Read Ebook: Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry His Friends Critics and After-Fame by Colvin Sidney

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Ebook has 655 lines and 184509 words, and 14 pages

--unseen, alone, Among cool clouds and winds, but that the free, The buoyant life of song, can floating be Above their heads, and follow them untired.

The poet, seeming to realize that the most difficult part of his tale is now to tell, again invokes the native Muse, and relates how the lovers, couched on the wings of the raven steeds, enter on their flight a zone of mists enfolding the couch of Sleep, who has been drawn from his cave by the rumour of the coming nuptials of a goddess with a mortal. The narrative is here very obscure, but seems to run thus. Alike the magic steed and the lovers reclining on their wings yield to the influence of sleep, but still drift on their aerial course. As they drift, Endymion dreams that he has been admitted to Olympus. In his dream he drinks of Hebe's cup, tries the bow of Apollo and the shield of Pallas; blows a bugle which summons the Seasons and the Hours to a dance; asks whose bugle it is and learns that it is Diana's; the next moment she is there in presence; he springs to his now recognized goddess, and in the act he awakes, and it is a case of Adam's dream having come true; he is aware of Diana and the other celestials present bending over him. On the horse-plume couch beside him lies the Indian maiden: the conflict between his two loves is distractingly renewed within him, though some instinct again tells him that he is not really untrue to either. He embraces the Indian damsel as she sleeps; the goddess disappears; the damsel awakes; he pleads with her, says that his other love is free from all malice or revenge and that in his soul he feels true to both.

What is this soul then? Whence Came it? It does not seem my own, and I Have no self-passion nor identity.

This charge, be it noted, is one which Keats in his private thoughts was constantly apt to bring against himself. Foreseeing disaster and the danger of losing both his loves and being left solitary, Endymion nevertheless rouses the steeds to a renewed ascent. He and the damsel are borne towards the milky way, in a mystery of loving converse: the crescent moon appears from a cloud, facing them: Endymion turns to the damsel at his side and finds her gone gaunt and cold and ghostly: a moment more and she is not there at all but vanished: her horse parts company from his, towers, and falls to earth. He is left alone on his further ascent, abandoned for the moment by both the objects of his passion, the celestial and the human. His spirit enters into a region, or phase, of involved and brooding misery and thence into one of contented apathy: he is scarcely even startled, though his steed is, by a flight of celestial beings blowing trumpets and proclaiming a coming festival of Diana. In a choral song they invite the signs and constellations to the festival: . Then suddenly Endymion hears no more and is aware that his courser has in a moment swept him down to earth again.

He finds himself on a green hillside with the Indian maiden beside him, and in a long impassioned protestation renounces his past dreams, condemns his presumptuous neglect of human and earthly joys, and declares his intention to live alone with her for ever and to shower upon her all the treasures of the pastoral earth:--

O I have been Presumptuous against love, against the sky, Against all elements, against the tie Of mortals each to each, against the blooms Of flowers, rush of rivers, and the tombs Of heroes gone! Against his proper glory Has my own soul conspired: so my story Will I to children utter, and repent. There never liv'd a mortal man, who bent His appetite beyond his natural sphere, But starv'd and died. My sweetest Indian, here, Here will I kneel, for thou redeemed hast My life from too thin breathing: gone and past Are cloudy phantasms. Caverns lone, farewell! And air of visions, and the monstrous swell Of visionary seas! No, never more Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore Of tangled wonder, breathless and aghast.

Here Keats spins and puts into the mouth of Endymion wooing the Indian maiden a long, and in some at least of its verses exquisite, pastoral fantasia recalling, and no doubt partly founded on, the famous passage in Ovid, itself founded on one equally famous in Theocritus, where Polyphemus woos the nymph Galatea. Apparently, though it was through sympathy with the human sorrow of the Indian damsel that Endymion has first been caught, he proposes to enjoy her society now in detachment from all other human ties as well as from all transcendental dreams and ambitions.

