment that the gift was perfect. flattery could not blind him to the limitations and defects of his early work. he was his own best and clearest critic. but he knew that so far as it went his poetic inspiration was true. he had faithfully followed the light of a pure and elevating joy in the opulent, manifold beauty of nature and in the eloquent significance of old-world legends, and he believed that
[171]
it had already led him to a place among the poets whose verse would bring delight, in far-off years, to the sons and daughters of mankind. he believed also that if he kept alive his faith in the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth it would lead him on yet further, into a nobler life and closer to those immortal bards whose
“souls still speak
to mortals of their little week;
of their sorrows and delights;
of their passions and their spites;
of their glory and their shame;
what doth strengthen and what maim.”
he expressed this faith very clearly in the early and uneven poem called “sleep and poetry,” in a passage which begins
“oh, for ten years, that i may overwhelm
myself in poesy! so i may do the deed
that my own soul has to itself decreed.”
and then, ere four years had followed that brave wish, his voice fell silent under a wasting agony of pain and love, and the daisies were growing upon his roman grave.
the pathos of his frustrated hope, his early death,
[172]
has sometimes blinded men a little, it seems to me, to the real significance of his work and the true quality of his influence in poetry. he has been lamented in the golden verse of shelley’s “adonaïs,” and in the prose of a hundred writers who have shared shelley’s error without partaking of his genius, as the loveliest innocent ever martyred by the cruelty of hostile critics. but, in fact, the vituperations of gifford and his crew were no more responsible for the death of keats, than the stings of insects are for the death of a man who has perished of hunger on the coast of labrador. they added to his sufferings, no doubt, but they did not take away his life. keats had far too much virtue in the old roman sense—far too much courage, to be killed by a criticism. he died of consumption, as he clearly and sadly knew that he was fated to do when he first saw the drop of arterial blood upon his pillow.
nor is it just, although it may seem generous, to estimate his fame chiefly by the anticipation of what he might have accomplished if he had lived longer; to praise him for his promise at the expense
[173]
of his performance; and to rest his claim to a place among the english poets upon an uncertain prophecy of rivalry with shakespeare. i find a far sounder note in lowell’s manly essay, when he says: “no doubt there is something tropical and of strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity nevertheless.” i hear the accent of a wiser and saner criticism in the sonnet of one of our american poets:
“touch not with dark regret his perfect fame,
sighing, ‘had he but lived he had done so’;
or, ‘were his heart not eaten out with woe
john keats had won a prouder, mightier name!’
take him for what he was and did—nor blame
blind fate for all he suffered. thou shouldst know
souls such as his escape no mortal blow—
no agony of joy, or sorrow, or shame.”
“take him for what he was and did”—that should be the key-note of our thought of keats as a poet. the exquisite harmony of his actual work with his actual character; the truth of what he wrote to what his young heart saw and felt and enjoyed; the simplicity of his very exuberance of
[174]
ornament, and the naturalness of his artifice; the sincerity of his love of beauty and the beauty of his sincerity—these are the qualities which give an individual and lasting charm to his poetry, and make his gift to the world complete in itself and very precious, although,—or perhaps we should even say because,—it was unfinished.
youth itself is imperfect: it is impulsive, visionary, and unrestrained; full of tremulous delight in its sensations, but not yet thoroughly awake to the deeper meanings of the world; avid of novelty and mystery, but not yet fully capable of hearing or interpreting the still, small voice of divine significance which breathes from the simple and familiar elements of life.
yet youth has its own completeness as a season of man’s existence. it is justified and indispensable. alfred de musset’s
“we old men born yesterday”
are simply monstrous. the poetry which expresses and represents youth, the poetry of sensation and sentiment, has its own place in the literature of the
[175]
world. this is the order to which the poetry of keats belongs.
he is not a feminine poet, as mr. coventry patmore calls him, any more than theocritus or tennyson is feminine; for the quality of extreme sensitiveness to outward beauty is not a mark of femininity. it is found in men more often and more clearly than in women. but it is always most keen and joyous and overmastering in the morning of the soul.
keats is not a virile poet, like dante or shakespeare or milton; that he would have become one if he had lived is a happy and loving guess. he is certainly not a member of the senile school of poetry, which celebrates the impotent and morbid passions of decay, with a café chantant for its temple, and the smoke of cigarettes for incense, and cups of absinthe for its libations, and for its goddess not the immortal venus rising from the sea, but the weary, painted, and decrepit venus sinking into the gutter.
he is in the highest and best sense of the word a juvenile poet—“mature,” as lowell says, but
[176]
mature, as genius always is, within the boundaries and in the spirit of his own season of life. the very sadness of his lovely odes, “to a nightingale,” “on a grecian urn,” “to autumn,” “to psyche,” is the pleasant melancholy of the springtime of the heart. “the eve of st. agnes,” pure and passionate, surprizing us by its fine excess of colour and melody, sensuous in every line, yet free from the slightest taint of sensuality, is unforgettable and unsurpassable as the dream of first love. the poetry of keats, small in bulk and slight in body as it seems at first sight to be, endures, and will endure, in english literature, because it is the embodiment of the spirit of immortal youth.