But the damsel is aware of matters which prevent her from falling in with her lover's desires. She puts him off, saying that she has always loved him and longed and languished to be his, but that this joy is forbidden her, or can only be compassed by the present death of both ; and so she proposes to renounce him. Despondingly they wander off together into the forest.

The poet pauses for an apostrophe to Endymion, confusedly expressed, but vital to his whole meaning. His suffering hero, he says, had the tale allowed, should have been enthroned in felicity before now . In truth he has been so enthroned for many thousand years : the poet, Keats himself, has had some help from him already, and with his farther help hopes ere long to sing of his 'lute-voiced brother': that is Apollo, to whom Endymion is called brother as being espoused to his sister Diana. This is the first intimation of Keats's intention to write on the story of Hyperion's fall and the advent of Apollo. But the present tale, signifies Keats, has not yet got to that point, and must now be resumed.

Endymion rests beside the damsel in a part of the forest where every tree and stream and slope might have reminded him of his boyish sports, but his downcast eyes fail to recognize them. Peona appears; he dreads their meeting, but without cause; interpreting things by their obvious appearance she sweetly welcomes the stranger as the bride her brother has brought home after his mysterious absence, and bids them both to a festival the shepherds are to hold tonight in honour of Cynthia, in whose aspect the soothsayers have read good omens. Still Endymion does not brighten; Peona asks the stranger why, and craves her help with him; Endymion with a great effort, 'twanging his soul like a spiritual bow', says that after all he has gone through he must not partake in the common and selfish pleasures of men, lest he should forfeit higher pleasures and render himself incapable of the services for which he has disciplined himself; that henceforth he must live as a hermit, visited by none but his sister Peona. To her care he at the same time commends the Indian lady: who consents to go with her, and remembering the approaching festival of Diana says she will take part in it and consecrate herself to that sisterhood and to chastity.

For a while they all three feel like people in sleep struggling with oppressive dreams and making believe to think them every-day experiences. Endymion tries to ease the strain by bidding them farewell. They go off dizzily, he stares distressfully after them and at last cries to them to meet him for a last time the same evening in the grove behind Diana's temple. They disappear; he is left in sluggish desolation till sunset, when he goes to keep his tryst at the temple, musing first with bitterness, then with a resigned prescience of coming death : then bitterly again:--

Peona went Home through the gloomy wood in wonderment.

The poem ends on no such note of joy and triumph over the attained consummation as we might have expected and such as we found at the close of the third book, at the point where the faculty and vision of the poet had been happily enriched and completed by the gift of the learning and beneficence of the sage. The fourth book closes, as it began, in a minor key, leaving the reader, like Peona, in a mood rather musing than rejoicing. Is this because Keats had tired of his task before he came to the end, or because the low critical opinion of his own work which he had been gradually forming took the heart out of him, so that as he drew near the goal he involuntarily let his mind run on the hindrances and misgivings which beset the poetic aspirant on his way to victory more than on the victory itself? Or was it partly because of the numbing influence of early winter as recorded in the last chapter? We cannot tell.

But why take all this trouble, the reader may well have asked before now, to follow the argument and track the wanderings of Endymion book by book, when everyone knows that the poem is only admirable for its incidental beauties and is neither read nor well readable for its story? The answer is that the intricacy and obscurity of the narrative, taken merely as a narrative, are such as to tire the patience of many readers in their search for beautiful passages and to dull their enjoyment of them when found; but once the inner and symbolic meanings of the poem are recognized, even in gleams, their recognition gives it a quite new hold upon the attention. And in order to trace these meanings and disengage them with any clearness a fairly close examination and detailed argument are necessary. It is not with simple matters of personification, of the putting of initial capitals to abstract qualities, that we have to deal, nor yet with any obvious and deliberately thought-out allegory; still less is it with one purposely made riddling and obscure; it is with a vital, subtly involved and passionately tentative spiritual parable, the parable of the experiences of the poetic soul in man seeking communion with the spirit of essential Beauty in the world, invented and related, in the still uncertain dawn of his powers, by one of the finest natural-born and intuitively gifted poets who ever lived. This is a thing which stands almost alone in literature, and however imperfectly executed is worth any closeness and continuity of attention we can give it. Having now studied, to the best of our power, the sources and scheme of the poem, with its symbolism and inner meanings so far as they can with any confidence be traced, let us pass to the consideration of its technical and poetical qualities and its relation to the works of certain other poets and poems of Keats's time.