here, i think, we touch its secret as an influence upon other poets. for that it has been an influence,—in the older sense of the word, which carries with it a reference to the guiding and controlling force supposed to flow from the stars to the earth,—is beyond all doubt. the history of english literature, with which taine amused us some fifty years ago, nowhere displays its narrowness of vision more egregiously than in its failure to take account of gray,
[177]
collins, and keats as fashioners of english poetry. it does not mention gray and collins at all; the name of keats occurs only once, with a reference to “sickly or overflowing imagination,” but to byron nearly fifty pages are devoted. the american critic, stedman, showed a far broader and more intelligent understanding of the subject when he said that “wordsworth begot the mind, and keats the body, of the idyllic victorian school.”
we can trace the influence of keats not merely in the conscious or unconscious imitations of his manner, like those which are so evident in the early poems of tennyson and procter, in hood’s plea of the midsummer fairies and lycus the centaur, in rossetti’s ballads and sonnets, and william morris’s earthly paradise, but also in the youthful spirit of delight in the retelling of old tales of mythology and chivalry; in the quickened sense of pleasure in the luxuriance and abundance of natural beauty; in the freedom of overflowing cadences transmuting ancient forms of verse into new and more flexible measures; in the large liberty of imaginative diction, making all nature sympathize
[178]
with the joy and sorrow of man,—in brief, in many of the finest marks of a renascence, a renewed youth, which characterize the poetry of the early victorian era.
i do not mean to say that keats alone, or chiefly, was responsible for this renascence. he never set up to lead a movement or to found a school. his genius is not to be compared to that of a commanding artist like giotto or leonardo or michelangelo, but rather to that of a painter like botticelli, whose personal and expressive charm makes itself felt in the work of many painters, who learned secrets of grace and beauty from him, though they were not his professed disciples or followers.
take for example matthew arnold. he called himself, and no doubt rightly, a wordsworthian. but it was not from wordsworth that he caught the strange and searching melody of “the forsaken merman,” or learned to embroider the laments for “thyrsis” and “the scholar-gypsy” with such opulence of varied bloom as makes death itself seem lovely. it was from john keats. or read the description of the tapestry on the castle walls in “tristram
[179]
and iseult.” how perfectly that repeats the spirit of keats’s descriptions in “the eve of st. agnes”! it is the poetry of the picturesque.
indeed, we shall fail to do justice to the influence of keats unless we recognize also that it has produced direct and distinct effects in the art of painting. the english pre-raphaelites owed much to his inspiration. holman hunt found two of his earliest subjects for pictures in “the eve of st. agnes” and “the pot of basil.” millais painted “lorenzo and isabella,” and rossetti “la belle dame sans merci.” there is an evident sympathy between the art of these painters, which insisted that every detail in a picture is precious and should be painted with truthful care for its beauty, and the poetry of keats, which is filled, and even overfilled, with minute and loving touches of exquisite elaboration.
but it must be remembered that in poetry, as well as in painting, the spirit of picturesqueness has its dangers. the details may be multiplied until the original design is lost. the harmony and lucidity of a poem may be destroyed by innumerable digressions and descriptions. in some of his
[180]
poems—in “endymion” and in “lamia”—keats fell very deep into this fault, and no one knew it better than himself. but when he was at his best he had the power of adding a hundred delicate details to his central vision, and making every touch heighten and enhance the general effect. how wonderful in its unity is the “ode on a grecian urn”! how completely magical are the opening lines of “hyperion”:
“deep in the shady sadness of a vale
far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
sat gray-hair’d saturn, quiet as a stone,
still as the silence round about his lair;
forest on forest hung about his head
like cloud on cloud.”
how large and splendid is the imagery of the sonnet “on first looking into chapman’s homer”! and who that has any sense of poetry does not recognize the voice of a young master in the two superb lines of the last poem that keats wrote?—the sonnet in which he speaks of the bright star
“watching, with eternal lids apart,
like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite,
[181]
the moving waters at their priestlike task
of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.”
the poets of america have not been slow to recognize the charm and power of keats. holmes and longfellow and lowell paid homage to him in their verse. lanier inscribed to his memory a poem called “clover.” gilder wrote two sonnets which celebrate his “perfect fame.” robert underwood johnson has a lovely lyric on “the name writ in water.”
but i find an even deeper and larger tribute to his influence in the features of resemblance to his manner and spirit which flash out here and there, unexpectedly and unconsciously, in the poetry of our new world. emerson was so unlike keats in his intellectual constitution as to make all contact between them appear improbable, if not impossible. yet no one can read emerson’s “may-day,” and keats’ exquisitely truthful and imaginative lines on “fancy,” one after the other, without feeling that the two poems are very near of kin. lowell’s “legend of brittany” has caught, not only the measure, but also the tone and the diction of “isabella.”