FOOTNOTES:

In the old Grecian world, the Endymion myth, or rather an Endymion myth, for like other myths it had divers forms, was rooted deeply in the popular traditions both of Elis in the Peloponnese, and of the Ionian cities about the Latmian gulf in Caria. The central feature of the Carian legend was the nightly descent of the moon-goddess Sel?n? to kiss her lover, the shepherd prince Endymion, where he lay spell-bound, by the grace of Zeus, in everlasting sleep and everlasting youth on Mount Latmos. This legend was early crystallized in a lyric poem of Sappho now lost, and thereafter became part of the common heritage of Greek and Roman popular mythology. The separate moon-goddess, Sel?n? for the Greeks and Luna for the Romans, got merged in course of time in the multiform divinities of the Greek Artemis and the Roman Diana respectively; so that in modern literatures derived from the Latin it is always of Diana that the tale is told. It is not given at length in any of our extant classical writings, but only by way of allusion in some of the poets, as Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Ovid, and in Cicero and some of the late Greek prose-writers, as Lucian, Apollodorus, and Pausanias. From these it passed at the Renaissance into the current European stock of classical imagery and reference.

In another place, Browne makes Endymion shut out from the favour of Cynthia stand figuratively for Raleigh in disgrace with Elizabeth: just as in Lyly's comedy the myth had been turned into an allegory of contemporary court intrigue, with Elizabeth for Cynthia, Leicester for Endymion, Tellus for Mary Queen of Scots, Eumenides for Sidney, and so forth.

Forthwith upsprung the quick and weightless Fire, Whose flames unto the highest Arch aspire: The next, in levity and peace, is Air: Gross elements to thicker Earth repair Self-clogg'd with weight: the Waters flowing round Possess the last, and solid Tellus bound.

The authority for this story is the late Sir B. W. Richardson, professing to quote verbatim as follows from Mr Stephens' own statement to him in conversation.

'One evening in the twilight, the two students sitting together, Stephens at his medical studies, Keats at his dreaming, Keats breaks out to Stephens that he has composed a new line:--

A thing of beauty is a constant joy.

"What think you of that, Stephens?" "It has the true ring, but is wanting in some way," replies the latter, as he dips once more into his medical studies. An interval of silence, and again the poet:--

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

"What think you of that, Stephens?" "That it will live for ever."'

It was the look and expression of Keats in reciting this same phrase, the reader will remember, which so struck Bailey that he found himself vividly recalling it thirty years later .

Moreover, through the dancing poppies stole A breeze most softly lulling to my soul; And shaping visions all about my sight Of colours, wings, and bursts of spangly light; The which became more strange, and strange, and dim, And then were gulph'd in a tumultuous swim:

Or this:--

So in that crystal place, in silent rows, Poor lovers lay at rest from joys and woes.-- The stranger from the mountains, breathless, trac'd Such thousands of shut eyes in order plac'd; Such ranges of white feet, and patient lips All ruddy,--for here death no blossom nips. He mark'd their brows and foreheads; saw their hair Put sleekly on one side with nicest care.