[182]
the famous introduction to “the vision of sir launfal,” with its often quoted line,
“what is so rare as a day in june?”
finds a parallel in the opening verses of “sleep and poetry”—
“what is more gentle than a wind in summer?”
lowell’s “endymion,” which he calls “a mystical comment on titian’s ‘sacred and profane love,’” is full of echoes from keats, like this:
“my day began not till the twilight fell
and lo! in ether from heaven’s sweetest well
the new moon swam, divinely isolate
in maiden silence, she that makes my fate
haply not knowing it, or only so
as i the secrets of my sheep may know.”
in lanier’s rich and melodious “hymns of the marshes” there are innumerable touches in the style of keats; for example, his apostrophe to the
“reverend marsh, low-couched along the sea,
old chemist, wrapped in alchemy,
distilling silence,——”
or his praise of the
“beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,
wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
[183]
chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves.”
one of the finest pieces of elegiac verse that have yet been produced in america, george e. woodberry’s poem called “the north shore watch,” has many passages that recall the young poet who wrote
“a thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
indeed, we hear the very spirit of endymion speaking in woodberry’s lines:
“beauty abides, nor suffers mortal change,
eternal refuge of the orphaned mind.”
father john b. tabb, who had the exquisite art of the greek epigram at his command, in one of his delicately finished little poems, imagined sappho listening to the “ode to a nightingale”:
“methinks when first the nightingale
was mated to thy deathless song,
that sappho with emotion pale
amid the olympian throng,
again, as in the lesbian grove,
stood listening with lips apart,
to hear in thy melodious love
the pantings of her heart.”
[184]
yes; the memory and influence of keats endure, and will endure, because his poetry expresses something in the heart that will not die so long as there are young men and maidens to see and feel the beauty of the world and the thrill of love. his poetry is complete, it is true, it is justified, because it is the fitting utterance of one of those periods of mental life which keats himself has called “the human seasons.”
but its completeness and its truth depend upon its relation, in itself and in the poet’s mind, to the larger world of poetry, the fuller life, the rounded year of man. nor was this forward look, this anticipation of something better and greater yet to come, lacking in the youth of keats. it flashes out, again and again, from his letters, those outpourings of his heart and mind, so full of boyish exuberance and manly vigour, so rich in revelations of what this marvellous, beautiful, sensitive, courageous little creature really was,—a great soul in the body of a lad. it shows itself clearly and calmly in the remarkable preface in which he criticizes his own “endymion,” calling it “a feverish attempt, rather than a deed
[185]
accomplished.” “it is just,” he writes, “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.” the same fine hope of a sane and manly youth is expressed in his early verses entitled “sleep and poetry.” he has been speaking of the first joys of his fancy, in the realm of flora and old pan: the merry games and dances with white-handed nymphs: the ardent pursuit of love, and the satisfied repose in the bosom of a leafy world. then his imagination goes on to something better.
“and can i ever bid these joys farewell?
yes, i must pass them for a nobler life,
where i may find the agonies, the strife
of human hearts: for lo! i see afar,
o’ersailing the blue cragginess, a car
and steeds with streamy manes—the charioteer
looks out upon the winds with glorious fear:
and now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly
along a huge cloud’s ridge: and now with sprightly
wheel downward come they into fresher skies,
tipt round with silver from the sun’s bright eyes.
... and there soon appear
shapes of delight, of mystery and fear,
passing along before a dusky space
[186]
made by some mighty oaks: as they would chase
some ever-fleeting music, on they sweep.
lo! how they murmur, laugh, and smile, and weep:
some with upholden hand and mouth severe;
some with their faces muffled to the ear
between their arms; some, clear in youthful bloom,
go glad and smilingly across the gloom;
some looking back, and some with upward gaze;
yes, thousands in a thousand different ways
flit onward—now a lovely wreath of girls
dancing their sleek hair into tangled curls;
and now broad wings. most awfully intent
the driver of those steeds is forward bent,
and seems to listen: o that i might know
all that he writes with such a hurrying glow.
the visions all are fled—the car is fled
into the light of heaven, and in their stead
a sense of real things comes doubly strong,
and, like a muddy stream, would bear along
my soul to nothingness: but i will strive
against all doubtings, and will keep alive
the thought of that same chariot, and the strange
journey it went.”
how young-hearted is this vision, how full of thronging fancies and half-apprehended mystic meanings! yet how unmistakably it has the long, high, forward look toward manhood, without which youth itself is not rounded and complete!
[187]
after all, that look, that brave expectation, is vital in our picture of keats. it is one of the reasons why we love him. it is one of the things which make his slender volume of poetry so companionable, even as an ardent, dreamy man is doubly a good comrade when we feel in him the hope of a strong man. we cannot truly understand the wonderful performance of keats without considering his promise; we cannot appreciate what he did without remembering that it was only part of what he hoped to do.
he was not one of those who believe that the ultimate aim of poetry is sensuous loveliness, and that there is no higher law above the law of “art for art’s sake.” the poets of arrested development, the artificers of mere melody and form, who say that art must always play and never teach, the musicians who are content to remain forever
“the idle singers of an empty day,”
are not his true followers.
he held that “beauty is truth.” but he held also another article that has been too often left out
[188]
in the repetition of his poetic creed: he held “truth, beauty,” and he hoped one day to give a clear, full utterance to that higher, holier vision. perhaps he has, but not to mortal ears.