O Haunter chaste Of river sides, and woods, and heathy waste, Where with thy silver bow and arrows keen Art thou now forested? O Woodland Queen, What smoothest air thy smoother forehead woos? Where dost thou listen to the wide halloos Of thy disparted nymphs? Through what dark tree Glimmers thy crescent? Wheresoe'er it be, 'Tis in the breath of heaven: thou dost taste Freedom as none can taste it, nor dost waste Thy loveliness in dismal elements; But, finding in our green earth sweet contents, There livest blissfully. Ah, if to thee It feels Elysian, how rich to me, An exil'd mortal, sounds its pleasant name! Within my breast there lives a choking flame-- O let me cool't the zephyr-boughs among! A homeward fever parches up my tongue-- O let me slake it at the running springs! Upon my ear a noisy nothing rings-- O let me once more hear the linnet's note! Before mine eyes thick films and shadows float-- O let me 'noint them with the heaven's light! Dost thou now lave thy feet and ankles white? O think how sweet to me the freshening sluice! Dost thou now please thy thirst with berry-juice? O think how this dry palate would rejoice! If in soft slumber thou dost hear my voice, O think how I should love a bed of flowers!--

The first fifteen lines of the above are broken and varied much in Keats's usual way: in the following fourteen it is to be noted how he throws the speaker's alternate complaints of his predicament and prayers for release from it not into twinned but into split or parted couplets, making each prayer rime not with the complaint which calls it forth but with the new complaint which is to follow it: a bold and to my ear a happy sacrifice of obvious rhetorical effect to his predilection for the suspended or delayed rime-echo.

Here it is obviously the need of a rime to 'men' that has suggested the word 'unpen' and the clumsy imagery of the 'baaing sheep' which follows, while the inappropriate and almost meaningless 'tinge of sanctuary splendour' lower down has been imported for the sake of the foxes with fire-brands tied to their tails which 'singe' the metaphorical corn-sheaves . Milder cases abound, as this of Circe tormenting her victims:--

Other faults that more gravely mar the poem are not technical but spiritual: intimate failures of taste and feeling due partly to mere rawness and inexperience, partly to excessive intensity and susceptibility of temperament, partly to second-rateness of social training and association. A habit of cloying over-luxuriance in description, the giving way to a sort of swooning abandonment of the senses in contact with the 'deliciousness' of things, is the most besetting of such faults. Allied with it is Keats's treatment of love as an actuality, which in this poem is in unfortunate and distasteful contrast with his high conception of love in the abstract as the inspiring and ennobling power of the world and all things in it. Add the propensity to make Glaucus address Scylla as 'timid thing!' and Endymion beg for 'one gentle squeeze' from his Indian maiden, with many a like turn in the simpering, familiar mood which Keats at this time had caught from or naturally shared with Leigh Hunt. It should, however, be noted as a mark of progress in self-criticism that, comparing the drafts of the poem with the printed text, we find that in revising it for press he had turned out more and worse passages in this vein than he left in.

or thus from the love-making of Cynthia:--

Be kind sweet Nymph unto thy lover, My soul's sole essence and my senses' mover, Life of my life, pure Image of my heart, Impression of Conceit, Invention, Art. My vital spirit receives his spirit from thee, Thou art that all which ruleth all in me, Thou art the sap and life whereby I live, Which powerful vigour doth receive and give. Thou nourishest the flame wherein I burn, The North whereto my heart's true touch doth turn.

Was Keats, then, after all familiar with the rare volume in which alone Drayton's early poem had been printed, or does the similar turn of the two passages spring from some innate affinity between the two poets,--or perhaps merely from the natural suggestion of the theme?

In nature-poetry, and especially in that mode of it in which the poet goes out with his whole being into nature and loses his identity in delighted sympathy with her doings, Keats already shows himself a master scarcely excelled. Take the lines near the beginning which tell of the 'silent workings of the dawn' on the morning of Pan's festival:--

Rain-scented eglantine Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass; Man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold, To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.

It is interesting to note how above all other nature-images Keats, whose blood, when his faculties were at their highest tension, was always apt to be heated even to fever-point, prefers those of nature's coolness and refreshment. Here are two or three out of a score of instances. Endymion tells how he had been gazing at the face of his unknown love smiling at him from the well:--

I started up, when lo! refreshfully, There came upon my face in plenteous showers Dew-drops, and dewy buds, and leaves, and flowers, Wrapping all objects from my smothered sight, Bathing my spirit in a new delight.

Coming to a place where a brook issues from a cave, he says to himself--

'Tis the grot Of Proserpine, when Hell, obscure and hot, Doth her resign; and where her tender hands She dabbles on the cool and sluicy sands:

A little later, and

Now he is sitting by a shady spring, And elbow-deep with feverous fingering, Stems the upbursting cold.

For many passages where the magic of nature is mingled instinctively and inseparably with the magic of Greek mythology, the prayer of Endymion to Cynthia above quoted may serve as a sample: and all readers of poetry know the famous lines where the beautiful evocation of a natural scene melts into one, more beautiful still, of a scene of ancient life and worship which comes floated upon the poet's inner vision by an imagined strain of music from across the sea:--

It seem'd he flew, the way so easy was; And like a new-born spirit did he pass Through the green evening quiet in the sun, O'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun, Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams The summer time away. One track unseams A wooded cleft, and, far away, the blue Of ocean fades upon him; then, anew, He sinks adown a solitary glen, Where there was never sound of mortal men, Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences Melting to silence, when upon the breeze Some holy bark let forth an anthem sweet, To cheer itself to Delphi.

Aeaea's isle was wondering at the moon?

And again in the pair of lines--

Like old Deucalion mountain'd o'er the flood Or blind Orion hungry for the morn,

do not the two figures evoked rise before us full-charged each with the vital significance of his story? Mr de S?lincourt is no doubt right in suggesting that in the Orion line Keats's vision has been stimulated by the print from that picture of Poussin's which Hazlitt has described in so rich a strain of eulogy.

One of the great symptoms of returning vitality in the imagination of Europe, as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth, was its re-awakening to the significance and beauty of the Greek mythology. For a hundred years and more the value of that mythology for the human spirit had been forgotten. There never had been a time when the names of the ancient, especially the Roman, gods and goddesses were used so often in poetry, but simply in cold obedience to tradition and convention; merely as part of the accepted mode of speech of persons classically educated, and with no more living significance than belonged to the trick of personifying abstract forces and ideas by putting capital initials to their names. So far as concerned any real effect upon men's minds, it was tacitly understood and accepted that the Greek mythology was 'dead.' As if it could ever die; as if the 'fair humanities of old religion,' in passing out of the transitory state of things believed into the state of things remembered and cherished in imagination, had not put on a second life more enduring and more fruitful than the first. Faiths, as faiths, perish one after another; but each in passing away bequeaths for the enrichment of the after-world whatever elements it has contained of imaginative or moral truth or beauty. The polytheism of ancient Greece, embodying the instinctive effort of the brightliest gifted human race to explain its earliest experiences of nature and civilization, of the thousand moral and material forces, cruel or kindly, which environ and control the life of man on earth, is rich beyond measure in such elements; and if the modern world at any time fails to value them, it is the modern mind which is in so far dead and not they. Some words of Johnson's written forty years before Keats's time may help us to realize the full depth of the deadness from which in this respect it had to be awakened:--

To rescue men's minds from this mode of deadness was part of the work of the English poetical revival of 1800 and onwards, and Keats was the poet who has contributed most to the task. Wordsworth could understand and expound the spirit of Grecian myths, and on occasion, as in his cry for a sight of Proteus and a sound of old Triton's horn, could for a moment hanker after its revival. Shelley could feel and write of Apollo and Pan and Proserpine, of Alpheus and Arethusa, with ardent delight and lyric emotion. But it was the gift of Keats to make live by imagination, whether in few words or many, every ancient fable that came up in his mind. The couple of lines telling of the song with which Peona tries to soothe her brother's pining are a perfect example alike of appropriate verbal music and of imagination following out a classic myth, that of the birth and nurture of Pan, from a mere hint to its recesses and finding the human beauty and tenderness that lurk there:--

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